The power of the RSS reader • Hacker News Board

Re: The power of the RSS reader

#81

Post by jasonjayr » Wed, Mar 27, 2013, 2:18 PM UTC

This is not a new problem -- newsgroups had this problem back in the day. I think the solution now is the same as it was back then -- better scoring/sorting/killfile tools that the end user can control.

The death of newsgroups, was also the death of an structured, parseable discussion forum, where the end user had the final say on how they'd see the discussion. Nowadays, we need moderators and the forum software on the server to re-implement these things that newsreaders had worked out.

I've setup my own ttrss instance, and it has some basic scoring abilities. Unfortunatly not all rss feeds provide the text of the article (or even the lede) in the feed directly, so the scoring ends up crippled.

Re: The power of the RSS reader

#82

Post by ldh » Wed, Mar 27, 2013, 4:20 PM 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.

Ok, so imagine the site in question is a little-known blog. I follow a link on reddit, enjoy the article, then click around to see what else the author writes. I find it really interesting and want to follow this author more closely. Do I then cross my fingers and hope reddit shares my taste in his other content and also hope I happen to catch it on reddit if that blog's content comes up again? No, I track the RSS and can peruse updates at my leisure without missing anything.

I think it's a different model of consumption. HN/Reddit is browsing, "let's see what the chatter by the watercooler is today". RSS is "I am more than casually interested in particular content and want to be notified of updates".

Re: The power of the RSS reader

#83

Post by charlieok » Wed, Mar 27, 2013, 8:03 PM UTC

ajslater wrote: post #66

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.

Something like PostRank needs to exist again. Hopefully in this second blooming of RSS post-reader, we'll get some attractive offerings in that area.

Re: The power of the RSS reader

#84

Post by josephkern » Thu, Mar 28, 2013, 5:15 AM UTC

Marco, you might also think of RSS readers like an archived narrow band search for high volume traffic. For example: I am a security researcher, so I susbscribe (via RSS) to everything security related that I can find: mailing lists, bleeding edge snort ruls, CVE, blogs, SANS, etc, etc.

Now when I want to see the current state of affairs in Ineternet Explorer security issues, I can simply search for "Internet Explorer" in my RSS reader. I am then presented with the traffic on the latest issues, their possible resolutions, and even possibly the person who discovered the issue.

The beauty of RSS is that it lets me decide what it will be, and when I want it to be that way.