Ask HN: How do you deal with high-volume RSS feeds? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you deal with high-volume RSS feeds?

6 pointsjuniperplant4 comments

I consume lots of content via RSS (Reddit, personal blogs, podcasts, YouTube, BBC World News etc.), however there are some sources that are much more active than others, causing feed entries from less active sources to fall into oblivion.

To give you an example, when I fire up my RSS reader ~90% of the entries I see are either from BBC or Reddit.

Do you have any tip, aside from organizing feeds into categories or using "proxy" services like hnrss[1]? Maybe I should simply unsubscribe from noisy feeds...

[1]: https://hnrss.github.io/

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Bookmark the homepages of busy feeds and then toss them out of your feed reader.

I did this a few weeks ago and it's been great.

BBC World News would be a good one to start with, I imagine. Bookmark the homepage and then unsubscribe from the feed. Click the bookmark once or twice a day, or whenever. Click through to full articles of stuff that interests you. Rinse and repeat.

Keep doing this for each busy feed as needed. Eventually you'll be left with just the quiet feeds.

I use RSS through my email client, Thunderbird. I can manage the feed subscriptions easily. I have subscribed to some topics through hnrss for certain keywords of interest in comments and posts/stories and it's working fine.

I have also subscribed to certain repositories on GitHub to read the release notes.

There's no feed that drowns the other because they are separated.

I have three strategies:

1 - Sort by feed: I can quickly skim through a high volume feed without missing a low volume feed

2 - Sort from old to new: especially if it’s a news feed, I can quickly scroll past all the old stuff that isn’t relevant anymore

So my feeds are basically:

Folder 1

- Feed 1 articles old to new

- Feed 2 articles old to new

Folder 2

- Feed 3 articles old to new

- Etc.

3 - This is more tricky/high maintenance, but filter out irrelevant content. For example, I follow some Apple blogs and for all of those, if the title contains “review”, my feed reader (Feedbin) will mark it as read so I don’t even see the item.

Unsubscribe. Too much is too much. Life is too short and too hard for such distraction.

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