Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 55 posts

Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity

#41

Post by thirdsun »

thirsteh wrote: post #4
glimcat wrote: post #2

"Making a conscious (or unconscious, as the case may be) decision to scan through 20-something RSS items a few times per hour means that you're constantly interrupting what you were doing in order to perform another task." Okay, I call shens on this whole article. Using RSS means that I speed-read over a few hundred article headers during half an hour over coffee and pop open around a dozen articles to read in full.…

The entire article was invalidated (in my mind) by the simple fact that you can choose when you want to open your RSS reader. You don't have to be pinged every 20 seconds. Don't punish everyone just because you can't control yourself. RSS is immensely useful for staying up-to-date with postings from a broad collection of websites, and without missing a lot of good content, and it's pretty much universally supported.…

Exactly. I use to sit back on launch Reeder on my iPad AFTER my working day is done. It may take some time to go through all those items and skipping duplicate stories can be anoying but it's always nice to end the day with good content that keeps you updated. There's really no need to consider rss as interfering notifications.

Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity

#42

Post by gnosis »

gasull wrote: post #27

Enter PostRank: http://www.postrank.com/feed/ For every RSS feed you will get 4 RSS sub-feeds: 1. Best posts. 2. Great posts. 3. Good posts. 4. All posts. The ranking (to decide if a post is good/great/best) is done through its popularity online (reddit, digg, delicious, etc.). When I'm interested in a website I usually subscribe to the best posts sub-feed, sometimes to the great posts sub-feed. This way I'm never ov…

It would be nice if this could be combined with something that extracts the content of HN's links in to the RSS feed itself, like:

http://andrewtrusty.appspot.com/readability/feed?url=http://...

Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity

#43

Post by gnosis »

adrianwaj wrote: post #7

Google Reader Notifiers https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/apflmjolhbonpkbkoo... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kfimchjilnmjmjpdge... Make checking efficient.

Could you elaborate on this? How does it "make checking efficient"? And what is an "efficient check" anyway?

Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity

#44

Post by trustfundbaby »

mikepk wrote: post #34

The current model of RSS consumption is still broken. For the vast majority of news sources, you really care about headlines and recency rather than read/unread counts. I had a rambling blog post about it a few years ago: http://bit.ly/rklROK My first startup was trying to address some of these issues but we never quite got there. Unfortunately, innovation in the RSS space pretty much stopped (partially because of th…

Feed Demon on Windows is doing a good job at it, Reeder on OS X is very nice too, but its not as good for consuming data quickly as Feed Demon

Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity

#45

Post by ryanklee »

fragsworth wrote: post #39
ryanklee wrote: post #30

I'm personally torn on RSS readers. Admittedly, I'm an almost entirely unproductive person lately, so I can't claim that it's because RSS is getting in the way of other things. My chief suspicion is that as the number of subscriptions goes up, the propensity to fly through headlines rises as well, and so too does the efficiency of applying whatever criteria normally applies in choosing whether or not to read past a h…

It seems there's a problem that needs to be solved, doesn't it? How's this for a startup idea: "Pandora for RSS" Users subscribe to a few feeds and provide feedback as to which articles they liked and disliked; the system correlates each individual with other similar users and starts providing suggestions, ratings, and sorts the articles in terms of "quality" that you defined by your votes. Then, as a user, you don't…

This really sounds to me exactly what sub-reddits already accomplish... am I missing something?

In fact, I do use sub-reddits as a kind of rss alternative and for my less frequented ones will sort by Top for last week/month/etc. It works pretty well, but sub-reddits can only get specific to a certain extent, which is where a feed excels in. Say I want to keep up not just philosophy, and not just epistemology but phenomenological epistemology (doesn't matter what it actually is, just that it's highly specialized). No sub-reddit exists for such a thing (or anything like it that is so specialized). And I can rely on /r/philosophy or even /r/epistemology to feed me that content.

What I really need is to get it all straight from the horses' mouths. Since posts are apt to be spread out, it doesn't make sense for me to continually check whatever blog or website for updated content: I want to be alerted when it's updated.

Say I have 50 to 100 such websites of similarly specialized content. The situation will be the same for each, so it seems like it would make sense to get the alerts all in the same place, hence RSS. But the problem is that now there's just too much being pushed, even though each content provider is only pushing a little bit every week, it adds up fast (and this isn't even taking into account more general, entertainment-like content that invariably works its way into the feed).

On the other hand, this is starting to sound less like a problem with technology and more of a problem with my personal information-junkie habits (that are unfortunately self-defeating).

Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity

#46

Post by akkartik »

voidfiles wrote: post #40
akkartik wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing his point: he separates his feeds into high- and low-volume, and is willing to triage the high-volume subset without missing out on the rest. I've been doing something similar for a couple of years now. I built http://readwarp.com to manage my high-volume sites, and now my google reader's dropped from 1500 feeds to 100 low-volume must-see feeds that generate 10 stories a day.

Yea, I don't think I did mis-understand the comment, but I glad you found a place to plug your site.

Wow, that is some nasty sarcasm you've got there.

Readwarp's an ancient hobby that I don't work on anymore. Did it seem like I was trying to convert traffic? We all know how to build landing pages with big, bright call-to-action buttons, you know.

I've long since pruned most features on the site. There's no way to import feeds, etc. It only really works for me anymore. I linked to it because it's hard to make sense of custom reading solutions without pointers to try them out.

Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity

#47

Post by adrianwaj »

gnosis wrote: post #43
adrianwaj wrote: post #7

Google Reader Notifiers https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/apflmjolhbonpkbkoo... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kfimchjilnmjmjpdge... Make checking efficient.

Could you elaborate on this? How does it "make checking efficient"? And what is an "efficient check" anyway?

Try clicking on the links, you'll see some pictures.

Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity

#48

Post by mcclanahoochie »

ryanklee wrote: post #25
mcclanahoochie wrote: post #3

I just use FeedSpeak ( http://feedspeak.tk ) - an app that reads your RSS feeds to you, so you can listen to articles while doing other things.

Unless they've got Morgan Freeman or Tom Waits or Garrison Keillor doing the reading, I'm not sure how you can stand this. I'm not just being cheeky, either; is listening to voice fonts for extended periods and for complex material just something you have to warm up to?

heh, the robotic lady voice was annoying at first, but i got used to it. there is experimental support for custom tts engines built into the app if you want to use different ones.

Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity

#49

Post by matusz13 »

If anything I would say that my reader saves me time and distraction. I don't have to search for the information I'm looking for, wasting needless time on links in search that wind up being non-relavent spam. I get to skim through articles that have a higher probability of being relevant to something that I need to know and I get to do this at my leisure.

Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity

#50

Post by chipsy »

Periodic wrote: post #22
glimcat wrote: post #2

"Making a conscious (or unconscious, as the case may be) decision to scan through 20-something RSS items a few times per hour means that you're constantly interrupting what you were doing in order to perform another task." Okay, I call shens on this whole article. Using RSS means that I speed-read over a few hundred article headers during half an hour over coffee and pop open around a dozen articles to read in full.…

For me it was the following two comments. It just showed me this was the type of person who is obsessed with following the latest news and keeping up with all their feeds. It's an edge use-case, and not one I subscribe to (pun intended). I combined that with my usual e-mail communications and my regular scans of Twitter in order to figure out what was going on during the day. Twitter is basically an RSS feed, and man…

Both Twitter and RSS have the advantage of letting you decide on your sources, so you have some options for lowering redundancy that don't occur in (more) centralized aggregation like HN or Reddit.

I only got into Twitter relatively recently and find it a better option than RSS, overall. Blogs are weighted down by the expectation of being their own content; tweets are mostly about linking or short updates, and following someone with good links can be a really great experience.

Post reply on HN