Hacker News Reader

Comment by DannoHung | Hacker News Reader

Here's my rule: If a feed emits more than about 5 items per day, it's probably a shitty feed. And more importantly, that anything that is actually interesting on them will be repeated here, on Hacker News, or on Digg, or reddit, or on one of the feeds that I do follow.

I largely use my feed reader to make sure I don't miss stuff from the sites that publish much more irregularly (and so that I don't have to periodically check them).

View on HN

Nearly 2 years ago I started using Google Reader. I signed up for a few great feeds and read it every morning and every night. Over the following months I signed up to more and more feeds, eventually to the point where my reader was flooded with up to a thousand articles per day, and I struggled to find time to do my work between keeping up with this influx of information.

Then one particular week where things got too heavy, I just didn't have time.

Now, I wouldn't say I have OCD, but I really dislike doing things out of order. I can't watch a trilogy out of order, I can't watch a new TV series unless I start at S01E01. When I returned to my reader I suddenly had 6000+ articles to read, and dreaded the thought that I'd have to read some out of order.

I don't know if I'm alone here, but eventually I no longer enjoyed the prospect of opening Google Reader. To keep up with all this information, I felt I had to, but it ceased to be fun. It's probably been a month since I've opened it, just casually reading reddit and HN, as well as a few forums I have in my Firefox Toolbar and a few emails a day I've subscribed to.

One day I will likely go back on Google Reader and somehow cull the hundreds of subscriptions, all neatly categorised into topics and subtopics, back down a number I can read in an hour per day. But I suspect I'll find that difficult, and so instead I just stay away.

And that's my story about RSS.

As always, it depends.

I subscribe to a small number of feeds. But several of them are themselves aggregating multiple feeds (e.g., running some sort of "planet" software), and so can produce lots of items depending on who's active on a given day.

I find this to be fairly useful (since it lets me get good coverage of particular niche topics I care about), but I'm also very careful about what I subscribe to and who I trust to choose the feeds which get aggregated.

I disagree to a certain extent. I see your point on using a feed reader for irregular sites but I think you’re just as likely if not more likely to accidentally miss something on a site like HN or Digg because there’s such a high volume of posts.

The fact that you’re trusting "the crowd" to do your filtering at all presents a problem. Because even in a community of likeminded people like HN we all have our own special interests which aren’t necessarily shared by the crowd (one example, I program in .Net but most HN readers don’t so a lot of good .Net stories never make it out of the "New" section)

So in the end that's the problem the author is laying out. How do you take a large number of messages and make the feed reader as effective as it is with the small sites? I don't know the answer either but I think it's still a huge problem being left on the table.

My rationality is thus: High volume means general interest. I do not want to be the filter feeder for general interest. Importantly, I don't care if I miss a few things; I'm eliminating the vast majority of false positives. I run the risk of missing a few false negatives, but I'm already roughly at my limit for dealing with the true positives anyhow, so it doesn't really matter: nothing I miss is going to cause me to lose a hojillion dollars or anything serious.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com