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.
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.
I find this topic of link aggregation, feeds and readlists highly interesting and believe that herein lies the solution for a new web similar to like reddit basically imagined it, before going full commercial.
Both presented ways in looking at an RSS feed make sense and come with their own set of pros and cons. But to me it looks like it is entirely possible and the best solution to treat it as both at the same time: the feed is a stream, but you treat it as an inbox not for the items that are streamed themselves (e.g. blog entries), but as the notification that they exist. So, I will try out in the future to keep three lanes: a readlis, where you store the things you want to read, a read-it where you store the things you actually read already and the RSS-feed aggregor "inbox" where you marked things as read if you decided to either put it on the readlist or not. So the read-marker of the RSS-feed aggregor becomes a "noted-it" button.
A fourth lane that forwards interesting reads or notifications could be the building brick of a new internet, where you aggregate things from people you like or trust and index them as your personalised search engine.
Yeah, everything you've said makes good sense. At the end of the day RSS is just a decent protocol for these purposes, even if more modern alternatives exist. But I think these modern alternatives are better for your purposes.
I had looked into JSON Feed or WebSub as a layer on feeds. I'm not sure it's possible but the federated thingies like ActivityPub might also give the same result, especially since Ghost supports it natively in the dashboard.
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.
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.
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):
> 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.
> 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.
To praise TikTok it has a highly effective recommendation engine precisely because it is showing you one piece of content at a time and registering your engagement on that.
YouTube's interface gives people a feeling of agency because it tempts you with 10 or so videos on the side and you can choose one, it also means YouTube does not get information about the 9 you didn't click, maybe you would have liked 5 of them and hated 4 of them but it can at best guess about that. I read about negative sampling in the recommender literature to address this issue and never felt I understood it or believed in it -- the literature clearly indicates that it sorta-kinda works but I think it does not work very well.
So far as hating on algorithmic feeds it is not the algorithms themselves that are bad but how they are chosen. If there is any characteristic of the content that can be quantified or evaluated a feed can be designed to privilege that. A feed could be designed to be highly prosocial, calming and such or designed to irritate you as much as possible. It's possible that people get bored with the first.
My own reader works like TikTok in that it shows one content piece of the time but it is basically the stuff that I submit to HN and it is scientific papers and articles about LLMs and programming languages and social psychology and political science and sports and and advanced manufacturing and biotech and such. You might say my world view is unusual or something but it is certainly not mindless lowest common denominator stuff or outrage (e.g. to be fair I post a few things to HN because YOShInOn thinks they are spicy -- YOShInOn has a model that can predict if y'all are going to comment on an article or not and I felt it was a problem that my comments/submission ratio was low before I had YOShInOn)
> To praise TikTok it has a highly effective recommendation engine precisely because it is showing you one piece of content at a time and registering your engagement on that.
I'm a bit divided on TikToks efficiency. It's a well working doom-scrooling-machine, better than any other platform, but from my personal experience, it's not actually that good at recommending the content I actually want. And I think it's largely because it has the wrong focus, namely the attention. High attention-content is not always what I want and need, but TikTok has barely any way to realize this, exactly because of how It works.
> YouTube's interface gives people a feeling of agency because it tempts you with 10 or so videos on the side
Interesting, never used that side-thing.
> it also means YouTube does not get information about the 9 you didn't click,
Yes, and that's OK. The not-clicked entries can still give me relevant information. And yes, the system can't act on this, but that's the whole point of RSS Readers, to make your own choice, on the spot, and switch it constantly as necessary. No system can react to this. "Smart" algorithmic solutions are doomed to stay mediocre because of this.
Personally I can't stand TikTok or Youtube Shorts or the videos on Instagram. I just can't stand the meaningless motion to get attention, it makes my skin crawl, it makes the bottom drop out of my stomach, etc. One time YT Shorts showed me an AI generation video of a pretty girl transforming into a fox on America's got talent, which is a good choice for me but then I got saturation videos of Chinese girls transforming into just about everything on AGT with the same music and reaction shots and it was more than I could use and not looking cool anymore but rather like AI slop. That said, I enjoy classic YouTube with relish.
My RSS reader gives recommendations based on explicit up/down and it has an AUC of maybe 0.78 or so, I saw a paper where TikTok is getting 0.83 so I feel like I'm doing OK.
I haven't done anything to change it in the last year except increase the number of random articles it inserts a little because making the recs worse actually can make them better, see [1] TikTok is famous for doing this. I think I could tune it up so for a given batch it could have a target "thumbs up" percentage or something more systematic but really I am very happy with the recs so it is not clear to me what "better" really is.
There is the problem with it that the system has a lot of latency which does not really matter for articles on most subjects because news about software or science or political science or engineering is usually OK if it is delayed a few days or a few weeks but it is a problem with sports where you really look like a dumbass if you post about something that happened on week 2 during week 4. It's a toughie though because I'd have to rework the thing to take out latency in 5+ stages of the system and then think systematically how to balance "urgent" vs "interesting" so I don't face the problem that urgent but interesting sports articles don't crowd other things out. [2]
[2] personally I don't mind the old articles for myself because I'm a weird kind of sports fan. Two years ago I used to follow the NFL but since I started doing sports photography I might go to 5 games on one weekend and if I am doing that the NFL is a lot less interesting than, say, Arknights so I am a little embarrassed to say I have no idea how the Bills are doing this year. But if I'm going to post sports articles to Bluesky or something it's a problem.
> 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.
Why would the author's use be the wrong one? And why should YouTube be different, in principle? (Maybe you are using YouTube wrong...)
I think at some point there was a shift in the way we consume online content, from "I'll read whatever is up now" to "I have my list of things to catch up with". RSS is older, so it is natural to connect it with the older way of consuming content. But there is no reason we can't do the same with YouTube channels, for example.
RSS has been traditionally used like an email client rather than a streaming service. You don't read every email, some go straight to spam or the trash bin. RSS is a time saver, not a time waster.
I can see that some feeds, like serializartions or low-volume/high quality content, is desirable to be consumed in its entirety, but the 80/20 principle seems to also apply to RSS feeds too in general. Specially if your RSS list reaches double digits.
A bit weird to make blanket statements about a tool like that. Some people read all emails, some don’t. Just like some people only subscribe to people’s personal blogs and want to read all of them.
Some might want to use it as a news aggregator and quickly browse through headlines. There no right or wrong usage of an RSS reader or “traditional usage”.
As RSS was being widespread around 2010, this is what most people said they were using it like, at least in my experience. It was the time when we still didn't have great spam filters, and people were used to receive and discard many emails without reading them.
RSS was also frequently compared to discussion forums, where you also want to efficiently ignore non-relevant content. RSS gave us the power to ignore the budding information overload.
A common setup was to have a folder hierarchy similar to email. Blogs were in folders organized by topic using whatever approach you felt best. You'd then dip into parts of the hierarchy. There often wasn't an aggregated feed that you could use but you could see a list of all items per blog. Each blog would then be highlighted or show a count when there was new content.
I said blog instead of feed because social networks had a focus on the single scrolling feed as a list of content aggregated from different authors. Some RSS clients embraced this to a degree, but it didn't start out that way. Twitter was the first social network I really used in 2007 to follow bloggers I subscribed to, and it took a while to adjust to this firehose of interspersed content. That wasn't an uncommon sentiment from devs.
So what? It's not a democratic vote to decide what way is the right/wrong way to use RSS. Do as you please, it's a simple usable protocol that basically allows for different use cases.
I just scroll over it. Only the newest 5000 items are preserved, by default I allow maximum 4 items per feed (some feeds more some less), titles must be at least 3 words long and I delete items if the title contains any of the badwords.
Now that I think of it, the mistake most people make is not having enough subscriptions. Some spot around 1000 feeds the experience changes dramatically. You can afford to be less interested in things as there is plenty more.
I think I find about one decent article per day for each 10 000 subs.
Disposing of crappy feeds isn't a lot of work and a word filter works really well because people want to stuff descriptive words into titles.
Business insider amused me. They are so good at writing good titles that practically non of their countless worthless publications make it though my word filter. What remains would have one think it is a reasonable website.
To me, this is the best quote of the year, thanks.
>RSS has been traditionally used like an email client rather than a streaming service
This is very similar to batch vs streaming argument where we have lambda, kappa and the latest "batch" is the special case of streaming data architecture. I have a very strong feeling that batch and streaming are the two sides of the same coin. Only by this realization that we can transform Kafka [1].
Perhaps better RSS client can be the killer application of this new unified data oriented batch and streaming architecture or I coined it coin architecture (pardon the pun).
[1] What If We Could Rebuild Kafka from Scratch? (220 comments):
I was a Feed Demon user. There are some videos of the experience which is much closer to a Windows email client than Google Reader was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIz5u9T94K0. Google Reader was late-stage RSS for me, but it brought some of the benefits of having all of the content download and aggregation being done server-side so the cost of adding new feeds was shared.
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.
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.
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.
> over 100k emails to go through in one lifetime isn't worth the trouble
Unless you're on a bunch of mailing lists, I can't even fathom having that much email, much less that much unread email. I'm fanatical about making sure that I'm at inbox zero as much as possible because the 'unread' counter is the enemy. It takes some effort to set up and adjust filters and actually unsubscribe from stuff, but it's completely worth it to have a mailbox that's actually usable.
I noticed that a few years ago that Google had removed the very handy tool I used to filter all mail from "x" sender and I could select all and delete. I believe they did it on purpose because I think Google really doesn't want you to delete emails. They made it harder to delete emails in bulk.
I do subscribe to things I find interesting but other times they are emails from services I joing. I am now using Office 365 and am being able to keep it much cleaner. All my Newsletters go into a Newsletter folder and I have a Sweep rule to keep the 10 most recent and delete the rest. My inbox is way easier to manage now. And every year I move the corresponding emails from that year into a folder, like "2024" and go through it from time to time. It's being a bliss.
My two gmail accounts probably have way over 100k as I've more or less abandoned them. Google also made the total emails you have in the account less apparent too, I was up to 80k and suddenly my inbox had around "3,000" or so emails.
Feedback: Would've been really nice to have an editor on your website. I'm on mobile, so I probably would have added a few feeds -> generated a link with query params -> put it on my slack to pick it up on my laptop later
I know I could just type it or send just the website link over, but it just feels like more work and I'm not invested enough (ie if I'd generated a link now I'd feel like I invested effort and would definitely open it on the laptop. With just a link...not sure)
I'm using a heavily customized 2005-era fork of tt-rss.
Early on in my use I recognized some feeds I wanted to read end-to-end (often individual blogs). Others (Hackaday, other aggregators) I dip into periodically. To keep the UI uncluttered I use naming of the feeds to differentiate. I could easily see adding some schema and UI to handle segregating the feeds, too.
I've thought about adding an algorithmic feed driven from the various feeds I only dip into.
I had some discussion on here re: feed readers that might publish a feed of "starred / tagged" articles. I would love to drive my algorithmic feed from a recommendation system based in part on the subscribing to these "starred" articles from the authors of feeds I already read. A decentralized system that drove recommendations like this would be awesome to play with.
Google Reader would present it almost like an inbox, where "unread" items are bold and read items are not.
To me, this caused a "not caught up on the inbox" reaction because I also use Gmail.
I know this is only one particular feed reader but this is just an example of how it could cause this. Looking at the screen felt like it was "work to be done" not "skimming headlines".
What I do is go through all the new titles from beginning to end and just open anything I want to read in a tab, FreshRSS supports this workflow well. Then it sits in that tab for however long and I read them in the order I want to, sometimes they grouped and stored while I do something else.
I also have sites I filter their RSS as well, they produce really large amounts of articles and I am only interested in certain topics. Took me a while to get around to this, for the most part I did not want a mainstream news site firehosing into my RSS but I have filtered it based on keywords.
That is about it. Takes a bit of effort to slowly build it up but I hate it when sites don't have RSS, I rarely read sites that don't now.
Same here. I more or less open feedly each day, go through 100-200 article titles and open those which seem interesting in new tabs. Then, after I'm done, I read the articles. I never read them inside feedly.
Can confirm. I subscribe to every feed that remotely interests me. So the aim is not to read everything end to end. The aim is to just glance the headlines, choose the interesting ones to check out later, and archive or delete the rest. Therefore, the feature that interests me in an RSS reader is its ability to sort the articles by my interests.
There are two wildly different models: subscribe only to a few people/channels/things and read or deliberately skip nearly everything, or subscribe to a large number of people/channels/things and let them wash over you while watching a small subset. The people seeking the former are also often the people who want "just give me reverse-chronological", the people who do the latter often like algorithms to help them deal with the firehose.
Personally, I subscribe to a few channels on YouTube and only follow social accounts of people I know well enough to want to read everything from, and deliberately avoid high-volume posters. As a result, I want reverse-chronological and I read/watch almost everything I subscribe to, with things I skip still being noticed and just deliberately skipped over. I know many others who do the same, and I often see that preference expressed here and elsewhere.
But I also know people who follow thousands of accounts and channels and similar, who just let the firehose wash over them, curated by an algorithmic feed. I don't understand that preference, but I know it exists, and I know it's why not everyone agrees with the preference of "just give me reverse-chronological, not an algorithm!".
> For me the purpose of RSS is to get the newest headlines, choose the interesting articles and skip the rest.
That's the only way I ever conceived of it.
What the author describes is unappealing to me. I choose my RSS feeds deliberately. I sort them into five categories, only two of which are must-view. Around half the articles from those two will be worth reading and I want to know that I didn't miss anything from either one. The rest is there for when I have extra time to kill while standing in line at the store, waiting for an elevator, etc.
If everything is random, I'll never know if I missed the one article that would have been the most important to me.
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.
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.
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 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 use 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> I've made a ton of attempts to build my giant collection of subscriptions but always just burn out on maintaining it.
RSS subscriptions aren't like Pokemon. You don't have to catch them all. One of the major selling points of RSS is that you can subscribe to sites that update infrequently so you get notified when they have a new update instead of checking the site manually and being disappointed that it hasn't updated in three weeks or whatever.
Adding a bunch of sites that update hundreds of times a day is a great way to DDOS your own attention span
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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)
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I find this topic of link aggregation, feeds and readlists highly interesting and believe that herein lies the solution for a new web similar to like reddit basically imagined it, before going full commercial.
Both presented ways in looking at an RSS feed make sense and come with their own set of pros and cons. But to me it looks like it is entirely possible and the best solution to treat it as both at the same time: the feed is a stream, but you treat it as an inbox not for the items that are streamed themselves (e.g. blog entries), but as the notification that they exist. So, I will try out in the future to keep three lanes: a readlis, where you store the things you want to read, a read-it where you store the things you actually read already and the RSS-feed aggregor "inbox" where you marked things as read if you decided to either put it on the readlist or not. So the read-marker of the RSS-feed aggregor becomes a "noted-it" button.
A fourth lane that forwards interesting reads or notifications could be the building brick of a new internet, where you aggregate things from people you like or trust and index them as your personalised search engine.
Yeah, everything you've said makes good sense. At the end of the day RSS is just a decent protocol for these purposes, even if more modern alternatives exist. But I think these modern alternatives are better for your purposes.
Do you have specific things in mind to which you refer as more modern alternatives?
I had looked into JSON Feed or WebSub as a layer on feeds. I'm not sure it's possible but the federated thingies like ActivityPub might also give the same result, especially since Ghost supports it natively in the dashboard.
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 :)
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.
Twitter was . Not is . And I'm not talking about the name change.
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...
> 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.
> 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.
To praise TikTok it has a highly effective recommendation engine precisely because it is showing you one piece of content at a time and registering your engagement on that.
YouTube's interface gives people a feeling of agency because it tempts you with 10 or so videos on the side and you can choose one, it also means YouTube does not get information about the 9 you didn't click, maybe you would have liked 5 of them and hated 4 of them but it can at best guess about that. I read about negative sampling in the recommender literature to address this issue and never felt I understood it or believed in it -- the literature clearly indicates that it sorta-kinda works but I think it does not work very well.
So far as hating on algorithmic feeds it is not the algorithms themselves that are bad but how they are chosen. If there is any characteristic of the content that can be quantified or evaluated a feed can be designed to privilege that. A feed could be designed to be highly prosocial, calming and such or designed to irritate you as much as possible. It's possible that people get bored with the first.
My own reader works like TikTok in that it shows one content piece of the time but it is basically the stuff that I submit to HN and it is scientific papers and articles about LLMs and programming languages and social psychology and political science and sports and and advanced manufacturing and biotech and such. You might say my world view is unusual or something but it is certainly not mindless lowest common denominator stuff or outrage (e.g. to be fair I post a few things to HN because YOShInOn thinks they are spicy -- YOShInOn has a model that can predict if y'all are going to comment on an article or not and I felt it was a problem that my comments/submission ratio was low before I had YOShInOn)
> To praise TikTok it has a highly effective recommendation engine precisely because it is showing you one piece of content at a time and registering your engagement on that.
I'm a bit divided on TikToks efficiency. It's a well working doom-scrooling-machine, better than any other platform, but from my personal experience, it's not actually that good at recommending the content I actually want. And I think it's largely because it has the wrong focus, namely the attention. High attention-content is not always what I want and need, but TikTok has barely any way to realize this, exactly because of how It works.
> YouTube's interface gives people a feeling of agency because it tempts you with 10 or so videos on the side
Interesting, never used that side-thing.
> it also means YouTube does not get information about the 9 you didn't click,
Yes, and that's OK. The not-clicked entries can still give me relevant information. And yes, the system can't act on this, but that's the whole point of RSS Readers, to make your own choice, on the spot, and switch it constantly as necessary. No system can react to this. "Smart" algorithmic solutions are doomed to stay mediocre because of this.
Well...
Personally I can't stand TikTok or Youtube Shorts or the videos on Instagram. I just can't stand the meaningless motion to get attention, it makes my skin crawl, it makes the bottom drop out of my stomach, etc. One time YT Shorts showed me an AI generation video of a pretty girl transforming into a fox on America's got talent, which is a good choice for me but then I got saturation videos of Chinese girls transforming into just about everything on AGT with the same music and reaction shots and it was more than I could use and not looking cool anymore but rather like AI slop. That said, I enjoy classic YouTube with relish.
My RSS reader gives recommendations based on explicit up/down and it has an AUC of maybe 0.78 or so, I saw a paper where TikTok is getting 0.83 so I feel like I'm doing OK.
I haven't done anything to change it in the last year except increase the number of random articles it inserts a little because making the recs worse actually can make them better, see [1] TikTok is famous for doing this. I think I could tune it up so for a given batch it could have a target "thumbs up" percentage or something more systematic but really I am very happy with the recs so it is not clear to me what "better" really is.
There is the problem with it that the system has a lot of latency which does not really matter for articles on most subjects because news about software or science or political science or engineering is usually OK if it is delayed a few days or a few weeks but it is a problem with sports where you really look like a dumbass if you post about something that happened on week 2 during week 4. It's a toughie though because I'd have to rework the thing to take out latency in 5+ stages of the system and then think systematically how to balance "urgent" vs "interesting" so I don't face the problem that urgent but interesting sports articles don't crowd other things out. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
[2] personally I don't mind the old articles for myself because I'm a weird kind of sports fan. Two years ago I used to follow the NFL but since I started doing sports photography I might go to 5 games on one weekend and if I am doing that the NFL is a lot less interesting than, say, Arknights so I am a little embarrassed to say I have no idea how the Bills are doing this year. But if I'm going to post sports articles to Bluesky or something it's a problem.
> YouTube does not get information about the 9 you didn't click, maybe you would have liked 5 of them
Meanwhile, I end up with 5 new tabs open...
I use it that way quite often but wish really the recs were more stable and I didn’t have to.
> 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.
Why would the author's use be the wrong one? And why should YouTube be different, in principle? (Maybe you are using YouTube wrong...)
I think at some point there was a shift in the way we consume online content, from "I'll read whatever is up now" to "I have my list of things to catch up with". RSS is older, so it is natural to connect it with the older way of consuming content. But there is no reason we can't do the same with YouTube channels, for example.
RSS has been traditionally used like an email client rather than a streaming service. You don't read every email, some go straight to spam or the trash bin. RSS is a time saver, not a time waster.
I can see that some feeds, like serializartions or low-volume/high quality content, is desirable to be consumed in its entirety, but the 80/20 principle seems to also apply to RSS feeds too in general. Specially if your RSS list reaches double digits.
A bit weird to make blanket statements about a tool like that. Some people read all emails, some don’t. Just like some people only subscribe to people’s personal blogs and want to read all of them.
Some might want to use it as a news aggregator and quickly browse through headlines. There no right or wrong usage of an RSS reader or “traditional usage”.
As RSS was being widespread around 2010, this is what most people said they were using it like, at least in my experience. It was the time when we still didn't have great spam filters, and people were used to receive and discard many emails without reading them.
RSS was also frequently compared to discussion forums, where you also want to efficiently ignore non-relevant content. RSS gave us the power to ignore the budding information overload.
A common setup was to have a folder hierarchy similar to email. Blogs were in folders organized by topic using whatever approach you felt best. You'd then dip into parts of the hierarchy. There often wasn't an aggregated feed that you could use but you could see a list of all items per blog. Each blog would then be highlighted or show a count when there was new content.
I said blog instead of feed because social networks had a focus on the single scrolling feed as a list of content aggregated from different authors. Some RSS clients embraced this to a degree, but it didn't start out that way. Twitter was the first social network I really used in 2007 to follow bloggers I subscribed to, and it took a while to adjust to this firehose of interspersed content. That wasn't an uncommon sentiment from devs.
So what? It's not a democratic vote to decide what way is the right/wrong way to use RSS. Do as you please, it's a simple usable protocol that basically allows for different use cases.
I just scroll over it. Only the newest 5000 items are preserved, by default I allow maximum 4 items per feed (some feeds more some less), titles must be at least 3 words long and I delete items if the title contains any of the badwords.
Now that I think of it, the mistake most people make is not having enough subscriptions. Some spot around 1000 feeds the experience changes dramatically. You can afford to be less interested in things as there is plenty more.
I think I find about one decent article per day for each 10 000 subs.
Disposing of crappy feeds isn't a lot of work and a word filter works really well because people want to stuff descriptive words into titles.
Business insider amused me. They are so good at writing good titles that practically non of their countless worthless publications make it though my word filter. What remains would have one think it is a reasonable website.
>RSS is a time saver, not a time waster
To me, this is the best quote of the year, thanks.
>RSS has been traditionally used like an email client rather than a streaming service
This is very similar to batch vs streaming argument where we have lambda, kappa and the latest "batch" is the special case of streaming data architecture. I have a very strong feeling that batch and streaming are the two sides of the same coin. Only by this realization that we can transform Kafka [1].
Perhaps better RSS client can be the killer application of this new unified data oriented batch and streaming architecture or I coined it coin architecture (pardon the pun).
[1] What If We Could Rebuild Kafka from Scratch? (220 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43790420
I was a Feed Demon user. There are some videos of the experience which is much closer to a Windows email client than Google Reader was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIz5u9T94K0. Google Reader was late-stage RSS for me, but it brought some of the benefits of having all of the content download and aggregation being done server-side so the cost of adding new feeds was shared.
IIRC, Gmail at one time offered mailbox as RSS feed many years 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.
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.
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.
> over 100k emails to go through in one lifetime isn't worth the trouble
Unless you're on a bunch of mailing lists, I can't even fathom having that much email, much less that much unread email. I'm fanatical about making sure that I'm at inbox zero as much as possible because the 'unread' counter is the enemy. It takes some effort to set up and adjust filters and actually unsubscribe from stuff, but it's completely worth it to have a mailbox that's actually usable.
I noticed that a few years ago that Google had removed the very handy tool I used to filter all mail from "x" sender and I could select all and delete. I believe they did it on purpose because I think Google really doesn't want you to delete emails. They made it harder to delete emails in bulk.
I do subscribe to things I find interesting but other times they are emails from services I joing. I am now using Office 365 and am being able to keep it much cleaner. All my Newsletters go into a Newsletter folder and I have a Sweep rule to keep the 10 most recent and delete the rest. My inbox is way easier to manage now. And every year I move the corresponding emails from that year into a folder, like "2024" and go through it from time to time. It's being a bliss.
My two gmail accounts probably have way over 100k as I've more or less abandoned them. Google also made the total emails you have in the account less apparent too, I was up to 80k and suddenly my inbox had around "3,000" or so emails.
Maybe you like my project: https://rssrdr.com/
It's the simplest RSS reader in the world: no badges, registration or download necessary.
Feedback: Would've been really nice to have an editor on your website. I'm on mobile, so I probably would have added a few feeds -> generated a link with query params -> put it on my slack to pick it up on my laptop later
I know I could just type it or send just the website link over, but it just feels like more work and I'm not invested enough (ie if I'd generated a link now I'd feel like I invested effort and would definitely open it on the laptop. With just a link...not sure)
I'm using a heavily customized 2005-era fork of tt-rss.
Early on in my use I recognized some feeds I wanted to read end-to-end (often individual blogs). Others (Hackaday, other aggregators) I dip into periodically. To keep the UI uncluttered I use naming of the feeds to differentiate. I could easily see adding some schema and UI to handle segregating the feeds, too.
I've thought about adding an algorithmic feed driven from the various feeds I only dip into.
I had some discussion on here re: feed readers that might publish a feed of "starred / tagged" articles. I would love to drive my algorithmic feed from a recommendation system based in part on the subscribing to these "starred" articles from the authors of feeds I already read. A decentralized system that drove recommendations like this would be awesome to play with.
Google Reader would present it almost like an inbox, where "unread" items are bold and read items are not.
To me, this caused a "not caught up on the inbox" reaction because I also use Gmail.
I know this is only one particular feed reader but this is just an example of how it could cause this. Looking at the screen felt like it was "work to be done" not "skimming headlines".
What I do is go through all the new titles from beginning to end and just open anything I want to read in a tab, FreshRSS supports this workflow well. Then it sits in that tab for however long and I read them in the order I want to, sometimes they grouped and stored while I do something else.
I also have sites I filter their RSS as well, they produce really large amounts of articles and I am only interested in certain topics. Took me a while to get around to this, for the most part I did not want a mainstream news site firehosing into my RSS but I have filtered it based on keywords.
That is about it. Takes a bit of effort to slowly build it up but I hate it when sites don't have RSS, I rarely read sites that don't now.
Same here. I more or less open feedly each day, go through 100-200 article titles and open those which seem interesting in new tabs. Then, after I'm done, I read the articles. I never read them inside feedly.
Why am I using it wrong when I only subscribe to interesting feeds? I read everything because I subscribe to stuff I want to read.
And I've been using RSS since the days when there were fights over atom vs RSS.
Can confirm. I subscribe to every feed that remotely interests me. So the aim is not to read everything end to end. The aim is to just glance the headlines, choose the interesting ones to check out later, and archive or delete the rest. Therefore, the feature that interests me in an RSS reader is its ability to sort the articles by my interests.
There are two wildly different models: subscribe only to a few people/channels/things and read or deliberately skip nearly everything, or subscribe to a large number of people/channels/things and let them wash over you while watching a small subset. The people seeking the former are also often the people who want "just give me reverse-chronological", the people who do the latter often like algorithms to help them deal with the firehose.
Personally, I subscribe to a few channels on YouTube and only follow social accounts of people I know well enough to want to read everything from, and deliberately avoid high-volume posters. As a result, I want reverse-chronological and I read/watch almost everything I subscribe to, with things I skip still being noticed and just deliberately skipped over. I know many others who do the same, and I often see that preference expressed here and elsewhere.
But I also know people who follow thousands of accounts and channels and similar, who just let the firehose wash over them, curated by an algorithmic feed. I don't understand that preference, but I know it exists, and I know it's why not everyone agrees with the preference of "just give me reverse-chronological, not an algorithm!".
> For me the purpose of RSS is to get the newest headlines, choose the interesting articles and skip the rest.
That's the only way I ever conceived of it.
What the author describes is unappealing to me. I choose my RSS feeds deliberately. I sort them into five categories, only two of which are must-view. Around half the articles from those two will be worth reading and I want to know that I didn't miss anything from either one. The rest is there for when I have extra time to kill while standing in line at the store, waiting for an elevator, etc.
If everything is random, I'll never know if I missed the one article that would have been the most important to me.
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.
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.
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 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/
I use 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.
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.
> 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.
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/id1...
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
Very cool! Is there a way to blacklist some feeds?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can kinda get a similar experience to StumbleUpon with marginalia's explore mode - https://marginalia-search.com/explore
Digg has recently re-launched. It’s in beta currently. I got in a couple weeks ago.
Unfortunately it just looks to be a Reddit clone now.
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.
Yeah I have a beta invite and the content and comments are 1:1 the same as Reddit, exactly the type of content that I do not want to read.
No way! Thank you, will go search right now.
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
> 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.
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.
> I've made a ton of attempts to build my giant collection of subscriptions but always just burn out on maintaining it.
RSS subscriptions aren't like Pokemon. You don't have to catch them all. One of the major selling points of RSS is that you can subscribe to sites that update infrequently so you get notified when they have a new update instead of checking the site manually and being disappointed that it hasn't updated in three weeks or whatever.
Adding a bunch of sites that update hundreds of times a day is a great way to DDOS your own attention span
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
I had just shared my new RSS app the other day 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.
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
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?
For me capturing list of RSS sources is fun
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds
But i do not check all 3k sources regularly
>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?
It's interesting that people with Atom feeds still call them RSS.
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.
Reminds me of stumbleupon, which despite taking you to a random page, was excellent because most of the pages were worth viewing.
This makes me so happy. I love, love, LOVED StumbleUpon. I was actually just thinking how I'd love to rebuild it.
Skimfeed to the rescue (once again).
https://skimfeed.com
What is this? I can't find any information about the site
Does anyone know if there are any services or software nowadays that can replace the traditional RSS format?
This is the best thing i read on internet today! Cant wait to try once its released for google chrome
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
This concept is begging to be built on atproto or solid.
This is amazing, thank you for this!
just a heads up: the verification emails land in spam
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.
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> 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.
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.
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.
> The spirit of the 90s is still here
"Dream of the '90s" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4hShMEk1Ew)
So funny that if I click the link I get a “not available in your country”
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
When I run a red light it's wrong, but when a fire truck does it it's ok?
Really makes you think.
Poor attempt to refute my point.
When was the last time you supported a content creator that has an RSS feed?