Hacker News Reader

Comment by MattyRad | Hacker News Reader

I've used RSS to follow all media for the past 2 years (FreshRSS+FeedMe, I have a guide here https://soapstone.mradford.com/hn-rss-guide/). It's been the single best thing I've done to reclaim my attention. Here's a couple of other random thoughts:

- Being able to dismiss articles where the headline is the story is really valuable. For example, I just dismissed "Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun (techcrunch.com)"- it's not worth my attention.

- It's possible to accrue a large backlog of unread "semi-interesting" items that may or may not be valuable. In this sense, there's still a FOMO aspect to RSS, and you have to be aggressive in dismissing articles. For exmaple, a few 2-week-old backlog titles in my feed include "SHA-3 Buffer Overflow", "Show HN: Restfox - Open source lightweight alternative to Postman", and "Five origami books by Shuzo Fujimoto are now public domain". These are semi-interesting, but really I should just dismiss them.

View on HN

I really like your reasoning. The only problem I see is that if everyone did what you propose, we wouldn't have Hacker News at all (upvotes, in the end, must come from somewhere).

So from a Kantian ethical point of view, it doesn't really work. There ought to be a better solution. But on a personal level, I wholeheartedly agree

The majority of users don't comment anyways.

Sometimes it is shocking how few upvotes you need to get to the HN frontpage.

It's shocking on many platforms. I can't find a citation but I swear I read a study (or small experiment, more likely) which showed the first two votes determine the fate of most posts on reddit. You can use bots on twitter to similarly guide "the hivemind", I receny learned the intelligence term for this practice is "consensus cracking". There's even guides on the internet: https://edith.reisen/computers/security/forum_shills.html

Depends on how active is the subreddit and heavily botted it is.

Using wsb as an example, you used to see quality posts with 20 upvotes then the 2020s roll around, bots and scrawlers started inflating the needed numbers and even with thousand of upvotes, some posts were blatant ads after wsb proved it had alot of wealthy eyes.

The main pages of reddit have the same problems full of bots that flood into selected posts almost immediately after it gets posted, this is especially obvious during election years, where billions are burned to "let us discover what the popular concensus is".

I take your point. But note that I'm here upvoting and commenting still!

I saw the link to this article in my RSS feed, and I took the time to open a browser, find the link, and comment because RSS adoption is something that I genuinely want to have a conversation about.

Which means that with RSS, you can still be a part of the community, you just won't reflexively upvote or spend time in the comments section.

Comment sections should have their own feed. Just like sub forums, users and search queries. Each comment could have its own feed of replies.

Sometimes an uninteresting website has a very interesting article. This is specially great for supper niche stuff. An empty feed should not draw much attention in a reader. The single comment posted years later could be really useful.

There is also <comment> https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html#ltcommentsgtSub...

"if everyone did X" should automatically evaluate to "false".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com