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 :)

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.

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.

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".

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.

And I've been using RSS since the days when there were fights over atom vs RSS.

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.

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.

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

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!".

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.

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)

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.

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.

Meanwhile, I end up with 5 new tabs open...

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.

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).

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.

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.

It's the simplest RSS reader in the world: no badges, registration or download necessary.

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.

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.

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

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.

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)

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”.

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 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.

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.

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.