Unexpected, Useless, and Urgent, or What RSS Gets Right | Hacker News Reader

Unexpected, Useless, and Urgent, or What RSS Gets Right

charlieharrington.com

142 pointswhatrocks62 comments

I came of age in the era of budding social media platforms, and that was my primary way to consume feeds and news online for the past 10 years or so (I include reddit in the "social media" category, especially more recently). Now, being older and having witnessed the many many problems that social media companies have exacerbated in society, I’ve started looking for other ways to read what's going on in the world.

This search has brought me to RSS. I use the same reader app as the author, and I absolutely love it. No addictive feed design, no ads built to manipulate me based on my mood and scrolling patterns. I hope RSS sticks around.

You kids these days.

I started using RSS in, I believe 2003, back when Mac OS X apps looked like this:

https://ranchero.com/images/nnw/progress.jpg

We synced our RSS feeds via FTP or .Mac, and we liked it.

For modern macOS and iOS users, Reeder 5 came out about a week ago and is pretty nice.

No .Mac syncing, but it does support iCloud!

NetNewsWire (from parent comment's screenshot) is also still around. Plenty of great RSS reader options.

NetNewsWire is even FOSS.

It supports only Feedbin (itself FOSS but supports non-self hosted) and Feedly though. I want to self-host. TANSTAAFL and either I get used for profiling/upselling (Feedly) or I need to pay money while I can self host (Feedbin).

Reeder 4 is also good, I tried it (for free) right before Reeder 5 got released. It supports a whole lot more than NetNewsWire, including self hosting services FreshRSS, Reader, and Fever (deprecated). It also has support for Pocket.

So I went with Reeder and got FreshRSS installed.

On Android I settled with FeedMe, but honestly I haven't found a slick one which works with FreshRSS.

I could settle with tmux + CLI + Browsh. In that case, consider Newsboat. It supports a myriad of (self-hosted) RSS services. But not the ones Reeder supports...

The next version of NetNewsWire will have iCloud sync, according to the roadmap.

edit: source: https://inessential.com/2020/09/19/netnewswire_5_1_for_mac_f...

Yeah, and perhaps more methods (that one's useless for me, YMMV). Its FOSS too, but author doesn't accept money bounty.

Reeder was a great app even when used on the iPhone 4, granted it was the best one out as the time. I believe Reeder 3 was the final version I bought before phasing out of using RSS. My Main Twitter account was started in 2009 so I think it’s fair to say that by 2013 there was more interesting real-time coverage becoming readily available through other sources instead of a RSS feed.

Now, as someone who has not used RSS since then, do all or many websites still have/advertise RSS feeds? I imagine each section now has their own obscure URL instead of a main feed hidden away in menus but I don’t know. Or if modern apps have a Internet-wide search where you can simply time in “News Site X” and it’ll populate their feeds.

Twitter has become easy to digest but I’d much rather prefer my news coming in vanilla again.

I use Feedly for my sync backend to various apps.

It has a pretty good automagic feed discovery system. Pop in the root URL of the site, and it’s good about discovering the proper feed.

In 2009 I bought my first smartphone, the HTC Magic. It was also the first smartphone sold by Vodafone Spain, who had zero experience with phones where you could actually use internet, so they offered uncapped contracts. To make things worse: - Android was just a few months old - Apps were not optimized for using as little data as possible - I was REALLY into RSS, with hundred of feeds, and RSS apps where continually polling for changes.

The rest is history: my first month with a smartphone - May 2009 - I consumed 10GB of data and I received a few calls from the Vodafone people

Funny, looking at that screenshot filled me with nostalgia for a program I've never used.

You need to actively curate your subreddits to get the best experience. When there is a disparity between your subreddits (in number of posts or their flashiness), few subreddits will flood your whole feed with useless junk. E.g. I have subscribed to EarthPorn (I like nice pictures of Earth naturally), and suddenly 50% of my feed becomes panoramas. That is nice to look at for a moment, but it is really bad for your reading. But if you are able to find few relevant subreddits that do not have that many users, it can be actually really great for discovering interesting stuff. You just need to be really aggressive with how you curate your subscriptions.

No, we need to just cut our losses with reddit altogether. Each year, it just gets more political and more authoritarian. Even if you find a good subreddit, its only a matter of time before it gets usurped by the usual powermods that each control 300+ subreddits and bans anyone who disagrees. The admins will never do anything about them since it's hundreds of people willing to perform free labor for them.

big fan of FPH?

e: Sorry that's a bit weak of a comment.

The deal with reddit authoritarianism makes sense. They don't want to support hate-filled communities that promote violence, crime, or misinformation. They are free to do whatever they want. Most of the people I see complaining about reddit had their favorite hate-filled subreddits banned.

That's not at all true; most Reddit subs have become their own circlejerk about US politics (even those that you'd think would be far from political), and frankly it's annoying.

You're making a lot of incorrect assumptions. Read the parent comment again. I clearly explained the problems.

Moderation has always been a pain point.

Source: was a junior moderator on CompuServe, was the hub for a BBS network.

I determined in late 80s that editor was most valuable function for coping with "infoglut" (term coined by BYTE Magazine?). The editor role's is to filter and explain.

Today we'd call that function or role curation.

The only thing that has changed is the scale. Any criticism of moderation you could possibly articulate has already been pile driven into the deep firmament by legions of people before you.

FWIW, I'm personally familiar with a handful of sites that do moderation well. HN, ravelry.org, r/askhistorians, metafilter. There's certainly others. I'd LOVE for some academic ethnographers anthropologists to try to explain how and why and when moderation seems to work well. In the style of Clay Shirky or Michael Lewis, making stuff obvious once someone points it out.

Yep! Personally, I solved this with a multireddit bundle of subreddits that I really care about (they tend not to have much volume). So I can sort them by new/weekly top and have something meaningful.

This is exactly what I found with subreddits.

Did you know you can follow subreddits via RSS? It makes reddit work for me.

If anyone is interested in the early conflicts (Dave Winer threatening to sue Roger Cadenhead) that shaped RSS, I wrote a fight-by-fight, meeting-by-meeting history of the conflict, back in 2006, which was widely discussed back at the time, including by some of the central figures in the story, such as Sam Ruby:

http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-...

> Either a single company, perhaps Bloglines, shall gain such marketshare that it can force a de facto resolution of the ambiguities pertaining to the 2.0 format, or companies will eventually abandon RSS in favor of Atom. Atom, after all, gives companies a chance to start over fresh and do everything right. Of these two possibilities, the latter seems more likely.

Both formats lost as far as public mainstream syndication is concerned :(. (Who won ? Twitter, facebook and silos).

I think the issue here is that you're comparing RSS with Social Media only as a consumer. But in Social Media you're also producing content and interacting with other users, and also watching interactions between users, that's for me a big difference between RSS and Social Media too.

RSS for me it's like reading the news paper, while Social Media would be to go to a bar with some friends and talk about the news/hot topic of the moment. They cover different needs.

Better social media has RSS, which I use extensively: Reddit, blogs, this very website.

You can also follow youtube via RSS. Even twitter via RSS.

I've spent some time to find a way to turn my twitter timeline into an RSS feed. It seemed like a lot of work to me. Which approach do you favor?

It's relatively easy find solutions to produce RSS feeds from individual twitter users, but I'd like to read my whole timeline in the RSS reader. There's one tool called [twitter-to-rss](https://github.com/ankitshekhawat/twitter-to-rss), but I haven't tried it and it might be outdated.

For a more technical discussion of what RSS gets right (or not), see:

https://nullprogram.com/blog/2013/09/23/

Anyone have recommendations for an RSS Reader for Android? Specifically, I'm looking for one that:

- doesn't have advertisements or tracking

- doesn't require an account

And I am definitely willing to pay for it.

Feeder: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/

I'm reading this thread though feeder as I type. Big fan

Does HN do RSS subscriptions?

It does. I think I just googled for it and a look came up.

hnrss.org - it’s amazing

https://damng.github.io/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content/...

It does what is says on the tin, pulls content from the OP link. Links to HN comments too.

Yep that’s what I use to read HN

Flym has no ads, no account and is free.

I use Podcast Addict on my [Android] tablet and Smartphone. Free with ads, cheap for no ads.

RSS for whatever you want: podcasts, comedian tour schedules, webcomics.

I host my Tiny Tiny RSS Reader and use this on Android:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.ttrssreade...

Innoreader -- the full web app and the Android app are both great

Been using News+ for years, with the Bazqux Reader plugin to sync to Bazqux.

I personally love FeedMe. I have tried so many, and its the only one that has a pleasant UI, tons of features and free. I would pay for it if it wasn't free. No ads.

I used to run a no-account feed reader on my laptop, but realized it's a mistake -- because it can only update when it's on, and if you're e.g. away for a week without connectivity (highly recommended!) you can't get the updates back -- some of the feeds I follow average 20 posts/day, but only publish the recent 100 on RSS.

I switched to an always-on server app (NewsBlur paid service, which has a no-ad app for iOS, and which I highly recommend, and I assume the Android version is good as well) - but it does require an account (you can self host; I was too lazy)

If you want to read tech blogs feeds, I run [1] to aggregate and present tech RSS feeds from many many tech blogs. Check out the tag cloud there to quickly read through major news of the day.

[1] https://embit.ca

You can try my app Plenary - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spians.ple... which perfectly suits your needs. It doesn't have ads or tracking and doesn't require an account. Plenary is combination of RSS reader and offline article downloader with built-in support for podcasts. Check it out and let me know if it works for you!

My RSS reader (Feedbin + the Reeder app) really is my little corner of coziness on my phone or computer.

Three times a day I spend 10-20 minutes to skim through the headlines and fully read the interesting stuff.

So in 30-60 minutes per day, I stay up to date on all important, interesting and worthwhile stuff going on. It’s fantastic.

As far as infinite scroll goes it's a matter of how many RSS feeds you pull down. My opml feedlist is almost 2 MB at this point and almost recreates the infinite scroll feel of a centralized social media aggregator.

My take on the problem of filtering crap while still allowing the unexpected useful content to come through is filtering out everything unwanted.

Back in the Usenet days I solve the same problem with liberal use of filters in nn. I could filter out any thread with disruptive participants, or using keywords against titles/post content. Other than the horrible UX for defining the filters it was actually working quite well.

I wish there was more RSS readers with advanced filtering capabilities. I haven't tried Feedly's mute filters feature yet. On paper it looks like exactly what I'd need.

QuiteRSS has filters.

You can do a lot on the pro tier for inoreader. Paid, but usually goes on sale around black friday.

I think “notmuch” is actually a great solution to handle email (or a corpus of articles such as RSS) with a combination of search/filters and tags. The interface is also ripe to easily plug in ML based filters or other social curation filters (Eg: re-shared by my friends) if we manage to build good ones.

If only we had a pleasant graphical interface on top (which played nice with HTML email), rather than needing to use text-based interfaces, I think it would be a HUGE improvement over most mail clients out there.

He must be using a different RSS than me, because RSS for me is another endless feed.

If the answer is "you're not curating the list of people you follow well enough", then I don't see how RSS is different than any other network. Re: Twitter, is very common to hear people say "You have to curate your feed!", or "You have to use lists!". RSS is the same, if you subscribe to a handful of personal pages, then RSS will be nice. If you use RSS to subscribe to magazines, you're going to get a big list of articles. The same applies to FB or Twitter.

That's very true and why I avoided subscribing to magazines and other news sites. I ended up creating a category for them in my feed aggregator (self hosted FreshRSS, I'm quite happy with it) and masking them in my main feed. This way, I keep my curated and "slow" main feed, but I can dive into the big list of articles I receive from those magazines and news sites whenever I want.

RSS is great. I'm still using it extensively and taken up maintaining the TT-RSS full feed plugin Feediron for the last few years because it's been so essential for my workflow.

https://github.com/feediron/ttrss_plugin-feediron

High inbox volume is humorously labeled "infinite scroll", but I don't get the low-volume label: "medium-rare"?

In context, I think it means "not too often".

Medium-rare is how you want your beef, no?

Rarely get articles from Medium.

Quote: "Why does using opening my RSS inbox feel so much better than typing in gmail.com or tapping the iMessages icon or, heavens forbid, opening up Twitter?"

Exactly because you're using gmail, iMessage and Twitter. How about using Protonmail only? And ditch the rest in oblivion? Try that then tell me how much better you'll feel.

RSS is great but it's one-way broadcasting. Internet should really be two-way where reader should be able to communicate back to the author inside the same medium.

Yeah, right! A journalist would so much appreciate the communication from thousands of readers that would have no life left for anything else.

I like one way communications.

Adding two-way capability doesn't mean you have to use it. Journalist could just disable two-way communication. But others content creators may have career depend on it.

In the mean time I think RSS could standardize payment as well. Get rid of those patreon links, establish a neutral payment protocol.

That is a worrying characterization, I hope you reconsider.

I'd rather it be kept simple. That's probably the best thing about RSS.

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