Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What sites would you pay to use?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 70 posts

Re: What sites would you pay to use?

#61

Post by gopalakrishnans »

pchristensen wrote: post #40
baddox wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good alternative to Google Reader is simply visiting the sites you want to :-) I'm being sarcastic, but I honestly don't get the point of using a web-based RSS reader, I've always just bookmarked and visited the sites I desire to check.

Have you tried using Google Reader or other? I used to bookmark and revisit, but there were two problems - too much time visiting sites when there were no updates and it was too much hassle to visit sites with rare updates (like pg essays or Yegge novels). Now I follow ~150 feeds and it takes less time than I spent following 10-15 with bookmarks.

There is also Bloglines. I recently switched from Google Reader to Bloglines' beta version, since I felt the latter was slightly faster, and it is supported in my blackberry browser.

Re: What sites would you pay to use?

#63

Post by eru »

mdemare wrote: post #16

Gmail definitely, but I would consider it bait and switch. Wikipedia absolutely. wordreference.com (online dictionaries for english/french/italian/spanish). Love to have better options though. The Economist (used to have a web subscription, but cancelled it when they made all content free). Rescuetime. Keeps me productive. Fogbugz definitely (it's free for 1-2 persons). I entered 3000 bugs in 5 months.

I pay for the Economist. But I have a dead tree subscription and get the web one as a bonus.

Re: What sites would you pay to use?

#64

Post by simanyay »

pchristensen wrote: post #59
simanyay wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've solved that problem for me by configuring rawdog RSS reader. Now, it checks for update and generates a static HTML page. (if you are interested, here is the link: http://anton.kovalyov.net/tools/feeds/ ) So I don't have to visit a website just to make sure that there are no updates and I also don't have to use some big RSS reader with a lot of unnecessary things (ajax, tags, stars, share with friend, etc.)

That's really nice! I like the fact that you control the output and that it's web accessible. Does it include a way to mark items as read or do they just drop off the bottom?

Just drop off.

Re: What sites would you pay to use?

#65

Post by pchristensen »

jfornear wrote: post #47

I have been thinking about this a lot in the past hour or two, too. Though slightly off-topic: I've been thinking that a hassle-free solution for micro-transactions needs to hit mainstream before the average internet user will be willing to pay for more things online. Most people (including myself) would pay for more things online if it didn't involve finding your wallet and typing in your billing address and credit…

That would be a heck of an A/B test - some users see free, some see $4.99, some see $9.99. I wonder how those splits would break out for different sites.

Re: What sites would you pay to use?

#66

Post by pchristensen »

baddox wrote: post #29
mixmax wrote: post #3

Hacker news is probably the only site I would pay for. It seems to me there are pretty good free alternatives to just about everything else.

You, or someone else, could very easily create a free alternative to it. Hacker news is good because it's still relatively obscure. ANY social news site that is full-featured and doesn't censor its users will almost invariably start out great then begin it fail as more people find out about it.

I think you're underestimating the difficulty of attracting enough of the right kind of users.
Post reply on HN