[HN Gopher] It's Time to Get Back to RSS
___________________________________________________________________
It's Time to Get Back to RSS
Author : danielrm26
Score : 472 points
Date : 2020-05-17 15:57 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (danielmiessler.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (danielmiessler.com)
| larsrc wrote:
| I would have taken this article more seriously if an RSS feed
| icon had appeared among the social media icons below the title.
| Hoasi wrote:
| RSS are great and there are plenty of good RSS aggregators. Been
| using NetNewsWire (free and open source), again since it returned
| to its original creator.
| DevX101 wrote:
| RSS is dying (or dead) because it was incompatible with the
| dominant business model on the internet -- advertising. This is
| why Google killed it. This is why lots of professional publishers
| hated it. With HTTP you'd be able to earn money via embedded ads
| but you'd earn exactly $0 via RSS since the feed was stripped of
| ads, just content. This forced publishers to put useless blurbs,
| redirecting to the HTTP version, which was a bad user experience
| and just sucked.
|
| I'd like to see new innovation around protocols and client
| 'browsers' that were made with monetization built-in as a first-
| tier specification.
|
| 1) client sends request for content with some header with payment
| information attached. 2) server verifies payment transferred. 3)
| server responds to client with content after payment
| verification.
|
| If this existed, RSS would be alive and well. Internet publishers
| would be alive and well. The internet would be a more beautiful
| place with a viable first-party alternative to ads.
|
| Challenges here would be:
|
| - Sufficiently low transaction costs to make micropayments
| viable. (Bundle payments?) - Verifying proof of payment extremely
| fast
|
| Someone(s) should create a new protocol.
|
| FTP was invented in 1971. SMTP was invented in 1982. HTTP was
| invented in 1989. RSS was invented in 1999. Bitcoin was invented
| in 2008.
|
| The amount of innovation around protocol has been abysmal
| relative to the explosion in creativity around applications on
| top of these protocols. And SMTP/HTTP are the only ones with any
| real mass adoption today.
| zelly wrote:
| Micropayments have been tried. They all failed. The fair market
| price for content is $0. What is happening is that the only
| publishers that will exist shall be only those who create it
| for free. There is simply a glut of content out there because
| the barrier to creating content is completely gone.
| Dotnaught wrote:
| >The fair market price for content is $0.
|
| That's a gross oversimplification. Lots of content isn't
| worth anything but some is. If you're a stock trader, for
| example, certain timely information is well-worth paying for.
| And there's a market for that served by Bloomberg, Thomson-
| Reuters, and so on.
|
| The term "content" obscures the differences by suggesting its
| all interchangeable. That's certainly in the interest of the
| Googles and Facebooks of the world: When all content is
| equal, no content creator has any negotiating power.
|
| But there's a distinction between a multi-month investigative
| report and hastily paraphrased rewrite at some fly-by-night
| website intent on capturing algorithmic ad dollars.
|
| Pricing news content is hard because it has a different value
| to different people and often the value is only apparent
| after it has been consumed.
|
| It's worth asking how much we will pay for reports on
| political corruption, civic injustice, and so on. If the
| price for content is $0, the signal to noise ratio will
| disappear.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I think journalism is going to have to clean up its act a
| lot before I'm willing to trust it enough to pay for it.
|
| I'm seeing more credible journalism done by bloggers than
| the mainstream media at the moment.
| rb808 wrote:
| >The fair market price for content is $0.
|
| I would have agree with this two years ago but things have
| changed. I'm just worn down with the huge volume of free
| dross that doesn't tell you anything. This year I've started
| subscribing to a bunch of resources and stopped with google
| news/fb noise.
| ericflo wrote:
| What about games? People pay tons of money for them, and they
| are content too. When Cyberpunk 2077 comes out later this
| year, try telling people it's worth $0. I think the
| difference is social norms. The internet having no real
| built-in payment mechanism has obliterated the norm of paying
| for most content. Games have held the line, but things like
| Google Stadia and Apple Arcade are working to change that.
| hinkley wrote:
| Free, loss leader, or honeypot.
|
| Most places use content to get you to look at ads, but some
| places write content as a sort of ad itself - we said
| something thoughtful to build brand recognition, consumer
| confidence.
| KajMagnus wrote:
| > _Micropayments have been tried. They all failed_
|
| Would be interesting to read about that -- you happen to have
| any links?
|
| I websearched for "failed micropayments" and found: _" One
| type of micropayment that does work -- one you might not even
| think of as a micropayment -- is in-app-purchases (IAP). IAP
| are a huge source of revenue [...]"_
|
| And: _" One reason users don't like micropayments for content
| [to read] is it requires a decision ... waste the users'
| mental effort ... costs so little that its implied worth is
| almost nothing"_ (here: https://blog.applovin.com/why-
| micropayments-fail-and-one-not... )
| zrail wrote:
| The legions of small publishers making a living on substack
| beg to differ.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > Micropayments have been tried. They all failed. The fair
| market price for content is $0.
|
| To be fair, most were aweful and never reached critical mass.
| And many were to early and badly placed. Today situation is
| different. Patreon, twitch, youtube, netflix, spotify and all
| the other paid services proof that people are willing to pay
| something for content, to their conditions.
|
| I think a well implemented micro-payment could work out today
| well enough to be viable. Something build into the browsers
| and aggregator-sites (reddit, hackernews, google news,
| facebook...) first. Most users don't wanna waste their time
| with micromanaging their bills, so make it optional, and
| automate it for the rest of the time.
| clarkmoody wrote:
| > 1) client sends request for content with some header with
| payment information attached. 2) server verifies payment
| transferred. 3) server responds to client with content after
| payment verification.
|
| This is exactly the recently-proposed LSAT protocol[0]. It uses
| the HTTP402 response code to prompt for payment over the
| Lightning Network in exchange for a cryptographic bearer
| credential that may be used in future requests to the server.
|
| [0] https://lsat.tech/
| carapace wrote:
| I think you gotta connect the dots with UBI here. You wouldn't
| have to monetize if you didn't have to monetize.
| CuriousSkeptic wrote:
| While I agree with this take on UBI. There are middle grounds
| to explore.
|
| The streaming and game services seems to point at monthly
| subscription fee from an aggregator as a working model. Not
| sure how they distribute royalties though, I suspect there
| are many models I won't agree with based on what they
| incentivize.
|
| Then there are the Kickstarter/patreon. Where money is given
| more in support than for a specific product. This is more
| like the UBI approach.
|
| I think there is room for a hybrid approach here, merging the
| two.
| apostacy wrote:
| > RSS is dying (or dead) because it was incompatible with the
| dominant business model on the internet -- advertising. This is
| why Google killed it. This is why lots of professional
| publishers hated it.
|
| > I'd like to see new innovation around protocols and client
| 'browsers' that were made with monetization built-in as a
| first-tier specification.
|
| I don't think the solution should be to cater to what big
| platforms want.
|
| If we did that, then the logical conclusion of that is that we
| would have to download some bloated locked down app for each
| platform we wanted to visit, and we would have a plethora of
| walled gardens. Copying and pasting text would be very limited,
| and we certainly could not "view source". The best we could do
| to save content was take screen shots, we certainly could not
| click on an image and save it. Basically what they are doing
| now.
|
| Platforms would like nothing better than to completely
| deprecate access by web browsers all together. (Didn't
| Instagram do that recently?) Perhaps in the near future,
| websites will require that you use an "Apple approved" web
| browser, if they let you access them outside of the app at all.
|
| But, they fact that they present any of their content at all is
| because of the ubiquity of web browsers. They could probably
| make more money if they had complete control of their platform,
| and could do things like prevent ad-blocking.
|
| So, we should have pushed more for RSS to be de-facto
| requirement of serving content. Firefox, and other browsers,
| should have advertised when RSS was available, and make it
| highly discoverable for users.
|
| > The amount of innovation around protocol has been abysmal
| relative to the explosion in creativity around applications on
| top of these protocols. And SMTP/HTTP are the only ones with
| any real mass adoption today.
|
| I don't personally care that much about the protocol itself, I
| care about the content that the protocol makes available. If
| reading an RSS story required unpacking a bloated js runtime
| and fetching even more content, then why not just use a
| browser?
|
| Publishers also hate SMTP and IMAP, and would love to force
| users to log into their platform and view ads, just to send an
| email to someone. And Google is certainly doing their part to
| eventually kill off these protocols.
|
| AOL and many 90s ISPs did not support these protocols either
| (even though they used them internally) because they wanted to
| make users log into their platform instead of using their own
| mail client.
|
| But the reason that SMTP still exists today is because of its
| ubiquity. The more RSS is adopted, the more popular it becomes,
| and the more platforms had to support it, even if they did not
| want to.
|
| Being able to programmatically send emails is incredibly useful
| and helpful. I'm sure that when the last SMTP server shuts
| down, they will tell you that it is ok, because you can still
| use the mutually incompatible GMail or Outlook.com APIs.
| Pending approval.
| aembleton wrote:
| > Firefox, and other browsers, should have advertised when
| RSS was available, and make it highly discoverable for users.
|
| Firefox did, with a subscribe button in the address bar.
| https://mariolurig.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/firefox-
| rs...
| apostacy wrote:
| > Firefox did, with a subscribe button in the address bar.
| https://mariolurig.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/firefox-
| rs...
|
| Is that from Firefox 3.6? I would have to confirm this, but
| I'm pretty sure they started de-emphasizing RSS around 2011
| with Firefox 4.0.
|
| It was many years ago, I was looking at some discussion
| about it here: https://decafbad.com/blog/2011/01/15/how-to-
| use-feed-auto-di...
|
| I remember being rustled about it back then, also.
| aiilns wrote:
| Right now the top reply's first sentence is this: > Maybe the
| world needs an unmonetizable space.
|
| I have noticed that people in hackernews generally tend to look
| things from a, excuse me for saying so, narrow business "make
| money" perspective. Or maybe it's somewhat US related, I'm not
| sure.
|
| There are thousands of sites that don't live from advertising.
| Government, universities, and every public or even private
| institute has a site to provide information, news,
| announcements etc. There are also hobbyists' sites who are
| never going to make money from adverts.
|
| Not everything should be reduced to a Facebook page.
|
| Not everything should be about money.
|
| First and foremost I think there is a need to recalibrate what
| matters and what actions that requires.
| xtracto wrote:
| So maybe a combination of RSS and Brave?
| evantahler wrote:
| I've seen a number of news RSS feeds that only give you the
| first paragraph or a summary in RSS, and to get the rest, you
| need to log into the site (paywall). I think this is quite an
| OK RSS business model - it's like a preview, and you pay to get
| the rest.
| worble wrote:
| > This forced publishers to put useless blurbs, redirecting to
| the HTTP version, which was a bad user experience and just
| sucked.
|
| Is this that bad? I personally don't mind this at all, I
| subscribe to RSS feeds so I can easily tell at a glance who has
| an update in one place. If they then want to redirect me for
| the full content, then so be it, especially if the alternative
| is me loading every single one of those sites every day to
| check anyway.
| HunOL wrote:
| Absolutely agree. I just can't get why in every discussion
| about RSS somebody mentions that y it's dead because
| publishers had to give away content for free. Feed could
| contain full article, but don't have to.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| I do mind such RSS feeds that just try to force people to
| load the webpage. With the vast majority of my RSS feeds, I
| never have to leave Emacs' Elfeed RSS reader to consume daily
| news. If a feed won't let me see the full content in RSS,
| then I am more likely to delete the feed than become a pair
| of eyeballs for the website's advertisers.
| k1m wrote:
| I work on a project to convert partial feeds into full-text
| versions. It pulls in the article content from each feed
| item and then creates a new full-text feed. Feel free to
| try it out here: http://ftr.fivefilters.org/
| VLM wrote:
| Maybe the world needs an unmonetizable space.
|
| I keep hearing how RSS is dead for many years. My favorite
| blogs seem to be doing fine, its not like my newsblur stream of
| posts has decreased over the years.
|
| Many people are unhappy about non-monetized readers and authors
| just being happy off by themselves. The people most able to
| "fix" that are the happy readers and authors, and the readers
| are not very motivated to spam and tax themselves, and the
| authors obviously don't mind not monetizing or they wouldn't be
| blogging to begin with.
|
| There doesn't seem to be an obvious disruptive force or angle
| to apply force to "improve" the stable situation of a
| distributed decentralized happy unmonetized ecosystem.
| varenc wrote:
| For the blogs and writers you follow that use RSS, are they
| really choosing to forgo a meaningful monetization
| opportunity?
|
| Unless a blog really has ~50,000+ daily uniques, or a
| lucractive audience niche, I suspect there's not much
| opportunity to monetize even if they wanted to.
| dgudkov wrote:
| >1) client sends request for content with some header with
| payment information attached. 2) server verifies payment
| transferred
|
| What you describe looks like authentication and authorization
| rather than payment processing. Which may be a good thing.
| Adding support for authentication to the RSS protocol (OAuth
| for RSS anyone?) and RSS clients can potentially make it more
| interesting for publishers and solve the problem with
| monetization.
| aswanson wrote:
| +1. This is one of the areas where the profit motive leaders to
| a worse user experience in a competitive environment.
| wasdfff wrote:
| But the thing is, it's not dead nor dying. I don't think very
| many major websites have stopped their rss feeds. Maybe it's
| just you that isn't using it. There is rarely a webpage that I
| find that can't be followed via rss, either natively which is
| most always the case, but there are also services that an rss-
| ize content.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| > This is why Google killed it.
|
| Is this true? It certainly doesn't feel like it. Reader was a
| first party branded reader. Google could put ads on Reader
| relevant to your interests (which they'd have been more keenly
| aware of than if you weren't using Reader), and they didn't
| have to pay out the publishers.
|
| Google killed Reader, I think, for the second reason you
| mentioned: publishers were neutering their feeds. Reader had
| gone from a tool for consuming content to a tool for being
| notified about content.
| DevX101 wrote:
| Google would have been rightfully sued to hell and back if
| they started putting ads in the reader client with no
| compensation back to the publishers.
| jefftk wrote:
| Why? Many RSS readers have ads, and the publisher is making
| their feed available to readers.
| slightwinder wrote:
| Google never made an public attempt to show ads in their
| Reader, unlike GMail. Publisher feeds were also still
| prospering and widely used when Google killed the reader. It
| all started to die fast in years after.
|
| Also, IIRC they specifically killed it because of Google
| Plus, which according to their plans should replace Google
| Reader and the demand for RSS.
| debaserab2 wrote:
| RSS was already broken and then medium came along and slurped up
| the majority of independent/longtail blogs (where most of the
| good stuff really is) and now we're stuck in some awful state
| that there seems to be no easy way out of. Content needs to be
| decentralized again before RSS can rule again.
| danesparza wrote:
| I never stopped using RSS.
|
| But man -- what a testament to how much I loved Google Reader
| that it still feels like a fresh wound to have it brought up
| again.
|
| Damn you, Google!
| symgryph wrote:
| I've been using BAZQUX which is a nice aggregator and reeder4
| Since 2013. I have a nice opml file. And my eyes don't bleed
| because I could have text only webpages. For those of you who are
| adventurous you can try TINYTINYRSS. I don't see why everyone
| said RSS is dead almost every site still supports it.
| _samjarman wrote:
| For me, I joined twitter, followed all the authors I loved, and
| then my RSS reader became redundant. It wasn't deliberate, it
| wasn't terribly conscious. I got the same content, a whole lot
| more personality, and even some interactions and discussions with
| the author and other readers.
| adrian1973 wrote:
| I heard this same sentiment a ton when Twitter first got big.
| But there are things that RSS is incredibly useful for that
| Twitter is terrible for, and vice versa.
|
| For RSS, I use it to follow company and engineering feeds:
| every web browser and every major product all have feeds. e.g.,
| I follow the Safari, Google Chrome, and Firefox browser feeds
| to learn about current and upcoming updates. And the best part
| is I can read them only once a week, and they do not disappear
| from my "timeline".
|
| OTOH, I stopped subscribing to news via RSS years ago. Trying
| to make sense of every single headline some news site published
| --usually dozens per day for most of them--is impractical. And
| while there's a lot of blog authors I like to read, I just
| can't keep up with them either. Better to just set aside some
| time once a week and skim their sites.
|
| The thing about Twitter I never liked is the feeling that I had
| to be on it all the time, every second, or I would "miss"
| something. But screw that, I have things to do, and I'll catch
| up when I catch up.
| synchrone wrote:
| To reroute much of web-based feeds consumption to RSS - check out
| https://docs.rsshub.app/en/
|
| It works quite well, has vibrant community, and support for
| ripping twitter and instagram feeds among dozens of other sites.
| It also has a browser extension to help discover available feeds
| on sites that it can digest - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/rsshub-radar-...
|
| There's also a Chrome extension, but that one is not translated
| from Chinese yet.
| dantondwa wrote:
| RSS works pretty well for me. Every single website I follow
| supports it, both the mainstream and the niche ones. I use on my
| desktop and phone NetNewsWire, which is a great, fast and simple
| piece of software. Overall, I'd say RSS is not the latest and
| greatest anymore, but it keeps working for me.
|
| In fact, I use RSS for this website as well.
| ddevault wrote:
| Feedly seems nice but it's a total non-starter due to the lack of
| an email-based signup. I have none of the social media accounts
| it wants you to log in with and it'll be a cold day in hell
| before I share that much personal information with an RSS reader
| anyway. But a brief reading of the privacy policy will tell you
| that Feedly is a data hoarder and has every intention of selling
| that information:
|
| https://feedly.com/i/legal/privacy
|
| $6-$18/mo should be fucking enough for a service to keep my
| goddamn information to themselves.
|
| I'm using FeedReader[0], but I'm not especially happy with it.
| Would love to hear some more recommendations.
|
| https://jangernert.github.io/FeedReader/
| pjmlp wrote:
| > We all mourned when Reader died and took RSS with it, but it's
| time to return to what made it great
|
| I did not, I just kept using native clients like Outlook. No big
| deal.
| mememem wrote:
| There are several nice apps for RSS feeds, but unfortunately, the
| low support on OS level makes RSS comfortable for geeks but not
| for ordinary people, who now mainly consume content in Twitter
| and Facebook whose feeds btw is a centralized and more
| comfortable version of their ancestor - RSS.
| crazygringo wrote:
| A newsfeed is an extremely complex and tricky product to get
| right, even more so when it's an aggregated one.
|
| There are so many competing concerns to handle -- prioritization
| with a source, prioritization between sources, discoverability,
| UX flow, preview vs. full content, social content from your
| friends vs. institutional content, commenting, and last but not
| least, a business model: what is incentivizing content sources to
| cooperate in good faith and not ignore it or abuse it?
|
| Fact of the matter is, RSS is just far too simplistic to handle
| these competing concerns in any kind of balanced or reasonable
| way. But it's also possible there _is_ no single answer.
|
| Which is why different "newsfeeds" for me (HN, Reddit, NYT, AV
| Club, Twitter) have drastically different interfaces and
| interaction models. I don't want my HN to work like Twitter, or
| my Twitter to work like the NYT. And I can't even imagine of any
| possible interface that could somehow aggregate them all.
| mmcconnell1618 wrote:
| The business model of RSS is harder than just slapping ads on
| your homepage and encouraging more page clicks. I think that's
| the real reason you don't see a strong RSS ecosystem. The content
| producers don't have a strong financial incentive to support it
| well.
| hkt wrote:
| In my experience RSS is at its best when dealing with
| infrequent publishers or niche audiences. People who don't
| expect to be paid for their writing because they want a wider
| audience, like think tanks or university departments.
| wpietri wrote:
| That's definitely where it shines for me. I follow hundreds
| of infrequently-updated sites using Newsblur. It's sort of
| the same value proposition for me as Twitter. I'd never
| follow the New York Times in either place; what I want is to
| get beyond what's commercially viable to publish.
| Nition wrote:
| I wrote this just yesterday in another thread but I'll say it
| here as well:
|
| I think RSS should be better built in to browsers. Make it as
| simple as a follow button is on centralised websites.
|
| e.g.: A little RSS icon pops up when RSS is available on a page,
| press it and you're now following that feed. Feeds window in the
| browser shows your feeds, and a small alert icon shows up
| somewhere when there's unread content. Your subscriptions are
| saved to your account. If you want to read the article, you click
| the link and read it directly on the source website. It doesn't
| need to be any more complex than that.
|
| Firefox had "Live Bookmarks" for RSS but it was relatively
| terrible, and eventually got removed.
| hkt wrote:
| I love RSS, but do think it needs to be developed.
|
| For a start, clients aren't great. Most have poor UX and are
| clunky, and I've used very few which don't choke on large numbers
| of feeds.
|
| Second, having lots of subscriptions really shows the value of an
| editor. I don't often want to scroll through everything that has
| been published by a recently hyperactive feed in order to see
| things with a lower cadence. There is no filter for relevance,
| which is perhaps something that could be added through an
| external service or added to a hosted reader. Maybe someone has
| already done this.
|
| Third, search and recommendations is pretty poor. I'd be very
| much in the market for "if you liked this then you'll like this"
| for RSS feeds. Perhaps this already exists, but I'm not aware of
| it.
|
| What I've always liked about RSS is the fact it can keep me in
| touch with more sources than I can track myself. It highlights
| the blogs that only publish once a month, and if I only check in
| weekly, it turns the internet into a handy snapshot of who has
| updated and who hasn't. The part I like less is filtering between
| relevance and irrelevance.
| jadell wrote:
| Nitpick: pretty sure Slashdot predated Google reader by almost a
| decade.
| mkchoi212 wrote:
| I so agree with the author. Less effort it takes to retrieve
| documents, the less it will mean to you, which means that you'll
| less likely consume it.
| [deleted]
| iagooar wrote:
| If it wasn't for podcasting, I wonder if RSS wouldn't actually be
| dead by now.
| Andrex wrote:
| I'm moving from Feedly to self-hosted Tiny Tiny RSS soon:
| https://tt-rss.org
|
| Would be fun if others did the same and posted about their
| experiences!
| trotFunky wrote:
| I have been using self-hosted RSS aggregators for some time now
| (currently [FreshRSS](https://freshrss.org/ )) and I have been
| delighted ! I feel it complements HN or Reddit really well in
| giving me the ability to follow specific people or projects.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Interesting, thanks for the link. I just noticed it is also
| packaged into Debian.
| moogly wrote:
| I moved to self-hosted tt-rss when Google Reader shut down and
| the 50 or so other clients/services I tried were not good
| enough. Been using tt-rss ever since and very happy with it.
| macawfish wrote:
| RSS + Dat is a great combo, for what it's worth
| darekkay wrote:
| Site aggregators and RSS don't contradict each other. In fact,
| I'm reading this very post through my HN RSS feed.
|
| RSS is not only great for providing _content_, but also for
| learning/trivia/facts. That's why I've created Tip of the Day
| [1], which provides daily tips on different topics (e.g. logical
| fallacies, chemical elements etc.). It's open source, so other
| topics can be added by anyone.
|
| [1] https://tips.darekkay.com/
| mcescalante wrote:
| RSS has been really great for me over the last year or so (when I
| got back into it). I tried Feedly, and then Inoreader. I was not
| willing to pay for either and ended up trying out the two popular
| self-hosted options: ttrss (tiny tiny rss) and Miniflux. Stuck
| with Miniflux for its simplicity. Using the Fever API with Reeder
| on my Mac and Readably on my Android.
| psycadet wrote:
| Spinned up Miniflux a couple of hours a go, thanks for the
| recommendation. Software like this makes my self hosting
| cravings very satisfied.
| gexla wrote:
| This could somewhat be the fault of web developers. Unless
| there's a paywall, the (client|customer|boss) probably wouldn't
| object to throwing in an RSS feed. Maybe it would require a
| little extra time, but it's easier than jacking around with HTML
| / CSS. Most of the time, developers probably don't even think
| about RSS or it's at the bottom of their list.
|
| I read my feeds in Thunderbird. I don't want yet another 3rd
| party service for this. I get overloaded, but my web browser is a
| worse distraction. I probably waste less time surfing through RSS
| feeds than I do by mindlessly browsing. I can more easily develop
| a routine for browsing feeds and the view is less distracting.
|
| There's probably a lot of opportunity in aggregation. Newsletters
| such as "Inside" do a great job of this, but it's just one small
| slice.
| generalpass wrote:
| I saw this pop up in my HN RSS feed.
| number6 wrote:
| All this talk about rss being dead. Almost every major side
| offers an rss feed somewhere.
|
| I self host an rssreader and use it for new YouTube videos or
| release on github or hackernews and my favourite blogs.
| arkanciscan wrote:
| Whining about blogs and RSS is the "baby rabbits adopt old dog as
| their mother" of Hacker News. It just never fails to work y'all
| nerds into a frenzy.
| nsuser3 wrote:
| Customizable HN feeds (inofficial):
| https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/
|
| It's really easy to get posts on the frontpage only if they have
| more than x points:
|
| https://hnrss.org/frontpage?points=x
|
| Or contain certain keywords:
|
| https://hnrss.org/newest?q=git+OR+linux
| tetron wrote:
| I use RssDaemon on Android, which had been around forever (8-9
| years maybe?) is apparently so dead that the author just released
| a new version with major UI update.
|
| My most used been apps on my phone are RssDaemon and Twitter. I
| read Hackers news though RSS. Twitter on the other hand has been
| getting worse.
|
| The backlash against centralized social media platforms is
| building, but it is hard to say what comes next.
| arkanciscan wrote:
| Whining about blogs and RSS is the "baby rabbits adopt old dog as
| their mother" of Hacker News. It just never fails to work y'all
| nerds into a frenzy
| nanna wrote:
| RSS seems to me to have use cases far beyond website updates, if
| it was extended a little.
|
| Event syndication. Say that I'd collect the event feeds from a
| load of cinemas, music venues I like around the world, why not,
| plus those of musicians. I want my RSS-based events reader to
| narrow down the date field to be this weekend, location to be my
| town, and ticket field to be available, and why not price to
| something I can afford, while I'm at it? Bam, everything I could
| dream of doing this weekend, no Facebook and using a slightly
| modified version of a two-decade-old tech.
|
| Similar functionality for shopping.
|
| Why couldn't RSS be extended to something like this?
| Crespyl wrote:
| It's really not that RSS couldn't handle (/be extended to
| handle) this use case, it's that the parties publishing this
| information _do not want you to have that much control over the
| feed_.
|
| See how much effort Netflix puts into making their catalog hard
| to browse, to obfuscate the actual size of the catalog and
| promote specific things they need to show a large return on, or
| all the sponsorships/ad-deals/promotions that inevitably begin
| to clutter almost any commercial news feed.
|
| We have the technology, but publishers will fight tooth and
| nail to keep control over the platform away from the end user.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Remember the heady days when Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, et
| all had almost open access to their 'social graphs', allowing
| people to grab content from one place, post to another, build
| connections using tools like Yahoo Pipes? I sometimes long
| for simpler days when companies were more open with their
| data. Didn't Netflix even have a more open api back in the
| day that you could rank and sort, and see new release dates,
| etc?
| nanna wrote:
| But Netflix is different from a gigging band, venue and
| cinema, whose financial models are based on actual ticket
| sales not whatever the hell Netflix's is. It takes so much
| labour and money for them to get eyeballs filtered through
| social media and paper ads and to attract customers to their
| sites. So for them this would simply be almost a free extra
| way to drive traffic.
|
| I think you're making a valid point about Netflix, but not
| seeing how it applies to more traditional financial models?
| WWWWH wrote:
| Yes, yes, yes! This is such a good idea. Working at a
| University, I've often thought this would be the ideal way of
| advertising seminars. I suspect the problem is chicken and egg,
| the technological barrier is just a little too high for this to
| be implemented when RSS readers are not widely used.
| 6510 wrote:
| You can publish an RSS feed for shopping search results.
|
| You can put a future date in RSS for events.
|
| To lazy to search for examples sorry.
| VLM wrote:
| From one direction 99% of the world's VCR clocks blinked
| "12:00" for the entire lifespan of that media format. The
| proposal is a lot of interactivity and cognitive load to demand
| from most of humanity. Only a very small segment of society,
| mostly engineers, can utilize parametric search. Even engineers
| are lazy or in a hurry sometimes, in theory investing time in a
| parametric search would benefit me, in practice I needed a USB
| cable and going to amazon for a generic search of "amazonbasics
| usb type-c cable" works well enough.
|
| From the other direction there's not much middle ground between
| the proposal and a REST API. You're asking for
| developer.ebay.com, I've fooled around with that a little and
| its fun. Sometimes I think the business people don't understand
| how much the devs are exposing in their APIs, which makes me
| worry about the staying power of public APIs. There are
| businesses where their business model and front-end UI could
| all be replaced by a very small shell script and I don't think
| the business people understand that weakness. Of course an API
| can be shut off with the flick of a switch once it eats into
| profits.
| bertman wrote:
| From the article: Not only will this reduce your
| anxiety and churn from constantly opening and
| closing various sites, but RSS also shows the content in a
| standard format, with less to distract you.
|
| Hmm, if you get anxiety from closing and opening tabs, you should
| probably go offline for a while.
| thelazydogsback wrote:
| I dunno -- bookmarking, checking up on sites, tab-management,
| etc., is all-in-all a pretty poor experience IMHO. There are
| plug-ins, but none are great and they are not interoperable.
| iotku wrote:
| >Hmm, if you get anxiety from closing and opening tabs, you
| should probably go offline for a while.
|
| You'll be able to go offline for a while thanks to RSS feeds.
|
| You can click one button to check for feed updates and know
| you're up to date on things or what's new.
|
| vs.
|
| 1) Open browser
|
| 2) Load folder of bookmarks for favorite sites
|
| 3) Look through each tab to see if there's new content.
|
| To me given those two scenarios RSS feeds seem much more
| efficient and I do get anxiety when I'm repeating menial tasks
| potentially multiple times a day for no perceivable benefit.
|
| RSS is another victim of the manipulation of social media
| companies trying to steal everyone's attention and time.
| gmoore wrote:
| I love RSS - it's how I found this article :) I've been using The
| Old Reader every since Google reader shut down...I love it.
| aSplash0fDerp wrote:
| Same. Glancing over 1000 headlines on a fresh pull saves so
| much time and energy.
|
| The 30 minutes it takes to peruse makes for a good breakfast
| routine versus only making it 10 to 20 stories deep in the same
| amount of time.
| encom wrote:
| Though I don't use it for reading HN, I've been using The Old
| Reader since Google Reader shut down. It's basically a copy of
| Google Reader as it was.
|
| https://theoldreader.com/
| stevewilhelm wrote:
| My I recommend IPTC's NewsML-G2
| https://iptc.org/standards/newsml-g2/
| docdeek wrote:
| I really like Reeder 4.0. I use it on iOS and Mac and it's a
| dream.
| durandal1 wrote:
| I recently configured FreshRSS on my Raspberry Pi 4 and I'm using
| both the web interface as well as Reeder syncing through its
| greader compatible API. While this setup may not be for everyone,
| reducing time on twitter in favor of reading blogs notably
| increased my happiness, and how content I am in terms of
| intellectual stimulation after taking an RSS reading break.
|
| As a bonus, the FreshRSS web interface, while not being the
| prettiest, is surprisingly effective for going through the unread
| articles.
| lildata wrote:
| I believe Mastodon should support RSS, at least some users would
| use it at first as a feed aggregator as then progressively switch
| to the social media aspects of the platform.
| messo wrote:
| This! I would love to be able to add some blogs to my mastodon
| feed.
| thelazydogsback wrote:
| RSS is the only way I consume content regularly -- if Innoreader
| can't see a feed at a site that I may come across, I won't be
| visiting regularly. Too much of a PITA otherwise. No Twitter
| account either -- I don't want a "push" model, and the S/N ratio
| is way too low...
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Totally agree. If I can't add an RSS feed for a site to
| Inoreader then I simply don't visit the site. RSS is the single
| thing that makes sites like CNN usable to me.
| jadell wrote:
| Same. A site having a feed is much more likely to get
| consistent recurring traffic from me than a site I can only
| consume via social network posts.
| devinegan wrote:
| If self-hosted is your thing I highly recommend tiny-rss and the
| iOS app accompanying it. https://tt-rss.org/
| kc0bfv wrote:
| I came here via ttRSS, with the Android app. I host it via the
| hosting service I've used for years, it only requires PHP and a
| Cron job. The Android app lets me keep ttRSS and its
| authentication behind a separate HTTP basic auth, which I think
| keeps the attack surface low and security high-ish.
|
| I think it's fantastic.
| simonw wrote:
| The single worst offense against the usability of Atom/RSS right
| now comes from Apple and iOS.
|
| If you click a link to an Atom feed in Mobile Safari, iOS will
| launch the Apple News app. Which will then show you an error
| message saying the content is unavailable.
|
| As far as I can tell there is no way for an installed reader app
| to take over handling of feed URLs. It just makes the entire feed
| ecosystem look broken for anyone using an iPhone or iPad.
| gsich wrote:
| Stop using Apple products. Stop developing for Apple products.
| Stop treating Apple like they matter.
| yawn wrote:
| Your other choice without lots of friction is Google, an
| advertising company. I hate that this is the world we live
| in.
| gsich wrote:
| At least with Android (not Google) I have a choice on what
| software I install.
|
| Besides that you can still use a desktop PC. Most people do
| anyway.
| SXX wrote:
| > At least with Android (not Google) I have a choice on
| what software I install.
|
| I'm have very negative outlook on Apple with their vendor
| lock-in and walled garden, but how long do you think
| Google will let you make this choice if they gonna have
| no competition at all?
|
| Google was slowly making Android less and less open with
| every release. Now "security" features like SafetyNet
| decide whatever you're allowed to use software or not.
|
| Think on it! Just look at what Google doing with web
| because of their monopoly on search and browser markets.
| pedro2 wrote:
| I dislike a lot Feedly, almost like Inoreader and kinda like
| bazqux.
|
| Not sure why though.
| mawise wrote:
| Inoreader (at least their paid version) supports private rss
| feeds--that is feeds with HTTP Basic Auth headers for non-
| public content. Private blogs and private RSS are a space
| where monetizing your content just isn't important. This is
| where people can write personal, vulnerable things to share
| with friends and family without creating a burden of "now I
| need to visit 50 different friends' websites"
| EddieLomax wrote:
| I used bazqux for a while and paid for the annual
| subscription. It just ended and I was looking around for free
| alternatives, and found CommaFeed, which reminds me a lot of
| Google Reader.
| [deleted]
| znpy wrote:
| I wonder if the EU could, in theory, take action about this
| behavior.
|
| Apple is basically monopolizing the whole market for rss
| readers.
| tolle wrote:
| How many EU countries are Apple News available in?
| znpy wrote:
| All of them, I guess?
| pzumk wrote:
| Apple News is not available in Germany. The only thing we
| get is the non-customisable News-Widget.
| znpy wrote:
| Well it might not be available as a service but apple
| might be handling the RSS URLs anyway.
| tpush wrote:
| Which is really awful. Always showing tabloid nonsense
| that you can't get rid of.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| Only the UK.
| jedberg wrote:
| The UK is not part of the EU anymore.
| tifadg1 wrote:
| Thats neither factually nor theoretically correct, as all
| the EU laws apply until the transition period has
| expired, which I wouldn't be surprised will be extended
| given corona has taken so much focus and time away from
| it.
| Closi wrote:
| It's both factually and theoretically correct - the UK
| has left the EU, but laws are extended until the
| transition period is over.
|
| Note the absence of the UK in the below sources:
|
| https://www.gov.uk/eu-eea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M
| ember_state_of_the_European_U...
| naniwaduni wrote:
| It is theoretically correct. The factuality is the point
| under dispute...
| jedberg wrote:
| Officially they are no longer part of the EU. They have
| agreed to abide by the rules of the EU for now, and the
| EU has agreed to allow them to trade as though they were
| part of the EU, but they officially left on Jan 31.
| ethbro wrote:
| Duck typing says they're currently a member.
| tpush wrote:
| After UK exits, none.
|
| Apple News is available in a whopping 4 countries, 4 years
| after its introduction.
| nojito wrote:
| >Apple is basically monopolizing the whole market for rss
| readers.
|
| You can't be a monopoly with such a small userbase.
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| Of course, you can. The company is the monopoly not the
| userbase.
| [deleted]
| SalimoS wrote:
| i don't know about you how you use your iOS device if you do
| but after installing an RSS reader (NetNewsWire is an excellent
| open source app) you can share the webpage/website/blog using
| the share menu and it will be added to your RSS reader
| rado wrote:
| I read this via RSS.
| mrsaint wrote:
| Consuming RSS with Inoreader here. Probably the most used app on
| my phone.
| drdeadringer wrote:
| I remember that brief time when free email addresses were being
| offered up before RSS was created. You could get daily news
| emailed to your inbox from such as USA Today, Wired, and so
| forth. An electronic newspaper tossed at your digital front door
| every morning. I actually looked forward to it.
|
| Then RSS was invented. Now RSS is supposed to be dead, and/or
| killed, what appears to be several times over. I never did get on
| the Google Reader bandwagon because I was subscribing to RSS
| feeds via other means.
|
| Nowadays, I have the app 'Podcast Addict' [free with ads, $0.99
| once for no ads; I'm just a user here] installed on my tablet
| through which I subscribe to over 50 RSS feeds - podcasts,
| webcomics, even a comedian's "upcoming shows" feed. There are
| countless other RSS feeds available via in-app search and
| discovery let alone the "add your own" option.
|
| By missing out on an RSS apocalypse folks seem to love to talk
| about from time to time, have I accidentally become one of those
| "welcome back" guys?
| BrunoBernardino wrote:
| I felt very similarly.
|
| If you're interested in getting "the news" delivered to you
| daily, instead of having to check a reader app, I've built
| something that aggregates all your feeds (and websites without
| feeds) into a daily digest via email.
|
| I don't want to "spam" so I won't link here, but you can check
| on my submissions for "News, calm".
|
| On the "RSS apocalypse" front, I can say that on this product I
| noticed that most websites "non-tech people" follow don't offer
| RSS feeds, apparently over monetization concerns.
|
| I was definitely in a filter bubble as everything I followed
| had RSS.
| topherPedersen wrote:
| Signed up for Feedly, now following danielmiessler.com, and added
| a super sweet RSS button to my WordPress blog,
| https://topherpedersen.blog.
| dewey wrote:
| Also if you don't want to sign up for another service there's
| also a bunch of self hosted RSS readers like https://miniflux.app
| which I'll never get tired of recommending in threads like this.
| andrewnc wrote:
| I had my first experience with RSS a few weeks back. I added a
| feed to my tech blog at request of one of those on my mailing
| list.
|
| I ended up writing a python script that transforms the HTML of my
| blog's landing page into an RSS feed. Not elegant, but it got the
| job done.
|
| My main problem is it seems hard for me to interact with my
| readers this way. They can, of course, reach out via twitter or
| some such.
|
| Anyway, I'm not sure there has been much value added on my end.
| But I'm happy to oblige.
| detaro wrote:
| How do you interact with readers that visit your blog directly?
| apostacy wrote:
| This is why I was so heartbroken when Mozilla removed first party
| RSS support from Firefox, for what seemed like an extremely
| flimsy justification.[1]
|
| RSS should be ubiquitous, and seen as an essential part of any
| service that serves structured incremental content. People should
| be emailing webmasters asking why there is no little orange icon.
|
| It also serves as a back door form of accessibility. But I
| strongly suspect that RSS goes against the interests of big tech
| who don't like RSS, because companies like Facebook go through so
| much trouble to make it difficult to scrape or modify their
| content.
|
| I just wish that Mozilla would stand up more to their corporate
| underwriters. Now RSS is relegated to add-ons, and is on the same
| tier gopher (no offense to gopher).
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17613051
| z3t4 wrote:
| RSS and bookmarks bypass Google, meaning less money for the
| browser. Yes Firefox is funded by ads (Google ads).
|
| It seems to me that Mozilla executives has no fortitude. They
| prefer revenue rather then invention and what's best for the
| user. KaiOS is becoming the third biggest mobile OS, guess what
| it's FirefoxOS, but Mozilla was too afraid to give it a shot.
| Then there's the Rust programming language that is taking the
| world with storm. It seems there are great talent, and if they
| would be allowed to work in the user's best interest people
| would switch over from Chrome - and Firefox would become big
| enough to matter. As for revenue, _a lot_ of purchases are
| initiated from the web, but they leave the browser for a short
| while and takes a 3-5% cut. Browsers could work with banks and
| offer a secure wallet. And micro-transactions could become a
| thing. Publishers are crying for a solution! The web have been
| funded by ads for over 20 years now, with diminishing returns.
| And users hate it! The web is ripe for invention!
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > RSS and bookmarks bypass Google
|
| Bollocks!
|
| Google - and any search engine - cannot help you find an
| _exact_ web-page you found after hours of researching while
| web-surfing earlier.
|
| And RSS feeds are for when you're already interested in a
| content source. Google searches help you find something new:
| they won't help you automatically be informed of new posts.
| They just save you the time of having to manually sort-out
| new content from the old when you visit an article website.
|
| Google isn't to blame for the drop in popularity of RSS
| (Google Reader's closing was a symptom, not a cause), it's
| the content websites' webmasters who saw that by allowing
| machine-readable access to their content index means that
| users wanting to get to their new content can bypass the
| advertising on their home-page, effectively halving the
| pageviews and thus halving their revenue - or if they
| included their whole article content in the RSS feed then
| they're missing out on potentially all of the advertising
| revenue - that's why some content authors, like Daring
| Fireball's John Gruber, as an example, only provide their
| full RSS feed to paying subscribers.
|
| RSS still works for podcasts though - as podcasts wouldn't be
| popular at all if people had to navigate through a webpage to
| download each audio file each time a new release is made - so
| the halving of web banner ad revenue is compensated-for by
| having a much larger audience for the in-audio advertising
| baked into the podcast content.
|
| Twitter - and centralised content platforms like Facebook
| also was/is a major part for the reasons I described above:
| allowing direct access to content means less pageviews.
| Somewhat concerningly, we're seeing people use Twitter to do
| things that RSS was originally designed for: such as posting
| links to new articles posted to a blog or for things like
| live service uptime status updates.
|
| Finally, there's the usability issue: it's difficult to
| describe what RSS is or why it's good to a layperson. Ssure,
| today we can just say "an RSS feed is just like a podcast,
| but for normal web content, or anything at all" - but back in
| the early 2000s when RSS awareness (or hype...) peaked, I had
| difficulty understanding what a "syndication feed" was - the
| terminology "feed" implied to me it was a unidirectional
| continuous push-style connection (like a HTML/HTTP
| EventSource) - not a pull-style index file. Don't forget the
| format-war with Atom too.
| j-f1 wrote:
| > that's why some content authors, like Daring Fireball's
| John Gruber, as an example, only provide their full RSS
| feed to paying subscribers
|
| This is false. I am not a paying subscriber, but I still
| get the full content of Daring Fireball articles in my RSS
| reader. In fact, the RSS feed is one of the links on the
| site's sidebar. https://daringfireball.net/feeds/
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| That's not the "full feed", that's $19/yr and mentioned
| here: https://daringfireball.net/members/info
|
| > However, paying supporters do get access to a few
| members-only perquisites, including separate full-content
| RSS feeds for articles and the Linked List (my daily list
| of links and blurbs related to Mac, web, and design
| nerdery).
| [deleted]
| jjordan wrote:
| Smart Bookmarks were fantastic. Add your favorite sites' RSS
| feeds to your bookmark toolbar and you'd have all the recent
| headlines from all your favorite sites at one click.
| Fortunately I wasn't the only one that appreciated this long
| neglected feature so someone created Livemarks
| (https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/) that mostly replicated its
| functionality. I highly recommend it as I've been on the web a
| long time and have yet to come across a faster way to check all
| my favorite sites at once.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| I don't understand why they removed support for it. Isn't RSS a
| "solved issue" - what possible updates can be made to it? Why
| couldn't they just keep it available and forget about it.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| The functionality was never _polished_ , and there were some
| fairly serious technical problems with the implementation due
| to lack of maintenance, seen often in apparently minor things
| like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=337897.
|
| I can readily understand why they removed it--it was
| implemented in what had become the wrong way for such a
| feature, and fixing it would have taken more effort than they
| wanted to expend on such a niche feature, and it was starting
| to hold back other improvements. (Similar deal to why they
| broke old extensions: they were holding the browser back
| technically, and a couple of years later I think it was
| fairly clearly the right decision, painful though it was.)
| syshum wrote:
| Yea it competed with Pocket, that is the actual reason it
| was removed
| apostacy wrote:
| > The functionality was never polished, and there were some
| fairly serious technical problems with the implementation
| due to lack of maintenance, seen often in apparently minor
| things like
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=337897.
|
| Then that is a great justification for improving it then.
| Or at least bundling an RSS add-on. Mozilla felt that
| bundling Pocket was ok, but not one of the many great RSS
| add-ons?
|
| > I can readily understand why they removed it--it was
| implemented in what had become the wrong way for such a
| feature, and fixing it would have taken more effort than
| they wanted to expend on such a niche feature, and it was
| starting to hold back other improvements.
|
| The truth is, they did not see it as an essential part of
| the web, worth implementing. If you look at the other stuff
| that Mozilla is allocating resources for, it becomes clear
| that maintaining RSS support would be a drop in the bucket.
|
| RSS could have been fixed for a fraction of the cost of one
| of their many dead-end research projects, or they could
| have swapped out the canapes for a cheaper finger food at
| one of their events.
|
| The fact that anyone would call RSS "niche" is part of the
| problem; something can still be important even if not a lot
| of people use it at the moment. But that kind of nuance is
| something lost with this toxic market-driven mentality.
| Accessibility features are also "niche", should they be
| removed? Many people consider RSS to be a type
| accessibility feature. Should all accessibility features be
| relegated to add-ons that must be manually sought out and
| installed?
|
| I don't know the details of the high level decisions at
| Mozilla, but I also can't help but notice that all of the
| decisions made by Mozilla seem to align perfectly with the
| interests of companies Facebook, Google, Apple, Netflix,
| Amazon.
|
| Sending alerts to users and getting them to navigate to
| your platform is what big content wants. Mozilla agrees
| that that is the future and that RSS is obsolete and
| apparently holding them back. Mozilla has no problem
| implementing whatever Google wants and always being behind
| Chrome. Mozilla also decided to legitimize web DRM with its
| embrace of EME.
|
| > (Similar deal to why they broke old extensions: they were
| holding the browser back technically, and a couple of years
| later I think it was fairly clearly the right decision,
| painful though it was.)
|
| Honestly this is a whole other discussion, but I would
| dispute that they made the right decision. If browser
| extensions are just toys to you, then I'm sure you
| appreciate how streamlined and simple they are now.
| thawaway1837 wrote:
| Mozilla should be focusing on RSS within Thunderbird,
| because that was the original location for RSS
| functionality, and is a much better fit anyways (due to
| the expected presence of an almost always open left hand
| sidebar.
|
| Unfortunately Mozilla has dropped thunderbird almost
| completely so that's not been a real option either.
| apostacy wrote:
| I completely agree. I never actually used Firefox as an
| RSS reader, but I did get my mom started on RSS through
| Firefox, and later she moved on to a dedicated RSS
| reader. I don't remember, but I think that Firefox would
| offer to subscribe to a feed via Thunderbird if you
| didn't already have one set up.
|
| But I think Mozilla's abandonment of Thunderbird is very
| much in line with their abandonment of RSS, and their
| loss of commitment to an open web.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Slight correction where I was unclear: I don't call RSS
| niche, but RSS reading _within the browser itself_.
| thelazydogsback wrote:
| Innoreader can make a virtual feed from changes that appear in
| any site -- a new feature I haven't tried yet. Used to use
| Google Reader, but now I pay for Inno, which I'm happy to do.
| apostacy wrote:
| That is pretty cool.
|
| But unfortunately that is not really a solution. It is like
| saying that it is ok that a website removed screen-reader
| support, because you have a screen reader that can still
| parse the website anyway. The problem is RSS not being made
| available at all.
|
| RSS being made available less and less, and they have less of
| an incentive to do so. And I am saddened that a lot of the
| good work Mozilla did was abandoned by them and that the web
| is regressing.
|
| Additionally, having to make your own scraper is really not a
| solution to RSS not being available. Scrapers are very high
| maintenance, and can easily break with updates.
| thelazydogsback wrote:
| Sure -- not saying it's as good as presenting make-for-rss
| posts -- may be helpful in some cases though. At least I'll
| know that content changes, and if I don't like the virtual
| feed, I can just link out to the source and view it
| directly.
| apostacy wrote:
| I appreciate you sharing. I didn't mean to shoot you down
| or anything.
| thelazydogsback wrote:
| No problem -- I didn't take it that way at all!
| synchrone wrote:
| as far as i can see, RSSHub does exactly that, and supports
| as many as 536 scraped sources (of varying caliber) at
| https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub/tree/master/lib/routes.
|
| It's not an outlandish amount of work, if lots of people
| chip in with their favorite source.
| apostacy wrote:
| I see what you are saying, but I still think it is a far
| cry from having content providers simply providing the
| feeds themselves.
|
| In the same way that I don't think that YouTube allowing
| users to submit closed caption transcripts, or machine
| generating them, any substitute for the content creator
| providing them in the first place. I'm sure in the near
| future, smart TVs will be able to machine generate closed
| captions from the audio, but I still don't think we
| should let television producers off the hook for
| providing captions.
|
| RSS should be the default. And it is not hard to generate
| RSS.
|
| I happen to think that big platforms only reluctantly
| adopted RSS over a decade ago because it was a
| "standard", and because they felt that it was popular
| enough to justify the traffic from it. But they do not
| like RSS. It works against their analytics, their ads,
| and their control of the presentation.
|
| And while it is cool that people are crowd sourcing
| scrapers, I think the real solution is to promote RSS
| itself and encourage more platforms to simply provide it.
| And organizations like Mozilla taking Facebook's position
| that RSS is obsolete has been profoundly unhelpful to the
| web.
| jjordan wrote:
| Maybe what we need is an accessibility equivalent to the
| SSL Server Test. Input your domain and it gives you a
| letter grade on how accessible your site is. RSS access
| should be heavily weighted, of course.
| Fiveplus wrote:
| I used to be a big fan of RSS feeds but with their demise I
| started using Feedly.
|
| It let's me curate sources into different customizable feeds
| like news or science. I pay for the pro happily since they
| let me add specific twitter accounts too. Really saves me
| time!
| danielrm26 wrote:
| Feedly is an RSS reader. It's not one or the other.
| dollers wrote:
| The first thing I noticed after setting up an RSS reader was gow
| click batey and dumb everything in my RSS feed was.
| mironov wrote:
| You can read content from Hacker News, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter,
| and a lot of other platforms using an RSS reader. You can even
| receive newsletters there.
|
| I wrote about the process here: https://blog.mironov.live/how-to-
| build-your-personal-news-in...
| awinter-py wrote:
| I'm with the author in needing better reading tools, but the
| 'firehose' of RSS isn't by itself the answer
|
| aggregators solve a different variety problem vs RSS -- RSS gives
| you access to random sources that you curate yourself, whereas HN
| or link-heavy blogs give you access to a meaningful amount of
| high-impact articles from high-diversity sources (i.e. more
| different websites than you subscribe to in feedly) that everyone
| else is reading
|
| at minimum, I need a tool that lets me tame the RSS firehose with
| some kind of ranking or priority queue, plus mix in some
| aggregator reading so I don't miss things
| trynewideas wrote:
| That was why the friend-of-a-friend social features of Google
| Reader were such a big deal for me -- I got curation and
| aggregation from a person I trusted, and the people they
| trusted.
|
| I didn't have to subscribe to anything to get content, I just
| had to follow people I knew, and even if they weren't sharing a
| lot, their first-level connections collectively shared plenty.
| The interface let me subscribe to whatever feeds they were
| sharing from, which is how I discovered a lot of content I
| never would've on my own, and in a lot of cases likely not
| through other aggregation methods either.
|
| Add the content they were clipping content with the bookmarklet
| and even sites that weren't syndicating their content were
| getting my regular traffic via shares.
| awinter-py wrote:
| +1
|
| all kinds of trust networks are good
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I can't get back to RSS: I never left it. After the demise of
| Google Reader I just switched to Feedly and can happily recommend
| it to anyone. Feedly rocks!
|
| I'm even thinking to make a gate from RSS to XMPP, that would
| work just like these 'channels' do in Telegram.
| bane wrote:
| RSS is dead, but API-drive API access to data on a monthly
| subscription is all over many industries. Why not just sell
| access to an RSS feed on a subscription?
| zelly wrote:
| Twitter has replaced RSS for all intents and purposes.
|
| I miss Google Reader and RSS too, but the world has changed.
| Another reason RSS is in the past is because it was a means of
| delivering long blog articles which only a small minority of
| internet users has the interest or attention span for.
|
| You miss RSS because you miss 2007.
| 6510 wrote:
| Books are dead too! Long live books.
|
| When someone has an opinion like this one should wonder if they
| ever used RSS. Web applications for RSS aggregation is worse than
| using IRC in a web interface. I cant take strong opinions about
| IRC seriously either if the person didn't install a client. With
| RSS the person is merely describing himself.
|
| Please do go install [or make] a client, gather some feeds, do
| some filtering. When you have your first 10 000 subscriptions I'd
| love to hear every angle of your story, the topics, the
| organization, what client you use, what language it was written
| in, what database it uses, who wrote it. ETC ETC
|
| The walled gardens full of [self] censorship, data mining, adware
| and bullshit content have useful features too! Aggregation isn't
| it. HN headlines only vaguely map to our interest but reading the
| comments is wonderful.
|
| (Reminds me to install thunderbird and backup my gmail. I'm not
| young enough to trivialize losing my data.)
| MPSimmons wrote:
| This comment is needless gatekeeping. Nobody cares how many RSS
| feeds you subscribed to back in your hayday. Really.
| 6510 wrote:
| It doesn't matter how much other people care. It is that you
| want to have an informed opinion - for yourself.
|
| If I make an opinion prematurely I see myself defend it while
| familiarizing myself with the topic. I go blind to what
| contradicts it and remember only what fits my preconceived
| ideas. This is why I try to avoid it.
|
| Perhaps other people (you) are able to suspend their
| uninformed opinion but I highly doubt it.
|
| But okay, I will at least try (and no doubt fail) to describe
| the taste of the soup before you try it:
|
| The issue is that it gets so much better if you have a lot of
| subscriptions (sorted by pubDate) The experience is much like
| a search result but with everything you enjoy mixed together.
|
| There are no notifications of course since new articles
| happen much to frequently. In stead you gaze over the
| headlines periodically and open a few articles (in the
| browser)
|
| Because there are few people as interested in (the
| proverbial) antique silver thimbles as you those articles
| need to float to the top or live in a different folder.
|
| I for example one time crawled a bunch of fortune 500
| websites looking for feeds. The flood of press releases
| really gave me a sense what is going on. Lots of boring
| corporate speak but at least every page described a serious
| effort to accomplish something.
|
| You really need to subscribe to every remotely interesting
| small weblog you can still find so that you can at least
| bother to read the headlines. The small blog really needs
| you. This is where the original content happens.
|
| You will also find out that the rest of the web is a giant
| echo chamber with thousands upon thousands of websites
| recycling the same topics.
|
| Trump is no doubt important enough to have thousands of
| articles written about a single sentence he spoke.
|
| David Bowie was no doubt important enough to have a millions
| articles about his death.
|
| Think of the bizarre number of topics handed down to us by
| Rupert Murdoch?
|
| But is it what I should be filling my head with?
|
| I tried lots of online aggregators. Around 1000 subscriptions
| they stopped working. How do I get my data out?
|
| Ill just put https://danielmiessler.com/feed/ on the pile and
| ill be checking his headlines for years to come. Until the
| death of the website or the end of my existence. It's a
| perfect relationship. No need for a middle man - no thank
| you.
| Zhyl wrote:
| Haven't seen newsboat be mentioned so far. I've written a bunch
| of scripts that help subscribe to feeds (e.g. search YouTube for
| keyword and add RSS feed for channel of the top hit), scripts to
| curate (e.g. extract 'topics' from BBC articles that are only
| available on the page and not in the RSS feed) and consume (watch
| videos with mpv, open images in feh, add long videos to a
| backlog).
|
| It's one of the best news experiences I've had and is an
| improvement over what I was used to with Google Reader and
| Feedly. I feel much more in control of my content consumption.
| niemenmaa wrote:
| Care to share your scripts? Avid newsboat user here also!
| Zhyl wrote:
| They're very messy - they've built up slowly over the last
| year or so. Will add some comments over the next few days!
|
| https://github.com/daharka/newsboat_scripts
| Chirael wrote:
| I used commafeed with various categories and have a mixture
| of websites and YouTube channels. It was a game-changer for
| me when I discovered that you can "subscribe" to a YouTube
| channel's videos as an RSS feed by pasting the channel URL
| into a feed reader. All of a sudden YT became usable again.
| _curious_ wrote:
| I agree with this OP/authors thesis...long live RSS!
|
| But don't tell me the answer to anything is found in signing up
| for / purchasing a specific product, then it becomes a commercial
| :/
|
| "It's unclear what exactly destroyed RSS"
|
| The driving force (well before Google decided to close reader) is
| that many professional publishers (those who made a living/ran a
| pubco, notsomuch indie bloggers) stopped supporting RSS because
| it was harder to monetize RSS content consumers for obvious
| reasons.
|
| Even mid-late 2000s, I remember literally hacking constantly
| breaking RSS feeds from major sites or going back n forth with
| pubco support/webmaster requesting (at times even paying) for a
| custom feed because the format was so efficient.
| jtth wrote:
| Some of us never left. Reading this is weird, like someone
| "rediscovering" your suburban house.
| wasdfff wrote:
| I've been hearing the death bell for RSS for over a decade and
| here I am not noticing any difference in the quanitity or
| availability of feeds. RSS is no longer mainstream and deep
| into the nerd territory, but claims about its death have been
| greatly exaggerated.
| pembrook wrote:
| The reason RSS failed to reach mainstream adoption by users is
| because it is not user friendly at all. While I love RSS myself,
| no amount of tech nerd nostalgia is going to make it popular
| enough that your mom starts using it.
|
| Most sites still have implemented RSS in a terrible way. For
| example, many blogs I follow only show excerpts in their feeds.
| So the feed is worthless to me. Others put every podcast episode
| they do every day in between their posts. Annoying and worthless.
|
| Then, if you want to follow a site that publishes a lot of
| content, often you have to subscribe to everything or nothing.
| Sorry all mainstream tech news sites. I don't want to read 1,000
| low quality articles every day.
|
| Then comes the UX nightmare of actually finding the feed on each
| website you visit. If the site even has one.
| apostacy wrote:
| > The reason RSS failed to reach mainstream adoption by users
| is because it is not user friendly at all. While I love RSS
| myself, no amount of tech nerd nostalgia is going to make it
| popular enough that your mom starts using it.
|
| I think it is a false premise that something is only valid if
| "mom starts using it". That is the profit-driven mentality. eg.
| "how can we market this? How can we expand RSS market share
| into valuable demographics?" etc
|
| Also, I actually did teach my Mom to use RSS a decade ago and
| she still uses it today.
|
| These concepts are really not that hard. I told my mom it was
| like she was getting a newsletter from her blogs delivered to a
| special dedicated inbox, but without cluttering up her email.
| She was delighted.
|
| I think if someone knows how to use email, and knows how to
| browse the web, and knows how to sign up for email newsletters,
| they can handle RSS. I would argue that it is in many ways more
| useful for less computer literate people.
|
| > Then comes the UX nightmare of actually finding the feed on
| each website you visit. If the site even has one.
|
| This UX nightmare was solved 15 years ago. Browsers displayed a
| little icon in the corner when RSS is detected.[1], Firefox
| later displayed an RSS icon prominently in the address bar[2].
|
| The UX nightmare was then re-introduced as the RSS icon was de-
| emphasized[3][4] and eventually dropped completely, with a
| dubious justification.[5]
|
| [1]: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/FeedAutoDiscovery.aspx
|
| [2]: http://scripting.com/images/2011/01/15/rssicon.gif
|
| [3]: https://decafbad.com/blog/2011/01/15/how-to-use-feed-auto-
| di...
|
| [4]:
| http://scripting.com/stories/2011/01/15/mozillaPleaseKeepThe...
|
| [5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17613051
| pembrook wrote:
| I certainly agree, it's not that hard.
|
| Most things are not that hard. The problem isn't the
| difficulty level. It's friction.
|
| I mean, cooking healthy food for yourself and vacuuming your
| floors are both cognitively easy things to do. But most
| people don't have enough motivation to do these things all
| the time. It's why meal kits and the roomba exist.
|
| The minute you introduce the slightest bit of friction, you
| lose people. RSS contains enough friction to remove a 95%+ of
| potential users before they even get started.
|
| The reason why people prefer social media newsfeeds is
| because they have zero friction.
|
| I'm not arguing that the problem with RSS is that it should
| be driven by a profit mentality. I'm arguing the problem is
| 95%+ of people will never benefit from what it can
| potentially offer the world: a better way to consume the
| internet.
|
| I personally love RSS. Alongside email, it's my preferred
| method for reading the internet. However, I think the world
| would benefit more if the RSS ecosystem could be made viable
| for the average person. Whether that's a better protocol or a
| better client, I don't know.
| akkartik wrote:
| High-volume sites are not a good use case for RSS. We already
| have various social ways to filter. Like the site you're on. I
| think RSS should be for high-quality niche sites where you care
| about every single post.
|
| I subscribe to 200+ feeds, but only read a dozen or so stories
| a week on them: http://akkartik.name/feeds.xml
| thelazydogsback wrote:
| Other than the issue of posting abridged content, it seem like
| all the other issues can be handled with a capable client. It's
| better to post more (inlc. the podcasts, etc.) and then filter
| as you desire, no?
| pembrook wrote:
| Whenever you put the burden on the end user to endlessly
| customize everything you've just lost 95% of the mainstream
| public and [insert thing] remains a niche tool used by people
| on HackerNews.
|
| ...and then mom still ends up getting her news from Facebook.
| thelazydogsback wrote:
| 5% of users is fine -- nobody is saying that RSS should be
| the only interface to the internet-at-large. We just want
| to enable the 5% (or less) of users that are invested
| enough in the process that it's worth it for them to get
| their specialized content efficiently, but not lose out on
| valuable content.
| Zaskoda wrote:
| I would like to take one comment in this post to recognize Aaron
| Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
| catacombs wrote:
| What's his connection to RSS?
| adambyrtek wrote:
| It's literally in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia link
| above...
| tuukkah wrote:
| From the link: "At age 14, he became a member of the working
| group that authored the RSS 1.0 web syndication
| specification."
| Thristle wrote:
| After google reader went dark i used "The Old Reader" and when
| they moved to pay only (or they closed? i can't remember) i moved
| to inoreader
|
| its the only way i consume news/blogs. there is no way im
| checking 40+ websites every day for new content and that way i
| won't miss anything
|
| if a site has no RSS or its RSS feed doesn't work right chances
| are i just won't use that site
| stevekemp wrote:
| I always used rss2email (wrote a simple clone of that
| application in golang, so I could drop python from my servers),
| which ensures I don't miss updates and I have a local history I
| can search along with my email.
|
| https://github.com/skx/rss2email
| wei8wahL wrote:
| +1, that's my favorite way of consuming rss as well. I love
| the fact that it takes advantage of all the privacy features
| of the mail (like not phoning home when you open the
| content).
|
| I rewrote it as well, but for an other reason: when the app
| on my server fetches an item, it will issue a http request to
| get the content of the actual article and put it as
| attachment of the email - because on many feeds, the rss item
| content is just an excerpt, sometimes useless.
|
| Although, it works well for me because I use mutt and it
| displays the attachment with `lynx -dump`, other mail clients
| may phone home to fetch images/css/js/whatever when you
| display the mail.
| lokedhs wrote:
| I'm using the old reader and i Have never paid for it.
|
| There are some limitations for the free accounts but to be
| honest I have never run into them.
| jdripper wrote:
| +1 for Inoreader. It costs less than Feedly as well
| lewiscollard wrote:
| > and when they moved to pay only (or they closed? i can't
| remember)
|
| The incident you are thinking about, would be when they said
| they were going to close the service entirely, because of the
| volume of signups they had in the aftermath of Google Reader
| closing.
| https://blog.theoldreader.com/post/56798895350/desperate-tim...
|
| In the end they did not do that, but realising any service I
| sign up for might close just as readily as Google Reader put me
| off RSS for years. (I am a paid The Old Reader user now.)
| PappaPatat wrote:
| The Old Reader works like a champ.
|
| I went the same route as you did, and have the same attitude
| towards sites that do not provide a RSS feed: they drop of my
| radar.
| jayd16 wrote:
| It would be nice to see RSS come back and replace some of the
| centralized web. In theory social networks could be replaced by
| event feeds your friends publish. If you use something like IPFS
| you could, in theory, have a fully decentralized social network.
|
| There's still some business benefit to hosting, scraping,
| providing search etc. The business models are closer to the open
| web.
|
| I'm sure there's flaws and challenges in the idea. Even if
| private posts were encrypted you'd still leak some info publicly.
| Still I think its a neat idea.
| pedro1976 wrote:
| As one that loves and RSS and hated that many websites don't
| offer them anymore, I created a middleware that transforms the
| static HTML of most websites to an RSS/Atom feed. Its just a
| proof-of-concept, but maybe you like it :)
|
| https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy/
| k1m wrote:
| This looks interesting, thanks for sharing the link! I work on
| a project that's somewhat similar but users have to be explicit
| (using CSS selectors) about the elements that will be used to
| create the feed.[1] I like that yours appears to try to pick
| out the best elements without user input.
|
| [1] http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/
| ghostwriter wrote:
| Is there an up-to-date alternative to Media RSS aiming at sharing
| feeds of media content (on-demand video, streaming video,
| photos)?
| nergal wrote:
| I used Google reader but went for feedly. But I missed some
| simple reader for the terminal since that's where I spend most of
| my time. So I built gorss to read rss/atom feeds. Ended up
| reading more news faster :) take it for a spin:
| https://github.com/lallassu/gorss
| Tepix wrote:
| Luckily RSS support was already commonplace in blogging software
| by the time of Google Reader's demise so at many places, it never
| disappeared.
|
| I never used Google Reader, the corporation knows too much about
| me already, I don't want them to know what RSS feeds I subscribe
| to and what items I click on. Luckily there have always been
| alternatives.
| Chirael wrote:
| One of the best parts about an RSS reader is that it doesn't
| report every click back to Advertising Central to update the
| profile they keep on you.
| baby wrote:
| As someone who is a heavy user of RSS feeds (check my
| cryptography RSS feed[1]) and has had to implement RSS feeds for
| my websites:
|
| 1. we need to move away from XML. JSON would be a much better
| modern candidate.
|
| 2. we need better support in all web-first programming languages,
| and possibly in web frameworks.
|
| 3. we need to have a stricter set of rules on how to use HTML5
| tags like articles, sections, and such. An RSS feed shouldn't
| have to be manually produced when a crawler should recognize
| modern HTML5 tag and produce one on its own.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/mimoo/crypto_blogs
| j-f1 wrote:
| For #1, check out JSON Feed (https://jsonfeed.org/). It's at
| least supported by Feedly, and it's probably supported
| elsewhere too.
| tschellenbach wrote:
| If anyone wants to help, here's an open source project I worked
| on quite a bit: https://github.com/GetStream/winds Goal is to
| build RSS for regular users instead of the power user audience
| that RSS readers tend to cater to. I think this is part of the
| problem. The market for RSS shrank. All commercial RSS readers
| focused on the people who pay (IE the power users). Creating a
| user experience that is just not viable for most consumers. You
| end up in this vicious cycle because of that. RSS usage drops,
| RSS readers become more power user focused, sites drop support,
| continue the cycle.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| I don't mean to sound harsh but if a user is either required to
| run their own React/NodeJS (which is not going to happen for
| your stated target audience of "regular users") or to use a
| centrally managed RSS service that could go away at any
| moment... doesn't this defeat the purpose of syndication /
| federation a little bit?
|
| If
| larsrc wrote:
| I would have taken this article more serious if an RSS feed icon
| had appeared among the social media icons below the title.
| cygx wrote:
| We should go more old-school and resurrect NNTP instead: Have
| clients that render Markdown, and servers where users can create
| their own access-controlled groups.
|
| Have a group where only the owner may post: That's a feed.
|
| Have a group where only the owner may post top-level articles,
| but anyone may respond: That's a blog.
| edhelas wrote:
| If we get back to RSS, can we at least all stick to Atom 1.0 :) ?
| It's way stricter, simpler and easier to use, and I never found a
| parser that was not accepting it.
| qznc wrote:
| Atom has one annoying characteristic: It requires a self link
| to be valid. For static website generators it means you
| configure the domain for no reason except Atom validity.
| calibas wrote:
| When people don't use extra namespaces and everything is
| consistent, Atom 1.0 works great. And I understand why
| namespaces exist, but they create this system where each site
| speaks its own language and that fundamentally undermines the
| whole point of RSS as this shared way of communicating.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| I strongly agree: Atom is technically _substantially_ superior
| to RSS, and in regular feed readers is supported universally
| (with fewer issues, e.g. fields like title and description are
| _definitely_ plain text or HTML, as specified, rather than the
| RSS approach which leads to clients guessing all sorts of
| different things so that you can't safely use things like angle
| brackets in titles).
|
| However, the podcasting industry seems to have ignored Atom,
| which is _stupid_. Podcast feeds are exclusively RSS, and from
| information found, most major clients _probably_ don't support
| Atom. But the area is a mess with no good documentation
| _anywhere_ on what works or doesn't (and all of the even-
| halfway-decent content of this sort is from 2006-2010).
|
| --------
|
| People colloquially refer to feeds as RSS, even when they're
| mostly Atom. Reminds me a bit of the SSL/TLS situation (where I
| _think_ the name "TLS" is finally more popular than the name
| "SSL").
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