9 ms·

Unexpected, Useless, and Urgent, or What RSS Gets Right

142 points by whatrocks 6y ago

happytoexplain 6y ago
High inbox volume is humorously labeled "infinite scroll", but I don't get the low-volume label: "medium-rare"?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- sp332 6y ago
  In context, I think it means "not too often".
- aleken 6y ago
  Medium-rare is how you want your beef, no?
- PTOB 6y ago
  Rarely get articles from Medium.
pmoriarty 6y ago
For a more technical discussion of what RSS gets right (or not), see: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2013/09/23/ https://nullprogram.com/blog/2013/09/23/
ssivark 6y ago
I think “notmuch” is actually a great solution to handle email (or a corpus of articles such as RSS) with a combination of search/filters and tags. The interface is also ripe to easily plug in ML based filters or other social curation filters (Eg: re-shared by my friends) if we manage to build good ones. If only we had a pleasant graphical interface on top (which played nice with HTML email), rather than needing to use text-based interfaces, I think it would be a HUGE improvement over most mail clients out there.
ewmiller 6y ago
I came of age in the era of budding social media platforms, and that was my primary way to consume feeds and news online for the past 10 years or so (I include reddit in the "social media" category, especially more recently). Now, being older and having witnessed the many many problems that social media companies have exacerbated in society, I’ve started looking for other ways to read what's going on in the world. This search has brought me to RSS. I use the same reader app as the author, and I absolutely love it. No addictive feed design, no ads built to manipulate me based on my mood and scrolling patterns. I hope RSS sticks around.
- perardi 6y ago
  You kids these days. I started using RSS in, I believe 2003, back when Mac OS X apps looked like this: https://ranchero.com/images/nnw/progress.jpg https://ranchero.com/images/nnw/progress.jpg We synced our RSS feeds via FTP or .Mac, and we liked it.
  - wlesieutre 6y ago
    For modern macOS and iOS users, Reeder 5 came out about a week ago and is pretty nice. No .Mac syncing, but it does support iCloud! NetNewsWire (from parent comment's screenshot) is also still around. Plenty of great RSS reader options.
    - Fnoord 6y ago
      NetNewsWire is even FOSS. It supports only Feedbin (itself FOSS but supports non-self hosted) and Feedly though. I want to self-host. TANSTAAFL and either I get used for profiling/upselling (Feedly) or I need to pay money while I can self host (Feedbin). Reeder 4 is also good, I tried it (for free) right before Reeder 5 got released. It supports a whole lot more than NetNewsWire, including self hosting services FreshRSS, Reader, and Fever (deprecated). It also has support for Pocket. So I went with Reeder and got FreshRSS installed. On Android I settled with FeedMe, but honestly I haven't found a slick one which works with FreshRSS. I could settle with tmux + CLI + Browsh. In that case, consider Newsboat. It supports a myriad of (self-hosted) RSS services. But not the ones Reeder supports...
lliamander 6y ago
Anyone have recommendations for an RSS Reader for Android? Specifically, I'm looking for one that: - doesn't have advertisements or tracking - doesn't require an account And I am definitely willing to pay for it.
- reedlaw 6y ago
  Feeder: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/
  - pochamago 6y ago
    I'm reading this thread though feeder as I type. Big fan
    - lliamander 6y ago
      Does HN do RSS subscriptions?
      - pochamago 6y ago
        It does. I think I just googled for it and a look came up.
      - benrapscallion 6y ago
        hnrss.org - it’s amazing
        dodgyb 6y ago
        https://damng.github.io/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content/output.rss https://damng.github.io/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content/... It does what is says on the tin, pulls content from the OP link. Links to HN comments too.
      - t0ughcritic 6y ago
        Yep that’s what I use to read HN
superkuh 6y ago
As far as infinite scroll goes it's a matter of how many RSS feeds you pull down. My opml feedlist is almost 2 MB at this point and almost recreates the infinite scroll feel of a centralized social media aggregator.
gorbachev 6y ago
My take on the problem of filtering crap while still allowing the unexpected useful content to come through is filtering out everything unwanted. Back in the Usenet days I solve the same problem with liberal use of filters in nn. I could filter out any thread with disruptive participants, or using keywords against titles/post content. Other than the horrible UX for defining the filters it was actually working quite well. I wish there was more RSS readers with advanced filtering capabilities. I haven't tried Feedly's mute filters feature yet. On paper it looks like exactly what I'd need.
- timbit42 6y ago
  QuiteRSS has filters.
- wasdfff 6y ago
  You can do a lot on the pro tier for inoreader. Paid, but usually goes on sale around black friday.
leokennis 6y ago
My RSS reader (Feedbin + the Reeder app) really is my little corner of coziness on my phone or computer. Three times a day I spend 10-20 minutes to skim through the headlines and fully read the interesting stuff. So in 30-60 minutes per day, I stay up to date on all important, interesting and worthwhile stuff going on. It’s fantastic.
lkrubner 6y ago
If anyone is interested in the early conflicts (Dave Winer threatening to sue Roger Cadenhead) that shaped RSS, I wrote a fight-by-fight, meeting-by-meeting history of the conflict, back in 2006, which was widely discussed back at the time, including by some of the central figures in the story, such as Sam Ruby: http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-by-in-fighting-among-those-who-advocate-for-it http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-...
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  > Either a single company, perhaps Bloglines, shall gain such marketshare that it can force a de facto resolution of the ambiguities pertaining to the 2.0 format, or companies will eventually abandon RSS in favor of Atom. Atom, after all, gives companies a chance to start over fresh and do everything right. Of these two possibilities, the latter seems more likely. Both formats lost as far as public mainstream syndication is concerned :(. (Who won ? Twitter, facebook and silos).
dugite-code 6y ago
RSS is great. I'm still using it extensively and taken up maintaining the TT-RSS full feed plugin Feediron for the last few years because it's been so essential for my workflow. https://github.com/feediron/ttrss_plugin-feediron https://github.com/feediron/ttrss_plugin-feediron
est 6y ago
RSS is great but it's one-way broadcasting. Internet should really be two-way where reader should be able to communicate back to the author inside the same medium.
- unnouinceput 6y ago
  Yeah, right! A journalist would so much appreciate the communication from thousands of readers that would have no life left for anything else. I like one way communications.
  - est 6y ago
    Adding two-way capability doesn't mean you have to use it. Journalist could just disable two-way communication. But others content creators may have career depend on it. In the mean time I think RSS could standardize payment as well. Get rid of those patreon links, establish a neutral payment protocol.
  - approxim8ion 6y ago
    That is a worrying characterization, I hope you reconsider.
- brokenmachine 6y ago
  I'd rather it be kept simple. That's probably the best thing about RSS.
unnouinceput 6y ago
Quote: "Why does using opening my RSS inbox feel so much better than typing in gmail.com or tapping the iMessages icon or, heavens forbid, opening up Twitter?" Exactly because you're using gmail, iMessage and Twitter. How about using Protonmail only? And ditch the rest in oblivion? Try that then tell me how much better you'll feel.
ergl 6y ago
He must be using a different RSS than me, because RSS for me is another endless feed. If the answer is "you're not curating the list of people you follow well enough", then I don't see how RSS is different than any other network. Re: Twitter, is very common to hear people say "You have to curate your feed!", or "You have to use lists!". RSS is the same, if you subscribe to a handful of personal pages, then RSS will be nice. If you use RSS to subscribe to magazines, you're going to get a big list of articles. The same applies to FB or Twitter.
- trotFunky 6y ago
  That's very true and why I avoided subscribing to magazines and other news sites. I ended up creating a category for them in my feed aggregator (self hosted FreshRSS, I'm quite happy with it) and masking them in my main feed. This way, I keep my curated and "slow" main feed, but I can dive into the big list of articles I receive from those magazines and news sites whenever I want.
kuu 6y ago
I think the issue here is that you're comparing RSS with Social Media only as a consumer. But in Social Media you're also producing content and interacting with other users, and also watching interactions between users, that's for me a big difference between RSS and Social Media too. RSS for me it's like reading the news paper, while Social Media would be to go to a bar with some friends and talk about the news/hot topic of the moment. They cover different needs.
- lostmsu 6y ago
  Better social media has RSS, which I use extensively: Reddit, blogs, this very website.
  - wasdfff 6y ago
    You can also follow youtube via RSS. Even twitter via RSS.
    - kossmoboleat 6y ago
      I've spent some time to find a way to turn my twitter timeline into an RSS feed. It seemed like a lot of work to me. Which approach do you favor? It's relatively easy find solutions to produce RSS feeds from individual twitter users, but I'd like to read my whole timeline in the RSS reader. There's one tool called [twitter-to-rss](https://github.com/ankitshekhawat/twitter-to-rss https://github.com/ankitshekhawat/twitter-to-rss), but I haven't tried it and it might be outdated.

142 points by whatrocks 6y ago

happytoexplain 6y ago

High inbox volume is humorously labeled "infinite scroll", but I don't get the low-volume label: "medium-rare"?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sp332 6y ago
In context, I think it means "not too often".
aleken 6y ago
Medium-rare is how you want your beef, no?
PTOB 6y ago
Rarely get articles from Medium.

pmoriarty 6y ago

For a more technical discussion of what RSS gets right (or not), see: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2013/09/23/ https://nullprogram.com/blog/2013/09/23/

ssivark 6y ago

I think “notmuch” is actually a great solution to handle email (or a corpus of articles such as RSS) with a combination of search/filters and tags. The interface is also ripe to easily plug in ML based filters or other social curation filters (Eg: re-shared by my friends) if we manage to build good ones. If only we had a pleasant graphical interface on top (which played nice with HTML email), rather than needing to use text-based interfaces, I think it would be a HUGE improvement over most mail clients out there.

ewmiller 6y ago

I came of age in the era of budding social media platforms, and that was my primary way to consume feeds and news online for the past 10 years or so (I include reddit in the "social media" category, especially more recently). Now, being older and having witnessed the many many problems that social media companies have exacerbated in society, I’ve started looking for other ways to read what's going on in the world. This search has brought me to RSS. I use the same reader app as the author, and I absolutely love it. No addictive feed design, no ads built to manipulate me based on my mood and scrolling patterns. I hope RSS sticks around.

perardi 6y ago
You kids these days. I started using RSS in, I believe 2003, back when Mac OS X apps looked like this: https://ranchero.com/images/nnw/progress.jpg https://ranchero.com/images/nnw/progress.jpg We synced our RSS feeds via FTP or .Mac, and we liked it.
- wlesieutre 6y ago
  For modern macOS and iOS users, Reeder 5 came out about a week ago and is pretty nice. No .Mac syncing, but it does support iCloud! NetNewsWire (from parent comment's screenshot) is also still around. Plenty of great RSS reader options.
  - Fnoord 6y ago
    NetNewsWire is even FOSS. It supports only Feedbin (itself FOSS but supports non-self hosted) and Feedly though. I want to self-host. TANSTAAFL and either I get used for profiling/upselling (Feedly) or I need to pay money while I can self host (Feedbin). Reeder 4 is also good, I tried it (for free) right before Reeder 5 got released. It supports a whole lot more than NetNewsWire, including self hosting services FreshRSS, Reader, and Fever (deprecated). It also has support for Pocket. So I went with Reeder and got FreshRSS installed. On Android I settled with FeedMe, but honestly I haven't found a slick one which works with FreshRSS. I could settle with tmux + CLI + Browsh. In that case, consider Newsboat. It supports a myriad of (self-hosted) RSS services. But not the ones Reeder supports...

lliamander 6y ago

Anyone have recommendations for an RSS Reader for Android? Specifically, I'm looking for one that: - doesn't have advertisements or tracking - doesn't require an account And I am definitely willing to pay for it.

reedlaw 6y ago
Feeder: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/
- pochamago 6y ago
  I'm reading this thread though feeder as I type. Big fan
  - lliamander 6y ago
    Does HN do RSS subscriptions?
    - pochamago 6y ago
      It does. I think I just googled for it and a look came up.
    - benrapscallion 6y ago
      hnrss.org - it’s amazing
      - dodgyb 6y ago
        https://damng.github.io/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content/output.rss https://damng.github.io/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content/... It does what is says on the tin, pulls content from the OP link. Links to HN comments too.
    - t0ughcritic 6y ago
      Yep that’s what I use to read HN

superkuh 6y ago

As far as infinite scroll goes it's a matter of how many RSS feeds you pull down. My opml feedlist is almost 2 MB at this point and almost recreates the infinite scroll feel of a centralized social media aggregator.

gorbachev 6y ago

My take on the problem of filtering crap while still allowing the unexpected useful content to come through is filtering out everything unwanted. Back in the Usenet days I solve the same problem with liberal use of filters in nn. I could filter out any thread with disruptive participants, or using keywords against titles/post content. Other than the horrible UX for defining the filters it was actually working quite well. I wish there was more RSS readers with advanced filtering capabilities. I haven't tried Feedly's mute filters feature yet. On paper it looks like exactly what I'd need.

timbit42 6y ago
QuiteRSS has filters.
wasdfff 6y ago
You can do a lot on the pro tier for inoreader. Paid, but usually goes on sale around black friday.

leokennis 6y ago

My RSS reader (Feedbin + the Reeder app) really is my little corner of coziness on my phone or computer. Three times a day I spend 10-20 minutes to skim through the headlines and fully read the interesting stuff. So in 30-60 minutes per day, I stay up to date on all important, interesting and worthwhile stuff going on. It’s fantastic.

lkrubner 6y ago

If anyone is interested in the early conflicts (Dave Winer threatening to sue Roger Cadenhead) that shaped RSS, I wrote a fight-by-fight, meeting-by-meeting history of the conflict, back in 2006, which was widely discussed back at the time, including by some of the central figures in the story, such as Sam Ruby: http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-by-in-fighting-among-those-who-advocate-for-it http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-...

johnchristopher 6y ago
> Either a single company, perhaps Bloglines, shall gain such marketshare that it can force a de facto resolution of the ambiguities pertaining to the 2.0 format, or companies will eventually abandon RSS in favor of Atom. Atom, after all, gives companies a chance to start over fresh and do everything right. Of these two possibilities, the latter seems more likely. Both formats lost as far as public mainstream syndication is concerned :(. (Who won ? Twitter, facebook and silos).

dugite-code 6y ago

RSS is great. I'm still using it extensively and taken up maintaining the TT-RSS full feed plugin Feediron for the last few years because it's been so essential for my workflow. https://github.com/feediron/ttrss_plugin-feediron https://github.com/feediron/ttrss_plugin-feediron

est 6y ago

RSS is great but it's one-way broadcasting. Internet should really be two-way where reader should be able to communicate back to the author inside the same medium.

unnouinceput 6y ago
Yeah, right! A journalist would so much appreciate the communication from thousands of readers that would have no life left for anything else. I like one way communications.
- est 6y ago
  Adding two-way capability doesn't mean you have to use it. Journalist could just disable two-way communication. But others content creators may have career depend on it. In the mean time I think RSS could standardize payment as well. Get rid of those patreon links, establish a neutral payment protocol.
- approxim8ion 6y ago
  That is a worrying characterization, I hope you reconsider.
brokenmachine 6y ago
I'd rather it be kept simple. That's probably the best thing about RSS.

unnouinceput 6y ago

Quote: "Why does using opening my RSS inbox feel so much better than typing in gmail.com or tapping the iMessages icon or, heavens forbid, opening up Twitter?" Exactly because you're using gmail, iMessage and Twitter. How about using Protonmail only? And ditch the rest in oblivion? Try that then tell me how much better you'll feel.

ergl 6y ago

He must be using a different RSS than me, because RSS for me is another endless feed. If the answer is "you're not curating the list of people you follow well enough", then I don't see how RSS is different than any other network. Re: Twitter, is very common to hear people say "You have to curate your feed!", or "You have to use lists!". RSS is the same, if you subscribe to a handful of personal pages, then RSS will be nice. If you use RSS to subscribe to magazines, you're going to get a big list of articles. The same applies to FB or Twitter.

trotFunky 6y ago
That's very true and why I avoided subscribing to magazines and other news sites. I ended up creating a category for them in my feed aggregator (self hosted FreshRSS, I'm quite happy with it) and masking them in my main feed. This way, I keep my curated and "slow" main feed, but I can dive into the big list of articles I receive from those magazines and news sites whenever I want.

kuu 6y ago

I think the issue here is that you're comparing RSS with Social Media only as a consumer. But in Social Media you're also producing content and interacting with other users, and also watching interactions between users, that's for me a big difference between RSS and Social Media too. RSS for me it's like reading the news paper, while Social Media would be to go to a bar with some friends and talk about the news/hot topic of the moment. They cover different needs.

lostmsu 6y ago
Better social media has RSS, which I use extensively: Reddit, blogs, this very website.
- wasdfff 6y ago
  You can also follow youtube via RSS. Even twitter via RSS.
  - kossmoboleat 6y ago
    I've spent some time to find a way to turn my twitter timeline into an RSS feed. It seemed like a lot of work to me. Which approach do you favor? It's relatively easy find solutions to produce RSS feeds from individual twitter users, but I'd like to read my whole timeline in the RSS reader. There's one tool called [twitter-to-rss](https://github.com/ankitshekhawat/twitter-to-rss https://github.com/ankitshekhawat/twitter-to-rss), but I haven't tried it and it might be outdated.