I've been curating some of the last few personal blogs in one place for a couple years now (http://boredreading.com).
It always makes me happy to see more people bring back blogging. I hate that everything is on platforms like substack, and would much rather see a million wordpress or ghost installs.
Wow, I really wanted to like this site. The domain name is perfect. But it's a sad example of what's wrong with the web.
The top 25% is the nav bar, ok, maybe that's reasonable? the next 25% is a "new here", please join upsell. The next 20% is another upsell, please give me your email so I can spam you. The bottom 35% is tags, and the bottom 25% is finally links... but they're mostly covered by another upsell. Holy shit!
And to top it all off, even with uBo enable there's a full sceen popup/modal add dimming the whole page, begging me to let them help me with my overwhelming debt.
It's funny, you (the user, and everyone else that commented about registering) say it's not worth your time registering, but if you look at it from my perspective, it's not worth putting in all this effort for someone who isn't willing to even register for free, let alone pay for the service that cost months to build.
But you did and people don’t want to register. So do you want to iterate towards a model that works for you and your users? I think OC left really good feedback. I’ve been in your shoes before and I really can empathize with your situation deeply but I’d try to lose the defensiveness asap. It sucks when the model of the universe in your head gets dashed by reality at launch but I think not taking the feedback is a mistake.
I’d also challenge your line of reasoning about what constitutes a user for your service. I hear what you’re saying about ignoring bad (non-paying) users in the case of SaaS products etc. but this is literally a blogging aggregator without a network. Get the network going by reducing all the friction in the world and worry about the rest later. 6 man months is not a lot of time for a product. There’s a whole “free” internet just a click away.
The good news is it does seem like there is market for this and as OC pointed out there are ways to make iterations and improvements that could get people to sign up. Keep moving! Good luck!
> it's not worth putting in all this effort for someone who isn't willing to even register for free
Keep in mind that most products are not successful and thus, in theory, "not worth putting in all this effort".
The feedback from people saying that they bounced because of registration is a signal that you can choose to address or ignore. If _enough_ people bounce before they can see the value, then ignoring the signal means you're effectively giving up on this becoming viable. Another alternative, though, is to find more ways to demonstrate the value before registration is required to make sure you're not losing people too early in the sales funnel.
I feel like asking people to look at it from your perspective is not a great attitude in product management, which is more about figuring out the prospective customer's perspective and making sure you're offering something they want.
Whenever I share something that requires a login like reading a Twitter thread, my friends say they find the initial tweet interesting but they can't continue since they don't have/don't want to make an account. It adds friction with finding utility in a site. They need to be really motivated to continue using the website. Counterexample is TikTok: anyone can see a TikTok, no login required.
As another example, I was interested in Matter/Readwise reader apps. Matter has a very limited freemium version, Readwise doesn't. I tried Matter, I liked it, gave them my money. Maybe Readwise is better, who knows, but I didn't even give it a chance since I wasn't able to check if it's going to be useful for me.
Maybe I'm a cheapskate so I don't want to "screw" myself with paying for a month of Readwise and checking what it offers or maybe the freemium model really works better.
Registering is free though. People use their email to signup for newsletters all the time. So I feel like it's a fair ask to signup to read some really high quality curated articles with an unparalleled reading experience.
I feel that in HN crowd it may be easier from registered to paying than from unregistered to registered. You know, tech privacy-aware crowd.
I also bounced after getting signup clicking #programming FYI.
Either make those 3-5 categories free or make them with like 24h refresh because so far I saw that your page has 5 not interesting articles and wants me to create an account.
This is too little to give you my precious email address or apple throwaway mailinator email.
From my perspective I still have a backlog of 200 items in my rss reader for today. It would be better for you to show slightly more value of what your product gives us. As from the comments it seems that it was interesting for a lot of people to at least try and open the page!
Yes, but a user has no inkling that they will have to sign up to keep reading. It feels dishonest and they pull a 'revenge-bail'. You don't get to decide if the articles are high quality or unparalleled reading experience -- let them make that determination.
You do. But a lot of the people you'd like to sign up don't. You can argue all you like here, but it's not going to change many minds. And it certainly won't change the mind of anybody who just sees your home page and bounces.
So given that you're not going to win the argument, what's your next step?
Sure, but that's not the only thing that makes registration a high-friction event. For instance, any time I register for something, free or not, I am also aware that I'm probably getting my name on a marketing list (and probably sold to other lists) as well. So I'm not registering for anything unless there's already a very well-established value exchange for it.
OK, but how do I know I'm getting "really high quality curated articles with an unparalleled reading experience"? I can't see what I'd be getting unless I sign up, hence the issue.
The majority of users are not going to look at it from your perspective. The HN crowd is likely to be your highest intent audience, and your comment suggests they don't feel your product expresses enough of a value prop ahead of the registration wall. If you want this to grow organically, you're going to need to take a user-centered design perspective. It's not sufficient to say you yourself represent a user persona because you're biased by your desire to see a return on investment.
> from my perspective, it's not worth putting in all this effort for someone who isn't willing to even register for free
How does free registration benefit you? It's just more cost for you (time to deal with problems, money to store the login information, and additional load on your server). The only way your statement makes sense - and the only reason you'd care that much - is if you're planning to monetize the information.
That's not quite the right one for you, in that you have a freemium product where you could have a tier of unregistered users like Reddit does, but you get the idea.
The only users who are going to produce the sort of profits that you are hoping for with your months of work are going to go through a variety of stages. Unless you're running this like an influencer or an NPR pledge drive or something, none of those stages will involve them looking at it from your perspective. They're going to look at personal cost/benefit ratios for each step. Which, I'll remind you, is something you surely do for almost every purchase you make.
You can indulge your feelings of resentment here that "everyone else that commented about registering" aren't sufficiently respectful of your efforts. But given that you didn't show any respect for my effort in giving you free advice, you might be able to imagine how long you'll have to wait for people to come around on that. Or you could focus on meeting your users where they are and maximizing flow through your funnel.
after enough times of trying to read something that came up on google or somewhere similar, being forced to create an account to read it, handing over my personal information, going back to try and read the article with an account, being told that i now have to download an app or pay a monthly subscription to read the article, then having to figure out how to delete the account that i didn't want to make, yeah, i'm not registering for shit anymore unless it's something i already use or have some kind of relationship with, or it's something special and i can tell it's going to provide more value to me than i provide to it.
the mainstream web is unfortunately a cesspit mostly made up of predatory sites that provide a barely useful service which is easy to live without, which only exist as a way to hoard peoples data or lock them into subscriptions in the hope that they'll forget they're paying it. if your site is different and you want people to actually care, you'll need to show them.
You know your work's worth, the users don't know yet. OP simply wants to know more about your product before willing to put in the time and effort for registering.
You are getting really good answers to that position. Hope you notice them.
For mine: the registration wall is the same as thousands of others which I dismiss just the same - because if I'm asked to register this early it's because my registration is the product - and not the alleged value that is used to scam me in. And that's from someone who has worked on plenty of marketing efforts. The request for registration is not a signal of quality. The content offered before that registration would be - and there isn't much of that. Your site may be high value and totally deserving of registration but the bar for my registration is much higher than that.
The articles update every hour, so please check back again. The articles are from blogs that were deemed high quality, but even high quality blogs can churn out filler content. But in general, I think you'll always find one or two really interesting things to read at any given time, if not on the homepage, then on the blogs you follow.
> The articles update every hour, so please check back again.
Is that apparent to a user?
You want ppl to stick around just a bit longer? Put a countdown clock to your master reset. Get it in their mind to come back and check again. Add just a touch of FOMO.
OP here: I'm considering it. Can you email me please? (email in profile)
Would love to figure out a way I can work out a self hosted version for those who want it, given there is enough interest in it. This goes to anyone else who's interested in self hosting, please email me! Thanks!
I built BoredReading.com a few years ago because I enjoy reading but hate having to curate my own feeds, so this is a done for you kinda app.
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