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Comment by RexM | Hacker News Reader

I want an easy way to find these quality sources.

There's no "easy way to find quality sources", that's mutually exclusive nowadays. Whatever is mainstream and easy to find gets automatically gamed through SEO junk, advertising, astroturfing, and becomes poor quality again in no time. Like how much do you trust CNET and Linus Tech Tips?

The best quality sources are always involving thorough human vetting of trusted and impartial people on platforms which have higher bar to entry and require some friction to find, aka word of mouth.

Which is why curated and moderated user platforms like HN, some sub-Reddit, blogs, mailing lists, community forums, are so important and also why Google search is just so useless nowadays for finding anything other than model number datasheets and product online shopping.

> There's no "easy way to find quality sources", that's mutually exclusive nowadays. Whatever is mainstream and easy to find gets automatically gamed through SEO junk, advertising and astroturfing, and becomes poor quality again in no time.

So true, a what unsolvable problem. SEO in particular, and greed in general, kills the ability of knowledge networks to organically grow, at least past the niche state.

Putting time in building your own network of trusted sources pays off handsomely. But it takes time.

Back in '05 when I started self-hosting tt-rss I thought it'd be cool to add some "social" features to it. Specifically, I'd like to see new feed suggestions from people for whom I have followed feeds in-common.

My idea was dismissed by the tt-rss author (and at the time and I still had aspirations to submit patches). I gave up on submitting patches, forked the code for my personal use, and never got around to the "social" idea.

I don't know if mainstream feed readers still do OPML[0] exports or not. I'd enjoy seeing OPML files from people whose blogs I read.

Actually, I'd like it if people on HN published OPML files. Maybe I should. Hmmm...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPML

> I don't know if mainstream feed readers still do OPML[0] exports or not

Most of the feed readers (at least the open source ones) I have seen lately have offered OPML exports.

There is no easy way, because you have to be able to identify the greats of a field to find relentless quality. You have to become a nerd of greatness, armed with an RSS reader. Example: You can probably tell what Jeff Beck, Stefan Hauk, Jacob Deraps have in common. Sreten of M539 Restaurations? Marco Reps or Shariar of The Signal Path? Igor Bogdanov. Chips and Cheese. The Orbital Mechanics Podcast. The War Zone. Some post once a year or even less.

One of the many things I love about seamonkey is that it has built-in RSS support and will pop up an icon at the end of the URL bar when an RSS feed is defined on a site. Combined with the built in RSS/Email/NNTP reader, it makes it very convenient to find feeds just by clicking links on sites like this one.

Same , wish there was a directory of rss . In past it was googles task to provide quality sources when searching and google excelled at this but somehow google is failing at this now.

I'm pretty sure every site on this directory has RSS:

http://ooh.directory/

Not the complete answer, but a part of it.

Seems like this would be a good feature for Kagi search if it isn't there already?

Just a directory of feeds could be of limited use. You don't know the signal-to-noise ratio of each feed for you.

You subscribe to tens or hundreds of feeds and, boom, you have another problem - how do you prioritize which feed to read .

With https://linklonk.com I'm trying to solve both problems: discovering feeds to follow and prioritizing content from all feeds.

You start with content you liked - submit links you liked and you will get connected to all feeds that included this link.

For example, there are a bunch of feeds that included this link https://simonwillison.net/2024/Feb/21/gemini-pro-video/

Those are:

- https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/ - the original blog

- https://kagi.com/api/v1/smallweb/feed/ - a feed of "small web" links, I didn't know it existed, but one of the users must have submitted this feed.

- https://hnrss.org/newest?points=1000&count=100 - HN links that got more than 1000 points

- https://lobste.rs/rss - submissions to Lobste.rs

- https://lobste.rs/t/ai.rss - submissions to Lobste.rs with "ai" tag.

The point is, if you upvote this link on LinkLonk (https://linklonk.com/item/481037215144673280), you automatically get subscribed to all of these feeds. This is a way to discover new feeds through content you liked.

Now, being connected to hundreds or thousands of feeds might seem crazy. But we have a solution to that which also relies on what content you "liked". LinkLonk knows how often you liked content from each feed you are connected to (which is essentially the signal-to-noise ratio). So it ranks new content based on that. If you like 50% of posts from https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/ then new posts from Simon Willison will be shown above other links from, say, https://lobste.rs/rss.

The more you like - the better the ranking of fresh content becomes.

In this world you don't have to actively manage which feeds you are subscribed to or not. You only rate content.

There are people like me, who write blogs that routinely include links posts. Subscribe to those blogs, check out the stories that interest you, and subscribe to those sites in turn. I have a couple hundred sites in NetNewsWire.

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