RSS: less noise, more information
I love RSS, to me it clearly is the best way to consume news on the internet and to keep up with the flood of information. You choose the sources you want to follow, and no algorithm is going to select what items should appear in your feeds. You get every item published.
This sounds great, and it is, but i’ve always had at least 2 issues with it:
- The more sources i follow, the more duplicates in my feed. Apple keynote ? it’s at least 20 articles in my feeds about the same exact story. New Samsung phone? my feed is flooded with reviews, specs leaked photos...
- The information i get is not diverse enough. These past few years we’ve talked a lot about echo chambers, about not getting diverse point of views… And it’s a trap when you use RSS to get your news. You depend on the sources you follow. Not so easy to get news from outside your feeds.
These are 2 of the reasons why i decided to build a RSS reader: Aktu.
Too much noise
This is one of my feed folders, mostly Tech related news. There’s Techcrunch, HackerNews, Engadget and a few other RSS feeds.
It’s Sunday, Sunday is a slow day, and yet there’s 100+ items in my feed this morning.
No breaking news, no important story but there’s already duplicate articles.
You can spot a few different stories repeated in the feed, each story with a few different articles:
- Apple watch detects irregular heart beat (3 items)
- Blind mice reagin sight (2 items)
- Facebook and the New Zealand shooting (2 items)
- Android antivirus apps (2 items)
This is a simple example, a slow Sunday without too much news and less than 10 RSS feeds. That usually is way worse than that.
Single source of information
The other problem i’ve always had with RSS is that it gives you a limited view of the news, depending on the feeds/sources you’ve subscribed to.
For example, a few single items from this feed:
- The Intercept, a billionaire-funded public charity, cuts back
- Most Americans Are Terrified of Getting in a Self-Driving Car
- Study Finds Tectonics Triggered Earth’s Three Major Ice Ages
- Neil deGrasse Tyson will continue with ‘Cosmos’ after investigation
That would be great to have more information about these items, maybe different point of views from different authors / news outlets.
Sure i can google something if i want to know more, or i guess i could subscribe to 100 tech-related blogs/websites to get my tech news and have more information and more diverse point of views on each story.
And i could do the same for each category: politics, sports, etc… I would end up with 1000s of articles in my feeds each morning…
But that’s not what i want, what if i could keep my subscriptions to the websites i want, and have articles from other sources referenced and included in my feed?
Problems? solution!
Cleaner feeds, less noise and easy access to more information. That’s what i had in mind when i started building Aktu.
Grouping together the items that belong to the same story is now one of the core features of Aktu. It is done automatically for every item in every feed. Looks like it was the solution i was looking for.
Two birds, one stone
- I get to keep my RSS feeds and the sources i chose to follow, no need to follow every news source on the internet. But now the articles in my feeds are grouped together if they belong to the same story. No more duplicates, Less noise.
- For each story i now have references to other articles from different sources. I keep the original article from the source i follow, and i can easily check the story coverage by other websites. More information, different point of views.
