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> And that's also where the magic lies because it's that very process of engaging with content and deciding whether or not it has value to you that makes using

by bsnnkv 1y ago

> And that's also where the magic lies because it's that very process of engaging with content and deciding whether or not it has value to you that makes using an RSS reader a better experience and one where you own your attention. Back when RSS was more popular, the tyranny of never-ending backlogs was a topic that was discussed somewhat regularly, but it gets glossed over a little these days since RSS talk is naturally enclosed within a layer of nostalgia For a few years now my approach has basically been "read it now or read it never" - this means that my RSS feeds are typically empty and I never save anything to "read it later" queues If it's something I'm supposed to read, it'll probably be resurfaced one way or another (or maybe it won't, and that's fine too) at a later time when I'm immediately ready to pick up what is being put down

safety1st 1y ago
RSS came of age in a very different time, when the world of computing was more, for lack of a better term, workstation-centric. People wanted RSS clients that were similar to email clients, or maybe even integrated directly into the email client, and they had this idea that they should 'catch up' on everything that was published since their last session, almost like it was a job. Nowadays people have an implicit understanding that the net is vast and infinite, it's beyond the ability of one man to fully catch up, and you're just tuning into a slice of the data stream. RSS clients never really departed from their roots of showing reverse chronological lists of all the posts, but this UI loses usefulness when the data stream gets too big. Commercial social media saw an opportunity and decided to make the algorithm that arranges the feed totally opaque - with that achieved, they proceeded to auction off each spot in it and get rich. Even worse than the reverse chronological firehose. What we lack is a presentation that is actually good! I don't have the answer. One thing I want to experiment with, though, is digests. I use a straight reverse chronological UI that aggregates all my items in all my feeds. One thing I noticed is that this ends up wildly biased toward feeds that have lots of posts, like news aggregator websites, or Reddit. Anyone who's foolish enough to work hard and produce wonderful long form content with less frequency, gets lost in the firehose, which may tell us a lot about how the collapse-in-progress of our civilization got started. I have no idea how to solve this and do better than the UIs and algorithms that rule the world today. I do have it on my todo list to try a digest style UI - like perhaps each website gets one entry per day in my feed, and if they made multiple posts on that day, those are represented as multiple small title links in a compact format. Whereas a less frequent poster might even get an excerpt along with their title or something.
- frosted-flakes 1y ago
  In my opinion the answer is curation. If you're getting so many magazines and newspapers in the post that you can't read them all, the answer isn't to hire someone to cut out random pages for you to read (oh, why are they all adverts?), the answer is to stop subscribing to so many publications. I never fail to read all of my social media feeds and email messages, because I actively cancel subscriptions to stuff that I don't have time to read. After all, it's entertainment/casual education, not mandatory learning.
  - ghaff 1y ago
    Most people never read most of the magazines and newspapers they got cover to cover. I certainly read a fairly small percentage of the New York Times.
  - quantadev 1y ago
    Hire someone? What about just using a system that crowd-sources it. That's what "Thumbs Up" icons can do, if you can get people to use them.
    - snackbroken 1y ago
      Popularity contests don't do a great job of surfacing quality. They do OK at pruning away the dullest 25℅, but tend to also throw away the top 5‰ most interesting stuff, because that stuff is invariably niche. They also don't do great in the meh middle, favoring loudness and approachability over thoughtfulness and competence.
      - quantadev 1y ago
        It's just like when people say Twitter/X is a Cesspool. Of course it is if you view the unfiltererd/agorithmic feed. However, if you only view the content from who you're following you get exactly the content you want. I use Twitter/X and all I ever see is AI/LLM stuff because it's all I follow and all I use it for. Zero politics. If someone does a political post, that's an instant unfollow. This is how we can rank RSS as well. You can look at a rank-ordered list only from people you trust, or a rank-ordered list from the public at large, which will be a dumpster fire. So you can take a union of all content from those you follow and put the ones with most upvotes at top, and viola, you're done. EDIT: However a better approach is do use AI to categorize as, politics/non-politics, hotdog/non-hotdog, etc, and then I can turn off political posts without having to completely unfollow someone I'd otherwise like.
setopt 1y ago
It depends what you use it for. I’m a researcher and use it to follow scientific literature (relevant arXiv sections and scientific journals, as well as funding agency announcements), and keeping an eye on what’s up is then arguably part of the job. If you use it for general news and blogs, that’s of course different. I completely agree with letting the FOMO go.
soapdog 1y ago
There are a couple readers that avoid that by providing a calmer experience without a firehose and without background fetching. https://blogcat.org https://blogcat.org (I made this one) https://fraidyc.at https://fraidyc.at (this is the inspiration for many calm readers) https://cblgh.itch.io/rad-reader https://cblgh.itch.io/rad-reader (multiplatform and super calm)
- pityJuke 1y ago
  Ended up abandoning Fraidycat after it atrophied (a number of the integrations that weren't plain RSS, like YouTube/Twitch, didn't work well, it ended up choking my browser, and then stopped working entirely)... did not know there were so many spiritual successors. Thanks! Now... if anyone knows of an iOS equivalent, that'd be awesome.
al_borland 1y ago
One of the big issue I had (and have) with RSS is that is discouraged me from following multiple similar sources, as I’ll see similar stories in each feed and it becomes very noisy. Some apps I saw in the past, like Fever that attempted to quell this issue, but I ended to taking the approach of just being ruthless about what I subscribe to. The ultimate result of this was just a few feeds, but one of them is ars technica, which on its own can become too much if I don’t keep up on it daily, and if they miss covering something, I miss reading about it. It doesn’t leave room for special interest blogs in tech, without inevitably creating more duplication than I’d like. I don’t think the modern algorithmic approach is much better, as things can just as easily fall through the cracks. I need to seriously consider adopting your “read it now or read it never” approach. This is effectively how my read-it-later accounts work in practice, but with the good intentions of reading something later, comes the shame of never actually doing it. Compound that with the regret I feel when I occasionally open it up and find dead links. I don’t think any of this shame or regret actually makes my life better.

by bsnnkv 1y ago

safety1st 1y ago

RSS came of age in a very different time, when the world of computing was more, for lack of a better term, workstation-centric. People wanted RSS clients that were similar to email clients, or maybe even integrated directly into the email client, and they had this idea that they should 'catch up' on everything that was published since their last session, almost like it was a job. Nowadays people have an implicit understanding that the net is vast and infinite, it's beyond the ability of one man to fully catch up, and you're just tuning into a slice of the data stream. RSS clients never really departed from their roots of showing reverse chronological lists of all the posts, but this UI loses usefulness when the data stream gets too big. Commercial social media saw an opportunity and decided to make the algorithm that arranges the feed totally opaque - with that achieved, they proceeded to auction off each spot in it and get rich. Even worse than the reverse chronological firehose. What we lack is a presentation that is actually good! I don't have the answer. One thing I want to experiment with, though, is digests. I use a straight reverse chronological UI that aggregates all my items in all my feeds. One thing I noticed is that this ends up wildly biased toward feeds that have lots of posts, like news aggregator websites, or Reddit. Anyone who's foolish enough to work hard and produce wonderful long form content with less frequency, gets lost in the firehose, which may tell us a lot about how the collapse-in-progress of our civilization got started. I have no idea how to solve this and do better than the UIs and algorithms that rule the world today. I do have it on my todo list to try a digest style UI - like perhaps each website gets one entry per day in my feed, and if they made multiple posts on that day, those are represented as multiple small title links in a compact format. Whereas a less frequent poster might even get an excerpt along with their title or something.

frosted-flakes 1y ago
In my opinion the answer is curation. If you're getting so many magazines and newspapers in the post that you can't read them all, the answer isn't to hire someone to cut out random pages for you to read (oh, why are they all adverts?), the answer is to stop subscribing to so many publications. I never fail to read all of my social media feeds and email messages, because I actively cancel subscriptions to stuff that I don't have time to read. After all, it's entertainment/casual education, not mandatory learning.
- ghaff 1y ago
  Most people never read most of the magazines and newspapers they got cover to cover. I certainly read a fairly small percentage of the New York Times.
- quantadev 1y ago
  Hire someone? What about just using a system that crowd-sources it. That's what "Thumbs Up" icons can do, if you can get people to use them.
  - snackbroken 1y ago
    Popularity contests don't do a great job of surfacing quality. They do OK at pruning away the dullest 25℅, but tend to also throw away the top 5‰ most interesting stuff, because that stuff is invariably niche. They also don't do great in the meh middle, favoring loudness and approachability over thoughtfulness and competence.
    - quantadev 1y ago
      It's just like when people say Twitter/X is a Cesspool. Of course it is if you view the unfiltererd/agorithmic feed. However, if you only view the content from who you're following you get exactly the content you want. I use Twitter/X and all I ever see is AI/LLM stuff because it's all I follow and all I use it for. Zero politics. If someone does a political post, that's an instant unfollow. This is how we can rank RSS as well. You can look at a rank-ordered list only from people you trust, or a rank-ordered list from the public at large, which will be a dumpster fire. So you can take a union of all content from those you follow and put the ones with most upvotes at top, and viola, you're done. EDIT: However a better approach is do use AI to categorize as, politics/non-politics, hotdog/non-hotdog, etc, and then I can turn off political posts without having to completely unfollow someone I'd otherwise like.

setopt 1y ago

It depends what you use it for. I’m a researcher and use it to follow scientific literature (relevant arXiv sections and scientific journals, as well as funding agency announcements), and keeping an eye on what’s up is then arguably part of the job. If you use it for general news and blogs, that’s of course different. I completely agree with letting the FOMO go.

soapdog 1y ago

There are a couple readers that avoid that by providing a calmer experience without a firehose and without background fetching. https://blogcat.org https://blogcat.org (I made this one) https://fraidyc.at https://fraidyc.at (this is the inspiration for many calm readers) https://cblgh.itch.io/rad-reader https://cblgh.itch.io/rad-reader (multiplatform and super calm)

pityJuke 1y ago
Ended up abandoning Fraidycat after it atrophied (a number of the integrations that weren't plain RSS, like YouTube/Twitch, didn't work well, it ended up choking my browser, and then stopped working entirely)... did not know there were so many spiritual successors. Thanks! Now... if anyone knows of an iOS equivalent, that'd be awesome.

al_borland 1y ago

One of the big issue I had (and have) with RSS is that is discouraged me from following multiple similar sources, as I’ll see similar stories in each feed and it becomes very noisy. Some apps I saw in the past, like Fever that attempted to quell this issue, but I ended to taking the approach of just being ruthless about what I subscribe to. The ultimate result of this was just a few feeds, but one of them is ars technica, which on its own can become too much if I don’t keep up on it daily, and if they miss covering something, I miss reading about it. It doesn’t leave room for special interest blogs in tech, without inevitably creating more duplication than I’d like. I don’t think the modern algorithmic approach is much better, as things can just as easily fall through the cracks. I need to seriously consider adopting your “read it now or read it never” approach. This is effectively how my read-it-later accounts work in practice, but with the good intentions of reading something later, comes the shame of never actually doing it. Compound that with the regret I feel when I occasionally open it up and find dead links. I don’t think any of this shame or regret actually makes my life better.