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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the love of RSS readers. The basic concept is trivial; you could write one in five minutes. It doesn't seem radically different from any of thousands of news aggregator type web sites, including HN.

I read upthread that Google Reader had a social mechanism for recommending feeds to friends. That's great for discovery, but it still hardly seems earth-shaking.

It feels an awful lot like a rose-colored-glasses situation, where something existed that wasn't horrible but doesn't reappear because it wasn't all that great, either. What is it I'm missing?

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It's about the locus of control. HN, or other aggregators, are about the crowd curating your feed; RSS is about you curating your feed. The unit of attention, namely some headline, is either presented to you by The Algorithm (whether human-powered or otherwise) if on a modern aggregator, or your own previous choices if using RSS.

In modernity, we might call that latter a "filter bubble", but in the parlance of the 00s, we thought of it as a "personal newspaper".

Isn't your source of RSS feeds the curation? Is that very different from Facebook or Twitter showing you the people you subscribe to?

I know Facebook and Twitter play stupid games with "the algorithm", injecting stuff you didn't ask for and hiding stuff from your friends, but in the end it's not as if you were just being force-fed solely stuff you had no interest in.

So wouldn't an RSS feed be just as much of a filter bubble, based on who you choose to subscribe to? You might feel better knowing that you were seeing it in a simple chronological order without the algorithmic opinion, but it doesn't seem like a solution to filter bubbles.

I don't think anyone is claiming that RSS a solution to the filter bubble problem. But the benefit of RSS is that you create your own filter bubble, rather than relying on someone else's (often malicious) algorithm to do it for you.

With Facebook and Twitter you subscribe to people and brands. It is trivially easy to make a social media post so they tend to be more numerous and less useful/informative. RSS is usually used to subscribe to blog posts/articles which tend to be more in depth. Someone upthread mentioned a magazine and I think that is a good comparison. Curated long form writing about subjects that interest you makes it quite a bit different than social media.

RSS is also handy for following blogs or websites that only post intermittently.

RSS and filter bubbles could go either way. Nothing stopping you from filling your feeds with folks that don't think the way you do. Most of us don't have the patience to wade through thoughts contrary to our own. That's the real issue when it comes to popping your filter bubble, not which tool you use to get the info.

>Isn't your source of RSS feeds the curation?

Like I said, RSS is about you curating your feed. Using RSS, you don't see headlines from anything you didn't choose to see.

>in the end it's not as if you were just being force-fed solely stuff you had no interest in

That's trivially true. That said, if the choice, regarding seeing shit I'm not interested in/calculated ragebait/for-profit spam/etc, is between seeing it "never" and seeing it "sometimes, when someone else wants me to see it", the choice seems obvious.

>it doesn't seem like a solution to filter bubbles

I don't think it is either; that said, I still think it's better. Part of the conceptual transition from "personal newspaper" to "filter bubble" was the increasing prevalence of calculated ragebait/for-profit spam/etc on aggregators -- the pressures present in aggregators, and the inevitable comment sections, help shape content to be more ragey or spammy, to get that all-important engagement. That shaping happens everywhere on the aggregator -- here on HN, for instance, dang goes around silencing non-HNish comments with impunity and without appeals. This isn't a bad thing, but it is a shaping of the aggregator's content by shaping the aggregator's culture. If one spends all one's time on an aggregator, consuming that shaped culture, one's perspective can easily start to skew. With a "personal newspaper", one is more aware of the artificiality -- it's not a site itself, it's just the sum total of the RSS feeds of blogs X, Y, and Z. A "filter bubble"'s ostensibly organic culture, and ostensibly broader curation, helps one convince oneself that it's a community with justified beliefs.

RSS doesn't really afford that kind of escalation. If HN were dang's blog, the pressure he exerts would only affect the comments section of that blog. Sure, audience pressure can help make an RSS'd source more extreme, but if that pressure happens it's got to be occurring on the site's own commenting infrastructure, which means local moderation can sort it out. At a minimum, there's no chance of the contamination hopping RSS feed sources (at least, via RSS itself).

Its not about discovery or aggregation or being social. Its a way to keep up to date with things you explicitly subscribe to. You have a bunch of sites that you like, which puts out periodic updates. Like a weekly webcomic, or a news site, or local weather alerts. Then you subscribe to those feeds. Then whenever they make a new post, it shows as an update in your reader. Think Twitter, but instead of 280 character posts, they're previews of other webpages.

I'm not sure what you're missing. I think aggregators are great for a lot of things, but I primarily use it for discovery. I infrequently contribute (like this, I guess?). After discovery, RSS is really convenient to continue consuming that source's content, regardless of its appearance on an aggregator a second time.

It doesn't seem radically different from any of thousands of news aggregator type web sites, including HN.

It allows you to tailor your aggregation, and create you own aggregation of topics if there isn't another aggregator out there.

Are you into kumquats, ancient Mesopotamia, and The Buzzcocks? You're not going to find a web aggregator for that. But you can put together several RSS feeds into your own aggregation.

Couldn't I just subscribe to kumquats, ancient Mesopotamia, and The Buzzcocks groups on Facebook? Yeah, I know "the algorithm" means that I'd miss some things and have other things injected into my feed, but it doesn't sound like the total content is radically different.

I understand the idea of wanting to feel more control by seeing precisely and exactly the groups you asked for, but I feel like it's not really a radical change in terms of content.

Facebook shoves content I don't care about in my face, and frequently hides content from pages and people that I do care about (who don'y pay Zuck's troll toll or play visibility optimization games like emphasizing useless Story content).

My RSS reader (FreshRSS, self-hosted, and NetNewsWire on macOS/iOS) shows me all posts from all feeds I've chosen to subscribe to. Nothing more, nothing less. No ads, no murky VC cloud funding -- I self host on my own raspberry pi -- and no privacy concerns.

Social media is kind of like a flaky RSS feed with comments from people I don't know or care about that sometimes doesn't show me content I DO want to see but also constantly shows me ads, tries to manipulate me into spending more time browsing, and hoovers up as much data as humanly possible. Oh, and it changes the UI every 6-8 months in seemingly random UX a/b tests in the name of "optimization." And it radicalizes my older relatives politically.

That seems like a pretty shitty RSS feed to me.

Most of the sites that I follow do not have a presence on Facebook. Plus it's nice to have the info sent to you unencumbered by the nonsense/ads/privacy concerns on social media sites.

Then you need to check Facebook everyday to not miss stuff, whereas with RSS you have full control WHEN you consume your feeds.

Couldn't I just subscribe to kumquats, ancient Mesopotamia, and The Buzzcocks groups on Facebook?

Sure, you could. I can't. I'm locked out of Facebook. And in spite of sending a photo of my government ID into Facebook's customer service black hole, nothing has changed.

RSS gives me the freedom to aggregate information without relying on some faceless tech company to decide when I can have it, and when I should be cut off.

I don’t think the tech is the interesting part. Most websites I want to read don’t even post the whole article on an RSS feed, and you’re at the mercy of every website offering a feed.

The better solution is a post-RSS smart reader where you can drop links into it and it figures out how to turn the website into a feed and it caches all the content so the origin never needs to be available.

We over cling to RSS the same way we over cling to IRC instead of looking for ways to build on the good parts. Then we’re always stuck reminiscing and over glamorizing a past that wasn’t as good as we remember.

> It doesn't seem radically different from any of thousands of news aggregator type web sites, including HN.

RSS lets me subscribe to everything jfengel (say) posts, not just the minority of jfengel posts that make it onto HN. That matters for those who are jfengel fans.

Edit: of course, it's also useful if jfengel only posts about once a month. You don't want to miss anything, but neither do you want to visit the blog every day to see if there's something new. Facebook is terrible at this -- I regularly find that I've missed something that a friend who is an occasional FB user has posed.

>of course, it's also useful if jfengel only posts about once a month.

I think that's the point a number of people on this thread are missing. Newsletters, for example, are fine if there are a handful of people who publish regularly/frequently who you want to follow. They're less useful if you want to follow what 50 people who may only publish something once a month are writing.

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