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Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

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Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#71

Post by cykros »

ranger207 wrote: post #63

You don't have to read everything you're subscribed to. I'll wake up and have, say, 150 or so unread items in my feed reader, and I'll just take 5 minutes or so hitting the next button and marking them as read, and if there's something I care to actually read I'll mark it unread and move on. Then once I've actually found everything I want to read I'll go back and actually read those. A Eurogamer article on a game I d…

I'm shocked hearing there are people who try to read everything in their RSS queue. That's madness. I get 300-600 in any given day.

What it does though is give me a range of headlines from news sources I've chosen to follow, that I can skim through, and read maybe 10-30 of on a given day (for some definition of "read" anyway...engage with would be more accurate). Heck, it's how I got here in the first place.

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#72

Post by VP2262 »

I can still funnel most stuff I want to read into one place, a RSS reader, that's the main advantage for me. Whether I can read everything I've subscribed to is another question. I've had to cull a number of sources to reduce the amount of reading, but sadly I'm still skim reading a lot of it.

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#73

Post by lexoj »

karpathy wrote: post #7

I also find myself wanting to go back to RSS for the exact same reasons of 1st paragraph. You own your content and host it. Unfortunately all the RSS readers are too raw and I think one of them has to port over Twitter features, things like: more ephemeral feed instead of an inbox, reply, quote tweet, retweet, like, follow, and new: LLM-driven customizable algorithmic feed.

As per LLM-driven feed, check the Analyst feature in Matcha rss reader which generates simple MD files and you have more control.

https://github.com/piqoni/matcha?tab=readme-ov-file#analyst-...

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#74

Post by throwawayqqq11 »

simonw wrote: post #4

I don't think this is just about RSS: > So, how do we decide and filter for ourselves? My favored approach is fairly old fashioned: Chains of trust. 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. Part of the judgement that we're looking for in these trustees is not simply whether or not content is accurate…

"Filtering" is the imprortant part here and it is more then just finding good sources, because you still dont control the content and the more sources you get, the larger SNR becomes.

I've a gigantic list of RSS sources and at the top of that list are some must-read outlets ... and filters that only show new entries, when some keywords match. Without that, my feedreader would be borderline unusable too.

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#75

Post by Matumio »

safety1st wrote: post #26
vaylian wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> firehose This is what the modern information space feels like in one word. It's impossible to read everything. But at the same time, it's not necessary to read everything. > What we lack is a presentation that is actually good! I don't have the answer. One thing I want to experiment with, though, is digests. Do you have a RSS feed that I can subscribe to so that I get notified when you publish your experiment?

I've never actually published any of the code I use to view my RSS feeds. This question comes up from time to time when I discuss the subject though! Maybe I will one of these days.

Other people do, though (not mine): https://github.com/facundoolano/feedi

I'm not using that one yet, but I very much like their idea to highlight infrequent sources. If I hand-added the feeds, I feel they should by default have at least an equal chance of me noticing a post in them, without clicking through all the feeds.

I also like the idea of subscribing to everything and then privately filtering the for special-interest keywords. I'm not doing that currently, but I subscribe via RSS to some searches or tags. E.g. here via hnapp.com, or on StackOverflow you can subscribe to tags, or the RSS feed of low-traffic subreddits.

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#76

Post by immibis »

quantadev wrote: post #69
snackbroken wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Popularity contests don't do a great job of surfacing quality. They do OK at pruning away the dullest 25℅, but tend to also throw away the top 5‰ most interesting stuff, because that stuff is invariably niche. They also don't do great in the meh middle, favoring loudness and approachability over thoughtfulness and competence.

It's just like when people say Twitter/X is a Cesspool. Of course it is if you view the unfiltererd/agorithmic feed. However, if you only view the content from who you're following you get exactly the content you want. I use Twitter/X and all I ever see is AI/LLM stuff because it's all I follow and all I use it for. Zero politics. If someone does a political post, that's an instant unfollow. This is how we can rank R…

I thought X forced you to see Elon's posts

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#77

Post by immibis »

quantadev wrote: post #61
AndrewOMartin wrote: post #3

This is perfectly reasonable, but I think it is a bit general. The notion of a chain of trust leading to a curated feed can equally apply to YouTube if you stick to the subscribed channels view. There are also specific skills I've picked up from being subscribed to the Hacker News "top" RSS feed. Namely judicious use of the "mark all as read" button.

Definitely the `Chain of Trust` concept can be applied to anything. For example Social Media Protocol developers have thought a lot about using CoTrust, to be able to block undesirable people (moderation), by following a 'whitelist' only of users you trust or ones they trust, down a dependency tree of trust. Interestingly you could decentralize this onto some Relay system like Nostr and use Crypto signing, where each…

Nostr isn't decentralized because you need to choose relays.

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#78

Post by quantadev »

immibis wrote: post #77
quantadev wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely the `Chain of Trust` concept can be applied to anything. For example Social Media Protocol developers have thought a lot about using CoTrust, to be able to block undesirable people (moderation), by following a 'whitelist' only of users you trust or ones they trust, down a dependency tree of trust. Interestingly you could decentralize this onto some Relay system like Nostr and use Crypto signing, where each…

Nostr isn't decentralized because you need to choose relays.

The word has different meanings in different contexts. In Social Media context calling Nostr decentralized is in every way accurate. But this will be my only post with you debating the definition of words. Hope you enjoyed it.

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#79

Post by quantadev »

immibis wrote: post #76
quantadev wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just like when people say Twitter/X is a Cesspool. Of course it is if you view the unfiltererd/agorithmic feed. However, if you only view the content from who you're following you get exactly the content you want. I use Twitter/X and all I ever see is AI/LLM stuff because it's all I follow and all I use it for. Zero politics. If someone does a political post, that's an instant unfollow. This is how we can rank R…

I thought X forced you to see Elon's posts

I hadn't heard that. I only follow AI-related researchers and individuals into AI stuff, and I never see Elon's posts. Maybe this is another CNN+MSM lie? Because they'll stop at nothing to do damage to any conservative they can.

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#80

Post by random3 »

safety1st wrote: post #10
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…

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…

> RSS clients never really departed from their roots of showing reverse chronological lists of all the posts

Actually, that’s the nature of the feed and the whole point here IMO

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