kixiQu

joined 4 years ago
MODERATOR OF
 

This link argues no. I would argue yes, because of a technical solution and a phenomenon I've observed.

The technical problem:

It’s not enough to interleave their posts into a “river” or “stream” paradigm, where only the most recent N items are shown in one big, combined, reverse-chronological list (much like a Twitter timeline), because many of them would get buried in the noise of higher-volume feeds and people’s tweets.

One of the really nice things about RSS is what it doesn't do. It doesn't order your content by obscure algorithms aiming to vacuum you further and further into an advertising-driven time suck, as Twitter now does.

That doesn't mean, however, that your only option is to present behavior chronologically.

The technical solution: I have my RSS reader do a round-robin ordering for each page displayed, so the higher-volume feeds pool at the bottom. This effect is more noted with a larger page size. For me, this works well enough. I don't see why marking "read all" is a bad thing, and I do it decently regularly.

The phenomenon: Navigating directly to lifehacker.com or whatever other high-volume site feels like gambling. All the colorful previews are engaging, and it all seems to grab me more than my staid feed reader's presentation. It's tempting to roll the dice and see if there's something new. It makes me less this to consume everything in my feed reader is what I guess I'm saying. That's valuable to me.

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tarotwave (www.kickstarter.com)
 

I really wish I'd known about this deck during its funding.

Doesn't it scream for some patterned Mylar foiling?

 

I don't know if this will be useful to anyone, but... I find that Miniflux is maybe a little too "minimalist" and "opinionated" for my taste? Anyway, I've got a few Tampermonkey userscripts for it now and this is the first one I've cleaned up.

The other puts sort buttons on the feed page for absolute number of unread entries descending, and unread:read ratio descending. If anyone wants that one I'll clean it up and put it up too.

 

My problem switching off of gmail is that I'd really like to start moving to an alias-based approach (so, you know, lemmy@maya.land for Lemmy emails, etc.) but this then conflates two issues so I solve neither.

I wish Google Takeout were required to maintain consistent formats so people could develop tools against it. I could make a lot of progress by pulling out the decade of history I have with them and not maintaining more than a couple months of data inside their stuff at any given time.

 

It's a bit programmery, but I'm always curious to see what people are doing to inject some aesthetic into stuff they're making! :palm tree: