That's a choice.

You don't actually have to be an innocent passive bystander; that's a choice. A lot of these nostalgic threads read like old men shouting at clouds at this point "Get off my lawn!". I'm part of the generation that built the internet (though I didn't build any of it). It wasn't taken from us; we just got old. That's actually on us. Nobody ever stopped anyone from blogging, publishing RSS feeds, or whatever it is people did when they and the internet were young. I was there as well. The only thing that changed is that we sunk in a collective mid life crisis when Google Reader pulled the plug. Alternatives never filled the vacuum. Social networks took over and then imploded. And boohoo the evil corporations took our toys. Give me a break!

If you choose to get your news from algorithmic ad factories, that's a choice. Sure, it's convenient. I do this as well. But actually we're empowered to do whatever we want. More so than ever. There are plenty of tools and content creators out there. And with AI it's trivial to build your own tools. Try it, it's fun. The only limitation is your imagination and apathy.

I've been working on a Google reader style reading experience but running locally with codex. It uses locally running LLMs, embeddings, and entity extraction to stay on top of the fire hose of news. Embeddings enable semantic search, clustering, related articles. Entities identify common topics. LLMs allow me to turn this into a personal news agent and editor. Grand vision and I'm a bit geeking out. But completely doable with all the modern toys we have available. Use openclaw/codex/claude cowork/whatever agentic thing you want, make it parse opml and sync and store feeds. Add some skills and you have yourself an AI news agent. Or skip all of that AI nonsense and do it by hand. RSS readers never were rocket science. This stuff no longer is hard.

I partly share this opinion because most branding and UIs, products that are primarily marketed as a "lifestyle", etc., are obnoxious. Yes, appearance is a factor of anything we interact with, but when using technology my primary thought is if it solves a practical problem. Not if it's broadcasting an image, or even if it's enjoyable to use. The latter is important, but often companies prioritize it over functionality, which is backwards to me.

So starting with a mostly functional product, and giving me the choice of how to style it, is appealing to me. This is why I still use RSS, custom style sheets, the CLI and simple GUI wrappers, etc.

There is an audience for this type of product, but it's of the magnitude of a rounding error, so naturally most companies don't, and likely shouldn't, focus on this segment.

I think HN reflexively shoots down any idea or prediction with a bias to the incumbent.

Generally, a technological advancement will render some previous ways of working useless or outdated. People value convenience way more than a curated experience but I'm not disagreeing that brand differentiation would still exist.

A company that offers a meaningfully better experience in the long term will outcompete a company that focuses too much on aesthetics.

If they get generative UI right, where the UI provider can also give their own flavour and have some differentiation but also allow enough personalisation to afford the user better experience, it will happen.

Some bets don't work (like RSS) but some bets have worked - like the Amazon e-commerce model. A person in 1985 could have shut Amazon's idea down the same way you have.

It's not just content/info/data, it's a performance (in the creative sense).

Brands spend a lot of time honing their appearance - not just fonts and colours but the whole composition and visual pacing - their entire "say something without saying anything at all" aspect etc. Just walk through any place with physical shops and really look at how the stores have worked on their appearance and how they present themselves to customers. They're not just selling a product, they're selling a lifestyle/feeling/etc/etc. They're not just going to give that creative control away to some LLM.

Another way to think of it is instead of people watching a movie or play when they go to the cinema or theater, they're just given the script to read. Same information but the entire artistry of both the performers and the directors is totally absent, leaving it up to each reader to imagine the delivery of lines or the scene's setting etc.

I think on HN and in tech in general people seem to forget that "the first bite is with the eye", and that is why "normal people" never liked or used RSS. The desire to leave our mark and to create (and view!) visually appealing things seems to be pretty innate in humans - we've been doing it since cave paintings. I struggle to think of a world where we just hand that over to AIs and humans have zero creative control.

This will automatically download the OPML file for all the blogs that have an RSS address filed on blogroll.org

There's a bit of everything in there but if what you want is a wild ride maybe you can give that a try.

I don't like counting the number of subscribers, that ends up surfacing things like major news websites, or the hacker news feed. But I've found the graph to be useful in finding recommendations.

This is actually a great idea. The key is to actually continue to do this and not gatekeep and charge money for promoted crap and add algorithms once it seems profitable to do so. If that happens we’re just recreating the wheel!

and was pleasantly surprised to see my blog was already on this website!

> RSS / Atom Feed URL *

I really need to implement an RSS/Atom feed in my static site generator, the lack of this feature is really starting to hurt. I can probably get Claude to help me with this.

That said, it got its list of feeds from the repo that someone made which hasn't been updated in a few years, so even if new blog content gets pulled, the list of blogs doesn't change. Oh well, wasn't a super serious project.

Ctrl-F for planet: https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/blogrolls/

There's an older list at https://web.archive.org/web/20170823064412/http://planetplan...

The very first line in your readme is "CivicClaw is a set of scripts and prompts" though? And almost the entire repo is a bunch of python scripts under a /scripts folder.

I looked at one randomly chosen script (scripts/sf_rec_park.py) and it's 549 lines of Python to fetch and summarise data that is available on an RSS feed ( https://sanfrancisco.granicus.com/ViewPublisher.php?view_id=... )