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Comment by wolvesechoes | Hacker News Reader

To be honest I consider even RSS as too much.

I have a blog. I post there one fairly long text once per month at most. I follow few other blogs. If I want to check updates I can open a browser and visit a specific blog once per week/month. Literally no effort.

I have all things I want to follow in one place - the Web. It works by typing domain names in my URL bar or by clicking bookmarks.

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I integrate RSS into my daily email flow - I don't track too many different sites, so I just let emails build up in an "Automated.RSS" folder until I want to read them.

Having feeds send their output by email means I can use my existing way to keep state - if I've read an article it shows as read on any system I use for email (be it desktop, laptop, or phone). I can also easily search and filter feed items inside the mail-client if I want to.

I wrote/use rss2email, but there are no doubt a hundred different implementations of the idea, with the same name:

https://github.com/skx/rss2email/

IIRC there used to be a website with this very name (rss2email) that basically had just two input fields; an RSS URL and an email address.

I may want the opposite - email2rss.

I have a good method for handling hundreds of RSS feeds in the Bazqux reader. Reading in gmail feels like a burden as I have yet to find a good flow to handle too much information.

I guess if you just follow a few blogs the tiny overhead isn't worth it. But I follow literally hundreds of blogs and vlogs, many that only post a few times a year. It would be a waste of time to not automate the aggregation.

To each according to his needs. I do not care about most of the content out there, and in my view very few people write things interesting, subversive or novel enough to justify following their activity.

You don’t have to read everything that comes up in your feed you know. You can even follow hn on rss and have aggregated content from multiple people on there.

> If I want to check updates I can open a browser and visit a specific blog once per week/month. Literally no effort.

That sounds like rather a lot of effort to me - remembering that a given blog exists, remembering its URL, remembering to check it every so often.

A buddy of mine just updated his blog after a 14 month hiatus. I forgot he even had a blog, and I would have definitely missed the update if it wasn't in my RSS reader.

Come on, if checking a blog once a month is too much effort for you, maybe you're spending way too much time glued to your RSS reader and not enough time outside touching grass. Just saying.

What an uncharitable diagnosis of my life.

Same could be said of your comment to my submission, and hard work.

For me, it's exactly the opposite problem. If I'm not checking something every day, I forget about it.

For example, I'm subscribed to over 700 YouTube channels, but most of them only post one a week to once a quarter. I force notifications on for these, and it's always a treat when one of my favorites pops up in the feed.

There are very few YouTube channels that I want to watch daily, unless it's a series... or Simon Whistler.

Well, I tend to believe that I remember things worth remembering. If I would forget about any of the blogs I read from time to time, I wouldn't consider it a loss.

Someone else here mentioned they follow 700 YT channels. I follow maybe 4, so I think we are from different planets.

As someone with ADHD, I’m glad that the technology exists to create a RSS feed off a website even if the author intentionally doesn’t maintain one.

I don’t think “if it’s important you’ll remember it” is applicable to everyone.

I don't know how to see the number of YT channels I subscribe to, but I bet it's similar.

I also have over 1000 tabs open in my Firefox session.

I agree with you, RSS for me are bad because it tells me when to go to check a blog, with bookmarks I have the control of when I want to go

> Literally no effort

- you need to remember all the names

- you have to navigate through incomplatible interfaces to get a list of articles

- you have to remember the last one you've read to make sure you're not missing anything

- you can't easily sync check/reading status across your devices

- you waste time polling sites without updates

...

Even for a few blogs that's wasted effort vs. opening a single list and reading through it

And here lies the difference. I do not care if I read the same post again, as I only follow those creators that create something worth getting back to. I do not care if I visit their blog and do not find any new content, for their old content is good and worth rereading. I do not care about syncing, as I have only laptop and a phone, and tend to use the first one. I do not need to navigate through incompatible interfaces, as they all consists of text and hyperlinks. And I have no issue with remembering all the names, since there is like 5 of them.

So like I said, no effort.

If you think all that is no effort, following those same blogs on rss is like negative effort.

> difference. I do not care

That's indeed the only difference. Otherwise the wasted effort still exists

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