https://hnrss.github.io/ lets you subscribe only to posts above a certain number of points, or other metrics.
> These days I have to "view-source" and search for feed or atom or rss to tell.
Doesn’t your feed service/app auto-detect feeds if you just paste the webpage? That’s a common feature.
Yes, that's the one I used, but I feel it's still too much noise. You don't want a firehose in your RSS feeds.
Just open https://news.ycombinator.com when you want to doomscroll through an almost endless stream of information. RSS doesn't work well with social media, and that's a feature.
You prefer to let other people determine what you read?
There are multiple levels of delegation to the "wisdom of the crowd":
- visiting this HN website by itself is already letting people determine what you read. The stories are submitted by others.
- reading only the front page of just the top-voted 30 stories instead of doom scrolling the other 500 is another level of delegation
- inside of each story, only reading a subset of the most upvoted comments is another level
People do all 3 to various degrees because there's limited time to read.
_By far_, the best posts I have ever seen to this website were often ones that didn't get many comments, or may have even gotten reported.
> the top HN frontpage articles
I don't even really understand what the HN feed is. I looked in the FAQ, etc. the other day and couldn't find an explanation. The description ("Links for the intellectually curious, ranked by readers.") is nice PR, but it doesn't tell me what I'm seeing. Is it every post submitted? Every post that made it to the front page? Same, but stayed on the front page for a certain amount of time? Received at least X upvotes? I have no idea...
I'm in the middle of that myself. I have folders labelled rarely, weekly, frequent and social. Rarely and weekly I tend to read most of it, as they are the folders I open first. I only open frequent once I'm done with the others and I usually scroll through the titles and only read very few articles. Social is for mastodon and bluesky accounts, which I open when I only have 5 minutes to kill and I know I won't have time to finish reading long posts/articles.
Additionally, Newsblur added an automated "Infrequent Site Stories" for things it knows come from feeds that don't update all that frequently. (Which you can use in tandem with Focused view for even less time.)
I started using again, but I have a few rules: all the feeds only refresh once week; and any news feed (like hackers news) that generates too much content is purged also once a week, so I only have the latest one week articles.
In my mind, my RSS feed for me is like an old school weekly magazine. This solve the FOMO feeling of missing something interesting, but I don’t feel like I need to read something as soon as is published.
This is an app/service that I've built for myself, but it's up for anyone go give it a go and use it.
RSS didn't stick for me until:
1. I decided to quit most social media, so without RSS I would miss stuff I actually care about.
2. I unsubscribed to all news sites. RSS fatigue is a thing. Don't subscribe to sites that make money the more they post. I used to subscribe to Phoronix, the top HN frontpage articles, OSNews, LWN, etc.: bad idea, you don't want to wake up to 50 unread posts per day and get overwhelmed. Now I mostly follow personal blogs, and I have one new post per day to read. Much more manageable and higher signal-to-noise ratio.
3. https://fetchrss.com/ is genius for everything else that doesn't support RSS. It allows to turn any website into an RSS feed, and the free plan is generous enough for my needs.
I pay for Feedbin, and it's great.
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1: I wish Firefox still showed an RSS feed icon when a page has one. These days I have to "view-source" and search for feed or atom or rss to tell.