Comment by PurpleRamen
5 hours ago
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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”.
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IIRC, Gmail at one time offered mailbox as RSS feed many years ago
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.
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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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.
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.
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!".