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To me, RSS and Twitter/FB/etc are very different things. With RSS you are „alone“ while reading it. There’s no one to discuss things with you. I‘m not really qu
by manmal 9y ago
To me, RSS and Twitter/FB/etc are very different things. With RSS you are „alone“ while reading it. There’s no one to discuss things with you. I‘m not really qualified to make this statement, but I‘d say RSS feeds don’t have a social component, leaving your limbic system (responsible for social interaction) widely out of the process. You process the info and that’s it.
With Twitter, everything is attached to a social context. If a link is posted by your personal idol, you engage in (pseudo?) social behavior if you read it. You may then feel compelled to discuss it, and you will feel rejected if nobody answers, or very good if you get a lot of likes. So, lots of limbic/social interaction.
Both have their merits.. without Twitter, I would have a content discovery problem, and with (only) Twitter I‘ll live in a bubble, plus my IRL social interactions might be somewhat crowded out by the interactions on Twitter, plus Twitter can make me feel socially miserable for very petty reasons.
Personally I would love a system that combines my personal RSS feed with recommendations resulting from mining Twitter and applying ML to generate relevant results.
- addicted 9y agoWell, one reason Google Reader’s closure was such a loss was because it added a social layer to RSS. And it was a completely optional and non-intrusive social layer. I really wish Google had tried to enhance Reader instead of killing it to promote Google+. Allowing the ability to post short messages in your shared feeds would have made it very Twitter like, only nicer.
- manmal 9y agoThey should kill Google Plus and resurrect the Reader.
- typon 9y agoAgreed. Imagine having an RSS feed for all the posts here on Hackernews and just reading that instead. I come here mainly for the comments - and not usually to debate or discuss even - a lot of times to contextualize the content in question because inevitably someone more knowledgeable will post their thoughts about it. RSS is not a panacea and it is no replacement for social platforms.
- hokus 9y agoSomething more sexy than just... https://news.ycombinator.com/rss https://news.ycombinator.com/rss ...would be nice. Such a nerdy website should really publish an OPML for its top tabs. It would be truly nerdy if they would crawl for available feeds from front page news articles and build an OPML out of that. Flat lists of feeds works too. Imagine an OPML or a flat list of feeds including everything with more than 100 points from the last 30 days. Noobs will probably cry about it being larger than 4 items but if it is 100 000 feeds it would truly be an awesome thing that I will worship like a god.
- mechhrt 9y agoAre you aware of hnrss.org? Not my site but one I find extremely useful.