HN buzz
Telegram bot that sends you HackerNews stories by keywords
A nice milestone!
Unfortunately, nobody wants to support the bot with donations, so I have no choice but to make it fully commercial...
Now all users will have a 2-week trial period, after which they will have to register the bot by getting a monthly subscription at BuyMeCoffee.
Boy, time sure flies... It's been two years already...
The bot grows slowly, mostly because I don't know how or where to promote it and have no marketing budget for it.
Still, there are about 500 active users now and the server cost is starting to be burdensome.
I will try to offset this cost with donations via buymecoffee:
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/solus
and see what happens.
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Just a suggestion, there are already a bunch of similar sites. You should have tried investing time on other projects. They could have been successful.
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What "sites"? It's a bot.
And I do work on other projects that's just one of them.
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I know... I mean there are other similar projects out there that do the exact same work... some just notify via an email , some list on the front page their website.. etc They are all built around Hacker News API.
The way you mentioned 2 years, I thought you were working on it for a very long time. I am glad you are working on other projects.
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You're right, there are similar services, but not quite like this, otherwise I wouldn't have built it :)
The main advantage is you choose the list of keywords to filter notifications. Plus, Telegram provides a very nice platform to receive notifications: it's fast, you can use it on any device, it expands links automatically, you can search history, etc.
So I still believe this bot can be useful to people. Just don't know how to promote it.
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We reached a small milestone of 100 active users.
The bot sent 38,437 notifications to users.
Most popular tags are:
ai, [show], musk, tesla, javascript, startup, design, learning, machine, [ask], android, bitcoin, flutter, google, facebook, github, hiring.
There are more than 180,000 stories in the database, which you can search using the '/find' command.
You can now search the database of old submissions with the "/find" command:
/find javascript blockchain
The bot returns up to 5 posts and if there's more, you can use the "/more" command to get the rest.
All the regular rules apply to search keywords, for example you can search for all posts from a particular domain:
/find github.com
The database currently extends back about 6 months.
"/del" deletes one or more keywords from your list:
/del robot ai, amazon
The "/tags" command will also be replaced by "/list". For now both of them work.
URL handling was improved, now it catches duplicate submissions more reliably.
The bot is approaching 100 active users now, hopefully we will achieve that milestone soon.
You can now use "/add" command to add one or more keywords to your list.
Example: say you already have these keywords:
[show] | ai
By typing "/add robots, military drones" you will append those keywords to your set and your keywords will now be:
[show] | ai | military drones | robots
Keywords parsing algorithm was also improved: it now removes duplicate keywords and sorts them in alphabetical order.
You can now use "/random [N]" command to fetch one or more random stories from the past.
N is an optional number of stories to get, 1 to 10. If not specified, the command will send you just one random story.
The stories selection is truly random, the bot doesn't use your keywords to filter them.
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/hn-buzz
Although it's on the home page, that didn't bring many users. I certainly expected more from Product Hunt. Seems like it's shrinking, I remember it being way more popular...
Sad to see giant companies sucking all the attention of people from the Internet. In the past you could share something and there would be a lot of people interested, but now - why bother when there's a next season on Netflix?
I wonder if this path we've chosen as a society is good for us...
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PH used to be place I checked every day for new useful products. But then people started to abuse it by creating 30 min side project and submit there just for exposure, instead to provide real value.
So I guess people got over saturated with bunch of unrelated, none-valuable stuff.
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Hi, not sure how many visits/active users are on product hunt but i always saw it as a place from founders for founders so unless you have a tool for other founders/created i would not expect much from PH.
Anyway try many more platforms, maybe you find the right one.gl
Since the same link can be submitted to Hacker News multiple times, it was quite annoying to receive the same story multiple times...
So the bot now tracks if it already sent you this link and doesn't send it again, if so.
There are also some minor improvements.
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