I have always told friends and family to be prepared because you don't know what will come. Often I tell them this when their life and personal growth stagnates.
If you stagnate and spin your wheels, don't graduate college, you may miss that job opportunity at a dream company.
If you don't grow your career, don't earn what you are worth, you may miss out on your dream vacation or dream house.
Life is finite and it is entirely too easy to sit there a dink, smoke a joint, and do nothing. Existence wants us dead and it isn't until we push forward to bend it to our will that we can consider ourselves living. Nothing comes to those who wait except ruin.
This is very much in the spirit of what we were trying to do with trove.to [1] — give people an easy way to curate & annotate lists of websites, and layer a social graph and endorsement system on top of those lists.
The problem we encountered is that the vast majority of people are not hyper-organized list makers — the 1% rule of the internet [2]. To create a "human curated search engine" with any utility, you need a massive amount of manually-categorized data — data which most people are simply not interested in generating. This is why no social bookmarking site (e.g. delicious, pinboard, etc.) has ever taken off to hundreds of millions of users.
I still think there's something exciting to be built here, but it will likely need to take a more "automated" approach as you suggested.
Reddit effectively has this information buried in its database. But they don’t really use it, preferencing issues of the day and recycled tik toks apparently.
Hey HN! It's been 3 months since Trove's original Show HN [1], and since then we've released tons of new features and improvements including:
- a fully-fledged WYSIWYG + Markdown editor
- a Chrome extension [2] to take and save notes directly from the browser
- image uploading
- collaboration (can invite others to add to your trove)
- feeds (to see new blocks from people you follow)
- a new logo!
Trove can be used in so many different ways, e.g. for saving and annotating articles, organizing your recipes, sharing book recommendations, planning trips with a group, doing product research, creating a syllabus for self-teaching, or even just jotting down ideas. Use it long enough, and eventually you'll have a curated "knowledge library" for every topic you're interested in — see my profile [3] for instance.
Give it a try and let me know if you have any ideas or feedback!
Interesting observation. I wonder if these are issues intrinsic to the sites themselves, or if instead there’s some fundamental law that states once a publishing platform reaches a critical mass of popularity, it ceases to yield high-quality content (on average).
I do wonder how Substack is thinking about this problem. They obviously have a different business model than Medium, but I think they are still susceptible to this issue.
Interesting... where can I see Lex Fridman's shelf?
It seems everyone and their mother is working on a knowledge management / list curation tool these days—well, including myself (I'm working on Trove [1, 2]). IMO, the key value that has yet to be unlocked (though we're trying to do this with Trove) is layering a community / social network on top of a tool like this—so that it's not just a single player utility.
Always happy to chat / share notes if you have any thoughts on this! (email in bio)
Hi Wes - thanks for your feedback! Indeed PKM is still a big, unsolved problem. Too bad many of the solutions created only end up being side projects - I still believe there is room for an end-to-end integrated "Figma" of resources management. Sent you an email to share our thoughts! Cheers
For an academic take on "how-to Linux", I'd recommend CMU's CS 15-213 course [1]. The systems class I took in college borrowed liberally from it, IIRC.
Also, I'm putting together a master list [2] of the best resources from this thread and the other one OP mentioned. Let me know if I'm missing anything!
There's a ton of different note taking methods, as you can tell by the variety of responses here. People will evangelize one method as being superior to another, but I think you just have to try them out and see what works best for you.
IMO, a prior question to understanding the information we consume is deciding what information to consume. There's an essentially infinite amount of content out there, but we have a finite amount of time to learn. The strategy we usually employ is random and mindless—we consume whatever happens to show up in our HN or Twitter feeds. But I think there's a real value in thoughtfully curating the knowledge we take in, which is why I built Trove [1,2].
I'm curious to hear, how does everyone else here optimize their information diet (if at all)?
While it's a very difficult problem to crack, I do think there's a way to serve both the bookmarking ("single player") and recommendation ("multiplayer") use cases with one product. Fred Wilson has a good article from 2015 on this dilemma [1].
My personal opinion is that Goodreads and other similar services have failed to do this because they don't make their user-generated content a first-class citizen. The focus is on rating and making lists of books, not their users' thoughts and annotations on those books (which would tie content creation and consumption into a much tighter feedback loop).
I'm working on Trove [2] because I think this is a problem worth solving — we recently did a Show HN [3] you may have seen. Would love to hear if anyone has more ideas on how to tackle this.
Interesting that you see things that way. I think the biggest hurdle to any Goodreads competitor for me is that it would be without GR's massive amount of user-content.
My reading loop is like this:
I start a book on my kindle ; it's automatically added to my GR collection.
I highlight as I read, on my kindle ; those highlights are transferred automatically to my GR account.
I finish the book, give it a lame 5-star rating ; its status and rating updated automatically on my GR account.
I write my own notes & thoughts about the book (pen and paper style in my own journal).
I go to GR to read what others have thought about the book. There are always a couple decent commentaries (and I read a lot of somewhat obscure translated fiction, sometimes only 100 or so other readers of it).
I just don't see any other service pulling me away, no matter how slick the interface.
Yeah, for your workflow here I don't think there is any better solution, especially because of the Kindle / Goodreads integration (which Amazon will never open up to other services).
As the Fred Wilson piece I linked above notes:
> I wonder if listmaking is really a vertical thing instead of a horizontal thing. That would suggest that there will be successes in verticals like food, travel, shopping, reading, film, music, etc but that each will be its own thing and not part of some meta listmaking community.
With Trove we're trying to build something closer to the "horizontal" thing, but I suspect power users of a particular vertical (e.g. "power readers" like yourself) will still flock to vertically focused and integrated solutions (like Goodreads for books).
On your first point, we are in fact working on an extension to help make trove creation easier. I also think we can make the editor experience a lot better, especially for less technical users who don't know Markdown.
On your second point, you're totally right that the demo could be a lot more compact. Honestly, I know I could have made it a lot more polished / rehearsed — but since we're changing the product a lot at this stage, I figured I'll be making another one soon enough :)
