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> More ideologically, I think RSS is ready for a comeback Ideologically, I love RSS too. I think it's one of the great achievements of the Internet, alongside

> More ideologically, I think RSS is ready for a comeback Ideologically, I love RSS too. I think it's one of the great achievements of the Internet, alongside with torrents and Wikipedia. However I would expect that people who think like us are exactly the kind of people likely to be wary of delegating what they're reading to "AI". I love RSS, but if I wanted someone else to decide what I see I'd be consuming from Twitter or Facebook, not RSS. What do you think about this?

derbOac 3y ago
I'm happy to see this and might give it a try as I've often wanted RSS + recommendations. I like being tipped off to things I wouldn't have found on my own and like RSS as a standard protocol. I've often wondered if it could all be done in some kind of decentralized way though, just to avoid a central server for the recommendations. I'm not sure my interest in the decentralized part comes from a privacy concern per se, it's more of a pure interest, "would this work" thing, maybe with a bit of robustness interest too.
- jacobobryant 3y ago
  I've thought about this as well. Privacy is actually one impediment I think. If you make everyone's raw usage data public (so that anyone can use it to train their own recommendation model), some of the training data might be de-anonymizable. However there's plenty of data out there that people are already happy to make public, so the privacy thing probably isn't a show-stopper. e.g. Reddit seems like it'd be a rich source of training data. Twitter too, if it were more open. I'd keep an eye on Bluesky!
jacobobryant 3y ago
The key question I think is "how do you create a recommender system that serves the user's interests instead of just the business's interests?" And how do you help the user have confidence that the system is serving their interests? I think competition is a big part of that. You want options for different reading apps, so if e.g. the one you're using keeps pelting you with culture war content/low-value viral content/etc, you can switch to a different app that gives you better recommendations. And then that creates a market opening for apps that really do put the user's interests first. (After all, we can design algorithms to optimize for just about anything--the question is what the business incentives push us to optimize for.) RSS makes competition a lot more feasible: since Yakread doesn't host any of the content it recommends, anyone else is free to make a reading app that has just as much access to content as Yakread does. Even if Yakread really took off, it would never have the same amount of lock-in/internal network effects as e.g. Twitter. My "grand vision" is for Yakread to become a medium-sized business, and for plenty of other companies to develop "mainstream RSS readers" as well. That being said, even though I am similarly concerned about this issue, I don't think it'll be a concern for most users. Mostly Yakread is an attempt to make an RSS reader that can get mainstream adoption beyond the HN demographic, so most people in the target audience probably don't have strong opinions about algorithmic recommendations anyway. Hence you don't actually even need to know what RSS is to use Yakread. Although I've focused on RSS and the recommendation/ranking algorithm in this Show HN, usually I just describe Yakread as an app that helps you spend more time reading long-form content. I think that's the best way to promote interoperability anyway: build stuff that has the right foundations, but focus on the immediate user benefits in your marketing.

derbOac 3y ago

I'm happy to see this and might give it a try as I've often wanted RSS + recommendations. I like being tipped off to things I wouldn't have found on my own and like RSS as a standard protocol. I've often wondered if it could all be done in some kind of decentralized way though, just to avoid a central server for the recommendations. I'm not sure my interest in the decentralized part comes from a privacy concern per se, it's more of a pure interest, "would this work" thing, maybe with a bit of robustness interest too.

jacobobryant 3y ago
I've thought about this as well. Privacy is actually one impediment I think. If you make everyone's raw usage data public (so that anyone can use it to train their own recommendation model), some of the training data might be de-anonymizable. However there's plenty of data out there that people are already happy to make public, so the privacy thing probably isn't a show-stopper. e.g. Reddit seems like it'd be a rich source of training data. Twitter too, if it were more open. I'd keep an eye on Bluesky!

jacobobryant 3y ago

The key question I think is "how do you create a recommender system that serves the user's interests instead of just the business's interests?" And how do you help the user have confidence that the system is serving their interests? I think competition is a big part of that. You want options for different reading apps, so if e.g. the one you're using keeps pelting you with culture war content/low-value viral content/etc, you can switch to a different app that gives you better recommendations. And then that creates a market opening for apps that really do put the user's interests first. (After all, we can design algorithms to optimize for just about anything--the question is what the business incentives push us to optimize for.) RSS makes competition a lot more feasible: since Yakread doesn't host any of the content it recommends, anyone else is free to make a reading app that has just as much access to content as Yakread does. Even if Yakread really took off, it would never have the same amount of lock-in/internal network effects as e.g. Twitter. My "grand vision" is for Yakread to become a medium-sized business, and for plenty of other companies to develop "mainstream RSS readers" as well. That being said, even though I am similarly concerned about this issue, I don't think it'll be a concern for most users. Mostly Yakread is an attempt to make an RSS reader that can get mainstream adoption beyond the HN demographic, so most people in the target audience probably don't have strong opinions about algorithmic recommendations anyway. Hence you don't actually even need to know what RSS is to use Yakread. Although I've focused on RSS and the recommendation/ranking algorithm in this Show HN, usually I just describe Yakread as an app that helps you spend more time reading long-form content. I think that's the best way to promote interoperability anyway: build stuff that has the right foundations, but focus on the immediate user benefits in your marketing.