> 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.
> 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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!".
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.
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.
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):
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
1 reply →
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
Maybe you like my project: https://rssrdr.com/
It's the simplest RSS reader in the world: no badges, registration or download necessary.
1 reply →
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.
2 replies →
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.
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.
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!".
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
> 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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
Digg has recently re-launched. It’s in beta currently. I got in a couple weeks ago.
Unfortunately it just looks to be a Reddit clone now.
1 reply →
No way! Thank you, will go search right now.
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.
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.
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.
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!
> 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.
This is the best thing i read on internet today! Cant wait to try once its released for google chrome
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.
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.
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
> 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
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
This concept is begging to be built on atproto or solid.
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
Reminds me of stumbleupon, which despite taking you to a random page, was excellent because most of the pages were worth viewing.
Does anyone know if there are any services or software nowadays that can replace the traditional RSS format?
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
This makes me so happy. I love, love, LOVED StumbleUpon. I was actually just thinking how I'd love to rebuild it.
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.
just a heads up: the verification emails land in spam
Skimfeed to the rescue (once again).
https://skimfeed.com
What is this? I can't find any information about the site
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
When I run a red light it's wrong, but when a fire truck does it it's ok?
Really makes you think.
Poor attempt to refute my point.
When was the last time you supported a content creator that has an RSS feed?