Alex Payne — Fever and the Future of Feed Readers

Re:Alex Payne — Fever and the Future of Feed Readers by TomOfTTB on Sunday July 19, 2009 @05:01AM (#712772)

I disagree to a certain extent. I see your point on using a feed reader for irregular sites but I think you’re just as likely if not more likely to accidentally miss something on a site like HN or Digg because there’s such a high volume of posts.

The fact that you’re trusting "the crowd" to do your filtering at all presents a problem. Because even in a community of likeminded people like HN we all have our own special interests which aren’t necessarily shared by the crowd (one example, I program in .Net but most HN readers don’t so a lot of good .Net stories never make it out of the "New" section)

So in the end that's the problem the author is laying out. How do you take a large number of messages and make the feed reader as effective as it is with the small sites? I don't know the answer either but I think it's still a huge problem being left on the table.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Alex Payne — Fever and the Future of Feed Readers by DannoHung on Sunday July 19, 2009 @11:06AM (#713007)

My rationality is thus: High volume means general interest. I do not want to be the filter feeder for general interest. Importantly, I don't care if I miss a few things; I'm eliminating the vast majority of false positives. I run the risk of missing a few false negatives, but I'm already roughly at my limit for dealing with the true positives anyhow, so it doesn't really matter: nothing I miss is going to cause me to lose a hojillion dollars or anything serious.

[ Parent | on HN ]