Scour - September Update
Hi friends,
Welcome if you've recently signed up! And if you've been using Scour for a while, product updates are back!
This summer was one where life got in the way of me working on Scour, but I'm back at it now. Please share any feedback you have on the feedback board to help me prioritize what to work on next!
Since the last update in May, Scour has tripled the amount of content it is ingesting per month and it scoured 1,535,995 posts from 13,875 sources in September.
š® Better Interest Recommendations
Interest recommendations are now more specific and, hopefully, more interesting! Take a look at what it suggests for you and let me know what you think.
š Reading History
You can now see the history of all the articles you clicked on through Scour. That should make it easier to find those good posts you read without needing to search for them through your feed.
Relatedly, Scour now syncs the read state across devices (so links you've clicked will appear muted, even if you clicked them on another device). Thanks to u/BokenPhilia for the suggestion!
š° Reaction Links
Scour's weekly update emails and the RSS/Atom/JSON feeds it produces now include links to š° Love, š Like, or š Dislike posts. Thank you to @ashishb and an anonymous user for suggesting this addition!
š© Flagging Posts
You can now flag posts as Harmful, Off-Topic, Low-Quality, etc (look for the flag icon below the link). Thank you to Andy Piper for the suggestion!
On a related note, I also switched away from using LlamaGuard to identify harmful content. It was flagging too many okay posts, not finding many bad ones, and it became the most expensive single cost for operating this service. Scour now uses a domain blocklist along with explicit flagging to remove harmful content. Thank you to an anonymous user for the feedback!
š° Content Preview in Scour Feeds
The RSS/Atom/JSON feeds produced by Scour now include a short preview of the content to help you decide if the article is worth reading.
š· Performance
Tripling the number of items Scour ingests means there are more posts to search through to find your hidden gems when you load your feed. That, unfortunately, slowed down the page load speed, especially when you're scouring All Feeds and/or looking at a timeframe of the past week or month. (Thank you to Adam Gluck for pointing out this slowness!)
I spent quite a bit of time working on speeding up the feed loading again and cut the time by ~35% when you're scouring All Feeds. If you're interested in reading about the technical details behind this speedup, you can read this blog post I wrote about it: Subtleties of SQLite Indexes.
š Some of My Favorite Posts
Finally, here were a couple of my favorite posts that I found on Scour in September:
- Identifying and Upweighting Power-Niche Users to Mitigate Popularity Bias in Recommendations
- Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces, from a developer
- Improving Cursor Tab with online RL
Happy Scouring!
- Evan