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F5Bot: Email Keyword Alerts from Reddit, Hacker News, or Lobsters
- prophesi 8y agoDoes the author have a timeline for when they'll open source it? https://github.com/codeplea/f5bot https://github.com/codeplea/f5bot
- overcast 8y agoI wish services like this would move beyond offering everything for free. It's a valuable enough service to charge a nominal fee, be it lifetime or whatever to ensure it sticks around, and give the developer incentive to improve upon it. I'm guessing the next big web movement will be more paid services that actually have value. Weeding out all the trash that disappears with your data in a year. Update: Looking at his Patreon. He's making a total of $41. Not even enough to cover his hosting fees apparently. That's why you charge for something worth charging for. https://www.patreon.com/f5bot https://www.patreon.com/f5bot
- craftyguy 8y agoWell they are charging and only taking in $41/mo, so perhaps this isn't something that many folks are willing to pay for.
- overcast 8y agoThey aren't charging, it's free. The Patreon is donations. Put up a paywall of $1 a month, and I GUARANTEE you will make more than $41 a month.
- prophesi 8y agoSure, they may make less money, but your major gripes with free services: "It's a valuable enough service to charge a nominal fee, be it lifetime or whatever to ensure it sticks around, and give the developer incentive to improve upon it." These will all be resolved once the Patreon hits the $100/mo mark, which I GUARANTEE will be reached pretty quickly if it is indeed a valuable enough service.
- overcast 8y agoConsidering that's not even identified on the front page of f5bot, doubtful. People are more apt to pay for something, when they have no choice.
- craftyguy 8y ago> and I GUARANTEE Only if people think it is worth it. $12/year for notifications is a bit much, IMHO.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoDepends. I actually started writing a similar project on the side for HN only, just because I hope getting notifications for a bunch of topics will reduce the amount of time spent refreshing the frontpage here. This translates to life satisfaction and sometimes real money (procrastination is a bitch when you're freelancing). I'm going to test this particular project now, instead of finishing my own, and if it works well enough (over the next couple days/weeks), I am going to pay it $10/month.
- brazzledazzle 8y agoIs it worth seeking out an invite to Lobsters am I better off lurking?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Jaruzel 8y agoLobsters is very low traffic compared to HN. The posts tend to have ~50% cross-over rate with HN as well. anyhoo, I can hook you up if you want. DM/Mail/Smoke-Signals me.
- jplank1983 8y agoI've been using this for a few months and it's been really useful. I agree that offering a free version and a "premium" version with a few extra bells and whistles would be a really good idea. It's definitely the kind of thing that I'd pay to have extra features for.
- codeplea 8y agoHi, F5Bot author here. I'm working on a premium version, and a couple features are already available through Patreon. It has just been a low priority. If you have ideas for any premium features you would like to see, please feel free to drop me an email sometime (just hit reply on any alert you get).
- a_wild_dandan 8y agoAh, so that's how extremists seemingly always find Reddit threads related to certain hot topics and brigade them. I used to think that it was a simple case of fringe folks being attracted to popular threads. But it happens frequently enough on smaller threads on otherwise moderate, modest communities that I thought something was up.
- prolikewh0a 8y agoThere is also this: http://wiki.project-pm.org/wiki/Persona_Management http://wiki.project-pm.org/wiki/Persona_Management And this: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/us/politics/rick-gates-psy-group-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/us/politics/rick-gates-ps... I left reddit because with the API these disinformation campaigns are too easy to create. After watching from afar during the 2016 elections noticing weird new things happening, new patterns, I decided that I no longer knew what was real and left.
- dec0dedab0de 8y agoI always forget about lobste.rs I remember wanting a membership when it launched and getting mad that I couldn't find anyone to send me an invite. Kinda made me feel like it was the no homers club.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- WA 8y agoWhat’s the difference to a Google Alert with: "site:reddit.com KEYWORD"?
- TeMPOraL 8y agoDo Google Alerts even work reliably these days? I set up a bunch some years ago, realized they don't seem to be working, and promptly forgot about this feature. Every month or free some alert I set up then triggers and send me an e-mail, but I kind of expected to get such e-mails every day.
- edoceo 8y agoThey are hit and miss. Nearly 100% of the results are from news sites and it seems to lag. Like, I'll get forwards from associates about Topic on Monday then the Google alert on Wednesday
- codeplea 8y agoGoogle Alerts seems to miss most of Reddit these days. It's really broken.
- foob 8y agoThe author of F5Bot recently published a guest-post on the Intoli Blog called How F5Bot Slurps All of Reddit [1]. It goes into a lot of technical detail about how the service works and some of the challenges that arise when dealing with such a large number of posts and comments. If you're a fan of F5Bot, or just learning about it now, then you might be interested to check that out. As others have mentioned, F5Bot is free and completely driven by donations and Lewis Van Winkle's generosity. Please consider giving a donation if you're a user of the service and find it helpful [2]. [1] - https://intoli.com/blog/f5bot/ https://intoli.com/blog/f5bot/ [2] - https://www.patreon.com/f5bot https://www.patreon.com/f5bot
- justaguyhere 8y agoThank you for the intoli link. It was a good read, plus I learned about Aho–Corasick algorithm
- wenbin 8y agoI built a similar service, but for podcasts: https://www.listennotes.com/alerts/ https://www.listennotes.com/alerts/
- marknadal 8y agoThis is the first time I've heard of it and this is awesome and amazing, and I'm so glad it is free. Thank you for making this available as a great tool!
- benjojo12 8y agoI use F5 and it's been genuinely useful seeing where my own blog posts come up! Thanks to the creator for making it