Hacker News Reader

Try https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/feed-preview/

Perfect, thanks!

> I used to subscribe to (…) the top HN frontpage articles

https://hnrss.github.io/ lets you subscribe only to posts above a certain number of points, or other metrics.

> These days I have to "view-source" and search for feed or atom or rss to tell.

Doesn’t your feed service/app auto-detect feeds if you just paste the webpage? That’s a common feature.

> https://hnrss.github.io/ lets you subscribe only to posts above a certain number of points, or other metrics.

Yes, that's the one I used, but I feel it's still too much noise. You don't want a firehose in your RSS feeds.

Just open https://news.ycombinator.com when you want to doomscroll through an almost endless stream of information. RSS doesn't work well with social media, and that's a feature.

"..lets you subscribe only to posts above a certain number of points.."

You prefer to let other people determine what you read?

Considering you define the heuristic seems like a daft argument for you to make

>You prefer to let other people determine what you read?

There are multiple levels of delegation to the "wisdom of the crowd":

- visiting this HN website by itself is already letting people determine what you read. The stories are submitted by others.

- reading only the front page of just the top-voted 30 stories instead of doom scrolling the additional 1000 is another level of delegation

- inside of each story, only reading a subset of the most upvoted comments is another level

People do all 3 to various degrees because there's limited time to read.

> People do all 3 to various degrees because there's limited time to read.

_By far_, the best posts I have ever seen to this website were often ones that didn't get many comments, or may have even gotten reported.

I prefer to also hear other people’s opinion about an article as a sort of a peer review.

Unfortunately I don't have time to personally vet literally every single piece of writing being produced by all of humanity every day.

Alternative: https://hnrss.org/ PS: it's just a shortcut

I think #2 is a great tip. I’ve tried to use my feed reader to segregate by 'frequency' before, but I haven't really given it a full trial—it still feels a bit awkward.

> the top HN frontpage articles

I don't even really understand what the HN feed is. I looked in the FAQ, etc. the other day and couldn't find an explanation. The description ("Links for the intellectually curious, ranked by readers.") is nice PR, but it doesn't tell me what I'm seeing. Is it every post submitted? Every post that made it to the front page? Same, but stayed on the front page for a certain amount of time? Received at least X upvotes? I have no idea...

> I’ve tried to use my feed reader to segregate by 'frequency' before, but I haven't really given it a full trial—it still feels a bit awkward.

I'm in the middle of that myself. I have folders labelled rarely, weekly, frequent and social. Rarely and weekly I tend to read most of it, as they are the folders I open first. I only open frequent once I'm done with the others and I usually scroll through the titles and only read very few articles. Social is for mastodon and bluesky accounts, which I open when I only have 5 minutes to kill and I know I won't have time to finish reading long posts/articles.

I liked Newsblur's approach to this when I was using a firehose (I dropped most of my firehose-like feeds a couple years ago for various reasons including I didn't actually like most of them all that much). Newsblur has Focused versus Disliked and you can "train" all sorts of things to Like or Unlike about an article. You can Like an entire feed, but you can also Like things like specific authors or tags in a feed or words in a headline. Similarly you can use all the same tools to Unlike an article. If an article has more Likes than Unlikes it shows up in a Focused view and if an article has more Unlikes than Likes it shows up only in an "All" view, meaning it disappears from the default Unread view. When you have a limited amount of time you read Focused, when you have more time you read Unread, and if you want to check on spam or topics you dislike you can zoom out to "All" and spot-check feeds for Unliked articles.

Additionally, Newsblur added an automated "Infrequent Site Stories" for things it knows come from feeds that don't update all that frequently. (Which you can use in tandem with Focused view for even less time.)

The point 2 is an important one, I used RSS for years but had to stop using it as I was way too anxious trying to read everything.

I started using again, but I have a few rules: all the feeds only refresh once week; and any news feed (like hackers news) that generates too much content is purged also once a week, so I only have the latest one week articles.

In my mind, my RSS feed for me is like an old school weekly magazine. This solve the FOMO feeling of missing something interesting, but I don’t feel like I need to read something as soon as is published.

I'd suggest giving a go to lenns.io (shameless plug). It gives you source prioritisation control + number of items per source control + category prioritisation. In the end, you get exactly what you want without being overwhelmed.

This is an app/service that I've built for myself, but it's up for anyone go give it a go and use it.

I’ve recently quit all social media and been wanting to do the same thing. Thank you!

My biggest gripe with RSS is that it is a page that is changing continuously. If I want to read what was on that page 6 months ago, I cant seem to find a way to do so. Do you have any ideas how to go about doing this? or find what I can RSS historical data

Two options - visit the website - use a hosted RSS reader like feedly or inoreader that stores historical rss feeds

> Don't subscribe to sites that make money the more they post.

That's an interesting tip. Never thought about it this way.