Comment by JeffJenkins | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JeffJenkins | Hacker News Reader

I was working on a (now-shuttered) startup in this space. Almost universally people's favorite feature was seeing the live website. I had also built in a reading queue into the application, the idea being that you could do inbox-zero with your feeds if you could process them extremely fast.

I talked to a bunch of largely non-technical RSS power users and discovered that the people who really use RSS readers are subscribed to 1500+ feeds and barely scratch the surface of reading everything in them.

It was really disheartening to discover my fundamental premise was wrong, and at the same time my now-cofounder contacted me with a great idea with a clearly underserved market so I abandoned the solo effort for that.

I think there's a ton of room for innovation in the media reader space, so I wish NewsBlur luck!

> I talked to a bunch of largely non-technical RSS power users and discovered that the people who really use RSS readers are subscribed to 1500+ feeds and barely scratch the surface of reading everything in them.

That is an interesting finding, in its own right. When Google neutered Google Reader's sharing features, "sharebros" started an "I am the 1000+" campaign (as a play on the "I am the 99%"). To me, that suggests having 1000+ unread feed items is common enough to be a viral joke.

There may be a business opportunity for helping people find the wheat from the chaff in their 1000+ feeds.

That's one of the tenets of NewsBlur -- by using NewsBlur's training filters, you can hide stories you don't want to see while highlighting the stories you want to focus on.

As the other reply says, that is what news blur is trying to do and i think it is the right way to go.

I had, but never got to try, an idea to only show users a small percent of the articles. Then, since metainbox was designed for quick triaging, you could show people more articles based on what other people read or queued. It would allow the "curation" to be done by more people

Reply on news.ycombinator.com