alt Hacker NewsMaking RSS More Fun
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> 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.
People often use "RSS" as a generic term for a web/news 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-host...
> 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.
I love RSS projects!
I created powRSS - (https://powrss.com) and lettrss - (https://lettrss.com)
powRSS is a public RSS feed aggregator for indie websites.
lettrss sends a chapter a day of a public domain book to your RSS feed.
Feel free to check them out!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reminds me of stumbleupon, which despite taking you to a random page, was excellent because most of the pages were worth viewing.
Does anyone know if there are any services or software nowadays that can replace the traditional RSS format?
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)
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
just a heads up: the verification emails land in spam
> 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.
> 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.