4 ms·

Pretty much disagree with this entirely. Being in charge is the best bit, if you amass a big list of crap then you're doing it wrong. Sure it's a little more w

Pretty much disagree with this entirely. Being in charge is the best bit, if you amass a big list of crap then you're doing it wrong. Sure it's a little more work than having some AI from a multinational advertising company dictating what you see, but then that's the price for freedom to choose. The only issue I see, unsolved by RSS, is discovery. Most of my feeds are there by chance more than anything else. The first thing I do when I find something interesting is search for a feed. If there isn't one, it's forgotten about, maybe a bookmark. If there is the feed sits in quarantine until I see if it's worth keeping. If I like it it stays, otherwise it's gone. I then sit every morning with a coffee and scan my feeds, reading the ones that tickle my fancy.

loveparade 2y ago
I agree with the OP here. The biggest issue unsolved by RSS is customizability. You can pick what feeds you subscribe to, but that's your only level of control. HN, Reddit, Twitter, etc give you a feed of several hundreds posts per day. Most of them are irrelevant to my interests or filtering criteria. For example, I may only be interested in posts containing certain keywords, a certain amount of comment activity, or a certain number of upvotes/downvotes. Whatever it may be. The RSS protocol doesn't let you control this. Of course, I can ignore anything I am not interested in. But the reality of the situation is that out of 30 minutes reading RSS feeds I spend 20 minutes filtering out stuff I am not interested in. Also, crucial information such as post popularity is missing because it's not available at publishing time and changes over time. "Social" is not part of the protocol. You can argue that social media sites don't belong into RSS, but then you are removing the single biggest use case of RSS. If I can't put social media feeds into RSS it's useless to me because social media is exactly what overwhelms you with information and FOMO, which is what RSS should be solving.
- lawgimenez 2y ago
  It seems like you are addicted to social media. Using RSS will cure you from it. Trust me.
- laborcontract 2y ago
  Newsblur allows you to have precisely those type of keyword filters. I agree with OP’s dissenter.
  - lapcat 2y ago
    > Newsblur allows you to have precisely those type of keyword filters. Indeed, many RSS readers do. See also Hacker News RSS: https://hnrss.github.io https://hnrss.github.io
- paulmd 2y ago
  Sounds like a good application for a neural model to sieve out the stuff you’re interested in. (And that stuff actually existed for a long time, CRM-114 is an example but not the first, I was playing with this in the early 00s with stuff that could categorize emails with Bayesian filtering etc, not just spam vs not.)

loveparade 2y ago

I agree with the OP here. The biggest issue unsolved by RSS is customizability. You can pick what feeds you subscribe to, but that's your only level of control. HN, Reddit, Twitter, etc give you a feed of several hundreds posts per day. Most of them are irrelevant to my interests or filtering criteria. For example, I may only be interested in posts containing certain keywords, a certain amount of comment activity, or a certain number of upvotes/downvotes. Whatever it may be. The RSS protocol doesn't let you control this. Of course, I can ignore anything I am not interested in. But the reality of the situation is that out of 30 minutes reading RSS feeds I spend 20 minutes filtering out stuff I am not interested in. Also, crucial information such as post popularity is missing because it's not available at publishing time and changes over time. "Social" is not part of the protocol. You can argue that social media sites don't belong into RSS, but then you are removing the single biggest use case of RSS. If I can't put social media feeds into RSS it's useless to me because social media is exactly what overwhelms you with information and FOMO, which is what RSS should be solving.

lawgimenez 2y ago
It seems like you are addicted to social media. Using RSS will cure you from it. Trust me.
laborcontract 2y ago
Newsblur allows you to have precisely those type of keyword filters. I agree with OP’s dissenter.
- lapcat 2y ago
  > Newsblur allows you to have precisely those type of keyword filters. Indeed, many RSS readers do. See also Hacker News RSS: https://hnrss.github.io https://hnrss.github.io
paulmd 2y ago
Sounds like a good application for a neural model to sieve out the stuff you’re interested in. (And that stuff actually existed for a long time, CRM-114 is an example but not the first, I was playing with this in the early 00s with stuff that could categorize emails with Bayesian filtering etc, not just spam vs not.)