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Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds

johnwalker.nl

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Re: Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds

#51

Post by nonrandomstring »

PaulHoule wrote: post #35

The 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…

Let it go Paul. It's like the word "hacker". We ain't getting it back.

It's sad the popular perception of a fundamental computer science concept, the great progeny of Al-Khwarizmi Musa, the life work of heroes like Donald Knuth, is sullied and stained with dire B-movie comic-book Bond villainy. Thank the hooligan broligarchs and their manchild ambitions for trashing that bit of computing culture.

Even my mum spits in the dust like a cowboy at the sound of "Algorithm".

Re: Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds

#52

Post by jefurii »

edoceo wrote: post #39

I 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?

If they're not using an RSS-capable platform maybe they're not so great?

Re: Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds

#53

Post by PaulHoule »

bluebarbet wrote: post #50
PaulHoule wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What people are calling an "algorithm" is really a heuristic.

In the public discourse over "algorithms", the definition seems to be "something that maximizes your (time on site|outrage|clicking)" and not the real definition

  In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm (/ˈælɡərɪðəm/ ⓘ) is a 
  finite sequence of mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used 
  to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. [1]
By that definition any well-defined process that creates your feed (sorting chronologically, alphabetically) is an "algorithm"; in the machine learning age it is easy to make an algorithm that selects for anything at all, except for the capital-T Truth.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm

Re: Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds

#57

Post by alserio »

azemetre wrote: post #37
Pooge wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In this case having more people asking for it or expecting it can contribute to expanding the availability of RSS feeds to more websites. While the vast majority of technical stuff I follow uses RSS, the same cannot be said for some other resources I like to read. While some are kind enough to enable them when asked, I don't expect them to want to support them for just a handful of people in their target audience.

Re: Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds

#58

Post by josephcsible »

PaulHoule wrote: post #35

The 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…

> 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.

My preference would be chronological feeds, but following few enough accounts that I can see every single post in it. Then that's not a problem.

Re: Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds

#59

Post by Eji1700 »

Pooge wrote: post #20
soupfordummies wrote: post #8

So 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.

Honestly that might be for the best in some ways. I see rss as "allowed to exist" because not enough people use it. There's plenty of ways to subscribe to things that I enjoy right now that could be nuked if suddenly enough people were using it that they weren't seeing the conversion rates they wanted.

Re: Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds

#60

Post by 8organicbits »

jopsen wrote: post #10

This 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 have a project that is collecting blogrolls and planets, especially those that publish OPML files. Here's my list of around one hundred planets!

https://github.com/robalexdev/rss-blogroll-network/blob/385d...

These are aggregated and enriched to build this site: https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/blogrolls/

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