Internet Filtering Tools

How I organize the internet for myself

Hey everyone,

I hope you are all well and able to spend the winter holidays with loved ones. I was able to make it home for just over a week after thinking I wouldn’t be able to - the last few days have been busy with baking and cooking!

Context

Now that the food has been made, I have some time to sit and write about ‘filtering tools,’ which was the winning topic in my last post’s poll. Being a tool nerd, very much online, and sort of in the HCI field, I have long looked for specific tools that help make the internet a more manageable place. I am always curious to see new ways we can interact with all the digital information the internet provides. This is especially important when I find something I want to keep.

One of the reasons I write these posts is to help clarify my writing - this is not a novel concept¹. The Greeks and Romans had a culture of note taking and commentary (rough translations) - hypomnemata - which I find inspiring even though I haven’t been able to successfully implement it (and think digital tools to do so may be a sham…). Knowledge management, internet filtering, and productivity software has become increasingly large trend over the last 5-7 years, peaking during the pandemic. In my opinion, the amount of content, lockdown leading to more creative production, tools reaching a level of feature maturity, and influencers promoting them all resulted in a big circular bubble.

Further, people looking for (somewhat niche) tools to categorize the internet will probably have attachments to the things they are collecting, and the formats they are collected in. It can be a very personal process, especially when it takes so long to set up some of these tools! Because of this, and related popular themes of productivity, knowledge, and process automation, there can also be a lot of virtue signaling.

Ads for ‘my mind’ and Perplexity (click in to see the full images):

For example, these themes are referenced in ‘multi layered calendars.’ Amie recently attempted this, waxing poetic at the founder’s process in making the software which generated substantial funding and Twitter hype. It ended up taking years to be ready for release, and was executed poorly (half-baked features, poor performance, etc.). The next one bubbling up seems to be Joi. I believe this is pretty common in software dev, but especially so for more personal software like internet filtering tools.

Unfortunately, I think much of the bubble was grown by people chasing aspirational goals that won’t be found in digital tools, or at least not yet. With the technology of today, it is often more work to organize these typically cumbersome tools to yield results that will benefit the creator.² There is a high barrier of entry for most tools, which I was never committed to scale (and I believe many believe they scaled it, happy to do the busy work of building part of the system, without actually completing it enough to make it useful). This may change with AI making tagging - a typically crucial part of building these systems - automatic, but that is yet to be seen. Some of the newer entrants are starting ‘from the ground up’ with AI technologies built into these sorts of tools, and I am optimistic they will be more than a marginal improvement on the previous batch of products.

With that, here’s everything I’ve used that I think is noteworthy. A crown attached to the icon indicates that I still use it (sometimes begrudgingly).

Reading

Readwise is one of my favorite pieces of software out there. It works excellently, has unique features, and aggregates everything I can throw at it. I have been following Readwise’s development since the team started working on it and can vouch that they are extremely attentive and active.

Writing

Google Docs is the simplest cross platform piece of software I have found. I would prefer to use others with built in assistants and less features to streamline the process, but they either cost too much or are too complicated to use on multiple devices. Further, GDocs seems to have the best copy and paste experience into Substack :).

General Notes/Knowledge

I think these tools aren’t worth the effort necessary to upkeep the system or get started. They are also sometimes oriented to a more daily task management replacement workflow that I don’t need. There are so many sorts of these tools and thousands of ‘getting started’ or ‘how I use __’ or ‘__ hacks and systems’ videos for these them.

Web Annotation

Also shouting out Greenwich, which shows a little tunnel marker next to another user’s annotation - leads to fun little internet finds! Curious seems to be popular among Waterloo kids, and I believe my high school helped develop Hypothesi.is???

Browsers

By far my favorite category! Browsers dictate much of how we experience and navigate the internet and are made up of so many subtle yet crucial interactions. Urbit, Beaker (rip) and Mainframe are more nontraditional, especially Urbit. Keep an eye out for Mainframe as Jordan Singer (one of my favorite design engineers) and co. release more information about it in 2025.

What I’ve settled on

For now, I’m using Arc, Readwise, and Sublime. I like how Readwise aggregates all sorts of sources and lets me highlight quickly without limits (I highlight as I read just to make it more active), and the team is quick to add new features. I use Sublime in large part because I like the team and ethos behind it - it is still a young product, but I find its related card feature useful because of the sort of people that use Sublime :).³ The team behind Arc tends to lean aspirational these days, but I think their initial product is solid after a few years of use - I can’t really go back to more normal browsers.

If you’re curious, check out my public collections here, and check out Sari’s - Sublime’s founder - writing and other work!⁴

I don’t have any strong opinions on what will come, but I am very eager to see what comes next.

Quick interesting tidbits

1. Every is experiment with extendable articles - pretty cool, it can help you navigate the piece, reference the sources, etc.

2. Finally got around to the 11 Labs app, tried adding an article into their ‘make it a podcast’ feature and the whole UX was unexpectedly pleasant! I particularly liked the music/experience when waiting for the podcast to be generated.

3. I didn’t include journaling in the roundup above as I am new to these tools but wanted to shoutout Stoic (really excellent vision and pursuit of it), Gravity (Malhar’s early WIP but really sleek to use), and How We Feel (nonprofit dev’d, simple, ez to share with friends)!!!

That’s all everyone - enjoy the rest of 2024! Almost a quarter way through the century…

- Andrei

Me, my mom, and a sleepy Basil :)

1. “the only way out is through” was on my mind writing this paragraph

2. Notion shorts showing fancy dashboards, for a fee ;) and require choppy integrations or extensions…

3. The sound effects in the product I find very satisfying!

4. Frequent collaborator with Yancey Strickler, who is behind Metalabel. Worth looking at if you haven’t heard of it!!!