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Comment by PurpleRamen | Hacker News Reader

> I rarely want to read all of a websites content from beginning to end

I get the impression this person is using RSS reader wrong. Or is there really a culture of people you are using RSS like a youtube-channel, consuming everything from beginning to end? For me the purpose of RSS is to get the newest headlines, choose the interesting articles and skip the rest. This means there is a limited list of items to check each day, and a finishing line.

> The whole appeal of TikTok, for those who haven't wasted hours of their lives on it, is that I get served content based on an algorithm that determines what I might think is useful or fun.

But TikTok is even worse. It's an endless stream of content, pressuring you constantly, always pushing you on the "just one more"-train. How is that even better? This all reads more like this person should use a readlater-list, not a different RSS reader.

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To praise TikTok it has a highly effective recommendation engine precisely because it is showing you one piece of content at a time and registering your engagement on that.

YouTube's interface gives people a feeling of agency because it tempts you with 10 or so videos on the side and you can choose one, it also means YouTube does not get information about the 9 you didn't click, maybe you would have liked 5 of them and hated 4 of them but it can at best guess about that. I read about negative sampling in the recommender literature to address this issue and never felt I understood it or believed in it -- the literature clearly indicates that it sorta-kinda works but I think it does not work very well.

So far as hating on algorithmic feeds it is not the algorithms themselves that are bad but how they are chosen. If there is any characteristic of the content that can be quantified or evaluated a feed can be designed to privilege that. A feed could be designed to be highly prosocial, calming and such or designed to irritate you as much as possible. It's possible that people get bored with the first.

My own reader works like TikTok in that it shows one content piece of the time but it is basically the stuff that I submit to HN and it is scientific papers and articles about LLMs and programming languages and social psychology and political science and sports and and advanced manufacturing and biotech and such. You might say my world view is unusual or something but it is certainly not mindless lowest common denominator stuff or outrage (e.g. to be fair I post a few things to HN because YOShInOn thinks they are spicy -- YOShInOn has a model that can predict if y'all are going to comment on an article or not and I felt it was a problem that my comments/submission ratio was low before I had YOShInOn)

> To praise TikTok it has a highly effective recommendation engine precisely because it is showing you one piece of content at a time and registering your engagement on that.

I'm a bit divided on TikToks efficiency. It's a well working doom-scrooling-machine, better than any other platform, but from my personal experience, it's not actually that good at recommending the content I actually want. And I think it's largely because it has the wrong focus, namely the attention. High attention-content is not always what I want and need, but TikTok has barely any way to realize this, exactly because of how It works.

> YouTube's interface gives people a feeling of agency because it tempts you with 10 or so videos on the side

Interesting, never used that side-thing.

> it also means YouTube does not get information about the 9 you didn't click,

Yes, and that's OK. The not-clicked entries can still give me relevant information. And yes, the system can't act on this, but that's the whole point of RSS Readers, to make your own choice, on the spot, and switch it constantly as necessary. No system can react to this. "Smart" algorithmic solutions are doomed to stay mediocre because of this.

Well...

Personally I can't stand TikTok or Youtube Shorts or the videos on Instagram. I just can't stand the meaningless motion to get attention, it makes my skin crawl, it makes the bottom drop out of my stomach, etc. One time YT Shorts showed me an AI generation video of a pretty girl transforming into a fox on America's got talent, which is a good choice for me but then I got saturation videos of Chinese girls transforming into just about everything on AGT with the same music and reaction shots and it was more than I could use and not looking cool anymore but rather like AI slop. That said, I enjoy classic YouTube with relish.

My RSS reader gives recommendations based on explicit up/down and it has an AUC of maybe 0.78 or so, I saw a paper where TikTok is getting 0.83 so I feel like I'm doing OK.

I haven't done anything to change it in the last year except increase the number of random articles it inserts a little because making the recs worse actually can make them better, see [1] TikTok is famous for doing this. I think I could tune it up so for a given batch it could have a target "thumbs up" percentage or something more systematic but really I am very happy with the recs so it is not clear to me what "better" really is.

There is the problem with it that the system has a lot of latency which does not really matter for articles on most subjects because news about software or science or political science or engineering is usually OK if it is delayed a few days or a few weeks but it is a problem with sports where you really look like a dumbass if you post about something that happened on week 2 during week 4. It's a toughie though because I'd have to rework the thing to take out latency in 5+ stages of the system and then think systematically how to balance "urgent" vs "interesting" so I don't face the problem that urgent but interesting sports articles don't crowd other things out. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit

[2] personally I don't mind the old articles for myself because I'm a weird kind of sports fan. Two years ago I used to follow the NFL but since I started doing sports photography I might go to 5 games on one weekend and if I am doing that the NFL is a lot less interesting than, say, Arknights so I am a little embarrassed to say I have no idea how the Bills are doing this year. But if I'm going to post sports articles to Bluesky or something it's a problem.

> YouTube does not get information about the 9 you didn't click, maybe you would have liked 5 of them

Meanwhile, I end up with 5 new tabs open...

I use it that way quite often but wish really the recs were more stable and I didn’t have to.

> I get the impression this person is using RSS reader wrong. Or is there really a culture of people you are using RSS like a youtube-channel, consuming everything from beginning to end? For me the purpose of RSS is to get the newest headlines, choose the interesting articles and skip the rest. This means there is a limited list of items to check each day, and a finishing line.

Why would the author's use be the wrong one? And why should YouTube be different, in principle? (Maybe you are using YouTube wrong...)

I think at some point there was a shift in the way we consume online content, from "I'll read whatever is up now" to "I have my list of things to catch up with". RSS is older, so it is natural to connect it with the older way of consuming content. But there is no reason we can't do the same with YouTube channels, for example.

RSS has been traditionally used like an email client rather than a streaming service. You don't read every email, some go straight to spam or the trash bin. RSS is a time saver, not a time waster.

I can see that some feeds, like serializartions or low-volume/high quality content, is desirable to be consumed in its entirety, but the 80/20 principle seems to also apply to RSS feeds too in general. Specially if your RSS list reaches double digits.

A bit weird to make blanket statements about a tool like that. Some people read all emails, some don’t. Just like some people only subscribe to people’s personal blogs and want to read all of them.

Some might want to use it as a news aggregator and quickly browse through headlines. There no right or wrong usage of an RSS reader or “traditional usage”.

As RSS was being widespread around 2010, this is what most people said they were using it like, at least in my experience. It was the time when we still didn't have great spam filters, and people were used to receive and discard many emails without reading them.

RSS was also frequently compared to discussion forums, where you also want to efficiently ignore non-relevant content. RSS gave us the power to ignore the budding information overload.

A common setup was to have a folder hierarchy similar to email. Blogs were in folders organized by topic using whatever approach you felt best. You'd then dip into parts of the hierarchy. There often wasn't an aggregated feed that you could use but you could see a list of all items per blog. Each blog would then be highlighted or show a count when there was new content.

I said blog instead of feed because social networks had a focus on the single scrolling feed as a list of content aggregated from different authors. Some RSS clients embraced this to a degree, but it didn't start out that way. Twitter was the first social network I really used in 2007 to follow bloggers I subscribed to, and it took a while to adjust to this firehose of interspersed content. That wasn't an uncommon sentiment from devs.

So what? It's not a democratic vote to decide what way is the right/wrong way to use RSS. Do as you please, it's a simple usable protocol that basically allows for different use cases.

IIRC, Gmail at one time offered mailbox as RSS feed many years ago

I just scroll over it. Only the newest 5000 items are preserved, by default I allow maximum 4 items per feed (some feeds more some less), titles must be at least 3 words long and I delete items if the title contains any of the badwords.

Now that I think of it, the mistake most people make is not having enough subscriptions. Some spot around 1000 feeds the experience changes dramatically. You can afford to be less interested in things as there is plenty more.

I think I find about one decent article per day for each 10 000 subs.

Disposing of crappy feeds isn't a lot of work and a word filter works really well because people want to stuff descriptive words into titles.

Business insider amused me. They are so good at writing good titles that practically non of their countless worthless publications make it though my word filter. What remains would have one think it is a reasonable website.

I was a Feed Demon user. There are some videos of the experience which is much closer to a Windows email client than Google Reader was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIz5u9T94K0. Google Reader was late-stage RSS for me, but it brought some of the benefits of having all of the content download and aggregation being done server-side so the cost of adding new feeds was shared.

>RSS is a time saver, not a time waster

To me, this is the best quote of the year, thanks.

>RSS has been traditionally used like an email client rather than a streaming service

This is very similar to batch vs streaming argument where we have lambda, kappa and the latest "batch" is the special case of streaming data architecture. I have a very strong feeling that batch and streaming are the two sides of the same coin. Only by this realization that we can transform Kafka [1].

Perhaps better RSS client can be the killer application of this new unified data oriented batch and streaming architecture or I coined it coin architecture (pardon the pun).

[1] What If We Could Rebuild Kafka from Scratch? (220 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43790420

When I used RSS, a hundred years ago, I certainly got anxiety from my NetNewsWire badge showing 10, then 100, then 10,000 unread articles. If I used it today, I would simply turn off the badge and tell it to mark everything 2+ days old as read. But certainly, at a time I did approach it as a "I should read everything on these websites". I was also young and an idiot, some of that has changed now.

I, like many, was a heavy Google Reader user. I would have it show me the headlines and then, when interested, I would look at the blurb when I expanded the item. If that piqued my interest further, I would dig into the actual article.

I have a problem with 'unreads' and I'm INBOX 0 and I keep all of my phone notifications at 0 at all times. I would do the same w/Google Reader. But; if there was something that kept surfacing old content as 'new', I would disable that feed or work to fix it before it ended up in GR.

I miss GR.

My Inoreader became unmanageable and reminded me a lot of the reason I quit using Gmail: over 100k emails to go through in one lifetime isn't worth the trouble.

> over 100k emails to go through in one lifetime isn't worth the trouble

Unless you're on a bunch of mailing lists, I can't even fathom having that much email, much less that much unread email. I'm fanatical about making sure that I'm at inbox zero as much as possible because the 'unread' counter is the enemy. It takes some effort to set up and adjust filters and actually unsubscribe from stuff, but it's completely worth it to have a mailbox that's actually usable.

I noticed that a few years ago that Google had removed the very handy tool I used to filter all mail from "x" sender and I could select all and delete. I believe they did it on purpose because I think Google really doesn't want you to delete emails. They made it harder to delete emails in bulk.

I do subscribe to things I find interesting but other times they are emails from services I joing. I am now using Office 365 and am being able to keep it much cleaner. All my Newsletters go into a Newsletter folder and I have a Sweep rule to keep the 10 most recent and delete the rest. My inbox is way easier to manage now. And every year I move the corresponding emails from that year into a folder, like "2024" and go through it from time to time. It's being a bliss.

My two gmail accounts probably have way over 100k as I've more or less abandoned them. Google also made the total emails you have in the account less apparent too, I was up to 80k and suddenly my inbox had around "3,000" or so emails.

Maybe you like my project: https://rssrdr.com/

It's the simplest RSS reader in the world: no badges, registration or download necessary.

Feedback: Would've been really nice to have an editor on your website. I'm on mobile, so I probably would have added a few feeds -> generated a link with query params -> put it on my slack to pick it up on my laptop later

I know I could just type it or send just the website link over, but it just feels like more work and I'm not invested enough (ie if I'd generated a link now I'd feel like I invested effort and would definitely open it on the laptop. With just a link...not sure)

I'm using a heavily customized 2005-era fork of tt-rss.

Early on in my use I recognized some feeds I wanted to read end-to-end (often individual blogs). Others (Hackaday, other aggregators) I dip into periodically. To keep the UI uncluttered I use naming of the feeds to differentiate. I could easily see adding some schema and UI to handle segregating the feeds, too.

I've thought about adding an algorithmic feed driven from the various feeds I only dip into.

I had some discussion on here re: feed readers that might publish a feed of "starred / tagged" articles. I would love to drive my algorithmic feed from a recommendation system based in part on the subscribing to these "starred" articles from the authors of feeds I already read. A decentralized system that drove recommendations like this would be awesome to play with.

Google Reader would present it almost like an inbox, where "unread" items are bold and read items are not.

To me, this caused a "not caught up on the inbox" reaction because I also use Gmail.

I know this is only one particular feed reader but this is just an example of how it could cause this. Looking at the screen felt like it was "work to be done" not "skimming headlines".

What I do is go through all the new titles from beginning to end and just open anything I want to read in a tab, FreshRSS supports this workflow well. Then it sits in that tab for however long and I read them in the order I want to, sometimes they grouped and stored while I do something else.

I also have sites I filter their RSS as well, they produce really large amounts of articles and I am only interested in certain topics. Took me a while to get around to this, for the most part I did not want a mainstream news site firehosing into my RSS but I have filtered it based on keywords.

That is about it. Takes a bit of effort to slowly build it up but I hate it when sites don't have RSS, I rarely read sites that don't now.

Same here. I more or less open feedly each day, go through 100-200 article titles and open those which seem interesting in new tabs. Then, after I'm done, I read the articles. I never read them inside feedly.

Why am I using it wrong when I only subscribe to interesting feeds? I read everything because I subscribe to stuff I want to read.

And I've been using RSS since the days when there were fights over atom vs RSS.

Can confirm. I subscribe to every feed that remotely interests me. So the aim is not to read everything end to end. The aim is to just glance the headlines, choose the interesting ones to check out later, and archive or delete the rest. Therefore, the feature that interests me in an RSS reader is its ability to sort the articles by my interests.

There are two wildly different models: subscribe only to a few people/channels/things and read or deliberately skip nearly everything, or subscribe to a large number of people/channels/things and let them wash over you while watching a small subset. The people seeking the former are also often the people who want "just give me reverse-chronological", the people who do the latter often like algorithms to help them deal with the firehose.

Personally, I subscribe to a few channels on YouTube and only follow social accounts of people I know well enough to want to read everything from, and deliberately avoid high-volume posters. As a result, I want reverse-chronological and I read/watch almost everything I subscribe to, with things I skip still being noticed and just deliberately skipped over. I know many others who do the same, and I often see that preference expressed here and elsewhere.

But I also know people who follow thousands of accounts and channels and similar, who just let the firehose wash over them, curated by an algorithmic feed. I don't understand that preference, but I know it exists, and I know it's why not everyone agrees with the preference of "just give me reverse-chronological, not an algorithm!".

> For me the purpose of RSS is to get the newest headlines, choose the interesting articles and skip the rest.

That's the only way I ever conceived of it.

What the author describes is unappealing to me. I choose my RSS feeds deliberately. I sort them into five categories, only two of which are must-view. Around half the articles from those two will be worth reading and I want to know that I didn't miss anything from either one. The rest is there for when I have extra time to kill while standing in line at the store, waiting for an elevator, etc.

If everything is random, I'll never know if I missed the one article that would have been the most important to me.

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