The power of the RSS reader • Hacker News Board

Re: The power of the RSS reader

#61

Post by notaddicted » Tue, Mar 26, 2013, 10:41 PM UTC

Something else that Marco didn't dwell on is the diversity of stuff that you can basically just plug into your rss reader if you want notification. A website may choose to use it to publish anything they wish. Misc. examples:

1. Following a user on reddit via rss:

http://www.reddit.com/user/PresidentObama/.rss

2. Following a search term on reddit via rss:

http://www.reddit.com/search/.rss?q=manbearpig

3. Checking a mailinator throwaway email via rss:

http://www.mailinator.com/rss.jsp?email=webmaster

4. Google Alerts (RIP.)

Re: The power of the RSS reader

#62

Post by Spittie » Tue, Mar 26, 2013, 10:45 PM UTC

I partially agree - I do use RSS to check for sites that publish daily updates (yes, even Hacker News). But even with those, you don't need to overload yourself. Right now I get about ~100 news every day, which is perfectly fine with me. I went away last week, and I was greeted by ~500 news. I was able to skim through those in maybe one hour, so it was fine.

Everytime I feel that my feed reader is overloaded, I write down every site that I follow, and decide about which sites I really care, and which sites i can easily unsubscribe without problems. I also try to remove sites that post the same thing (this happen a lot with news sites).

Re: The power of the RSS reader

#63

Post by saraid216 » Tue, Mar 26, 2013, 10:53 PM UTC

I wonder how much of a challenge it would be to create an RSS client that provides a direct payment system to content creators. I'm sort of shocked that I can't remember hearing about something like that; the issue was always about getting page views and having a donation link or whatever. They never seemed to consider direct payment of any kind, even though PayPal was definitely around back then.

Take a slice en route and you have a business model.

...I feel like I should append this to the top comment so that it gets seen, heh. I'm not interested in doing this. Someone else do it.

Re: The power of the RSS reader

#64

Post by mkr-hn » Tue, Mar 26, 2013, 11:54 PM UTC

sbarre wrote: post #8

joebadmo wrote: post #4

Personally, I have different labels. I have a high volume label that I nuke with impunity, then another label with low volume feeds that I treat more like Marco describes in tfa. This lets me keep up with all of those low volume feeds, but also skim the daily news when I have time. I also prune my feeds pretty aggressively. This is probably a much fiddlier setup than most people will want, but really so is any RSS re…

Yeah he lost me when he started saying that I'm doing it wrong just because I subscribe to high-volume feeds.. Years ago I came across someone's excellent strategy for organizing Google Reader under two top-level groups: * Must Read * Can Miss Under those 2 labels I have other classifications, but those are the two main groups that all my feeds fall under. The low-volume or high-importance feeds go into "Must Read" a…

I use Digg as my Can Miss folder. It's a surprisingly good filter for the day's news.

Re: The power of the RSS reader

#65

Post by stevewilhelm » Wed, Mar 27, 2013, 12:32 AM UTC

I think RSS is being replaced by Twitter. Many of the RSS feeds I currently consume already cross post to a dedicated Twitter account. If publishers aren't doing this, they should start before Google Reader is shuttered.

As a consumer, set up a Twitter account dedicated to reading "long tail" low volume twitter feeds or use a fancy Twitter client like Tweetbot that manages lists.

Re: The power of the RSS reader

#66

Post by ajslater » Wed, Mar 27, 2013, 12:59 AM UTC

charlieok wrote: post #47

The feature I want on RSS readers: Volume sliders. A volume slider per feed, and perhaps also a global one. If a feed is posting too much stuff, but I still like some of the stuff on it, I'd prefer not to unsubscribe if I had a better option. If I notice a feed getting a bit noisy, I'd like to open a view for that feed, with titles and timestamps. Then I'd just move a slider and watch stuff drop out, until I've turne…

Google bought the technology that would facilitate your volume slider. It was called PostRank: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostRank They even had a Chrome plugin for Google Reader that enabled just that on the client side.

I for instance, can't be bothered to read all of Hacker News. So I read only the posts that have 150 points or more, via http://hckrnews.com/ (a by-points curator) in the form of an RSS feed.

Re: The power of the RSS reader

#67

Post by taligent » Wed, Mar 27, 2013, 1:17 AM UTC

stevewilhelm wrote: post #65

I think RSS is being replaced by Twitter. Many of the RSS feeds I currently consume already cross post to a dedicated Twitter account. If publishers aren't doing this, they should start before Google Reader is shuttered. As a consumer, set up a Twitter account dedicated to reading "long tail" low volume twitter feeds or use a fancy Twitter client like Tweetbot that manages lists.

With RSS I often get the entire content or at minimum a decent sized summary with lots of photos.

Twitter has none of that.

Re: The power of the RSS reader

#68

Post by bsimpson » Wed, Mar 27, 2013, 1:47 AM UTC

ldh wrote: post #41

bsimpson wrote: post #20

I never got into RSS readers, but I use Hacker News and Reddit for the purposes Marco is describing. I have Pulse on my phone set up to follow a handful of RSS feeds (Hacker News, The Verge, Daring Fireball, Ars Technica, etc.) so I have an easy way to see what's happening if I have a couple minutes to kill throughout my day.

I think you're missing what he says. Hacker News and Reddit are completely perpendicular use cases to RSS. From the article: The true power of the RSS inbox is keeping you informed of new posts that you probably won’t see linked elsewhere. I feel like I've been shouting this into the void over the last few days of RSS-related submissions, but RSS is not best suited as a news-discovery paradigm. Aggregators like HN or…

But if there's an interesting article on marco.org, someone who reads that will post it to /r/programming, and I'll get to read it without having to find and follow the author.

Re: The power of the RSS reader

#69

Post by mkr-hn » Wed, Mar 27, 2013, 2:09 AM UTC

bsimpson wrote: post #68

ldh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing what he says. Hacker News and Reddit are completely perpendicular use cases to RSS. From the article: The true power of the RSS inbox is keeping you informed of new posts that you probably won’t see linked elsewhere. I feel like I've been shouting this into the void over the last few days of RSS-related submissions, but RSS is not best suited as a news-discovery paradigm. Aggregators like HN or…

But if there's an interesting article on marco.org, someone who reads that will post it to /r/programming, and I'll get to read it without having to find and follow the author.

I didn't know marco.org had anything to do with programming. I added it to Feedly when someone linked a good article on it. I don't care for programming, so I wouldn't have /r/programming/ in my subscriptions.

Different people internet differently

Re: The power of the RSS reader

#70

Post by Sami_Lehtinen » Wed, Mar 27, 2013, 2:18 AM UTC

You don't need RSS for monitoring sites for infrequent updates. http://www.changedetection.com/ Free and well working solution. I use that to monitor all low traffic sites, which do not provide RSS.