Scour - April Update
Hi friends,
Scour is now checking over 3,000 sources (3,034 to be precise) for content matching your interests. This month, it scoured 281,968 posts.
Here are the new features I added:
š„ Hot Mode
Scour now has a hot mode that shows content from the past week while balancing between relevance and recency. This will show you a mix of very recent posts with especially relevant ones from a few days ago that you might have missed.
Right now, Hot mode is the default. If you prefer a different timeframe (for example, the past day), you can set that in your settings. Thanks justmoon for the suggestion!
(One thing I'm not so happy about with Hot mode is that it takes closer to ~250ms to load, rather than the <100ms I'm aiming for. I'm working on getting that back down so your feed feels extra snappy, no matter which timeframe you pick.)
š° Extra-Liking Posts
You can now Love especially great posts you find on Scour using the acorn icon. It's up to you what counts as a Love versus a Like, but I'm personally using it to mark those posts that make me think "wow, I'm so glad I found that! That's so timely and I definitely would have missed it otherwise." Thanks to everyone who voted for this idea.
That said, Vahe Hovhannisyan brought up a good point that thinking about whether to like or love a post introduces extra decision fatigue. Please weigh in on this if you agree or disagree! I might make the love reaction an optional setting, hide it somehow, or remove it in the future.
š Single-Interest View
You can click on any one of your interests on the Interests page or on the tags next to post titles to see only posts related to that interest.
If you browse other users' pages, you can also see posts related to any one of their interests. And, if you like a topic someone else has added, you can easily add that interest to your set. Thanks also to justmoon for this suggestion!
š Design Update
Scour got a design refresh! The website should look and feel a bit more modern and polished now. Let me know if you run into any little design issues.
(For those that are interested, I switched from PicoCSS to Tailwind. Pico was great for getting off the ground quickly, but I found I was fighting with it more and more as I built out more features.)
šØ Email Updates (Coming Soon!)
I'm almost done building out automatic email updates so you'll hopefully have the first personalized weekly roundup in your inboxes this Friday. Thanks to Allen Kramer for this suggestion!
š· Other Updates
- Added a Logout button on the Settings page. Thanks to the anonymous contributor who suggested this!
- Also added an option to delete your account on the Settings page. Thanks to the other anonymous contributor who suggested this -- though I'm sorry to see you go!
- The JSON Feed version of all Scour-created feeds includes the score, quality, and quality probability for each post. Thanks to the anonymous contributor who requested that!
š Some of My Favorite Posts
Here were a couple of my favorite posts that I found on Scour this month:
- A faster way to copy SQLite databases between computers (what a clever little trick! TL;DR using a DB dump to avoid copying indices)
- Two tower embeddings instead of 'hybrid search'
- Cross-Encoder Rediscovers a Semantic Variant of BM25 (š¤Æ)
Happy Scouring ā and keep the feedback coming!
- Evan