Hacker News Reader

Comment by fredley | Hacker News Reader

I've been seriously considering trying to consume the web solely by RSS again. All the news sites, the few twitter accounts I actually care about, HN. HN still provides RSS, and there are ways to get it for sites that don't support it, e.g. Twitter.

Everything seems to be gearing more towards deliberately occupying as much of my time as possible, algorithmically selecting content that achieves this. I want out of this situation, but overcoming addiction and interrupting the automatic trigger cycle is hard. Maybe now's the time.

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I actually read everything by RSS except HN, since the posts here often get better over time, thanks to comments, so they're less suitable for RSS, in my opinion.

By the way, if you follow YouTube channels, not only do they still provide RSS feeds, as you can get a nice OPML file of all the channels you subscribe to: https://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager (scroll to the bottom)

What are you using to aggregate the feeds?

Self-hosted TinyTinyRSS on a cheap VPS (alongside my email).

Off-topic: what do you use for self-hosted email? I'm considering abandoning it and going back to gmail/fastmail, for the constant configuration hassle (DKIM/SPF, etc.) causing sent/received emails to be incorrectly marked as spam and/or refused :-/

Any "sane defaults, regular updates, impossible to shoot yourself in the foot" package to recommend?

I self-hosted for a long time but I eventually switched to fastmail mostly because, no matter how much I tweaked, I couldn’t get the spam down to a tolerable level and I got sick of tweaking the weighting on the various filters in spamassassin.

I use https://mailinabox.email which handles everything you just mentioned.

Looks neat. Thanks!

https://mailcow.email

https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign

https://mailinabox.email

FreeBSD-specific: http://www.purplehat.org/?page_id=4

Thanks :)

I use RSS for following YouTube channels, but the only problem I have is that I have to click on each video, I'd like a RSS client to create a custom playlist, at least for all the music videos.

I used to use YouTube's email notifications, but they would skip some videos randomly, and I'd be left wondering what videos I missed.

Content creators can choose to disable notifications on specific videos.

Creators sometimes do this if they publish more videos than usual, or of the video is different from their normal content.

Also when you subscribe you now also have to click the bell next to the subscribe button to get all notifications.

YouTube itself also has a built in subscription feed that lists all videos published by channels you subscribe to. It also lists the channels with an icon next to each if they have unwatched video.

That's interesting, my subscriptions only update once or twice a week so I never felt that need.

How do you see it working? Create and play a playlist of currently unviewed videos?

Exactly, a "Make playlist" button on either a folder of YouTube channels, or on just a channel, that would make a custom playlist of all unviewed videos.

I use Feedly for this exact thing! YouTube's recommendations were either distracting or just not relevant. Feedly embeds the video right in the reader so no going to YouTube even. And now I only get the videos I want to watch.

hckrnews.com is the RSS style interface I used to read HN.

I stopped using RSS circa 2010 since RSS produces just too much content (well at least my reader did, as it was not archiving stuff until read, just like an email inbox). I was reading my RSS feeds almost as a full-time job and the unread count was only going up and up :)

TBH, it's a bit like this now for me with HN and Twitter even without RSS. "This looks interesting... (click)(open in new tab)". One week later: 300 tabs open.

So what if the unread counts go up? I have a feed with 543 unread items, and many others with 100+. Sometimes I scan the titles of the latest dozens of items, then mark all as read.

For me, that's the advantage of RSS over Twitter: your unread counts are separate for each feed, so that blog that rarely updates but is always worthwhile to read doesn't get lost in the pile of cheap content.

Lol and I have a feed with 3000 unread items, actually several. I don't pay attention to unread counts. Well actually I do, they're there for reference, but that's it. I do the same thing, I might open 50-100 interesting-looking links and then mark the rest as read.

I find the key to RSS is that you need to subscribe to actual content, rather than just a feed. A lot of the stuff on the internet is, frankly, just a barely curated feed of information pushed out a firehose. Unless you feel like you need to, don't subscribe to feeds from news organizations unless you're willing to skim and blast away lots of unread stuff. Most of that you simply won't read.

With RSS, I like subscribing to journals and organizations that publish substantial content (lots of text rather than ads) at steady but not explosive rates. RSS is pure consumption, so if you're using it to "follow a feed" I think you're doing it wrong. Though YMMV, of course.

I am constantly producing tabs on my laptop, and every now and then saving the session somewhere so I can get some fresh air after ~200 open tabs. But the real problem is on Android, where chrome must have +1000 tabs by now (the last time I counted they were +700) We really have to find a way from this enormous amount of content.

I've gotten into the habit of organizing my feeds into two groups. People who post infrequently with high quality articles get put into one group. Sites that generate loads of articles (NPR, Guardian, HN) go into the other.

I generally read everything in group one. In group two, I start the day by just marking the entire group read. If something neat comes into group two during the day I might read it when I have a spare moment. Otherwise, it gets flushed.

RSS is great, but for community voted sites like HN and reddit I wrote a tool to 'slow down' the links: https://github.com/srid/slownews

A live running version of mine can be seen at: http://slownews-naivete.herokuapp.com/

As an ex RSS addict I'm wondering why you think you can fix things by using RSS feeds. For me it actually takes more of my time.

Only one place to go for things, no 'endless scroll', once stuff is read it's read.

For me the hassle of checking different things in different place made it so that I would only check "a few" places.

With RSS I'm crawling under a huge load of articles that I always have to clear up. I used to be extremely addicted to that, I used it to get through work stuff now and when I have weeks of articles pilling up in my feed I feel bad.

I use it, and definitely love that, but it def. re-enforce addiction, not the contrary.

For me it cured the addiction. On my view I could see if there are relevant news and if not get done very fast as to compared to visiting each site on my own. Then the occasional backlog made me realize that most isn't even relevant. That lead to a more healthy relationship with news.

All the Wordpress sites still have a RSS feed. You just have to look at the code.

Where is the HN RSS link?

Just add /rss to the URL [0]

Easiest way to find the RSS feed on most sites is to search for "RSS" in the page source; there's usually just one instance, and it's a direct link.

These days, many sites don't advertise their feeds, but it's still in the source (and is often broken in one way or another). If it is botched, a friendly email to their web admin with a link to the W3C Feed Validator [1] can go a long way; most times it's an easy fix for them.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

[1] https://validator.w3.org/feed/

That works for the main firehose feed and https://news.ycombinator.com/showrss, but there isn't a feed for the ask posts as of yet that I've seen anyway.

I tried to follow HackerNews default RSS, but there are too many stories.

I suggest to use hnrss.org: https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/

It gives you filters like how many points or comment a post must have before appears to you.

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