Bye Bye Readwise? blog.numericcitizen.me

@numericcitizen I’m in the same boat and cancelled my renewal this morning. I still have a couple months to change my mind, but I rarely use it anymore.

@ChrisJWilson I previously used Instapaper and Pocket (quite different services) and I dropped them too. I don’t know of any alternative to Readwise that has so much widespread support.

@ericgregorich Done. Cancelled.

@ChrisJWilson Out of curiosity, what features do you use most often?

@dgreene196 In reader.

1. Ghostreader summary to give me an idea if I want to read an article/watch video.
2. highlighting article
3. Asking ghost reader to generate a summary of action points/tips if it’s a topic like that. About 50% of the time it’s completely correct, the other 50% I edit them but it saves me time often.
4. It’s my RSS reader but I don’t subscribe to much at the moment (and I’m bad at checking!)
5. I used it as my reader for PDFs from Bible college courses. I have them all tagged with the course name so it’s easy to jump to them.

In readwise

1. Reviewing highlights (I’m irregular but usually hit at least 3 days a week)
2. Syncing highlight to Obsidian. (which I can then copy into other docs/link a literature note to the readwise summary of the book I made/ link notes with ideas to the readwise highlight note).

@ChrisJWilson I think you’re doing a better job of using all the features of Reader than I am! While there may be an app that replicates many of those functions (when I want a document summarized, I usually use the smaller LLM I have running locally on my Mac as a starting point). There’s lot of apps for highlighting PDFs or websites (even Micro.blog), but both? That’s a smaller list. DEVONThink probably is the closest match (web archive highlighting, pdf highlighting, RSS feed management, can interface with Obsidian), but doesn’t do AI summaries, but I’ve never loved the iPad app - For my uses, at least, DEVONThink plus Ollama gets me close. I’ve heard rumors of DEVONThink 4 coming at some point, but no actual information on that; it may be even closer, but all the other things that app does. Good luck!

@dgreene196 I’m fairly sure I should stick with Reader as it does seem to suit my needs well. The AI stuff I could probably go without and I wonder if a different workflow (fewer highlights, more made notes) would serve me better. Really, I think I’m feeling the (2?) year itch of any app helped by the fact that it doesn’t feel that native.
Another point about ghostreader thing, I really don’t think it uses the best LLMs as it’s sumarising rate is worse than other tools I’ve used. I kind of like that as I KNOW it won’t be 100% right.

@numericcitizen I remember there was one of these every source reader apps called… omnivore or something? I think @gregmorris liked it a lot but I think it got shut down.

@ChrisJWilson well, sadly, Omnivore is dead, which is a shame. Back focus to Inoreader. cc @gregmorris

@ChrisJWilson For sure. You know you know the material if you know how LLM is likely to be wrong and can explain why it’s wrong! I have at times used it to make review questions, where the point of the question is, “How is this question or answer wrong?”