ksh-b / raven

News Aggregator
GNU General Public License v3.0
242 stars 4 forks source link

Article sorting #22

Open ElDani82 opened 6 months ago

ElDani82 commented 6 months ago

So I'm a bit curious, how are articles sorted in the app currently? When I use the app with the following feeds activated ...

Ars Technica: All BBC: World, Technology, Science Reuters: World, Sports

... what I initially get upon starting the app is a list of 30 articles from various feeds. They are all sorted by age descending, meaning the oldest ones are at the top (why?). When I click on "Load more", another set of mixed articles is added and they too are sorted the same way. This produces articles sorted by age, but they end up mixed in a rather unhelpful way:

1d, 1d, 21h, 19h, 16h, [...] 1h, 55m, 24m, 7m, 3d, 3d, 2d, [...] 19h, 5h, 5h, [...] 1h, 55m, 22m, 5d, 5d, [...] 1d, 1d, 22h, [...] 1h, 45m, 41m, 7d (etc)

Based on this structure - and I could also be wrong - it seems like the app takes a certain number of articles from the top of every subscribed feed to populate each page and it keeps getting the next newest articles until all feeds have been exhausted. Whether that's true or not, this method of populating the list is rather unhelpful, should you be like me and use a mix of more (Reuters) and less active feeds (Ars Technica) like I described above.

In order to find articles from the most active feeds, I end up scrolling past those I've already seen or read multiple times, not only every day but for weeks! In my specific case, I have to press the "Load more" button maybe a dozen times to even read articles that have accumulated overnight. For example, these are the ages of the first and last article on each of the first 8 pages:

1d to 1m 3d to 27m 5d to 32m 7d to 52m 11d to 1h 14d to 1h 18d to 2h 20d to 2h

You can see the problem, I hope.

First of all, I wish there was a way to sort all articles by age ascending (date descending). I'm not really sure why you'd want to highlight the oldest news at the top.

Second, I wish there was a way to disable the grouping that's going on. Yes, some articles from a less active feed wouldn't show until a later page, but the downside of these old articles being a constant distraction is too large.

I love the interface and the built-in reader and translation functionality. The sorting is the only thing that stops me from using Raven as my daily news app.

ksh-b commented 6 months ago

They are all sorted by age descending, meaning the oldest ones are at the top (why?)

That sorting was not intended (The newest articles should have been on top). I think I messed it up a 2 releases ago. Would be fixed in next release. Thanks for bringing it up.

it seems like the app takes a certain number of articles from the top of every subscribed feed to populate each page and it keeps getting the next newest articles until all feeds have been exhausted.

The app gets all the articles from a page, but takes only 5 for the current page in the app and keeps aside the rest.

For example from this arstechnica page - there are about 30 articles. Only first 5 would be shown on the first page of the app. The next 5 will be shown when you click on 'Load more' and so on. The intention behind this was to not have overwhelming amount of articles from one feed and making other feeds less noticed. If I understand you correctly you do not want to have this limit of 5 per page.

ElDani82 commented 6 months ago

If I understand you correctly you do not want to have this limit of 5 per page.

Yes, this would fix the issue for me.

Of course there are many other ways to arrive at a similar goal. My current news app on Android is Nunti, which has two independent methods of doing this. One, users are allowed to set a maximum article age. Two, articles can be up- or downvoted. While the app uses that information to weigh articles for a customized combined feed display, it also hides already voted articles. I'm only mentioning this for reference, but it has little to do with this sorting issue beyond how I use it to get as clean a combined feed as possible.

ksh-b commented 5 months ago

Sorting was fixed in an earlier release, and limit per subscription can be increased in v0.13.0.

ksh-b commented 5 months ago

Sorting doesnt seem to be fixed. So reopening.