Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Making RSS More Fun

matduggan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 108 posts

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#11

Post by garciasn »

GCUMstlyHarmls wrote: post #9
PurpleRamen wrote: post #7

> 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.

I, like many, was a heavy Google Reader user. I would have it show me the headlines and then, when interested, I would look at the blurb when I expanded the item. If that piqued my interest further, I would dig into the actual article.

I have a problem with 'unreads' and I'm INBOX 0 and I keep all of my phone notifications at 0 at all times. I would do the same w/Google Reader. But; if there was something that kept surfacing old content as 'new', I would disable that feed or work to fix it before it ended up in GR.

I miss GR.

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#12

Post by dan_h »

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 mentioned in this post ("upvoting" based on views, tiktok-style video experience in the app, etc), but it's still very much a WIP and doesn't exactly fix the complexity problems yet. Still, I get encouraged seeing more projects like the OPs that hopefully bring about some sort of RSS resurgence.

[0] https://jesterengine.com

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#13

Post by Telemakhos »

colesantiago wrote: post #2

> 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…

The dream of consuming free content is really a throwback to the 90's way of thinking about an open web as a public space where anyone can freely access files that are published, as "published" meant "freely available." When YouTube made publishing something monetizable and guarded by DRM (look at all the trouble yt-dlp has been going through lately), that open web lost a lot of steam. Social media companies monetized discovery and surfacing through user data collection, and also undercut some of the desire to publish—once your basic info was on Facebook, having a personal web page became much less important. As having personal hosting became less and less the norm, publishing power concentrated in the hands of fewer companies (like YouTube) that were set up to monetize content and built the expectation of pecuniary compensation for "content creation," where the 1990's open web publishers were happy just being noticed and appreciated. The 1990's were a long time ago and are never coming back, because the past exists only as memory.

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#15

Post by manuelmoreale »

Telemakhos wrote: post #13
colesantiago wrote: post #2

> 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…

The dream of consuming free content is really a throwback to the 90's way of thinking about an open web as a public space where anyone can freely access files that are published, as "published" meant "freely available." When YouTube made publishing something monetizable and guarded by DRM (look at all the trouble yt-dlp has been going through lately), that open web lost a lot of steam. Social media companies monetize…

The spirit of the 90s is still here. There are still many, many people who are happy to have a space on the web and share what they’re passionate about or what is in their heads simply because they enjoy the process.

It’s not an all-or-nothing scenario. The two things can coexist. Some people will pursuit monetization, others are happy to share for the sake of sharing.

It comes down to individual choices.

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#16

Post by throw0101d »

People often use "RSS" as a generic term for a web/news feed:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed

But if someone will is actually going to implement a feed, should it be (actual) RSS, or Atom (or JSON Feed)? Are there particular pros/cons/trade-offs for each?

I know that for podcasts we're currently basically "suck" with at least providing RSS (even if there are also other options):

* https://podcasters.apple.com/4115-technical-updates-for-host...

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#17

Post by PaulKeeble »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #7

> 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…

What I do is go through all the new titles from beginning to end and just open anything I want to read in a tab, FreshRSS supports this workflow well. Then it sits in that tab for however long and I read them in the order I want to, sometimes they grouped and stored while I do something else.

I also have sites I filter their RSS as well, they produce really large amounts of articles and I am only interested in certain topics. Took me a while to get around to this, for the most part I did not want a mainstream news site firehosing into my RSS but I have filtered it based on keywords.

That is about it. Takes a bit of effort to slowly build it up but I hate it when sites don't have RSS, I rarely read sites that don't now.

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#18

Post by bananaflag »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #7

> 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…

Same here. I more or less open feedly each day, go through 100-200 article titles and open those which seem interesting in new tabs. Then, after I'm done, I read the articles. I never read them inside feedly.

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#20

Post by SCdF »

More power to you obviously. But I have mixed feelings about this.

There is so much information that curation is inevitable. Sure. But I don't want that curation to be "fun". I don't _want_ tiktok in my life, or really anything whose goal is "engagement". I don't want time killers.

One of the reasons for getting back into RSS for me was to have a direct feed to authors I'm interested in.

But I understand that quickly can become unmanageable.

When that time comes, I think I'd be interested in the curation being about compressing content down, not expanding it out. That is to say: use the algorithm to select from a large pool of what you're interested in, down to a manageable static size (like a weekly newsletter), as opposed to using it to infinitely expand outward to keep engaging you.

Post reply on HN