Ask HN: Best curated newsletters?
Based on my experience, Google searches rarely surface high quality blog posts, articles, and insider analyses. Twitter + LinkedIn have an SNR problem. HN is great only for the (primarily US) tech/startup scene, and other similar sites often lack the community standard or size to maintain a consistent flow of worthwhile new content.
What hand-curated newsletters or websites do experts in any field find incredibly useful? A recent example I've found is Mattermark's daily email newsletter, which has a curated list of 5-10 articles and blogposts from investors and operators.
Open to lists that aren't career related too -- ie: a jazz playlist curated by professional jazz artists.
71 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 84.5 ms ] threadI like Dave Pell's Next Draft, which is just interesting general news stories, and also Azeem Azhar's Exponential View, which covers tech, with a slant towards AI/ML. In terms of stuff the HN crowd is less likely to already know about, I like Archinect, which covers architecture. It's not really a curated article roll-up so much as it is an architecture news site, but their weekly email is a nice way to stay on top of what's going on in the field.
I used to sign up for an HN newsletter that'd only show the top posts. I thought that was an effective way of pushing only the best content to me every few days. Realized later that I enjoy reading a some articles that didn't get a lot of upvotes.
I also tried to create an open google doc where a small group of friends could share links to articles they found particularly noteworthy. Participation was 0, so I gave up and now just store interesting articles in my bookmarks folder. Messy.
I think the stuff I line most on HN doesn't always correlate with what has the most upvotes, so I don't think I'd be happy with a best-of-HN summary either.
Are there any email newsletters you already subscribe to and would recommend?
I found some of the human-made playlists on 8tracks.com to be better than a lot of the algorithmically generated ones on Pandora/Spotify/Youtube, but music is highly subjective.
Been meaning to give product hunts collections a solid attempt: https://www.producthunt.com/collections
For book recommendations, I find an intellectually-minded friend on Goodreads who has similar tastes to me, and just go down his/her list.
I think a general pattern here is: there are positive deviants in society whose tastes and interests correlate with my own far stronger than the average's.
Great original question, BTW.
The problem is getting it to the optimum size. If it's too small, it won't work because nobody will want to post. If it's too large, then the signal-to-noise ratio drops and it's no better than Reddit or HN.
Also, moderation is hard.
I think the best solution is to find one or two people who know their stuff to curate everything. Add community engagement mechanisms incrementally. For example, enable social media sharing and commenting before account creation, upvoting, and article submissions.
Wonder how a Quora/Medium model (invite-only) or The Information (paywall) would work for newsletters, since content isn't original?
http://www.hadoopweekly.com/index.html
https://summitroute.com/blog/ - (mine) Infosec news.
http://ben-evans.com/#newsletter - Email only newsletter from Benedict Evans of A16Z mostly related to large mobile business moves.
https://www.feistyduck.com/bulletproof-tls-newsletter/ - TLS crypto news (monthly)
http://golangweekly.com/ - Golang links
Alvin Ashcroft's Morning Dew http://www.alvinashcraft.com/
Chris Alcock's Morning Brew http://themorningbrew.net/
Regular Geek http://regulargeek.com/category/geek-reading/
It's sent once a week and you should find at least one or two good articles that are worth reading.
Then there is https://www.brainpickings.org where the author reads a bunch of books and sends out a newsletter with a resume of each book. I personally don't think there's anything like this out there!
* http://softwareleadweekly.com/ - about people, culture, leadership
* http://www.devopsweekly.com/ - DevOps, by Gareth Rushgrove
Just my pick. Indeed, I've found links there that haven't popped up anywhere else (HN, Twitter), so I second the original poster's opinion that mail newsletters are a good thing - wouldn't have thought that.
I don't always have time to read it. But, when I do, I never regret it.
[0]: http://www.devopsweekly.com/archive
Recently, though, I signed up for the "cron.weekly" [0] newsletter and it's actually pretty decent. I think I first saw it mentioned here.
The "archives" [1] are available as well, so you can get an idea of what it's like before you sign up.
[0]: http://www.cronweekly.com/
[1]: http://www.cronweekly.com/archives/
I'm writing that mailing list, so I'm very happy to read you're enjoying it. Thanks for sharing!
Mattias
Some RSS-Feeds I follow and which might be of interest: http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/ - http://www.rand.org/blog.html - https://blog.codinghorror.com/ - https://bsdmag.org/
(PS: You can also get rss-updates about new entries in Youtube-Playlists (google it) and if you use Twitter and follow some interesting people, that might also be a good way to stay up to date)
Take a look at some of their past newsletters - http://us10.campaign-archive2.com/home/?u=d7f0f45160075006b2...
2nd Place : Weekly Newsletter + Podcasts from Andreessen Horowitz (A16z). The podcasts are amazing - discussions with entrepreneurs working on bio-tech, AI, Fin-tech, Quantum Computing. All the people I would love to hang out with.
Preview http://us7.campaign-archive2.com/home/?u=35c671b34bb40414916...
Non-tech: Brain Pickings FTW!
MarketingDay does an amazing job curating posts from around the web as well as give you the top stories published on MarketingLand that day. It is a must read for anyone involved in any area of digital marketing.
http://www.fintechstreet.com http://www.altcoinweekly.com
For Machine Learning I can't recommend Talking Machines (http://www.thetalkingmachines.com/blog/) highly enough. It is a podcast though.
https://wdrl.info/
On nothing to do with tech: I'm desperately trying to find something that covers general world news without too much of a US slant, in a nice concise way. Next Draft (mentioned elsewhere in this thread) is pretty good, but is very US heavy.
When I trialled subscribing to The Economist their Espresso app-- which is essentially a daily curated newsletter-- was pretty decent, so if you sub to them you should definitely check it out.
These days I'm trying the qz daily digest, which I think is working out OK: they talk about what to expect in the next day, what happened while you were asleep etc. If anyone has any better suggestions I'd love to hear them: I like how the economist actually talks about other parts of the world apart from the states, but I don't love it enough to pay their standard sub rate.
In terms of general flowery writing I get emails from Medium based on what I've read, emails from Pocket based on what I read, and longform.org's newsletter. Depending on how snowed under I feel at any given time I either just delete them without opening them, of potentially skim them to see if anything is interesting.
Example: http://qz.com/599694/a-peek-inside-modern-day-elite-kitty-pa... (I read that article two times and still don't understand why "Kitty Parties" are of significance and how they differ from other social gatherings of business minded women or people in general)
@OP: Thanks for posting this questions. Looking forward to other people's answers. I find it quite reassuring that other people also long for curated newsletters.