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RSS is awesome

evanverma.com

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Re: RSS is awesome

#21

Post by al_borland »

627467 wrote: post #19
user3939382 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RSS is the antidote to algorithm feeds. I’m glad for any mention of it. 90% of the tools users need were built 1970-2000 including RSS.

Having restarted using rss in the past months (after probably 10+ years of not using it) i am now starting to remember why I stopped using it: lack of a personal "algorithm" that made hundreds (if not 1000s) of unread daily items to be manageable. I know part of it is on me. I need to let go, unsubscribe aggressively, etc... but this is... work? Im not a regular iOS user, but on it I have feeeeds which actually seem…

The thing that made RSS work for me is to really limit my feeds. Instead of following 10 tech news sites that have a bunch of overlap, I follow 1 that has most of what I want. A few blogs are for apps I use and want to be informed of new information, but they post infrequently, which is good.

Feed with dozens of posts per day turn into noise, especially if you have a lot of them.

By choosing one site I trust, I let the editors edit, instead of the algorithm.

Re: RSS is awesome

#22

Post by cxr »

user3939382 wrote: post #6
k2enemy wrote: post #2

Boy do I feel old if a short, low content PSA about the existence of RSS is considered "hacker news."

RSS is the antidote to algorithm feeds. I’m glad for any mention of it. 90% of the tools users need were built 1970-2000 including RSS.

What's an algorithm?

Re: RSS is awesome

#23

Post by geor9e »

Yes! I've been using RSS (feedbro reader) to de-algorithm social media for a long time now. Twitter (via nitter), Facebook (public posts only), HN, etc. It's all in a chronological RSS feed. No algorithms choosing what I see, no infinite scroll. If it's not a public post from a user I added, I don't see it. Luckily all my close friends are public-only type posters so it works.

My pet conspiracy is that big tech has wanted RSS dead ever since Google Reader briefly took off, because they can't suck you into a walled garden of infinite ads when it exists. Obviously they can't kill it entirely, but they can pressure browsers to drop support, acquire and softly kill off the readers, paywall them so they suck to use, discontinue others, make scraping to RSS against the TOS of their site, etc, etc.

Re: RSS is awesome

#24

Post by AndrewDavis »

henriquegogo wrote: post #18

RSS/Atom is great to follow blogs, news and some social network such as hackernews and reddit. I hope X/Twitter back to this functionality, but that's a low probability.

I just restarted using RSS recently. And I discovered I can also use it to track software releases (on github). The url is the release page with .atom appended. Eg

https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases.atom

Re: RSS is awesome

#26

Post by Perizors »

Is there any RSS reader that is also able to subscribe to newsletters in some way? There are lot of contents that are only provided as newsletters nowadays and I wanted to be able to read my feed and newsletters in the same app, without going into my mail inbox.

Re: RSS is awesome

#27

Post by senectus1 »

ropable wrote: post #20

I'm sad that a basic description of what RSS consists of makes it onto HN. I still upvoted to help educate the kids :/ FYI FreshRSS is fairly trivial to self-host, and is a really nice option for an RSS reader app.

FreshRSS is dabomb! Highly recommend it.

Re: RSS is awesome

#28

Post by akoboldfrying »

627467 wrote: post #19
user3939382 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RSS is the antidote to algorithm feeds. I’m glad for any mention of it. 90% of the tools users need were built 1970-2000 including RSS.

Having restarted using rss in the past months (after probably 10+ years of not using it) i am now starting to remember why I stopped using it: lack of a personal "algorithm" that made hundreds (if not 1000s) of unread daily items to be manageable. I know part of it is on me. I need to let go, unsubscribe aggressively, etc... but this is... work? Im not a regular iOS user, but on it I have feeeeds which actually seem…

If you're looking for a project, I think this is something that an LLM, even a dumb local one, would be pretty good at. Give it a list of 50 articles you like, 50 you hate (or however many fit into the context window), and let it read the full text of each post and assign a 1-5 score. Then sort and/or filter by that.

In theory, this is actually a very textbook ML supervised learning problem, and stuffing an already-trained LLM's context window with a small handful of samples like I suggested is a gross hack. But it might be the easier option.

Re: RSS is awesome

#29

Post by zikzak »

Perizors wrote: post #26

Is there any RSS reader that is also able to subscribe to newsletters in some way? There are lot of contents that are only provided as newsletters nowadays and I wanted to be able to read my feed and newsletters in the same app, without going into my mail inbox.

Many can accept forwarded emails and some will offer an email address you can use to subscribe to newsletters. I prefer the former because you can cancel the forward rule if you don't want to continue with a given rss app or service.
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