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Making RSS More Fun

matduggan.com

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Re: Making RSS More Fun

#81

Post by andai »

Isofarro wrote: post #52

The idea that you have to read everything is a reader UI design flaw. By presenting feeds as an inbox, it gives the impression of RSS feeds being email. And that's not right, it can be, but it doesn't have to be. The TikTok model is about scrolling, skipping, being selective. RSS readers should be treated the same way. "River of news" is an RSS thing. You dive in when stuff interests you, and you let what doesn't int…

I went through this thought process of creating a mechanical system to find interesting content all across the web for me based on my preferences that it learned.

And I started thinking about the supreme importance of high quality data sources... realizing there's a power law there, where I could just subscribe to a few high quality people... and ended up reinventing RSS from first principles.

And then instead of embeddings we have tags...

Honestly I think we nailed it in 2005 :)

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#83

Post by zerkten »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #66
dewey wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit weird to make blanket statements about a tool like that. Some people read all emails, some don’t. Just like some people only subscribe to people’s personal blogs and want to read all of them. Some might want to use it as a news aggregator and quickly browse through headlines. There no right or wrong usage of an RSS reader or “traditional usage”.

As RSS was being widespread around 2010, this is what most people said they were using it like, at least in my experience. It was the time when we still didn't have great spam filters, and people were used to receive and discard many emails without reading them. RSS was also frequently compared to discussion forums, where you also want to efficiently ignore non-relevant content. RSS gave us the power to ignore the bu…

A common setup was to have a folder hierarchy similar to email. Blogs were in folders organized by topic using whatever approach you felt best. You'd then dip into parts of the hierarchy. There often wasn't an aggregated feed that you could use but you could see a list of all items per blog. Each blog would then be highlighted or show a count when there was new content.

I said blog instead of feed because social networks had a focus on the single scrolling feed as a list of content aggregated from different authors. Some RSS clients embraced this to a degree, but it didn't start out that way. Twitter was the first social network I really used in 2007 to follow bloggers I subscribed to, and it took a while to adjust to this firehose of interspersed content. That wasn't an uncommon sentiment from devs.

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#84

Post by emschwartz »

efilife wrote: post #80
emschwartz wrote: post #74

Give 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?

Glad you think so!

There isn't a way to block feeds (yet), but you can subscribe to specific feeds, which basically acts like creating your own list of allowed feeds.

Separately, I'm going to be working on letting you exclude content from certain domains (which was requested in https://feedback.scour.ing/33).

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#85

Post by zerkten »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #49
sebtron wrote: post #32

Earlier 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 was a Feed Demon user. There are some videos of the experience which is much closer to a Windows email client than Google Reader was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIz5u9T94K0. Google Reader was late-stage RSS for me, but it brought some of the benefits of having all of the content download and aggregation being done server-side so the cost of adding new feeds was shared.

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#86

Post by mrandish »

manuelmoreale wrote: post #15
Telemakhos wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dream of consuming free content is really a throwback to the 90's way of thinking about an open web as a public space where anyone can freely access files that are published, as "published" meant "freely available." When YouTube made publishing something monetizable and guarded by DRM (look at all the trouble yt-dlp has been going through lately), that open web lost a lot of steam. Social media companies monetize…

The spirit of the 90s is still here. There are still many, many people who are happy to have a space on the web and share what they’re passionate about or what is in their heads simply because they enjoy the process. It’s not an all-or-nothing scenario. The two things can coexist. Some people will pursuit monetization, others are happy to share for the sake of sharing. It comes down to individual choices.

> The spirit of the 90s is still here

"Dream of the '90s" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4hShMEk1Ew)

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#87

Post by 65 »

This is a hard problem to solve. Basically what people want is an addictive way to consume high quality text.

I have made my own RSS readers with things like filtering, creating feeds from pages (e.g. the APNews.com home page), rendering the page itself with custom CSS/Javascript, etc.

Except I don't really use my RSS feed I spent months making because the firehose of random articles just does not work. I like The Atlantic as much as everyone, but do I want to read _every_ article? No.

Why is Reddit and Hacker News addictive? Because of the social component of it. So the author is on the right track with the insight to make it more like StumbleUpon. But... why bother when you can just go read Reddit or Hacker News? RSS readers are fundamentally lonely.

The non-social solution to "addictive internet text" to me is the research part of finding information you're curious about. I frequently will read something or think of something and go down this Wikipedia rabbit hole, trying to find more information. This is way more engaging than reading a random news article. The question is how to create discovery that leads to more discovery, where the user can find the information themselves (something like how people go down the Ancestry DNA rabbit holes). This way you don't need a social hook to build something "addictive." But how to get there is something I'm still trying to figure out.

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#88

Post by rambambram »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #66
dewey wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit weird to make blanket statements about a tool like that. Some people read all emails, some don’t. Just like some people only subscribe to people’s personal blogs and want to read all of them. Some might want to use it as a news aggregator and quickly browse through headlines. There no right or wrong usage of an RSS reader or “traditional usage”.

As RSS was being widespread around 2010, this is what most people said they were using it like, at least in my experience. It was the time when we still didn't have great spam filters, and people were used to receive and discard many emails without reading them. RSS was also frequently compared to discussion forums, where you also want to efficiently ignore non-relevant content. RSS gave us the power to ignore the bu…

So what? It's not a democratic vote to decide what way is the right/wrong way to use RSS. Do as you please, it's a simple usable protocol that basically allows for different use cases.

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#89

Post by EMM_386 »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #7

> 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…

Google Reader would present it almost like an inbox, where "unread" items are bold and read items are not.

To me, this caused a "not caught up on the inbox" reaction because I also use Gmail.

I know this is only one particular feed reader but this is just an example of how it could cause this. Looking at the screen felt like it was "work to be done" not "skimming headlines".

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#90

Post by BeetleB »

Isofarro wrote: post #52

The idea that you have to read everything is a reader UI design flaw. By presenting feeds as an inbox, it gives the impression of RSS feeds being email. And that's not right, it can be, but it doesn't have to be. The TikTok model is about scrolling, skipping, being selective. RSS readers should be treated the same way. "River of news" is an RSS thing. You dive in when stuff interests you, and you let what doesn't int…

This is an insight I realized several years ago: I want RSS, but I don't want to track what I've read and haven't. I solved my problem by writing a bot for each RSS feed - it would mirror posts in Diaspora. I would then subscribe to those bots.

These days it's Mastodon, but same idea. I just scroll and browse a bit, with nothing in the system telling me I have 573 unread posts.

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