[schrodinger]

Thank you so much! "Epsilon greedy" sounds like a great approach for the general idea I had in mind — I only glanced it but will read it more deeply.

I'll definitely try out your product, but I have to say — an enter your email box is surprisingly high-friction and if you weren't a considerate person I'd met on Hacker News I'd probably close the tab when I saw that. I'll try it out and see if there's a particular reason why you need to capture an email address so early on, but I'd bet if you simplified it you'd get more traffic!

[jacobobryant]

Thanks for the feedback. I've structured Yakread (and its predecessors) as a daily email newsletter because it increases user retention tremendously. It's much less work for users if Yakread can show up in a place they already check regularly (their email inbox) rather than trying to get users right away to build a habit of visiting a new website regularly. The most common approach to this problem for consumer products is to make a mobile app so you can send push notifications; I like email a lot more since it's a bit more decentralized and is/can be less pushy (no pun intended).

But yeah, I wouldn't be opposed to trying out an alternate landing page that shows you article recommendations up front with a signup box somewhere. Could be interesting to see how both approaches perform in an A/B test. Especially if I ever made a concerted effort to get traffic from HN; then structuring the site a bit more like HN would probably be great. Maybe even aggregate comments from bluesky/mastodon? Once I get through the mountain of other TODO items that's been piling up :).