[prepend]

We really just need RSS. Everyone on Facebook should get an RSS feed and you just subscribe to who you want to follow.

News publishers already have feeds. So you can mix in as you like to get NYTimes right next to Uncle Jim’s fakenews.

There’s no algorithm, just based on publishing order. Maybe mix in some flags that let you see if others have disliked things with that same URI.

We need more protocols and less platform.

[thescribe]

I would love to see an RSS reader that was smart enough to follow links and make a 'source graph' so it the NYT and Slashdot write articles about the same source they both appear in the same 'thread' about that source. To me that would be the killer app for RSS.

[ivcha]

Even though I like RSS and use it daily, I think it cannot act as a replacement, since Facebook, as a platform, allows two-way communication between parties (e.g. when someone or some group shares a post, people can give feedback on it).

[SomewhatLikely]

An algorithm is desperately needed though. Sources have varying publishing rates and quality. Aggregating across them and culling is crucial. For the most part I've thrown up my hands and delegated this job to hacker news and Reddit subscriptions, but it's still not well personalized.

[gaius]

An algorithm is desperately needed though

An algorithm that weaponises jealousy, FOMO and outrage will always out-monetise a benign or no algorithm at all, over any financially viable timescale. The algo doesn’t “know” of course. It just knows that showing you X has historically made you spend longer on the site than Y.

The only way to win is not to play.

[aninhumer]

I don't think we need an "algorithm" just better RSS readers that let us filter things easily.

Or ideally more effort put into feeds by sources, so we get better curation of the feeds to start with.

[thescribe]

I do fine without an algorithm, everything appears at the rate it is published in chronological order, if I dislike a feed or discover I rarely read it I remove it.

[drdrey]

We used to have RSS. Why did it not stick around?

When Google Reader was killed, my account was just a stressful pile of thousands of unread items. The occasional gem was drowned in the noise.

[prepend]

RSS is still here, but the major platforms don’t publish RSS feeds and make it hard to scrape into feeds. Facebook and Twitter don’t allow it. Google usually doesn’t.

I use RSS extensively to follow blogs and news sources. There are even many that put ads into my feed, which is cool by me.

[drdrey]

RSS is technically still here, but it seems to me you're the exception here, not the norm. RSS is not quite as mainstream as it used to be

[thescribe]

That's how I feel about social sites, unlike RSS I have no control about items, they just disappear in a sea of tweets. To me it sounds like you subscribe to a lot of spammy feeds.