[deleted]
I ditched the algorithm for RSS
51–60 of 283 posts
Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS
#52Shout out to any share bro's out there! Long live RSS!
Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS
#53If I remember correctly "the algorithm" as a concept of feed curation has been introduced by facebook ( or youtube?), long after RSS was used by blogs and podcasts. Heck, even Twitter used to have an RSS feed they killed a looong time ago [1] I also remember that in the beginning I was chuckling to myself "who on earth would want to have their feed curated by a black box whose target function cannot be checked? If I…
>turns out I was very wrong and lots of people seem to prefer just getting washed in a steady stream of somewhat internally consistent worldview.
If you're putting together an RSS feed from creators you like, isn't that liable to happen anyway?
Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS
#54Apologies for promoting my project again (did this in at least 2 other threads related to RSS), but I'm weirdly proud of it: I'm curating a list of human-written blogs on my blog reader/discovery/search engine called Minifeed: https://minifeed.net/blogs/ There's an OPML export available as well: https://minifeed.net/blogs/opml.xml
This is great! Thank you. I'm trying to figure out where I can stash the link so I don't forget about it.
Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS
#55If I remember correctly "the algorithm" as a concept of feed curation has been introduced by facebook ( or youtube?), long after RSS was used by blogs and podcasts. Heck, even Twitter used to have an RSS feed they killed a looong time ago [1] I also remember that in the beginning I was chuckling to myself "who on earth would want to have their feed curated by a black box whose target function cannot be checked? If I…
>turns out I was very wrong and lots of people seem to prefer just getting washed in a steady stream of somewhat internally consistent worldview. If you're putting together an RSS feed from creators you like, isn't that liable to happen anyway?
I think the “washed in a steady stream” part is missing from RSS feeds.
You’d need to join like meta rss feeds.
Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS
#56I've done this. Built a whole RSS app, where I can use RSS feeds to serve me the web page itself, then customize the web page with my own styling if I want. I can also use non-RSS pages in my RSS reader and show once a day or however often I want. The problem is with discovery, though (e.g. getting new information you wouldn't get with an RSS feed, such as YouTube videos). I still think you'd need to make your own al…
Feedly (paid service though) does a good job of discovery on their search tool.
Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS
#57I never left RSS.
After Google Reader shut down paid for Feedly for a while before switching to self-hosted FreshRSS. (https://freshrss.org)
I'm not a web guy and I detest all forms of system administration, but I had no trouble setting it up on my host. I've got it configured to update its feeds one per hour from 6AM to 8PM. It just does its thing, and works fine on both desktop and mobile.
Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS
#58I've been using Feeeed[0] for a while, and it's pretty great. It sort of has the 'algorithmic selection' vibe, but it's fundamentally a feed (!) of content/articles from sources you select.
Mostly mind is video games related, so I have sites like Polygon, Nintendo Life, IGN, Rock Paper Shotgun, etc., but I've also added a few subreddits like /r/pcgaming and /r/dragonage. It also occasionally suggests other sources to me; it might suggest Gematsu because I seem to be interested in industry news, it's suggesting /r/gaming right now "because you follow eurogamer", and it's suggested a few YouTube channels as well. All of the suggestions have been relevant, all of them have been small cards sat in my feed being relatively unobtrusive and easy to scroll past or look into.
It also supports adding other random stuff into your feed, like your Birthdays calendar from your contacts, and a few other things that I don't remember because they're not relevant.
Techcrunch link because the website seems to be down.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/11/feeeed-is-a-reader-app-tha...
Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS
#59I will say something that’s potentially controversial, but — the problem with current times is the abundance of content. RSS worked for me in 2000s, because more or less, there were less interesting content/people writing things for public. Most decent things would get into people’s feeds, and generally everyone was happy. I can’t really see it being feasible nowadays, unless something (reads: algo) filters things that I’m definitely not interested in. Which, obviously, creates a whole different problem of siloed echo chambers. It becomes even a bigger problem when you try to move the conversations to the real world, because your friends wouldn’t have read the same things as your tailored algo recommended to you.
There’s also assumed-financial-incentives, which ruins most of blogs/content for me. That’s probably my cynicism, and maybe I just grew up, but every time I see any write up, my first question is how this person gets financial benefits from it. I just never thought that far until 2015.
Sorry for ranting, and obviously I have no solution to this problem.
Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS
#60Apologies for promoting my project again (did this in at least 2 other threads related to RSS), but I'm weirdly proud of it: I'm curating a list of human-written blogs on my blog reader/discovery/search engine called Minifeed: https://minifeed.net/blogs/ There's an OPML export available as well: https://minifeed.net/blogs/opml.xml
This is great! Thank you. I'm trying to figure out where I can stash the link so I don't forget about it.
Funnily enough, I'm working on a link-blog feature on Minifeed. Kind of like del.icio.us or pinboard; at first, I implemented an ability to add blog posts to favorites and to lists, but there are so many blogs/sites without RSS, that I decided to allow users to save arbitrary links. Example: https://minifeed.net/l/rakhim