Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

I want to to see bulk RSS feeds of independent blogs.

My RSS reader YOShInOn uses superfeedr to ingest RSS feeds which I am highly satisfied with except that it costs 10 cents/feed per month. If a feed gets 100 items a day it is a bargain. I have a $10 a month bill right now, ingest about 100 feeds and get about 3000 items a day.

I'd like to add a few hundred independent blogs but it would be crazy expensive for a small amount of content. I could build my own RSS crawling infrastructure but no matter how you slice it, polling all those feeds would be a hassle. There used to be quite a few instances of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)

but today I've only found a handful worth pointing YOShInOn at and I'd like to see more.

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I was thinking more of a discovery problem like how will you find independent blogs that are worth adding to your rss feed ? hackernews is just one option which has very few blogs and most are tech related. Which is why i think the webrings will solve as the the websites list will be curated

YOShInOn fundamentally changes the relationship with RSS feeds in that I don't read 100% of what it ingests. In the last run (I do one every two and half days on average, I think) it ingested 7000 articles and sampled 300 to show me. That's a bit less than 5%. I have screens that let me see what came from particular feed, things that fall into automatically generated clusters (roughly "sports", "ukraine war", "neural networks", ...) and that the it thinks y'all (Hacker News readers) will upvote or comment on.

The main screen looks like TikTok for text, it shows me one article at a time that I can thumbs up or thumbs down.

Even in 2001 I was saying that "Failing RSS readers keep failing with the same failing user interfaces that always fail..." in particular anything with a "mark as read" button is putting an undue burden on the user, there is nothing inspiring about interfaces that look like a mail reader or a USENET reader or that have 20 boxes with a list of items in them for 20 different feeds.

Personally I want to subscribe to RSS feeds even if they aren't 100% great because my system does a very good job of filtering good stuff to the top so I am happy to subscribe first and discover later.

I wouldn't mind paying if the most of the $10 went to the blog owners.

The problem is I'd have no trouble finding 1000 RSS feeds in which case it is $100 a month instead of $10. As you say, it wouldn't be so bad if it went to the owners but it doesn't as there isn't really any mechanism in place to do that, but maybe an aggregated feed built to do that from the beginning would be a practical way to do that.

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