Hacker News Reader

Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Do people really want recommendations?

I personally want to just have an RSS reader that gives me the articles from the sites I freaking asked for. Not what some service thinks I'll like. Google, Pocket, and other sites are already doing a great job of thumbing through what I read and trying to sneak in their "suggestions": that's the kind of invasive data-combing that I want to avoid.

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There are a few distinct use cases for RSS readers with very different requirements for automatic filtering.

I use RSS readers to keep up with infrequently-updated fiction and webcomics. In this use case, "suggestions" are worse than useless - if I miss a daily or weekly strip or, worse yet, a chapter being posted, that can cripple my enjoyment of the story. I check my RSS feeds once ever two or three days and read exactly every single post in them, all twenty or forty of them.

There are other people (myself about six years ago, for example) that use their RSS reader as a news firehose. They get a hundred posts an hour and even checking their titles manually would be difficult. In this case suggestions are not just a good idea but actually required.

Personally, I'd like an RSS reader that has a per-feed toggle for automatic filtering. I so far haven't seen that.

Winds has 2 displays. One is personalized, the other is chronological. Thanks for explaining how you use RSS.

And even both at the same time. I have a set of comics and low-frequency posting blogs that I want to always read every post, in order, and defer them if I didn't want to read it right now. And then a firehose of other articles that I may or may not be interested in reading and can skim it to see if I want to read it, and then open it in a new tab and continue.

I feel like it's challenging to get both of these use cases in the same app. I could do it in google reader by having categories, but when it closed I switched to Inoreader and it does the "helpful" thing of only showing the last 30 days if you want to read it in chronological order, and used up my mental energy switching and basically just gave up RSS after that and haven't read them in a long time.

Newsblur has per-feed filtering configuration.

For webcomics, I just want to plug this site: http://piperka.net/

(Free and mostly open source: http://piperka.net/blog/2015/about-crawler-source/, and currently being rewritten from unmaintainable Perl into Haskell)

For macOS, there's Vienna:

http://www.vienna-rss.org/

I'm in a similar situation regarding use case - some busy news feeds, where I'll just scan the titles and read a few articles of interest, and plenty of comics that aren't updated daily, and thus can't slot conveniently into an OmniWeb workspace.

https://github.com/swanson/stringer -- I built an RSS reader a few year agos with the same ethos: "Stringer has no external dependencies, no social recommendations/sharing, and no fancy machine learning algorithms. But it does have keyboard shortcuts..."

It's not being actively developed (it's 'feature complete' and working just fine), but might suit your needs.

Happy user here :-) has been running smoothly for over 2 years already.

Thanks for posting, this looks great and I'll probably use it.

Not being a dev that is a pain to install, would have been nice to try it.

Click the big purple "Deploy to Heroku" button. If you have an account, it will basically start running for you.

I don't care much about being suggested more feeds to follow. Instead, I wish the learning algorithm would notice when I don't bother reading certain things (granular below the whole-feed level) in my RSS, and move them out of the way.

I've been pondering setting up an RSS-to-email forwarding gateway, and a separate Gmail account, so that I could use Gmail's online-learning mail categorization system to clean up my feeds for me. If a service can do any better than that, I'd like to see it.

We track both impressions and engagements so that allows us to see when you're not interested in something. Details about the integration: http://blog.getstream.io/personalization-machine-learning-ne...

NewsBlur has a training feature which allows you to do things like that—excluding items with a certain tag, or a certain keyword in the title. How it works seems a little opaque, but it does seem to work.

I felt the same way until I had the following problem:

1. By subscribing to something that always had good content I missed quite a bit from occasional interesting posts on other feeds. 2. Subscribed to those occasionally good feeds. Now I have way too many feeds. 3. Screw it time to just use HN, social media and reddit. 4. Miss interesting articles not on those networks. 5. Now I use both rss, email lists, HN, social media/give up and miss interesting articles.

I would use a product that was a really good classifier for articles I would like and aggressively found them for me. I don't have enough time in the day to read through every blog post someone writes.

Cooler yet if the trained model were portable and I could use it in other applications.

I used to love Google Desktop Search for this feature:

It would create an automatically updated stream of articles based on (I guess) RSS feeds of recently visited sites.

Sometimes someone asks what we would pay for.

I think I would pay USD25 without much hesitation to get that thing back exactly as I remember it.

I feel that way about a lot of google products. If they combined that tech with reader (RIP old friend) I would pay monthly.

Zite used to do this for me. Hope we'll get Winds to that level.

That's my big takeaway from the last week. I don't want algorithms influencing how I think.

Yeah, that's why I don't use newsblur for instance.

I want to see EVERYTHING that are in the feeds I follow.

We do that with Nextcloud News: https://github.com/nextcloud/news/#nextcloud-news-app

I’d be interested in what you think about it. It’s completely open source, so any feedback or contribution is much appreciated! :)

Can you expand on this?

Are you referring to it only keeping the last month or so of feeds?

I use Newsblur and see everything in the feeds I follow. The "training" and etc. are optional.

NB filters "inappropriate" images from my feeds, which is annoying.

Happy Newsblur subscriber here. I've never missed anything in a feed (other than the HTTP/HTTPS errors that my browser gives me)

I'm working on this project, so slightly biased.

First, we show you both the chronological display in a list mode. That allows you to browse through things quickly and filter out what you're interested in manually. The personalization is used in combination with the image style layout. On that screen we try to surface the most interesting information.

Second, yesterday I was browsing quora questions about features of RSS readers. The most requested feature was personalization to help deal with information overload. I think some percentage of users doesn't need personalization, but the vast majority do.

Personally I was a big fan of Zite, I used that app everyday. Pity they were acquired and shutdown.

Zone is still around, buried in the options of Flipboard. The recommendations are weaker, but still valuable and worth the training investment.

I tried for a few weeks, but couldn't get Flipboard to show me content i'm actually interested in.

To get Cover Stories to be useful, it was necessary to downvote many of the initial selections, unfollow some tags, follow other tags, then upvote the few stories that were interesting. It gradually got better. But yes, there were many stories of poor relevance or quality. One problem is that the UI takes more clicks than Zite to rate stories and select tags.