Ask HN: Why do RSS Readers (mostly) suck? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Why do RSS Readers (mostly) suck?

#71

Post by adw » Mon, Jun 28, 2010, 12:53 AM UTC

neonfunk wrote: post #36

joe_the_user wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you could give some reasons why?

Immaculate UI/UX. Whether in landscape or portrait orientation, there are many clever flourishes: it uses Tweetie's "pull up to refresh" mechanism for moving between articles in a feed; or you can swipe an article left or right to return to the feed index; or you can pinch the article/feed to return to all of your feeds. In a feed index view, you can swipe a list item to the left or right to either toggle the read st…

What you said, plus it looks really, really nice.

Re: Ask HN: Why do RSS Readers (mostly) suck?

#72

Post by humblepatience » Mon, Jun 28, 2010, 1:15 AM UTC

I have A, B, and C tags ordered by "importance" to me - i.e. mostly rss feeds where I want to read or skim every entry.

The rest are ordered by category/tag.

Works fine for me!

Also I use Postrank to turn some of the high-volume into low-volume high-importance feeds.

Re: Ask HN: Why do RSS Readers (mostly) suck?

#73

Post by silencematters » Mon, Jun 28, 2010, 1:34 AM UTC

kes wrote: post #10

Try Fever: http://feedafever.com/

It is a great idea, though a little too over-designed. The concept gets in the way of reading more than it should.

Re: Ask HN: Why do RSS Readers (mostly) suck?

#74

Post by thegyppo » Mon, Jun 28, 2010, 4:27 AM UTC

sandaru1 wrote: post #19

I have a quite good experience with feedly. It's a firefox extension which integrates with google reader. The integration seems to have some bugs with new "shared items", other than that it's perfect.

Feedly rocks, I prefer the magazine like appearance to reading feeds (especially when I've got so many).

Re: Ask HN: Why do RSS Readers (mostly) suck?

#75

Post by coned88 » Mon, Jun 28, 2010, 4:51 AM UTC

I use bloglines.

Re: Ask HN: Why do RSS Readers (mostly) suck?

#76

Post by TrevorBurnham » Mon, Jun 28, 2010, 1:42 PM UTC

I'm reading this in NetNewsWire for the iPad, a beautiful, slick, polished app that syncs with Google Reader. I have no complaints.

It sounds like you're subscribing to too many feeds. 2500+ items? You need to do an audit, cut that figure in half, then see if you're still unhappy with your RSS app.

Re: Ask HN: Why do RSS Readers (mostly) suck?

#77

Post by turtle4 » Mon, Jun 28, 2010, 2:11 PM UTC

ary wrote: post #17

I wondered this myself until I hit upon the simple solution of deleting feeds with too low a signal to noise ratio (for my personal tastes). Expecting RSS readers to tease out relevance means having to give them an idea of what's relevant to you. This seems to be a self-inflicted problem on the part of people who use feed readers. I've tended to think I "needed" to follow more than I could possibly consume and retain…

I have a similar setup. Add anything I am interested in to Google Reader, consume via Reeder on iPhone/iPad, or consume via Feedly if using a browser.

Reeder and Feedly both rock, but the key is eliminating low signal to noise sources.

Re: Ask HN: Why do RSS Readers (mostly) suck?

#78

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 28, 2010, 5:39 PM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #68

bravura wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your claim that recommendation algorithms aren't AI complete, but for different reasons. "It only involves matching patterns to key-words." False. Recommendation might be far trickier. Nonetheless, if you can do recommendation perfectly, it still doesn't mean that you can solve NLP, machine vision, control (robotics), planning, or any of the other major AI tasks.

Well, I was speaking broadly... But the point is that we have many examples of recommendation systems that do work reasonably well and working reasonably well is what I suspect would satisfy most users. Further, a reader which could learn reasonably well from passive observation would give users the base do explicit tagging and rating.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Why do RSS Readers (mostly) suck?

#79

Post by jerf » Mon, Jun 28, 2010, 9:09 PM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #57

jerf wrote: post #22

Sit down and really write out your requirements. Two things will emerge from that exercise: 1. there probably is in fact a reader out there that meets it, you just haven't found it yet or 2. your requirements require solving the AI-complete problem of perfectly determining what you are interested in. Generally I find most people slot into #2. I am not kidding. I've been listening to this complaint for about 8 years n…

The problem of reasonably determining what someone is interested in from what they've previously read, skimmed and skipped shouldn't be "AI complete." It only involves matching patterns to key-words. It might not be easy and the results might not be perfect but it seems possible. Using data from friends and finding the best correlates could help too. You could use the Netflix algorithm or other magic. I suspect that'…

Implement it. Prove me wrong. Sell it and get rich.

Good luck.