Hacker News Reader

Comment by choko | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand what people use to see new information from multiple websites at once if they aren't using RSS. Are they actually visiting 10 or 20 websites a day manually? Do "normal" users stick to just a few websites?

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>Are they actually visiting 10 or 20 websites a day manually?

Some do. My brother, for example, has several dozen political or gun-related blogs that he reads religiously. He doesn't even keep a bookmark list--he just remembers all of them, and visits them one by one when it's time for reading, keeping track of which posts are new. I showed him Google Reader and suggested it would streamline things greatly, but he just grunted it off and said he liked doing things the way he liked doing things.

They like the site on Facebook and follow updates on their wall. That's what I noticed "non-technical" friends and family do.

That's so... Not open.

I consider myself a very technical person, but I never saw a reason to use RSS feeds (or Reader for that matter).

There are not a lot of "content websites" that I follow (Fefes Blog, Beautiful Pixels, MacRumors...) but rather content aggregation websites like HackerNews or Reddit, which I use to get my daily dose of news (not just tech but all kinds of categories). And yes, I check those manually, often on my phone in the respective apps, and it does not at all feel like a hassle. I've tried using Google Reader and other feed managers like Feedly but never got used to them.

For personalized news I look at the two social sites I follow (App.net and Twitter).

It would be damn annoying for me to check fefe several times, find the last link I read and start above it. And that's for his somewhat low-update blog. Stuff like techdirt is way worse with ~50 or so posts per day.

Sure, RSS isn't ideally suited for "news" when you can just hit an aggregation site or two. But it's extremely useful for following particular content you're interested in regardless of popularity. If I come across a particularly insightful, well-written blog on some obscure programming topic I'd like to read more of what that person has to say without having to remember to check back at some point or cross my fingers that enough cool kids upvote it on an aggregator.

And the best part about Reader (and now The Old Reader, for me)? The comments come from people I mostly know or are vouched for by people I do, so there's a distinct lack of inane Reddit-y comments.

Most of the time the author has a Twitter account you can follow and they post not only links to their new articles but also random interesting thoughts you wouldn't necessarily get through RSS.

Twitter's single timeline format is very much not designed for following all updates from someone (which is what I'm interested in for a blog). There are ways around it (keeping your subscriptions count very low, list tricks, etc), but it's complicated compared to just using rss.

The twitterverse is a very small subset of reality, although it is very easy to believe otherwise, as it is used by "us" and "our multipliers". As far as my (of course limited) observations go, twitter is filling the social communication need of a certain part of the population and is rejected because of practical considerations by the rest.

If you wonder what the practical problems are, consider a person that has the (possibly job-related) constraint that they cannot look at their twitter client whenever they want. If that person now wants to stay informed about something without missing an update, they are essentially screwed with twitter and other information-stream based services. At this point I am very certain that what I just described is not an outlier but rather the reality for a large section of the general population.

That just plain isn't true. Even if it were, Twitter is singularly unsuited to that kind of information consumption.

I don't need everyone to find RSS as useful as I do and I'm fine with the fact that others have different usage patterns and preferences. But I wish everyone saying "meh, what's the big deal" would realize that others find RSS to be the best fit for them and are well-justified in worrying about its decline.

yes,and i dont care the author tweeting about his daughter ,his car or his vacation. with a rss reader, noise => trashcan.

My wife just starts typing the name of the site she wants from memory and the browser auto-completes it. No readers, no bookmarks. I would guess quite a lot of people browse the web this way.

Bookmarks. I personally have multi row toolbar and Tree Style Tab on Firefox. I really see no need for RSS (and yes I tried it[1])

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5383772

bookmarks dont update themselves automatically when new articles are available ,dont tell you what you've already read or not and are not an open protocol to share information across websites.

I visit sites manually, and the overhead of doing so is one of the ways I maintain self-control over being overly consumerist about my information. I didn't actually get any benefit from using an RSS reader 5 years ago and I don't think I'd really get much benefit today.

You don't need updates from 10 to 20 websites. Find one or two good aggregators. HN and Facebook are enough for me.

Don't tell me what I need. A lot of people like following more than just content that gets picked up by the hype machine, just like some people aren't satisfied only listening to top-40 music. Aggregators are good for new discovery, but they don't know more about what I'm interested in than I do.

I do.

HN and such aggregators are nice for fluff content, which appeals to a broad range of people. More specific content either isn't aggregated, or the aggregators themselves are so niche that they only update once in a while (e.g. Lambda-the-Ultimate). And frankly, while obviously none is indispensable for my life or well-being, I'd rather miss out on HN than on the smaller blogs and feeds.

What about Facebook?

I wouldn't know, I don't have an account.

    HN and Facebook are enough for me.

Do your favorite researchers post comments at Facebook regarding their latest papers?

Yes, since I follow them on Facebook.

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