You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Risto_Saarelma comments on Open thread, February 15-28, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: David_Gerard 15 February 2013 11:17PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (345)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: gwern 23 February 2013 03:51:55PM 3 points [-]

They might be a different demographic than people who know what a gwern is.

Maybe. On the other hand, would you entertain for even a second the thought of paying for an RSS feed? Personally, I can think of paying for an email newsletter if it's worth it, but the thought of paying for a blog with an RSS feed triggers an 'undefined' error in my head.

Also if I pay money for something, then it becomes a burdensome Rare and Valuable Possession I Must Now Find a Safe Place For, instead of a neat thing I can go look at, then forget all about, then go look up again after five years based on some vaguely remembered details.

Email is infinitely superior to RSS in this respect; everyone gets a durable copy and many people back up their emails (including you - right? right?). I have emails going back to 2004. In contrast, I'm not sure how I would get my RSS feeds from a year ago since Google Reader seems to expire stuff at random, never mind 2006 or whenever I started using RSS.

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 23 February 2013 04:46:34PM *  3 points [-]

You're right about the paying part. I don't care to even begin worrying about how setting Google Reader to fetch something from beyond a paywall might work, but e-mail from a paid service makes perfect sense, tech-wise.

And now that you mention it, if I were living in an email client instead of Google Reader, I could probably get along just fine having stuff from my RSS subscriptions get pushed into my mailbox. Unfortunately, after 15 years I still use email so little that I basically consider it a hostile alien environment and haven't had enough interesting stuff go on there so far that I'd ever really felt the need to back up my mails. Setting up a proper email workflow and archiving wouldn't be a very big hurdle if I ever got reason to bother with it though.

An actual thing I would like is an archived log of "I read this thing today and it was interesting", preferrably with an archive of the thing. I currently use Google Reader's starring thing for this, but that's leaving stuff I actually do care about archiving at Google's uncertain mercy, which is bad. Directing RSS to email would get me this for free.

Did I just talk myself into possibly starting to use email properly with an use case where I'd mostly be mailing stuff to myself?

Comment author: chemotaxis101 23 February 2013 06:19:54PM 2 points [-]

I'd recommend using Blogtrottr for turning the content from your RSS feeds into email messages. Indeed, as email is (incidentally) the only web-related tool I can (and must) consistently use throughout the day, I tend to bring a major part of the relevant web content I'm interested in to my email inbox - including twitter status updates, LW Discussion posts, etc.