Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are planets, in this context?
They are just feed aggregators composed of multiple feeds. Based on this software: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)
Thank you!
Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds
41–50 of 110 posts
Re: Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds
#42The 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…
Which RSS reader do you use in that case?
And is it fair to say there's a middle ground between purely chronological feeds vs algorithms that reward engagement/time spent on the app?
Re: Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds
#43This 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…
Thank you for reminding me about planets! I had forgotten about them, and your post has inspired me to explore them again. I appreciate your insights.
Re: Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds
#44The 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…
> 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.
If you control the algorithm there is nothing to prevent you from sorting feeds by volume and adjusting their presentation accordingly.
Actually you can imagine countless other UI adaptations depending on preferences, usage patterns etc.
Ideally RSS readers should offer flexible customizations, e.g., with plugins or even some low-code environemnt.
Re: Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds
#45I 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?
Request good producers to use platforms that syndicate.
Re: Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds
#46The 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…
Which RSS reader do you use in that case? And is it fair to say there's a middle ground between purely chronological feeds vs algorithms that reward engagement/time spent on the app?
An algorithm doesn't have to reward engagement or time spent on the app. It can reward or punish anything at all -- and that's what it is about algorithms.
My feed reader (that I wrote myself) rewards things that I thumbs up and punishes things that I thumbs down.
Re: Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds
#47So 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.
Realism shared. I work with journalists, exactly the type of normies who would most benefit from this technology. Years of evangelism has had no effect whatsoever. Nobody they know is using it, they don't see the logo anywhere, or a big friendly "Get started" button. It's all so unfamiliar and technical-sounding. Even the name itself was a disaster, IMO: a hopelessly geeky and opaque acronym. It should have been called Webfeeds! It's all such a wasted opportunity.
Re: Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds
#48An advanced RSS reader/browser could bring back the magic of the web.
Re: Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds
#49The 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.
The problem with time based feeds is this.
You can read x articles a day; your system ingests y articles a day.
x=y is perfect but requires close-to-perfect balance (if x=0.9y to 1.1y maybe you can adjust your reading habit to your your feed)
if x>y then your system isn't showing you enough, if yWith an algorithmic feed of some kind you choose to read x items a day, your system shows you the best x items a day out of y based on some set of criteria and constraints.
These things are common sense but seemingly nonsensical to a lot of people. For instance our impoverished rights-based discourse (see [1]) about "free speech" presupposes that 100% of people can read 100% of what everybody else posts, realistically platforms can only show people some fraction of what gets posted so one thing is going to get more visibility and other things get less and that's a choice -- it could be random but it's still a choice. (As Rush would put it, "if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice")
I think the discussion is so impoverished that we never hear that an algorithm could choose to do anything other than maximize profits for a platform, when in fact that is just one thing an algorithm could do out of countless options.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Rights-Talk-Impoverishment-Political-...
Re: Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which RSS reader do you use in that case? And is it fair to say there's a middle ground between purely chronological feeds vs algorithms that reward engagement/time spent on the app?
An algorithm doesn't have to reward engagement or time spent on the app. It can reward or punish anything at all -- and that's what it is about algorithms. My feed reader (that I wrote myself) rewards things that I thumbs up and punishes things that I thumbs down.
Is this mysterious feed reader one that you made yourself?
I agree about the need to have some means of filtering. This is a major weakness of RSS, alongside onboarding and discovery. Algorithms serve the purpose of filtering well. The problem is their opacity.