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Comment by not--felix | Hacker News Reader

I think the main reason why rss failed is the lack of an algorithmic feed. If you follow just a few news sites you drown in articles. The social media sites are much better in filtering out stuff you do not want to see.

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You must be using different social media than me because it is all pushing celebrities and ads not friends and family that I want to see.

I much prefer being in control of my feed. In an ideal world there would probably be a mix of both (I have a list of people who I see every post and a list where I see popular or major items) but between the current options I far prefer something straightforward. Especially when the algorithm isn't fully tuned to optimize my interests.

> not friends and family that I want to see

My friends and family don’t seem to post anymore. At least FB has groups for shared niche interests.

My friends and family either never post, or post garbage several times a day. (Once upon a time it was funny cat pictures and jokes; now it's "reels," whatever those are.) As you say, groups now seem to be the only place to find worthwhile content on FB.

The only ways I use social media would be better served by RSS. I follow specific businesses, organizations, and people, and want to see everything they post, in chronological order. I do my best to achieve this with social media, but RSS would be better.

For news: per-topic or per-region feeds would probably help. I think AP used to have those, maybe still does.

> I do my best to achieve this with social media

which one? there are a bunch. you could either be talking about whatsapp or youtube

Mostly IG (businesses and organizations) and BlueSky (people) right now. IG won't let you set the "following" page to your default any more (boooo) but it's still quick to get to, so you can just ignore the (incredibly, aggressively shit) "feed".

RSS would be better, but this works OK.

RSS feeds can drown you in quality content you're not interested in 75% of the time. Social Media can drown you in content that seems interesting, but is worthless 75% of the time. But that's my experience - yours could be different (I totally made up the numbers, but you get the idea).

Depending on your feed reader you can filter stuff pretty well with custom rules. I use newsboat. Even without hard filtering, thanks to the compact density I can sift through a huge number of articles in barely any time at all. Yes, I am doing it myself, the horror of laboring, but again it takes barely any time at all to go through the days RSS feeds even with a few news sites throwing 100 articles a day. Mark as read. Done.

On the contrary, IME social media sites seem to fight me on filtering what I get to see. They are happy to show me what they want me to see, but constantly thwart my attempts to decide for myself. How many plugins should I need to install to get FB or twitter to respect my choice to show the timeline chronologically.

In theory a market could arise around providing bespoke algorithmic feeds for one's RSS content, in some kind of adapter model, but I don't know enough about ML engineering to suggest whether that is at all economically feasible. Maybe?

An RSS client could do that, no?

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