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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 wi

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.

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.