Comment by bsnnkv
8 months ago
> 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
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.
> "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".
This is beautifully written, and condense enough to explain to anyone why we're burnt out with consumption.
Your full comment is spot on, and like you, I don’t have a perfect solution. Digests are a good idea, but there’s always going to be some kind of bias, whether it’s set by you, by an algorithm, or by another human. I think the real challenge is to create a digest that gives you a personal, meaningful view while still leaving the door open to a wider context. But if you lean too far into broadening it, you risk losing that sense of ownership and relevance. It’s a tough balance.
Thank you,
> there’s always going to be some kind of bias, whether it’s set by you, by an algorithm, or by another human
This is spot on, and why I become more of a free software radical every year. Even though these UX experiments roll around in my head, I doubt you can make any algorithm that is "unbiased" and perfect for all people.
Ergo the only real solution is to let a thousand algorithms bloom, and give people the ability to select the ones they want; this is getting back to the idea of the software being a "user agent" that fetches content for you and does what you want it to do, as opposed to being an advertiser's agent. Maybe there's some alternate reality out there where everything was AGPL'ed from the get-go and Facebook et al got forked a thousand times and had to compete with forks that were more user friendly. Or barring that maybe the problem gets solved in 100 years with a dozen Mastodon forks blooming, I don't know, but I'm sure if you could choose your algorithm, it would look nothing like the Instagram app in particular does today, which is my personal choice for the most mind-destroying software I find myself sometimes using
Or maybe if the government succeeds in breaking the monopolies that rule over both social media and the online advertising industry...?
> 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?
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.
1 reply →
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.
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.
4 replies →
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.
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').
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.
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.
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/TwitterBreakin...
> I need to treat it as a stream that I dip my toe into every so often
> RSS clients never really departed from their roots of showing reverse chronological lists of all the posts
Actually, that’s the nature of the feed and the whole point here IMO
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)
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.
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.
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.