3 ms·

The problem with blog feeds is the action required by the user to decide what blogs to follow, and then the desire to go to a different app to read them. But t

The problem with blog feeds is the action required by the user to decide what blogs to follow, and then the desire to go to a different app to read them. But this strikes me as a problem that can be solved, and potentially already has been. If I go to a newsreeder the first time, it's empty. I have to decide what to follow. If you can get me to add a few blogs of interest, you start understanding what I want to read. I can then subscribe and follow, just like I would on twitter, and you can present new stuff to me, so I'm never showing up without something new. I suspect this is something like what substack is doing, but that means all the blogs have to be on substack. I never go to substack to browse, I go there when a link sends me there. If there was a service that I as a blog-writer can submit my feed to, and that service is managing the promotion of my blog to the right readers, that would be a benefit, and I wouldn't feel locked in. I'm sure this has been done, why did it fail?

esseph 1y ago
I'm just speaking for myself here... The last thing I want is another service with an algorithm. RSS by itself is devoid of that, which is an appealing feature. Does everything have to be a fucking product?????
- pedalpete 1y ago
  Nobody is telling you that you have to use it. How do you overcome the discoverability problem with RSS. It isn't a "product", it's a solution to a problem.
  - esseph 1y ago
    I still don't know what the problem is you're complaining about. I find things I like, I add them to RSS reader. I don't have thousands or hundreds of things in there, maybe a few dozen. "Make it easy for users to find things" - if they can find a website, they can find an RSS feed. I'm sure any LLM with Deep Research would be great for that.
    - chrisweekly 1y ago
      "I find things I like" is the discoverabity problem right there. Where do you find them?
      - esseph 1y ago
        They're all websites. We've spent decades building search engines that index and categorize these. Mostly though they are just news websites, aggregators, friends, or friends of friends. I'm not searching to solve a problem, per say, just things I may enjoy reading about if I have time.
8organicbits 1y ago
https://feedland.com/?username=robalexdev https://feedland.com/?username=robalexdev is the closest variant I know. You can see who else subscribes to feeds that you follow, and see what other feeds they like. The current version doesn't have a recommendation engine, but you could easily build your own. > so I'm never showing up without something new. I like a feed I can fully consume and then move on, filling it with endless content would make it less valuable to me.
- pedalpete 1y ago
  Yeah, there is a delicate balance between endless content and "hey, this is probably valuable to you". Maybe you could even set "I only want to see a maximum of 5 new posts a day" or something like that. I wonder with the right incentives if this could be run as a distributed open-source service.

esseph 1y ago

I'm just speaking for myself here... The last thing I want is another service with an algorithm. RSS by itself is devoid of that, which is an appealing feature. Does everything have to be a fucking product?????

pedalpete 1y ago
Nobody is telling you that you have to use it. How do you overcome the discoverability problem with RSS. It isn't a "product", it's a solution to a problem.
- esseph 1y ago
  I still don't know what the problem is you're complaining about. I find things I like, I add them to RSS reader. I don't have thousands or hundreds of things in there, maybe a few dozen. "Make it easy for users to find things" - if they can find a website, they can find an RSS feed. I'm sure any LLM with Deep Research would be great for that.
  - chrisweekly 1y ago
    "I find things I like" is the discoverabity problem right there. Where do you find them?
    - esseph 1y ago
      They're all websites. We've spent decades building search engines that index and categorize these. Mostly though they are just news websites, aggregators, friends, or friends of friends. I'm not searching to solve a problem, per say, just things I may enjoy reading about if I have time.

8organicbits 1y ago

https://feedland.com/?username=robalexdev https://feedland.com/?username=robalexdev is the closest variant I know. You can see who else subscribes to feeds that you follow, and see what other feeds they like. The current version doesn't have a recommendation engine, but you could easily build your own. > so I'm never showing up without something new. I like a feed I can fully consume and then move on, filling it with endless content would make it less valuable to me.

pedalpete 1y ago
Yeah, there is a delicate balance between endless content and "hey, this is probably valuable to you". Maybe you could even set "I only want to see a maximum of 5 new posts a day" or something like that. I wonder with the right incentives if this could be run as a distributed open-source service.