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Do people really want recommendations? I personally want to just have an RSS reader that gives me the articles from the sites I freaking asked for. Not what so
by AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
Do people really want recommendations?
I personally want to just have an RSS reader that gives me the articles from the sites I freaking asked for. Not what some service thinks I'll like. Google, Pocket, and other sites are already doing a great job of thumbing through what I read and trying to sneak in their "suggestions": that's the kind of invasive data-combing that I want to avoid.
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y agoI have a script that sends RSS feeds to my email and then filters that organize them as necessary.
- wanda 10y agoYou might like this: https://www.goread.io https://www.goread.io https://github.com/mjibson/goread https://github.com/mjibson/goread Easy to self-host, solid replacement for Google Reader.
- discreditable 10y agoI'm a fan of Tiny Tiny RSS (tt-rss). I self-host it at home. I use a mix of the web UI and the Android app to view it. I tried a few cloud-hosted readers but didn't like their UI as much as tt-rss.
- benbristow 10y agoSame. It's great. Can even run it in a Docker container. https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-tt-rss https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-tt-rss
- tschellenbach 10y agoI'm working on this project, so slightly biased. First, we show you both the chronological display in a list mode. That allows you to browse through things quickly and filter out what you're interested in manually. The personalization is used in combination with the image style layout. On that screen we try to surface the most interesting information. Second, yesterday I was browsing quora questions about features of RSS readers. The most requested feature was personalization to help deal with information overload. I think some percentage of users doesn't need personalization, but the vast majority do. Personally I was a big fan of Zite, I used that app everyday. Pity they were acquired and shutdown.
- walterbell 10y agoZone is still around, buried in the options of Flipboard. The recommendations are weaker, but still valuable and worth the training investment.
- tschellenbach 10y agoI tried for a few weeks, but couldn't get Flipboard to show me content i'm actually interested in.
- walterbell 10y agoTo get Cover Stories to be useful, it was necessary to downvote many of the initial selections, unfollow some tags, follow other tags, then upvote the few stories that were interesting. It gradually got better. But yes, there were many stories of poor relevance or quality. One problem is that the UI takes more clicks than Zite to rate stories and select tags.
- youdounderstand 10y agoThat's my big takeaway from the last week. I don't want algorithms influencing how I think.
- branchless 10y agoI'd love something where I can just cut all these guys out the loop. I'd love an rss server I can run on my PC, it downloads all content for each new entry to my tablet at 6am each day. I can then read all content offline.
- CaptSpify 10y agoIf that's what you want, I recommend tt-rss: https://tt-rss.org/gitlab/fox/tt-rss/wikis/home https://tt-rss.org/gitlab/fox/tt-rss/wikis/home It may be a bit overkill to run on your PC, but I don't know of a better program for that. I also sync it to my tablet every day for offline reading.
- bisby 10y agoI came here checking to see if this could be a replacement for ttrss... But no. it appears that ttrss wins in the "just give me the rss feeds I want" category for me.
- jancborchardt 10y agoI’d recommend you too to take a look at Nextcloud News then: https://github.com/nextcloud/news/#nextcloud-news-app https://github.com/nextcloud/news/#nextcloud-news-app :)
- bisby 10y agoGood to know! I use nextcloud, but it is performing TERRIBLY on my raspberry pi 3. I need to see about recreating the setup they use on the nextcloud box. Is this better than ttrss? or just different? Worth the hassle of migrating things?
- branchless 10y agoInteresting. How do you sync it to your tablet? Do you get the full article each time for offline reading? If so what part is responsible for this? tt-rss or your client?
- Veen 10y ago> Do people really want recommendations? I do. Or rather, I want a service that will filter out the crap I don't want to see and bubble the relevant content to the top. In my job I have to keep an eye on loads of feeds, and it's almost always worthless dross, but I can't tell that it's worthless until I've seen it.
- java-man 10y agoTry http://news-ai.com/ http://news-ai.com/ May or may not work for you due to some bias in selection of feeds.
- mpweiher 10y ago> but I can't tell that it's worthless until I've seen it. So how do recommendations help?
- Veen 10y agoI meant that of all the feeds, a small proportion of the content is valuable. I have to look at the non-valuable content to determine that it isn't valuable. I would like it if an automated system could score the content based on my criteria and behavior, reducing the amount of non-valuable content I have to filter manually. As I understand it, that's the functionality Winds promises, but it only does it with a predetermined set of feeds, which isn't useful to me.
- greglindahl 10y agoNewsblur has that feature. I don't use it, so I don't know how well it works.
- Veen 10y agoYeah, it works reasonably well, but you have to manually set filters and keywords, which is a drag.
- Gmo 10y agoYeah, that's why I don't use newsblur for instance. I want to see EVERYTHING that are in the feeds I follow.
- chadgeidel 10y agoHappy Newsblur subscriber here. I've never missed anything in a feed (other than the HTTP/HTTPS errors that my browser gives me)
- jancborchardt 10y agoWe do that with Nextcloud News: https://github.com/nextcloud/news/#nextcloud-news-app https://github.com/nextcloud/news/#nextcloud-news-app I’d be interested in what you think about it. It’s completely open source, so any feedback or contribution is much appreciated! :)
- tokenizerrr 10y agoCan you expand on this?
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoAre you referring to it only keeping the last month or so of feeds?
- greglindahl 10y agoI use Newsblur and see everything in the feeds I follow. The "training" and etc. are optional.
- jessaustin 10y agoNB filters "inappropriate" images from my feeds, which is annoying.
- username223 10y agoNetNewsWire has been doing that for me for years. I keep 30-40 feeds in a handful of folders. When one of them gets too spammy or boring, I delete it; when I find something potentially useful, I add it. I have never felt the need for some algorithm suggesting even more feeds to read. I also write a weblog useful to a non-techie audience, and am disappointed and slightly frustrated by how few of those people use RSS. If you want to solve a problem related to RSS, solve that.
- robohamburger 10y agoI felt the same way until I had the following problem: 1. By subscribing to something that always had good content I missed quite a bit from occasional interesting posts on other feeds. 2. Subscribed to those occasionally good feeds. Now I have way too many feeds. 3. Screw it time to just use HN, social media and reddit. 4. Miss interesting articles not on those networks. 5. Now I use both rss, email lists, HN, social media/give up and miss interesting articles. I would use a product that was a really good classifier for articles I would like and aggressively found them for me. I don't have enough time in the day to read through every blog post someone writes. Cooler yet if the trained model were portable and I could use it in other applications.
- reitanqild 10y agoI used to love Google Desktop Search for this feature: It would create an automatically updated stream of articles based on (I guess) RSS feeds of recently visited sites. Sometimes someone asks what we would pay for. I think I would pay USD25 without much hesitation to get that thing back exactly as I remember it.
- robohamburger 10y agoI feel that way about a lot of google products. If they combined that tech with reader (RIP old friend) I would pay monthly.
- tschellenbach 10y agoZite used to do this for me. Hope we'll get Winds to that level.
- derefr 10y agoI don't care much about being suggested more feeds to follow. Instead, I wish the learning algorithm would notice when I don't bother reading certain things (granular below the whole-feed level) in my RSS, and move them out of the way. I've been pondering setting up an RSS-to-email forwarding gateway, and a separate Gmail account, so that I could use Gmail's online-learning mail categorization system to clean up my feeds for me. If a service can do any better than that, I'd like to see it.
- chrismorgan 10y agoNewsBlur has a training feature which allows you to do things like that—excluding items with a certain tag, or a certain keyword in the title. How it works seems a little opaque, but it does seem to work.
- tschellenbach 10y agoWe track both impressions and engagements so that allows us to see when you're not interested in something. Details about the integration: http://blog.getstream.io/personalization-machine-learning-news-feeds-social-networks/ http://blog.getstream.io/personalization-machine-learning-ne...
- swanson 10y agohttps://github.com/swanson/stringer https://github.com/swanson/stringer -- I built an RSS reader a few year agos with the same ethos: "Stringer has no external dependencies, no social recommendations/sharing, and no fancy machine learning algorithms. But it does have keyboard shortcuts..." It's not being actively developed (it's 'feature complete' and working just fine), but might suit your needs.
- PascalW 10y agoHappy user here :-) has been running smoothly for over 2 years already.
- unimpressive 10y agoThanks for posting, this looks great and I'll probably use it.
- zouhair 10y agoNot being a dev that is a pain to install, would have been nice to try it.
- evilduck 10y agoClick the big purple "Deploy to Heroku" button. If you have an account, it will basically start running for you.
- saulrh 10y agoThere are a few distinct use cases for RSS readers with very different requirements for automatic filtering. I use RSS readers to keep up with infrequently-updated fiction and webcomics. In this use case, "suggestions" are worse than useless - if I miss a daily or weekly strip or, worse yet, a chapter being posted, that can cripple my enjoyment of the story. I check my RSS feeds once ever two or three days and read exactly every single post in them, all twenty or forty of them. There are other people (myself about six years ago, for example) that use their RSS reader as a news firehose. They get a hundred posts an hour and even checking their titles manually would be difficult. In this case suggestions are not just a good idea but actually required. Personally, I'd like an RSS reader that has a per-feed toggle for automatic filtering. I so far haven't seen that.
- greglindahl 10y agoNewsblur has per-feed filtering configuration.
- Mathnerd314 10y agoFor webcomics, I just want to plug this site: http://piperka.net/ http://piperka.net/ (Free and mostly open source: http://piperka.net/blog/2015/about-crawler-source/ http://piperka.net/blog/2015/about-crawler-source/, and currently being rewritten from unmaintainable Perl into Haskell)
- porsupah 10y agoFor macOS, there's Vienna: http://www.vienna-rss.org/ http://www.vienna-rss.org/ I'm in a similar situation regarding use case - some busy news feeds, where I'll just scan the titles and read a few articles of interest, and plenty of comics that aren't updated daily, and thus can't slot conveniently into an OmniWeb workspace.
- tschellenbach 10y agoWinds has 2 displays. One is personalized, the other is chronological. Thanks for explaining how you use RSS.
- fryguy 10y ago
- corobo 10y agoIndeed. I've collected a bunch of feeds I like to keep up to date on. What I really need in an RSS reader is the ability to import them (from Feedly if that helps) and then I want the feed reader to poll those feeds and let me read them. That's all I need. If I can chuck articles over to Instapaper et al, bonus. Actually what I want is a podcast app but for articles. Let my device do the work.
- sotojuan 10y agohttps://feedbin.com/ https://feedbin.com/
- tn13 10y agoA lot of the "recommendation" apps are underestimating human ability to comb through nonsense. On a social network like FB where primary use case is people and their personal stuff, recommendations of news items might make a lot of sense. For RSS readers where I have explicitly asked for what I want it makes no sense.
- tedmiston 10y agoI'm with you. Feedly still does a decent job of letting me track the feeds I know want to track. Though I definitely don't check it as much as I used to.
- criddell 10y agoI've been a Feedly user since Google Reader shut down and have been pretty happy with it. The tings I subscribe to there I read from top to bottom every day. When I'm looking for something outside of that, I've found the Apple News app to be shockingly good. For the things I read, it does a much better job of showing me interesting things than Google's Newsstand app. This surprises me because Google knows a lot more about me than Apple.