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Different conversion for a different topic. > For a fast moving feed, if the users don't read soon enough some items will be missed. This may work well for yo

Different conversion for a different topic. > For a fast moving feed, if the users don't read soon enough some items will be missed. This may work well for you but definitely isn't what I prefer. For example I often subscribe to recording feeds for conferences or other events. These feeds don't post for most of the year but them might have hundreds of entries. I definitely don't want my feed reader to drop all but the last 10 (YouTube for example keeps much less than the latest 100 videos in the feed). I want it to keep them all so that I can work through the list and watch the ones I am interested in. So while your some solution might work in some cases this definitely isn't what I would want personally and in my opinion what Feedly did here was reasonable as a general behavior, even if it isn't optimal for this particular case. I'd rather have it handle the happy common case we'll then to hurt it for the rare case when someone makes a mistake, especially when the downsides for the mistake aren't that high.

derekzhouzhen 5y ago
> I want it to keep them all so that I can work through the list and watch the ones I am interested in. Your usage case can be better served by visiting the website directly, after you learn that there are some updates from the feed. There is no guaranty that a feed aggregator would not miss anything anyway; this is the the nature of the poll based delivery.
- kevincox 5y ago
  Thanks for explaining my use case to me. - How to I remember where I am when I have watched half of the videos? - What if two events happen around the same time. Now I need to check both instead of them being in the same place. It turns out that leaving items in my feed reader and dismissing them as I watch or decide not to watch works incredibly well.
  - derekzhouzhen 5y ago
    You are using the feed to overcome the usability problem of a poorly designed website. I have seen my fair share of poorly designed websites so I can't argue with that :) My feed reader's intended use case is to following a large number of slow moving feeds like personal blogs, which are usually not bursty and not super important if a few items fell in the crack.
    - kevincox 5y ago
      Maybe, but I don't expect most websites to track which videos I have watched and I don't want to need to create an account or somehow sync my watch list across devices. So I just use my feed reader for that and it works excellently. > My feed reader's intended use case is to following a large number of slow moving feeds like personal blogs This is also the majority of my feeds. While I agree that a few items falling through the cracks is a big deal I would still prefer if they don't. But I think the morale of the story is that there is a huge set of ways that people use RSS Feeds. They are a generic system for distributing updates and it is hard to make quick fixes that work well for all of the wide variety of use cases that people have.
    - hombre_fatal 5y ago
      You're just picking from different trade-offs, not doing something better nor worse (nor right nor wrong). A major use-case of RSS readers is to have a local, eternal copy of a producer's content to read at your own leisure. I have content in my RSS reader that I cherish from blogs that aren't even online anymore. That I don't need to visit poorly designed websites is only a tertiary perk—I don't need to visit the origin, ever. There's not much to argue here, though. It's just a different offering. For example, I use https://sumi.news/ https://sumi.news/ (created by some HNer) and certainly don't use it read the entire history of every news website. Nothing wrong with that.
      - derekzhouzhen 5y ago
        > You're just picking from different trade-offs Of course. I am not feedly and I can't afford to keep everything for all the feeds ever subscribed by my users in my database. There are feeds that keep thousands of items and there are feeds that have broken date fields so I cannot prune by date reliably.

derekzhouzhen 5y ago

> I want it to keep them all so that I can work through the list and watch the ones I am interested in. Your usage case can be better served by visiting the website directly, after you learn that there are some updates from the feed. There is no guaranty that a feed aggregator would not miss anything anyway; this is the the nature of the poll based delivery.

kevincox 5y ago
Thanks for explaining my use case to me. - How to I remember where I am when I have watched half of the videos? - What if two events happen around the same time. Now I need to check both instead of them being in the same place. It turns out that leaving items in my feed reader and dismissing them as I watch or decide not to watch works incredibly well.
- derekzhouzhen 5y ago
  You are using the feed to overcome the usability problem of a poorly designed website. I have seen my fair share of poorly designed websites so I can't argue with that :) My feed reader's intended use case is to following a large number of slow moving feeds like personal blogs, which are usually not bursty and not super important if a few items fell in the crack.
  - kevincox 5y ago
    Maybe, but I don't expect most websites to track which videos I have watched and I don't want to need to create an account or somehow sync my watch list across devices. So I just use my feed reader for that and it works excellently. > My feed reader's intended use case is to following a large number of slow moving feeds like personal blogs This is also the majority of my feeds. While I agree that a few items falling through the cracks is a big deal I would still prefer if they don't. But I think the morale of the story is that there is a huge set of ways that people use RSS Feeds. They are a generic system for distributing updates and it is hard to make quick fixes that work well for all of the wide variety of use cases that people have.
  - hombre_fatal 5y ago
    You're just picking from different trade-offs, not doing something better nor worse (nor right nor wrong). A major use-case of RSS readers is to have a local, eternal copy of a producer's content to read at your own leisure. I have content in my RSS reader that I cherish from blogs that aren't even online anymore. That I don't need to visit poorly designed websites is only a tertiary perk—I don't need to visit the origin, ever. There's not much to argue here, though. It's just a different offering. For example, I use https://sumi.news/ https://sumi.news/ (created by some HNer) and certainly don't use it read the entire history of every news website. Nothing wrong with that.
    - derekzhouzhen 5y ago
      > You're just picking from different trade-offs Of course. I am not feedly and I can't afford to keep everything for all the feeds ever subscribed by my users in my database. There are feeds that keep thousands of items and there are feeds that have broken date fields so I cannot prune by date reliably.