Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

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> The causation is opposite, and it's the whole problem with chronological feeds, including RSS - chronological feeds incentivises spam-posting, posters compete on quantity to get attention.

That doesn't make any sense. Quantity might make you more prominent in a unified facebook feed, but an RSS reader will show it like this:

    Sam and Fuzzy (5)
    Station V3 (128)

They've always displayed that way. You never see one feed mixed into another feed. This problem can't arise in RSS. There is no such incentive. Quantity is a negative thing; when I see that I've missed 128 posts, I'm just going to say "mark all as read" and forget about them. (In fact, I have 174 unread posts in Volokh Conspiracy A† right now. I will not be reading all of those.)

† Volokh Conspiracy is hosted on Reason. Reason provides an official feed at http://reason.com/volokh/atom.xml . But Volokh Conspiracy also provides an independent feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/volokh/mainfeed . Some of their posts go into one of those feeds, and the rest go into the other. I can't imagine that they do this on purpose, but it is what they do.

> They've always displayed that way. You never see one feed mixed into another feed. This problem can't arise in RSS.

All readers I know have the option to display all feeds chronologically, or an entire folder of feeds chronologically. In most, that's the default setting when you open the app/page.

I always use it like that. If I'd want to see all new posts from a single author, I might as well just bookmark their blog.

If you bookmark Dave's blog, you have to check his blog every day to see if there's something new, even if Dave only posts monthly. Or you check less often, and sometimes discover a new post long after the discussion in the comments has come and gone.

If you put Dave's blog in your RSS reader, one day "Dave (1)" shows up in your list of unread sources and you can read his new post immediately, and you didn't need to think about Dave's blog any other day.

I could use the "all articles" feed in my RSS reader (TT-RSS), but I would never do such a thing unless all the blogs I follow had similar posting frequencies that would mesh well together, which they don't. I never use the front page of Reddit for the same reason: the busy subs would drown out the ones that get a post a week.

> All readers I know have the option to display all feeds chronologically, or an entire folder of feeds chronologically. In most, that's the default setting when you open the app/page.

The option might exist. It was certainly not the default in mainstream readers in the past and it still isn't now. I never encountered it in Google Reader (as mainstream as it gets), or in Yoleo (highly niche), or in Thunderbird (also as mainstream as it gets).

Whether a bunch of unused projects make something strange the default doesn't really have an impact on the user experience. This is not something you can expect to encounter when using RSS.

> If I'd want to see all new posts from a single author, I might as well just bookmark their blog.

That approach will fail for two obvious reasons:

1. The bookmark is not sensitive to new posts. When there is no new post, you have to check it anyway. When there are several new posts, you're likely to overlook some of them.

2. Checking one bookmark is easy; checking 72 bookmarks is not.

> I never encountered it in Google Reader

It was the default view in Google Reader, the "All Items" view.

A mix of all feeds, ordered chronologically, is the default view in tt-rss, miniflux, inoreader, feedly, netnewswire, and all RSS readers I've ever seen.

It's also what "syndication" means.

For your weirdest claim:

> syndication noun

> syn·di·ca·tion

> the act of selling something (such as a newspaper column or television series) for publication or broadcast to multiple newspapers, periodicals, websites, stations, etc.

>> the syndication of news articles and video footage

( https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/syndication )

The "syndication" in RSS refers to distributing the same content to many different readers.

Here's MDN: https://devdoc.net/web/developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/RSS/...

> This article provides a simple guide to using RSS to syndicate Web content.

Note that this is a guide to creating an RSS feed from the publisher's perspective. It is not possible for two feeds to be displayed together, or at all, on the publisher's end. How do you interpret the verb syndicate?

Yea, dismiss a whole argument based on your specific experience with your specific reader and your specific taste. Not to mention your argument proves the point - you already got their attention even when you didn't read the post and even shared the name of the blog here. However is the feed arranged, posters who compete on attention will optimize for it and eventually bubble up. That's why "the algorithms" are complicated in practice, you're always fighting against Goodhart's law.

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