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The main problem I had with RSS was the fatigue of keeping up. I usually had dozens of new entries each day and it was always a constant struggle to keep up. I

The main problem I had with RSS was the fatigue of keeping up. I usually had dozens of new entries each day and it was always a constant struggle to keep up. I wanted a reader that allowed me to better manage the incoming stream, something like a score or rank system, better auto-expiring systems, maybe a Bayesian system. I'm not 100%, but none of the readers at the time offered anything but a time series. Has this improved?

slipmagic 9y ago
I was thinking that perhaps changing the UI to where it was like tinder, so that a user could swipe articles that they wanted to read later in one direction and ones they knew they wanted to skip in the other would be at least a faster way of going through things. Either that, or making it like Inbox by Google, where someone could snooze an article for later. Information could be collected based on that and sent to the publisher so they would know which content was popular and what was not (along with which articles were shared from the app, etc). A third option would be to use a messenger UI where a user delete/archive links or favorite them, and reply to messages with their thoughts and comments for things that they find useful. I currently have a setup similar to this, but it's not very elegant. There could be a new feed given to the user, based on that, if they feel overwhelmed with their unfiltered one, but always switch over to the regular view/feed as needed. It could be even more granular, where some feeds are algorithmically sorted or ignored based on certain keywords set by the user and others are not.
smarx007 9y ago
I sort my subscriptions by the amount of new posts in a descending order. I then go through the biggest offenders individually and simply unsubscribe from those that abuse my RSS feed. I read RSS once a week and sometimes once a month (I am in academia, and "Deep Work" from Cal Newport had quite an impact on me). For example, Monzo bank's blog had 31 new entries when I checked it today and OKFN labs had just 4. I opened Monzo's feed and its signal-to-noise ratio was too low and I unsubscribed from it: c'est la vie. I think you can do this only when you take a look back at a week/month worth of material as opposed to running the hamster wheel of the twitter feed.

slipmagic 9y ago

I was thinking that perhaps changing the UI to where it was like tinder, so that a user could swipe articles that they wanted to read later in one direction and ones they knew they wanted to skip in the other would be at least a faster way of going through things. Either that, or making it like Inbox by Google, where someone could snooze an article for later. Information could be collected based on that and sent to the publisher so they would know which content was popular and what was not (along with which articles were shared from the app, etc). A third option would be to use a messenger UI where a user delete/archive links or favorite them, and reply to messages with their thoughts and comments for things that they find useful. I currently have a setup similar to this, but it's not very elegant. There could be a new feed given to the user, based on that, if they feel overwhelmed with their unfiltered one, but always switch over to the regular view/feed as needed. It could be even more granular, where some feeds are algorithmically sorted or ignored based on certain keywords set by the user and others are not.

smarx007 9y ago

I sort my subscriptions by the amount of new posts in a descending order. I then go through the biggest offenders individually and simply unsubscribe from those that abuse my RSS feed. I read RSS once a week and sometimes once a month (I am in academia, and "Deep Work" from Cal Newport had quite an impact on me). For example, Monzo bank's blog had 31 new entries when I checked it today and OKFN labs had just 4. I opened Monzo's feed and its signal-to-noise ratio was too low and I unsubscribed from it: c'est la vie. I think you can do this only when you take a look back at a week/month worth of material as opposed to running the hamster wheel of the twitter feed.