alt Hacker NewsI ditched the algorithm for RSS
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My buddy will soon offer an RSS reader. I will post it here.
Yes, you can create an RSS feed from a Youtube Channel. You can can create an RSS feed from Reddit.
You can't to my best knowledge create an RSS feed anymore from Twitter
Newsletter to RSS: https://kill-the-newsletter.com/
More stuff:
Blogs & RSS https://rssfeedasap.com/ https://code.rosaelefanten.org/rssparser.lisp/dir?ci=tip
This one you have to pay. I am considering it. Some RSS feeds don't work on my TinyTinyRSS. I think cloudflare, like always, is killing it:
https://politepol.com/en/prices
PS: If you have an idea for a RSS reader domain, please suggest.
I am a big proponent of RSS, but I think that it suffers from a lack of imagination these days, for example, the "quality filter" approach mentioned in this article is not very useful imo.
The biggest cost of RSS feed items as a consumer is figuring out whether something is worth reading. A lot of feeds these days don't provide anything useful in the body to make a determination on this, and others just dump the entire contents in the body, which means you're wasting a bunch of time reading N% of something until you realize you're not interested in it and it can be skipped.
In addition to this, RSS feeds tend to be structured to just throw everything at you, regardless of the topics you are interested in.
For a few years I have been publishing my own topic-specific feeds[1] for others to consume where I fill the body with my own personal highlights from the source, with a link through to the source (ie. the things I found interesting, the "hooks" that give a quick signal to a consumer if this might be something they want to invest time in reading). They have a couple of die-hard consumers, but ultimately this really a case of a niche within a niche.
I wish there were more feeds like this for me as a consumer, but unfortunately I get the feeling that this idea will never really become popular enough to catch on widely as RSS becomes less and less relevant to the mainstream.
[1]: my software development topic RSS feed for example: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development
I love RSS. I use RSS daily. I use link-aggregation websites like HN to find interesting authors and subscribe to any RSS feeds that they have. Highlights from my reader sync automatically into my Obsidian vault. It's great.
But I know I, and everyone else posting in this thread, are in the minority. It's clear that most people prefer algorithmic drip in a walled garden. There's a reason everyone flocks to those platforms when RSS superseded them. I don't think I need to re-hash why those platforms are bad for the health of the internet and society as a whole.
So what can be done at a structural level to fight this? What can be done to incentivize people to leave these algorithmic drip feeds to reverse this trend?
The one thing that kills me is the number of "modern" blogs/sites that don't offer rss or atom is really frustrating. If I really like your site, please let me be an engaged reader and let me know when you have something valuable to say again!
I've even resorted to adding features in my personal feedreader to seek out common feed locations or APIs that common blogging tools leave on mostly unnoticed.
Note that (US) governments in particular offer tons of RSS feeds.
Want to keep tabs on what Congress is up to? https://www.govinfo.gov/rss/bills.xml
Want to follow SEC press releases? https://www.sec.gov/news/pressreleases.rss
In WA state and want to follow bills related to schools? https://app.leg.wa.gov/bi/report/topicalindex/?biennium=2025...
The federal government has a big list at https://www.govinfo.gov/feeds. Your county might also have one (e.g. Spokane has https://www.spokanecounty.org/rss.aspx).
I will say something that’s potentially controversial, but — the problem with current times is the abundance of content. RSS worked for me in 2000s, because more or less, there were less interesting content/people writing things for public. Most decent things would get into people’s feeds, and generally everyone was happy. I can’t really see it being feasible nowadays, unless something (reads: algo) filters things that I’m definitely not interested in. Which, obviously, creates a whole different problem of siloed echo chambers. It becomes even a bigger problem when you try to move the conversations to the real world, because your friends wouldn’t have read the same things as your tailored algo recommended to you.
There’s also assumed-financial-incentives, which ruins most of blogs/content for me. That’s probably my cynicism, and maybe I just grew up, but every time I see any write up, my first question is how this person gets financial benefits from it. I just never thought that far until 2015.
Sorry for ranting, and obviously I have no solution to this problem.
For those implementing feeds, "RSS" seems to get a lot of mentions, but how much of it is RSS-as-such and how much is "RSS" as a generic term for "feed", with Atom also perhaps being implemented:
RSS is a fantastic way of getting new articles, videos, updates etc from various sources that post 1-2 times per day at max. Getting news from News websites is hell, I had to do a LOT of filtering on Freshrss to make the news category less overwhelming. And if you wanna get to "inbox zero" you’ll spend a lot of time scrolling.
I've been building a site that automatically shows RSS feeds for the front page of Hacker News.
Very interested in hearing feedback!
If you click on the user icon and then login, I'll add you to the list and send you a once a day email with all the RSS feeds it found (see the sample by clicking the link inside the login dialog).
I have been collecting RSS feeds for the last few weeks using it (using self-hosted FreshRSS). Future versions I plan to offer a way to tell it to use your own feed reader, but you are welcome to create an account on my FreshRSS instance and save them there. For example, when I use my mobile phone, I wish it would send it to the Android RSS app Readrops using an Android intent. FreshRSS has a Google RSS Reader (RIP) compatible feed (?) so it works with any phone AFAIK.
I've definitely found it interesting to start my reading using RSS instead of randomly browsing. I am fascinated by who publishes RSS these days. Substack is pretty great that they offer RSS for every site.
I do see that I need an extra "introspection" to curate other articles in the feed. Often I'll subscribe and not have interest in many of the other articles, but if I subscribe it usually means there is at least one other good one. I'm sad the Hindenburg Research RSS feed is ending.
RSS is indeed a fun way to get closer to smart people and see fewer "advertising" posts.
I remember the period where I switched from the Something Awful forums to Reddit. Back in the day, you had to dig through a bunch of stuff that was bad to get to the "comedy gold". But even the bad stuff was sometimes comically bad. On Reddit, all the "gold" was always at the top, so there's always something "good", but it was generally lackluster and not quite it. Still it made me lazy and I switched (not that I read Reddit today).
Ditch the algorithm by using or building a custom feed in BlueSky. I'm interested in networking stuff so I built a BlueSky feed that anyone can use.
Apologies for promoting my project again (did this in at least 2 other threads related to RSS), but I'm weirdly proud of it: I'm curating a list of human-written blogs on my blog reader/discovery/search engine called Minifeed: https://minifeed.net/blogs/
There's an OPML export available as well: https://minifeed.net/blogs/opml.xml
RSS and the lack of algorithms may sound nice, until you subscribe to the feed of a couple of media outlets, and see the content of the independent creators that post less often get buried under a truckload of "stuff you're vaguely interested in".
BlueSky kinda addresses this issue with Feeds. I follow the people that post at a frequency that I know won't flood my main feed, then I have pinned a separate feed for news, another for photos of foxes and one for photos of cats. The app randomly inserts posts from those feeds into the main one (if you have enbaled "Show samples from your saved feeds" in https://bsky.app/settings/following-feed), so as I'm scrolling my "Following" feed, I also get some of that content, while keeping the main usable.
I've been using FreshRSS for about 3 years now, with pretty much the same sources of feeds as the author.
The main pro is that the signal to noise ratio is incalculably better than social media. It's trivial to obtain updates you're actually interested in when you control the filters.
The main con is that even though it has replaced social media, it's still not fulfilling, in the same way social media wasn't fulfilling. It's still a stream of often entertaining but mostly irrelevant information.
Wanted to share a repo I created last week to help add support for new RSS feeds: https://github.com/olshansk/rss-feeds/
Add support for Paul Graham's outdated RSS Feed. OpenAI research. Etc...
Leave a request or a star!
Also wrote a full blog post about it here: https://olshansky.substack.com/p/no-rss-feed-no-problem-usin...
I started using RSS in ~2007, and I haven't stopped. I think i used thunderbird first, then google reader, then feedly, then a self-hosted freshrss for the last few years.
I have a graveyard of old blogs and webcomics whose URLs I can't bear to delete. I have a crapton of feeds still happily churning out articles.
RSS seems to be making a come back. Just a couple of days back saw this post going viral on X about RSS https://x.com/0xglitchbyte/status/1878495012800897229
I use inoreader - https://www.inoreader.com/ as a feed aggregator and I absolutely love it. I use it every day to highlight, tag and search for information. I'd recommend it to anyone.
So this is why I built Digest (https://usedigest.com) -- the algorithms have stopped showing things of interest (my entire Instagram feed is full of memes instead of my friends posts), or things that cause you to doom scroll. We use RSS wherever we can to fetch data from sources to build your personalized digest, but if there is an API available we will use that too.
I sometimes struggled domains that incorrectly set up RSS feeds. Some were blocked behind some walled gardens. Sometimes 403 status was returned.
While tiny tiny RSS is nice, I also wrote interface to read URLs from the net. https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy
This gives me clean data of web page, title, description, etc, which I can further integrate into my own RSS reader.
I've recently launched Mashups.io - my own Yahoo Pipes tool.
And using the tool, I've been filtering, changing and tweaking various RSS feeds along the way.
I absolutely love RSS and absolutely loved Yahoo Pipes. For me, that got me into mashing up stuff on the web.
For devs, RSS feeds also provide a very easy way to source data. No need to get API keys and tokens, it gives you real life dataset immediately and easily. And from there, you can create tools.
> Want a youtube channel in your RSS feed? Just copy the channel's URL and subscribe to it in your reader.
You can also subscribe to playlists, by subscribing to
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=PLAYLIST_ID
Same! I'm creating telegram channels for topics using https://github.com/Rongronggg9/RSS-to-Telegram-Bot
That's how I found out about this post https://t.me/best_hn/99
Newsfeeds are really nice, I utilize them now 20 Years or so (RIP old Bloglines). But it's a bit sad that there is no really good newsreader for it. I also used to use Usenet in the 90s and early 2000, so my view on this is a bit different, maybe. But all the feedreaders I know are either very limited in abilities, or very cumbersome to use for more advanced features. It's really strange how there seem many technophile people are using and advocating for RSS, yet all the tools are more barebone and very simple.
I've been trying to get back into RSS recently. The problem I keep having is the dramatic weight difference between a news site and a personal blog; I'm occasionally interested in what the news site posts, but its volume is so overbearing that it's all I see in my feed. I just walk away with FOMO every time.
I'm currently thinking about trying Feedly AI as an algorithm that could surface good content for me.
Indeed owning the filter algorithm is the killer functionality. There is a torrent of RSS feeds still out there (pun), but they are not usable in firehose form. For example KDE's Akregator is an otherwise capable desktop feed reader that can handle large feed collections but its filtering capabilities are zero. Abandonware quiterss used to have at least some basic functionality. This is an area where a community open source project could have huge impact.
If I remember correctly "the algorithm" as a concept of feed curation has been introduced by facebook ( or youtube?), long after RSS was used by blogs and podcasts. Heck, even Twitter used to have an RSS feed they killed a looong time ago [1]
I also remember that in the beginning I was chuckling to myself "who on earth would want to have their feed curated by a black box whose target function cannot be checked? If I wanted that, I could just keep reading a single newspaper." - turns out I was very wrong and lots of people seem to prefer just getting washed in a steady stream of somewhat internally consistent worldview.
Would be really nice to see RSS make a comeback
[1] https://sociable.co/social-media/twitter-rss-feed-creator/
I used to use Google Reader a lot. I used to love reading through the feed but once Google killed it, I did not continue the RSS collections. Perhaps its time I get back to finding a new reader.
Heuristics for picking the most valued content is not always good. I see some posts on niche subs without much engagement, but align with my interests. Perhaps I can let a local LLM prioritize the feed based on my history or preference which I can tune as per my requirements rather than some black-box algorithm
Happy user of NetNewsWire on macOS for many, many years (including following HN, and a number YT channels).
I've done this. Built a whole RSS app, where I can use RSS feeds to serve me the web page itself, then customize the web page with my own styling if I want. I can also use non-RSS pages in my RSS reader and show once a day or however often I want.
The problem is with discovery, though (e.g. getting new information you wouldn't get with an RSS feed, such as YouTube videos). I still think you'd need to make your own algorithm based on your own parameters so you can get the benefits of discovery while also controlling what you see.
I've been using Feeeed[0] for a while, and it's pretty great. It sort of has the 'algorithmic selection' vibe, but it's fundamentally a feed (!) of content/articles from sources you select.
Mostly mind is video games related, so I have sites like Polygon, Nintendo Life, IGN, Rock Paper Shotgun, etc., but I've also added a few subreddits like /r/pcgaming and /r/dragonage. It also occasionally suggests other sources to me; it might suggest Gematsu because I seem to be interested in industry news, it's suggesting /r/gaming right now "because you follow eurogamer", and it's suggested a few YouTube channels as well. All of the suggestions have been relevant, all of them have been small cards sat in my feed being relatively unobtrusive and easy to scroll past or look into.
It also supports adding other random stuff into your feed, like your Birthdays calendar from your contacts, and a few other things that I don't remember because they're not relevant.
Techcrunch link because the website seems to be down.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/11/feeeed-is-a-reader-app-tha...
I started doing this a couple of years ago. In fact, I found this post when going through my RSS after breakfast.
My biggest problem so far is that the RSS data is often very lacking (body, images, etc) and that there are still lots of content I'd like to filter out by sentiment. Like if I follow a technology outlet I don't want to know that there's an absolute steal on Sonos Arc on Bestbuy because I'm generally not into consuming and I live in northern Europe.
I have high hopes for ML to populate the RSS data and filter content like this. I want to experiment with this.
This is tangential but maybe some of the crowd here has wisdom: are there any apps (iOS or Android) that are built for RSS but have a good experience for just photos? What I mean by this is an app that is more or less Instagram-esque in browsing behavior, but just backed by RSS feeds with no comments/likes/etc.
I've been meaning to write about this but I recently found that I missed having one central place to share photos with people when I travel/build things/etc. When I thought about it further, I realized that I don't want the social media bits there - I just wanted the photos, self hosted, in something I could brand myself. This also solved for another problem I had, which is that I wanted to share my stuff across n platforms and got very tired of having to constantly provide any text context when doing so. Open graph tags work really well for "write once, share anywhere".
I have a working prototype up at https://photos.rymc.io/ and so far it's been great. I'll probably open source the stuff this year. It's not necessarily groundbreaking but I do think it's a decent approach; uploading auto-scrubs specific metadata, handles generating various previews, etc. Very easy to customize and just tries to do one thing well.
Notably, any page on it can be "followed" via RSS by just requesting it in the right format, e.g:
JSONFeed: https://photos.rymc.io/?format=json Atom: https://photos.rymc.io/?format=atom RSS: https://photos.rymc.io/?format=rss
It can be tag-specific too, so if someone's only interested in my travel photos, e.g:
JSONFeed: https://photos.rymc.io/tag/travel/?format=json
Back to the original point of the comment though: I'd like to find an app that I could give to e.g my dad and just let him browse things and see what I'm up to. None of the RSS apps I've tried fit well here though, with ReadKit on iOS coming somewhat close but it's a clunky experience.
If need be I'll just build my own at some point, it's not exactly rocket science... but it is time I could be doing other things. Anyone got any recs?
I never left RSS.
After Google Reader shut down paid for Feedly for a while before switching to self-hosted FreshRSS. (https://freshrss.org)
I'm not a web guy and I detest all forms of system administration, but I had no trouble setting it up on my host. I've got it configured to update its feeds one per hour from 6AM to 8PM. It just does its thing, and works fine on both desktop and mobile.
Great post. Given me a bunch of ideas to add to my RSS app at https://feedgrab.net!
If you want an RSS feed of your YouTube video subscriptions, I made an app for that:
https://yt-better-subs.web.app/
I went through quite the hassle to get the app's oauth scopes approved with Google so that it can keep your subscriptions up-to-date as you add or remove YouTube channel subscriptions.
Not a fan of RSS, but put a serious thoughts why it's useful at conceptual level, and came up with two simple apps
- github.com/trending daily, weekly, monthly group by 10 programming languages i'm familiar with. will add aggregator private upvote, hiding and 140 chars comment functionality
- grouped youtube channels by interests and tagged them in a cloud tag fashion - got RSS like feeds for ai, databases, c++, go, rust, robotics, etc topics, checking them them regularly on weekly and monthly, but no more doom scrolling or swipping next
Most interesting videos and repos has very few likes or views, and great depth. No way algo will push it up in my feed.
The result - no more time or interest to open up twitter, reddit or facebook feeds.
No stress. No feelings on "missing out"
50% of content correlates with the most trending topic on HN.
Thought to do HN weekly aggregation as a next step ... decided not to do
It's just a pleasure to use HN with comments section as its for me
I use https://theoldreader.com/ it's been reliable and trouble free since the death of google reader.
I even use it to catch popular hacker news stories: hnrss.org/newest?points=150
One thing I wish I could easily augment with RSS is the ability to send and discover webmentions. I would love to read something in my RSS feed, respond to it, and post a webmention back to the original author. I'd also like to be able to see in the RSS feed what other pages have posted webmentions to the page I'm reading.
I made my blog software support all feed types back in the day:
http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?rss
http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?atom
http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?json
http://sprout.rupy.se/feed (my own :P)
It's open-source: http://github.com/tinspin/sprout
Yes please, RSS is the true federated Internet for content distribution.
In case it's helpful / relevant for folks, wanted to share a few things I do:
* OPML is a format that bundles feeds together to share with others.
* I publish an automated list of the feeds I'm subscribed to on my blog. [1]
* I pay for Feedly ($50/year and I don't regret it) which has API access, and I use an Azure function to produce it. I have a blog post if you're interested in setting something like that up for yourself. [2]
[1]: https://seankilleen.com/reading-list/
[2]: https://seankilleen.com/2019/01/tutorial-reading-list-feedly...
You can also gain a lot of utility from your RSS feeds by using Hoarder [1] to auto tag items with AI for creating searchable archives, also to auto download feed content into a RAG for creating knowledge repos.
I'm going to plug my personal project here which is a weekly curated list of gaming content called The Gaming Pub - https://thegamingpub.com
I heavily use RSS to curate most of the content, and I believe it's one of the best ways to get news and articles without the bias of an algorithm.
My modus operandi for finding a non-obvious RSS feed is to check the Wayback Machine's list of saved URLs and search for "RSS", "feed", or "XML". That normally will find the feed as long as it exists.
I found this particularly true for Twitter/X
I haven't found anywhere else with the same quality of content/takes (purely from a philosophy/tech angle, politics aside), but there were too many videos in the feed
So I built a chrome extension to remove it, and my experience improved by a lot.
If anyone's interested (it's free):
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/remove-twitter-vide...
Just FYI, If you want FREE, synchronizing reader, be sure to checkout Vivaldi browser.
A good algorithm is a good thing. However what a good algorithm is for me is often different from what it is for those who maintain them. Outrage gets attention and sometimes it is needed, but there is a level of too much, and also a lot of outrage unfairly represents the issues and so it makes me mad even though if I understood the details I wouldn't be mad just concerned.
I want an algorithm that surfaces things of interest to me, then says "you have seen it all, go outside" (with an option of if I'm confined to a hospital bed to go on). Algorithm maintainers want me to keep scrolling for more ad dollars.