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A reader where you'll click into the body under a headline only 1-5% of the time is a totally different beast.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I used RSS, a hundred years ago, I certainly got anxiety from my NetNewsWire badge showing 10, then 100, then 10,000 unread articles. If I used it today, I would simply turn off the badge and tell it to mark everything 2+ days old as read. But certainly, at a time I did approach it as a "I should read everything on these websites". I was also young and an idiot, some of that has changed now.
Maybe you like my project: https://rssrdr.com/ It's the simplest RSS reader in the world: no badges, registration or download necessary.
I know I could just type it or send just the website link over, but it just feels like more work and I'm not invested enough (ie if I'd generated a link now I'd feel like I invested effort and would definitely open it on the laptop. With just a link...not sure)
Anyone else already tried something similar?
I'm also trying to figure out that problem. The challenge I've seen is that RSS feeds rarely use the category field. I did notice people doing hashtags in the description field (maybe they POSSE to Mastodon or X) so I parse those out in a crawler I built [1], but theres still so much uncategorized content.
In my personal feed I aim to only subscribe to feeds I plan to read, so I hit "inbox zero" on my RSS feed every day, reading about 20% of the content. What this means is that I unsubscribe from anyone who posts too often. I think there's a negative correlation between posting frequency and my desire to read the content. People who blog every day are mostly writing uninteresting content and that will fill your feed unless you balance it out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My Inoreader became unmanageable and reminded me a lot of the reason I quit using Gmail: over 100k emails to go through in one lifetime isn't worth the trouble.
> over 100k emails to go through in one lifetime isn't worth the trouble Unless you're on a bunch of mailing lists, I can't even fathom having that much email, much less that much unread email. I'm fanatical about making sure that I'm at inbox zero as much as possible because the 'unread' counter is the enemy. It takes some effort to set up and adjust filters and actually unsubscribe from stuff, but it's completely w…
I do subscribe to things I find interesting but other times they are emails from services I joing. I am now using Office 365 and am being able to keep it much cleaner. All my Newsletters go into a Newsletter folder and I have a Sweep rule to keep the 10 most recent and delete the rest. My inbox is way easier to manage now. And every year I move the corresponding emails from that year into a folder, like "2024" and go through it from time to time. It's being a bliss.
My two gmail accounts probably have way over 100k as I've more or less abandoned them. Google also made the total emails you have in the account less apparent too, I was up to 80k and suddenly my inbox had around "3,000" or so emails.
Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. It depends on the content. And that's one thing I've longed to see solved in RSS feed readers as well as podcasts. However, I have not been able to imagine a UX that solves my problems, so there's that.
> I rarely want to read all of a websites content from beginning to end I get the impression this person is using RSS reader wrong. Or is there really a culture of people you are using RSS like a youtube-channel, consuming everything from beginning to end? For me the purpose of RSS is to get the newest headlines, choose the interesting articles and skip the rest. This means there is a limited list of items to check e…
YouTube's interface gives people a feeling of agency because it tempts you with 10 or so videos on the side and you can choose one, it also means YouTube does not get information about the 9 you didn't click, maybe you would have liked 5 of them and hated 4 of them but it can at best guess about that. I read about negative sampling in the recommender literature to address this issue and never felt I understood it or believed in it -- the literature clearly indicates that it sorta-kinda works but I think it does not work very well.
So far as hating on algorithmic feeds it is not the algorithms themselves that are bad but how they are chosen. If there is any characteristic of the content that can be quantified or evaluated a feed can be designed to privilege that. A feed could be designed to be highly prosocial, calming and such or designed to irritate you as much as possible. It's possible that people get bored with the first.
My own reader works like TikTok in that it shows one content piece of the time but it is basically the stuff that I submit to HN and it is scientific papers and articles about LLMs and programming languages and social psychology and political science and sports and and advanced manufacturing and biotech and such. You might say my world view is unusual or something but it is certainly not mindless lowest common denominator stuff or outrage (e.g. to be fair I post a few things to HN because YOShInOn thinks they are spicy -- YOShInOn has a model that can predict if y'all are going to comment on an article or not and I felt it was a problem that my comments/submission ratio was low before I had YOShInOn)
> I rarely want to read all of a websites content from beginning to end I get the impression this person is using RSS reader wrong. Or is there really a culture of people you are using RSS like a youtube-channel, consuming everything from beginning to end? For me the purpose of RSS is to get the newest headlines, choose the interesting articles and skip the rest. This means there is a limited list of items to check e…
To praise TikTok it has a highly effective recommendation engine precisely because it is showing you one piece of content at a time and registering your engagement on that. YouTube's interface gives people a feeling of agency because it tempts you with 10 or so videos on the side and you can choose one, it also means YouTube does not get information about the 9 you didn't click, maybe you would have liked 5 of them a…
I'm a bit divided on TikToks efficiency. It's a well working doom-scrooling-machine, better than any other platform, but from my personal experience, it's not actually that good at recommending the content I actually want. And I think it's largely because it has the wrong focus, namely the attention. High attention-content is not always what I want and need, but TikTok has barely any way to realize this, exactly because of how It works.
> YouTube's interface gives people a feeling of agency because it tempts you with 10 or so videos on the side
Interesting, never used that side-thing.
> it also means YouTube does not get information about the 9 you didn't click,
Yes, and that's OK. The not-clicked entries can still give me relevant information. And yes, the system can't act on this, but that's the whole point of RSS Readers, to make your own choice, on the spot, and switch it constantly as necessary. No system can react to this. "Smart" algorithmic solutions are doomed to stay mediocre because of this.
> I rarely want to read all of a websites content from beginning to end I get the impression this person is using RSS reader wrong. Or is there really a culture of people you are using RSS like a youtube-channel, consuming everything from beginning to end? For me the purpose of RSS is to get the newest headlines, choose the interesting articles and skip the rest. This means there is a limited list of items to check e…
> I get the impression this person is using RSS reader wrong. Or is there really a culture of people you are using RSS like a youtube-channel, consuming everything from beginning to end? For me the purpose of RSS is to get the newest headlines, choose the interesting articles and skip the rest. This means there is a limited list of items to check each day, and a finishing line. Why would the author's use be the wrong…
I can see that some feeds, like serializartions or low-volume/high quality content, is desirable to be consumed in its entirety, but the 80/20 principle seems to also apply to RSS feeds too in general. Specially if your RSS list reaches double digits.
To me, it feels like most feed readers are made by people who don't use RSS, and just exercise their feed reader on a few feeds. I seem to be at 211 feeds with (currently) 13,000 cached entries, organized across a couple dozen categories. A reader where you'll click into the body under a headline only 1-5% of the time is a totally different beast.