Comment by LinaLauneBaer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LinaLauneBaer | Hacker News Reader

Maybe OT:

When RSS gained popularity I got myself a decent RSS reader and subscribed to a lot of feeds. What happened was that after a short period of time I had +1000 unread posts. At this point I stopped using RSS for a while because it was just too much noise. A few months back I discovered RSS again for myself but this time I did not subscribe to every site I found interesting. There are a lot of news sites which I visit often and they also have a feed in most cases. I do not subscribe to them because I visit them anyway and they are most of the time high volume feeds. Instead I only subscribe to sites (almost always interesting blogs from fellow developers) who write a new post maybe three times a year or so and I only subscribe to blogs from developers/people who only post if they have something very important to say. This made RSS useful to me again because I would never every remember to visit all those sites twice a year… If I see a unread item in my RSS reader I know that I have to read this post soon because it will blow my mind again.

Who of you is doing it in a similar way?

FWIW, an acquaintance of mine worked on one of the early RSS readers (Bloglines, I think). He mentioned that they had run some analytics on their users and found that the typical user would join, add a bunch of feeds, then slowly add more feeds over time until they had a ton of feeds and then would either delete a bunch of feeds or quit using the reader entirely.

I found that kind of funny. They were clearly deriving value from the reader, or they wouldn't've joined or kept adding feeds in the first place; but if they were feeling burdened or oppressed by their reader, why didn't they just stop adding feeds? Or if they had to keep finding new feeds, prune back the old feeds a bit. Why load up on feeds until you need to do a burst of spring cleaning or quit entirely?

There's probably a lesson in ensuring that high-value items show up, and "noisy" feeds have lower visibility, or similar work to make it feel like the user is not obligated to read everything (i.e., make it feel like work).

Even a "hide feeds with no posts" would help (I don't know if bloglines has that).

> Even a "hide feeds with no posts" would help (I don't know if bloglines has that).

I dunno about Bloglines then or now (whoever bought it threw out all the old code and started over), but at least in Google Reader, there is an option to, in the sidebar, omit feeds with no updates. I checked that option. It saves a lot of space for me.

You need a River of News aggregator: http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com/riverOfNews

Which is possibly one of the reasons Google Reader was so successful, it sort of looked like it had categories and stuff and satisfied people who thought that was important, but it was really river-of-news at its heart.

Try http://rssident.com/mash

I am doing exactly that and I'm very picky with my subscriptions.

To put it in perspective:

> Since March 20, 2007 you have read a total of 9,085 items.

Where do you find this information? I looked for it yesterday, and couldn't find it...

Look for "Trends" under "All Items".

Thanks! "Since July 18, 2007 you have read a total of 228,650 items." Woaw.

Unfortunately all I get is "300,000+".

I'm a heavy user. 3300 in the past month and that's well down on what it used to be.

I used it somewhat this way but also subscribed to some big prolific sites that I don't happen to visit that often and then once in awhile, in Reader, I'd glance at the newest 50 items in their list. I didn't have a problem ignoring > 50% of the feeds in my list but still keeping them in my list.

I'd read the feeds I most care about and once in awhile visit the ones I less cared about.

I loved Bloglines and only reluctantly switched to Reader. Like you I mostly used it as a way to check less prolific blogs including blogs by friends and family.

Maybe not what you're asking for, but I don't. I don't have any issues with clicking "Mark all as read" for news sites that push several items a day.

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