LESSWRONG
LW

by SquirrelInHell
1 min read
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4

Some stuff that is currently broken about handling RSS feeds:

  • rss link builders on the front page create invalid urls
  • all feeds except the one with all posts are unusable in practice, because of sth like the low end of the range of posts that is available in them sometimes goes back in time, which makes rss readers pick up old posts as new posts
  • if user accounts are supposed to work like personal blogs, then they need to have their own rss links which are easy to access from there
  • ideally, there would be a way to subscribe to an aggregate feed of all blogs which one is following, and also to all non-meta posts
  • relatedly, I can't find a way to view a list of accounts which I'm following
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[-]habryka30

Huh, can you elaborate on your first bullet point? I would be happy to fix this but haven’t seen any invalid urls.

I don’t think I am fully getting your second bullet point. Could you describe a concrete scenario in which that is the case?

And yep, personal blog RSS feeds are coming soon, sorry for that not being there yet. As well as actually working personal subscription systems.

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[-]SquirrelInHell30

I get links like this:

https://www.lesserwrong.com/feed.xml?view=%5Bobject%20Object%5D&karmaThreshold=0

One concrete scenario is: front page contains posts A(1 karma), B(2 karma) and C(3 karma). You subscribe to a RSS feed (frontpage, karmaThreshold=0) and it contains C, B (assuming max feed size is 2). RSS reader shows new articles C, B. Then someone downvotes C to -1 karma. The RSS feed contains B, A. RSS reader shows A as a new article. Note that this is not the full extent of the problem but I do not fully understand the other issues around this, like at some point I had 30 articles from Conor's sequence mysteriously pop up at the front of my "frontpage" subscription marked as new.

It's pretty much the case that the only usable RSS setup (that has no obvious compatibility issues) is having it act as a fixed-length FIFO queue, with no changes allowed except insertion of new entries at the beginning.

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