Remind me later

More and more YouTube creators are posting videos with future release dates, but unfortunately YouTube’s feeds show these videos when they’re uploaded and the author sets a schedule, so I end up with an item in NewsBlur that doesn’t go anywhere for a few days.

In an ideal world I’d love to have NewsBlur detect these and just suppress them entirely until the video is available, but I’d also be happy if I could have a “Remind me later” (or a “Hide until…”) which would mark the item as read and hidden, then unhide that item and mark it as unread at the selected time.

An example that has multiple pending videos right now is https://newsblur.com/site/7725227/ with the item “Plate Tectonics Preclude Young Earth Creationism | Bite-Sized Busts” not being published for 14 days from now, which is hopefully enough time to use this as an example.

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By the time I got to this ticket, the window of opportunity for that feed has passed. But I’m still wondering if this is the right feature for your use case. Better yet would be to mark unread on story changes. Problem in building that is how much of a story change is enough? And in this case, would the story have changed?

If what you want is a built-in reminder, are specific stories all you want from that? Could they just go into a new feed of Delayed Stories that pop into existence, or do you want the original story marked as unread on a certain date?

I don’t think the article changes in any meaningful way when it goes live.

Junk DNA! with Dr. Fazale Rana - YouTube is currently in the same state, it seems to have started happening a lot which either means a change in YouTube’s behaviour, or that it is summer and creators are pre-publishing a lot of content, but it comes up a lot now.

I’ve been adding them to Reeder’s “Read Later” (which is really just an internal Instapaper/Pocket, no reminders or anything, just a list). Unfortunately this makes Yet Another List I now need to supervise, and more than once I gave up on my entire Instapaper backlog which defeats the point. I stopped using read-later services as a result.

I think what would work best for this particular situation is just bringing the article (video) back as Unread later, that way it would appear in my usual list of videos and usual workflow. I could be re-dated or not, I don’t care, and keeping the original date seems simpler to implement. I’d be just as happy if you detected this state and just didn’t show me the video at all until it publishes, but for people who would want the advanced notice so they can join the moment it “premiers”, they might not like that behaviour. I’m indifferent, I just want a list of content I can consume now.

I’d use “remind me about this article” for other things if it were generic, for example, advanced notices of software releases (same idea, they’re telling me now about something I can’t have until tomorrow).

YouTube has a ‘Remind Me” which technically does what I want, except I simply don’t trust it given that YouTube has made subscriptions so unreliable that I need third party apps to follow the creators that I want. In fact when I did try it YouTube “reminded” me of the video before I could actually watch it anyway — They’re desperate for anything that brings someone to the site, because they can give you a “Well, you can’t watch this yet, but while you’re here…” and the reality is that I get sucked into that hole when I would actually prefer not, so I am trying to structure my content consumption.

I can just throw stuff into my task organizer too, it’s just more steps than I’d like, and again has the “multiple places to look for one thing” problem.

It might be too niche to be worth it for NewsBlur, but given that you already have special handling for YouTube I guess I’m not the only one using Newsblur in this way.

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A potential solution I could see it to ignore stories/videos from youtube that aren’t published yet if such a flag exists in the api. But looking at that video, I would think the current behavior is correct and you really do need a notifier on newsblur.

It wouldn’t take me more than a day to build but I’m not convinced anybody else wants this, since it would also add to the UI and lead to some people using it unintentionally.

I think it wouldn’t be too obtrusive in the right-click menu (or gear menu on mobile), and accidental activations wouldn’t be a big deal since the user would then need to specify the date/time to return, so there wouldn’t be any user surprise involved.

…Unless you were able to pull that from YouTube, and if so a “Remind me when video is published” would be pretty self-explanatory as a banner appearing in the article for qualifying videos.

But none of this changes the need to maintain the code if the feature is not widely used enough to justify it, and it needs a bit of backend logic of some sort to resurrect the articles too not just a UI thing.

I can think of other times I would use it if the “mark this as unread at…” generic existed… My primary e-mail account has implemented similar and it is exceedingly useful there, more than I expected. But I already have workflows for these things, it is just YouTube where I am struggling because Newsblur is where I go when I’m looking for something to watch.

Either way, I appreciate the consideration!

thedaveCA - if you use Gmail, there’s a Snooze email function, whereby you can leave an email in a form of limbo - not archived, but not sitting in your inbox. I use it a lot for online purchase notifications, snoozing until around about when the parcel is supposed to arrive, so that the email re-appears in my inbox, at the top of my feed roughly around the likely arrival date. You can specify morning/afternoon/evening, or a specific time.

Could a function like that help? Snooze a news item for a specific date, and have it pop up in the newer end of your feed as a reminder.

That’s what I’m asking for, without Gmail’s UI lie about what is actually happening — Mark the item as Unread at the defined time.