51–60 of 98 posts
RSS gives the user maximum control - but it lacks the social features. What we need is a way to connect our RSS feeds together.
It seemed like a great idea, but the social features really didn't work. People dumped their RSS feeds, but the decentralized nature meant that attempts at flowing comments between sites ended up losing context.
FB/Twitter are known to have algorithms designed to show you things that you will like (because people stop using Twitter/FB if they see stuff that makes them unhappy). While newspapers have this to a certain extent (all those "Drink 2 glasses of wine a day to live longer" articles) since they aren't targeted based on your individual preferences you still get a very wide variety of news sticking to only a single newspaper, and pretty much all the news if you mix in 2 or 3.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> hard news > The BBC Have you visited the BBC News website recently? They even have Daily Mail style headlines now, where a random word is capitalised for emphasis: "Up to NINE terrible things happened" I browse with an ad blocker, so those are actual headlines, not Outbrain/Taboola (ugh) links.
I recall 10 years ago it wasn’t nearly as terrible. Did something happen to the bbc?
And it seems to be far from unique to the BBC, you can notice it with all the national broadcasters (Though BBC being English and thus have a worldwide reach in its original form, is more noticeable outside of the UK).
The idea that you get news from FB and Twitter is fundamentally flawed. FB/Twitter are known to have algorithms designed to show you things that you will like (because people stop using Twitter/FB if they see stuff that makes them unhappy). While newspapers have this to a certain extent (all those "Drink 2 glasses of wine a day to live longer" articles) since they aren't targeted based on your individual preferences…
But Twitter? I know they insert this whole "in case you missed" but most of the feed is still chronological. A very different problem is with having overly prolific retweeters in your feed, but that is a problem of your making, not Twitter's.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"What we need is a way to connect our RSS feeds together." Could you flesh this out a little? What is it that you want to see?
I would like to publish an output from my reading as RSS channels - then other people could subscribe to those channels making a full circle. I don't know what these channels would be - we could start with simple 'liked articles', then readers would count in how many 'liked channels' from friends a given article is and do other heuristics. But everybody would be able to make his own channels and then observe if peopl…
TheOldReader.com is really good, and kind of duplicates the Google Reader experience. Only problem is, none of my friends use it!
The idea that you get news from FB and Twitter is fundamentally flawed. FB/Twitter are known to have algorithms designed to show you things that you will like (because people stop using Twitter/FB if they see stuff that makes them unhappy). While newspapers have this to a certain extent (all those "Drink 2 glasses of wine a day to live longer" articles) since they aren't targeted based on your individual preferences…
FB sure, as they have made it harder and harder to flip the feed to chronological. But Twitter? I know they insert this whole "in case you missed" but most of the feed is still chronological. A very different problem is with having overly prolific retweeters in your feed, but that is a problem of your making, not Twitter's.
I was okay with social-curated news when my social feeds were chronological, but now that everyone's doing algorithms, you miss way too much if you aren't looking at something like RSS. Personally, I use TinyTinyRSS on Sandstorm.io. There's a fantastic TTRSS client available for Windows UWP that works on Windows Mobile too.
But I have to upvote for the TTRSS. The web client is always open in one of my tabs, and when I'm away from my computer I use the ttRSS Android app. I stuck it on one of my boxes and basically forget about it aside from checking for updates semi-regularly.
One interesting thing is that a specific twitter search sorted by latest, often produces very decent localized news/reports during some events. One of the first things I turn to confirm the scale of an event, for example blackouts, fire, or meteoroid sightings. Also there are specific feeds on twitter for some cities that report police/fire scanners. If you ever get a power outage you can track the scale within minut…
RSS gives the user maximum control - but it lacks the social features. What we need is a way to connect our RSS feeds together.
The cool thing about using reddit this way is that you can use your reader (like Thunderbird) to process your feeds according to rules. For instance, you could automatically delete all posts from /r/programming which don't feature Nim or Python.
(https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.madsvyat.s...)
Sad to note that apparently around the time HN renewed or changed a security cert configuration about a month or so ago, the app stopped updating this site's feed. Having removed and re-added it, the feed woke up on my phone, but my tablet stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the feed, even after reinstalling the app, manually removing config folders, caches etc., and restoring a backup of the config files from my phone.