

Why I Don't Use RSS Anymore - Nic0
http://www.nicosphere.net/why-i-dont-use-rss-anymore-2536/

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toddh
Then you are missing out and are letting the masses decide what you read.
Technical experts have highly targeted RSS feeds and thus highly relevant
information. Once you give up on that you've really just given up.

~~~
Nic0
You are certainly right, I'm not a technical experts, and the average contain
of HN is usually enough for me. If I would need some too specific stuff, it
wouldn't work.

~~~
zachgreen
Sounds like a good balance is best. RSS for specific, infrequent blogs and
twitter for the mass news. This is where I have found myself lately. I have
dropped all feeds that post more than 3 or 4 times a day other than HN. If I
could get a more refined feed from HN (just stuff that makes it to the front
page), I would be even happier.

~~~
Nic0
> If I could get a more refined feed from HN (just stuff that makes it to the
> front page

There is possibly a way, this twitter account provide only HN stories higher
than 100 points, Twitter also allow to follow via RSS feed, unless they it
turned off, <https://twitter.com/#!/newsyc100> So it would provide readable
feed for HN.

~~~
zachgreen
awesome. i didn't know about that twitter account. thanks.

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ramraj07
I'm actually very sad that people don't understand the power of RSS. Of course
you have to be stupid to push Reddit through Google Reader, but that does not
mean RSS is dead as much as email is dead because we have Facebook messaging.
While that analogy sounds outrageous, think about it: you won't kick yourself
because you missed the top post in Reddit from the morning (maybe it annoys
you that you don't understand the windfall of followup posts) but I sure as
hell don't want to miss the one important publication that got published in a
journal about my research. Sure, my unread count is now 2000, but I can still
rest assured that my procrastination will not make things I haven't read to
just disappear.

I used to really love some subreddits, especially r/askscience. I used to be
able to just put an RSS feed and never miss a single question I could help
with. But now its overwhelming; I can't do anything about it. So I just didn't
even bother going there for a while. Until I figured out ways to filter the
posts in the subreddit and feed them into RSS (I used <http://ifttt.com/> for
that btw) and now I can at least try to answer questions of my interest.

While social aggregation sites are good to go through while munching dinner,
when you need to consume data for real knowledge acquisition, I don't think
you can beat RSS. For that I hope RSS never dies in spite of all the ignorance
around it.

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po
For high traffic sites, RSS is pretty unusable (mostly because the state of
the art in clients seems to be fixated on read/unread counts. Feed a Fever
looked interesting <http://feedafever.com/> but never really seemed to take
off) but there are always going to be never-want-to-miss sites.

I have a collection of blogs and sites where I want to read every thing that
person says. There are many people that post infrequently, post extremely
insightful commentary and yet don't show up in my social media feeds.

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hpaavola
Many excellent sites publish new stuff very rarely. RSS is the best way to
follow those sites.

~~~
Nic0
I agree that good sites publish rarely. Some site get in the Hacker News front
page at every publication, even if they publish once a month, because they
stuff are excellent. I'm not following them with RSS, but I still aware of
them.

~~~
smackfu
The tricky bit is that YOU still need to follow the news everyday. If Joel On
Software has a new post, it surely will get posted to HN, but if you are on
vacation, you will miss it. RSS would let you see it when you come back.

------
gnoupi
Google Reader allows me to mix high traffic and "I don't want to miss
anything" sites.

I make extensive use of tags, and put my "not to miss" feeds under a
"favorite" tag, that I always read. 2-3 other tags I read all from as well.

And the rest (including HN), I only read in "All items", sorted by "magic".
That way, I know I will see if something big happened on these sites (it's
sorted mostly by the amount of "+1", I think) in priority, and the rest, maybe
later.

Then, during the weekend (slow update days), I purge all Google Reader,
prepared for Monday, and it goes for another week.

That's the most effective way I've found to follow tech and gaming news, since
I started. It's a good compromise in my opinion, since many of my "favorite"
feeds are not really popular or likely to appear on Reddit or HN.

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currywurst
"Unread item overload" is why I started using the PostRank Extension
([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pnngeaoibaajihakbn...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pnngeaoibaajihakbnngcfecdkinjjpf))

It plugs into Google Reader (and even HN!) really well, and can quickly help
you pick out the best links from 100's of RSS items easily.

~~~
chollida1
That looks like a great ad on.

Does it come with source? My 20 second review didn't show up anything and I've
become very leery of letting any plugin that I can't read the source get added
to my browser.

~~~
currywurst
Yeah, I totally understand. The company was recently acquired by Google, so I
guess you can consider having some measure of 'safety'.

~~~
chollida1
Well that is a pretty good stamp of approval.

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zachgreen
The high number of grammatical errors caused me to quit reading in the middle.

~~~
Nic0
Thank you for pointing this problem. I started writing in English only
recently. I hope it will be a good practice, and help me with grammatical
errors.

Any tips to improve with this?

~~~
andrewcooke
write more :o) it's the only way you'll get better _and_ it's a good way of
saying "fuck you" to those that cricise...

[other things i do include silently talking to myself in the foreign language
while i am out walking (describe what is happening) and trying to listen/read
in an "aware" way - for example, when listening to someone speak, try to
consciously note the gender of the nouns they are using (doesn't work for
english, but you get the idea...). but the most important thing is practice -
my spanish got much, much worse when i started working from home rather than
in a spanish-speaking company]

~~~
Nic0
Thanks for your advises, in fact, I hesitated to write it in French, the easy
way...

So I will carry on practice, I could try force myself to think in English as
you said, good advice. Thanks.

------
Tomis
Depends on what you're interested in. I was once subscribed (Opera's RSS
client, just for the record) to feeds with a high content volume (Ars
Technica, space.com), which is basically unmanageable because it leads to
thousands of unread messages.

I scrapped those feeds and kept the ones that post new content rarely enough
for me to forget about them but care for enough to want to know immediately
when this happens.

