A couple pieces of feedback from someone who loves your content
1. I can't find an RSS feed anywhere?
2. Your homepage (https://longlead.com/#stories) is — and there's no gentle way to put this — borderline unusable. All I want is a simple list of your stories.
With a little bit of "undesigning," you'd have an amazing site :)
1. Being RSS-compatible would unbundle the editorial and art from the design. I wish RSS readers and aggregators would support our builds, but they do not. We do produce newsletters (currently through Substack) that do/would, but those are very different editorial products.
2. I understand this critique. We have outgrown this build, and are looking to develop a new website this year. It was good when we were starting out, but it doesn't serve our readership well anymore -- as you're pointing out!
This was killed by the HN community. I’ve vouched for it. Killing posts you disagree with isn’t the point of the flag feature.
With that being said, I understand your perspective. I’ve grappled with this myself. Please note that having RSS does not mandate that there’s content attached to each entry. It can “just” be a title, date, stable id like your slug, and a link. That way, if you insist on directing visitors to your own site, that can be done, while still allowing the reader to get updates in their reader.
I can assure you that if you add an RSS feed, I will regularly consume your content. If you don’t, I won’t even know it exists. For all the faults of legacy media, attaining readership is not one of them. They’d all remove RSS feeds in an instant if they could without loosing readers.
1. I can't find an RSS feed anywhere?
2. Your homepage (https://longlead.com/#stories) is — and there's no gentle way to put this — borderline unusable. All I want is a simple list of your stories.
With a little bit of "undesigning," you'd have an amazing site :)