[HN Gopher] Blog Feeds
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Blog Feeds
Author : stevedsimkins
Score : 58 points
Date : 2025-10-04 19:08 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blogfeeds.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (blogfeeds.net)
| leakycap wrote:
| Social media is easy, yet users commonly need help because they
| simply can't manage a login/password... I don't think this DIY
| approach is simple enough to get traction
|
| I could see a service where you paste in a URL of anything you
| find interesting, then that service going around and finding an
| RSS feed or newsletter signup and doing it for them... maybe
| taking off
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Or, as we call it, a "Follow" button.
| leakycap wrote:
| Who is "we"?
|
| Whoever "we" is doesn't seem to see the distinction between
| what is being described here & above and a follow button.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| I'm working on something similar, rather than finding an RSS
| feed it simply finds blog posts (or personal site pages) that
| are similar to your query. Probably a next iteration would be
| to create RSS feeds from the dataset.
| bwilliams wrote:
| > The best part about blog feeds? It's just an idea. There's no
| central authority. There's no platform.
|
| I think this is blessing _and_ a curse. I had an idea that I
| built a while back that centralizes RSS feeds so you get the
| centralized benefits of social media while authors can own and
| control their own content.
|
| If anyone's curious, I built it out here: https://onread.io but I
| never had the time to really share it out or push it beyond the
| SUPER basic MVP that it currently is. I was thinking about
| pivoting it more into a tool that I could turn into an RSS feed
| for myself, but I haven't found the time, really.
|
| Either way, I don't think RSS feeds as-is are as useful as they
| once were, and social media still has significant value over
| feeds due to conversation, sharing of content to folks with
| similar taste and interests, etc.
| esseph wrote:
| I'd argue RSS more relevant and mostly void of the abuse of
| other systems and platforms.
|
| The social component is exactly the problem for many.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| This is sort of what Substack is! It is a proprietary platform,
| but on the other hand i don't think most of us will get around to
| making a blog.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Please replace social media
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| I wish it mentioned WebMentions in the comment section.
| clueless wrote:
| if you think this will work, you haven't fully understood why the
| likes of twitter has become successful, i.e. centrally controlled
| collaborative filtering, amongst others aspect
| lapcat wrote:
| The reason social media is so popular is that most social media
| users have nothing interesting to say, so the only way they can
| get anyone's attention online is to intrude into other people's
| replies. They couldn't write a blog post if their life depended
| on it.
| kh_hk wrote:
| I write on my blog, but I am not sure who I am writing for. Which
| is fine, because in the end I write for myself. Years ago you
| would get comments, posts would get linked (remember pingbacks?).
| Maybe as time progressed I started writing more niche things that
| reach nobody, or maybe that web started disintegrating. Hope it
| comes back, but I will not hold my breath. I will keep posting
| though.
| firefoxd wrote:
| Some people have been following my blog for over 10 years. The
| only reason I know is because someone decided to email me on a
| random Tuesday. You'd be surprised what you find when you look
| through your logs.
| netruk44 wrote:
| This is actually one of my use cases for vibe coding.
| Creating and customizing an HTML dashboard from my nginx logs
| generated hourly via cron.
|
| It's nice to be able to see a graph of my blog's popularity
| over the past year and which posts have the most traction.
|
| It's also a bit disappointing to see exactly how much traffic
| is non-human, but the human portion steadily increasing
| outweighs that disappointment I think.
| stared wrote:
| Though, it kind of works that you keep adding blogs and blogs,
| until it turns out that RSS feed is mess. Maybe no clickbaits or
| ads, but still density of posts I want to read goes down.
|
| Do you know any good solution, where there is collaborative
| filtering or RSS (bonus points for open, tweakable algorithm) +
| some AI with _custom_ prompt to give me top recommendations?
|
| Something where I am in the charge of the algorithm, not the
| other way around.
| chrisamiller wrote:
| I don't mean this to sound snarky, but if a blog doesn't have a
| good ratio of signal to noise, you just unsubscribe from the
| feed.
|
| The solution is to be okay with missing some things instead of
| trying to drink from the firehose.
| stared wrote:
| Maybe it is one way to go.
|
| But I had a similar though with newspapers. There are quite a
| few I like. Yet, there are more articles in one that I can
| read - especially when I want to have other sources as well.
| So yeah, if there were only a handful of good blogs, it would
| be the case. But there is a long tail of interesting stuff
| there.
|
| Anyway, even for the Hacker News, I would like to filter a
| bit, so to have feed like the hackernewsletter (which I like
| a lot), but profiled more to my tastes.
| esseph wrote:
| This is like taking responsibility then claiming you don't
| really want it.
| not--felix wrote:
| I am thiking of adding an algorithm to my reader, but I am
| still not sure how. For collaborative filtering you need a lot
| of user to have enough data on small niche blogs.
| pedalpete wrote:
| The problem with blog feeds is the action required by the user to
| decide what blogs to follow, and then the desire to go to a
| different app to read them.
|
| But this strikes me as a problem that can be solved, and
| potentially already has been.
|
| If I go to a newsreeder the first time, it's empty. I have to
| decide what to follow.
|
| If you can get me to add a few blogs of interest, you start
| understanding what I want to read.
|
| I can then subscribe and follow, just like I would on twitter,
| and you can present new stuff to me, so I'm never showing up
| without something new.
|
| I suspect this is something like what substack is doing, but that
| means all the blogs have to be on substack.
|
| I never go to substack to browse, I go there when a link sends me
| there.
|
| If there was a service that I as a blog-writer can submit my feed
| to, and that service is managing the promotion of my blog to the
| right readers, that would be a benefit, and I wouldn't feel
| locked in.
|
| I'm sure this has been done, why did it fail?
| esseph wrote:
| I'm just speaking for myself here...
|
| The last thing I want is another service with an algorithm.
|
| RSS by itself is devoid of that, which is an appealing feature.
|
| Does everything have to be a fucking product?????
| 8organicbits wrote:
| https://feedland.com/?username=robalexdev is the closest
| variant I know. You can see who else subscribes to feeds that
| you follow, and see what other feeds they like. The current
| version doesn't have a recommendation engine, but you could
| easily build your own.
|
| > so I'm never showing up without something new.
|
| I like a feed I can fully consume and then move on, filling it
| with endless content would make it less valuable to me.
| mustaphah wrote:
| > RSS is actually already familiar to you if you have ever
| subscribed to a newsletter [...]
|
| RSS is far better than a (digest) newsletter; you can browse
| individual posts at your own pace, keep some unread for later,
| and revisit them across sessions.
|
| With newsletters, you either read the whole thing in one sitting
| or leave the email unarchived forever.
|
| If only every newsletter had an RSS feed. But of course they
| don't - can't show you ads!
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| That's a great way to promote blog discovery. And fairly hands-
| off.
| silcoon wrote:
| I thought about a similar problems because I always find really
| interesting blogs (mostly on HN) but I don't have a real place to
| store them, so they get lost when I close the tab. I can save
| them in the favorites but I'm not used to check favorites
| regularly.
|
| Feeds are a tangent solution because they give you only the new
| stuff. Feeds transform blogs into social media platforms where
| what matter is the new fresh content, ready to "feed" the
| algorithm. But blogs and personal sites are different. High
| quality content is usually written in a single article, maybe in
| the past, and it will not be shown on your feed.
|
| Actually I judge a blog on what's already written in there, so I
| want to read more articles but maybe just not right now. If I add
| the blog to my RSS reader I would only read future content.
|
| Another patch to this problem is Instapaper. I can save there the
| most interesting articles and read them later, but the entire-
| blog view is missing.
|
| I would like to have a way (platform) where I can save a blog and
| read all/some articles, with a standard formatting (custom blogs
| are nice but not always comfortable to read) and not having a
| default sorting for recent articles.
| nicbou wrote:
| Instapaper and Feedly work for me. Instapaper is the main thing
| and Feedly a thing I check occasionally for the blogs I love.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > If I add the blog to my RSS reader I would only read future
| content.
|
| Why? All the old articles are there as well.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| What year was this written?
|
| All for people doing their own sites/blogs. But social media is
| the RSS feed and has been for like 15 years. Short form posts
| that link to long form posts. Social posts that link to the
| content you've published wherever. And the reposting of other
| curated favorites is the extra feed portion. The change in recent
| years is ppl skipping the self-hosting/POS part of the POSSE and
| posting directly on the social media sites because they were
| convinced to do that and the social media sites were discouraging
| users from travelling off-site etc. We just need to get away from
| using social media sites as the hosts of our content and back to
| the POS part.
| _zeta wrote:
| I use my blog to mainly write about stuff I do that I really
| don't want to forget about, like interesting vulnerabilities I
| found or projects I want to share, reach is ~30k visits/month
| (still no idea how since I think it's kinda niche) but so far is
| working.
|
| I consider it also a good way to force myself to keep thoughts in
| order and to do a recap on the activities I do that most of the
| time are very chaotic.
|
| I would probably consider integrating messages also to receive
| feedbacks.
|
| I use hugo with the backend hosted on GitHub Pages, so far is a
| pretty solid setup that requires minimal effort since I just
| wrote an action to build pages every time a commit is done on the
| main branch
|
| In case you are interested: https://appsec.space
| not--felix wrote:
| I do not think RSS can replace social media, but we need more
| blogs where people just "reblog" thinks they liked, it would
| really help with discovering new feeds.
| m-hodges wrote:
| I don't have any analytics or social trackers on my blog, so I
| usually don't know if anyone is really reading it; but
| occasionally someone will email me in reaction to a post and
| that's usually quite nice.
| nicbou wrote:
| It's so nice and personal, unlike a social media notification.
| It feels like having a pen pal.
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(page generated 2025-10-04 23:00 UTC)