Hacker News Reader

Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, I don't agree: heavy Google Reader user and now a NewsBlur one. While I appreciate the NewsBlur existence it is very very very slow while Google Reader was extremely fast. I don't know if NewsBlur only retrieves my feeds when I start a request or if it constantly retrieves them on the backend.

Disclosure: I have 2350 feeds in NewsBlur.

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Is that... normal? 2350 feeds seems like an astronomical amount of news feeds. Can I ask how much of that do you read?

I think this is a good discussion to have. One thing is to be subscribed to thousands of feeds from major media sites where you receive a huge amount of articles every day and another to be subscribed to specific blogs with sporadic articles. I have more of the later.

Only from VCs I have more than 200.

I have around 1500. Most are not active, though.

And I wouldn't take the claim seriously that Google Reader was fast with that many feeds; I found that GR struggled with that feeds: http://the-digital-reader.com/2012/11/01/i-broke-google-read...

Agreed, very curious how much of that actually gets even glanced over.

I thought I was information overload with ~150 sites. I hope OP uses the 'focus' features so they can get a modicum of information from those 2350 feeds.

> I thought I was information overload with ~150 sites.

It mainly depends of the feed volume, not how many feeds are you subscribed to. I cherry picked a lot of personal blogs that are not updated often.

That was my perception, a lot of personal blogs, thank you for clarifying.

Somewhat unrelated, but it would be neat if there was some kind of lost and found for RSS as I have sites from the early 00s that I followed which are no longer updated but I imagine the author just changed their site, etc.

NewsBlur has an organizer that provides this exact info. Just sort of last update (or even stories per month) and mass delete. It's somewhat new but it makes a world of a difference. The organizer is on web and just launched on iOS. See http://blog.newsblur.com.

Yes, I think this is one of the issues related to Internet archeology. Not equal but similar to the recovery of Usenet discussions.

But is your intention really to read every post by every site you're subscribed to? Someone subscribed to over 1000 sites isn't trying to avoid missed posts - they're just dipping into the stream of sites they're interested in at any given moment.

Read every post, no. But at least get a general idea of the posts for the sites I subscribe to. There are a couple of sites that I let over lapse, HN is a good example, but for the most part, I atleast read the headlines / tags of posts for sites.

One nice feature of newsblur, which I don't use often and not sure if it is available in other readers, but the intelligence trainer would probably help in instances where you have a lot of sites and don't necessarily bother reviewing all posts.

Maybe I just use RSS readers differently. But if I were just going to periodically review what a site has, I would probably go to the site periodically rather than clutter up my list of feeds.

I am in the same boat and I simply quickly go through the 50-100 posts of the sites per day. I actually open maybe 10% in the browser. Following small sites and blogs about your interests gives you the best quality of the web in my opinion.

You can add a lot of low-volume sites without having them pile up too much, also I break out my feeds in groups and that makes them a lot easier to go through.

It's possible that many of those could be discarded without being read. As an example, I'm subscribed to the Best Of Metafilter RSS feed, but if I'm on vacation for a week and come back to over a hundred posts, I just mark 'em all as read.

Maybe try bazqux. Super fast, written in haskell https://bazqux.com/faq

I have about 1100 feeds and have found that newsblur is pretty good as long as I'm not (a) on safari and (b) leaving the tab open for a long time. (that is, it's fine on chrome, and it's fine on safari if I close the tab after a while).

Downvotes to this are very suspicious since it is a fact that goes in the opposite direction of other comments in the thread.

I suspect your disclosure (2300 feeds!) overly negated what would have been valid criticism of the tool...

No, how many e-mails do you have in GMail? Had this downvotes asked how do I use these feeds?

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