[HN Gopher] Making RSS More Fun
___________________________________________________________________
Making RSS More Fun
Author : salmon
Score : 166 points
Date : 2025-12-05 13:00 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (matduggan.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (matduggan.com)
| colesantiago wrote:
| > I want to sit somewhere and passively consume random small
| creators content, then upvote some of that content and the
| service should show that more often to other users. That's it. No
| advertising, no collecting tons of user data about me, just a
| very simple "I have 15 minutes to kill before the next meeting,
| show me some random stuff."
|
| In other words consume things for free and don't support the
| small content creators work.
|
| Sounds very similar to what the AI companies are doing, consuming
| RSS feeds and not paying it back to the small creators, but when
| we are doing it, it is okay because _we_ are not AI companies.
|
| hmmm.
| yourboirusty wrote:
| AI companies hoover up the data, dump it in a giant pile and
| never tell you the source of it.
|
| This extension literally just redirects you to the website. If
| the small creator has ads on that website, they're going to get
| paid. They're going to get the exposure.
| tclancy wrote:
| Are you complaining about this project or RSS in general?
| Because your complaint applies to both. I loved the era of RSS
| readers. Maybe I never sent anyone money but it was never the
| point. That was a way to feel properly connected to an Internet
| stranger, to stay up on what was going on and what they
| thought. It doesn't have to be financial remuneration at the
| end of every flow chart. "It is easier to imagine an end to the
| world than an end to capitalism.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| > That was a way to feel properly connected to an Internet
| stranger, to stay up on what was going on and what they
| thought.
|
| I think too many people have forgotten that this is by far
| one of the best quality of the internet, especially the more
| personal one.
|
| There does not need to be a financial exchange. Sometimes
| it's enough to share content and read content others have
| shared.
| oersted wrote:
| You are putting words in their mouth. There is no reason why
| such an RSS app wouldn't link to the original source instead of
| scraping it.
|
| The app doesn't need to be a central source of monetization for
| the creators either, that's usually the source of all these
| problems. The app can monetize their aggregation and curation
| services as they wish, and the individual creators sites can
| monetize their contribution as they wish. Be it ads,
| subscriptions, donations or anything else, as usual.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| The dream of consuming free content is really a throwback to
| the 90's way of thinking about an open web as a public space
| where anyone can freely access files that are published, as
| "published" meant "freely available." When YouTube made
| publishing something monetizable and guarded by DRM (look at
| all the trouble yt-dlp has been going through lately), that
| open web lost a lot of steam. Social media companies monetized
| discovery and surfacing through user data collection, and also
| undercut some of the desire to publish--once your basic info
| was on Facebook, having a personal web page became much less
| important. As having personal hosting became less and less the
| norm, publishing power concentrated in the hands of fewer
| companies (like YouTube) that were set up to monetize content
| and built the expectation of pecuniary compensation for
| "content creation," where the 1990's open web publishers were
| happy just being noticed and appreciated. The 1990's were a
| long time ago and are never coming back, because the past
| exists only as memory.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| The spirit of the 90s is still here. There are still many,
| many people who are happy to have a space on the web and
| share what they're passionate about or what is in their heads
| simply because they enjoy the process.
|
| It's not an all-or-nothing scenario. The two things can
| coexist. Some people will pursuit monetization, others are
| happy to share for the sake of sharing.
|
| It comes down to individual choices.
| mrandish wrote:
| > The spirit of the 90s is still here
|
| "Dream of the '90s"
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4hShMEk1Ew)
| Devasta wrote:
| When I run a red light it's wrong, but when a fire truck does
| it it's ok?
|
| Really makes you think.
| colesantiago wrote:
| Poor attempt to refute my point.
|
| When was the last time you supported a content creator that
| has an RSS feed?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| My YOShInOn reader basically looks like this. It takes a few 1000
| up/down judgements to make good content-based recs [1], a reader
| that does collaborative filtering probably learns faster.
|
| [1] train a BERT+SVM classifer to predict my judgements, create
| 20 k-Means clusters to get some diversity, take the top N from
| each cluster, blend in a certain fraction of randoms to keep it
| honest.
|
| The clusters are unsupervised and identify big interest areas
| such as programming, sports, climate change, advanced
| manufacturing, anime, without putting labels on the clusters --
| the clusters do change from run to run but so what. If I really
| wanted a stable classification I would probably start with
| clusters, give them names, merge/split a little, and make a
| training set to supervised classifier to those classes.
| lexoj wrote:
| The way I have made RSS more fun is by adding local LLM
| functionalities[0] and push notifications. (that can notify me
| when something I expect to happen, happens)
|
| [0] https://github.com/piqoni/matcha
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| > I rarely want to read all of a websites content from beginning
| to end
|
| I get the impression this person is using RSS reader wrong. Or is
| there really a culture of people you are using RSS like a
| youtube-channel, consuming everything from beginning to end? For
| me the purpose of RSS is to get the newest headlines, choose the
| interesting articles and skip the rest. This means there is a
| limited list of items to check each day, and a finishing line.
|
| > The whole appeal of TikTok, for those who haven't wasted hours
| of their lives on it, is that I get served content based on an
| algorithm that determines what I might think is useful or fun.
|
| But TikTok is even worse. It's an endless stream of content,
| pressuring you constantly, always pushing you on the "just one
| more"-train. How is that even better? This all reads more like
| this person should use a readlater-list, not a different RSS
| reader.
| GCUMstlyHarmls wrote:
| When I used RSS, a hundred years ago, I certainly got anxiety
| from my NetNewsWire badge showing 10, then 100, then 10,000
| unread articles. If I used it today, I would simply turn off
| the badge and tell it to mark everything 2+ days old as read.
| But certainly, at a time I did approach it as a "I should read
| everything on these websites". I was also young and an idiot,
| some of that has changed now.
| garciasn wrote:
| I, like many, was a heavy Google Reader user. I would have it
| show me the headlines and then, when interested, I would look
| at the blurb when I expanded the item. If that piqued my
| interest further, I would dig into the actual article.
|
| I have a problem with 'unreads' and I'm INBOX 0 and I keep
| all of my phone notifications at 0 at all times. I would do
| the same w/Google Reader. But; if there was something that
| kept surfacing old content as 'new', I would disable that
| feed or work to fix it before it ended up in GR.
|
| I miss GR.
| N3mor wrote:
| My Inoreader became unmanageable and reminded me a lot of the
| reason I quit using Gmail: over 100k emails to go through in
| one lifetime isn't worth the trouble.
| basscomm wrote:
| > over 100k emails to go through in one lifetime isn't
| worth the trouble
|
| Unless you're on a bunch of mailing lists, I can't even
| fathom having that much email, much less that much _unread_
| email. I 'm fanatical about making sure that I'm at inbox
| zero as much as possible because the 'unread' counter is
| the enemy. It takes some effort to set up and adjust
| filters and actually unsubscribe from stuff, but it's
| completely worth it to have a mailbox that's actually
| usable.
| N3mor wrote:
| I noticed that a few years ago that Google had removed
| the very handy tool I used to filter all mail from "x"
| sender and I could select all and delete. I believe they
| did it on purpose because I think Google really doesn't
| want you to delete emails. They made it harder to delete
| emails in bulk.
|
| I do subscribe to things I find interesting but other
| times they are emails from services I joing. I am now
| using Office 365 and am being able to keep it much
| cleaner. All my Newsletters go into a Newsletter folder
| and I have a Sweep rule to keep the 10 most recent and
| delete the rest. My inbox is way easier to manage now.
| And every year I move the corresponding emails from that
| year into a folder, like "2024" and go through it from
| time to time. It's being a bliss.
|
| My two gmail accounts probably have way over 100k as I've
| more or less abandoned them. Google also made the total
| emails you have in the account less apparent too, I was
| up to 80k and suddenly my inbox had around "3,000" or so
| emails.
| due-rr wrote:
| Maybe you like my project: https://rssrdr.com/
|
| It's the simplest RSS reader in the world: no badges,
| registration or download necessary.
| ctxc wrote:
| Feedback: Would've been really nice to have an editor on
| your website. I'm on mobile, so I probably would have added
| a few feeds -> generated a link with query params -> put it
| on my slack to pick it up on my laptop later
|
| I know I could just type it or send just the website link
| over, but it just _feels_ like more work and I 'm not
| invested enough (ie if I'd generated a link now I'd feel
| like I invested effort and would definitely open it on the
| laptop. With just a link...not sure)
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| What I do is go through all the new titles from beginning to
| end and just open anything I want to read in a tab, FreshRSS
| supports this workflow well. Then it sits in that tab for
| however long and I read them in the order I want to, sometimes
| they grouped and stored while I do something else.
|
| I also have sites I filter their RSS as well, they produce
| really large amounts of articles and I am only interested in
| certain topics. Took me a while to get around to this, for the
| most part I did not want a mainstream news site firehosing into
| my RSS but I have filtered it based on keywords.
|
| That is about it. Takes a bit of effort to slowly build it up
| but I hate it when sites don't have RSS, I rarely read sites
| that don't now.
| bananaflag wrote:
| Same here. I more or less open feedly each day, go through
| 100-200 article titles and open those which seem interesting in
| new tabs. Then, after I'm done, I read the articles. I never
| read them inside feedly.
| sebtron wrote:
| > I get the impression this person is using RSS reader wrong.
| Or is there really a culture of people you are using RSS like a
| youtube-channel, consuming everything from beginning to end?
| For me the purpose of RSS is to get the newest headlines,
| choose the interesting articles and skip the rest. This means
| there is a limited list of items to check each day, and a
| finishing line.
|
| Why would the author's use be the wrong one? And why should
| YouTube be different, in principle? (Maybe you are using
| YouTube wrong...)
|
| I think at some point there was a shift in the way we consume
| online content, from "I'll read whatever is up now" to "I have
| my list of things to catch up with". RSS is older, so it is
| natural to connect it with the older way of consuming content.
| But there is no reason we can't do the same with YouTube
| channels, for example.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| RSS has been traditionally used like an email client rather
| than a streaming service. You don't read every email, some go
| straight to spam or the trash bin. RSS is a time saver, not a
| time waster.
|
| I can see that some feeds, like serializartions or low-
| volume/high quality content, is desirable to be consumed in
| its entirety, but the 80/20 principle seems to also apply to
| RSS feeds too in general. Specially if your RSS list reaches
| double digits.
| dewey wrote:
| A bit weird to make blanket statements about a tool like
| that. Some people read all emails, some don't. Just like
| some people only subscribe to people's personal blogs and
| want to read all of them.
|
| Some might want to use it as a news aggregator and quickly
| browse through headlines. There no right or wrong usage of
| an RSS reader or "traditional usage".
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| As RSS was being widespread around 2010, this is what
| most people said they were using it like, at least in my
| experience. It was the time when we still didn't have
| great spam filters, and people were used to receive and
| discard many emails without reading them.
|
| RSS was also frequently compared to discussion forums,
| where you also want to efficiently ignore non-relevant
| content. RSS gave us the power to ignore the budding
| information overload.
| zerkten wrote:
| A common setup was to have a folder hierarchy similar to
| email. Blogs were in folders organized by topic using
| whatever approach you felt best. You'd then dip into
| parts of the hierarchy. There often wasn't an aggregated
| feed that you could use but you could see a list of all
| items per blog. Each blog would then be highlighted or
| show a count when there was new content.
|
| I said blog instead of feed because social networks had a
| focus on the single scrolling feed as a list of content
| aggregated from different authors. Some RSS clients
| embraced this to a degree, but it didn't start out that
| way. Twitter was the first social network I really used
| in 2007 to follow bloggers I subscribed to, and it took a
| while to adjust to this firehose of interspersed content.
| That wasn't an uncommon sentiment from devs.
| rambambram wrote:
| So what? It's not a democratic vote to decide what way is
| the right/wrong way to use RSS. Do as you please, it's a
| simple usable protocol that basically allows for
| different use cases.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| IIRC, Gmail at one time offered mailbox as RSS feed many
| years ago
| 6510 wrote:
| I just scroll over it. Only the newest 5000 items are
| preserved, by default I allow maximum 4 items per feed
| (some feeds more some less), titles must be at least 3
| words long and I delete items if the title contains any of
| the _badwords_.
|
| Now that I think of it, the mistake most people make is not
| having enough subscriptions. Some spot around 1000 feeds
| the experience changes dramatically. You can afford to be
| less interested in things as there is plenty more.
|
| I think I find about one decent article per day for each 10
| 000 subs.
|
| Disposing of crappy feeds isn't a lot of work and a word
| filter works really well because people want to stuff
| descriptive words into titles.
|
| Business insider amused me. They are so good at writing
| good titles that practically non of their countless
| worthless publications make it though my word filter. What
| remains would have one think it is a reasonable website.
| zerkten wrote:
| I was a Feed Demon user. There are some videos of the
| experience which is much closer to a Windows email client
| than Google Reader was:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIz5u9T94K0. Google Reader
| was late-stage RSS for me, but it brought some of the
| benefits of having all of the content download and
| aggregation being done server-side so the cost of adding
| new feeds was shared.
| goku12 wrote:
| Can confirm. I subscribe to every feed that remotely interests
| me. So the aim is not to read everything end to end. The aim is
| to just glance the headlines, choose the interesting ones to
| check out later, and archive or delete the rest. Therefore, the
| feature that interests me in an RSS reader is its ability to
| sort the articles by my interests.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| To praise TikTok it has a highly effective recommendation
| engine precisely because it is showing you one piece of content
| at a time and registering your engagement on that.
|
| YouTube's interface gives people a feeling of agency because it
| tempts you with 10 or so videos on the side and you can choose
| one, it also means YouTube does not get information about the 9
| you didn't click, maybe you would have liked 5 of them and
| hated 4 of them but it can at best guess about that. I read
| about _negative sampling_ in the recommender literature to
| address this issue and never felt I understood it or believed
| in it -- the literature clearly indicates that it sorta-kinda
| works but I think it does not work very well.
|
| So far as hating on algorithmic feeds it is not the algorithms
| themselves that are bad but how they are chosen. If there is
| any characteristic of the content that can be quantified or
| evaluated a feed can be designed to privilege that. A feed
| could be designed to be highly prosocial, calming and such or
| designed to irritate you as much as possible. It's possible
| that people get bored with the first.
|
| My own reader works like TikTok in that it shows one content
| piece of the time but it is basically the stuff that I submit
| to HN and it is scientific papers and articles about LLMs and
| programming languages and social psychology and political
| science and sports and and advanced manufacturing and biotech
| and such. You might say my world view is unusual or something
| but it is certainly not mindless lowest common denominator
| stuff or outrage (e.g. to be fair I post a few things to HN
| because YOShInOn thinks they are spicy -- YOShInOn has a model
| that can predict if y'all are going to comment on an article or
| not and I felt it was a problem that my comments/submission
| ratio was low before I had YOShInOn)
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| > To praise TikTok it has a highly effective recommendation
| engine precisely because it is showing you one piece of
| content at a time and registering your engagement on that.
|
| I'm a bit divided on TikToks efficiency. It's a well working
| doom-scrooling-machine, better than any other platform, but
| from my personal experience, it's not actually that good at
| recommending the content I actually want. And I think it's
| largely because it has the wrong focus, namely the attention.
| High attention-content is not always what I want and need,
| but TikTok has barely any way to realize this, exactly
| because of how It works.
|
| > YouTube's interface gives people a feeling of agency
| because it tempts you with 10 or so videos on the side
|
| Interesting, never used that side-thing.
|
| > it also means YouTube does not get information about the 9
| you didn't click,
|
| Yes, and that's OK. The not-clicked entries can still give me
| relevant information. And yes, the system can't act on this,
| but that's the whole point of RSS Readers, to make your own
| choice, on the spot, and switch it constantly as necessary.
| No system can react to this. "Smart" algorithmic solutions
| are doomed to stay mediocre because of this.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Well...
|
| Personally I can't stand TikTok or Youtube Shorts or the
| videos on Instagram. I just can't stand the meaningless
| motion to get attention, it makes my skin crawl, it makes
| the bottom drop out of my stomach, etc. One time YT Shorts
| showed me an AI generation video of a pretty girl
| transforming into a fox on America's got talent, which is a
| good choice for me but then I got saturation videos of
| Chinese girls transforming into just about everything on
| AGT with the same music and reaction shots and it was more
| than I could use and not looking cool anymore but rather
| like AI slop. That said, I enjoy classic YouTube with
| relish.
|
| My RSS reader gives recommendations based on explicit
| up/down and it has an AUC of maybe 0.78 or so, I saw a
| paper where TikTok is getting 0.83 so I feel like I'm doing
| OK.
|
| I haven't done anything to change it in the last year
| except increase the number of random articles it inserts a
| little because making the recs worse actually can make them
| better, see [1] TikTok is famous for doing this. I think I
| could tune it up so for a given batch it could have a
| target "thumbs up" percentage or something more systematic
| but really I am very happy with the recs so it is not clear
| to me what "better" really is.
|
| There is the problem with it that the system has a lot of
| latency which does not really matter for articles on most
| subjects because news about software or science or
| political science or engineering is usually OK if it is
| delayed a few days or a few weeks but it is a problem with
| sports where you really look like a dumbass if you post
| about something that happened on week 2 during week 4. It's
| a toughie though because I'd have to rework the thing to
| take out latency in 5+ stages of the system and then think
| systematically how to balance "urgent" vs "interesting" so
| I don't face the problem that urgent but interesting sports
| articles don't crowd other things out. [2]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
|
| [2] personally I don't mind the old articles for myself
| because I'm a weird kind of sports fan. Two years ago I
| used to follow the NFL but since I started doing sports
| photography I might go to 5 games on one weekend and if I
| am doing that the NFL is a lot less interesting than, say,
| _Arknights_ so I am a little embarrassed to say I have no
| idea how the Bills are doing this year. But if I 'm going
| to post sports articles to Bluesky or something it's a
| problem.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| There are two wildly different models: subscribe only to a few
| people/channels/things and read or deliberately skip nearly
| everything, or subscribe to a large number of
| people/channels/things and let them wash over you while
| watching a small subset. The people seeking the former are also
| often the people who want "just give me reverse-chronological",
| the people who do the latter often like algorithms to help them
| deal with the firehose.
|
| Personally, I subscribe to a few channels on YouTube and only
| follow social accounts of people I know well enough to want to
| read everything from, and deliberately avoid high-volume
| posters. As a result, I want reverse-chronological and I
| read/watch almost everything I subscribe to, with things I skip
| still being noticed and just deliberately skipped over. I know
| many others who do the same, and I often see that preference
| expressed here and elsewhere.
|
| But I also know people who follow thousands of accounts and
| channels and similar, who just let the firehose wash over them,
| curated by an algorithmic feed. I don't understand that
| preference, but I know it exists, and I know it's why not
| _everyone_ agrees with the preference of "just give me
| reverse-chronological, not an algorithm!".
| Semaphor wrote:
| Why am I using it wrong when I only subscribe to interesting
| feeds? I read everything because I subscribe to stuff I want to
| read.
|
| And I've been using RSS since the days when there were fights
| over atom vs RSS.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I'm using a heavily customized 2005-era fork of tt-rss.
|
| Early on in my use I recognized some feeds I wanted to read
| end-to-end (often individual blogs). Others (Hackaday, other
| aggregators) I dip into periodically. To keep the UI
| uncluttered I use naming of the feeds to differentiate. I could
| easily see adding some schema and UI to handle segregating the
| feeds, too.
|
| I've thought about adding an algorithmic feed driven from the
| various feeds I only dip into.
|
| I had some discussion on here re: feed readers that might
| publish a feed of "starred / tagged" articles. I would love to
| drive my algorithmic feed from a recommendation system based in
| part on the subscribing to these "starred" articles from the
| authors of feeds I already read. A decentralized system that
| drove recommendations like this would be awesome to play with.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| Google Reader would present it almost like an inbox, where
| "unread" items are bold and read items are not.
|
| To me, this caused a "not caught up on the inbox" reaction
| because I also use Gmail.
|
| I know this is only one particular feed reader but this is just
| an example of how it could cause this. Looking at the screen
| felt like it was "work to be done" not "skimming headlines".
| dan_h wrote:
| I've felt similarly about RSS for a while now--I've made a ton of
| attempts to build my giant collection of subscriptions but always
| just burn out on maintaining it. Another issue is when I try to
| get anyone even slightly non-technical to use RSS they bounce off
| immediately; it sadly just seems too complex/too much overhead
| for a large number of users.
|
| I've been trying to build a site/app that adds some features
| mentioned in this post ("upvoting" based on views, tiktok-style
| video experience in the app, etc), but it's still very much a WIP
| and doesn't exactly fix the complexity problems yet. Still, I get
| encouraged seeing more projects like the OPs that hopefully bring
| about some sort of RSS resurgence.
|
| [0] https://jesterengine.com
| latexr wrote:
| > I've made a ton of attempts to build my giant collection of
| subscriptions but always just burn out on maintaining it.
|
| Seems to me your problem lies in this part:
|
| > giant collection
|
| Don't add so much that you can't deal with it. Concentrate on
| _infrequently updated_ sources. Any news website, for example,
| is too much and shouldn't be in your reader. A small creator or
| YouTube channel from whom you want to see (almost) everything
| does go in.
|
| If you ever feel overwhelmed, you have too many feeds and
| should remove every single one you don't feel is absolutely
| valuable. Exceptions can be made if e.g. you were on vacation
| and never checked the reader. In that case, mark as read
| instead of removing.
|
| If you ever find yourself regularly skipping the content from a
| feed without reading, remove it then and there. If you're not
| consuming at least 80% (made up number, adapt to yourself) of
| posts, it does not belong in your feed reader.
| aaravchen wrote:
| Doubling down on this, get a Reader that let's you filter,
| and do so judiciously.
|
| I have some feeds where I only allow thru items with specific
| categories. Others I have dozens of filters for "spam". And
| some I just had to give up on because they enshittified their
| feed to inhibit differentiation of junk/sponsored/spam
| content from real content.
|
| Personally I just self-hosted a personal FreshRSS instance,
| but you can also get a lot of similar features from a paid
| Inoreader account.
| basscomm wrote:
| > I've made a ton of attempts to build my giant collection of
| subscriptions but always just burn out on maintaining it.
|
| RSS subscriptions aren't like Pokemon. You don't have to catch
| them all. One of the major selling points of RSS is that you
| can subscribe to sites that update infrequently so you get
| notified when they have a new update instead of checking the
| site manually and being disappointed that it hasn't updated in
| three weeks or whatever.
|
| Adding a bunch of sites that update hundreds of times a day is
| a great way to DDOS your own attention span
| brador wrote:
| Skimfeed to the rescue (once again).
|
| https://skimfeed.com
| basedrum wrote:
| What is this? I can't find any information about the site
| throw0101d wrote:
| People often use "RSS" as a generic term for a web/news feed:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed
|
| But if someone will is actually going to implement a feed, should
| it be (actual) RSS, or Atom (or JSON Feed)? Are there particular
| pros/cons/trade-offs for each?
|
| I know that for podcasts we're currently basically "suck" with at
| least providing RSS (even if there are also other options):
|
| * https://podcasters.apple.com/4115-technical-updates-for-host...
| latexr wrote:
| > But if someone will is actually going to implement a feed,
| should it be (actual) RSS, or Atom (or JSON Feed)?
|
| I've been doing JSON feeds exclusively since it came out.
| Support in readers is pretty good (Universal? Near universal?)
| and they're super simple to generate and consume
| programatically with standard tools in current mainstream
| programming languages.
|
| When adding to my feed reader, I'll take whatever and don't
| care1. When generating it myself or consuming via a script,
| 100% JSON feed.
|
| 1 In practice that means RSS or JSON. I've been using RSS for
| some two decades and never cared for Atom. I don't have
| anything against it, I just never saw the need.
| SCdF wrote:
| More power to you obviously. But I have mixed feelings about
| this.
|
| There is so much information that curation is inevitable. Sure.
| But I don't want that curation to be "fun". I don't _want_ tiktok
| in my life, or really anything whose goal is "engagement". I
| don't want time killers.
|
| One of the reasons for getting back into RSS for me was to have a
| direct feed to authors I'm interested in.
|
| But I understand that quickly can become unmanageable.
|
| When that time comes, I think I'd be interested in the curation
| being about compressing content down, not expanding it out. That
| is to say: use the algorithm to select from a large pool of what
| you're interested in, down to a manageable static size (like a
| weekly newsletter), as opposed to using it to infinitely expand
| outward to keep engaging you.
| nyoki wrote:
| I love RSS projects!
|
| I created powRSS - (https://powrss.com) and lettrss -
| (https://lettrss.com)
|
| powRSS is a public RSS feed aggregator for indie websites.
|
| lettrss sends a chapter a day of a public domain book to your RSS
| feed.
|
| Feel free to check them out!
| jandrusk wrote:
| He clearly hasn't met elfeed that you run from within Emacs; I've
| used all of the major RSS readers over the years and elfeed is
| unbelievably versatile as are most things in Emacs, but learning
| Emacs might be worth it just for elfeed and org-mode.
| N3mor wrote:
| I love this - thank you for your work! Stumble Upon was one of
| those sites that I trully enjoyed. I'm glad to see something
| similar. I wish someone would develop a spiritual successor to
| DIGG.
| turoczy wrote:
| Totally agree. Very much a throwback to StumbleUpon in the best
| way. And more directed given that we get to choose the focus of
| the content.
| al_borland wrote:
| Digg has recently re-launched. It's in beta currently. I got in
| a couple weeks ago.
| N3mor wrote:
| No way! Thank you, will go search right now.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| Unfortunately it just looks to be a Reddit clone now.
| al_borland wrote:
| It's a joint effort between Kevin Rose (Digg founder) and
| Alexis Ohanian (Reddit co-founder).
|
| There is definitely some Reddit influence, but Reddit was
| also heavily influenced by Digg to start with. Listening to
| the users, it's hard to know which way it's going to go.
| There are a lot of people who don't want it to be the new
| Reddit and want to make sure the same problems aren't
| repeated. At the same time, some Reddit culture is coming
| over (with a bit of push back) and some people seem to want
| Digg to have all the stuff they liked from Reddit, which
| would end up as a Reddit clone.
|
| I'm hoping it will be successful, as there needs to be a
| better Reddit alternative than what exists now and the
| Fediverse isn't getting the job done. Only time will tell.
| bjord wrote:
| just a heads up: the verification emails land in spam
| bjord wrote:
| had to uninstall this right away. among other things, every key
| shortcut is already in use elsewhere (and they cannot be changed)
|
| for reference: alt+shift+s, alt+shift+u, and alt+shift+d
| mr_windfrog wrote:
| Does anyone know if there are any services or software nowadays
| that can replace the traditional RSS format?
| jlturner wrote:
| Reminds me of stumbleupon, which despite taking you to a random
| page, was excellent because most of the pages were worth viewing.
| vandyswa wrote:
| To me, it feels like most feed readers are made by people who
| don't use RSS, and just exercise their feed reader on a few
| feeds. I seem to be at 211 feeds with (currently) 13,000 cached
| entries, organized across a couple dozen categories.
|
| A reader where you'll click into the body under a headline only
| 1-5% of the time is a totally different beast.
| miladyincontrol wrote:
| Too true. Not that every user has to be some sort of power user
| but its rather telling when a reader can hardly scale to a
| modest amount of articles, has no filtering mechanisms, or
| methods for organizing otherwise.
| spamfilter247 wrote:
| Over the holidays I intend to build (or fork NetNewsWire TBH) an
| RSS reader app that uses the Apple on-device models (or BYOK) to
| summarize and prioritize articles - my very own personalized
| algorithmic feed. Curious to see how it turns out.
|
| Anyone else already tried something similar?
| 8organicbits wrote:
| > I need to sort stuff into categories so that you get more stuff
| in genres you like
|
| I'm also trying to figure out that problem. The challenge I've
| seen is that RSS feeds rarely use the category field. I did
| notice people doing hashtags in the description field (maybe they
| POSSE to Mastodon or X) so I parse those out in a crawler I built
| [1], but theres still so much uncategorized content.
|
| In my personal feed I aim to only subscribe to feeds I plan to
| read, so I hit "inbox zero" on my RSS feed every day, reading
| about 20% of the content. What this means is that I unsubscribe
| from anyone who posts too often. I think there's a negative
| correlation between posting frequency and my desire to read the
| content. People who blog every day are mostly writing
| uninteresting content and that will fill your feed unless you
| balance it out.
|
| [1] https://alexsci.com/blog/rss-categories/
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I use https://karakeep.app/ to subscribe to RSS feeds; not only
| can I view the content in the app, but it also captures the
| content and stores an archive of it. It uses generative AI to
| create tags (but also supports full text search of everything
| archived). You can also create RSS feeds with criteria, with it
| acting as a bus for your content; perhaps it can enrich your
| RSS feeds while you continue to use your existing RSS reader. I
| hope this is helpful for your problem statement.
| Zaskoda wrote:
| > I also don't really care if the content is chronological
|
| Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. It depends on the content.
| And that's one thing I've longed to see solved in RSS feed
| readers as well as podcasts. However, I have not been able to
| imagine a UX that solves my problems, so there's that.
| Isofarro wrote:
| The idea that you have to read everything is a reader UI design
| flaw. By presenting feeds as an inbox, it gives the impression of
| RSS feeds being email. And that's not right, it can be, but it
| doesn't have to be.
|
| The TikTok model is about scrolling, skipping, being selective.
|
| RSS readers should be treated the same way. "River of news" is an
| RSS thing. You dive in when stuff interests you, and you let what
| doesn't interest you flow by.
|
| Twitter is basically an RSS-like reader with 120 character limits
| on posts. You subscribe to interesting people, and their little
| posts drop on your homepage in reverse chronological order.
| There's no inbox or unread items. You just scroll past to the
| next item that interests you.
|
| Yeah, turning off unread-items counters, definitely. The value of
| RSS is in what you chose to read. It's not an anti-library. And
| if something is really great, a good subscription list means
| someone you're reading will likely mention it and link to it.
| andai wrote:
| I went through this thought process of creating a mechanical
| system to find interesting content all across the web for me
| based on my preferences that it learned.
|
| And I started thinking about the supreme importance of high
| quality data sources... realizing there's a power law there,
| where I could just subscribe to a few high quality people...
| and ended up reinventing RSS from first principles.
|
| And then instead of embeddings we have tags...
|
| Honestly I think we nailed it in 2005 :)
| BeetleB wrote:
| This is an insight I realized several years ago: I want RSS,
| but I don't want to track what I've read and haven't. I solved
| my problem by writing a bot for each RSS feed - it would mirror
| posts in Diaspora. I would then subscribe to those bots.
|
| These days it's Mastodon, but same idea. I just scroll and
| browse a bit, with nothing in the system telling me I have 573
| unread posts.
| memonkey wrote:
| This makes me so happy. I love, love, LOVED StumbleUpon. I was
| actually just thinking how I'd love to rebuild it.
| dundercoder wrote:
| I would love to use RSS to disseminate updates I'm working on,
| especially to my family. But my family wouldn't know what RSS
| was, let alone use a reader. Are there ways my family could
| already be using RSS and not know? I don't want to try to get
| them to install yet another app or use another service because
| the friction will prevent them from doing it.
| greenwallnorway wrote:
| What about email?
|
| Email is a cousin to RSS - everyone has their email feed.
|
| Senders push to an email inbox, rather than readers pulling
| feeds into an inbox.
| TechSquidTV wrote:
| I had just shared my new RSS app the other day
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46134023
|
| I didn't get any traction here, but on Lemmy there was a decent
| discussion about the issues with discovering RSS feeds. They
| would surely love this.
| mcdonje wrote:
| This concept is begging to be built on atproto or solid.
| agcat wrote:
| This is the best thing i read on internet today! Cant wait to try
| once its released for google chrome
| charcircuit wrote:
| Another flaw is that it requires the site to have an RSS feed.
| Especially with LLMs it should be possible to check any website
| on the web for new articles.
| jama211 wrote:
| This is amazing, thank you for this!
| 627467 wrote:
| Feeed[0] nailed the ux for a rss reader (and other type of feeds)
| by having a local algorithm that keeps the main feed diverse yet
| short no anxiety of unread count. Unfortunately it's iOS only and
| I have not seen open source RSS readers on android that take
| similar approach. Many support a "today" tab which does help in
| keeping the task of catching up more focused but if you follow
| high volume feeds that post a lot you end up having to scroll
| alot to see variety of content.
|
| [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/feeeed-rss-reader-and-
| more/id1...
| desireco42 wrote:
| I had similar idea long time ago during StumbleUpon and it was
| called OneRandomSite...
|
| It was meant to help founders promote their startups or
| something.
|
| Didn't work out for me.
| andai wrote:
| >Auth is a JWT, which actually was a pain and I regret doing it.
| I don't know why I keep reaching for JWTs, they're a bad user
| experience and I should stop.
|
| What is this about? Bad for the user or the dev?
| reimuwu wrote:
| An important benefit of RSS is that it isn't influenced by
| recommendation algorithms. It won't keep pushing content from a
| single domain; instead, you can read articles from a wide range
| of fields. What the article describes feels more like a return to
| the traditional, linear information-flow model.
| emschwartz wrote:
| Give Scour a try!
|
| It ranks articles by how closely related they are to your
| interests. You can import a set of RSS feeds or scour all 15,000+
| sources.
|
| I built it because I wanted to find the good articles among noisy
| feeds like HN Newest. I've also avoided RSS readers in the past
| because of that feeling of having thousands of unread emails.
|
| https://scour.ing
| efilife wrote:
| Very cool! Is there a way to blacklist some feeds?
| emschwartz wrote:
| Glad you think so!
|
| There isn't a way to block feeds (yet), but you can subscribe
| to specific feeds, which basically acts like creating your
| own list of allowed feeds.
|
| Separately, I'm going to be working on letting you exclude
| content from certain domains (which was requested in
| https://feedback.scour.ing/33).
| loughnane wrote:
| I use miniflux and like it. Still, this post got me thinking.
|
| I'd like to try out a feature where by self-hosted instance
| learns what I like and highlights relevant posts in my feed. Then
| I can go through the other ones later.
|
| Main things are that I would control what feeds go in and there
| is no monetization incentive since it's self-hosted.
| James_K wrote:
| It's interesting that people with Atom feeds still call them RSS.
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| For me capturing list of RSS sources is fun
|
| https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds
|
| But i do not check all 3k sources regularly
| 65 wrote:
| This is a hard problem to solve. Basically what people want is an
| addictive way to consume high quality text.
|
| I have made my own RSS readers with things like filtering,
| creating feeds from pages (e.g. the APNews.com home page),
| rendering the page itself with custom CSS/Javascript, etc.
|
| Except I don't really use my RSS feed I spent months making
| because the firehose of random articles just does not work. I
| like The Atlantic as much as everyone, but do I want to read
| _every_ article? No.
|
| Why is Reddit and Hacker News addictive? Because of the social
| component of it. So the author is on the right track with the
| insight to make it more like StumbleUpon. But... why bother when
| you can just go read Reddit or Hacker News? RSS readers are
| fundamentally lonely.
|
| The non-social solution to "addictive internet text" to me is the
| research part of finding information you're curious about. I
| frequently will read something or think of something and go down
| this Wikipedia rabbit hole, trying to find more information. This
| is way more engaging than reading a random news article. The
| question is how to create discovery that leads to more discovery,
| where the user can find the information themselves (something
| like how people go down the Ancestry DNA rabbit holes). This way
| you don't need a social hook to build something "addictive." But
| how to get there is something I'm still trying to figure out.
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