Making RSS More Fun
matduggan.com
Making RSS More Fun
1–10 of 108 posts
Re: Making RSS More Fun
#2> I want to sit somewhere and passively consume random small creators content, then upvote some of that content and the service should show that more often to other users. That's it. No advertising, no collecting tons of user data about me, just a very simple "I have 15 minutes to kill before the next meeting, show me some random stuff."
In other words consume things for free and don’t support the small content creators work.
Sounds very similar to what the AI companies are doing, consuming RSS feeds and not paying it back to the small creators, but when we are doing it, it is okay because we are not AI companies.
hmmm.
Re: Making RSS More Fun
#3> I want to sit somewhere and passively consume random small creators content, then upvote some of that content and the service should show that more often to other users. That's it. No advertising, no collecting tons of user data about me, just a very simple "I have 15 minutes to kill before the next meeting, show me some random stuff." In other words consume things for free and don’t support the small content creat…
AI companies hoover up the data, dump it in a giant pile and never tell you the source of it.
This extension literally just redirects you to the website. If the small creator has ads on that website, they're going to get paid. They're going to get the exposure.
Re: Making RSS More Fun
#4> I want to sit somewhere and passively consume random small creators content, then upvote some of that content and the service should show that more often to other users. That's it. No advertising, no collecting tons of user data about me, just a very simple "I have 15 minutes to kill before the next meeting, show me some random stuff." In other words consume things for free and don’t support the small content creat…
Are you complaining about this project or RSS in general? Because your complaint applies to both. I loved the era of RSS readers. Maybe I never sent anyone money but it was never the point. That was a way to feel properly connected to an Internet stranger, to stay up on what was going on and what they thought. It doesn’t have to be financial remuneration at the end of every flow chart. "It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.
Re: Making RSS More Fun
#5My YOShInOn reader basically looks like this. It takes a few 1000 up/down judgements to make good content-based recs [1], a reader that does collaborative filtering probably learns faster.
[1] train a BERT+SVM classifer to predict my judgements, create 20 k-Means clusters to get some diversity, take the top N from each cluster, blend in a certain fraction of randoms to keep it honest.
The clusters are unsupervised and identify big interest areas such as programming, sports, climate change, advanced manufacturing, anime, without putting labels on the clusters -- the clusters do change from run to run but so what. If I really wanted a stable classification I would probably start with clusters, give them names, merge/split a little, and make a training set to supervised classifier to those classes.
Re: Making RSS More Fun
#6The way I have made RSS more fun is by adding local LLM functionalities[0] and push notifications. (that can notify me when something I expect to happen, happens)
Re: Making RSS More Fun
#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 each day, and a finishing line.
> The whole appeal of TikTok, for those who haven't wasted hours of their lives on it, is that I get served content based on an algorithm that determines what I might think is useful or fun.
But TikTok is even worse. It's an endless stream of content, pressuring you constantly, always pushing you on the "just one more"-train. How is that even better? This all reads more like this person should use a readlater-list, not a different RSS reader.
Re: Making RSS More Fun
#8> I want to sit somewhere and passively consume random small creators content, then upvote some of that content and the service should show that more often to other users. That's it. No advertising, no collecting tons of user data about me, just a very simple "I have 15 minutes to kill before the next meeting, show me some random stuff." In other words consume things for free and don’t support the small content creat…
You are putting words in their mouth. There is no reason why such an RSS app wouldn’t link to the original source instead of scraping it.
The app doesn’t need to be a central source of monetization for the creators either, that’s usually the source of all these problems. The app can monetize their aggregation and curation services as they wish, and the individual creators sites can monetize their contribution as they wish. Be it ads, subscriptions, donations or anything else, as usual.
Re: Making RSS More Fun
#9> 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…
When I used RSS, a hundred years ago, I certainly got anxiety from my NetNewsWire badge showing 10, then 100, then 10,000 unread articles. If I used it today, I would simply turn off the badge and tell it to mark everything 2+ days old as read. But certainly, at a time I did approach it as a "I should read everything on these websites". I was also young and an idiot, some of that has changed now.
Re: Making RSS More Fun
#10> I want to sit somewhere and passively consume random small creators content, then upvote some of that content and the service should show that more often to other users. That's it. No advertising, no collecting tons of user data about me, just a very simple "I have 15 minutes to kill before the next meeting, show me some random stuff." In other words consume things for free and don’t support the small content creat…
Are you complaining about this project or RSS in general? Because your complaint applies to both. I loved the era of RSS readers. Maybe I never sent anyone money but it was never the point. That was a way to feel properly connected to an Internet stranger, to stay up on what was going on and what they thought. It doesn’t have to be financial remuneration at the end of every flow chart. "It is easier to imagine an end…
> That was a way to feel properly connected to an Internet stranger, to stay up on what was going on and what they thought.
I think too many people have forgotten that this is by far one of the best quality of the internet, especially the more personal one.
There does not need to be a financial exchange. Sometimes it’s enough to share content and read content others have shared.