Show HN: Web Digest – Collection of (daily) big stories on the web

webdigest.pages.dev

2 points

3 years ago

I hate browsing news apps and news websites. It is a time-consuming, energy-draining, and information-overloading experience. There are endless articles to read if one is to read something. The journalism industry, including the UGC aspect of it, produces contents significantly more than what an ordinary human can process (or even decide which to process).

However, I do find the fear of missing out a real problem which should be addressed, or even solved, and solving it with an illusion of not missing out is good enough. One has to be very selective in reading, otherwise one would be drown in the flood of information. I find it necessary to limit the size of readable contents and repel the creators/editors/platforms who tempt me to read more and more endlessly. Being long is not a problem for me, but having an unknown length is.

Hence this project was brought forth onto this world. I have written scripts to automate the production of Web Digest artifacts in PDF/HTML/MD at 00:01 UTC every day. All artifacts are published with CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

Daily updates are available on the website, in the RSS feed (/rss.xml), and via Telegram channel (@webdigestchannel).

I have been testing with the artifacts since 2023-01-07, and it has turned out to be a success, at least for me. I feel relaxed about news more than ever before. Every day, I take a quick glance over the 30-ish pages of lists of news entries and choose a few to read following the links, and call it a well-informed day. Perhaps I spend more time in reading news than I did before, but I feel better. I wish this project may bring help to people who share my difficulties with news.

So far the sources of stories (HN, GitHub, AP, Zaobao, etc) are selected mainly for bilingual people in the Internet / software industry. I will be maintaining more variants (arrays of sources) in short future if I can draw the attention from people with other industrial backgrounds and people preferring monolingual contents.

Discussions are welcomed at the comments section of this HN post, the discussions board of this project on GitHub (https://github.com/neruthes/webdigest/discussions), and the affiliated group of the Telegram channel (@webdigesttalk). Feedbacks are appreciated, especially recommendations for sources.

P.S. There is also an experimental ActivityPub feed at <https://mypubnode.pages.dev/u/webdigest/Person.json>, but for now I have no test tool to figure out whether my implementation can be subscribed properly...