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RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

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Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

#13

Post by creamyhorror »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #7

I've been toying with LLM based agents for staying on top of feeds lately. Staying on top of the fire hose was always the challenge with RSS readers, a lot of interesting low frequency stuff from people you follow gets buried under the non stop feed of stuff from high volume news that is actively trying to drown everyone out with many updates per day. Back in the day I solved it by simply not using RSS feeds for high…

I'm building Subweb.net (not ready yet, it's just a few test feeds without the LLM pipeline turned on yet) to LLM-tag RSS feed items with topic, relevance/interest, location, and translations, and present them as feeds. I'm thinking I could maybe let users specify their preferred custom prompts and ranking params or similar, though the standard prompt is already fine.

I think the open web needs to come back, but in a fair way for everyone, giving readers control over their feeds while also sending traffic and comments back to the original sources. Not quite sure how to do that yet.

Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

#15

Post by podgietaru »

I toyed around with using Language Embeddings as a way to categorize my RSS Feeds.

It works pretty well. But importantly, it's so cheap that I have never really seen it on my bill. An earlier prototype used OpenAI embeddings. I loaded 5$ API credits and after a year the credits expired.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/use-language-e...

https://github.com/aws-samples/rss-aggregator-using-cohere-e...

Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

#16

Post by renegat0x0 »

How else to notify readers? RSS is quite good.

Corporations do not like it though, because they want to control spread of information. They prefer you re-enter page, be targeted with more ads, or spoonfed with their news algorithm on-site.

However RSS only works, if someone knows about your page. YouTube is quite good with RSS though. You can have channel RSS, be notified about new videos, while channels still are discoverable.

Also shameless plug to my own database of RSS feeds

h ttps://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-feeds

Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

#17

Post by rambambram »

Oh yeah, your feed is definitely in my reader. When I click through to your site, in the URL I pass ?rss_ref=mydomain This way you - and other domains I visit - can know where the RSS-visitor is coming from (not foolproof of course, because your average spammer can also put their domain in the URL).

More important, when you see my traffic your post is definitely read on your website itself (or at least opened to read). There's no background stuff going on in my reader, pulling in feeds without reading them.

My way of reading feeds is more Tinder-style: the latest post from a random feed per time, then another one, etc. I feel irky even thinking about a firehose of content coming my way.

Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

#18

Post by dorianmariewo »

renegat0x0 wrote: post #16

How else to notify readers? RSS is quite good. Corporations do not like it though, because they want to control spread of information. They prefer you re-enter page, be targeted with more ads, or spoonfed with their news algorithm on-site. However RSS only works, if someone knows about your page. YouTube is quite good with RSS though. You can have channel RSS, be notified about new videos, while channels still are di…

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