Update 1: Based on initial feedback, I might be conveying this wrong. The proposed idea is not yet another way to find interesting things to read. Example use case: The moment you visit a URL, just as you are about to read it, the browser tells you that “hey, before you read this, this might actually be a waste of your time.”
If you’ve never seen that expression “TLDR” on the web, that’s short for “too long didn’t read”.
I use Instapaper to save things I want to read for later when I have time to read. But just as my pre-Instapaper days, the problem is that my list of things to read grows faster than I actually have time to read and de-queue items from the list. As you’ve heard, “wealth of information creates poverty of attention“. Not a new problem that I’m sure a lot of people suffer from.
We all have our own ways of coping, so I wonder if we could take all the methods (that work) and productize it.
There is an old story about a finance professor and a student who come upon a $100 bill lying on the ground. The student stoops to pick it up. “Don’t bother,” the professor admonishes. “If it were really a $100 bill, it wouldn’t be there.[1]“
The above story captures the essence behind one of my own tactics to cope[2].
How I do it
For any given article I am about to read, if that article has already been posted to Hacker News, I’ll read the top few comments before I actually read the article.
What I am looking for
I’m quickly looking for comments with information about the article to decide if the article is worth my time reading. Sometimes the general consensus is “this is baseless” or “this is awesome”, which will steer my decision to read or not read something. The more upvotes/downvotes and comments, the more accurate this becomes. Sometimes a kind-hearted person will post an abbreviated version of the lengthy article in the comments which is then voted up (especially if it’s valuable article but long-winded one), thus benefiting everybody else (if you do this, thank you so much! – and usually, the “market” rewards this, as an efficient capitalistic marketplace would, by upvoting that comment more, which increases the commenter’s karma, thus an incentive to do more of it, and so forth)
Note: from here on out I’ll use the term “market” for a lack of a more accurate term to describe it
Devil’s advocate
Are there ways where my method here will fail? Yes, but more often than not it works very well (for topics HN covers), thanks to the very efficient HN market of intelligent readers who contribute back to the system.
I’m a voracious reader, if I had all the time in the world I would read everything! Learning is a life-long endeavor. When it comes to saving me precious time from my daily regular morning reads, a “good enough”, 80-20 Pareto principle solution solves my pain point.
Product / solution sketch
Let’s germinate an idea of what the solution could possibly look like.
For every article’s URL I am about to read in my browser, I will have a method (be it a bookmarklet, browser plugin, social plugin, etc) to check if that URL exists in a trustworthy marketplace for that article’s topic.
If a moderate-to-strong opinion exists for the article referenced by that URL from that marketplace, the browser then informs me of the top X opinions (e.g. this could be an in-page drop-down that fades away like Instapaper’s “saving..”; the solution shall not be intrusively obnoxious)
With this opinion, I can decide to proceed reading that or hit the browser back button.
Items that require more thought
Where do you find an efficient market of readers for a particular topic to do this URL lookup?
- Startups, technology –> HN
- Stuff Reddit is good at –> Reddit, subreddits
- Everything else not listed above –> ?
For everything else not listed above, say cooking (heck I don’t cook, I don’t know), we’ll have to find where we can possibly look it up. But that’s also a lot of work, there’s a lot of niches/verticals – you’d have to correctly find the goto place every time.
Is it possible to build an efficient reader marketplace for all the other topics, centralized or decentralized?
Such a solution doesn’t have to work 100% of the time. Especially if it’s the 1st MVP. If it saves me from reading a 5-minute article each day, in 7 days I’ve already saved 35 minutes! I would totally use it. If you attach an approx. dollar value to your time (annual income/work days/work hours), this solution would definitely make me more money than my savings account right now 
I’d be interested to hear:
* Your tactics, subconscious or not, to cope with information overload
* If you have a better way to improve on this idea, please do share with your peers
If you’re reading this and are interested in building a solution to attack this problem, let me know (perhaps we could work together). If you plan on building this without me, that’s cool too – I’m glad someone’s attacking a problem that’s been plaguing me for years. Execution is hard.
[1] I recalled this story but I couldn’t remember where from, so this was what I found on Google. “Are Markets Efficient? — Yes, Even if They Make Errors” by Burton G. Malkiel, Wall Street Journal, December 28, 2000
[2] I sometimes even apply this to my inbox. That is, I wait for other people to chime in on a topic (in a group email) before I read all the inputs and reply. Sometimes after the dust settles, I decide that I don’t even need to reply – thus saving me time.
Tags: attention economy, half-baked idea of the day, information overload, tldr