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Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

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Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#31

Post by setopt »

bsnnkv wrote: post #6

> And that's also where the magic lies because it's that very process of engaging with content and deciding whether or not it has value to you that makes using an RSS reader a better experience and one where you own your attention. Back when RSS was more popular, the tyranny of never-ending backlogs was a topic that was discussed somewhat regularly, but it gets glossed over a little these days since RSS talk is natur…

It depends what you use it for. I’m a researcher and use it to follow scientific literature (relevant arXiv sections and scientific journals, as well as funding agency announcements), and keeping an eye on what’s up is then arguably part of the job.

If you use it for general news and blogs, that’s of course different. I completely agree with letting the FOMO go.

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#32

Post by mbanerjeepalmer »

mnls wrote: post #21

There is a misunderstanding about RSS and escaping algorithms. Sure, you are not under the social media control but you certainly are under the publisher control. Now you have to see everything that they publish. Which makes it the absolutely worst way to consume news. It becomes overwhelming and if you want inbox zero it’s another digital burden. The result is that I pretty much lost interest on following some websi…

> Now you have to see everything that they publish.

Ha, that's almost word-for-word on https://zacusca.net. [0]

And Zacusca represents a third way (the first two being reverse chron and newsletters, which both put control in the publisher's hands). If you can articulate what you enjoy then you can filter the RSS according to that.

[0] I'm working on Zacusca. Other, frankly more developed, alternatives include: - https://feeds.fun/ - https://scour.ing/about

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#33

Post by nickdothutton »

> We start by finding someone whose judgement we trust and subscribing to their feed, and then we find out who they trust and subscribe to their feed, and so on.

I do this, but then to avoid echo chambers I do occasional fault injection where I pick someone that one of my feed is at an opposite pole to in some salient, on some axis, and inject them to my feed for a while. Maybe I have something to learn from them, maybe I don’t, maybe they stay on the feed or maybe they are removed. I hope this helps me avoid groupthink.

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#34

Post by runiq »

nickdothutton wrote: post #33

> We start by finding someone whose judgement we trust and subscribing to their feed, and then we find out who they trust and subscribe to their feed, and so on. I do this, but then to avoid echo chambers I do occasional fault injection where I pick someone that one of my feed is at an opposite pole to in some salient, on some axis, and inject them to my feed for a while. Maybe I have something to learn from them, ma…

I do the same. Case in point: I started to follow someone's blog because of their technical achievements, then I realized I don't like their political views _at all_, but I keep them on the list mostly to keep myself on my toes.

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#35

Post by hyperbolablabla »

runiq wrote: post #34
nickdothutton wrote: post #33

> We start by finding someone whose judgement we trust and subscribing to their feed, and then we find out who they trust and subscribe to their feed, and so on. I do this, but then to avoid echo chambers I do occasional fault injection where I pick someone that one of my feed is at an opposite pole to in some salient, on some axis, and inject them to my feed for a while. Maybe I have something to learn from them, ma…

I do the same. Case in point: I started to follow someone's blog because of their technical achievements, then I realized I don't like their political views _at all_, but I keep them on the list mostly to keep myself on my toes.

Jonathan Blow perchance?

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#36

Post by _dain_ »

mnls wrote: post #21

There is a misunderstanding about RSS and escaping algorithms. Sure, you are not under the social media control but you certainly are under the publisher control. Now you have to see everything that they publish. Which makes it the absolutely worst way to consume news. It becomes overwhelming and if you want inbox zero it’s another digital burden. The result is that I pretty much lost interest on following some websi…

>and if you want inbox zero

There's your problem. Turn off the "unread" indicators and just chill. You're not going to read everything and that's okay.

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#37

Post by soapdog »

bsnnkv wrote: post #6

> And that's also where the magic lies because it's that very process of engaging with content and deciding whether or not it has value to you that makes using an RSS reader a better experience and one where you own your attention. Back when RSS was more popular, the tyranny of never-ending backlogs was a topic that was discussed somewhat regularly, but it gets glossed over a little these days since RSS talk is natur…

There are a couple readers that avoid that by providing a calmer experience without a firehose and without background fetching.

https://blogcat.org (I made this one)

https://fraidyc.at (this is the inspiration for many calm readers)

https://cblgh.itch.io/rad-reader (multiplatform and super calm)

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#38

Post by mbanerjeepalmer »

People here seem to fall into two camps:

(A) Studiously prune your feeds like a bonsai. As the author suggest, follow the chain of trust to a small number of voices (for me, something like Stratechery, Simon Willison, Inner Ring).

(B) Realise that RSS is another form of 'tyranny', this time at the hands of the publisher instead of the platform, where the composition of your feeds, and therefore what uses your attention, doesn't correlate highly with what matters to you.

I can feel the pickaxes being unsheathed as I type this but...I have reason to believe my (and others') LLM/embeddings-driven products are a good solution.

Position (A) isn't tenable if FOMO matters. Paraphrasing another comment here: 'Following arXiv is part of the job'.

So let's say you adopt position (B). You recognise that everything that matters to you is distributed across some set of feeds. But only a small proportion of the total material in those feeds matters to you. If you can articulate what matters then you can let an LLM or embeddings model use their attention, instead of yours, on the low-relevance items by filtering them out.

Some options:

- https;//scour.ing

- https://feeds.fun

- https://zacusca.net (disclosure: mine, and still pretty janky)

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#39

Post by lexoj »

The way I have addressed this is using my own tool [1] which creates daily digests instead (MD files with date). This removes the stress to check everything or having hundreds of unread, I care only about the current day. If I get some time, say on the weekend, I could go in previous days and check if I skipped. I think its a better trade off than having so many unread stories that grow over time.

[1] https://github.com/piqoni/matcha

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#40

Post by AStonesThrow »

ghaff wrote: post #18
safety1st wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RSS came of age in a very different time, when the world of computing was more, for lack of a better term, workstation-centric. People wanted RSS clients that were similar to email clients, or maybe even integrated directly into the email client, and they had this idea that they should 'catch up' on everything that was published since their last session, almost like it was a job. Nowadays people have an implicit unde…

Someone I know once described Twitter as being a river that you dipped into when you had the time and the interest. I think RSS was similar but, as you say, the clients had a somewhat different model. You could get around by having a priority category or something like that.

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/TwitterBreakin...

> I need to treat it as a stream that I dip my toe into every so often

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