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Comment by SamWhited | Hacker News Reader

I still don't understand how people who don't use RSS/Atom get by day to day… during development of software projects I subscribe to tags on GitHub for dependencies that I may need to update, same thing for stuff I package in the Arch User Repos and need to update promptly after a release, for services that I host I subscribe to lots of services blogs and status pages so that I get news of security updates or outages quickly, etc.

Even for non development stuff I can't imagine going to each blog I read individually or just hoping that I see it on a social network; instead they all come to me and I don't have to do any work to read through all the various blogs I like, news sites, etc.

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I had a RSS reader. I am bothered by unread emails or notifications. It was a big waste of time for me to clean up all the "new stuff". And just marking as read felt like missing out.

Now I just browse a blog when I feel like it. If there's nothing new, I might reread some old post. That's it!

yah, I only subscribe to things where I actually want to read every article; otherwise there's just too much stuff (well, with a few exceptions where I want to read most of it and don't mind skipping over the occasional post I don't care about or where I don't care to read some of it, but it's critical that I don't miss certain posts like security updates to an important product I use).

I added GreenkeeperBot/renovate to my project so a PR is done whenever a dependency can be updated.

Email notifications and newsletters are much more popular than RSS/Atom, as far as I can tell. People already "get" email, and probably have an account, so it's easier to convert non-techies.

That's fair I suppose; I still use a lot of newsletters for things that don't have RSS feeds. My inbox tends to be more cluttered and harder to organize though (filters vs. just dragging a feed into a folder or adding a label) so I avoid it wherever possible. Still, having things come to me that way isn't the end of the world either.

For checking dependencies for updates, my package/dependency manager (pipenv) can check for me, and even do an audit for what dependencies need security updates, through the safety tool (https://github.com/pyupio/safety). This is for an application though, not a distro like what you seem to be doing.

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