9 ms·

What does it feel like to read RSS feeds?

58 points by 8organicbits 2y ago

082349872349872 2y ago
> ...the posts are (usually) longer form articles instead of short bits. If I want superficial takes, I can get more than my fill of them IRL. I enjoy the internet precisely because it allows me to spend a few minutes reading what someone invested a few hours in writing (and had maybe even been thinking about for a few days beforehand?).
- _xivi 2y ago
  > > ...the posts are (usually) longer form articles instead of short bits. > If I want superficial takes, I can get more than my fill of them IRL I'm confused, where did this assumption of low-quality come from? Are you thinking of SEO spam articles? which targets mainstream search engines in order to increase ad views and revenue? Those type of websites are on a different spectrum and usually RSS-hostile to begin with. Anyway, RSS is a standard, it's not limited (or related) to "superficial takes" you can use it to follow your favorite short-form content too.
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    You're probably confused because we agree: the low-quality stuff doesn't tend to wind up in RSS (and if it does, it's easy to drop that feed)
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
senectus1 2y ago
>His main points were: >You’re the curator >You decide what’s interesting >You have more control over what you read and how >It’s a fast and efficient way of reading a lot of web >It’s just better than the endless scroll of a social media feed exactly This is why I self host a freshrss session and I visit it a couple of times a day. I chew through about 1000 articles a day very quickly just actually consuming maybe a half dozen to twenty out of the lot. I can see trends in the proliferation of particular stories or technology and I never feel like FOMO. I dont use FB/insta/etc at all, I only ever visit X/twitter if I see a link posting to something in particular.paticular It lets me control the firehose of news from the internet.
- Kodiack 2y ago
  I set up a self-hosted FreshRSS instance as well, and I feel the same benefits from it. I got back into RSS after Reddit pushed its API changes through, and it’s been so refreshing. I’m using social media a lot less now and those tingly FOMO feelings all but disappeared.
cpill 2y ago
I do it too but the trouble is that it's a fire hose of information. Some intelligent filtering would be nice, mixed with serendipity (some how)...
- Hamatti 2y ago
  That's where the heavy pruning comes in. If there's too much coming in, it's important to get rid of the ones that are less important or most often skipped. For me, the serendipity comes through discoveries inside the blog posts: people linking to other interesting blogs.
imiric 2y ago
> All the recommendation algorithm driven platforms tend to encourage active posting and discourage occasional participation. This is an important point that is not mentioned enough. The problem whenever a platform introduces an algorithm to decide what users see, by either promoting or penalizing submissions, is that it unavoidably leads to content that is created purposely to game that algorithm, which ultimately corrupts the user experience. This happens not just with social media and video platforms, but with web search results as well. The vast majority of web content is now spam whose only purpose is to generate ad revenue. SEO is a more accepted practice, but it really shouldn't exist at all. For search results there obviously needs to be some algorithm behind it, but this should be driven exclusively by delivering the most relevant results, and the only smart behavior should be spam detection. Google had solved this decades ago, yet they've created a global problem they can't, and likely have no interesting in solving. As far as investors are concerned, it's a legendary success story, and that's all that matters.
- Hamatti 2y ago
  > it unavoidably leads to content that is created purposely to game that algorithm, which ultimately corrupts the user experience. This is the functionality that really drove me away from social platforms, other than Mastodon. I prefer human curation over automatic recommendations for a couple of reasons: 1) Human curation creates less suggestions which makes it more manageable to go through 2) If I trust the source of the recommendation and know what they like, I can adjust my trust in the recommendation itself 3) A friend telling me something they enjoy is not motivated by money
fxj 2y ago
I highly recommend inoreader.com. It is like the old google reader on steroids. It is the first app I open in the morning to get my news and my personal feed consists of some 4000 single feeds from everything that I gathered on the internet. All nicely organized with filters and folders. It is a bessing for keeping up with youtube content, because all channels appear as single feeds that you can organize. You can put several single RSS feeds into a folder which presents itself again as a feed.
- geekodour 2y ago
  do you use the free one or pro?
  - _xivi 2y ago
    OP mentioned having 4000 feeds, inoreader free plan is limited 150 (afaik it's actually the most generous among similar services, eg: feedly is limited to 100)
  - fxj 2y ago
    I started with the free plan but after a while I realized that this is the news app that I use almost exclusively so I got the pro plan.
- arthur-st 2y ago
  Ditto on the recommendation, I’ve been using them since the 2013 launch. Over the years, web has sadly become a bit more closed in terms of having accessible feeds and such. Firehosing is another problem, when some sites just offer one feed that has way too much in it. But when it works, it works great. In addition to RSS, I also run newsletters, YouTube, and a few other things through it.
pflenker 2y ago
RSS works great if the amount of content is manageable. The problem social media feeds (or any other feed for that matter) solve is curation/filtering. Hacker News does the Dame thing, albeit with different mechanisms than classical social media.
- imiric 2y ago
  Why do you think social media feeds "solve" curation? They merely sort the content according to some predefined criteria, but you will still be overwhelmed by the stream, and likely miss a lot of content, just as you would if there was no algorithm at all. That's all curation essentially is: sorting. Social media companies claim that this is a good thing since everyone's feed is personalized, but these are just empty platitudes. They never know exactly what everyone wants to see at any moment. If they did, they wouldn't show me any ads or promoted content to begin with. The things I want to see changes constantly, so the only sorting and filtering functionality I want is one which I'm allowed to control myself.
  - pflenker 2y ago
    Whether or not something solves the problem depends on the person having the problem. For avid social media users, the curation it brings seems to solve the problem better than other mechanisms. For you (or me) it doesn’t.
    - hgyjnbdet 2y ago
      I consider social media curation a problem in an of itself, I've no evidence, but consider it a driving force behind a lot of society's current problems. Too easy to filter bubble and manipulate the masses.
Almondsetat 2y ago
RSS still leads to a lot of wasted time. Being in charge of your own feed does not mean it will remain lean and sweet. The ideal of browsing your RSS feed in the morning cup of coffee in hand just like your father read the morning paper and then got on with his day is mostly just a fantasy. What happens in reality is that you more or less quickly ammass a big list of blogs and sources that gets updated by the hour and you end up either ignoring most of the entries or you check on them multiple times a day and you waste your time sieving through a stream of countless new content
- Hamatti 2y ago
  > Being in charge of your own feed does not mean it will remain lean and sweet. You're right. It does not automatically mean it. You have to maintain it just like anything else in life. > is mostly just a fantasy. It's a fantasy I live in daily. > What happens in reality is that you more or less quickly ammass a big list of blogs and sources that gets updated by the hour I guess this mostly depends on what kind of things you subscribe to. 95% of my sources are personal blogs of software developers or artists and most of them blog weekly or more rarely. I couldn't handle a feed where sources update multiple times a day, it would just become a pain.
  - bowsamic 2y ago
    Why do you choose to knowingly live a fantasy?
    - Hamatti 2y ago
      I wrote about many of those reasons in the blog post. Cutting off the middle-man, slowing down the hectic life and staying in touch with my internet friends are a few of those reasons.
    - mdp2021 2y ago
      What do you mean with «liv[ing] a fantasy», the root poster wrote that browsing RSS is not an ideal session like reading the newspapers because through RSS there would be overflow and sieving - but the same is valid for newspapers unless you read a dazibao, so the fantasy seems to be that of the root poster...
KronisLV 2y ago
Did you know that Thunderbird has RSS support? https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/05/thunderbird-rss-feeds-guide-favorite-content-to-the-inbox/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/05/thunderbird-rss-feeds-g... I use it for a news site in my country primarily and it's cool to have a list that's not full of pictures and ads and other distracting things, but just simple article headers that I can open and read if interested. Feeds are precious due to that alone, even. Also, here's some of the blogs that HN users run: https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev/ https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev/ I wonder if there's gonna be another blog sharing thread sometime, whoever had the original idea was pretty cool.
- noman-land 2y ago
  I put my HN replies feed in Thunderbird and treat it as just another inbox. It rules.
mro_name 2y ago
is survivorship bias a bias towards surviving? I'd take that as a starting point every day.
pennybanks 2y ago
can anyone recommend an rss they like? im currently using inoreader but iv been looking for better
- hgyjnbdet 2y ago
  For podcasts: AntennaPod [0], for everything else: Feeder [1]. [0] https://github.com/AntennaPod/AntennaPod https://github.com/AntennaPod/AntennaPod [1] https://github.com/spacecowboy/Feeder https://github.com/spacecowboy/Feeder
- laborcontract 2y ago
  I really like Newsblur. I’ve paid for it for at least ten years now. Whew. Tough to say that out loud.
- nickthegreek 2y ago
  I think Inoreader is the best of the bunch.
brador 2y ago
https://skimfeed.com https://skimfeed.com is based on RSS and solves a lot of these. The V5 algo was so good I never made a V6 12 years ago.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
endorphine 2y ago
Even better for all of these points: prefer books to blog posts.
_nalply 2y ago
One big plus of RSS: sometimes posts are removed silently and the act of removing is telling a lot about the publisher just by reading the subject. I still see at least the subject. On HN which I primarily consume by RSS I sometimes read posts which are flagged. In my years on HN I once vouched for a flagged post because I found that the post has a lot of merit. If I had read by the front page I never would have seen these posts.
majikaja 2y ago
Frustrating QuiteRSS crashes all the time for me Is there anything better?
- molave 2y ago
  I use Feedly, switched to it from my previous platform because it can support atom feeds
smitty1e 2y ago
There are various usage patterns I have in feedly. If I have time, I walk through the list of titles with the vi keystrokes. If I don't, I'll just roll through the list with a mouse. One killer feature is filters. I can drop "Kardashian" without ever seen any such content.
johnea 2y ago
What does it feel like to read RSS? Well, my eyes go from left to right across a field of text, which I interpret as words, sentences and paragraphs. If the overall body of text is interesting, I continue reading; if not, I don't. I really have a hard time understanding the problems that many people seem to experience in modern life...
kkfx 2y ago
For me? Simply the fact I made my own list of sources and keep them evolving instead of drink passively what someone else offer me via some recommendation system I do not own nor govern. It could means also a more pleasant reading, all in my clients without crap, IF the feed owner do publish the entire article, something normally unseen in recent time for 99% of feeds. Aside they are good to follow security alerts and new releases.

58 points by 8organicbits 2y ago

> ...the posts are (usually) longer form articles instead of short bits. If I want superficial takes, I can get more than my fill of them IRL. I enjoy the internet precisely because it allows me to spend a few minutes reading what someone invested a few hours in writing (and had maybe even been thinking about for a few days beforehand?).

_xivi 2y ago
> > ...the posts are (usually) longer form articles instead of short bits. > If I want superficial takes, I can get more than my fill of them IRL I'm confused, where did this assumption of low-quality come from? Are you thinking of SEO spam articles? which targets mainstream search engines in order to increase ad views and revenue? Those type of websites are on a different spectrum and usually RSS-hostile to begin with. Anyway, RSS is a standard, it's not limited (or related) to "superficial takes" you can use it to follow your favorite short-form content too.
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  You're probably confused because we agree: the low-quality stuff doesn't tend to wind up in RSS (and if it does, it's easy to drop that feed)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

senectus1 2y ago

>His main points were: >You’re the curator >You decide what’s interesting >You have more control over what you read and how >It’s a fast and efficient way of reading a lot of web >It’s just better than the endless scroll of a social media feed exactly This is why I self host a freshrss session and I visit it a couple of times a day. I chew through about 1000 articles a day very quickly just actually consuming maybe a half dozen to twenty out of the lot. I can see trends in the proliferation of particular stories or technology and I never feel like FOMO. I dont use FB/insta/etc at all, I only ever visit X/twitter if I see a link posting to something in particular.paticular It lets me control the firehose of news from the internet.

Kodiack 2y ago
I set up a self-hosted FreshRSS instance as well, and I feel the same benefits from it. I got back into RSS after Reddit pushed its API changes through, and it’s been so refreshing. I’m using social media a lot less now and those tingly FOMO feelings all but disappeared.

cpill 2y ago

I do it too but the trouble is that it's a fire hose of information. Some intelligent filtering would be nice, mixed with serendipity (some how)...

Hamatti 2y ago
That's where the heavy pruning comes in. If there's too much coming in, it's important to get rid of the ones that are less important or most often skipped. For me, the serendipity comes through discoveries inside the blog posts: people linking to other interesting blogs.

imiric 2y ago

> All the recommendation algorithm driven platforms tend to encourage active posting and discourage occasional participation. This is an important point that is not mentioned enough. The problem whenever a platform introduces an algorithm to decide what users see, by either promoting or penalizing submissions, is that it unavoidably leads to content that is created purposely to game that algorithm, which ultimately corrupts the user experience. This happens not just with social media and video platforms, but with web search results as well. The vast majority of web content is now spam whose only purpose is to generate ad revenue. SEO is a more accepted practice, but it really shouldn't exist at all. For search results there obviously needs to be some algorithm behind it, but this should be driven exclusively by delivering the most relevant results, and the only smart behavior should be spam detection. Google had solved this decades ago, yet they've created a global problem they can't, and likely have no interesting in solving. As far as investors are concerned, it's a legendary success story, and that's all that matters.

Hamatti 2y ago
> it unavoidably leads to content that is created purposely to game that algorithm, which ultimately corrupts the user experience. This is the functionality that really drove me away from social platforms, other than Mastodon. I prefer human curation over automatic recommendations for a couple of reasons: 1) Human curation creates less suggestions which makes it more manageable to go through 2) If I trust the source of the recommendation and know what they like, I can adjust my trust in the recommendation itself 3) A friend telling me something they enjoy is not motivated by money

fxj 2y ago

I highly recommend inoreader.com. It is like the old google reader on steroids. It is the first app I open in the morning to get my news and my personal feed consists of some 4000 single feeds from everything that I gathered on the internet. All nicely organized with filters and folders. It is a bessing for keeping up with youtube content, because all channels appear as single feeds that you can organize. You can put several single RSS feeds into a folder which presents itself again as a feed.

geekodour 2y ago
do you use the free one or pro?
- _xivi 2y ago
  OP mentioned having 4000 feeds, inoreader free plan is limited 150 (afaik it's actually the most generous among similar services, eg: feedly is limited to 100)
- fxj 2y ago
  I started with the free plan but after a while I realized that this is the news app that I use almost exclusively so I got the pro plan.
arthur-st 2y ago
Ditto on the recommendation, I’ve been using them since the 2013 launch. Over the years, web has sadly become a bit more closed in terms of having accessible feeds and such. Firehosing is another problem, when some sites just offer one feed that has way too much in it. But when it works, it works great. In addition to RSS, I also run newsletters, YouTube, and a few other things through it.

pflenker 2y ago

RSS works great if the amount of content is manageable. The problem social media feeds (or any other feed for that matter) solve is curation/filtering. Hacker News does the Dame thing, albeit with different mechanisms than classical social media.

imiric 2y ago
Why do you think social media feeds "solve" curation? They merely sort the content according to some predefined criteria, but you will still be overwhelmed by the stream, and likely miss a lot of content, just as you would if there was no algorithm at all. That's all curation essentially is: sorting. Social media companies claim that this is a good thing since everyone's feed is personalized, but these are just empty platitudes. They never know exactly what everyone wants to see at any moment. If they did, they wouldn't show me any ads or promoted content to begin with. The things I want to see changes constantly, so the only sorting and filtering functionality I want is one which I'm allowed to control myself.
- pflenker 2y ago
  Whether or not something solves the problem depends on the person having the problem. For avid social media users, the curation it brings seems to solve the problem better than other mechanisms. For you (or me) it doesn’t.
  - hgyjnbdet 2y ago
    I consider social media curation a problem in an of itself, I've no evidence, but consider it a driving force behind a lot of society's current problems. Too easy to filter bubble and manipulate the masses.

Almondsetat 2y ago

RSS still leads to a lot of wasted time. Being in charge of your own feed does not mean it will remain lean and sweet. The ideal of browsing your RSS feed in the morning cup of coffee in hand just like your father read the morning paper and then got on with his day is mostly just a fantasy. What happens in reality is that you more or less quickly ammass a big list of blogs and sources that gets updated by the hour and you end up either ignoring most of the entries or you check on them multiple times a day and you waste your time sieving through a stream of countless new content

Hamatti 2y ago
> Being in charge of your own feed does not mean it will remain lean and sweet. You're right. It does not automatically mean it. You have to maintain it just like anything else in life. > is mostly just a fantasy. It's a fantasy I live in daily. > What happens in reality is that you more or less quickly ammass a big list of blogs and sources that gets updated by the hour I guess this mostly depends on what kind of things you subscribe to. 95% of my sources are personal blogs of software developers or artists and most of them blog weekly or more rarely. I couldn't handle a feed where sources update multiple times a day, it would just become a pain.
- bowsamic 2y ago
  Why do you choose to knowingly live a fantasy?
  - Hamatti 2y ago
    I wrote about many of those reasons in the blog post. Cutting off the middle-man, slowing down the hectic life and staying in touch with my internet friends are a few of those reasons.
  - mdp2021 2y ago
    What do you mean with «liv[ing] a fantasy», the root poster wrote that browsing RSS is not an ideal session like reading the newspapers because through RSS there would be overflow and sieving - but the same is valid for newspapers unless you read a dazibao, so the fantasy seems to be that of the root poster...

KronisLV 2y ago

Did you know that Thunderbird has RSS support? https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/05/thunderbird-rss-feeds-guide-favorite-content-to-the-inbox/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/05/thunderbird-rss-feeds-g... I use it for a news site in my country primarily and it's cool to have a list that's not full of pictures and ads and other distracting things, but just simple article headers that I can open and read if interested. Feeds are precious due to that alone, even. Also, here's some of the blogs that HN users run: https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev/ https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev/ I wonder if there's gonna be another blog sharing thread sometime, whoever had the original idea was pretty cool.

noman-land 2y ago
I put my HN replies feed in Thunderbird and treat it as just another inbox. It rules.

mro_name 2y ago

is survivorship bias a bias towards surviving? I'd take that as a starting point every day.

pennybanks 2y ago

can anyone recommend an rss they like? im currently using inoreader but iv been looking for better

hgyjnbdet 2y ago
For podcasts: AntennaPod [0], for everything else: Feeder [1]. [0] https://github.com/AntennaPod/AntennaPod https://github.com/AntennaPod/AntennaPod [1] https://github.com/spacecowboy/Feeder https://github.com/spacecowboy/Feeder
laborcontract 2y ago
I really like Newsblur. I’ve paid for it for at least ten years now. Whew. Tough to say that out loud.
nickthegreek 2y ago
I think Inoreader is the best of the bunch.

brador 2y ago

https://skimfeed.com https://skimfeed.com is based on RSS and solves a lot of these. The V5 algo was so good I never made a V6 12 years ago.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

endorphine 2y ago

Even better for all of these points: prefer books to blog posts.

_nalply 2y ago

One big plus of RSS: sometimes posts are removed silently and the act of removing is telling a lot about the publisher just by reading the subject. I still see at least the subject. On HN which I primarily consume by RSS I sometimes read posts which are flagged. In my years on HN I once vouched for a flagged post because I found that the post has a lot of merit. If I had read by the front page I never would have seen these posts.

majikaja 2y ago

Frustrating QuiteRSS crashes all the time for me Is there anything better?

molave 2y ago
I use Feedly, switched to it from my previous platform because it can support atom feeds

smitty1e 2y ago

There are various usage patterns I have in feedly. If I have time, I walk through the list of titles with the vi keystrokes. If I don't, I'll just roll through the list with a mouse. One killer feature is filters. I can drop "Kardashian" without ever seen any such content.

johnea 2y ago

What does it feel like to read RSS? Well, my eyes go from left to right across a field of text, which I interpret as words, sentences and paragraphs. If the overall body of text is interesting, I continue reading; if not, I don't. I really have a hard time understanding the problems that many people seem to experience in modern life...

kkfx 2y ago

For me? Simply the fact I made my own list of sources and keep them evolving instead of drink passively what someone else offer me via some recommendation system I do not own nor govern. It could means also a more pleasant reading, all in my clients without crap, IF the feed owner do publish the entire article, something normally unseen in recent time for 99% of feeds. Aside they are good to follow security alerts and new releases.