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Making RSS More Fun

matduggan.com

31–40 of 108 posts

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#31
post #24

I love this - thank you for your work! Stumble Upon was one of those sites that I trully enjoyed. I'm glad to see something similar. I wish someone would develop a spiritual successor to DIGG.

Digg has recently re-launched. It’s in beta currently. I got in a couple weeks ago.

No way! Thank you, will go search right now.

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#32

> I rarely want to read all of a websites content from beginning to end I get the impression this person is using RSS reader wrong. Or is there really a culture of people you are using RSS like a youtube-channel, consuming everything from beginning to end? For me the purpose of RSS is to get the newest headlines, choose the interesting articles and skip the rest. This means there is a limited list of items to check e…

> I get the impression this person is using RSS reader wrong. Or is there really a culture of people you are using RSS like a youtube-channel, consuming everything from beginning to end? For me the purpose of RSS is to get the newest headlines, choose the interesting articles and skip the rest. This means there is a limited list of items to check each day, and a finishing line.

Why would the author's use be the wrong one? And why should YouTube be different, in principle? (Maybe you are using YouTube wrong...)

I think at some point there was a shift in the way we consume online content, from "I'll read whatever is up now" to "I have my list of things to catch up with". RSS is older, so it is natural to connect it with the older way of consuming content. But there is no reason we can't do the same with YouTube channels, for example.

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#34

> I rarely want to read all of a websites content from beginning to end I get the impression this person is using RSS reader wrong. Or is there really a culture of people you are using RSS like a youtube-channel, consuming everything from beginning to end? For me the purpose of RSS is to get the newest headlines, choose the interesting articles and skip the rest. This means there is a limited list of items to check e…

Can confirm. I subscribe to every feed that remotely interests me. So the aim is not to read everything end to end. The aim is to just glance the headlines, choose the interesting ones to check out later, and archive or delete the rest. Therefore, the feature that interests me in an RSS reader is its ability to sort the articles by my interests.

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#35

> I rarely want to read all of a websites content from beginning to end I get the impression this person is using RSS reader wrong. Or is there really a culture of people you are using RSS like a youtube-channel, consuming everything from beginning to end? For me the purpose of RSS is to get the newest headlines, choose the interesting articles and skip the rest. This means there is a limited list of items to check e…

When I used RSS, a hundred years ago, I certainly got anxiety from my NetNewsWire badge showing 10, then 100, then 10,000 unread articles. If I used it today, I would simply turn off the badge and tell it to mark everything 2+ days old as read. But certainly, at a time I did approach it as a "I should read everything on these websites". I was also young and an idiot, some of that has changed now.

Maybe you like my project: https://rssrdr.com/

It's the simplest RSS reader in the world: no badges, registration or download necessary.

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#37
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I used RSS, a hundred years ago, I certainly got anxiety from my NetNewsWire badge showing 10, then 100, then 10,000 unread articles. If I used it today, I would simply turn off the badge and tell it to mark everything 2+ days old as read. But certainly, at a time I did approach it as a "I should read everything on these websites". I was also young and an idiot, some of that has changed now.

My Inoreader became unmanageable and reminded me a lot of the reason I quit using Gmail: over 100k emails to go through in one lifetime isn't worth the trouble.

> over 100k emails to go through in one lifetime isn't worth the trouble

Unless you're on a bunch of mailing lists, I can't even fathom having that much email, much less that much unread email. I'm fanatical about making sure that I'm at inbox zero as much as possible because the 'unread' counter is the enemy. It takes some effort to set up and adjust filters and actually unsubscribe from stuff, but it's completely worth it to have a mailbox that's actually usable.

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#38

> I want to sit somewhere and passively consume random small creators content, then upvote some of that content and the service should show that more often to other users. That's it. No advertising, no collecting tons of user data about me, just a very simple "I have 15 minutes to kill before the next meeting, show me some random stuff." In other words consume things for free and don’t support the small content creat…

When I run a red light it's wrong, but when a fire truck does it it's ok?

Really makes you think.

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#39
post #38

> I want to sit somewhere and passively consume random small creators content, then upvote some of that content and the service should show that more often to other users. That's it. No advertising, no collecting tons of user data about me, just a very simple "I have 15 minutes to kill before the next meeting, show me some random stuff." In other words consume things for free and don’t support the small content creat…

When I run a red light it's wrong, but when a fire truck does it it's ok? Really makes you think.

Poor attempt to refute my point.

When was the last time you supported a content creator that has an RSS feed?

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#40
post #12

I've felt similarly about RSS for a while now--I've made a ton of attempts to build my giant collection of subscriptions but always just burn out on maintaining it. Another issue is when I try to get anyone even slightly non-technical to use RSS they bounce off immediately; it sadly just seems too complex/too much overhead for a large number of users. I've been trying to build a site/app that adds some features menti…

> I've made a ton of attempts to build my giant collection of subscriptions but always just burn out on maintaining it.

RSS subscriptions aren't like Pokemon. You don't have to catch them all. One of the major selling points of RSS is that you can subscribe to sites that update infrequently so you get notified when they have a new update instead of checking the site manually and being disappointed that it hasn't updated in three weeks or whatever.

Adding a bunch of sites that update hundreds of times a day is a great way to DDOS your own attention span

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