Why I Don't Use RSS Anymore | Hacker News Reader

Why I Don't Use RSS Anymore

nicosphere.net

10 pointsNic027 comments

Then you are missing out and are letting the masses decide what you read. Technical experts have highly targeted RSS feeds and thus highly relevant information. Once you give up on that you've really just given up.

You are certainly right, I'm not a technical experts, and the average contain of HN is usually enough for me. If I would need some too specific stuff, it wouldn't work.

Sounds like a good balance is best. RSS for specific, infrequent blogs and twitter for the mass news. This is where I have found myself lately. I have dropped all feeds that post more than 3 or 4 times a day other than HN. If I could get a more refined feed from HN (just stuff that makes it to the front page), I would be even happier.

> If I could get a more refined feed from HN (just stuff that makes it to the front page

There is possibly a way, this twitter account provide only HN stories higher than 100 points, Twitter also allow to follow via RSS feed, unless they it turned off, https://twitter.com/#!/newsyc100 So it would provide readable feed for HN.

awesome. i didn't know about that twitter account. thanks.

Harnessing thousands of wetware processors executing trained expert systems, for a news filter? Not giving up, to use Hacker News.

I'm actually very sad that people don't understand the power of RSS. Of course you have to be stupid to push Reddit through Google Reader, but that does not mean RSS is dead as much as email is dead because we have Facebook messaging. While that analogy sounds outrageous, think about it: you won't kick yourself because you missed the top post in Reddit from the morning (maybe it annoys you that you don't understand the windfall of followup posts) but I sure as hell don't want to miss the one important publication that got published in a journal about my research. Sure, my unread count is now 2000, but I can still rest assured that my procrastination will not make things I haven't read to just disappear.

I used to really love some subreddits, especially r/askscience. I used to be able to just put an RSS feed and never miss a single question I could help with. But now its overwhelming; I can't do anything about it. So I just didn't even bother going there for a while. Until I figured out ways to filter the posts in the subreddit and feed them into RSS (I used http://ifttt.com/ for that btw) and now I can at least try to answer questions of my interest.

While social aggregation sites are good to go through while munching dinner, when you need to consume data for real knowledge acquisition, I don't think you can beat RSS. For that I hope RSS never dies in spite of all the ignorance around it.

For high traffic sites, RSS is pretty unusable (mostly because the state of the art in clients seems to be fixated on read/unread counts. Feed a Fever looked interesting http://feedafever.com/ but never really seemed to take off) but there are always going to be never-want-to-miss sites.

I have a collection of blogs and sites where I want to read every thing that person says. There are many people that post infrequently, post extremely insightful commentary and yet don't show up in my social media feeds.

Many excellent sites publish new stuff very rarely. RSS is the best way to follow those sites.

I agree that good sites publish rarely. Some site get in the Hacker News front page at every publication, even if they publish once a month, because they stuff are excellent. I'm not following them with RSS, but I still aware of them.

The tricky bit is that YOU still need to follow the news everyday. If Joel On Software has a new post, it surely will get posted to HN, but if you are on vacation, you will miss it. RSS would let you see it when you come back.

Google Reader allows me to mix high traffic and "I don't want to miss anything" sites.

I make extensive use of tags, and put my "not to miss" feeds under a "favorite" tag, that I always read. 2-3 other tags I read all from as well.

And the rest (including HN), I only read in "All items", sorted by "magic". That way, I know I will see if something big happened on these sites (it's sorted mostly by the amount of "+1", I think) in priority, and the rest, maybe later.

Then, during the weekend (slow update days), I purge all Google Reader, prepared for Monday, and it goes for another week.

That's the most effective way I've found to follow tech and gaming news, since I started. It's a good compromise in my opinion, since many of my "favorite" feeds are not really popular or likely to appear on Reddit or HN.

"Unread item overload" is why I started using the PostRank Extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pnngeaoibaajihakbn...)

It plugs into Google Reader (and even HN!) really well, and can quickly help you pick out the best links from 100's of RSS items easily.

That looks like a great ad on.

Does it come with source? My 20 second review didn't show up anything and I've become very leery of letting any plugin that I can't read the source get added to my browser.

Yeah, I totally understand. The company was recently acquired by Google, so I guess you can consider having some measure of 'safety'.

Well that is a pretty good stamp of approval.

The high number of grammatical errors caused me to quit reading in the middle.

It seems the writer just started blogging in English (from french) this month.

Thank you for pointing this problem. I started writing in English only recently. I hope it will be a good practice, and help me with grammatical errors.

Any tips to improve with this?

write more :o) it's the only way you'll get better and it's a good way of saying "fuck you" to those that cricise...

[other things i do include silently talking to myself in the foreign language while i am out walking (describe what is happening) and trying to listen/read in an "aware" way - for example, when listening to someone speak, try to consciously note the gender of the nouns they are using (doesn't work for english, but you get the idea...). but the most important thing is practice - my spanish got much, much worse when i started working from home rather than in a spanish-speaking company]

Thanks for your advises, in fact, I hesitated to write it in French, the easy way...

So I will carry on practice, I could try force myself to think in English as you said, good advice. Thanks.

Keep practicing English to improve your English :)

I'm getting burned out on RSS, too. I think the burnout started for me when TechCrunch decided that publishing every single idea that came to mind was somehow a good use of my reading time.

Have someone else proof read the document first, and have them actually send you what they found so you can fix it (and learn from it). Even if you are writing in your native language, a second set of eyes makes a tremendous difference.

This would be perfect, but in practice, even in my native language, it isn't easy to ask someone else proof read, it takes time and it's never easy to ask someone else time. But I agreed that is a perfect solution.

Just marry a technical writer. Works for me! Except when I forget to ask her...

What helped me most was american/english media, and mostly movies. It gave me a better feel for the language than just reading something, and gives more context for association regarding unknown words and phrases.

Depends on what you're interested in. I was once subscribed (Opera's RSS client, just for the record) to feeds with a high content volume (Ars Technica, space.com), which is basically unmanageable because it leads to thousands of unread messages.

I scrapped those feeds and kept the ones that post new content rarely enough for me to forget about them but care for enough to want to know immediately when this happens.

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