What does it feel like to read RSS feeds?

https://hamatti.org/posts/what-does-it-feel-like-to-read-rss-feeds/

by 8organicbits • 2 years ago

58 56 2 years ago

...the posts are (usually) longer form articles instead of short bits.

If I want superficial takes, I can get more than my fill of them IRL. I enjoy the internet precisely because it allows me to spend a few minutes reading what someone invested a few hours in writing (and had maybe even been thinking about for a few days beforehand?).

_xivi2• 2 years ago

> ...the posts are (usually) longer form articles instead of short bits.
If I want superficial takes, I can get more than my fill of them IRL

I'm confused, where did this assumption of low-quality come from?

Are you thinking of SEO spam articles? which targets mainstream search engines in order to increase ad views and revenue? Those type of websites are on a different spectrum and usually RSS-hostile to begin with.

Anyway, RSS is a standard, it's not limited (or related) to "superficial takes" you can use it to follow your favorite short-form content too.

0823498723498722• 2 years ago

You're probably confused because we agree: the low-quality stuff doesn't tend to wind up in RSS

(and if it does, it's easy to drop that feed)

senectus1• 2 years ago

His main points were:
You’re the curator
You decide what’s interesting
You have more control over what you read and how
It’s a fast and efficient way of reading a lot of web
It’s just better than the endless scroll of a social media feed

exactly

This is why I self host a freshrss session and I visit it a couple of times a day. I chew through about 1000 articles a day very quickly just actually consuming maybe a half dozen to twenty out of the lot.

I can see trends in the proliferation of particular stories or technology and I never feel like FOMO.

I dont use FB/insta/etc at all, I only ever visit X/twitter if I see a link posting to something in particular.paticular

It lets me control the firehose of news from the internet.

Kodiack• 2 years ago

I set up a self-hosted FreshRSS instance as well, and I feel the same benefits from it. I got back into RSS after Reddit pushed its API changes through, and it’s been so refreshing. I’m using social media a lot less now and those tingly FOMO feelings all but disappeared.

cpill• 2 years ago

I do it too but the trouble is that it's a fire hose of information. Some intelligent filtering would be nice, mixed with serendipity (some how)...

Hamatti6• 2 years ago

That's where the heavy pruning comes in. If there's too much coming in, it's important to get rid of the ones that are less important or most often skipped.

For me, the serendipity comes through discoveries inside the blog posts: people linking to other interesting blogs.

imiric2• 2 years ago

All the recommendation algorithm driven platforms tend to encourage active posting and discourage occasional participation.

This is an important point that is not mentioned enough.

The problem whenever a platform introduces an algorithm to decide what users see, by either promoting or penalizing submissions, is that it unavoidably leads to content that is created purposely to game that algorithm, which ultimately corrupts the user experience.

This happens not just with social media and video platforms, but with web search results as well. The vast majority of web content is now spam whose only purpose is to generate ad revenue. SEO is a more accepted practice, but it really shouldn't exist at all.

For search results there obviously needs to be some algorithm behind it, but this should be driven exclusively by delivering the most relevant results, and the only smart behavior should be spam detection. Google had solved this decades ago, yet they've created a global problem they can't, and likely have no interesting in solving. As far as investors are concerned, it's a legendary success story, and that's all that matters.

Hamatti6• 2 years ago

it unavoidably leads to content that is created purposely to game that algorithm, which ultimately corrupts the user experience.

This is the functionality that really drove me away from social platforms, other than Mastodon. I prefer human curation over automatic recommendations for a couple of reasons:

1) Human curation creates less suggestions which makes it more manageable to go through

2) If I trust the source of the recommendation and know what they like, I can adjust my trust in the recommendation itself

3) A friend telling me something they enjoy is not motivated by money

fxj2• 2 years ago

I highly recommend inoreader.com. It is like the old google reader on steroids. It is the first app I open in the morning to get my news and my personal feed consists of some 4000 single feeds from everything that I gathered on the internet. All nicely organized with filters and folders. It is a bessing for keeping up with youtube content, because all channels appear as single feeds that you can organize. You can put several single RSS feeds into a folder which presents itself again as a feed.

geekodour• 2 years ago

do you use the free one or pro?

_xivi2• 2 years ago

OP mentioned having 4000 feeds, inoreader free plan is limited 150 (afaik it's actually the most generous among similar services, eg: feedly is limited to 100)

fxj2• 2 years ago

I started with the free plan but after a while I realized that this is the news app that I use almost exclusively so I got the pro plan.

arthur-st• 2 years ago

Ditto on the recommendation, I’ve been using them since the 2013 launch.

Over the years, web has sadly become a bit more closed in terms of having accessible feeds and such. Firehosing is another problem, when some sites just offer one feed that has way too much in it.

But when it works, it works great. In addition to RSS, I also run newsletters, YouTube, and a few other things through it.

pflenker2• 2 years ago

RSS works great if the amount of content is manageable. The problem social media feeds (or any other feed for that matter) solve is curation/filtering. Hacker News does the Dame thing, albeit with different mechanisms than classical social media.

imiric2• 2 years ago

Why do you think social media feeds "solve" curation? They merely sort the content according to some predefined criteria, but you will still be overwhelmed by the stream, and likely miss a lot of content, just as you would if there was no algorithm at all.

That's all curation essentially is: sorting. Social media companies claim that this is a good thing since everyone's feed is personalized, but these are just empty platitudes. They never know exactly what everyone wants to see at any moment. If they did, they wouldn't show me any ads or promoted content to begin with.

The things I want to see changes constantly, so the only sorting and filtering functionality I want is one which I'm allowed to control myself.

pflenker2• 2 years ago

Whether or not something solves the problem depends on the person having the problem. For avid social media users, the curation it brings seems to solve the problem better than other mechanisms. For you (or me) it doesn’t.

Almondsetat• 2 years ago

RSS still leads to a lot of wasted time. Being in charge of your own feed does not mean it will remain lean and sweet.

The ideal of browsing your RSS feed in the morning cup of coffee in hand just like your father read the morning paper and then got on with his day is mostly just a fantasy.

What happens in reality is that you more or less quickly ammass a big list of blogs and sources that gets updated by the hour and you end up either ignoring most of the entries or you check on them multiple times a day and you waste your time sieving through a stream of countless new content

Hamatti6• 2 years ago

Being in charge of your own feed does not mean it will remain lean and sweet.

You're right. It does not automatically mean it. You have to maintain it just like anything else in life.

is mostly just a fantasy.

It's a fantasy I live in daily.

What happens in reality is that you more or less quickly ammass a big list of blogs and sources that gets updated by the hour

I guess this mostly depends on what kind of things you subscribe to. 95% of my sources are personal blogs of software developers or artists and most of them blog weekly or more rarely.

I couldn't handle a feed where sources update multiple times a day, it would just become a pain.

bowsamic• 2 years ago

Why do you choose to knowingly live a fantasy?

flir• 2 years ago

RSS still leads to a lot of wasted time.

FOMO is big. Plus there's a dark cousin to Inbox Zero in there somewhere.

There are worse solutions than blocking distractions at the router during focus hours.

Hamatti6• 2 years ago

For me, RSS is the solution to FOMO because I don't need to worry about missing new posts because some algorithm decided not to show them to me or because I didn't happen to see them during the short window they were visible in other feeds.

jraph• 2 years ago

I follow a few RSS feeds, some become blue during the week because there are new entries, I go through them when I feel like it, probably once a week, maybe during the weekend or the evening.

I don't feel any FOMO, the entries aren't going anywhere if I don't read them now and I just ignore entries that don't attract me or I go through them fast.

riidom• 2 years ago

What you describe, sounds like there are some high frequency sources in your feeds.

IMO, these don't belong into RSS: I add no feed that updates more often than daily (doing some exceptions now and then, ofc). Things like news sites, forums, aggreagators etc. are prominent bookmarks in my browser instead (like, on a new tab).

In other words, if it's too much content, I go there by myself instead of having it delivered to me.

In yet another words, I ask myself, do I need to know about every single new thing on this site? If not, it's fine as a bookmark.

benfortuna• 2 years ago

IMO, these don't belong into RSS: I add no feed that updates more often than daily (doing some exceptions now and then, ofc). Things like news sites, forums, aggreagators etc. are prominent bookmarks in my browser instead (like, on a new tab).

This is a very good point, as aggregators (like HN) quickly overwhelm an RSS reader to the point updates from less frequent sites are buried in the topic stream.

That said, browser bookmarks have not evolved in years, and still have the same poor UX they always have.

mdp20212• 2 years ago

wasted time

Allocated time.

ammass a big list ... you end up either ignoring most of the entries or ... sieving through a stream of countless new content

Like «the morning paper[s]», just bigger because of the larger availability.

Browsing HN is the same... A lot of content, so much to check, so little time.

So? That is the problem, the starting point. But look, it is also primarily a solution, it is a solution to begin with - it is a possibility otherwise missing. Solutions contain other problems of their own (you buy a car, you have to maintain it etc.) - that is the nature of things.

hgyjnbdet3• 2 years ago

Pretty much disagree with this entirely.

Being in charge is the best bit, if you amass a big list of crap then you're doing it wrong. Sure it's a little more work than having some AI from a multinational advertising company dictating what you see, but then that's the price for freedom to choose.

The only issue I see, unsolved by RSS, is discovery. Most of my feeds are there by chance more than anything else.

The first thing I do when I find something interesting is search for a feed. If there isn't one, it's forgotten about, maybe a bookmark. If there is the feed sits in quarantine until I see if it's worth keeping. If I like it it stays, otherwise it's gone.

I then sit every morning with a coffee and scan my feeds, reading the ones that tickle my fancy.

loveparade• 2 years ago

I agree with the OP here. The biggest issue unsolved by RSS is customizability. You can pick what feeds you subscribe to, but that's your only level of control. HN, Reddit, Twitter, etc give you a feed of several hundreds posts per day. Most of them are irrelevant to my interests or filtering criteria. For example, I may only be interested in posts containing certain keywords, a certain amount of comment activity, or a certain number of upvotes/downvotes. Whatever it may be. The RSS protocol doesn't let you control this.

Of course, I can ignore anything I am not interested in. But the reality of the situation is that out of 30 minutes reading RSS feeds I spend 20 minutes filtering out stuff I am not interested in. Also, crucial information such as post popularity is missing because it's not available at publishing time and changes over time. "Social" is not part of the protocol.

You can argue that social media sites don't belong into RSS, but then you are removing the single biggest use case of RSS. If I can't put social media feeds into RSS it's useless to me because social media is exactly what overwhelms you with information and FOMO, which is what RSS should be solving.

knorker• 2 years ago

What happens in reality is that you more or less quickly ammass a big list of blogs and sources that gets updated by the hour

Maybe you do. I don't.

But you're not the only one misusing RSS. One of the things Larry Page said when he shut down Google Reader was that getting to the end of the RSS feed is like getting to the end of the Internet, and called RSS users "irrational".

Clearly Larry Page didn't understand RSS. If you can't get to the end of your RSS feed over the proverbial daily coffee, then you're using it wrong. And don't dismiss an entire technology just because you don't understand it.

Both reddit and hackernews have feeds. Nobody should be putting those feeds into their RSS reader.

gmuslera• 2 years ago

Wasted time compared to what? Not getting the news/posts/whatever? Having someone/something else that do the selection of what "should" be relevant to you and send you from the links to the full text?

HN does a good enough filtering, if you have it on your feed list. Some other aggregators can do the same. And the individual blog owners don't make a lot of posts daily. And more important than that, depending on your feed reader, you may get at most a headline, and then decide to read a bit more, or the full article. And of course, decide what feeds to follow based on their quality or your load/required time to go through it.

All of that is miles away from going to each site, see the already read content, ads, images/js. And we already know the dangers of letting something to do the selection of what we should read instead of us.

safety1st• 2 years ago

The thing you are saying doesn't happen, is pretty much exactly what I do.

I browse my RSS feeds in the morning while I'm having my coffee. When my coffee's done I move on.

Why is this fictional?

My feed list is a text file in my personal git repo, pretty easy to update.

I find social media like Reddit sucks me into the eternal doomscroll far more easily than my self-curated RSS feeds. My feed list has an end. It's not tailored to show me "hot" (read: emotion, probably anger spiking) content. It's not really addictive.

RSS > all

kennethrc• 2 years ago

The ideal of browsing your RSS feed in the morning cup of coffee in hand just like your father read the morning paper and then got on with his day is mostly just a fantasy.

+1 with the others, that's exactly how I do it. Plus with the news sources I use (Reuters, BBC, HN, Slashdot, etc.) the headline is usually enough to give me the gist of it, so I don't even expand ~95% of the actual content

m0wer• 2 years ago

That's exactly what happens. And even if you unfollow most feeds, it's normal to not be interested in most articles (e.g. HN feed alone).

Nevertheless, I think the sweet spot is having a curated list of feeds and then filtering a bit the posts. I've been pretty happy with a side project that does just that: filtering posts based on past reads using AI. Takes out half of the work and makes your feed more enjoyable.

KronisLV• 2 years ago

Did you know that Thunderbird has RSS support? https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/05/thunderbird-rss-feeds-g...

I use it for a news site in my country primarily and it's cool to have a list that's not full of pictures and ads and other distracting things, but just simple article headers that I can open and read if interested. Feeds are precious due to that alone, even.

Also, here's some of the blogs that HN users run: https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev/

I wonder if there's gonna be another blog sharing thread sometime, whoever had the original idea was pretty cool.

noman-land• 2 years ago

I put my HN replies feed in Thunderbird and treat it as just another inbox. It rules.

mro_name• 2 years ago

is survivorship bias a bias towards surviving? I'd take that as a starting point every day.

pennybanks• 2 years ago

can anyone recommend an rss they like? im currently using inoreader but iv been looking for better

hgyjnbdet3• 2 years ago

For podcasts: AntennaPod [0], for everything else: Feeder [1].

[0] https://github.com/AntennaPod/AntennaPod

[1] https://github.com/spacecowboy/Feeder

laborcontract2• 2 years ago

I really like Newsblur. I’ve paid for it for at least ten years now. Whew. Tough to say that out loud.

nickthegreek• 2 years ago

I think Inoreader is the best of the bunch.

brador• 2 years ago

https://skimfeed.com is based on RSS and solves a lot of these. The V5 algo was so good I never made a V6 12 years ago.

endorphine• 2 years ago

Even better for all of these points: prefer books to blog posts.

_nalply• 2 years ago

One big plus of RSS: sometimes posts are removed silently and the act of removing is telling a lot about the publisher just by reading the subject. I still see at least the subject.

On HN which I primarily consume by RSS I sometimes read posts which are flagged. In my years on HN I once vouched for a flagged post because I found that the post has a lot of merit.

If I had read by the front page I never would have seen these posts.

majikaja• 2 years ago

Frustrating

QuiteRSS crashes all the time for me

Is there anything better?

molave• 2 years ago

I use Feedly, switched to it from my previous platform because it can support atom feeds

smitty1e• 2 years ago

There are various usage patterns I have in feedly.

If I have time, I walk through the list of titles with the vi keystrokes.

If I don't, I'll just roll through the list with a mouse.

One killer feature is filters. I can drop "Kardashian" without ever seen any such content.

johnea• 2 years ago

What does it feel like to read RSS?

Well, my eyes go from left to right across a field of text, which I interpret as words, sentences and paragraphs.

If the overall body of text is interesting, I continue reading; if not, I don't.

I really have a hard time understanding the problems that many people seem to experience in modern life...

kkfx• 2 years ago

For me? Simply the fact I made my own list of sources and keep them evolving instead of drink passively what someone else offer me via some recommendation system I do not own nor govern.

It could means also a more pleasant reading, all in my clients without crap, IF the feed owner do publish the entire article, something normally unseen in recent time for 99% of feeds.

Aside they are good to follow security alerts and new releases.

What does it feel like to read RSS feeds?

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