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Show HN: Refind – The home for the best links on the web

41 points by dominikgro ↗ HN
We’re building Refind, a community of founders, hackers, and designers who collect and share the best links on the web. It’s super early but we’re on Product Hunt today and we don’t want to miss the opportunity to reach out to HN too! Founders, hackers, and designers are the audience we had in mind when building this so we’d really love to know what you think!

https://refind.com

HOW IT WORKS Save great links that will come in handy in the future. Discover what others save. And then find everything again when you really need it – for example when you later search for this topic on Google, Refind highlights links you or your friends saved (optional).

DELICIOUS? Delicious pioneered social bookmarking in 2003. We’re trying to take up on where they left off. And here’s how we believe Refind fits into today’s landscape: https://refind.com/home#difference

READ LATER? Refind is complementary to Instapaper or Pocket: Read Later is a reading list, Refind is an archive. Read Later is todo, Refind is fire and forget. Here’s how we see and use the two in combination (with the example of Pocket): https://medium.com/@refind/refind-pocket-a0ecb08de814

WHY? Here’s why we’re building this: https://medium.com/@refind/this-is-why-we-re-building-refind-7e7229bee370

We really hope you like it! Again, it’s super early but we’re going to work on this for a very long time so we’d love to know what you think! I’ll be around here and you can also reach me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/dominikg) or at dominik@refind.com.

Thanks a lot, Dominik (Founder)

40 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 93.5 ms ] thread
[dead] adsons
love to use it as my personal archive for interesting articles. easy to use, it became one of my favorite tools
mkuhn
I am a user for a while now and Refind has become part of my routine.

The biggest part for me is not the repository of knowledge that I am building though - is is the social aspects of the product. A new tab extension allows me to see the links stored by people I follow and the quality of those links has been very high - although I have to be diligent with unfollowing noisy people that do not fit my interest spectrum. The Refind stream has drastically reduced my Twitter usage as I just get my daily dose of inspiring articles and content there.

[dead] MarcoGrue
An awesome tool to structure your web-research even more poweful. Use Refind and be always up to speed with the latest developments within your favorite sectors.
[dead] firmasaga1
Really helpful. If you want to refind use refind. Love it!
[dead] firmasaga1
Really helpful. If you want to refind use refind. Love it!
[dead] babalunda
To be honest, I'm a little bit overwhelmed by all the bookmarking services, but Refind is surprisingly different! Because all Refind users bookmark for themselves in the first place, the stream of links is very relevant to me and contains a lot of gems.
andreasbrenner
Refind has become my no. 1 source of valuable content. It filters the noise and delivers only what's valuable and useful.
chmars
How does the filtering work? I have to admit that I have not 'gotten' Refind so far but that might change with some help!
mkuhn
The filtering is basically done by the people you follow. They add what they find interesting and that is a pre-selection.
chmars
Most users seems to add all links from their tweets. Maybe that will change!
mkuhn
Not in my experience. But as I have mentioned in my own top-level comment, I have been fairly diligent about unfollowing the people that produced noise in the stream.
geo_O
Two thinks I especially like:

- Fire away. No bad feelings as with e.g. Pocket that I am delegating too much stuff to my future self. But I still have a place where I could find again important stuff.

- Finally a nice way to be inspired in my areas of interest besides the stuff I follow activeley/is easily accessible, eg on HN or reddit.

Edit: formatting

dominikgro
Great, that's really part of why we're building this. Fire and forget, Refind will remind you when you really need it.
[dead] patbreitenmoser
I've been using Refind a couple of weeks now and more or less stop using Pocket. Other then storing interesting links and Articles it's also a really valuable tool to discover easily the best content of topics I am passionate about.
OJFord
This is interesting, I've signed up and I'll see how it goes.

Your Pocket flow seems to ignore the fact that Pocket has an archive though?

I suppose the Google search integration is useful, but Google does already have the "you visited (x|many) times [on y]" text (that you override?).

It would be good if the "You | Friends" portion of the filter was visible (and usable) even without searching. Maybe right now I don't care about others, and I'm not looking for something specific, I just want to browse things I saved.

If things I upvoted on HN were automatically added, that would be great.

dominikgro
Thanks, OJFord!

- Pocket: It does respect 'Archived' – it only suggests links to save to Refind that you've archived on Pocket. - Google: No override! - Filter: When you search on refind.com, you can search in All, Friends, You... - HN links: Great idea! :)

OJFord
Sorry, what I meant was that with regards to not competing with Pocket (instead 'working with') it seems to me that Refind is a slightly enhanced Pocket archive?

What I meant about the filter was that it would be good to be able to do that when not searching. I want to browse everything that was saved by me only. At the moment, that doesn't seem to be possible.

[dead] nettra
Really clean and easy to use. I like the fact that I can see which one of my friends posted the same thing - I know to bring up the article when I next see him. Great minds think alike heheh.
neilwillgettoit
I'd rather not be forced to sign up with twitter.
dominikgro
Understand! In the long run, we'll open this up.
chmars
I just hope that Twitter is not working on a similar app …
grhmc
Many of the comments here are by first-time users, registered in the last 30 minutes, just to upvote this:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patbreitenmoser

- https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=nettra

- https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=babalunda

- https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=adsons

- https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=xbertschy

- https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=MarcoGrue

This is very gross behavior, dominikgro / Refind.

EDIT:

I'm also skeptical about these accounts:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=firmasaga1

- https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=andreasbrenner

- https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=geo_O

[deleted]
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dominikgro
Before HN, Refind had about 900 users (half of them very active). We just announced by email and in the product that we're on HN today.
mkuhn
Also, as a Refind user, I recognize quite a few of these people. Definitely here because of the announcement and not fake profiles.
andreasbrenner
You don't need to be sceptical about my account :) It has been registered with Hackernews for >1 year. Many YC alumni can confirm me being real and being not Dominik (founder of refind). I know him personally, I have been a happy user of refind and when I learned there was a chance to push it on hackernews I did.
dang
It breaks HN's rules to solicit votes (see the FAQ), which promoting a submission often has the effect of. This often gets the submission, accounts, and/or site banned or penalized, so please avoid this. HN's software, moderators, and (as you've seen here) community are all sensitive to it.
oxplot
I've seen this happen once or twice before. I think HN should have some simple algo to detect these and adjust weighting accordingly.
chmars
I did not know that new users could upvote on HN. Interesting!
noyesno
A few questions come to mind: how do they make money out of this? Can I export my data?
dominikgro
No revenue plans at this point. I want to createsomething useful first! Sure you can export your data.
dshibarshin
Anyone else having issues with the Safari extension? After clicking the trust button the extension still failed to install.
dominikgro
Hm, weird. Can you email me at dominik@refind.com and I'll ping you once I know the issue / have a solution.
pstehlik
have been using refind for some time now. i really like the content that my network shares through it. found some great articles.
akyburz
Great to see 'Refind' made it to HN. I've been using Refind for 2 months and it has completely replaced Pocket in my workflow. Better browser integration, better search, and I really like the social twist of it.
tmaly
after delicious went down, I moved over to google bookmarks. it works sort of, but I have trouble searching for my older links. Do you support importing an xml file from google bookmarks?

I tried pocket for saving links, but it reformatted articles with code in a way I could not use.

Fuzzwah
I've used a number of similar services; delicious, spurl and now diigo.

I've been very happy with diigo for a long time, but I feel like I'm a bit of an outlier on the service. Most users are in the education sphere, so using it to discover similar content to what I'm bookmarking isn't as good as what refind seems to surface.

Still, if anyone is looking around for something to use; diigo is worth checking out.