61–70 of 110 posts
So many RSS stories this week! I'm sensing a trend (hopefully)
Scaling it to a wider audience than HN is a longshot, as much as I love the idea.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 y With 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 o…
We've grown used to having a practically infinite amount of things presented to us all the time, but I've come to believe recently that limiting the amount of posts you see can be a fine (and maybe healthier) choice. There's value in being able to say "I'm caught up, I'm done", it can be a natural stopping point.
I'm not as good about limiting myself like this as I would like to be, but it is a goal of mine.
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…
> 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 c…
In search rankings for instance you night have a document score (like Pagerank) that tries to identify the quality of a document, and you might have a query-document score that identifies the relevance of a document to a query. It's not trivial at all to find a way to blend those that gives you queries that are both relevant and quality as opposed to just one or the other.
The greatest weakness of my current RSS reader is that it's slow, depending on how much I am using it, articles could be delayed anywhere from a day to a week. For certain kinds of articles [1] recency doesn't matter, but other articles [2] have a definite shelf-life and if you repost them too late you look like a total dope.
I'd like to let articles about sports "cut the line" in front of higher quality articles about other topics but it's really hard to find a balance that's right because I don't want to get flooded with lower quality sports articles. It's one thing to say "let people make up their mind about how to balance these things" but when you really try it you find it's pretty hard. Not only do I have to change the whole way my pipeline works (can't be a batch job anymore) but it's not clear to me how to tune up the selection criteria.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S294979062... [2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2025/01/19/eagles-...
I need to find some way to see a chronological feed of what people I am friends with on facebook post. I literally get randomly suggested posts from unrelated accounts, and scrolling through them all will start to repeat them, never showing me content from some people who are actual friend connections.
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 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. Ther…
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…
I use inoreader and track basically everything I want in a huge list of feeds.
It's pretty trivial to mark stuff as "always flag this", and then leave the rest of the pile as "scan through and manually tag anything else"
Anything low volume goes on the "always" flag list as it takes one review a day of the new content to decide if it's something I care about.
Ultimately what I want, and what most people want, is the ability to just hook up to various data streams and apply rules to it. From there filtering as desired comes pretty easily.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 y With 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 o…
And the whole point of the people who want RSS is that they disagree with the idea that "the algorithm" shows the best x items.
The whole point is that they don't want "the algorithm". And your answer is "Have you heard of the algorithm? I think it's a solution to your problem".