>Auth is a JWT, which actually was a pain and I regret doing it. I don't know why I keep reaching for JWTs, they're a bad user experience and I should stop.
What is this about? Bad for the user or the dev?
Making RSS More Fun
71–80 of 108 posts
Re: Making RSS More Fun
#72An important benefit of RSS is that it isn’t influenced by recommendation algorithms. It won’t keep pushing content from a single domain; instead, you can read articles from a wide range of fields. What the article describes feels more like a return to the traditional, linear information-flow model.
Re: Making RSS More Fun
#73> 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'm using a heavily customized 2005-era fork of tt-rss.
Early on in my use I recognized some feeds I wanted to read end-to-end (often individual blogs). Others (Hackaday, other aggregators) I dip into periodically. To keep the UI uncluttered I use naming of the feeds to differentiate. I could easily see adding some schema and UI to handle segregating the feeds, too.
I've thought about adding an algorithmic feed driven from the various feeds I only dip into.
I had some discussion on here re: feed readers that might publish a feed of "starred / tagged" articles. I would love to drive my algorithmic feed from a recommendation system based in part on the subscribing to these "starred" articles from the authors of feeds I already read. A decentralized system that drove recommendations like this would be awesome to play with.
Re: Making RSS More Fun
#74Give Scour a try!
It ranks articles by how closely related they are to your interests. You can import a set of RSS feeds or scour all 15,000+ sources.
I built it because I wanted to find the good articles among noisy feeds like HN Newest. I've also avoided RSS readers in the past because of that feeling of having thousands of unread emails.
Re: Making RSS More Fun
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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. 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 large…
Well...
Personally I can't stand TikTok or Youtube Shorts or the videos on Instagram. I just can't stand the meaningless motion to get attention, it makes my skin crawl, it makes the bottom drop out of my stomach, etc. One time YT Shorts showed me an AI generation video of a pretty girl transforming into a fox on America's got talent, which is a good choice for me but then I got saturation videos of Chinese girls transforming into just about everything on AGT with the same music and reaction shots and it was more than I could use and not looking cool anymore but rather like AI slop. That said, I enjoy classic YouTube with relish.
My RSS reader gives recommendations based on explicit up/down and it has an AUC of maybe 0.78 or so, I saw a paper where TikTok is getting 0.83 so I feel like I'm doing OK.
I haven't done anything to change it in the last year except increase the number of random articles it inserts a little because making the recs worse actually can make them better, see [1] TikTok is famous for doing this. I think I could tune it up so for a given batch it could have a target "thumbs up" percentage or something more systematic but really I am very happy with the recs so it is not clear to me what "better" really is.
There is the problem with it that the system has a lot of latency which does not really matter for articles on most subjects because news about software or science or political science or engineering is usually OK if it is delayed a few days or a few weeks but it is a problem with sports where you really look like a dumbass if you post about something that happened on week 2 during week 4. It's a toughie though because I'd have to rework the thing to take out latency in 5+ stages of the system and then think systematically how to balance "urgent" vs "interesting" so I don't face the problem that urgent but interesting sports articles don't crowd other things out. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
[2] personally I don't mind the old articles for myself because I'm a weird kind of sports fan. Two years ago I used to follow the NFL but since I started doing sports photography I might go to 5 games on one weekend and if I am doing that the NFL is a lot less interesting than, say, Arknights so I am a little embarrassed to say I have no idea how the Bills are doing this year. But if I'm going to post sports articles to Bluesky or something it's a problem.
Re: Making RSS More Fun
#76I use miniflux and like it. Still, this post got me thinking.
I’d like to try out a feature where by self-hosted instance learns what I like and highlights relevant posts in my feed. Then I can go through the other ones later.
Main things are that I would control what feeds go in and there is no monetization incentive since it’s self-hosted.
Re: Making RSS More Fun
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
RSS has been traditionally used like an email client rather than a streaming service. You don't read every email, some go straight to spam or the trash bin. RSS is a time saver, not a time waster. 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…
I just scroll over it. Only the newest 5000 items are preserved, by default I allow maximum 4 items per feed (some feeds more some less), titles must be at least 3 words long and I delete items if the title contains any of the badwords.
Now that I think of it, the mistake most people make is not having enough subscriptions. Some spot around 1000 feeds the experience changes dramatically. You can afford to be less interested in things as there is plenty more.
I think I find about one decent article per day for each 10 000 subs.
Disposing of crappy feeds isn't a lot of work and a word filter works really well because people want to stuff descriptive words into titles.
Business insider amused me. They are so good at writing good titles that practically non of their countless worthless publications make it though my word filter. What remains would have one think it is a reasonable website.
Re: Making RSS More Fun
#78> I need to sort stuff into categories so that you get more stuff in genres you like 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 t…
I use https://karakeep.app/ to subscribe to RSS feeds; not only can I view the content in the app, but it also captures the content and stores an archive of it. It uses generative AI to create tags (but also supports full text search of everything archived). You can also create RSS feeds with criteria, with it acting as a bus for your content; perhaps it can enrich your RSS feeds while you continue to use your existing RSS reader. I hope this is helpful for your problem statement.
Re: Making RSS More Fun
#79It's interesting that people with Atom feeds still call them RSS.
Re: Making RSS More Fun
#80Give Scour a try! It ranks articles by how closely related they are to your interests. You can import a set of RSS feeds or scour all 15,000+ sources. I built it because I wanted to find the good articles among noisy feeds like HN Newest. I've also avoided RSS readers in the past because of that feeling of having thousands of unread emails. https://scour.ing
Very cool! Is there a way to blacklist some feeds?