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Comment by sebtron | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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

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