How many feeds are you subscribed to? How do you read them: Skim all posts? Read selectively? Read everything? Why do you read feeds the way you do? If you don't, why do you choose not to?
I would re-subscribe to the HN feed if there were some option for a feed which only displays entries with X upvotes and/or X comments (and X could be specified in the options).
The general problem with subscribing to the feed is that I don't see which entries are popular and which not because stories tend to hit the frontpage rather fast on HN compared to other big sites.
For now, I just visit HN and click on a few stories on the frontpage (mostly these with many comments or upvotes).
Including a rating, or including a dynamic feed for a particular rating would be icing on the cake.
fwiw, i'm a happy google reader user -- 158 subscriptions. The only downside is that it's my go-to procrastination website. I read just about all RSS content, and click through about 10-20% of the time depending on the feed. If I find that I clear the unread on a feed more than once or twice, I'll usually unsubscribe (because obviously I don't have the time to keep up with it). Sometimes I use feeds as a glorified bookmark.
a) took too much absolute time (high volume, long posts - ie big news sites without targeted content)
b) too low signal to noise ratio (typically from someone that writes one popular posts that's a little outside their main topics) - Stuff White People like was on this - funny, not that funny, repetitive, too often. If it was once a week, I would have read it.
I read (see) probably 50 posts a day - anything more than that and I go back and prune some. I spend maybe 1-2 hours a day reading. It's my equivalent of watching TV. Here are the main categories:
Must reads - the Yegges, Grahams, Mosers, etc
High volume, quick reads - FAIL blog, Seth Godin
High volume, useful but not always great - SvN, CodingHorror, Joel
Low volume - product blogs, occasional bloggers
These I see all day, skim almost all (especially in the morning) and hit quite a few. Keeping it confined to my little dashboard area makes it accessible, while keeping it ignorable/attendable the same way I manage email et al.
I also use mobile Google Reader on my BlackBerry when bored.
Seriously, I'm subscribed to about 40 feeds, but I usually don't even start my feed browser because it's a time sink.
The S/N ratio with most blogs isn't very high, but I subscribe just to get that occasional important nugget of information/insight.
But I am coming to the realization that RSS is a bit of a distraction - if I start my RSS reader, I feel obliged to read everything just to get rid of the 'unread' icon. It doesn't really help me build great stuff.
Anyway, I use Google Reader. I tend to read everything I subscribe to. If I don't read it, I unsubscribe to it after I've ignored it long enough. I have maybe 30-40 subscriptions, all to sites that post infrequently, so I rarely have more than a handful of articles unread.
I get a lot of interesting articles via Hacker News too, and also via Google-Reader recommendations (one of GReader's killer features imho).
For the iGoogle Homepage I have HN and /. feeds. These feeds are updated so frequently that I don't want to subscribe to them in my reader (and have the unread ones pile up). These I read selectively - only the titles that interest me.
The Opera Feed reader I use for blogs that get updated at most daily. For the most part, I read every entry, skipping only the ocassional esoteric post. I used to read these ones in Google Reader; but once I discovered Opera's reader is much faster, I haven't gone back. (It would be nice if their synch system did feeds too, though.) I like to use the reader for these because it helps me keep track of what I've read, keeps all my daily/weekly reading in one place, and for feeds that include their content since they load considerably faster without the overhead of their site (e.g. Dilbert Blog).
Much like I used to read a newspaper, I've turned google reader into my information aggregator. It alerts me to daily podcasts, local/regional/national/global/financial news, interesting articles, etc... I read what's interesting, throw the rest away, star whatever I may want to revisit or leisurely read on the weekend, share whatever I want people to see on my blog, and 'mark all as read' when I start my weekend.
I skim whenever I'm waiting on a build or have a spare minute between meetings, but I separate out into categories things I'd like to read and things I may read if there's extra time. I spend about 2-3 hours a week in google reader, but much less time wading through comments and ads for a net gain.
From the trends page on google reader: "From your 114 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 9,483 items."
Have embarked upon a quest to break it — up to ~1000 feeds, and although it stalls out my MBP during huge updates, it's held up very well. Tried Google Reader but at about ~200 feeds, it crapped out and the whole AJAXy UI became totally unmanageable (plus, frequent bouts where the server never returned) — Google Reader issues may have been rectified, but at time I experimented with it, it was unwieldy.
I need to do some housekeeping to NNW — presently, I sort by feed source, and just fly through/ignore about half the feeds (especially the ones with frequent updates). It seems the more frequent the update, the less the quality fare, though HN is an exception in this regard. Really need to set up folder buckets to bury those that I might want to read, given extra time.
I scan and can flip through titles and first few paragraphs rapidly (3 pane view).
It really is a more efficient reading experience that magnifies your news/blog coverage, but you need to refine, and dispense with the ones that don't add value or at least bury them.
There is a dichotomy in reading experience via RSS vs. the Web that I will write an article about at some future point and lay out all my thoughts — lots of good stuff out there that has no RSS or content that RSS is not sufficiently capturing the content (some titles only or less than a sentence in body, or web site styling that enhances the viewership experience).
OTOH, the big benefit of RSS is getting to read without the extraneous, tarted up graphic fare in a font size/style more suited to reading text on a monitor.
Really want to change that, so there's no fixed "inbox", but the posts that are critical should bubble up to top, and the rest should only be findable with specific topic searches.
I use about 10 categories: must read, local, off topic, certain topic, like say Python, Javascript, etc.
It was a big problem before I started leaving unread categories for a couple of days. Now it is great. Read couple of categories on daily basis, then the other, when I have time, or sometimes mark them all as read (I hate myself for that later).
OT: Since when Bloglines became so unpopular? Or is it just HN trend? Does Google Reader rule the blog readers world now?
Perhaps I need to adjust my approach to feeds to maximize my information/time; I tend to cycle between subscribing to many feeds and then unsubscribing from many. My biggest trouble is with feeds that are high volume (1 post/day or more) yet have interesting content. These can be enormous timesinks if I'm not careful.
The stuff I was interested in would change over time, so I was left with feeds I wasn't so interested in anymore. I tried different feedreaders. And I would always feel overwhelmed when I saw 4,283 unread messages.
So I'm back trying it again with a "must read" folder in Google Reader and only putting feeds in that I definitely want to read.
But when I do subscribe and am committed to reading, I try to make an effort to at least open every post and start reading it.
In general thought, most news actually isn't news. It's just data and we need to model what we actually care about, and then monitor for that.
E.g. I don't really care that there's a war in Darfur, I care that the world has more armed conflicts now than last year. So write a script to keep track of them (scrape wikipedia) and when the number goes up, email yourself to write a check to UNHCR.
Otherwise, I check HN and a couple other news sites. Most of the good stuff tends to rise to the top, and Google Alerts catches the good articles that don't get on the front page.
Quite a pain on Monday (I don't read feeds on weekends) to come into work and have 50 new articles on Business of Software and Hacker News :P. Just one of those burdens I bear, I guess. I used to actually click through and read each and every HackerNews article, so I've improved somewhat from there. Little baby steps.
Yet at work, I use my E-mail (Thunderbird), perhaps because the RSS feeds tend to be blogs, newsgroups or other similar E-mail-like items.
In other words, my reader depends on the style of the content: is it E-mail-like, or web-like.
I have my feeds logically grouped into prioritized groups so that if I start to get a backlog of 500+ posts I will read my favorite blog from a given category then mark all as read to reduce the counts.
Every month or so I go through my feeds and only keep the ones that consistently have posts that catch my attention.
I highly recommend it to anyone on OS X Leopard. Mail doesn't count unread RSS entries as unread mail, so RSS feeds become more of a "you could potentially look at this when you have nothing to do, and these are the entries you didn't read". It's good.
Fast, simple, console-friendly, familiar keybindings and gets the job done without any distractions.
What more could you possibly wish for?
I also track around 800 feeds (opinion / lower frequency) on Netvibes on a weekly / biweekly basis.
129.
Read the most important ones, then eventually catch up on the other ones.
I'd go mad if I didn't read them selectively like this.