Hacker News Reader

Comment by harryf | Hacker News Reader

The closest thing to the reader I always wanted is Hackernews; a selection of significant, educational and relevant articles on topics I'm interested in.

Meanwhile RSS readers have done little, if anything, to figure out how not to waste my time "nexting" through stuff I have no time or interest in.

The entry point for any software in this field should be "how much time per day do you have to spend on reading feeds?"

For example medium.com has a brilliant little feature - labelling articles with the time it takes to read them e.g. "2 min read". Yes! More like this please.

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If you're constantly getting content that you're not interested in, then you should unsubscribe from that feed.

There have been many attempts at trying to figure out what you'll like. They either try to recommend stuff that they think you'll like ("Oh, you like computers? Check out this cat at a computer that 2308234 people have reshared!" Ugh.) or filter out the stuff they think you won't like. That's not how I (or the majority of people that I have talked to about RSS) use RSS though! We want every single update, no matter how unpopular they were.

As for length, it's trivial to see a giant wall of text and either click next or mark as unread to return to it later. I've tried Google Reader's "magic" sorting, among other ways of sorting articles, but I always end up on "oldest first" or "newest first", depending on the content.

I disagree. I get far away from any RSS reader trying to put "intelligence" into my feed reading. There are indeed curated communities for that (choose your own poison, obviously, HN is one of those). But no amount of machine learning will agree with me (without counting the silo effect which the more you read the same thing, the more you get of the same instead of allowing you to bump into new stuff).

Don't forget that the content you find on HN has to come from somewhere. How do articles get here?

1) Either the content author posts it, or someone who follows the blog/website/whatever posts it.

2) Those who spend time reading /newest actually upvote posts enough to get them to the front page.

If you enjoy the front page of HN, that's great! But the process of getting there isn't exactly automatic -- it depends on those who dig through unfiltered content.

The closest thing to the reader I always wanted is Hackernews; a selection of significant, educational and relevant articles on topics I'm interested in.

This is a crowd sourced, human curated list, different from a feed reader, where the crowd consists mostly of humans competent in the field.

The problem of course is such crowds do not exist for so many other fields, but I would pay for good human curated content.

Alas, none of that is in any feedreader...

Feedly uses some algorithm to generate a "today" section of recommended items, which seems to work really well at least for me. I'm sure I'm missing some things, but similarly to yourself, I like to only spend a few minutes managing my feed. It's worth checking out to see if it works for you.

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