Comment by forapurpose | Hacker News Reader

Comment by forapurpose | Hacker News Reader

I'll repeat my plea for an RSS reader that enables the user (i.e., me) to efficiently process 1,000+ feed items in maybe 20 minutes. Also, it needs to automate aspects of managing feeds (detect when the fail, maybe find a replacement, give me an interface for resolving the problem).

By "process" I mean: Read the headline and sometimes the summary, decide whether to read the story, open the story (if I'm reading it), delete the feed item. Repeat 1,000x.

Deduplication is necessary but will only cut items process by maybe 5%, I would guess.

'Grouping' is much more valuable - grouping feed items by topic. For example, after the big event last night, instead of skimming dozens of headlines interspersed among 1,000 others, group together the feed items for that event under a single headers. Then I can quickly pick out the item I want to read and discard the remainder en masse. I'd guess that it would reduce the feed items I need to process by well over 50%.

Other tricks are needed too: 1,000 in 20 minutes is just under 1 feed item per second.

I don't want to tell you what to do but wouldn't it be more helpful to just be more selective on what you subscribe to?

I subscribed to way too many feeds in the past and going through them with shortcuts / opening them in the background and then going through the opened pages to read them afterwards works well. It's even quite fast but as soon as you skip a day it just piles up until you can't work off the queue any more.

I then just decided to really look at which feeds I really get most out of and unsubscribed from most of them. Way happier with that strategy and I don't feel like I'm getting overwhelmed by the unread count.

> wouldn't it be more helpful to just be more selective on what you subscribe to?

I am very selective! Otherwise there would be far more. There are many feeds I cut despite having some excellent, irreplaceable content, because they also add too many unread feed items (i.e., poor signal-to-noise).

Have you tried Newsblur? Its training feature is very powerful to trim down large feeds to only the topics you are interested into.

I do this with NewsBlur. First, I have filtered out about 75% of what I might see with its training tools. When I process my feed, I use j/k keyboard notification and s to save. Super fast.

At ContentGems.com we aspire to offer some of the features you're looking for. We fetch a ton of feeds each day, index them, and let you filter the items based on a powerful query api (Lucene). So in addition to reading your own feeds, you can also extract interesting content from other feeds and discover new feeds. It also deduplicates articles (on a sliding scale of similarity). We are in the process of building out the feed reader component (which is trivial compared to what we're already doing with search). An interesting twist on feed readers is that CG treats your Twitter home timeline like an RSS feed, indexing all shared articles and including them in the Firehose of feeds. Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders.

That's a very interesting approach - pre-processing the feed items (if I understand you correctly). Here are a few more features I would need, as just one potential user:

* Ability to add feeds to your database. Some obscure feeds are important to me.

* Privacy: I don't want to share a list of everything I subscribe to and read. This is a deal-breaker for me; I'm happy to pay for the service.

* UI with no overhead in time and cognitive load. A learning curve is fine - I love Vim, for example - but when I'm reviewing feed items the UI shouldn't delay or distract me. In fact, a keyboard-based UI based on Vim would be awesome (though probably there's not a huge market for that).

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