Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity | Hacker News Reader

Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity

arstechnica.com

76 pointscarusen49 comments

"Making a conscious (or unconscious, as the case may be) decision to scan through 20-something RSS items a few times per hour means that you're constantly interrupting what you were doing in order to perform another task."

Okay, I call shens on this whole article.

Using RSS means that I speed-read over a few hundred article headers during half an hour over coffee and pop open around a dozen articles to read in full.

The problem they're talking about is checking your RSS feed obsessively - which has exactly the same issues as checking your email obsessively, or your texts, or your Facebook wall, or whatever the heck else that you should stop interrupting yourself with constantly.

"Keeping up" does not have to mean being OCD at the expense of getting work done.

The entire article was invalidated (in my mind) by the simple fact that you can choose when you want to open your RSS reader. You don't have to be pinged every 20 seconds. Don't punish everyone just because you can't control yourself.

RSS is immensely useful for staying up-to-date with postings from a broad collection of websites, and without missing a lot of good content, and it's pretty much universally supported. It annoys me very much that there are so many "hip techies" encouraging killing RSS when it is clearly superior to Twitter, or manually browsing all of the different websites, at syndicating content.

Exactly. I use to sit back on launch Reeder on my iPad AFTER my working day is done. It may take some time to go through all those items and skipping duplicate stories can be anoying but it's always nice to end the day with good content that keeps you updated. There's really no need to consider rss as interfering notifications.

Agreed.

I personally go through my RSS feed every few months and re-evaluate my feeds. If I have feeds that have low signal to noise ratios, or simply publishes articles that I never read, I remove them.

Also, I segregated high volume feeds (such as Flickr picture feeds and Gizmodo/NYTimes/BBC etc.) into a separate account. I have two accounts, one (low volume) where I try to take a closer more thorough look at everything, and another (high volume) where I simply do a quick scan then mark all as read.

Don't blame RSS for your inability to manage it.

The 'trends' tab in Google Reader is useful to check on that: it gives you both how many items a feed published and how many you clicked on for the last 30 days. This can be useful to confirm the ratios.

Most of my feeds publish only two or three times a week, some even less, but with high signal to noise ratio; that's where RSS really shines, since checking them manually would kill a huge amount of time.

Exactly... but, i can imagine how someone who is obsessed with keeping his rss feed reads all read will have a problem.(much like email). I personally have found it useful to have a limit of not more than 100 posts a month.If i do, i unsubscribe on some feeds that have become irrelevant to me.

For me it was the following two comments. It just showed me this was the type of person who is obsessed with following the latest news and keeping up with all their feeds. It's an edge use-case, and not one I subscribe to (pun intended).

I combined that with my usual e-mail communications and my regular scans of Twitter in order to figure out what was going on during the day.

Twitter is basically an RSS feed, and many people even more obsessively than coffee.

Others may say that they can avoid the all-day-long RSS time suck by only opening their clients once per day, but I argue that it still piles up redundant content that you now have to waste time going through all at once.

Of course, Twitter never has redundant content or an echo-chamber effect.

Both Twitter and RSS have the advantage of letting you decide on your sources, so you have some options for lowering redundancy that don't occur in (more) centralized aggregation like HN or Reddit.

I only got into Twitter relatively recently and find it a better option than RSS, overall. Blogs are weighted down by the expectation of being their own content; tweets are mostly about linking or short updates, and following someone with good links can be a really great experience.

That's what I was thinking, it sounds like she just replaced RSS with Twitter. She's obviously constantly checking Twitter. Instead of reading twitter all day every day I'd rather just browse my RSS feed in the morning and in the evening. I don't feel like I miss anything either.

Jacqui's job is what it is though. Not everyone has the same obligations that she does.

Enter PostRank:

http://www.postrank.com/feed/

For every RSS feed you will get 4 RSS sub-feeds:

1. Best posts.

2. Great posts.

3. Good posts.

4. All posts.

The ranking (to decide if a post is good/great/best) is done through its popularity online (reddit, digg, delicious, etc.).

When I'm interested in a website I usually subscribe to the best posts sub-feed, sometimes to the great posts sub-feed. This way I'm never overloaded with RSS items to read and I don't miss anything important.

Here are ultra-filtered HN sub-feeds using a feed of HN posts of 150 votes or above:

http://www.postrank.com/feed/20ad1f84cfa8acedf528c616cd441f6...

Also, here is a JavaScript bookmarklet I created to find the PostRank sub-feeds for the current website you're on:

  javascript:location.href='http://page2rss.com/page?url=+encodeURIComponent(location.href);

EDIT: ReFilter is also very useful if you want to only read posts about a particular topic:

http://re.rephrase.net/filter/

It would be nice if this could be combined with something that extracts the content of HN's links in to the RSS feed itself, like:

http://andrewtrusty.appspot.com/readability/feed?url=http://...

There's also the reader extension http://labs.postrank.com/gr You can set the treshold, and it will dim out the items that are below it. It greatly increases your ability to "fly through" items, without worrying too much about what you're missing.

OMG, thanks a lot. I was struggling with too many reposts and self-promotions by obscure bloggers on HN. This helps a lot. Looks like digg for rss. Subscribed to the best HN posts. Unsubscribed from the original feed.

You're welcome. Beware that is a best posts filter from an already filtered feed that contained only posts with at least 150 votes. Here's where the "original" already filtered feed came from:

http://talkfast.org/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news-overlo...

The current model of RSS consumption is still broken. For the vast majority of news sources, you really care about headlines and recency rather than read/unread counts. I had a rambling blog post about it a few years ago: http://bit.ly/rklROK

My first startup was trying to address some of these issues but we never quite got there. Unfortunately, innovation in the RSS space pretty much stopped (partially because of the adequate, and free, google reader). I keep waiting for someone to pick up the news source / skimming / river of news / feed magazine torch but I haven't seen it yet.

River of News: http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com/riverOfNews

From the guy responsible for the first RSS reader and RSS producers. One of those cases where the pioneer got it right and a lot of the following horde missed one of the key points. I've been using RSS since, well, not quite day one but month one, and River of News is the only way to go.

It's OK to just skim past a lot of articles. If you pop open your reader and don't feel like it, just hit "everything's read" and close it again. You must understand it as a transient view. It's not email, it's a stream, and if you drop some of it on the floor it's not a problem. Nobody will bite you. None of this is an obligation.

Google reader is acceptable as a river of news. I've stopped using local readers, partially because despite only having about 60 feeds, RSS-reader-authors seem nearly incapable of producing halfway performant software and even my modest feed set tends to crash or cause 100% CPU for extended periods of time. (There are some, but cutting down the reader space by the criterion of "what was written competently" means that the apparent space of hundreds is actually only a handful of choices, and most of those aren't very good at the river approach.)

Feed Demon on Windows is doing a good job at it, Reeder on OS X is very nice too, but its not as good for consuming data quickly as Feed Demon

Ars Technica criticizing RSS while advertising Twitter? With respect to the point of the article, that's a false dichotomy.

Other than that, RSS is universal and decentralized whereas Twitter is a vain, contained and centralized environment.

I'm personally torn on RSS readers. Admittedly, I'm an almost entirely unproductive person lately, so I can't claim that it's because RSS is getting in the way of other things. My chief suspicion is that as the number of subscriptions goes up, the propensity to fly through headlines rises as well, and so too does the efficiency of applying whatever criteria normally applies in choosing whether or not to read past a headline. What normally would be signal gets converted to noise because of the quantity needed to be consumed. Of course, one can always lower the number of subscriptions, but on the other hand, as one approaches lower bounds, the less sense RSS makes: one can simply and probably with more aesthetic pleasure, just make rounds to the website. Another point: there's more information and more of interest in a website than what gets printed as words in an article or in the images or whatever media that accompanies that article. And this is another suspicious element of RSS readers: they divorce content from the context in which it "originally" appears (scare quotes because of complexity). One can learn a good lot of important stuff about a content provider by looking at that provider's website, layout, design, ad priorities, etc. And not only about that provider, but about just what the hell the web looks like these days. If all I did was read via RSS, I'd probably have no clue. And more over, if all anybody ever did was read via RSS, websites themselves would be something else entirely and that something else probably wouldn't be much to look at.

So really that's two chief suspicions: one, it's hard to find an optimal number of subscriptions (or even if there is such a thing); and two, RSS annihilates the experience of everything it can't contain.

(I said I was torn, but I think I've started to convince myself that maybe I need to ditch Google Reader...)

It seems there's a problem that needs to be solved, doesn't it? How's this for a startup idea: "Pandora for RSS"

Users subscribe to a few feeds and provide feedback as to which articles they liked and disliked; the system correlates each individual with other similar users and starts providing suggestions, ratings, and sorts the articles in terms of "quality" that you defined by your votes. Then, as a user, you don't have to read everything - just the best recent posts.

It can be treated more like a tailored/customized version of Reddit or Hacker News. You don't have to "catch up", you just go browse it when you feel like it.

This really sounds to me exactly what sub-reddits already accomplish... am I missing something?

In fact, I do use sub-reddits as a kind of rss alternative and for my less frequented ones will sort by Top for last week/month/etc. It works pretty well, but sub-reddits can only get specific to a certain extent, which is where a feed excels in. Say I want to keep up not just philosophy, and not just epistemology but phenomenological epistemology (doesn't matter what it actually is, just that it's highly specialized). No sub-reddit exists for such a thing (or anything like it that is so specialized). And I can rely on /r/philosophy or even /r/epistemology to feed me that content.

What I really need is to get it all straight from the horses' mouths. Since posts are apt to be spread out, it doesn't make sense for me to continually check whatever blog or website for updated content: I want to be alerted when it's updated.

Say I have 50 to 100 such websites of similarly specialized content. The situation will be the same for each, so it seems like it would make sense to get the alerts all in the same place, hence RSS. But the problem is that now there's just too much being pushed, even though each content provider is only pushing a little bit every week, it adds up fast (and this isn't even taking into account more general, entertainment-like content that invariably works its way into the feed).

On the other hand, this is starting to sound less like a problem with technology and more of a problem with my personal information-junkie habits (that are unfortunately self-defeating).

It's funny that he says he doesn't need the productivity loss of keeping up with RSS because anything important will show up in his Twitter feed.

Who's this he you're referring to?

I simply separate my RSS feeds into two folders - A list and B list. A list is for independent writers who only post a couple times a day. B list is for news-centric websites. I do not hesitate to simply mark the entire B list as read.

I second this. Triageing feeds is the way to go. Also don't think you can read it all.

I think you're missing his point: he separates his feeds into high- and low-volume, and is willing to triage the high-volume subset without missing out on the rest.

I've been doing something similar for a couple of years now. I built http://readwarp.com to manage my high-volume sites, and now my google reader's dropped from 1500 feeds to 100 low-volume must-see feeds that generate 10 stories a day.

Yea, I don't think I did mis-understand the comment, but I glad you found a place to plug your site.

Wow, that is some nasty sarcasm you've got there.

Readwarp's an ancient hobby that I don't work on anymore. Did it seem like I was trying to convert traffic? We all know how to build landing pages with big, bright call-to-action buttons, you know.

I've long since pruned most features on the site. There's no way to import feeds, etc. It only really works for me anymore. I linked to it because it's hard to make sense of custom reading solutions without pointers to try them out.

Let's step back a little and consider whether it makes sense to blame a document format for our problems.

> I combined that with my usual e-mail communications (tips from readers, conversations with PR folks from different companies, interviews already in progress, etc.) and my regular scans of Twitter in order to figure out what was going on during the day. It was stress-free, and I never felt like I was missing anything—I knew that if something truly important or controversial blew up, I'd hear about it instantly via Twitter and our loyal readers.

> Sam Stephenson, a programmer at 37signals, agreed. "I gave up on RSS a couple of years ago when I realized it was just another unread indicator in my dock, another number to zero out," Stephenson told Ars. "If an article or link is important it almost always shows up in my Twitter stream, or on one of the handful of websites I check throughout the day."

I think I see the problem here.

Why on earth would you actually check a handful of sites throughout the day if you have RSS? That's what it's supposed to help with. You just have one site (or app), and check that whenever your code is compiling (or whatever), and _it_ checks all the other sites for you.

Actually opening up websites to see if they have something new feels horribly inefficient.

My RSS reader only refreshes every hour (and there's no easily accessible refresh button or way to force that), and I stick to feeds that get max 1 or 2 updates a day. Problem solved.

Don't blame the technology, blame the way you use it. Of course, subscribing to a high-traffic feed isn't much more effective than just keeping a tab open and refreshing every few seconds. You still have to cut throught the noise. But that's not the point, imo. Rss is great for tracking these obscure blogs that get one or two very well-though updates a week, or even less.

If anything I would say that my reader saves me time and distraction. I don't have to search for the information I'm looking for, wasting needless time on links in search that wind up being non-relavent spam. I get to skim through articles that have a higher probability of being relevant to something that I need to know and I get to do this at my leisure.

Swapping out RSS for twitter is illogical. They are both RSS but Twitter doesn't have an unread count.

The article instead should have pointed to content browsing solutions that replicate the experience of a newspaper for quick exploration leading to deeper reading.

Way back in the olden days, I built a lovely reader (inventively called Reader) at Earthlink.

The key feature to Reader was that it did not have unread counts at all. You could flip through the articles and it would keep keep track of where you were. If you left for more than half an hour, the rest of the articles were marked as read.

It was very liberating to not feel like you were ever trying to keep up with your feeds.

These days, Fever App seems the way to go... http://feedafever.com/

Fever looks great: rerank high volume feeds by correlation to other feeds I like, mark some feeds like bug reports/commits as read all

... but I cringed so hard when the demo said to set all the files to 777. It's a php app you run on your own webserver and according to the documentation updates itself automatically.

I don't think RSS as a mechanism is the problem here. If anything, it's a problem of oversubscribing to too many blogs and news sites. What's really needed is a better mechanism for providing an overview of these items in a way that allows one to quickly skim over unread items and decide what's worth reading and what's not. Something along the lines of Flipboard or Pulse with ReadItLater support, which already exists for your tablet/phone, but seems to be lacking for desktops (as far as I know. I could be wrong here though).

I use proxies to filter my news. Proxies are people like you and every other user of Reddit and HN. These people help me by voting on what stories they think are important. For example, I never go to TechCrunch on my own. Occasionally there will be an interesting article there, and it will show up on HN. It's using the wisdom of the crowd to filter the thousands of articles that are written every day.

Instead of saving stuff to read later, when I want to read something I go to HN and check what's currently on top. I'll almost always find something interesting, and if I check about ounce a day I don't miss much.

This is a great idea. But I find that the churn rate for HN is quite high in comparison to reddit, and I need to check HN quite a few times a day to not miss interesting stuff. Also, though this case is probably rare given the shared interests of HN and subreddits, it's still possible that you could miss out on something that you would have potentially found interesting, but the majority did not.

I just use FeedSpeak (http://feedspeak.tk) - an app that reads your RSS feeds to you, so you can listen to articles while doing other things.

Unless they've got Morgan Freeman or Tom Waits or Garrison Keillor doing the reading, I'm not sure how you can stand this.

I'm not just being cheeky, either; is listening to voice fonts for extended periods and for complex material just something you have to warm up to?

heh, the robotic lady voice was annoying at first, but i got used to it. there is experimental support for custom tts engines built into the app if you want to use different ones.

The issue with RSS is that you can't put advertisements in it else it'd lose all value. So RSS is not a good thing for sites such as Ars.

In the end you're going to have 3-10 RSS feeds to read max and they're exactly the same ones as the 3-10 sites you were going o read, except you can easily see headlines. Instead of putting 200 RSS feeds, which is clearly just as dumb as reading 200 sites (in fact its still easier to read 200 RSS than 200 sites)

And that's that.

> The issue with RSS is that you can't put advertisements in it else it'd lose all value. So RSS is not a good thing for sites such as Ars.

Yes and no. While you'll be less exposed to ads than while visiting the site, RSS also lets the site push content to the user, which can lead to more pageviews than if he had to remember to visit it.

Google Reader Notifiers

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/apflmjolhbonpkbkoo... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kfimchjilnmjmjpdge...

Make checking efficient.

Could you elaborate on this? How does it "make checking efficient"? And what is an "efficient check" anyway?

Try clicking on the links, you'll see some pictures.

A tip: use a service like www.blogtrottr.com to keep up on infrequently-updated RSS feeds. It emails you with an excerpt and link to the full article when one gets published. That way you're not cluttering up your RSS reader with feeds that 95% of the time will show old content or no content.

How does sam get what he needs from his twitter stream?

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