Hi all. Been enjoying the releases on iPhone and my Mac. I subscribe to a few high traffic news sites like guardian and some Asia news sites. Guardian will do hundreds of articles a day. Way too many so I limit the number down. I also set the feed as breaking which makes the articles go away after 3 hours. I don’t want to simply unsubscribe the feeds. So I’m curious how other users read and deal with high traffic news sites like guardian or whatever. I only read three news sites and most of the reading I do is blogs and tech news. I need the calm feeling I guess of not being forever overwhelmed with the hundred or so news posts. How do you all deal with larger news sites. Do you read them in current? Visit the website itself.
Thanks.
How do you all deal with larger news sites.
I just started using Current so I’m not sure yet how it will fit in my reading habits, but historically this is where I’ve appreciated Inoreader’s “Magic Sort” mode. Instead of just choosing between “Latest First” or “Oldest First”, they give you this mode where it’s sorted by, well, “magic”, but basically more or less what’s more interesting or popular first. My problem with that feature of course is that it’s not clear what factors into it (I like algorithmic sorting – I just don’t like it when I don’t know what the algorithm is!). It seems to be based on past reading habits and how many people starred/shared/etc a given article… anyway, I’ve been trusting it to “bubble up” the important stuff to the top, and then when I run out of time I can mark the rest of the feed or folder as read, more-or-less confident that it’s full of articles I wouldn’t have cared about.
I don’t know yet if Current addresses that issue. It feels like it addresses a slightly different issue, which is the one where lower-frequency feeds get drowned by higher-frequency ones. So it may not solve the problem of reading The Guardian, but it may solve the problem of missing out on some friend’s occasional blogging because The Guardian flooded everything.
To me this is THE key question I’m still trying to figure out. It’s the reason I might want to use an app like this over just Reeder.
I can limit to 3hrs but then who’s to say that overnight or while I was in a bunch of meetings that some key news came in that I want to see but miss? Or if I limit to only X per day, maybe those X are lifestyle articles I don’t care about and I miss the good stuff. It’s a tough one.
The dev mentioned a grouping of similar articles feature they’re working on that’s not quite ready. It could be that if eg you subscribed to a few high volume news sites, this feature could group the big stories of the day (because they’re all reporting on them) and have them bubble up.
TBH I’m tempted just not to follow news sites because of this firehose effect. But in that case, the standard RSS reader format (that NewsNetWire started) is probably sufficient and the philosophy of an app like Current kind of loses its need.
The part recently with Middle East News really brings this up. The guardian published 133 pieces today. I saw 10 of them if I rate limit the feed. I follow two other news sites which publish less. I like having one app that will do it all. The way current reader handles all other feeds I love. My solution so far is to have the news sites in their own current called News. I also use rate limiting. I fear not seeing an article there I might want to. Setting the fees for breaking gives a threshold of three hours. There must be a sweet spot in there. I think for me I need to not rate limit the feeds and have news in News and not use the entire source or river at all. Otherwise the 133 articles in the guardian feed take over everything. I think will just ignore the river completely and use my blog and favs and tech currents. When I want news I can look at all the articles there without the limiting. Just my thought. Or I use another app just for news feeds. Like NetNewsWire. Gonna play some and see if I can find the mix of things I want.