> notorious for sticking with chronologically-ordered timelines, so unless you have time to look at every single post, you’ll likely miss something.
The value of RSS to me is getting everything in chronological order, so I (not some algo) can throw 99% of it away, unread.
(and if I do want to go back and look at something I'd skipped without reading, it's easily findable, searchable by keyword or at least still there in the "read" list, next to all the things that were temporally close)
I don't understand that reasoning. If something is chronologically ordered I can scroll back to the last thing I saw and catch up, or likely not and just accept that I can't read everything, if it's interesting it'll probably be boosted or involved in ongoing discussions.
If it's ordered by algorithm I have no way of knowing what or how much I've missed.
Depends on the "algorithm"! At this point "algorithm" in the context of social media doesn't mean anything sensible. A very common "algorithm" used to order messages in email inboxes is by "read/unread" status, which very much helps you catch up efficiently. Chronological sorting is very limited, in comparison with the myriad of other ways you could organize such data.
The best way is threading, which combines chronological, unread status, and the tree structure of replies.
Everything else is either an attempt to do less work or an attempt to shape user experiences for your own goals.
Threading requires two data elements per message, generated at the time of message creation: a unique-enough message ID, and the parent message ID. The client needs to have a method of storing 1 bit of state per message, either locally or on a home server. If messages have a timestamp, then a high-water mark is a useful heuristic. If the messages have required subjects, tags or topic groups, you can significantly improve both performance and user experience.
I use newsboat, so it picks everything up in chronological (modulo feed oddity) order, but displays only "unread" items to me.
On top of that is further organisation: non-HN feeds are batched together in a single display, but HN often produces more than a screenful (~70) of unreads, so then I have hotkeys that filter out alphabetic subsets: A-G, H-R, or S-Z. That normally suffices to avoid any scrolling, but when I haven't been following RSS for several days, I also have filters that further limit to a single day, either 1, 2, 3, or 4 days ago.
Although the underlying data is kept chronologically indexed by newsboat, and I can always refer to it that way (frex the concrete splits AG/HR/SZ were determined by querying newsboat's SQLite instance) it by no means prevents layering a myriad (well 20, not counting newsboat's ad-hoc command line filter interface) of other ways to organise on top.
PS thank you for reminding me to finally look up how to turn off threading (View»Organise by Conversation) in the mac default mail proggy!
> At this point "algorithm" in the context of social media doesn't mean anything sensible.
Generally it means "select the material and the ordering in the manner that maximizes revenue for the platform's owners". I'd call that a sensible (if morally questionable) strategy for the owners.
I wasn't converted by algorthyms, but it's opening a new and exciting way to live my life.
For example, I've started ordering my calendar by algorithm. Whatever's at the top I'll go to, even if it was a week ago. Occasionally there'll still be some other people similarly sticking around in the concert hall or meeting room. Oh boy, do they have some stories!
I've also started paying bills by algorithm. If it's important enough, I'll pay it twice. Because algorithms at identifying the products I really need to pay for. If the algorithm doesn't prioritise it, I let it slide. I feel on the vanguard.
There should be a "shuffle by site" option though. I tried using RSS and noticed that the feed is dominated by 1 or 2 sites that post daily, and it takes a lot of scrolling to find sites that post less often.
The value of RSS to me is getting everything in chronological order, so I (not some algo) can throw 99% of it away, unread.
(and if I do want to go back and look at something I'd skipped without reading, it's easily findable, searchable by keyword or at least still there in the "read" list, next to all the things that were temporally close)