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I ditched the algorithm for RSS

joeyehand.com

241–250 of 283 posts

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#242

I love RSS. I use RSS daily. I use link-aggregation websites like HN to find interesting authors and subscribe to any RSS feeds that they have. Highlights from my reader sync automatically into my Obsidian vault. It's great. But I know I, and everyone else posting in this thread, are in the minority. It's clear that most people prefer algorithmic drip in a walled garden. There's a reason everyone flocks to those plat…

> Highlights from my reader sync automatically into my Obsidian vault. It's great. Which RSS reader do you use?

I bet it’s Readwise…

- i tried it, and it’s okay… however personally i much prefer a more private rss reader, where i don’t share all my personal data with yet another commercial company. Also, it’s quite expensive.

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#243

A good algorithm is a good thing. However what a good algorithm is for me is often different from what it is for those who maintain them. Outrage gets attention and sometimes it is needed, but there is a level of too much, and also a lot of outrage unfairly represents the issues and so it makes me mad even though if I understood the details I wouldn't be mad just concerned. I want an algorithm that surfaces things of…

A long long time ago before reddit, facebook, digg, twitter, etc, there was usenet. It worked a bit like reddit but subreddits were called news groups. There were many front ends for usenet, called news readers. My favourite was "nn" short for "no news". It showed you posts in groups you're subscribed to, allowed you to post comments, etc. When you had finished getting up to date it would EXIT and print: No news. (Is…

The cool thing is: Its still there!

Yeah, it may be not as populated as in the 80s to mid 90s, but there are still enough active groups in usenet to waste uncounted hours every day...

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#244
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Host your own Nitter instance and you'll be able to get RSS feeds

That’s gotten pretty hard to do recently since Musk cracked down on api access

It's not hard, you just need a Twitter account and put in the credentials.

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#245
post #27

I am a big proponent of RSS, but I think that it suffers from a lack of imagination these days, for example, the "quality filter" approach mentioned in this article is not very useful imo. The biggest cost of RSS feed items as a consumer is figuring out whether something is worth reading. A lot of feeds these days don't provide anything useful in the body to make a determination on this, and others just dump the enti…

Back when I heavily used RSS feed readers, the solution was simple: 1. Unsubscribe from feeds that put out too much content. 2. Optionally put them in their own category and ensure the main "view" doesn't include those items. 3. Realizing that overoptimizing for consuming the best content is (or at least should be) a sign of suboptimal mental health. 4. Timeboxing: Decide you'll spend no more than 30 minutes (even le…

In order of importance I'd put them exactly in reverse :)

And I'd add:

6. Stop thinking of yourself as a consumer. A consumer blindly ingurgitates whatever's fed to them. You're a customer. With tastes and personal opinions. They depend on you to make a living, not you on them. And an unhappy customer moves their business elsewhere, doesn't stay on forever like being a consumer implies.

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's something that RSS (or any other alternative) can fix. I don't think RSS is as toxic as algorithmic feeds, but they are still cut from the same hyper-connected cloth. If you want to fight the algorithmic drip, promote people to connect with others in their community on a small scale. Even if you have to use the internet to do it, making time to talk (with your vocal cords) to a friend on a regula…

Find long form blogs that publish 1 time every few months. The reader will just be empty which is a useful thing to have that doesnt consume time

RSS is great for this. The vast majority of my 200+ feed subscriptions are for rarely updated blogs or YouTube channels.

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#247
I sometimes struggled domains that incorrectly set up RSS feeds. Some were blocked behind some walled gardens. Sometimes 403 status was returned.

While tiny tiny RSS is nice, I also wrote interface to read URLs from the net. https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy

This gives me clean data of web page, title, description, etc, which I can further integrate into my own RSS reader.

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#248

A good algorithm is a good thing. However what a good algorithm is for me is often different from what it is for those who maintain them. Outrage gets attention and sometimes it is needed, but there is a level of too much, and also a lot of outrage unfairly represents the issues and so it makes me mad even though if I understood the details I wouldn't be mad just concerned. I want an algorithm that surfaces things of…

You should read about OPML blogrolls [1], they are gaining traction in this space. Personally, I like the idea of manually exploring recommendations, so I built a browsable index [2]. But you can crawl the these as well and build all sorts of recommendations engines. [1] https://opml.org/blogroll.opml [2] https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/discover/feed-c550c...

Thanks for the blogroll love!

You can also see one in action on my blog's home page.

http://scripting.com/

And on a special site..

https://blogroll.social/

A blogroll is a kind of feed reader.

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#249

I love RSS. I use RSS daily. I use link-aggregation websites like HN to find interesting authors and subscribe to any RSS feeds that they have. Highlights from my reader sync automatically into my Obsidian vault. It's great. But I know I, and everyone else posting in this thread, are in the minority. It's clear that most people prefer algorithmic drip in a walled garden. There's a reason everyone flocks to those plat…

1. Mandate that all platforms must have a reverse chronological feed as the default. Alternative "algorithmic" feeds must be explicitly opted in to (preferably with age verification).

2. Regulate out of existence the business model where time spent on site converts to revenue, and force people to directly pay for stuff. Levels of indirection in "payment" for services turn the free market into (even more of) a joke (Noam Chomsky already highlighted this when advertising was cohort based in print- and TV media long before the targeted advertising of today).

Would immediately increase the signal-to-noise ratio by many orders of magnitude.

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