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I ditched the algorithm for RSS

joeyehand.com

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Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#121

Post by cloverich »

artisanspam wrote: post #119

I love RSS. I use RSS daily. I use link-aggregation websites like HN to find interesting authors and subscribe to any RSS feeds that they have. Highlights from my reader sync automatically into my Obsidian vault. It's great. But I know I, and everyone else posting in this thread, are in the minority. It's clear that most people prefer algorithmic drip in a walled garden. There's a reason everyone flocks to those plat…

Build tools to make it easy for people to assemble their own chronological feeds that have quality UI / UX. IMHO the algorithmic feed's principle benefit is how easy it is for a user to curate something close to both what they want, and what they didn't know they want. We too often view things in terms of technical implementations and such, and lose focus on the core problems the user is actually having. Algorithmic feeds are great, because:

    - User installs app, opens it
    - User begins scrolling
    - Within a few minutes they have an endless feed of mostly interesting content
That is REALLY hard to do without an algorithmic feed, and there are a lot of problems when they subscribe. Not insurmountable, just easily underestimated. The motto I keep repeating to myself when I fall into a doomerism about the inevitability of the algorithm, I just say "Its time to build" and hope I can find something on the other side, if I keep digging. The principle weapon against the algorithm is, I think, not needing an infinite pool of profit. I.e. Facebook could build great apps that weren't algorithmic, but it is highly likely they would make much less money. So not only won't they, they literally _aren't realistically allowed to do it_. Its a crazy thing to think through.

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#122

Post by stonogo »

wussboy wrote: post #102
s1mplicissimus wrote: post #48

If I remember correctly "the algorithm" as a concept of feed curation has been introduced by facebook ( or youtube?), long after RSS was used by blogs and podcasts. Heck, even Twitter used to have an RSS feed they killed a looong time ago [1] I also remember that in the beginning I was chuckling to myself "who on earth would want to have their feed curated by a black box whose target function cannot be checked? If I…

Many people do not have the technical expertise to set up an RSS feed and so fell into the algo by default.

This is partly because the ad-funded browser hegemony removed all the features that made them easy to use, via the common "break it, wait for usage to drop off, then claim nobody uses it and delete it" project management path.

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#123

Post by ndriscoll »

bluGill wrote: post #100

A good algorithm is a good thing. However what a good algorithm is for me is often different from what it is for those who maintain them. Outrage gets attention and sometimes it is needed, but there is a level of too much, and also a lot of outrage unfairly represents the issues and so it makes me mad even though if I understood the details I wouldn't be mad just concerned. I want an algorithm that surfaces things of…

> you have seen it all, go outside

Or "you've seen it all. Bored? Click here to let your friends know you're looking for something to do/see who else is bored". Or "Bored? X needs volunteers!" Or some other positive suggestion to try to prevent a "eh guess I'll doomscroll something else" reaction.

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#124

Post by adeptima »

Not a fan of RSS, but put a serious thoughts why it's useful at conceptual level, and came up with two simple apps

- github.com/trending daily, weekly, monthly group by 10 programming languages i'm familiar with. will add aggregator private upvote, hiding and 140 chars comment functionality

- grouped youtube channels by interests and tagged them in a cloud tag fashion - got RSS like feeds for ai, databases, c++, go, rust, robotics, etc topics, checking them them regularly on weekly and monthly, but no more doom scrolling or swipping next

Most interesting videos and repos has very few likes or views, and great depth. No way algo will push it up in my feed.

The result - no more time or interest to open up twitter, reddit or facebook feeds.

No stress. No feelings on "missing out"

50% of content correlates with the most trending topic on HN.

Thought to do HN weekly aggregation as a next step ... decided not to do

It's just a pleasure to use HN with comments section as its for me

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#125

Post by dartos »

reverendsteveii wrote: post #90
criddell wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta et al have an infinite feed. You can scroll forever. My news reader had 6 articles in it yesterday and that's it. I can reload as many times as I want and that won't change.

little "m" meta, as in "rss feeds about rss feeds" rather than big "M" Meta the company

Yes, I realize now that it was a little confusing.

Meta is still Facebook in my mind.

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#126

Post by jen729w »

adeptima wrote: post #124

Not a fan of RSS, but put a serious thoughts why it's useful at conceptual level, and came up with two simple apps - github.com/trending daily, weekly, monthly group by 10 programming languages i'm familiar with. will add aggregator private upvote, hiding and 140 chars comment functionality - grouped youtube channels by interests and tagged them in a cloud tag fashion - got RSS like feeds for ai, databases, c++, go,…

Why aren't you a fan? That feels like saying 'not a fan of newspaper delivery, but...'.

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#127

Post by adeptima »

jen729w wrote: post #126
adeptima wrote: post #124

Not a fan of RSS, but put a serious thoughts why it's useful at conceptual level, and came up with two simple apps - github.com/trending daily, weekly, monthly group by 10 programming languages i'm familiar with. will add aggregator private upvote, hiding and 140 chars comment functionality - grouped youtube channels by interests and tagged them in a cloud tag fashion - got RSS like feeds for ai, databases, c++, go,…

Why aren't you a fan? That feels like saying 'not a fan of newspaper delivery, but...'.

Never sticked to me. I guess if I had my own hackable RSS feed UI I would have a better experience.

I do love very dense and rich UI functionality with relevant enriched information too. Not some sort of list I need to click through.

As for cross platform usability. I never wanted anyone to our my RSS aggregations. 100% ownership and ability to hack in is very important for me.

I should probably reassess my decision as it's clearly much easier to turn everything into RSS feed with LLM coding or tools like N8n

Any recommendations are greatly appreciated

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#128

Post by justinpombrio »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #106
bbkane wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My SSG (Zola) offers an RSS generation option, so I turned it on. Several months later I realized it was broken for some reason and I hadn't noticed. Nobody emailed me or anything (I'm not a popular blogger), so I just turned the RSS generation off

No blog is worth the hassle and honestly there is always a feed broken somewhere showing up in our reader we just wait for them to fix it. If they don't fix it then at some point it will just get deleted. That is just the reality of maintaining your own feed websites remove feeds sometimes and all you can do is go back see if its changed address and if not remove it.

But it's so little hassle: just send the blog author an email saying vaguely what the problem is!

Someone emailed me about an issue with my RSS feed once. I don't remember what the issue was anymore, but I was grateful and I fixed it. Being the author of a tiny blog, it was just really nice to know that someone wanted to read what I wrote enough to care that my RSS feed was borked.

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#129

Post by ttepasse »

mawise wrote: post #74
bsnnkv wrote: post #27

I am a big proponent of RSS, but I think that it suffers from a lack of imagination these days, for example, the "quality filter" approach mentioned in this article is not very useful imo. The biggest cost of RSS feed items as a consumer is figuring out whether something is worth reading. A lot of feeds these days don't provide anything useful in the body to make a determination on this, and others just dump the enti…

There is a lot of interesting work in this space by the IndieWeb community. They've got a vision of (and lots of a spec for) a social reader[1] that uses RSS for lots of the things people got in the habit of with Web2 social media (comment, repost, etc) [1] https://indieweb.org/social_reader

(Although the IndieWeb community has this weird thing against "side files" and prefer having the content inside the HTML, marked up with Microformats2 special attributes. A social reader then polls the HTML and parses it additionally with the Microformats2 algorithm. I suspect this cultural preference is a result of the usage of static site builders of the early IndieWeb pioneers like Tantek.)

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#130

Post by epicide »

artisanspam wrote: post #119

I love RSS. I use RSS daily. I use link-aggregation websites like HN to find interesting authors and subscribe to any RSS feeds that they have. Highlights from my reader sync automatically into my Obsidian vault. It's great. But I know I, and everyone else posting in this thread, are in the minority. It's clear that most people prefer algorithmic drip in a walled garden. There's a reason everyone flocks to those plat…

I don't think that's something that RSS (or any other alternative) can fix. I don't think RSS is as toxic as algorithmic feeds, but they are still cut from the same hyper-connected cloth. If you want to fight the algorithmic drip, promote people to connect with others in their community on a small scale.

Even if you have to use the internet to do it, making time to talk (with your vocal cords) to a friend on a regular basis can be much better than mindlessly scrolling or reading endless news feeds.

What might be even better are various other social activities away from a computer. It doesn't have to be highly social either. Just being in a park or library with other people silently reading or feeding ducks can be a highly positive semi-social experience. Just silently enjoying a common experience draws way more connection than the various "social" media apps out there.

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