Hacker News Reader

Comment by molticrystal | Hacker News Reader

I used to be a hybrid user, mixing RSS feeds with scrolling a set of pages a few page downs. Now I only use RSS feeds. To keep it manageable, they can be configured to be updated once or twice a day and have set restrictions on sites or search terms. https://hnrss.org/frontpage works for me as a restriction for stories on this site, but it can also filter by points or other criteria as well.

There are many mobile readers, for desktop I like QuiteRss & RSS Guard.

View on HN

I've seen this take a few times, and I'm glad it works for you, but when I originally tried it (long before the super aggressive social media algos) I ended up chronically checking to see if new rss stuff was available just as frequently; it was the possibility of missing or discovering some news or interesting article that did it.

Now it's at most just websites, out of sight out of mind unless I'm really bored. Actually relevant or important information doesn't change that frequently, and I'd rather my favorite websites make a deliberate editorial effort to surface worthwhile stories I can check in on maybe once a week. The content drip, self selecting or not, is just too habit forming and not necessary at all.

I've done https://deja.de.hueve.ar/hn for this - it updates every (Argentinian) midnight with HN's frontpage, so I have a fixed amount of stories to read per day, and it stops my compulsion to open HN's homepage without thinking every time I'm bored.

I wanted to do the same for the two local newspapers I read, but I think they have Github Actions blocked so the script can't reach them. And I didn't bother to search for a workaround.

Making things slow again is a good anxiety countermeasure.

I’ve been building my own RSS feeds for sites that don’t have them

Then I can filter them and add actual content to them so I can determine whether the link is worth opening or can I just hit ‘j’ to get to the next one in FreshRSS.

For example my HN feed grabs the link’s open graph preview and embeds it to the feed. It also filters by comment count and score before even adding it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com