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ThoAppelsintoday at 7:25 AM4 repliesview on HN

This just won’t work. If RSS becomes popular, there will be discovery platforms with “algorithm”s. It will be the same thing, just the discovery and content separated.

RSS appears good now only because it’s not popular enough for LLMs to meddle with. I don’t use RSS, so I don’t really mind, but those who use RSS are making disservice to its _purity_ by trying to popularize it.


Replies

staredtoday at 10:10 AM

RSS is just one element of the ecosystem - the input.

I envision that the filtering mechanism CAN use any rules - hand-written, heuristics, old-school machine learning, LLMs. Just with a key difference - you are the one controlling it. No hidden tricks to make you "engaged" (read: addicted) or "sold".

If you feel it is too much politics, you reduce it. If too little - add. If you want less clickbaits and intellectual fast food, you filter it. Etc, etc.

p4bl0today at 9:46 AM

> it’s not popular enough for LLMs to meddle with

About that, I was sad to see that TDMRep [1] doesn't provide a way to signal reservation for RSS feed, so it has to be done at the HTTP level, otherwise the same content delivered in RSS feed can be legitimately scrapped and mined even if the author opted-out using an HTML meta tag on the website.

[1] https://www.w3.org/community/tdmrep/

devsdatoday at 8:22 AM

> there will be discovery platforms with “algorithm”s.

We already have platforms like feedly that has optional AI curated feeds.

szszrktoday at 7:44 AM

> If RSS becomes popular, there will be discovery platforms with “algorithm”s.

So? If plain RSS exists, then you can still consume it the way you want.

I'd like to remind that when RSS was really popular we had "planet" aggregators everywhere, where someone interested in particular topic bundled posts from multiple people.

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