[HN Gopher] Reading RSS content is a skilled activity
___________________________________________________________________
Reading RSS content is a skilled activity
Author : d0liver
Score : 107 points
Date : 2025-04-26 00:08 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.doliver.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.doliver.org)
| tclancy wrote:
| Oh Lord. I miss the hell out of bloglines and wish we could go
| back to the glory days of RSS but this headline reads like a guy
| tipping his Trilby before explaining Rock and Mirty.
| AndrewOMartin wrote:
| This is perfectly reasonable, but I think it is a bit general.
| The notion of a chain of trust leading to a curated feed can
| equally apply to YouTube if you stick to the subscribed channels
| view.
|
| There are also specific skills I've picked up from being
| subscribed to the Hacker News "top" RSS feed. Namely judicious
| use of the "mark all as read" button.
| dmtroyer wrote:
| agreed. don't be afraid to use the mark all as read button!
| quantadev wrote:
| Definitely the `Chain of Trust` concept can be applied to
| anything. For example Social Media Protocol developers have
| thought a lot about using CoTrust, to be able to block
| undesirable people (moderation), by following a 'whitelist'
| only of users you trust or ones they trust, down a dependency
| tree of trust. Interestingly you could decentralize this onto
| some Relay system like Nostr and use Crypto signing, where each
| "trust" is Crypto certified to be correct, rather than needing
| to truse a central server/authority.
| simonw wrote:
| I don't think this is just about RSS:
|
| > So, how do we decide and filter for ourselves? My favored
| approach is fairly old fashioned: Chains of trust. We start by
| finding someone whose _judgement_ we trust and subscribing to
| their feed, and then we find out who they trust and subscribe to
| their feed, and so on. Part of the _judgement_ that we 're
| looking for in these trustees is not simply whether or not
| content is _accurate_ but whether or not it is worth our
| _attention_.
|
| This goes for any form of social media beyond just blogs. Find
| people who have good taste, good judgement and demonstrate their
| credibility in the subjects that matter to you. Collect those
| people - follow them on social media, hang out with them on
| Discord, attend events that they go to, subscribe to their blogs
| and their newsletters, read their papers (for academia), pay
| attention to the people THEY respect.
|
| Repeat that a bunch of times and you can become incredibly well
| informed on almost any topic.
| nativeit wrote:
| Media theory and critical thinking are sorely lacking in public
| education, and the lack of media literacy has never been more
| apparent. It sounded absurd, taking precious time away from
| teaching math to watch movies? But this is the first generation
| coming of age right now to have been exposed to mass
| communications in ways/amounts that have never existed--I suppose
| that's been true of each of the last several dozen generations,
| but it's crossed a threshold that I believe necessitates special
| care in raising adults who can better discern trustworthy
| sources, interpret and think critically about what they
| see/hear/read, and do precisely as this article recommends and
| filter your incoming information in a thoughtful and intentional
| way.
| bsnnkv wrote:
| > And that's also where the magic lies because it's that very
| process of engaging with content and deciding whether or not it
| has value to you that makes using an RSS reader a better
| experience and one where you own your attention.
|
| Back when RSS was more popular, the tyranny of never-ending
| backlogs was a topic that was discussed somewhat regularly, but
| it gets glossed over a little these days since RSS talk is
| naturally enclosed within a layer of nostalgia
|
| For a few years now my approach has basically been "read it now
| or read it never" - this means that my RSS feeds are typically
| empty and I never save anything to "read it later" queues
|
| If it's something I'm supposed to read, it'll probably be
| resurfaced one way or another (or maybe it won't, and that's fine
| too) at a later time when I'm immediately ready to pick up what
| is being put down
| safety1st wrote:
| RSS came of age in a very different time, when the world of
| computing was more, for lack of a better term, workstation-
| centric. People wanted RSS clients that were similar to email
| clients, or maybe even integrated directly into the email
| client, and they had this idea that they should 'catch up' on
| everything that was published since their last session, almost
| like it was a job.
|
| Nowadays people have an implicit understanding that the net is
| vast and infinite, it's beyond the ability of one man to fully
| catch up, and you're just tuning into a slice of the data
| stream.
|
| RSS clients never really departed from their roots of showing
| reverse chronological lists of all the posts, but this UI loses
| usefulness when the data stream gets too big. Commercial social
| media saw an opportunity and decided to make the algorithm that
| arranges the feed totally opaque - with that achieved, they
| proceeded to auction off each spot in it and get rich. Even
| worse than the reverse chronological firehose.
|
| What we lack is a presentation that is actually good! I don't
| have the answer. One thing I want to experiment with, though,
| is digests. I use a straight reverse chronological UI that
| aggregates all my items in all my feeds. One thing I noticed is
| that this ends up wildly biased toward feeds that have lots of
| posts, like news aggregator websites, or Reddit. Anyone who's
| foolish enough to work hard and produce wonderful long form
| content with less frequency, gets lost in the firehose, which
| may tell us a lot about how the collapse-in-progress of our
| civilization got started. I have no idea how to solve this and
| do better than the UIs and algorithms that rule the world
| today. I do have it on my todo list to try a digest style UI -
| like perhaps each website gets one entry per day in my feed,
| and if they made multiple posts on that day, those are
| represented as multiple small title links in a compact format.
| Whereas a less frequent poster might even get an excerpt along
| with their title or something.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| In my opinion the answer is curation. If you're getting so
| many magazines and newspapers in the post that you can't read
| them all, the answer isn't to hire someone to cut out random
| pages for you to read (oh, why are they all adverts?), the
| answer is to stop subscribing to so many publications.
|
| I never fail to read all of my social media feeds and email
| messages, because I actively cancel subscriptions to stuff
| that I don't have time to read. After all, it's
| entertainment/casual education, not mandatory learning.
| ghaff wrote:
| Most people never read most of the magazines and newspapers
| they got cover to cover. I certainly read a fairly small
| percentage of the New York Times.
| quantadev wrote:
| Hire someone? What about just using a system that crowd-
| sources it. That's what "Thumbs Up" icons can do, if you
| can get people to use them.
| snackbroken wrote:
| Popularity contests don't do a great job of surfacing
| quality. They do OK at pruning away the dullest 25, but
| tend to also throw away the top 5%0 most interesting
| stuff, because that stuff is invariably niche. They also
| don't do great in the meh middle, favoring loudness and
| approachability over thoughtfulness and competence.
| quantadev wrote:
| It's just like when people say Twitter/X is a Cesspool.
| Of course it is if you view the unfiltererd/agorithmic
| feed. However, if you only view the content from who
| you're following you get exactly the content you want.
|
| I use Twitter/X and all I ever see is AI/LLM stuff
| because it's all I follow and all I use it for. Zero
| politics. If someone does a political post, that's an
| instant unfollow.
|
| This is how we can rank RSS as well. You can look at a
| rank-ordered list only from people you trust, or a rank-
| ordered list from the public at large, which will be a
| dumpster fire. So you can take a union of all content
| from those you follow and put the ones with most upvotes
| at top, and viola, you're done.
|
| EDIT: However a better approach is do use AI to
| categorize as, politics/non-politics, hotdog/non-hotdog,
| etc, and then I can turn off political posts without
| having to completely unfollow someone I'd otherwise like.
| vaylian wrote:
| > firehose
|
| This is what the modern information space feels like in one
| word. It's impossible to read everything. But at the same
| time, it's not necessary to read everything.
|
| > What we lack is a presentation that is actually good! I
| don't have the answer. One thing I want to experiment with,
| though, is digests.
|
| Do you have a RSS feed that I can subscribe to so that I get
| notified when you publish your experiment?
| safety1st wrote:
| I've never actually published any of the code I use to view
| my RSS feeds. This question comes up from time to time when
| I discuss the subject though! Maybe I will one of these
| days.
| ghaff wrote:
| Someone I know once described Twitter as being a river that
| you dipped into when you had the time and the interest. I
| think RSS was similar but, as you say, the clients had a
| somewhat different model. You could get around by having a
| priority category or something like that.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/TwitterBreaki
| n...
|
| > I need to treat it as a stream that I dip my toe into
| every so often
| rambambram wrote:
| I did something like this with my reader:
|
| - Only subscribed to lots of niche news and small websites
| (most of my list has the category 'dev blog' attached to it,
| so that's all of you guys/girls with a blog).
|
| - Only get posts when I click, basically no automatic
| hoarding in the background (except for my Newspaper
| functionality, which does a little bit of background request
| for important feeds that I manually selected).
|
| - Just pick the last post from a randomly selected feed. This
| really gets me going from reading about Linux, to reading
| about the best way to bake a cake, to reading about interior
| design, to reading about bikepacking... all in one sit.
|
| - Or only pick from randomly selected feeds with a certain
| category, when I'm in the mood for a specific kind of news.
| For example, I want to know new videos on selected Youtube
| channels, or i only want to see posts with a picture attached
| (I call it 'photo feeds').
| quantadev wrote:
| Good stuff getting "lost in the firehose" is a big concern.
| If there were a 'not easily game-able' way to have people
| upvote great content in a way that votes could be tallied
| that would help, but I'd much prefer, dare I say it...a
| "decentralized" protocol for that if possible. Maybe Nostr
| based where stuff is crypto signed with your key, and you
| choose who to trust maybe even. Not sure how much of this
| "follow.it" is doing, if any of it, because I haven't dug
| into it yet, but I'm optimistic we can revive RSS in a big
| way. It's too good of an idea to let BigTech and BigMedia
| kill it off simply by ignoring it. Big companies and AD
| agencies of course hate RSS because it puts users in charge
| if what they read rather than having to wade thru tons of AD
| views to get to content.
| setopt wrote:
| It depends what you use it for. I'm a researcher and use it to
| follow scientific literature (relevant arXiv sections and
| scientific journals, as well as funding agency announcements),
| and keeping an eye on what's up is then arguably part of the
| job.
|
| If you use it for general news and blogs, that's of course
| different. I completely agree with letting the FOMO go.
| soapdog wrote:
| There are a couple readers that avoid that by providing a
| calmer experience without a firehose and without background
| fetching.
|
| https://blogcat.org (I made this one)
|
| https://fraidyc.at (this is the inspiration for many calm
| readers)
|
| https://cblgh.itch.io/rad-reader (multiplatform and super calm)
| pityJuke wrote:
| Ended up abandoning Fraidycat after it atrophied (a number of
| the integrations that weren't plain RSS, like YouTube/Twitch,
| didn't work well, it ended up choking my browser, and then
| stopped working entirely)... did not know there were so many
| spiritual successors. Thanks!
|
| Now... if anyone knows of an iOS equivalent, that'd be
| awesome.
| al_borland wrote:
| One of the big issue I had (and have) with RSS is that is
| discouraged me from following multiple similar sources, as I'll
| see similar stories in each feed and it becomes very noisy.
|
| Some apps I saw in the past, like Fever that attempted to quell
| this issue, but I ended to taking the approach of just being
| ruthless about what I subscribe to.
|
| The ultimate result of this was just a few feeds, but one of
| them is ars technica, which on its own can become too much if I
| don't keep up on it daily, and if they miss covering something,
| I miss reading about it. It doesn't leave room for special
| interest blogs in tech, without inevitably creating more
| duplication than I'd like.
|
| I don't think the modern algorithmic approach is much better,
| as things can just as easily fall through the cracks.
|
| I need to seriously consider adopting your "read it now or read
| it never" approach. This is effectively how my read-it-later
| accounts work in practice, but with the good intentions of
| reading something later, comes the shame of never actually
| doing it. Compound that with the regret I feel when I
| occasionally open it up and find dead links. I don't think any
| of this shame or regret actually makes my life better.
| karpathy wrote:
| I also find myself wanting to go back to RSS for the exact same
| reasons of 1st paragraph. You own your content and host it.
| Unfortunately all the RSS readers are too raw and I think one of
| them has to port over Twitter features, things like: more
| ephemeral feed instead of an inbox, reply, quote tweet, retweet,
| like, follow, and new: LLM-driven customizable algorithmic feed.
| zsoltkacsandi wrote:
| > more ephemeral feed instead of an inbox
|
| How would that work?
| rambambram wrote:
| Let your reader only show randomly selected posts from all
| your feeds, for instance.
| oceansweep wrote:
| Do you think you could expand on that? Like how you might
| imagine an ideal workflow to go? Would there be like a sea of
| tags that you could wade through, or just an '/all', only items
| you specifically subscribe to + your connections subscriptions
| according to some ranking algo? Items would 'fall off' or out
| of view(?) after X time/X amount of browsing a differently
| weighted topic?
|
| I ask because being honest, you're a big inspiration for
| myself, and inadvertently, adding an LLM-curated RSS feed
| reader as a planned feature to a project I'm working on. (I saw
| https://github.com/karpathy/LLM101n when I was getting
| interested in LLMs, and then got inspired by your project to
| start to attempt to build something like the primer from the
| diamond age.
|
| Where that leads is that I see an RSS feed reader + curation
| via self-described or identified interests as being a 'core'
| piece of information gathering for the 'future' individual and
| have had it on the to-do list as a feature-add for my project.
| AstroBen wrote:
| I adore RSS. Some gems I've found:
|
| https://hnrss.org/
|
| https://rsshub.app/twitter/user/{username} for twitter accounts
|
| Append .rss to any subreddit URL you want updates on
|
| YouTube also has an RSS feed for channels
| dandersch wrote:
| > _rsshub_
|
| This has been one of the key programs for me to move 90% of my
| "timeline" into an rss reader.
|
| If you self-host it, you can also pass it authentication tokens
| to RSSify things like:
|
| - your twitter timeline
|
| - github notifications, issues, commits
|
| - discord messages
|
| - youtube subscriptions
|
| - spotify/twitch/steam/etc.
| thefranke wrote:
| An to add another project in a similar vein (scraping to turn
| pages into RSS): https://rss-bridge.org/
| verisimi wrote:
| Feeder
|
| https://github.com/spacecowboy/Feeder?tab=readme-ov-file
|
| Free, excellent
| vindex10 wrote:
| came here to mention Feeder :) it's very good.
|
| it was a bit painful without search, but they finally merged
| the long-hanging merge request, and now the search across
| posts is available in the stable version!
|
| totally recommend!
|
| also, a bit aside, but for podcasts: antennapod seems to be
| doing a good job too!
| Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe wrote:
| For HN summaries via RSS I've been using gophersignal.com which
| is FOSS and been pretty happy with it and the dev is adorable.
|
| https://gophersignal.com/
| 1dom wrote:
| I think self curation is a theme not directly discussed.
|
| The recurring problem is other people trying to tell you what
| information you should see, resulting in suboptimal aggregations.
| If you don't curate your own stuff, you'll slide into whatever
| state of mind your curator wants you to slide into.
|
| Algorithmic feeds are widely accepted to cause doomscrolling, and
| my experience with RSS is similar to the author: it goes well,
| but then whenever an aggregate source of any kind is added, it
| drowns out everything else. This wouldn't be a problem if
| everything from the source was a good read. The issue is any
| aggregation by someone who isn't you isn't going to be perfect
| for you.
|
| My brain wants to make a link between collateralised debt
| obligations causing the recession, and aggregate info sources and
| algo feeds causing the collapse of the modern internet.
| Basically, everyone realises 90% of what they have in their
| feed/inbox is actually worthless and we only have it because the
| people who we get stuff from mixed it with a few good/relevant
| pieces of information so we trusted/assumed the rest would be
| good/relevant.
|
| Life takes effort, if you outsource the effort, your life
| requires less effort but is less likely to be what you want. The
| same applies to curating the content you consume. It's easy to
| accidentally outsource.
| mnls wrote:
| There is a misunderstanding about RSS and escaping algorithms.
| Sure, you are not under the social media control but you
| certainly are under the publisher control. Now you have to see
| everything that they publish. Which makes it the absolutely worst
| way to consume news. It becomes overwhelming and if you want
| inbox zero it's another digital burden. The result is that I
| pretty much lost interest on following some websites through RSS
| because even though I do like some of the articles, it's another
| way of doomscrolling when searching for the one thing that will
| give you the dopamine hit.
|
| So after excluding the vast majority of websites, I was left with
| 10-20 websites that I did enjoy ~60% of the content they put out
| and I've subscribed to their newsletter. Which in most cases is
| full of tracking links but that's a case for another topic.
| zufallsheld wrote:
| I can and do filter on certain feeds. My reader (tiny tiny rss)
| supports filtering based on the contents of the articles.
|
| I filter sponsored articles or ones that need a subscription,
| articles that are a series, links to podcasts, recurring
| series..
| rambambram wrote:
| > Now you have to see everything that they publish. Which makes
| it the absolutely worst way to consume news.
|
| I agree on the second part, but the first part is not
| necessary. RSS is technically not hard, one can write one's own
| reader very quickly. You don't have to consume everything a
| publishers publishes, I don't even see everything a publisher
| publishes because I don't even request everything a publisher
| publishes.
|
| I think the (your? my?) curation should focus on selecting some
| good sources (like the article says), but this means in no way
| that you should see everything all the time. Only when you
| want, in a quantity that's doable for you.
| mbanerjeepalmer wrote:
| > Now you have to see everything that they publish.
|
| Ha, that's almost word-for-word on https://zacusca.net. [0]
|
| And Zacusca represents a third way (the first two being reverse
| chron and newsletters, which both put control in the
| publisher's hands). If you can articulate what you enjoy then
| you can filter the RSS according to that.
|
| [0] I'm working on Zacusca. Other, frankly more developed,
| alternatives include: - https://feeds.fun/ -
| https://scour.ing/about
| _dain_ wrote:
| _> and if you want inbox zero_
|
| There's your problem. Turn off the "unread" indicators and just
| chill. You're not going to read everything and that's okay.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Fetching the feed less often can help but you still have to
| treat high volume feeds differently. With my best discipline, I
| was opening my reader just once a day and getting just whatever
| happens to be "front page" at the moment. The few YT channels I
| "follow" via RSS only post content a few times a month.
| quantadev wrote:
| You just need a reader that aggregates all your feeds into a
| single chronological list. Sure this means that you may never
| get thru the firehose, but it's easier to me than going to each
| subscription to read it individually. It's less work, and more
| fun as one big list.
| rambambram wrote:
| It takes effort indeed. Just as putting up a little homepage,
| writing articles, essays or short tidbits, and publishing an RSS
| feed for that.
|
| What I do with my self-built reader (link in bio) to have it not
| function as a newsfeed from regular social media, is to only get
| the latest posts from randomly selected feeds. I don't need all
| of the unread posts from all of the sources (there are 1415 now
| in my list) every time. This is also nicer for the publishers
| (that may be you, fellow HNer!), since every request to your feed
| is actually read.
|
| In the beginning of using my own reader I was really craving the
| dopamine shot from regular social media, it literally took me two
| years to get used to my self-inflicted info diet. Now it's really
| a calm blessing, especially because I read stuff posted by yet
| another internet fellow who has a blog. Way more human.
|
| Using RSS is different and should be different. Wanting RSS and
| the social open web, and then transforming it to regular social
| media with notifications and a firehose of news is the same as
| building a new barebones electric pickup truck and then wanting
| it to connect to an app.
| tducasse wrote:
| My problem with RSS is that I tend to subscribe to too many
| things and then it's too much. Also I wanted a solution that was
| free or self hosted, but I realized it's much better if someone
| manages the complexity for me, so I just ended up going with the
| paid hosting for miniflux (https://miniflux.app/).
|
| Now I've just subscribed to a few things I care about, I open the
| website from time to time, quickly mark as "read" stuff I'm not
| interested in, and when I have more time I just go through
| everything that is still unread, because it's been "filtered in".
| Seems to work!
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| > We start by finding someone whose judgement we trust and
| subscribing to their feed...
|
| ...and in no time at all, these "someones" will be made offers
| not all of them will refuse to parlay their trusted judgements
| into income by marketing agencies. It seems trust will not only
| need to be gained but also somehow maintained.
| nexo-v1 wrote:
| I keep coming back to the idea of curating my own reading through
| RSS.
|
| I missed the first wave: mostly stuck to aggregators and blogs,
| but eventually set up a Feedly account. Like others here, I found
| maintaining a meaningful list takes real energy. It's easy to
| over-subscribe and end up with a second inbox.
|
| Still, I think the effort is worth it. The best systems I've
| worked on always rewarded small, regular maintenance over trying
| to automate everything away. Feels like curating information
| works the same way.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| > We start by finding someone whose judgement we trust and
| subscribing to their feed, and then we find out who they trust
| and subscribe to their feed, and so on.
|
| I do this, but then to avoid echo chambers I do occasional fault
| injection where I pick someone that one of my feed is at an
| opposite pole to in some salient, on some axis, and inject them
| to my feed for a while. Maybe I have something to learn from
| them, maybe I don't, maybe they stay on the feed or maybe they
| are removed. I hope this helps me avoid groupthink.
| runiq wrote:
| I do the same. Case in point: I started to follow someone's
| blog because of their technical achievements, then I realized I
| don't like their political views _at all_, but I keep them on
| the list mostly to keep myself on my toes.
| hyperbolablabla wrote:
| Jonathan Blow perchance?
| runiq wrote:
| Not gonna sic the HN brigade on this person.
| mbanerjeepalmer wrote:
| People here seem to fall into two camps:
|
| (A) Studiously prune your feeds like a bonsai. As the author
| suggest, follow the chain of trust to a small number of voices
| (for me, something like Stratechery, Simon Willison, Inner Ring).
|
| (B) Realise that RSS is another form of 'tyranny', this time at
| the hands of the publisher instead of the platform, where the
| composition of your feeds, and therefore what uses your
| attention, doesn't correlate highly with what matters to you.
|
| I can feel the pickaxes being unsheathed as I type this but...I
| have reason to believe my (and others') LLM/embeddings-driven
| products are a good solution.
|
| Position (A) isn't tenable if FOMO matters. Paraphrasing another
| comment here: 'Following arXiv is part of the job'.
|
| So let's say you adopt position (B). You recognise that
| everything that matters to you is distributed across some set of
| feeds. But only a small proportion of the total material in those
| feeds matters to you. If you can articulate what matters then you
| can let an LLM or embeddings model use their attention, instead
| of yours, on the low-relevance items by filtering them out.
|
| Some options:
|
| - https;//scour.ing
|
| - https://feeds.fun
|
| - https://zacusca.net (disclosure: mine, and still pretty janky)
| yapyap wrote:
| (I think) the thing is that you are not meant to get served
| content that is specifically for you. (insert this hole was
| made for me img) [1]) You get someone's stream of content and
| you have to decide whether you are okay with the friction
| between what they are serving and yourself or if you are not
| and then unsubscribing.
|
| This is the same reason why AI generated music is soulless and
| isn't liked. If music can be made especially for you in
| milliseconds to soothe your mood or to suit your situation it
| isn't art, it's entertainment slop you're consuming. Art and
| things created by other people doesn't have to pander to you,
| it expresses something they made and you are allowed to observe
| or interact with it. What caused the creator to create it is
| what gives it meaning, when you start having to arbitrage your
| creations with the consumer (to become more appealing for more
| people) that's when you start losing credibility and the start
| of selling out.
|
| A few of the most heinous examples of people selling their
| dignity for 'the algorithm' to recommend their stuff to more
| consumers are those who impact their content for retention. An
| easy one is Mr. Beast, entire videos are focused solely around
| retention. If the team behind that channel finds something that
| gets them more appeal to their consumerbase they will implement
| or pivot towards it like there is no tomorrow.
|
| Another scathing example is Jay Z, who - in Moment of Clarity -
| rapped
|
| " I dumb down for my audience and double my dollars They
| criticize me for it, yet they all yell "holla" If skills sold,
| truth be told, I'd probably be lyrically Talib Kweli Truthfully
| I wanna rhyme like Common Sense But I did 5 mill' - I ain't
| been rhyming like Common since (Woo!)"
|
| admitting he has compromised his lyrical integrity for money
| and influence long before "the algorithm" was the all
| influential thing.
|
| I guess when it comes down to it, it's easier to make it in the
| world without integrity, but that definition of making it is
| more hollow.
|
| 1. https://i.imgflip.com/2uyz7f.png
| skydhash wrote:
| > _Art and things created by other people doesn't have to
| pander to you, it expresses something they made and you are
| allowed to observe or interact with it._
|
| And that's why you need to curate as it's an expression of
| your choice. Both by choosing which feeds to follow and which
| articles to read. Social media is like being in a public
| square alone while everyone is shouting at you while feeds
| are more like being in a gathering. In the latter, everyone
| is already vetted so you just skip from one interesting
| conversation to another while recognizing keeping track of
| everything is pointless.
| mbanerjeepalmer wrote:
| I don't disagree with you. I don't think that LLMs (or any
| other technology) filtering 'to meet my needs' ought to be my
| source of art, music or other worthy media. And part of the
| joy of picking up a printed newspaper or magazine is the
| sense it has been shaped for a wider audience, not just me,
| with a stronger shade of objective than subjective.
|
| The point, though, is that if I'm following an ML arXiv feed
| and I'm interested in recommender systems, I really don't
| need to trawl through everything on interpretability, image
| generation etc. to get there, no matter how artful those
| papers are.
| lexoj wrote:
| The way I have addressed this is using my own tool [1] which
| creates daily digests instead (MD files with date). This removes
| the stress to check everything or having hundreds of unread, I
| care only about the current day. If I get some time, say on the
| weekend, I could go in previous days and check if I skipped. I
| think its a better trade off than having so many unread stories
| that grow over time.
|
| [1] https://github.com/piqoni/matcha
| soapdog wrote:
| Seeing many posts here talking about how their feed reading
| experience is overwhelming cause it is a firehose of things they
| might not be interested in. So I wrote a little post about
| alternative experiences in RSS reading:
|
| https://andregarzia.com/2025/04/rss-doesnt-necessarily-means...
|
| You can have feed readers that provide a calmer UX. My own feed
| reader, BlogCat, lets you configure how many posts per website
| you want to see in the reader page and how often to fetch each
| site (with the default being daily). Without notifications or
| background fetching, you're in control of how often and when you
| want to see the posts from a website.
| bitbasher wrote:
| A good RSS reader/feed is nice to curb over consumption. I use it
| for youtube channels and blogs. As long as I can consume the
| content via my reader, I don't need to visit youtube and fall
| down any rabbit holes.
| al_borland wrote:
| I attempted this a while ago. I loaded all my YouTube
| subscriptions into an RSS reader, and then it quickly became
| too much for me to deal with. The big problem was that I do
| 99.5% of my YouTube viewing on a TV, while my RSS readers is on
| the phone and desktop. I learned that whatever solutions come
| up with needs to fit into my life. I'm not going to become a
| desk chair YouTube watcher.
|
| YouTube effectively already has this built-in with their
| subscriptions. Not being able to turn off the recommended page,
| or default to loaded the subscriptions when opening the app on
| the TV are the real issues.
| bitbasher wrote:
| I understand it's not for everyone, but it works for me. I
| don't watch youtube anywhere else other than my laptop. I
| can't imagine trying to use a TV app.. but that's a whole
| other can of worms :)
| kgwxd wrote:
| One thing I highly miss from using RSS is never having to rescan
| over items I've already decided I'm not going to read. The
| occasional post about RSS usually gets me back on the wagon.
| al_borland wrote:
| Why do you keep falling off the wagon? That is the real
| question to ask.
| quantadev wrote:
| This is a really cool idea. I'm a fan of RSS, and the biggest
| challenge with RSS is curating a good list of feeds. I joined up
| on 'follow.it'!! Is there a place to have discussions about this
| site and concept? Like on Reddit or Twitter/X? Because I have my
| own Social Media apps that I'd like to integrate into this
| ecosystem, and would love to discuss ideas with others, and I
| don't trust this HN thread as a legit place to host said in-depth
| discussion.
| dmtroyer wrote:
| funny, I am revisiting rss as a means to escape social media
| algorithms and doomscrolling. there are lots of good resources in
| the comments to even further fine tune RSS beyond just being
| careful about what I subscribe to.
| casey2 wrote:
| s/the internet/youtube, facebook, instagram, twitter, reddit/
| s/twitter/x/
|
| Youtube subscriptions generally work fine, it isn't worth my time
| maintaining rss feeds for channels. Just make sure you click the
| button that says subscriptions. I don't use any of the other
| sites so I can't comment.
|
| The real reason for frustration with personalization algorithms
| is that nobody is willing to go all the way because of the belief
| that the individual is evil and any creators that target
| individuals are promptly banned usually with no reason given at
| all, breaking some unspoken social rule.
| ranger207 wrote:
| You don't have to read everything you're subscribed to. I'll wake
| up and have, say, 150 or so unread items in my feed reader, and
| I'll just take 5 minutes or so hitting the next button and
| marking them as read, and if there's something I care to actually
| read I'll mark it unread and move on. Then once I've actually
| found everything I want to read I'll go back and actually read
| those. A Eurogamer article on a game I don't care about? Skipped.
| A Eurogamer article about an interview with the devs of a game I
| love? Mark unread and come back to it after filtering.
|
| The benefit of RSS is that it presents everything as a purely
| chronological feed. An algorithmic feed tries to figure out what
| you want and present it to you; a chronological feed you have to
| do that filtering yourself. RSS isn't a way of getting around
| that, it's a way of doing it better
| celeritascelery wrote:
| I hope that at some point I can use AI to filter my RSS feed for
| me. It knows the kind of content I want and the stuff I always
| skip. Sure it won't be perfect, but it would let me subscribe to
| more high volume feeds without having to manually filter
| everything.
| lexoj wrote:
| You can do that with the Analyst feature of Matcha RSS.[1] Just
| write to the prompt what you want back from Analyst feeds.
| Disclaimer: its my own tool.
|
| [1] https://github.com/piqoni/matcha?tab=readme-ov-
| file#analyst-...
| skybrian wrote:
| I recently figured out a good way to handle having more
| subscriptions than I feel like reading in Newsblur.
|
| I have one group ("0-front") for feeds that I usually read
| immediately (such as favorite comics) and many more groups of
| feeds that seemed interesting at the time. I will catch up with
| the first group, but only read the rest when I feel like it.
| sdsd wrote:
| I just filter my RSS subs through a locally running LLM trained
| on my journal to judge my interests, it then decides what to
| curate for me based on a prompt (sometimes something totally left
| field, this stuff always, etc)
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