Hacker News Reader

Comment by dewey | Hacker News Reader

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”.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com