Exactly!
Also the fact that rss enables this kind high quality, narrow domain, low volumes posting makes the web way better.
I don't want to read professional writers who have to write their quota whether there is good material to write about or not on that day. They too often focus on gossip and sensationalism. Although I might be entertained briefly, in the end I will not have gained much from reading this type of articles and it's a waste of my time.
I want to read the authors who mostly spends their time doing things in their domain of expertise and get out of their lab/office/cave once in a while to write a post on something they feel is interesting and worth sharing. Because they are not frequent writers the prose might be dryer but the facts, ideas and insights are usually much better than what you get from those who's main job is writing.
I love insights that comes directly from an expert's keyboard. They are pearls of wisdom and it would be sad to lose them because of a decline in support for RSS.
Writing this made me realize that the closing of G Reader might be a huge opportunity for Tumblr.
Tumblr already has RSS features on the publishing side which means they don't lock in their users content in their platform. Imagine if facebook would allow their users's public posts to be viewable in g+. That's what Tumblr does.
Having RSS publishing is a good first step for an open and interoperable social platform. Add to that the ability to see all unread posts from a group of subscriptions and the ability to subscribe to outside rss feeds within Tumblr and you got yourself a very good social network/feed reader/blogging platform.
Maybe the kids are on to something.
I wonder if there is a business model for a social network that keeps posts in the open and encourages consumptions from outside platforms through rss.
> Imagine if facebook would allow their users's public posts to be viewable in g+. That's what Tumblr does.
I may have missed something but I haven't seen some tumblr post posted on G+ via RSS (yet).
> Having RSS publishing is a good first step for an open and interoperable social platform. Add to that the ability to see all unread posts from a group of subscriptions and the ability to subscribe to outside rss feeds within Tumblr and you got yourself a very good social network/feed reader/blogging platform.
A good first step but they (facebook, twitter) all ended up removing it.
> Maybe the kids are on to something.
More like the parents (read: youngsters from the 2000) were on to something. I had high hopes for RSS and even higher for ATOM (I ended up writing my own flat-file blog system that only used ATOM documents as storage, I really liked it with the full xslt mumbo jumbo but in the end it's xml and that was it).
>I wonder if there is a business model for a social network that keeps posts in the open and encourages consumptions from outside platforms through rss.
Some tried to monetize RSS by adding ads in the feeds but that didn't take off. Reading a site's content only in the rss feed cuts off its authors from any kind of revenues (worse if the online reader displays its own add along the feeds).
I presented a project when I was a student. It consisted of a website that offered any registered user to transform the RSS/ATOM feeds they would have supplied into a mini updated WAP-enabled website for browsing the feeds on those old nokia of the 2000s. It was nice and all but when one of my advisors asked me "how would you turn it into something profitable or how would you bring it to the market?" all I could say was "this would never work because nobody with profits on his mind is promoting webfeeds".
I though the news-publishing industry would use RSS as a kind of copy-pasta medium but it doesn't look like things are going this way (at least not on the public side of things).
RSS (and ATOM because "i want to believe") isn't dead but I am not convinced it's going to make a come-back on any for-profit social network.
This exactly matches my use case for RSS. High volume daily websites - like HN - I read directly. I went through a phase where I tried to read HN via RSS (in Google Reader) and for me it wasn't better than just hitting HN directly.
But for the kind of sites Marco mentions (which I read most of, actually) that update on a semi-daily or weekly basis, RSS readers are perfect because I don't want to go and visit those pages individually just to see they don't have any updates. Typically those sites are narrowly-focused personal/organizational blogs in areas I am interested in.
Could not agree more, this is the exact use case for the 'power users' of RSS. And he is right that without RSS I don't know how these low-posting-frequency sites would keep their readership. If I had to give up one, I'd give up twitter or hackernews long before that low-frequency RSS feed. Those posts are gold and for niche subjects (I'm into bio) there is no where else they are aggregated.
Tech, video games, etc.. journalists have a very different use case for RSS, which is exactly using it to monitor dozens of other information sources (including their competitors). I think they match the definition of power users, perhaps more than you and I, because that's the primary tool for their job : they will routinely have hundreds of RSS feeds and will skim quickly through thousands of items a day to look for the information that they haven't treated yet.
RSS is perfect for that matter and it is precisely the opposite of what marco and you claim is a poor usage of RSS.
Right, RSS is great for low volume stuff that you don't want to miss.
I do have a way of using it productively with high-volume sites. Specifically, I read some of reddit via RSS. Sometimes I go deep into a project, and avoid distractions for quite a while. At the same time, I don't want to miss out on the zeitgeist. So I set up an RSS feed that takes the top n items over a certain period - for example, the top 3 weekly stories from proggit.
Then when I'm done the project I can go back and see what important items from the group discussion I've missed. Basically just turn a constant stream into a small amount of the best content that I don't want to miss.
Exactly. Most of the blogs I read are updated once a week or even once a month, but they have great content I don't want to miss. RSS allows me to not have those sites in my bookmarks but always get their latest content.
I've also used it for Craigslist searches and store updates when items go on sale, which are infrequent enough that I would miss them unless I checked every day.
I would like to use RSS to grab frequently updated tech news, but in a separate bucket that doesn't count as "unread". I'd rather strip out the site design and just focus on the content. That's what news is, right?
I go back & forth with HN, the reason being that I often star items that I'll want to follow-up on later.
For instance, if I read something at home that I want to share with the crew at work, I'll star it. Likewise, if I come across something at work that really doesn't apply to my job, but it's still interesting, I'll star it so I won't forget to read it at home.
Granted, those functions are not part & parcel to RSS readers, but it's one way that a reader can be extended to offer value beyond the normal RSS featureset. Much like the "note in Reader" feature, which I also used multiple times a day...
Personally, I have different labels. I have a high volume label that I nuke with impunity, then another label with low volume feeds that I treat more like Marco describes in tfa.
This lets me keep up with all of those low volume feeds, but also skim the daily news when I have time.
I also prune my feeds pretty aggressively.
This is probably a much fiddlier setup than most people will want, but really so is any RSS reader.
Yeah he lost me when he started saying that I'm doing it wrong just because I subscribe to high-volume feeds..
Years ago I came across someone's excellent strategy for organizing Google Reader under two top-level groups:
* Must Read
* Can Miss
Under those 2 labels I have other classifications, but those are the two main groups that all my feeds fall under.
The low-volume or high-importance feeds go into "Must Read" and the rest goes into "Can Miss".. Can Miss is for skimming, for catching up on the last few days of high-volume feeds or just for finding something to read through when I'm bored..
I regularly hit "Mark all as Read" on the "Can Miss" group, and I don't feel bad about it for a second, nor do I feel like I am somehow using RSS incorrectly.
But the "Must Read" label contains feeds that I really want to make sure I read all of, or don't miss anything from.. Like infrequently updated blogs, security update RSS feeds, some serial web comics or web shorts, etc.. In the last several years I don't think I've even once hit "Mark all as Read" in that label.
So while I agree that if your current approach to RSS is leading you to ignore most of what ends up in your reader, you might need a different approach, but that approach doesn't have to be "don't use RSS".
I read all the things in the "Interesting" label, they get one new item once every few days at most.
In the mass news section, I keep up to date with the first site but all others I only check up infrequently (hence they regularly get to 1000+ and I don't mind, that's normal).
And the Occasional label is kinda in between, but in reality I don't really read anything there anymore.
That's how I used to use Reader. One "Important" folder for stuff that I was very likely to read, and another for skimming.
It's a common complaint about Twitter that once you start following a few people who produce high volumes of crap, it becomes useless. The usual advice is to be quick to unfollow, but I've always missed a "must read" feature for Twitter, to specially mark those few people where you really do want to see every single tweet.
This is what Twitter's Lists functionality is for. I have separate lists of people for topics I am interested in, such as running, android, infosec, etc. The downside is that people on your lists don't enjoy the same capabilities as the people you follow, so they can't DM and they might be insulted that you show as not following them.
I like the "volume dial" on G+ Circles. Just wish it would let me filter circle posts by media type (i.e. block all images and videos, but show all text and link posts). I'm sure it can be done, as they just implemented this feature for Google+ searches.
I'm playing with a couple of strategies: creating a list, and then viewing tweets on the list (which show up jumbled when the list is first created, but seem in order thereafter), and just having multiple accounts...
I also had a 2 folder system, but subscribe to so few feeds that going away for a weekend only leaves me with a few hundred unread articles. Since many sites overlap in terms of content, I don't even always need to read every article anyway.
Yep. I read about 10% of Techdirt and Android Police but those 10% are usually things I'm really interested in so deleting them is not an option. So I usually just skip the headlines and open up whatever sounds interesting.
The feature I want on RSS readers: Volume sliders.
A volume slider per feed, and perhaps also a global one.
If a feed is posting too much stuff, but I still like some of the stuff on it, I'd prefer not to unsubscribe if I had a better option.
If I notice a feed getting a bit noisy, I'd like to open a view for that feed, with titles and timestamps. Then I'd just move a slider and watch stuff drop out, until I've turned it down to a volume I can handle.
Hopefully, the lower-signal items will drop out of view first and the higher-signal items last. The more data available for making these rankings, the better. Comment counts or scores from the hosting site should help. So should links/shares/likes/comments across the major social networks.
Right, the problem is just that "unread counts" aren't that nice of a feature for RSS feeds, because not all posts are created equal. (Hell, it's not even that nice of a feature on email, unless you do a lot of filtering.)
I like the volume slider ideal; I that you could leverage social media outlets as a scoring system. (I'd include HN in that - the more points, the higher the score.) That could give you a nice way to "bump up" the things past some "volume" you haven't seen in priority.
I don't like the idea of "just don't subscribe"; why can't the tool figure this out for me?
Edit: "aren't nice" -> "aren't that nice". I do think counts are useful, just far, far from perfect. What I find myself dong is finding a feed with unread items, skimming, then marking all as read. (Well, when I use Reader, sigh.)
I personally don't mind unread counts. That aspect really depends on the way you use it.
I used to have a ton of unread items sitting in the feed reader; now everything is either immediately discarded or immediately shunted into Pocket. (A good phone interface for me might be: swipe left = discard, swipe right = send to view-later service of choice and discard. Fast!)
Of course, that means I now have a ton of unread stuff sitting in Pocket. So I think services in that category could benefit from this kind of scoring too. I can see my Pocket stuff in reverse chronological order. I'd love a really intelligent, adaptive “sort by magic” for that big bucket.
You suggested using HN as a source. That's absolutely along the lines I'm thinking. It's like this: every site can be a source of stories, but every site should also be a potential source of scoring signals for stories -- either its own or elsewhere.
Google bought the technology that would facilitate your volume slider. It was called PostRank: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostRank
They even had a Chrome plugin for Google Reader that enabled just that on the client side.
I for instance, can't be bothered to read all of Hacker News. So I read only the posts that have 150 points or more, via http://hckrnews.com/ (a by-points curator) in the form of an RSS feed.
I've read HN over RSS for years. It's perfect for that.
Firefox isn't very well suited for keeping up with blogs and news sites like HN because it's so damn bloated and slow, and you can't really save any articles for later reading without upvoting, opening them in a new tab, or bookmarking them. Bookmarks in Firefox are a total pain in the ass, so I try to avoid them as much as possible. I already have more than enough tabs open, and don't want to waste more keeping some possibly interesting article waiting for me.
In my RSS reader (Newsbeuter[1]), all I have to do to save an article for later reading is not delete it. It will remain marked as new and I can read it later, at my leisure.
If I go for some days (or weeks) without reading HN at all, I can come back whenever I have time and still have all the articles waiting for me, instead of using HN's shitty time-limited "more.." prompt to painfully page through old articles.
Some years back, there were even a couple of "HN Full Feed" RSS feeds that would show the entire linked article in each RSS item, so I could read it in my RSS reader instead of having to click through to some crappily designed website and get pissed off at how long Firefox took to load it.
RSS is really one of the very best ways to read virtually any blog or news site, whether there are a ton of new items per day (like HN), or whether it's some little blog that's updated once every few years, or anywhere in between.
Newsbeuter is awesome for text heavy feeds, but less so for (say) photoblogs. I'd really like to see more development of different types of specialized rss readers and get away from the OP's argument that there's a "right way" to use rss.
Ironically, I use IFTTT to read the RSS and push sites like what he is describing into Instapaper. You lose the by-site organization of it, but if you don't overdo it you end up with a nice small selection of things to read every day when you fire up Instapaper.
I personally started using an RSS Reader to keep track of webcomics. Especially ones that update infrequently. Now they're all in one handy place and I never miss a panel.
The creator of Instapaper doesn't see the value-add of using an RSS reader to skim the postings of a high-volume site, for readability/usability reasons?
He didn't say anything to that effect at all. The only things that come close to that characterization are:
1. "If a site posts many items each day and you barely read any of them, delete that feed." (emphasis mine) If you're skimming all the items in a feed and deriving value from it, this piece of advice doesn't apply.
2. "RSS works best when following a large number of infrequently updated sites." Works best, not only works.
3. "It’s not enough to interleave their posts into a “river” or “stream” paradigm [...] because many of them would get buried in the noise of higher-volume feeds and people’s tweets." It's not enough, not that it's categorically not valuable.
The whole article dovetails nicely with Instapaper's purpose, which is to ensure you don't miss reading articles you find important. Relying solely on a river of news that's filled with high volume sources leads to a high chance of missing stuff you otherwise want to keep close tabs on. Pretty uncontroversial stuff.
> "You shouldn’t come back to hundreds or thousands of unread articles." ... "you shouldn’t subscribe to feeds that would generate that kind of unread volume." ... "you’re using it in a way that’s not good for you."
These sorts of prescriptive statements don't read as "I see the value others may derive from other use cases." They explicitly read as "I don't see the value" and "I've looked and I don't think it exists."
Further, using an RSS reader to skim a frequently-updated site, of which I read only a few articles, is precisely the point.
High quantities of postings exacerbates the flaws of their designs. But with RSS, it's easy to skim pages of headlines. After a long weekend I can deal with hundreds of unread articles precisely because I'm interested in so little.
If there were aggregating services that delivered what I was looking for, I'd certainly prefer that. But I haven't found them.
Readit News
I don't want to read professional writers who have to write their quota whether there is good material to write about or not on that day. They too often focus on gossip and sensationalism. Although I might be entertained briefly, in the end I will not have gained much from reading this type of articles and it's a waste of my time.
I want to read the authors who mostly spends their time doing things in their domain of expertise and get out of their lab/office/cave once in a while to write a post on something they feel is interesting and worth sharing. Because they are not frequent writers the prose might be dryer but the facts, ideas and insights are usually much better than what you get from those who's main job is writing.
I love insights that comes directly from an expert's keyboard. They are pearls of wisdom and it would be sad to lose them because of a decline in support for RSS.
Tumblr already has RSS features on the publishing side which means they don't lock in their users content in their platform. Imagine if facebook would allow their users's public posts to be viewable in g+. That's what Tumblr does.
Having RSS publishing is a good first step for an open and interoperable social platform. Add to that the ability to see all unread posts from a group of subscriptions and the ability to subscribe to outside rss feeds within Tumblr and you got yourself a very good social network/feed reader/blogging platform.
Maybe the kids are on to something.
I wonder if there is a business model for a social network that keeps posts in the open and encourages consumptions from outside platforms through rss.
I may have missed something but I haven't seen some tumblr post posted on G+ via RSS (yet).
> Having RSS publishing is a good first step for an open and interoperable social platform. Add to that the ability to see all unread posts from a group of subscriptions and the ability to subscribe to outside rss feeds within Tumblr and you got yourself a very good social network/feed reader/blogging platform.
A good first step but they (facebook, twitter) all ended up removing it.
> Maybe the kids are on to something.
More like the parents (read: youngsters from the 2000) were on to something. I had high hopes for RSS and even higher for ATOM (I ended up writing my own flat-file blog system that only used ATOM documents as storage, I really liked it with the full xslt mumbo jumbo but in the end it's xml and that was it).
>I wonder if there is a business model for a social network that keeps posts in the open and encourages consumptions from outside platforms through rss.
Some tried to monetize RSS by adding ads in the feeds but that didn't take off. Reading a site's content only in the rss feed cuts off its authors from any kind of revenues (worse if the online reader displays its own add along the feeds).
I presented a project when I was a student. It consisted of a website that offered any registered user to transform the RSS/ATOM feeds they would have supplied into a mini updated WAP-enabled website for browsing the feeds on those old nokia of the 2000s. It was nice and all but when one of my advisors asked me "how would you turn it into something profitable or how would you bring it to the market?" all I could say was "this would never work because nobody with profits on his mind is promoting webfeeds".
I though the news-publishing industry would use RSS as a kind of copy-pasta medium but it doesn't look like things are going this way (at least not on the public side of things).
RSS (and ATOM because "i want to believe") isn't dead but I am not convinced it's going to make a come-back on any for-profit social network.
But for the kind of sites Marco mentions (which I read most of, actually) that update on a semi-daily or weekly basis, RSS readers are perfect because I don't want to go and visit those pages individually just to see they don't have any updates. Typically those sites are narrowly-focused personal/organizational blogs in areas I am interested in.
I do have a way of using it productively with high-volume sites. Specifically, I read some of reddit via RSS. Sometimes I go deep into a project, and avoid distractions for quite a while. At the same time, I don't want to miss out on the zeitgeist. So I set up an RSS feed that takes the top n items over a certain period - for example, the top 3 weekly stories from proggit.
Then when I'm done the project I can go back and see what important items from the group discussion I've missed. Basically just turn a constant stream into a small amount of the best content that I don't want to miss.
Oh, I really like that idea. how do you set up that feed?
I've also used it for Craigslist searches and store updates when items go on sale, which are infrequent enough that I would miss them unless I checked every day.
I would like to use RSS to grab frequently updated tech news, but in a separate bucket that doesn't count as "unread". I'd rather strip out the site design and just focus on the content. That's what news is, right?
For instance, if I read something at home that I want to share with the crew at work, I'll star it. Likewise, if I come across something at work that really doesn't apply to my job, but it's still interesting, I'll star it so I won't forget to read it at home.
Granted, those functions are not part & parcel to RSS readers, but it's one way that a reader can be extended to offer value beyond the normal RSS featureset. Much like the "note in Reader" feature, which I also used multiple times a day...
This lets me keep up with all of those low volume feeds, but also skim the daily news when I have time.
I also prune my feeds pretty aggressively.
This is probably a much fiddlier setup than most people will want, but really so is any RSS reader.
Years ago I came across someone's excellent strategy for organizing Google Reader under two top-level groups:
Under those 2 labels I have other classifications, but those are the two main groups that all my feeds fall under.The low-volume or high-importance feeds go into "Must Read" and the rest goes into "Can Miss".. Can Miss is for skimming, for catching up on the last few days of high-volume feeds or just for finding something to read through when I'm bored..
I regularly hit "Mark all as Read" on the "Can Miss" group, and I don't feel bad about it for a second, nor do I feel like I am somehow using RSS incorrectly.
But the "Must Read" label contains feeds that I really want to make sure I read all of, or don't miss anything from.. Like infrequently updated blogs, security update RSS feeds, some serial web comics or web shorts, etc.. In the last several years I don't think I've even once hit "Mark all as Read" in that label.
So while I agree that if your current approach to RSS is leading you to ignore most of what ends up in your reader, you might need a different approach, but that approach doesn't have to be "don't use RSS".
http://img255.imageshack.us/img255/1528/imageiq.png
I read all the things in the "Interesting" label, they get one new item once every few days at most.
In the mass news section, I keep up to date with the first site but all others I only check up infrequently (hence they regularly get to 1000+ and I don't mind, that's normal).
And the Occasional label is kinda in between, but in reality I don't really read anything there anymore.
It's a common complaint about Twitter that once you start following a few people who produce high volumes of crap, it becomes useless. The usual advice is to be quick to unfollow, but I've always missed a "must read" feature for Twitter, to specially mark those few people where you really do want to see every single tweet.
A volume slider per feed, and perhaps also a global one.
If a feed is posting too much stuff, but I still like some of the stuff on it, I'd prefer not to unsubscribe if I had a better option.
If I notice a feed getting a bit noisy, I'd like to open a view for that feed, with titles and timestamps. Then I'd just move a slider and watch stuff drop out, until I've turned it down to a volume I can handle.
Hopefully, the lower-signal items will drop out of view first and the higher-signal items last. The more data available for making these rankings, the better. Comment counts or scores from the hosting site should help. So should links/shares/likes/comments across the major social networks.
I like the volume slider ideal; I that you could leverage social media outlets as a scoring system. (I'd include HN in that - the more points, the higher the score.) That could give you a nice way to "bump up" the things past some "volume" you haven't seen in priority.
I don't like the idea of "just don't subscribe"; why can't the tool figure this out for me?
Edit: "aren't nice" -> "aren't that nice". I do think counts are useful, just far, far from perfect. What I find myself dong is finding a feed with unread items, skimming, then marking all as read. (Well, when I use Reader, sigh.)
I used to have a ton of unread items sitting in the feed reader; now everything is either immediately discarded or immediately shunted into Pocket. (A good phone interface for me might be: swipe left = discard, swipe right = send to view-later service of choice and discard. Fast!)
Of course, that means I now have a ton of unread stuff sitting in Pocket. So I think services in that category could benefit from this kind of scoring too. I can see my Pocket stuff in reverse chronological order. I'd love a really intelligent, adaptive “sort by magic” for that big bucket.
You suggested using HN as a source. That's absolutely along the lines I'm thinking. It's like this: every site can be a source of stories, but every site should also be a potential source of scoring signals for stories -- either its own or elsewhere.
I for instance, can't be bothered to read all of Hacker News. So I read only the posts that have 150 points or more, via http://hckrnews.com/ (a by-points curator) in the form of an RSS feed.
Firefox isn't very well suited for keeping up with blogs and news sites like HN because it's so damn bloated and slow, and you can't really save any articles for later reading without upvoting, opening them in a new tab, or bookmarking them. Bookmarks in Firefox are a total pain in the ass, so I try to avoid them as much as possible. I already have more than enough tabs open, and don't want to waste more keeping some possibly interesting article waiting for me.
In my RSS reader (Newsbeuter[1]), all I have to do to save an article for later reading is not delete it. It will remain marked as new and I can read it later, at my leisure.
If I go for some days (or weeks) without reading HN at all, I can come back whenever I have time and still have all the articles waiting for me, instead of using HN's shitty time-limited "more.." prompt to painfully page through old articles.
Some years back, there were even a couple of "HN Full Feed" RSS feeds that would show the entire linked article in each RSS item, so I could read it in my RSS reader instead of having to click through to some crappily designed website and get pissed off at how long Firefox took to load it.
RSS is really one of the very best ways to read virtually any blog or news site, whether there are a ton of new items per day (like HN), or whether it's some little blog that's updated once every few years, or anywhere in between.
[1] - http://www.newsbeuter.org/index.html
check out http://www.readability.com/addons
That's a curious blind-spot.
1. "If a site posts many items each day and you barely read any of them, delete that feed." (emphasis mine) If you're skimming all the items in a feed and deriving value from it, this piece of advice doesn't apply.
2. "RSS works best when following a large number of infrequently updated sites." Works best, not only works.
3. "It’s not enough to interleave their posts into a “river” or “stream” paradigm [...] because many of them would get buried in the noise of higher-volume feeds and people’s tweets." It's not enough, not that it's categorically not valuable.
The whole article dovetails nicely with Instapaper's purpose, which is to ensure you don't miss reading articles you find important. Relying solely on a river of news that's filled with high volume sources leads to a high chance of missing stuff you otherwise want to keep close tabs on. Pretty uncontroversial stuff.
These sorts of prescriptive statements don't read as "I see the value others may derive from other use cases." They explicitly read as "I don't see the value" and "I've looked and I don't think it exists."
Further, using an RSS reader to skim a frequently-updated site, of which I read only a few articles, is precisely the point.
High quantities of postings exacerbates the flaws of their designs. But with RSS, it's easy to skim pages of headlines. After a long weekend I can deal with hundreds of unread articles precisely because I'm interested in so little.
If there were aggregating services that delivered what I was looking for, I'd certainly prefer that. But I haven't found them.