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

The RSS feed reader landscape

lighthouseapp.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 206 posts

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#181

Post by glenstein »

nonethewiser wrote: post #168
glenstein wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does raise a question if there's such a thing as a "minimum effective dose" of news consumption, and diminishing returns at certain thresholds of consumption. For instance, is one RSS feed with NYT headlines perhaps comprehensive enough that it is 90% functionally equivalent to a more voracious habit of reading diverse sources, subject matter expert blogs and so on?

That is a good question and I had the same thought while constructing it. Almost like stock market diversification. You can represent the entire market pretty well with just a handful of stocks. However, this seems like an overwhelmingly NO: >is one RSS feed with NYT headlines perhaps comprehensive enough that it is 90% functionally equivalent to a more voracious habit of reading diverse sources, subject matter exper…

>I think at minimum you would want 1 left, 1 right, and 1 center.

Probably a convo for a different place and time, but strong disagree here. Calibrating relative to political polarization is relativism, and I'm not a relativist.

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#182

Post by benrutter »

j3s wrote: post #155
benrutter wrote: post #136

Just gonna join the many other commenters shilling their favourite, mot mentioned rss reader! I absolutely love Vore (the rss reader, not the other thing!!!) It's really simplistic, and beautifully refuses to do anything I don't want it to. https://vore.website/

author here, glad u enjoy my lil project! lmk if there's anything you'd like to see. for the people who find the name unpalatable, i might come up with a safe-for-work url that directs to the same instance.

Ah hey! I love it, and wouldn't change anything, in fact I'd be dissapointed if a whole load of features did get added! Thanks for keeping it going - it's a rare piece of small-web coolness in an internet.

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#183

Post by DavideNL »

braza wrote: post #160

I bit of out-topic, but the best recommendation that I had here in HN was definitely the FreshRSS [1]. Yes, the design sounds _phpish_, but on Docker it's so reliable and fast, that I feel that I am in some sort of "final version of the software" and not needing anything else or enhancements, like WinRar, Notepad.exe, Winamp, Nero Burning ROM, Windows XP, etc. I do not know if others have the same feeling about a sof…

Agree, i’ve also been running it for years. It’s stable and has great features like CSS selectors, filtering, sharing as rss feed, etc.

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#184

Post by EvanAnderson »

lukasschwab wrote: post #178
AJ007 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if all we need is for bloggers to post a recommended feed with links to external posts in a separate RSS feed? The feed readers ingest the recommendation feeds and count them. I've been following ActivityPub and other protocols, by damn that stuff becomes a mess quick. The absolute simplest approach is probably the right one for now. The fundamental problem with recommendation engines are the platforms are forci…

Basically linkblogging. I'm not sure this needs to be a separate feed; JSON Feed has a dedicated `external_url` field: > If `url` [optional] links to where you’re talking about a thing, then `external_url` links to the thing you’re talking about. I'd be shocked if Atom/RSS didn't have equivalents. This kind of "repost"-ish behavior may just be obscured in the tools people use to construct feeds, so they remain obscur…

Replying to both your and parent post at once:

Using RSS for this seems reasonable for people who already have the ability to host a feed. I was thinking more about the Twitter-alikes for the "normies" who don't have a place to host a feed. I don't just want to see recommendations from bloggers. I'd like to be able to pull recommendations from a wider net of "content consumers" as well as "content creators".

I can't come up with an economic model that would work to run a hosting service for feedreader-generated feeds except in the case of for-profit feedreaders. There's abhorrent models there like, say, peppering the recommendation feeds with "sponsored content", or extracting demographic data from the participants and selling it. Making the recommendation feed a fee-based service also seems like a bad model, too.

That was why I look at the Twitter-alikes for the recommendation feeds-- because the transport is "free" (or, at least, not something where I'd have to worry about the business model).

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#185

Post by rambambram »

lukasschwab wrote: post #178
AJ007 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if all we need is for bloggers to post a recommended feed with links to external posts in a separate RSS feed? The feed readers ingest the recommendation feeds and count them. I've been following ActivityPub and other protocols, by damn that stuff becomes a mess quick. The absolute simplest approach is probably the right one for now. The fundamental problem with recommendation engines are the platforms are forci…

Basically linkblogging. I'm not sure this needs to be a separate feed; JSON Feed has a dedicated `external_url` field: > If `url` [optional] links to where you’re talking about a thing, then `external_url` links to the thing you’re talking about. I'd be shocked if Atom/RSS didn't have equivalents. This kind of "repost"-ish behavior may just be obscured in the tools people use to construct feeds, so they remain obscur…

The RSS spec has the 'source' sub-element, which should point to the original source feed to give credit while forwarding/reposting. I guess one can apply this spec loosely and point it to a webpage url instead of an RSS feed.

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#186

Post by criddell »

BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #107
criddell wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook deprioritizes (shadowbans?) posts that link off of their platform That tells you that's not what it's for. It would be like posting your resume on FB and LinkedIn and then pointing out that FB led to fewer job offers than LinkedIn. Different platforms, different purposes. Have you tried Feedly or Inoreader or Flipboard or The Old Reader or any other RSS services that popped up after Google Reader was kille…

>That tells you that's not what it's for. It would be like posting your resume on FB and LinkedIn and then pointing out that FB led to fewer job offers than LinkedIn. Different platforms, different purposes. Only insofar as the purpose of the platform is to generate ad revenue. The contents of the posts were semantically identical and they were made to the same platform; your example involves the same post to two dif…

> Only insofar as the purpose of the platform is to generate ad revenue.

Well, yeah. I'm not surprised that they don't promote posts containing links to their competitors.

I wonder what the outcome would have been if you had instead linked to Instagram or Threads? I would guess those have a smaller penalty.

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#187

Post by mzmzmzm »

One of the "I wish I'd paid for premium sooner" services I use is Newsblur. The UI is not the most modern, but it centralizes, organizes, offlines, etc with enough power features to handle edge cases that I can feel like I "read everything today" the way I used to with Google Reader.

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#190

Post by disillusioned1 »

stevejb wrote: post #189

I'm still on Carmen's Headline Viewer. I see no reason to swtich.

Ha! I started with CHV, then moved to Bloglines, then to Google Reader, then to NewsBlur, then to TT-RSS, then to Feedly, then to Inoreader, where I've stayed since 2016. I get an itch every time one of these RSS discussions happens, but it passes.
Post reply on HN