Hacker News Reader

Decentralized social RSS feed / article recommendations could totally happen if the community came up with a standard way to implement it.

Re-posting / paraphrasing a comment I made in a discussion about decentralized recommendation algorithms for RSS feed content:

People used to post a "blogroll" (and sometimes an OPML file) to their personal blogs showing the feeds they followed. That was one way to do decentralized recommendations, albeit manually since there was no well-known URL convention for publishing OPML files. If there was a well-known URL convention for publishing OPML files a client could build a recommendation graph.

OMPL files in well-known locations would be neat but would only provide feed-level recommendation. Article-level recommendation would be cooler.

One of the various federated/decentralized/whatever-Bluesky-is "modern" re-implementations of Twitter/NNTP could be used to drive article-level recommendations. My feed reader could emit machine-readable recommendation posts based on ratings I give while browsing articles. My feed reader could consume these recommendations from others, and then lots of fun could be had weighting recommendations based on social graph, algorithmic summary of the article body, trustworthiness of the poster, friend-of-friend status, etc.

I thought about some of this stuff back in '05 when I tried to contribute to ttrss. The maintainer didn't have much interest so I dropped it. I've thought about it periodically but never had the initiative to do anything with it.

Re: NNTP

Feedbase lets you add RSS/Atom feeds so you can read them with your favourite newsreader:

https://feedbase.org/

What if all we need is for bloggers to post a recommended feed with links to external posts in a separate RSS feed? The feed readers ingest the recommendation feeds and count them. I've been following ActivityPub and other protocols, by damn that stuff becomes a mess quick. The absolute simplest approach is probably the right one for now.

The fundamental problem with recommendation engines are the platforms are forcing content on the users based on what increases engagement (and possibly ad $) on their platform -- not what is valuable to the user.

If I'm following a particular blogger, and their signal to noise ratio is 9:1, if they recommend an article it would be vrey likely I am also interested in it. If I'm following a larger group of people, I may be interested, in aggregate, what they are interested in. All very basic stuff that seems to have been abused and forgotten. Other than e-mail, rss is the odd man out in 2025 which also makes it so much more valuable.

Any third party RSS feed service could ingest these feeds and spit out whatever other type of recommended feed they want. The could just view a hn/reddit style feed solely with counts of the people they want to follow along with "vote" counts and some decay algorithm. They could have a chronological feed that just shows everything. The users are in control again, not Meta/Facebook/IG, Reddit, Bytedance, or etc.

Basically linkblogging. I'm not sure this needs to be a separate feed; JSON Feed has a dedicated `external_url` field:

> If `url` [optional] links to where you’re talking about a thing, then `external_url` links to the thing you’re talking about.

I'd be shocked if Atom/RSS didn't have equivalents.

This kind of "repost"-ish behavior may just be obscured in the tools people use to construct feeds, so they remain obscure features of the standards. The designers had syndication in mind, very much like what you're describing — ingesting feeds, reprocessing/mixing/extending them, and exposing the result as another feed.

Replying to both your and parent post at once:

Using RSS for this seems reasonable for people who already have the ability to host a feed. I was thinking more about the Twitter-alikes for the "normies" who don't have a place to host a feed. I don't just want to see recommendations from bloggers. I'd like to be able to pull recommendations from a wider net of "content consumers" as well as "content creators".

I can't come up with an economic model that would work to run a hosting service for feedreader-generated feeds except in the case of for-profit feedreaders. There's abhorrent models there like, say, peppering the recommendation feeds with "sponsored content", or extracting demographic data from the participants and selling it. Making the recommendation feed a fee-based service also seems like a bad model, too.

That was why I look at the Twitter-alikes for the recommendation feeds-- because the transport is "free" (or, at least, not something where I'd have to worry about the business model).

The RSS spec has the 'source' sub-element, which should point to the original source feed to give credit while forwarding/reposting. I guess one can apply this spec loosely and point it to a webpage url instead of an RSS feed.

Shameless plug but you might enjoy the site I've been working on for the past few years: lynkmi.com

It's very much inspired by the earlier web and more recently especially catalysed by the trend you note of the big sites punishing doors to elsewhere. I remember a time when Facebook actually had a "links" section where you could see a list of all the cool stuff you had posted, so it's sad they've strayed so far.

Join the resistance! Every tag and profile automatically has an RSS feed too, and I just recently added internal backlinks which I'm enjoying a lot.

> I credit the demise of Google Reader with a lot of the downfall of the Old Web.

maybe you have causation wrong. social platforms were so effective they caused downfall of old web, and with it the demise of Google Reader

Google Reader was killed by Vic because it was the only "social" app at Google at the time. He wanted to grow their FB competitor (G+) and insisted on migrating users over from Reader to G+, which never happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vic_Gundotra#Career

lmao thanks. you would think you should spin up the next thing first and migrate over rather than kill then spin up

I used https://www.theoldreader.com/en/ for a long time before giving up on RSS. At the time it was the most similar to Google's.

Yeah, I moved to that once Bloglines went through enshittification/ being bought.

Newsblur has a similar social feature

I suppose you could make your own "meta" rss feed today, where you repost interesting articles to this feed, wrapped in your comments.

Mastodon with build in RSS feeds, repost an article from an RSS feed and your repost is really just new mastodon post

The easiest way to share good articles is to just write a short blog post about it

Yes, that's essentially what I want. With Google Reader, I liked how easily my reader and reblogger were integrated together with my social network, and linking to external sites wasn't penalized in the algorithm.

> Facebook deprioritizes (shadowbans?) posts that link off of their platform

That tells you that's not what it's for. It would be like posting your resume on FB and LinkedIn and then pointing out that FB led to fewer job offers than LinkedIn. Different platforms, different purposes.

Have you tried Feedly or Inoreader or Flipboard or The Old Reader or any other RSS services that popped up after Google Reader was killed?

>That tells you that's not what it's for. It would be like posting your resume on FB and LinkedIn and then pointing out that FB led to fewer job offers than LinkedIn. Different platforms, different purposes.

Only insofar as the purpose of the platform is to generate ad revenue. The contents of the posts were semantically identical and they were made to the same platform; your example involves the same post to two different platforms.

> Only insofar as the purpose of the platform is to generate ad revenue.

Well, yeah. I'm not surprised that they don't promote posts containing links to their competitors.

I wonder what the outcome would have been if you had instead linked to Instagram or Threads? I would guess those have a smaller penalty.

Is your critique that it’s unsurprising? I agree, but the original comment was complaining about how this practice kills the feeling of older social platforms where you could share whatever with your friends.

> That tells you that's not what it's for. It would be like posting your resume on FB and LinkedIn and then pointing out that FB led to fewer job offers than LinkedIn. Different platforms, different purposes.

In this case, I made two copies of the same post on the same platform. The only difference was whether the contents of the post were hosted on FB or if they were hosted on a competitor's platform.

It's not a question of medium (LinkedIn vs. Facebook). It's a question of algorithmic prioritization within the same platform.

Facebook deprioritizes my posts when I include hyperlinks to external websites -- I suspect especially if those sites don't run Meta ads.

It was the same video with the same text. The only difference was a hyperlink.

I want to support bloggers and content creators that I like (on a variety of platforms). Facebook skewed their algorithm to disproportionately show content hosted on their domains. I understand why they do that (advertising $$$ and "engagement" metrics) -- I just don't appreciate what it does to the user experience.

> Have you tried Feedly or Inoreader or Flipboard or The Old Reader or any other RSS services that popped up after Google Reader was killed?

Yes -- I tried Feedly and Inoreader. Maybe I should give The Old Reader a shot?

The feed-reading part of those clones is fine -- but again, what I miss is the sharing and discussion that could happen so easily within my social network with Google+ and Google Reader. The RSS piece is almost the least important piece for me.