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Non-social user here (no fb, twitter, other feeds except hn and few forums).

I cannot remember why exactly rss stopped fitting my needs. I was using a standalone reader before iphone was a thing, then google reader, and then began to simply check my 3-5 sites at non-busy times. I think that for HN I miss at least 1/2 of all topics since it is “a fast board”, among others. I don’t really want to be overwhelmed by all these events and knowing only things that are top-20 right now is actually okay for me. Rss is instant and has no “top/discussed” conception.

I’m not your auditory though probably.



In my case, RSS is not for HN or other high-traffic sites, it's for those blogs that rarely update but which posts are always at least worth looking at. For example, Oona Räisänen posts just a few times a year, but I read every single one.


I wrote a custom RSS reader which supports regular expressions for deciding if I want to see a post. So for hacker news I have the following:

mike@snake:~$ rss --list|grep ycombinator

155. https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

mike@snake:~$ rss --list-grep 155

74. title = (?i)\b((e-?|web)?mail|irc|internet relay chat|grpc|hashicorp|rust|debian|c\+\+|perl|(bit|name)coin|tor|pgp|gpg|gnupg|openpgp|digitalocean|ovh|linode|grepular|email\sprivacy\stester|parsemail|ssl|https|backdoor|apache|exim|distribut|peer (to|2) peer|vpn|secur|anonym|webrtc|torrent|webtorrent|nextcloud|owncloud|graphql)(ity|ous|e?s|ing?|ed?)?\b

I run it from a cron job, and it just emails me new RSS items. Manages state in an sqlite db. I have a sieve filter to filter those emails into a "News" folder in my mailbox. So I can just read them from whatever email client I'm using on whatever device I'm on.

I don't get why people need to use a third party service for feeds, or a special client for it either.


I think I know my reason.

I used RSS to follow some of very niche amateur literary/diary/essays blogs in my native tongue Hindi. Some stopped, some moved to social media, and some “upgraded” to English. That was about it.




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