12 ms·

Making RSS More Fun

224 points by salmon 10mo ago

colesantiago 10mo ago
> I want to sit somewhere and passively consume random small creators content, then upvote some of that content and the service should show that more often to other users. That's it. No advertising, no collecting tons of user data about me, just a very simple "I have 15 minutes to kill before the next meeting, show me some random stuff." In other words consume things for free and don’t support the small content creators work. Sounds very similar to what the AI companies are doing, consuming RSS feeds and not paying it back to the small creators, but when we are doing it, it is okay because we are not AI companies. hmmm.
- yourboirusty 10mo ago
  AI companies hoover up the data, dump it in a giant pile and never tell you the source of it. This extension literally just redirects you to the website. If the small creator has ads on that website, they're going to get paid. They're going to get the exposure.
- tclancy 10mo ago
  Are you complaining about this project or RSS in general? Because your complaint applies to both. I loved the era of RSS readers. Maybe I never sent anyone money but it was never the point. That was a way to feel properly connected to an Internet stranger, to stay up on what was going on and what they thought. It doesn’t have to be financial remuneration at the end of every flow chart. "It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.
  - manuelmoreale 10mo ago
    > That was a way to feel properly connected to an Internet stranger, to stay up on what was going on and what they thought. I think too many people have forgotten that this is by far one of the best quality of the internet, especially the more personal one. There does not need to be a financial exchange. Sometimes it’s enough to share content and read content others have shared.
- oersted 10mo ago
  You are putting words in their mouth. There is no reason why such an RSS app wouldn’t link to the original source instead of scraping it. The app doesn’t need to be a central source of monetization for the creators either, that’s usually the source of all these problems. The app can monetize their aggregation and curation services as they wish, and the individual creators sites can monetize their contribution as they wish. Be it ads, subscriptions, donations or anything else, as usual.
- Telemakhos 10mo ago
  The dream of consuming free content is really a throwback to the 90's way of thinking about an open web as a public space where anyone can freely access files that are published, as "published" meant "freely available." When YouTube made publishing something monetizable and guarded by DRM (look at all the trouble yt-dlp has been going through lately), that open web lost a lot of steam. Social media companies monetized discovery and surfacing through user data collection, and also undercut some of the desire to publish—once your basic info was on Facebook, having a personal web page became much less important. As having personal hosting became less and less the norm, publishing power concentrated in the hands of fewer companies (like YouTube) that were set up to monetize content and built the expectation of pecuniary compensation for "content creation," where the 1990's open web publishers were happy just being noticed and appreciated. The 1990's were a long time ago and are never coming back, because the past exists only as memory.
  - manuelmoreale 10mo ago
    The spirit of the 90s is still here. There are still many, many people who are happy to have a space on the web and share what they’re passionate about or what is in their heads simply because they enjoy the process. It’s not an all-or-nothing scenario. The two things can coexist. Some people will pursuit monetization, others are happy to share for the sake of sharing. It comes down to individual choices.
    - mrandish 10mo ago
      > The spirit of the 90s is still here "Dream of the '90s" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4hShMEk1Ew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4hShMEk1Ew)
      - manuelmoreale 10mo ago
        So funny that if I click the link I get a “not available in your country”
- Devasta 10mo ago
  When I run a red light it's wrong, but when a fire truck does it it's ok? Really makes you think.
  - colesantiago 10mo ago
    Poor attempt to refute my point. When was the last time you supported a content creator that has an RSS feed?
PaulHoule 10mo ago
My YOShInOn reader basically looks like this. It takes a few 1000 up/down judgements to make good content-based recs [1], a reader that does collaborative filtering probably learns faster. [1] train a BERT+SVM classifer to predict my judgements, create 20 k-Means clusters to get some diversity, take the top N from each cluster, blend in a certain fraction of randoms to keep it honest. The clusters are unsupervised and identify big interest areas such as programming, sports, climate change, advanced manufacturing, anime, without putting labels on the clusters -- the clusters do change from run to run but so what. If I really wanted a stable classification I would probably start with clusters, give them names, merge/split a little, and make a training set to supervised classifier to those classes.
lexoj 10mo ago
The way I have made RSS more fun is by adding local LLM functionalities[0] and push notifications. (that can notify me when something I expect to happen, happens) [0] https://github.com/piqoni/matcha https://github.com/piqoni/matcha
PurpleRamen 10mo ago
> I rarely want to read all of a websites content from beginning to end I get the impression this person is using RSS reader wrong. Or is there really a culture of people you are using RSS like a youtube-channel, consuming everything from beginning to end? For me the purpose of RSS is to get the newest headlines, choose the interesting articles and skip the rest. This means there is a limited list of items to check each day, and a finishing line. > The whole appeal of TikTok, for those who haven't wasted hours of their lives on it, is that I get served content based on an algorithm that determines what I might think is useful or fun. But TikTok is even worse. It's an endless stream of content, pressuring you constantly, always pushing you on the "just one more"-train. How is that even better? This all reads more like this person should use a readlater-list, not a different RSS reader.
- GCUMstlyHarmls 10mo ago
  When I used RSS, a hundred years ago, I certainly got anxiety from my NetNewsWire badge showing 10, then 100, then 10,000 unread articles. If I used it today, I would simply turn off the badge and tell it to mark everything 2+ days old as read. But certainly, at a time I did approach it as a "I should read everything on these websites". I was also young and an idiot, some of that has changed now.
  - garciasn 10mo ago
    I, like many, was a heavy Google Reader user. I would have it show me the headlines and then, when interested, I would look at the blurb when I expanded the item. If that piqued my interest further, I would dig into the actual article. I have a problem with 'unreads' and I'm INBOX 0 and I keep all of my phone notifications at 0 at all times. I would do the same w/Google Reader. But; if there was something that kept surfacing old content as 'new', I would disable that feed or work to fix it before it ended up in GR. I miss GR.
  - N3mor 10mo ago
    My Inoreader became unmanageable and reminded me a lot of the reason I quit using Gmail: over 100k emails to go through in one lifetime isn't worth the trouble.
dan_h 10mo ago
I've felt similarly about RSS for a while now--I've made a ton of attempts to build my giant collection of subscriptions but always just burn out on maintaining it. Another issue is when I try to get anyone even slightly non-technical to use RSS they bounce off immediately; it sadly just seems too complex/too much overhead for a large number of users. I've been trying to build a site/app that adds some features mentioned in this post ("upvoting" based on views, tiktok-style video experience in the app, etc), but it's still very much a WIP and doesn't exactly fix the complexity problems yet. Still, I get encouraged seeing more projects like the OPs that hopefully bring about some sort of RSS resurgence. [0] https://jesterengine.com https://jesterengine.com
- latexr 10mo ago
  > I've made a ton of attempts to build my giant collection of subscriptions but always just burn out on maintaining it. Seems to me your problem lies in this part: > giant collection Don’t add so much that you can’t deal with it. Concentrate on infrequently updated sources. Any news website, for example, is too much and shouldn’t be in your reader. A small creator or YouTube channel from whom you want to see (almost) everything does go in. If you ever feel overwhelmed, you have too many feeds and should remove every single one you don’t feel is absolutely valuable. Exceptions can be made if e.g. you were on vacation and never checked the reader. In that case, mark as read instead of removing. If you ever find yourself regularly skipping the content from a feed without reading, remove it then and there. If you’re not consuming at least 80% (made up number, adapt to yourself) of posts, it does not belong in your feed reader.
  - aaravchen 10mo ago
    Doubling down on this, get a Reader that let's you filter, and do so judiciously. I have some feeds where I only allow thru items with specific categories. Others I have dozens of filters for "spam". And some I just had to give up on because they enshittified their feed to inhibit differentiation of junk/sponsored/spam content from real content. Personally I just self-hosted a personal FreshRSS instance, but you can also get a lot of similar features from a paid Inoreader account.
- 10mo ago
brador 10mo ago
Skimfeed to the rescue (once again). https://skimfeed.com https://skimfeed.com
- basedrum 10mo ago
  What is this? I can't find any information about the site
throw0101d 10mo ago
People often use "RSS" as a generic term for a web/news feed: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed But if someone will is actually going to implement a feed, should it be (actual) RSS, or Atom (or JSON Feed)? Are there particular pros/cons/trade-offs for each? I know that for podcasts we're currently basically "suck" with at least providing RSS (even if there are also other options): * https://podcasters.apple.com/4115-technical-updates-for-hosting-providers https://podcasters.apple.com/4115-technical-updates-for-host...
- latexr 10mo ago
  > But if someone will is actually going to implement a feed, should it be (actual) RSS, or Atom (or JSON Feed)? I’ve been doing JSON feeds exclusively since it came out. Support in readers is pretty good (Universal? Near universal?) and they’re super simple to generate and consume programatically with standard tools in current mainstream programming languages. When adding to my feed reader, I’ll take whatever and don’t care¹. When generating it myself or consuming via a script, 100% JSON feed. ¹ In practice that means RSS or JSON. I’ve been using RSS for some two decades and never cared for Atom. I don’t have anything against it, I just never saw the need.
SCdF 10mo ago
More power to you obviously. But I have mixed feelings about this. There is so much information that curation is inevitable. Sure. But I don't want that curation to be "fun". I don't _want_ tiktok in my life, or really anything whose goal is "engagement". I don't want time killers. One of the reasons for getting back into RSS for me was to have a direct feed to authors I'm interested in. But I understand that quickly can become unmanageable. When that time comes, I think I'd be interested in the curation being about compressing content down, not expanding it out. That is to say: use the algorithm to select from a large pool of what you're interested in, down to a manageable static size (like a weekly newsletter), as opposed to using it to infinitely expand outward to keep engaging you.
nyoki 10mo ago
[dead]
jandrusk 10mo ago
He clearly hasn't met elfeed that you run from within Emacs; I've used all of the major RSS readers over the years and elfeed is unbelievably versatile as are most things in Emacs, but learning Emacs might be worth it just for elfeed and org-mode.
N3mor 10mo ago
I love this - thank you for your work! Stumble Upon was one of those sites that I trully enjoyed. I'm glad to see something similar. I wish someone would develop a spiritual successor to DIGG.
- turoczy 10mo ago
  Totally agree. Very much a throwback to StumbleUpon in the best way. And more directed given that we get to choose the focus of the content.
  - mukti 10mo ago
    You can kinda get a similar experience to StumbleUpon with marginalia's explore mode - https://marginalia-search.com/explore https://marginalia-search.com/explore
- al_borland 10mo ago
  Digg has recently re-launched. It’s in beta currently. I got in a couple weeks ago.
  - N3mor 10mo ago
    No way! Thank you, will go search right now.
  - GaryBluto 10mo ago
    Unfortunately it just looks to be a Reddit clone now.
    - al_borland 10mo ago
      It's a joint effort between Kevin Rose (Digg founder) and Alexis Ohanian (Reddit co-founder). There is definitely some Reddit influence, but Reddit was also heavily influenced by Digg to start with. Listening to the users, it's hard to know which way it's going to go. There are a lot of people who don't want it to be the new Reddit and want to make sure the same problems aren't repeated. At the same time, some Reddit culture is coming over (with a bit of push back) and some people seem to want Digg to have all the stuff they liked from Reddit, which would end up as a Reddit clone. I'm hoping it will be successful, as there needs to be a better Reddit alternative than what exists now and the Fediverse isn't getting the job done. Only time will tell.
bjord 10mo ago
just a heads up: the verification emails land in spam
bjord 10mo ago
had to uninstall this right away. among other things, every key shortcut is already in use elsewhere (and they cannot be changed) for reference: alt+shift+s, alt+shift+u, and alt+shift+d
mr_windfrog 10mo ago
Does anyone know if there are any services or software nowadays that can replace the traditional RSS format?
jlturner 10mo ago
Reminds me of stumbleupon, which despite taking you to a random page, was excellent because most of the pages were worth viewing.
vandyswa 10mo ago
To me, it feels like most feed readers are made by people who don't use RSS, and just exercise their feed reader on a few feeds. I seem to be at 211 feeds with (currently) 13,000 cached entries, organized across a couple dozen categories. A reader where you'll click into the body under a headline only 1-5% of the time is a totally different beast.
- miladyincontrol 10mo ago
  Too true. Not that every user has to be some sort of power user but its rather telling when a reader can hardly scale to a modest amount of articles, has no filtering mechanisms, or methods for organizing otherwise.
spamfilter247 10mo ago
Over the holidays I intend to build (or fork NetNewsWire TBH) an RSS reader app that uses the Apple on-device models (or BYOK) to summarize and prioritize articles - my very own personalized algorithmic feed. Curious to see how it turns out. Anyone else already tried something similar?
8organicbits 10mo ago
> I need to sort stuff into categories so that you get more stuff in genres you like I'm also trying to figure out that problem. The challenge I've seen is that RSS feeds rarely use the category field. I did notice people doing hashtags in the description field (maybe they POSSE to Mastodon or X) so I parse those out in a crawler I built [1], but theres still so much uncategorized content. In my personal feed I aim to only subscribe to feeds I plan to read, so I hit "inbox zero" on my RSS feed every day, reading about 20% of the content. What this means is that I unsubscribe from anyone who posts too often. I think there's a negative correlation between posting frequency and my desire to read the content. People who blog every day are mostly writing uninteresting content and that will fill your feed unless you balance it out. [1] https://alexsci.com/blog/rss-categories/ https://alexsci.com/blog/rss-categories/
- toomuchtodo 10mo ago
  I use https://karakeep.app/ https://karakeep.app/ to subscribe to RSS feeds; not only can I view the content in the app, but it also captures the content and stores an archive of it. It uses generative AI to create tags (but also supports full text search of everything archived). You can also create RSS feeds with criteria, with it acting as a bus for your content; perhaps it can enrich your RSS feeds while you continue to use your existing RSS reader. I hope this is helpful for your problem statement.
- mk12 10mo ago
  I have a few different types of content on my website and wanted to offer both individual feeds and a combined feed, so I was disappointed that nothing seems to support the category tag. I settled for prefixing the titles in the combined feed, e.g. "[Blog]" for blog posts.
Zaskoda 10mo ago
> I also don't really care if the content is chronological Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. It depends on the content. And that's one thing I've longed to see solved in RSS feed readers as well as podcasts. However, I have not been able to imagine a UX that solves my problems, so there's that.
Isofarro 10mo ago
The idea that you have to read everything is a reader UI design flaw. By presenting feeds as an inbox, it gives the impression of RSS feeds being email. And that's not right, it can be, but it doesn't have to be. The TikTok model is about scrolling, skipping, being selective. RSS readers should be treated the same way. "River of news" is an RSS thing. You dive in when stuff interests you, and you let what doesn't interest you flow by. Twitter is basically an RSS-like reader with 120 character limits on posts. You subscribe to interesting people, and their little posts drop on your homepage in reverse chronological order. There's no inbox or unread items. You just scroll past to the next item that interests you. Yeah, turning off unread-items counters, definitely. The value of RSS is in what you chose to read. It's not an anti-library. And if something is really great, a good subscription list means someone you're reading will likely mention it and link to it.
- andai 10mo ago
  I went through this thought process of creating a mechanical system to find interesting content all across the web for me based on my preferences that it learned. And I started thinking about the supreme importance of high quality data sources... realizing there's a power law there, where I could just subscribe to a few high quality people... and ended up reinventing RSS from first principles. And then instead of embeddings we have tags... Honestly I think we nailed it in 2005 :)
- BeetleB 10mo ago
  This is an insight I realized several years ago: I want RSS, but I don't want to track what I've read and haven't. I solved my problem by writing a bot for each RSS feed - it would mirror posts in Diaspora. I would then subscribe to those bots. These days it's Mastodon, but same idea. I just scroll and browse a bit, with nothing in the system telling me I have 573 unread posts.
- port11 10mo ago
  I prefer the inbox to the river. It's not that difficult to scan my (categorised) inbox and “mark all as read” for a given feed. But then again, I don't subscribe to too many things, and quickly unsubscribe from feeds that publish too often. There is a blog for fathers that publishes every day. No, thanks, I need to digest what I've read last week.
memonkey 10mo ago
This makes me so happy. I love, love, LOVED StumbleUpon. I was actually just thinking how I'd love to rebuild it.
dundercoder 10mo ago
I would love to use RSS to disseminate updates I’m working on, especially to my family. But my family wouldn’t know what RSS was, let alone use a reader. Are there ways my family could already be using RSS and not know? I don’t want to try to get them to install yet another app or use another service because the friction will prevent them from doing it.
- greenwallnorway 10mo ago
  What about email? Email is a cousin to RSS - everyone has their email feed. Senders push to an email inbox, rather than readers pulling feeds into an inbox.
TechSquidTV 10mo ago
I had just shared my new RSS app the other day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46134023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46134023 I didn't get any traction here, but on Lemmy there was a decent discussion about the issues with discovering RSS feeds. They would surely love this.
mcdonje 10mo ago
This concept is begging to be built on atproto or solid.
agcat 10mo ago
This is the best thing i read on internet today! Cant wait to try once its released for google chrome
charcircuit 10mo ago
Another flaw is that it requires the site to have an RSS feed. Especially with LLMs it should be possible to check any website on the web for new articles.
jama211 10mo ago
This is amazing, thank you for this!
throwaway888666 10mo ago
[dead]
627467 10mo ago
Feeed[0] nailed the ux for a rss reader (and other type of feeds) by having a local algorithm that keeps the main feed diverse yet short no anxiety of unread count. Unfortunately it's iOS only and I have not seen open source RSS readers on android that take similar approach. Many support a "today" tab which does help in keeping the task of catching up more focused but if you follow high volume feeds that post a lot you end up having to scroll alot to see variety of content. [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/feeeed-rss-reader-and-more/id1600187490 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/feeeed-rss-reader-and-more/id1...
desireco42 10mo ago
I had similar idea long time ago during StumbleUpon and it was called OneRandomSite... It was meant to help founders promote their startups or something. Didn't work out for me.
andai 10mo ago
>Auth is a JWT, which actually was a pain and I regret doing it. I don't know why I keep reaching for JWTs, they're a bad user experience and I should stop. What is this about? Bad for the user or the dev?
reimuwu 10mo ago
An important benefit of RSS is that it isn’t influenced by recommendation algorithms. It won’t keep pushing content from a single domain; instead, you can read articles from a wide range of fields. What the article describes feels more like a return to the traditional, linear information-flow model.
emschwartz 10mo ago
Give Scour a try! It ranks articles by how closely related they are to your interests. You can import a set of RSS feeds or scour all 15,000+ sources. I built it because I wanted to find the good articles among noisy feeds like HN Newest. I've also avoided RSS readers in the past because of that feeling of having thousands of unread emails. https://scour.ing https://scour.ing
- efilife 10mo ago
  Very cool! Is there a way to blacklist some feeds?
  - emschwartz 10mo ago
    Glad you think so! There isn't a way to block feeds (yet), but you can subscribe to specific feeds, which basically acts like creating your own list of allowed feeds. Separately, I'm going to be working on letting you exclude content from certain domains (which was requested in https://feedback.scour.ing/33 https://feedback.scour.ing/33).
loughnane 10mo ago
I use miniflux and like it. Still, this post got me thinking. I’d like to try out a feature where by self-hosted instance learns what I like and highlights relevant posts in my feed. Then I can go through the other ones later. Main things are that I would control what feeds go in and there is no monetization incentive since it’s self-hosted.
James_K 10mo ago
It's interesting that people with Atom feeds still call them RSS.
renegat0x0 10mo ago
For me capturing list of RSS sources is fun https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds But i do not check all 3k sources regularly
65 10mo ago
This is a hard problem to solve. Basically what people want is an addictive way to consume high quality text. I have made my own RSS readers with things like filtering, creating feeds from pages (e.g. the APNews.com home page), rendering the page itself with custom CSS/Javascript, etc. Except I don't really use my RSS feed I spent months making because the firehose of random articles just does not work. I like The Atlantic as much as everyone, but do I want to read _every_ article? No. Why is Reddit and Hacker News addictive? Because of the social component of it. So the author is on the right track with the insight to make it more like StumbleUpon. But... why bother when you can just go read Reddit or Hacker News? RSS readers are fundamentally lonely. The non-social solution to "addictive internet text" to me is the research part of finding information you're curious about. I frequently will read something or think of something and go down this Wikipedia rabbit hole, trying to find more information. This is way more engaging than reading a random news article. The question is how to create discovery that leads to more discovery, where the user can find the information themselves (something like how people go down the Ancestry DNA rabbit holes). This way you don't need a social hook to build something "addictive." But how to get there is something I'm still trying to figure out.
socalgal2 10mo ago
I don't know if it would work, but, I imagined a Youtube like inteface to blogs. The front page would be algorithmically selected blog posts. You could "Subscribe" and like you can with channels on Youtube. You could mark a post as "read", "not interested", "never recommend this channel" etc.... Note: I specifically mean a grid of thumbnails to posts when I say "youtube like".
- xeonmc 10mo ago
  could potentially build it as an Atproto appview, everybody publishes their blog feed url on their PDS and the appview pulls updates from the firehose based on your recommendation preference.
Animats 10mo ago
What I want, as a user experience, is something akin to TikTok. That makes more sense with TikTok frivolous content than with RSS feeds. If you've got Reuters, the BBC, AP and New York Times RSS feeds coming in, you need something that's more content aware and will group items together by subject.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

224 points by salmon 10mo ago

> I want to sit somewhere and passively consume random small creators content, then upvote some of that content and the service should show that more often to other users. That's it. No advertising, no collecting tons of user data about me, just a very simple "I have 15 minutes to kill before the next meeting, show me some random stuff." In other words consume things for free and don’t support the small content creators work. Sounds very similar to what the AI companies are doing, consuming RSS feeds and not paying it back to the small creators, but when we are doing it, it is okay because we are not AI companies. hmmm.

yourboirusty 10mo ago
AI companies hoover up the data, dump it in a giant pile and never tell you the source of it. This extension literally just redirects you to the website. If the small creator has ads on that website, they're going to get paid. They're going to get the exposure.
tclancy 10mo ago
Are you complaining about this project or RSS in general? Because your complaint applies to both. I loved the era of RSS readers. Maybe I never sent anyone money but it was never the point. That was a way to feel properly connected to an Internet stranger, to stay up on what was going on and what they thought. It doesn’t have to be financial remuneration at the end of every flow chart. "It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.
- manuelmoreale 10mo ago
  > That was a way to feel properly connected to an Internet stranger, to stay up on what was going on and what they thought. I think too many people have forgotten that this is by far one of the best quality of the internet, especially the more personal one. There does not need to be a financial exchange. Sometimes it’s enough to share content and read content others have shared.
oersted 10mo ago
You are putting words in their mouth. There is no reason why such an RSS app wouldn’t link to the original source instead of scraping it. The app doesn’t need to be a central source of monetization for the creators either, that’s usually the source of all these problems. The app can monetize their aggregation and curation services as they wish, and the individual creators sites can monetize their contribution as they wish. Be it ads, subscriptions, donations or anything else, as usual.
Telemakhos 10mo ago
The dream of consuming free content is really a throwback to the 90's way of thinking about an open web as a public space where anyone can freely access files that are published, as "published" meant "freely available." When YouTube made publishing something monetizable and guarded by DRM (look at all the trouble yt-dlp has been going through lately), that open web lost a lot of steam. Social media companies monetized discovery and surfacing through user data collection, and also undercut some of the desire to publish—once your basic info was on Facebook, having a personal web page became much less important. As having personal hosting became less and less the norm, publishing power concentrated in the hands of fewer companies (like YouTube) that were set up to monetize content and built the expectation of pecuniary compensation for "content creation," where the 1990's open web publishers were happy just being noticed and appreciated. The 1990's were a long time ago and are never coming back, because the past exists only as memory.
- manuelmoreale 10mo ago
  The spirit of the 90s is still here. There are still many, many people who are happy to have a space on the web and share what they’re passionate about or what is in their heads simply because they enjoy the process. It’s not an all-or-nothing scenario. The two things can coexist. Some people will pursuit monetization, others are happy to share for the sake of sharing. It comes down to individual choices.
  - mrandish 10mo ago
    > The spirit of the 90s is still here "Dream of the '90s" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4hShMEk1Ew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4hShMEk1Ew)
    - manuelmoreale 10mo ago
      So funny that if I click the link I get a “not available in your country”
Devasta 10mo ago
When I run a red light it's wrong, but when a fire truck does it it's ok? Really makes you think.
- colesantiago 10mo ago
  Poor attempt to refute my point. When was the last time you supported a content creator that has an RSS feed?

PaulHoule 10mo ago

My YOShInOn reader basically looks like this. It takes a few 1000 up/down judgements to make good content-based recs [1], a reader that does collaborative filtering probably learns faster. [1] train a BERT+SVM classifer to predict my judgements, create 20 k-Means clusters to get some diversity, take the top N from each cluster, blend in a certain fraction of randoms to keep it honest. The clusters are unsupervised and identify big interest areas such as programming, sports, climate change, advanced manufacturing, anime, without putting labels on the clusters -- the clusters do change from run to run but so what. If I really wanted a stable classification I would probably start with clusters, give them names, merge/split a little, and make a training set to supervised classifier to those classes.

lexoj 10mo ago

The way I have made RSS more fun is by adding local LLM functionalities[0] and push notifications. (that can notify me when something I expect to happen, happens) [0] https://github.com/piqoni/matcha https://github.com/piqoni/matcha

PurpleRamen 10mo ago

> I rarely want to read all of a websites content from beginning to end I get the impression this person is using RSS reader wrong. Or is there really a culture of people you are using RSS like a youtube-channel, consuming everything from beginning to end? For me the purpose of RSS is to get the newest headlines, choose the interesting articles and skip the rest. This means there is a limited list of items to check each day, and a finishing line. > The whole appeal of TikTok, for those who haven't wasted hours of their lives on it, is that I get served content based on an algorithm that determines what I might think is useful or fun. But TikTok is even worse. It's an endless stream of content, pressuring you constantly, always pushing you on the "just one more"-train. How is that even better? This all reads more like this person should use a readlater-list, not a different RSS reader.

GCUMstlyHarmls 10mo ago
When I used RSS, a hundred years ago, I certainly got anxiety from my NetNewsWire badge showing 10, then 100, then 10,000 unread articles. If I used it today, I would simply turn off the badge and tell it to mark everything 2+ days old as read. But certainly, at a time I did approach it as a "I should read everything on these websites". I was also young and an idiot, some of that has changed now.
- garciasn 10mo ago
  I, like many, was a heavy Google Reader user. I would have it show me the headlines and then, when interested, I would look at the blurb when I expanded the item. If that piqued my interest further, I would dig into the actual article. I have a problem with 'unreads' and I'm INBOX 0 and I keep all of my phone notifications at 0 at all times. I would do the same w/Google Reader. But; if there was something that kept surfacing old content as 'new', I would disable that feed or work to fix it before it ended up in GR. I miss GR.
- N3mor 10mo ago
  My Inoreader became unmanageable and reminded me a lot of the reason I quit using Gmail: over 100k emails to go through in one lifetime isn't worth the trouble.

dan_h 10mo ago

I've felt similarly about RSS for a while now--I've made a ton of attempts to build my giant collection of subscriptions but always just burn out on maintaining it. Another issue is when I try to get anyone even slightly non-technical to use RSS they bounce off immediately; it sadly just seems too complex/too much overhead for a large number of users. I've been trying to build a site/app that adds some features mentioned in this post ("upvoting" based on views, tiktok-style video experience in the app, etc), but it's still very much a WIP and doesn't exactly fix the complexity problems yet. Still, I get encouraged seeing more projects like the OPs that hopefully bring about some sort of RSS resurgence. [0] https://jesterengine.com https://jesterengine.com

latexr 10mo ago
> I've made a ton of attempts to build my giant collection of subscriptions but always just burn out on maintaining it. Seems to me your problem lies in this part: > giant collection Don’t add so much that you can’t deal with it. Concentrate on infrequently updated sources. Any news website, for example, is too much and shouldn’t be in your reader. A small creator or YouTube channel from whom you want to see (almost) everything does go in. If you ever feel overwhelmed, you have too many feeds and should remove every single one you don’t feel is absolutely valuable. Exceptions can be made if e.g. you were on vacation and never checked the reader. In that case, mark as read instead of removing. If you ever find yourself regularly skipping the content from a feed without reading, remove it then and there. If you’re not consuming at least 80% (made up number, adapt to yourself) of posts, it does not belong in your feed reader.
- aaravchen 10mo ago
  Doubling down on this, get a Reader that let's you filter, and do so judiciously. I have some feeds where I only allow thru items with specific categories. Others I have dozens of filters for "spam". And some I just had to give up on because they enshittified their feed to inhibit differentiation of junk/sponsored/spam content from real content. Personally I just self-hosted a personal FreshRSS instance, but you can also get a lot of similar features from a paid Inoreader account.
10mo ago

brador 10mo ago

Skimfeed to the rescue (once again). https://skimfeed.com https://skimfeed.com

basedrum 10mo ago
What is this? I can't find any information about the site

throw0101d 10mo ago

People often use "RSS" as a generic term for a web/news feed: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed But if someone will is actually going to implement a feed, should it be (actual) RSS, or Atom (or JSON Feed)? Are there particular pros/cons/trade-offs for each? I know that for podcasts we're currently basically "suck" with at least providing RSS (even if there are also other options): * https://podcasters.apple.com/4115-technical-updates-for-hosting-providers https://podcasters.apple.com/4115-technical-updates-for-host...

latexr 10mo ago
> But if someone will is actually going to implement a feed, should it be (actual) RSS, or Atom (or JSON Feed)? I’ve been doing JSON feeds exclusively since it came out. Support in readers is pretty good (Universal? Near universal?) and they’re super simple to generate and consume programatically with standard tools in current mainstream programming languages. When adding to my feed reader, I’ll take whatever and don’t care¹. When generating it myself or consuming via a script, 100% JSON feed. ¹ In practice that means RSS or JSON. I’ve been using RSS for some two decades and never cared for Atom. I don’t have anything against it, I just never saw the need.

SCdF 10mo ago

More power to you obviously. But I have mixed feelings about this. There is so much information that curation is inevitable. Sure. But I don't want that curation to be "fun". I don't _want_ tiktok in my life, or really anything whose goal is "engagement". I don't want time killers. One of the reasons for getting back into RSS for me was to have a direct feed to authors I'm interested in. But I understand that quickly can become unmanageable. When that time comes, I think I'd be interested in the curation being about compressing content down, not expanding it out. That is to say: use the algorithm to select from a large pool of what you're interested in, down to a manageable static size (like a weekly newsletter), as opposed to using it to infinitely expand outward to keep engaging you.

nyoki 10mo ago

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jandrusk 10mo ago

He clearly hasn't met elfeed that you run from within Emacs; I've used all of the major RSS readers over the years and elfeed is unbelievably versatile as are most things in Emacs, but learning Emacs might be worth it just for elfeed and org-mode.

N3mor 10mo ago

I love this - thank you for your work! Stumble Upon was one of those sites that I trully enjoyed. I'm glad to see something similar. I wish someone would develop a spiritual successor to DIGG.

turoczy 10mo ago
Totally agree. Very much a throwback to StumbleUpon in the best way. And more directed given that we get to choose the focus of the content.
- mukti 10mo ago
  You can kinda get a similar experience to StumbleUpon with marginalia's explore mode - https://marginalia-search.com/explore https://marginalia-search.com/explore
al_borland 10mo ago
Digg has recently re-launched. It’s in beta currently. I got in a couple weeks ago.
- N3mor 10mo ago
  No way! Thank you, will go search right now.
- GaryBluto 10mo ago
  Unfortunately it just looks to be a Reddit clone now.
  - al_borland 10mo ago
    It's a joint effort between Kevin Rose (Digg founder) and Alexis Ohanian (Reddit co-founder). There is definitely some Reddit influence, but Reddit was also heavily influenced by Digg to start with. Listening to the users, it's hard to know which way it's going to go. There are a lot of people who don't want it to be the new Reddit and want to make sure the same problems aren't repeated. At the same time, some Reddit culture is coming over (with a bit of push back) and some people seem to want Digg to have all the stuff they liked from Reddit, which would end up as a Reddit clone. I'm hoping it will be successful, as there needs to be a better Reddit alternative than what exists now and the Fediverse isn't getting the job done. Only time will tell.

bjord 10mo ago

just a heads up: the verification emails land in spam

bjord 10mo ago

had to uninstall this right away. among other things, every key shortcut is already in use elsewhere (and they cannot be changed) for reference: alt+shift+s, alt+shift+u, and alt+shift+d

mr_windfrog 10mo ago

Does anyone know if there are any services or software nowadays that can replace the traditional RSS format?

jlturner 10mo ago

Reminds me of stumbleupon, which despite taking you to a random page, was excellent because most of the pages were worth viewing.

vandyswa 10mo ago

To me, it feels like most feed readers are made by people who don't use RSS, and just exercise their feed reader on a few feeds. I seem to be at 211 feeds with (currently) 13,000 cached entries, organized across a couple dozen categories. A reader where you'll click into the body under a headline only 1-5% of the time is a totally different beast.

miladyincontrol 10mo ago
Too true. Not that every user has to be some sort of power user but its rather telling when a reader can hardly scale to a modest amount of articles, has no filtering mechanisms, or methods for organizing otherwise.

spamfilter247 10mo ago

Over the holidays I intend to build (or fork NetNewsWire TBH) an RSS reader app that uses the Apple on-device models (or BYOK) to summarize and prioritize articles - my very own personalized algorithmic feed. Curious to see how it turns out. Anyone else already tried something similar?

8organicbits 10mo ago

> I need to sort stuff into categories so that you get more stuff in genres you like I'm also trying to figure out that problem. The challenge I've seen is that RSS feeds rarely use the category field. I did notice people doing hashtags in the description field (maybe they POSSE to Mastodon or X) so I parse those out in a crawler I built [1], but theres still so much uncategorized content. In my personal feed I aim to only subscribe to feeds I plan to read, so I hit "inbox zero" on my RSS feed every day, reading about 20% of the content. What this means is that I unsubscribe from anyone who posts too often. I think there's a negative correlation between posting frequency and my desire to read the content. People who blog every day are mostly writing uninteresting content and that will fill your feed unless you balance it out. [1] https://alexsci.com/blog/rss-categories/ https://alexsci.com/blog/rss-categories/

toomuchtodo 10mo ago
I use https://karakeep.app/ https://karakeep.app/ to subscribe to RSS feeds; not only can I view the content in the app, but it also captures the content and stores an archive of it. It uses generative AI to create tags (but also supports full text search of everything archived). You can also create RSS feeds with criteria, with it acting as a bus for your content; perhaps it can enrich your RSS feeds while you continue to use your existing RSS reader. I hope this is helpful for your problem statement.
mk12 10mo ago
I have a few different types of content on my website and wanted to offer both individual feeds and a combined feed, so I was disappointed that nothing seems to support the category tag. I settled for prefixing the titles in the combined feed, e.g. "[Blog]" for blog posts.

Zaskoda 10mo ago

> I also don't really care if the content is chronological Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. It depends on the content. And that's one thing I've longed to see solved in RSS feed readers as well as podcasts. However, I have not been able to imagine a UX that solves my problems, so there's that.

Isofarro 10mo ago

The idea that you have to read everything is a reader UI design flaw. By presenting feeds as an inbox, it gives the impression of RSS feeds being email. And that's not right, it can be, but it doesn't have to be. The TikTok model is about scrolling, skipping, being selective. RSS readers should be treated the same way. "River of news" is an RSS thing. You dive in when stuff interests you, and you let what doesn't interest you flow by. Twitter is basically an RSS-like reader with 120 character limits on posts. You subscribe to interesting people, and their little posts drop on your homepage in reverse chronological order. There's no inbox or unread items. You just scroll past to the next item that interests you. Yeah, turning off unread-items counters, definitely. The value of RSS is in what you chose to read. It's not an anti-library. And if something is really great, a good subscription list means someone you're reading will likely mention it and link to it.

andai 10mo ago
I went through this thought process of creating a mechanical system to find interesting content all across the web for me based on my preferences that it learned. And I started thinking about the supreme importance of high quality data sources... realizing there's a power law there, where I could just subscribe to a few high quality people... and ended up reinventing RSS from first principles. And then instead of embeddings we have tags... Honestly I think we nailed it in 2005 :)
BeetleB 10mo ago
This is an insight I realized several years ago: I want RSS, but I don't want to track what I've read and haven't. I solved my problem by writing a bot for each RSS feed - it would mirror posts in Diaspora. I would then subscribe to those bots. These days it's Mastodon, but same idea. I just scroll and browse a bit, with nothing in the system telling me I have 573 unread posts.
port11 10mo ago
I prefer the inbox to the river. It's not that difficult to scan my (categorised) inbox and “mark all as read” for a given feed. But then again, I don't subscribe to too many things, and quickly unsubscribe from feeds that publish too often. There is a blog for fathers that publishes every day. No, thanks, I need to digest what I've read last week.

memonkey 10mo ago

This makes me so happy. I love, love, LOVED StumbleUpon. I was actually just thinking how I'd love to rebuild it.

dundercoder 10mo ago

I would love to use RSS to disseminate updates I’m working on, especially to my family. But my family wouldn’t know what RSS was, let alone use a reader. Are there ways my family could already be using RSS and not know? I don’t want to try to get them to install yet another app or use another service because the friction will prevent them from doing it.

greenwallnorway 10mo ago
What about email? Email is a cousin to RSS - everyone has their email feed. Senders push to an email inbox, rather than readers pulling feeds into an inbox.

TechSquidTV 10mo ago

I had just shared my new RSS app the other day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46134023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46134023 I didn't get any traction here, but on Lemmy there was a decent discussion about the issues with discovering RSS feeds. They would surely love this.

mcdonje 10mo ago

This concept is begging to be built on atproto or solid.

agcat 10mo ago

This is the best thing i read on internet today! Cant wait to try once its released for google chrome

charcircuit 10mo ago

Another flaw is that it requires the site to have an RSS feed. Especially with LLMs it should be possible to check any website on the web for new articles.

jama211 10mo ago

This is amazing, thank you for this!

throwaway888666 10mo ago

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627467 10mo ago

Feeed[0] nailed the ux for a rss reader (and other type of feeds) by having a local algorithm that keeps the main feed diverse yet short no anxiety of unread count. Unfortunately it's iOS only and I have not seen open source RSS readers on android that take similar approach. Many support a "today" tab which does help in keeping the task of catching up more focused but if you follow high volume feeds that post a lot you end up having to scroll alot to see variety of content. [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/feeeed-rss-reader-and-more/id1600187490 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/feeeed-rss-reader-and-more/id1...

desireco42 10mo ago

I had similar idea long time ago during StumbleUpon and it was called OneRandomSite... It was meant to help founders promote their startups or something. Didn't work out for me.

andai 10mo ago

>Auth is a JWT, which actually was a pain and I regret doing it. I don't know why I keep reaching for JWTs, they're a bad user experience and I should stop. What is this about? Bad for the user or the dev?

reimuwu 10mo ago

An important benefit of RSS is that it isn’t influenced by recommendation algorithms. It won’t keep pushing content from a single domain; instead, you can read articles from a wide range of fields. What the article describes feels more like a return to the traditional, linear information-flow model.

emschwartz 10mo ago

Give Scour a try! It ranks articles by how closely related they are to your interests. You can import a set of RSS feeds or scour all 15,000+ sources. I built it because I wanted to find the good articles among noisy feeds like HN Newest. I've also avoided RSS readers in the past because of that feeling of having thousands of unread emails. https://scour.ing https://scour.ing

efilife 10mo ago
Very cool! Is there a way to blacklist some feeds?
- emschwartz 10mo ago
  Glad you think so! There isn't a way to block feeds (yet), but you can subscribe to specific feeds, which basically acts like creating your own list of allowed feeds. Separately, I'm going to be working on letting you exclude content from certain domains (which was requested in https://feedback.scour.ing/33 https://feedback.scour.ing/33).

loughnane 10mo ago

I use miniflux and like it. Still, this post got me thinking. I’d like to try out a feature where by self-hosted instance learns what I like and highlights relevant posts in my feed. Then I can go through the other ones later. Main things are that I would control what feeds go in and there is no monetization incentive since it’s self-hosted.

James_K 10mo ago

It's interesting that people with Atom feeds still call them RSS.

renegat0x0 10mo ago

For me capturing list of RSS sources is fun https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds But i do not check all 3k sources regularly

65 10mo ago

This is a hard problem to solve. Basically what people want is an addictive way to consume high quality text. I have made my own RSS readers with things like filtering, creating feeds from pages (e.g. the APNews.com home page), rendering the page itself with custom CSS/Javascript, etc. Except I don't really use my RSS feed I spent months making because the firehose of random articles just does not work. I like The Atlantic as much as everyone, but do I want to read _every_ article? No. Why is Reddit and Hacker News addictive? Because of the social component of it. So the author is on the right track with the insight to make it more like StumbleUpon. But... why bother when you can just go read Reddit or Hacker News? RSS readers are fundamentally lonely. The non-social solution to "addictive internet text" to me is the research part of finding information you're curious about. I frequently will read something or think of something and go down this Wikipedia rabbit hole, trying to find more information. This is way more engaging than reading a random news article. The question is how to create discovery that leads to more discovery, where the user can find the information themselves (something like how people go down the Ancestry DNA rabbit holes). This way you don't need a social hook to build something "addictive." But how to get there is something I'm still trying to figure out.

socalgal2 10mo ago

I don't know if it would work, but, I imagined a Youtube like inteface to blogs. The front page would be algorithmically selected blog posts. You could "Subscribe" and like you can with channels on Youtube. You could mark a post as "read", "not interested", "never recommend this channel" etc.... Note: I specifically mean a grid of thumbnails to posts when I say "youtube like".

xeonmc 10mo ago
could potentially build it as an Atproto appview, everybody publishes their blog feed url on their PDS and the appview pulls updates from the firehose based on your recommendation preference.

Animats 10mo ago

What I want, as a user experience, is something akin to TikTok. That makes more sense with TikTok frivolous content than with RSS feeds. If you've got Reuters, the BBC, AP and New York Times RSS feeds coming in, you need something that's more content aware and will group items together by subject.

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