Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

doliver.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 88 posts

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#61

Post by quantadev »

AndrewOMartin wrote: post #3

This is perfectly reasonable, but I think it is a bit general. The notion of a chain of trust leading to a curated feed can equally apply to YouTube if you stick to the subscribed channels view. There are also specific skills I've picked up from being subscribed to the Hacker News "top" RSS feed. Namely judicious use of the "mark all as read" button.

Definitely the `Chain of Trust` concept can be applied to anything. For example Social Media Protocol developers have thought a lot about using CoTrust, to be able to block undesirable people (moderation), by following a 'whitelist' only of users you trust or ones they trust, down a dependency tree of trust. Interestingly you could decentralize this onto some Relay system like Nostr and use Crypto signing, where each "trust" is Crypto certified to be correct, rather than needing to truse a central server/authority.

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#62

Post by bitbasher »

al_borland wrote: post #57
bitbasher wrote: post #46

A good RSS reader/feed is nice to curb over consumption. I use it for youtube channels and blogs. As long as I can consume the content via my reader, I don't need to visit youtube and fall down any rabbit holes.

I attempted this a while ago. I loaded all my YouTube subscriptions into an RSS reader, and then it quickly became too much for me to deal with. The big problem was that I do 99.5% of my YouTube viewing on a TV, while my RSS readers is on the phone and desktop. I learned that whatever solutions come up with needs to fit into my life. I’m not going to become a desk chair YouTube watcher. YouTube effectively already ha…

I understand it's not for everyone, but it works for me. I don't watch youtube anywhere else other than my laptop. I can't imagine trying to use a TV app.. but that's a whole other can of worms :)

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#63

Post by ranger207 »

You don't have to read everything you're subscribed to. I'll wake up and have, say, 150 or so unread items in my feed reader, and I'll just take 5 minutes or so hitting the next button and marking them as read, and if there's something I care to actually read I'll mark it unread and move on. Then once I've actually found everything I want to read I'll go back and actually read those. A Eurogamer article on a game I don't care about? Skipped. A Eurogamer article about an interview with the devs of a game I love? Mark unread and come back to it after filtering.

The benefit of RSS is that it presents everything as a purely chronological feed. An algorithmic feed tries to figure out what you want and present it to you; a chronological feed you have to do that filtering yourself. RSS isn't a way of getting around that, it's a way of doing it better

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#64

Post by celeritascelery »

I hope that at some point I can use AI to filter my RSS feed for me. It knows the kind of content I want and the stuff I always skip. Sure it won’t be perfect, but it would let me subscribe to more high volume feeds without having to manually filter everything.

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#65

Post by lexoj »

celeritascelery wrote: post #64

I hope that at some point I can use AI to filter my RSS feed for me. It knows the kind of content I want and the stuff I always skip. Sure it won’t be perfect, but it would let me subscribe to more high volume feeds without having to manually filter everything.

You can do that with the Analyst feature of Matcha RSS.[1] Just write to the prompt what you want back from Analyst feeds. Disclaimer: its my own tool.

[1] https://github.com/piqoni/matcha?tab=readme-ov-file#analyst-...

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#66

Post by snackbroken »

quantadev wrote: post #53
frosted-flakes wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion the answer is curation. If you're getting so many magazines and newspapers in the post that you can't read them all, the answer isn't to hire someone to cut out random pages for you to read (oh, why are they all adverts?), the answer is to stop subscribing to so many publications. I never fail to read all of my social media feeds and email messages, because I actively cancel subscriptions to stuff that…

Hire someone? What about just using a system that crowd-sources it. That's what "Thumbs Up" icons can do, if you can get people to use them.

Popularity contests don't do a great job of surfacing quality. They do OK at pruning away the dullest 25℅, but tend to also throw away the top 5‰ most interesting stuff, because that stuff is invariably niche. They also don't do great in the meh middle, favoring loudness and approachability over thoughtfulness and competence.

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#67

Post by skybrian »

I recently figured out a good way to handle having more subscriptions than I feel like reading in Newsblur.

I have one group (“0-front”) for feeds that I usually read immediately (such as favorite comics) and many more groups of feeds that seemed interesting at the time. I will catch up with the first group, but only read the rest when I feel like it.

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#68

Post by sdsd »

I just filter my RSS subs through a locally running LLM trained on my journal to judge my interests, it then decides what to curate for me based on a prompt (sometimes something totally left field, this stuff always, etc)

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#69

Post by quantadev »

snackbroken wrote: post #66
quantadev wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hire someone? What about just using a system that crowd-sources it. That's what "Thumbs Up" icons can do, if you can get people to use them.

Popularity contests don't do a great job of surfacing quality. They do OK at pruning away the dullest 25℅, but tend to also throw away the top 5‰ most interesting stuff, because that stuff is invariably niche. They also don't do great in the meh middle, favoring loudness and approachability over thoughtfulness and competence.

It's just like when people say Twitter/X is a Cesspool. Of course it is if you view the unfiltererd/agorithmic feed. However, if you only view the content from who you're following you get exactly the content you want.

I use Twitter/X and all I ever see is AI/LLM stuff because it's all I follow and all I use it for. Zero politics. If someone does a political post, that's an instant unfollow.

This is how we can rank RSS as well. You can look at a rank-ordered list only from people you trust, or a rank-ordered list from the public at large, which will be a dumpster fire. So you can take a union of all content from those you follow and put the ones with most upvotes at top, and viola, you're done.

EDIT: However a better approach is do use AI to categorize as, politics/non-politics, hotdog/non-hotdog, etc, and then I can turn off political posts without having to completely unfollow someone I'd otherwise like.

Re: Reading RSS content is a skilled activity

#70

Post by kleinishere »

sdsd wrote: post #68

I just filter my RSS subs through a locally running LLM trained on my journal to judge my interests, it then decides what to curate for me based on a prompt (sometimes something totally left field, this stuff always, etc)

Was considering the same. Any GitHub link? If not, what LLM and what kind of pipeline? (If you can share!)
Post reply on HN