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Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

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Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#111

Post by diarrhea »

gxqoz wrote: post #38

Very much agree that Pocket has gotten worse as I've used it over the years. It's so bad I've mostly moved to the much better Readwise ( https://readwise.io/ ). I'd be fully over if they actually supported a decent export (see below). It's sad because I'm probably in the 99th percentile of Pocket users in terms of usage and am happily paying them for Premium. I can't remember a significant improvement to Pocket in 2…

Saving offline copies simply… doesn’t work. It’s stuck at “preparing” perpetually, every time. That’s with me having a Premium subscription! Search being poor is one thing, but at least it sometimes works. Offline saving is one of the flagship features, and it doesn’t work, and hasn’t in probably two years.

I’m too baffled to be mad about this.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#112

Post by diarrhea »

Starting out with Pocket some years ago, I almost immediately learned to not rely on its reader feature. I haven’t used it since. It makes a hash out of basically everything, with image captions presented as normal body text, code snippets missing (this is a big one), images missing, quotes missing etc.

Perhaps the respective article authors didn’t use html markup semantically correct, so a naive reader runs into trouble. But if such a Reader is part of your core business proposal and you are, by now, Mozilla, one would hope articles didn’t get butchered in reader view.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#113

Post by pm3003 »

asaddhamani wrote: post #94
hamsterbase wrote: post #68

Most "read it later" services save web pages on their servers, which cannot preserve paywalls, ad-free content, pages that require login or registration, and pages on a local network. Sharing why I decided to develop my own "read it later" software. 1. I have a habit of saving web pages I like, most of which are in MHTML format, some are saved as single-file HTML, and others are web archives saved on iOS. Altogether,…

Yesterday I was on a flight so I downloaded some paywalled articles on my phone using safari reading list. Once we took off and I lost connectivity I opened the article and saw - the paywall page. I tried looking for mobile read later apps that save offline and save what I saw not what their servers see, but not much luck. I’ve my own app which can save pages as I saw them and create reader views out of them, but no…

Opera offline save saves locally, it's efficient. I never had the paywall problem.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#114

Post by _xnmw »

Wrong tool for the job. If you want to do serious research and archival, use something like DevonThink. I have 20 GB+ worth of stuff there (millions of items including 10 year email history) and it still does full-text search in under 500ms.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#115

Post by mackrevinack »

ishanjain28 wrote: post #86

My pocket subscription renewal is coming up. After 8-10years of using pocket, I'll not be renewing it anymore. It was a decent product that just got worse over time and I just don't see them improving it anymore. Pinboard was a decent alternative but now that's not an option anymore. I'll be checking out the third newer option, raindrop I think.

theres wallabag as well. don't know how it compares but it also has a self hosted version if you are into that kind of thing

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#117

Post by denton-scratch »

blairbeckwith wrote: post #55
simonw wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. You need notes that you can search through, and useful information that you've collected. Otherwise you're limited by what you can hold in your head - and as you get older and take on more ambitious work you'll find that's a pretty big restriction. My version of that is spread out across way too many places now - it's mainly https://til.simonwillison.net/ and https://simonwillison.net/ for published notes, 700+…

You certainly don’t need - I know and have worked with many successful people who don’t have any sort of meaningful (beyond grocery list type) notes or externally-stored knowledge of any kind. This feels like a comment without substance and in a way, it is. But I think it’s important to push back on this idea that if you aren’t managing a Second Brain while you’re GTD’ing a side project and Tools for Thought-ing your…

I eventually settled on a hardback A4 notebook.

I don't usually need to scan back more than a few days, but one book lasts several months. You can use it standing up, e.g. in a SCRUM. It's resistant to having a mug of coffee spilled over it. It never crashes, and it doesn't need RAID or backups. You can attach post-its to the pages. You can use a stack of 4-5 of them as a monitor stand.

Downsides: you can't paste screencaps into it. And there's no search function.

Yes, it's a glorified grocery list. But it works better for me than any electronic solution.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#118

Post by simmerup »

asaddhamani wrote: post #94
hamsterbase wrote: post #68

Most "read it later" services save web pages on their servers, which cannot preserve paywalls, ad-free content, pages that require login or registration, and pages on a local network. Sharing why I decided to develop my own "read it later" software. 1. I have a habit of saving web pages I like, most of which are in MHTML format, some are saved as single-file HTML, and others are web archives saved on iOS. Altogether,…

Yesterday I was on a flight so I downloaded some paywalled articles on my phone using safari reading list. Once we took off and I lost connectivity I opened the article and saw - the paywall page. I tried looking for mobile read later apps that save offline and save what I saw not what their servers see, but not much luck. I’ve my own app which can save pages as I saw them and create reader views out of them, but no…

Honestly Apple just in general stops working the moment you lose internet connection and it sucks. The whole ecosystem seems to assume you always have internet.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#119

Post by renegat0x0 »

Some time ago I decided to write my own program to manage my links [1].

I don't want to sign up anywhere. I don't want algorithms and suggestions. My app is on LAN network. I can add links, download data, search, add tags, highlight.

Some things do not work. It is work in progress. I am not a web dev so it is bare bones. I do not use JavaScript, as I hate it. It uses Django and celery.

Once a day I make my bookmarks public [2].

I am still learning. I just wanted to say you do not have to rely on anything to host a link aggregation software.

[1] https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive

[2] https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#120

Post by dade_ »

mackrevinack wrote: post #115
ishanjain28 wrote: post #86

My pocket subscription renewal is coming up. After 8-10years of using pocket, I'll not be renewing it anymore. It was a decent product that just got worse over time and I just don't see them improving it anymore. Pinboard was a decent alternative but now that's not an option anymore. I'll be checking out the third newer option, raindrop I think.

theres wallabag as well. don't know how it compares but it also has a self hosted version if you are into that kind of thing

Wallabag the server is ok, not amazing at rendering webpages to be readable, and article thumbnail view needs work.

The browser plugins are the nightmare (Chrome comes to mind) You need to manually generate an API key and configure it in the browser. The process is very confusing, and too much work to configure on multiple machines with multiple browsers. The plug-ins are written by different developers, all open source as a hobby, so I while I think the effort is admirable and I hope it continues, it is still a beta experience.

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