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I largely browse using the front page. I am not looking to keep up with every article ever, I just look for a few interesting things to read, then close it and

• pmoriarty 8y ago
  "I am not looking to keep up with every article ever" HN's RSS feed does not post every article ever, but just those that make it to the front page. It's an alternate way of accessing the same articles, but I find it much more powerful and useful than using a web browser for the following reasons: 1 - I have a local archive of the titles of and links to each article that does not depend on HN. So if HN ever goes away, I can still access them all. 2 - I don't need to click through and wait for multiple web pages to load to browse through my archives. 3 - Newsboat, the terminal-based RSS reader I use is far faster and more responsive than any web browser, on my old, slow laptop. 4 - Newsboat is also way more powerful and extensible in ways that a plain web page is not. I can easily do things like tagging and filtering, I can delete articles that I don't want to see while saving the ones I do without actually having to open up the destination web page, and a lot more. 5 - I can locally search through articles without telling any external search engine company what I'm searching for. This is a small but important way to practice defense-in-depth in the realm of privacy. At some point I'll probably try switching to reading RSS feeds from within Emacs, which should be even more flexible and powerful.
  • forgotmypw 8y ago
    Thanks for sharing Newsboat!