I see PolitePol mentioned. What do people use to run scrapers to generate RSS feeds themselves for sites without them? Do you self host scrapers?
Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds
31–40 of 110 posts
Re: Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds
#32This is missing planets. A good way to find interesting blogs is to subscribe to a few planets. These are essentially aggregations of blog related to some project/topic. https://planet.gnome.org/ https://planet.kde.org/ https://planet.mozilla.org/ https://planet.documentfoundation.org/ PS. If you know any good planets worth skimming, please add to below :) That said, I don't really have a good RSS reader that syncs a…
(Disclaimer: my project)
https://feed.perfplanet.com for web performance
Also please open a GH issue if I’m missing a blog or 5
Re: Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds
#33I see PolitePol mentioned. What do people use to run scrapers to generate RSS feeds themselves for sites without them? Do you self host scrapers?
I do. Just a raspberry pi with nginx and a cron job that runs python scripts.
I'm not into AI but writing those scripts is boring so chatgpt is perfect for this.
Re: Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds
#34This is missing planets. A good way to find interesting blogs is to subscribe to a few planets. These are essentially aggregations of blog related to some project/topic. https://planet.gnome.org/ https://planet.kde.org/ https://planet.mozilla.org/ https://planet.documentfoundation.org/ PS. If you know any good planets worth skimming, please add to below :) That said, I don't really have a good RSS reader that syncs a…
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Re: Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds
#35The hate for algorithms boggles my mind.
Chronological feeds are awful. You'll never see anything from the people who post occasionally because they get drowned out by the people who are posting all the time.
There may be some algorithms that deliberately magnify hate because that's a way to increase engagement, but if you want to create one of those algorithms you can make a training set based on chronological feed + boosting/retweets/reposts.
I'm amazed at how people keep making failing RSS readers that keep failing with the same failing user interfaces that have been failing since 1999; everybody knows RSS has been failing but they never ask why or if we have a choice.
We still see the readers that make you mark things as read, that take their cues from email and newsreaders, that, when you subscribe to N feeds show you N boxes with a list of items, etc.
My RSS reader works like TikTok because I'm not afraid of algorithms.
Re: Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds
#36This is missing planets. A good way to find interesting blogs is to subscribe to a few planets. These are essentially aggregations of blog related to some project/topic. https://planet.gnome.org/ https://planet.kde.org/ https://planet.mozilla.org/ https://planet.documentfoundation.org/ PS. If you know any good planets worth skimming, please add to below :) That said, I don't really have a good RSS reader that syncs a…
I think it's little appreciated that planets solve many of the practical problems of feed crawling.
If you wanted to follow 2000 blogs yourself you'd find it is really a hassle. You can follow one planet and its easy.
For that matter, if 2000 people want to follow your blog (and many other blogs) they are going to generate 2000 requests per polling period. It is not wonder why people like [1] get so exasperated. There are three kinds of polling periods: (1) too fast, (2) too slow, (3) both at the same time. Instead of having 2000 people poll your blog too often, one planet can poll your blog. It improves the scalability and economics of the system dramatically.
(e.g. the difficulty of finding a good polling regime is one of 10 or 20 or so unappreciated reasons why RSS has remained nerdcore)
Re: Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds
#37So many RSS stories this week! I'm sensing a trend (hopefully)
I'm sorry to be the pessimist here, but I doubt it. HN users are the most likely to use RSS in the first place. I sincerely doubt that RSS is going to make a comeback this year with all my non-IT friends using it.
Why is the goal to appeal to as many people as possible?
Re: Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds
#38This is missing planets. A good way to find interesting blogs is to subscribe to a few planets. These are essentially aggregations of blog related to some project/topic. https://planet.gnome.org/ https://planet.kde.org/ https://planet.mozilla.org/ https://planet.documentfoundation.org/ PS. If you know any good planets worth skimming, please add to below :) That said, I don't really have a good RSS reader that syncs a…
big fan of feedmail [1] for a "dumb" reader. It just delivers it to your inbox. I have a folder set up called "feed" and I can do all the email things to the items landing in that folder. Every email costs a credit, you can buy 10 000 credits for $10, which works out to $0.001 per article.
The only thing it misses is any sort of highlight saving deal, but for those I just save the article to zotero and annotate it there.
Re: Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds
#39I love RSS but how can we get more of it? Walled-ish gardens seem to dominate. Many good producers are on platforms that just don't syndicate. What kind of pressure can we, consumers, put on?
Re: Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds
#40The hate for algorithms boggles my mind. Chronological feeds are awful. You'll never see anything from the people who post occasionally because they get drowned out by the people who are posting all the time. There may be some algorithms that deliberately magnify hate because that's a way to increase engagement, but if you want to create one of those algorithms you can make a training set based on chronological feed…
I prefer time-based feeds, but that's just me.
I don't think people are objecting to suggestive feeds in general; they're objecting to suggestive feeds whose primary objective is to keep you scrolling for as long as humanly possible to maximize company revenue.
That's simply not what I want to do with my day.
I'd train my own if I wanted to go that route.