Exactly!
Also the fact that rss enables this kind high quality, narrow domain, low volumes posting makes the web way better.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>This lets me keep up with all of those low volume feeds, but also skim the daily news when I have time.<p>I also prune my feeds pretty aggressively.<p>This is probably a much fiddlier setup than most people will want, but really so is any RSS reader.
The feature I want on RSS readers: Volume sliders.<p>A volume slider per feed, and perhaps also a global one.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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've read HN over RSS for years. It's perfect for that.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1] - <a href="http://www.newsbeuter.org/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.newsbeuter.org/index.html</a>
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?<p>That's a curious blind-spot.
I never got into RSS readers, but I use Hacker News and Reddit for the purposes Marco is describing. I have Pulse on my phone set up to follow a handful of RSS feeds (Hacker News, The Verge, Daring Fireball, Ars Technica, etc.) so I have an easy way to see what's happening if I have a couple minutes to kill throughout my day.
Something else that Marco didn't dwell on is the diversity of stuff that you can basically just plug into your rss reader if you want notification. A website may choose to use it to publish anything they wish. Misc. examples:<p>1. Following a user on reddit via rss:<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/user/PresidentObama/.rss" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/user/PresidentObama/.rss</a><p>2. Following a search term on reddit via rss:<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/search/.rss?q=manbearpig" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/search/.rss?q=manbearpig</a><p>3. Checking a mailinator throwaway email via rss:<p><a href="http://www.mailinator.com/rss.jsp?email=webmaster" rel="nofollow">http://www.mailinator.com/rss.jsp?email=webmaster</a><p>4. Google Alerts (RIP.)
I use to mess with rss and agree with Marco on the purpose of them. Then I found a better solution, just subscribe to some of the awesome curated newsletters out there that do all this for you. HN has one - <a href="http://hackernewsletter.com" rel="nofollow">http://hackernewsletter.com</a> and Peter Cooper's tech focused ones (<a href="https://cooperpress.com/" rel="nofollow">https://cooperpress.com/</a>) keep you in the loop in a particular stack, plus a lot of others that I've seen.<p>Now I don't have to check anything these days, except my email, which of course I check everyday anyhow!
I wonder how much of a challenge it would be to create an RSS client that provides a direct payment system to content creators. I'm sort of shocked that I can't remember <i>hearing</i> about something like that; the issue was always about getting page views and having a donation link or whatever. They never seemed to consider direct payment of any kind, even though PayPal was definitely around back then.<p>Take a slice en route and you have a business model.<p>...I feel like I should append this to the top comment so that it gets seen, heh. I'm not interested in doing this. Someone else do it.
I think advising people to delete feeds misses a possible feature that I wish was available in the feed readers I've tried: I would like to mark each feed/URL to tell the feed reader if it is a feed in which I care about seeing every new item. The "number unread" cue/badge should only count the important feeds and not ones where I just want to see the latest content if I have free time.
The rss2email script apparently works like a charm but it isn't suitable for large number of feed subscription. This is where Google Reader came in handy because I didn't have to care how long it takes to grab however many feeds I have under my account. Ultimately, all RSS feed readers (old and new) are going to be suffering from this issue of retrieving large number of feeds.
Everybody thinks everyone uses or should use the internet the same way they do.<p>I couldn't disagree with this post more. I subscribe to a lot of sites that accumulate thousands of <i>unread</i> items. In fact, I could care less about read/unread toggle. My RSS is indeed a river, but it's a river that sometimes I plunge wholeheartedly into and devour large chunks, other times I merely skim for items of interest. Then there are spots in which most is completely ignored. But it's still there and given the magic of <i>SEARCH</i>, I can pull up all the articles for a topic of interest, confining my query to <i>just</i> those sites I have pre-declared an interest in.<p>So I like the mailbox metaphor for being able to quickly traverse items and skim item summaries, so the real payoff for me is not just the increased efficiency in reviewing so much more than could be done by visiting each site (or even in a magazine/mosaic format) but also a repository ready to serve up information for any topic that I wish to browse upon in a future moment.
Just disable read status in your rss-client and the problem is solved. For low frequency sites that you care about you most likely remember their latest headlines anyway. For high frequency sites just watch the headlines roll by, if you happen to be interested in one then click it, otherwise just ignore.
So he advocates never subscribing to high frequency feeds because most clients show the contents of all feeds in one big list.<p>I find that is the wrong way to adress the problem. A more useful solution seems to be a different way to structure an rss reader. Opera for example incorporates one that works alongside its email client. It fixes the issue by treating individual feeds as email folders which can be structured inside more folders and highlighting folders with unread contents as well as displaying their content counts.<p>This screenshow should demonstrate usefully how easy this makes it to notice new updates on low-frequency feeds while still allowing skimming of high-frequency ones without one interrupting the other:<p><a href="https://dl.dropbox.com/u/10190786/feeds.png" rel="nofollow">https://dl.dropbox.com/u/10190786/feeds.png</a>
The "tyranny of the loudest" is a problem I wish more reader software addressed. If someone tweets 100 times a day, just show me the one that was retweeted 10 times. If someone tweets once a month I want to see every one.<p>Maybe give the option to accordion out a "100 tweets hidden" link.
Both high and low volume feeds have their use. You just have to know how to manage them.<p>I use River2 for my high volume feeds while I stick my rarely updated and "must read" feeds into NetNewsWire. Has been working pretty well for me so far.<p>When using NetNewsWire, I'm in "slow down mode" where just about every item (in theory) is important to me. But when I'm using River2, I'm in "scan and click mode" and just trying to see what the latest news is.<p>Using separate applications like this helps keep me "in the zone."<p>If I were to put high volume feeds in NetNewsWire the temptation to read all the posted items would be too great. In River2, items older than three hours just drop off the page. There's no "unread count" or "read older items" button to tempt you.
This is not a new problem -- newsgroups had this problem back in the day. I think the solution now is the same as it was back then -- better scoring/sorting/killfile tools that the end user can control.<p>The death of newsgroups, was also the death of an structured, parseable discussion forum, where the end user had the final say on how they'd see the discussion. Nowadays, we need moderators and the forum software on the server to re-implement these things that newsreaders had worked out.<p>I've setup my own ttrss instance, and it has some basic scoring abilities. Unfortunatly not all rss feeds provide the text of the article (or even the lede) in the feed directly, so the scoring ends up crippled.
Marco, you might also think of RSS readers like an archived narrow band search for high volume traffic. For example: I am a security researcher, so I susbscribe (via RSS) to everything security related that I can find: mailing lists, bleeding edge snort ruls, CVE, blogs, SANS, etc, etc.<p>Now when I want to see the current state of affairs in Ineternet Explorer security issues, I can simply search for "Internet Explorer" in my RSS reader. I am then presented with the traffic on the latest issues, their possible resolutions, and even possibly the person who discovered the issue.<p>The beauty of RSS is that it lets me decide what it will be, and when I want it to be that way.
I partially agree - I do use RSS to check for sites that publish daily updates (yes, even Hacker News). But even with those, you don't need to overload yourself. Right now I get about ~100 news every day, which is perfectly fine with me. I went away last week, and I was greeted by ~500 news. I was able to skim through those in maybe one hour, so it was fine.<p>Everytime I feel that my feed reader is overloaded, I write down every site that I follow, and decide about which sites I really care, and which sites i can easily unsubscribe without problems. I also try to remove sites that post the same thing (this happen a lot with news sites).
Like many of the points but not following the conclusions because Google Reader doesn't aid long tail discovery...was just best place to subscribe post-discovery.<p>If the need for RSS reader remains, then others will simply fill the GR niche?
> If a site posts many items each day and you barely read any of them, delete that feed. If you find yourself hitting “Mark all as read” more than a couple of times for any feed, delete that feed. You won’t miss anything important.<p>Actually, this could be an interesting feature of an RSS client. If the user keeps marking items of a feed as read, either put the feed in silent mode (no longer shows up in inbox) or lower the relevance of its items so that they go down the list (if the items are sorted by relevance).
This is a very interesting use case, particularly in investment analysis, my area of specialty.<p>The problem of obscure, rarely updated blogs with fantastic information (but no reader base) is plainly evident here. I can think of a blogger who is a fixture on "who's who" lists, but publishes a blog so ill-trafficked you can hear the crickets chirping. There are hundreds of these guys.<p>I'm at work on a finance-specific version of this. Hopefully we can announce something before the readerpocalypse.
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Surely there's a sorting metric that could solve this? Something like score = k_1/age_of_post * k_2/frequency_of_posts with appropriate k-weights.<p>Personally, my Google Reader has a folder for 'rarely updated', which I usually check first. Then I have the 'All Items' sorted by magic and skim the first few pages or so for things that strike me as interesting. Then I mark all as read.
I think RSS is being replaced by Twitter. Many of the RSS feeds I currently consume already cross post to a dedicated Twitter account. If publishers aren't doing this, they should start before Google Reader is shuttered.<p>As a consumer, set up a Twitter account dedicated to reading "long tail" low volume twitter feeds or use a fancy Twitter client like Tweetbot that manages lists.
This is precisely why I like Fever as an RSS reader. Fever lets you separate feeds into low-volume kindling and high-volume sparks. Kindling are the feeds you want to keep up with regularly, while items that are mentioned across Sparks bubble up to the top (Its like having your own personal Hacker News).
I tend to add feeds only when the site doesn't generate either a significant number of comments or comments that are actually worth reading. Sites like HN I'm often as (or more) interested in the comments as in the actual article, so I'll just visit the site for that reason instead of using RSS.
You don't need RSS for monitoring sites for infrequent updates. <a href="http://www.changedetection.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.changedetection.com/</a> Free and well working solution. I use that to monitor all low traffic sites, which do not provide RSS.