FRESH
Hacker News
Hacker News Hacker NewsThe 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.
* 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...
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.
A reader where you'll click into the body under a headline only 1-5% of the time is a totally different beast.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/feeeed-rss-reader-and-more/id1...
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
Note: I specifically mean a grid of thumbnails to posts when I say "youtube like".
That makes more sense with TikTok frivolous content than with RSS feeds. If you've got Reuters, the BBC, AP and New York Times RSS feeds coming in, you need something that's more content aware and will group items together by subject.
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.
Anyone else already tried something similar?
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds
But i do not check all 3k sources regularly
What is this about? Bad for the user or the dev?
It was meant to help founders promote their startups or something.
Didn't work out for me.
for reference: alt+shift+s, alt+shift+u, and alt+shift+d
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.