[HN Gopher] RSS is wonderful ___________________________________________________________________ RSS is wonderful Author : todsacerdoti Score : 546 points Date : 2021-10-23 11:47 UTC (11 hours ago) (HTM) web link (quakkels.com) (TXT) w3m dump (quakkels.com) | bertman wrote: | tl;dr: | | * RSS is awesome | | * OP wrote an "RSS Discovery Engine"[1] that | | "[...]works by taking the URL to a blog, or any site with an RSS | feed, and examining all the posts in the blog's RSS feed for | links to other sites. When a link to another site is found, it's | inspected to see if it also has an RSS feed. If the new site has | an RSS feed, then it's added to the results list.[...]" | | [1]https://rdengine.herokuapp.com/ | 0des wrote: | I wish RSS discovery were better. I got so angry one time when | I left my prepaid mobile data on and accidentally downloaded 12 | of the same introductory episode because I had auto-download | turned on and Wondery podcast network put out a preview on all | 12 feeds I was subscribed to of theirs. | | It frustrated me enough to look at ways I could support RSS and | introduce a new means of discovery, but as it turns out, RSS is | a finished spec and the authors requested that any changes to | the spec happen under a new protocol and a new name. I ended up | creating a new feed spec I've been cobbling together that | supports better discovery. Check it out, | https://readme.loud.so/ | | the TL;DR is that feeds can be treated as a show feed with a | singular show, or as a network feed with multiple shows, | allowing for a feed player consuming the new feed to provide UI | elements that let a user select which of the network's shows | they'd like to subscribe to, as well as a means to prompt the | user when a new show is added to the network feed. | | Also big shouts out to the podcast2.0 community who has been | very welcoming along the way, they are doing great things | within the confines of RSS as it stands. | xrd wrote: | It's cool but if we are going to use a new format (JSON) then | it feels like there isn't a good reason to consider others | like TOML. Or graphql-ish queries even. | tored wrote: | RSS is a finished specification but it does support | extensions. | 0des wrote: | Indeed! I highly recommend everyone to check out what the | Podcast2.0 people are doing, it's really impressive. | xrd wrote: | It is a little ironic that the first link in DDG is a | medium article but oh well. | | https://medium.com/@everywheretrip/an-introduction-to- | podcas... | | This is, indeed, fascinating. It's cool that they have a | micro-payment idea with Bitcoin lighting network. | RNCTX wrote: | More than a little, and associating with crypto is a way | to stay irrelevant. | lngnmn2 wrote: | It's not, when all you get in the feed is a bunch of links to web | pages full of ads and crap. | | It was supposed to stream full texts. | k1m wrote: | I work on a project intended to help people produce full text | feeds from partial ones. It's essentially a web service that | produces a new feed URL and handles article extraction when the | feed gets requested by your feed reader: | http://ftr.fivefilters.org/ | commoner wrote: | Clients like Feeder[1] and self-hosted services like Tiny Tiny | RSS[2] (through its Readability plugin) can extract the full | text from the source URL. | | [1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/ | | [2] https://tt-rss.org | Daunk wrote: | I really like RSS as well, but my main problem is always the RSS | "viewer". I haven't found a single one I like. I'd like to just | add a bunch of RSS feeds and set "tags" that I'm interested in | and get a notification about. Let's say I care about "Telegram" | if any of my RSS feeds mention "Telegram" or use "Telegram" as a | tag; I want to be notified. And I guess that requires a RSS | viewer running on the computer and not a website based RSS | viewer. But yeah, not found a single good RSS viewer yet. | upofadown wrote: | I have recently been trying to figure out something like that | as well. The best idea I have come up with so far is to convert | the RSS feeds into an email feed with rss2email and then filter | the email feed. | stevekemp wrote: | I wrote a simple rss2email application, which includes the | ability to only send emails for feed-entries matching/not- | matching a given term. | | I find it useful for simple filtering, but of course it being | email you can also filter at the receiving side, as well as | the sending side. | | https://github.com/skx/rss2email/ | axby wrote: | "Newsboat", a command line RSS reader, definitely has keyword | searches and a ton of other functionality for complex filtering | and grouping: https://newsboat.org/ | | I haven't found a good Android based RSS reader that does that, | though I haven't really looked. | mvaliente2001 wrote: | I prefer to use webpages as much as possible. I liked google | Reader, and once they killed I migrated to | https://theoldreader.com/ | frouge wrote: | That's where I think browsers are failing us (slightly). For me | the best way to use RSS would be directly along bookmarks. The | browser would should next to the title the number of unread | posts and that's it! That would be amazingly simple to use and | efficient. | berkes wrote: | Firefox has (had?) that. Called live bookmarks. | indymike wrote: | As a reader of written word content RSS was wonderful because it | allowed you to consume content without distraction, in the format | you liked it. For written word publishers RSS was problematic, | especially if you were trying to make a living from writing | because it stripped out all the paywalls, ads and/or traffic | tracking you needed to make a living. | | For non written content RSS is still huge (it's how podcasts work | https://podcasters.apple.com/support/823-podcast-requirement...). | Incidentally there are some very good podcast clients, and some | treat an RSS feed as podcast with a missing media | download/stream. | makecheck wrote: | I would have to assume they could track accesses to the RSS | feed if they wanted to. And they could embed text-only ad | messages. | | The problem isn't that these things became impossible, the | "problem" for ad companies is they couldn't do it in their | preferred obnoxious, overdone, and intrusive style. | gorgoiler wrote: | Remember when every Facebook page and profile had an RSS feed? | And FB messenger was XMPP compatible so you could use it with | bitlbee and your favourite IRC client. And you could email people | @facebook.com and it would show up in their messages. | | Google gets all the "credit" for killing RSS, but there's plenty | of dismay to be spread around! | axby wrote: | It is sad, but some good news for anyone considering trying | RSS: | | * all reddit subreddits can be turned into an rss feed by | adding ".rss" after the URL, e.g. | https://reddit.com/r/news/.rss | | * YouTube still supports RSS, but it is well hidden and I am | worried that it will be silently removed at some point. | | * HN supports RSS! | | * many major news sites still offer RSS, though it's often hard | to find the feed. Reuters shut it down about 1.5 years ago | Anthony-G wrote: | I unsubscribed from Reuters' feeds a couple of years ago but | it seems they still provide some feeds: | https://www.reutersagency.com/en/reutersbest/reuters-best- | rs... | axby wrote: | I had no idea this existed. It looks like it's | "reutersagency.com", which may be different from | reuters.com? | | These are the results that I get in my RSS reader, they | seem very different from https://www.reuters.com: | newsboat 2.10.2 - Articles in feed 'Reuters News Agency' | (10 unread, 10 total) - | https://www.reutersagency.com/feed/?taxonomy=best- | regions&post_type=best 1 N 2021-10-20 06:44 1.2K | Reuters exclusively reports Renault sees bigger production | hit from chip shortage; market reacts | 2 N 2021-10-18 06:52 1.3K Reuters exclusively reports | India presses Qatar for delayed LNG as power crisis mounts | 3 N 2021-10-18 06:50 1.4K Reuters reports Fortescue's | Forrest says Australia must commit to carbon cuts to keep | green energy advantage 4 N 2021-10-18 05:15 1.3K | Reuters reveals U.S. to lift restrictions Nov 8 for | vaccinated foreign travelers; market reacts 5 N | 2021-10-18 04:00 2.5K Reuters impact: U.S. lawmakers say | Amazon may have lied to Congress, Senator Warren urges | breakup, India retailers want probe after Reute 6 N | 2021-10-15 06:56 1.4K Reuters reveals how the illicit | copper trade is sapping South Africa 7 N | 2021-10-15 06:46 1.4K Reuters exclusively reports Italy | considering extending bank merger incentives to mid-2022 | 8 N 2021-10-15 06:43 1.9K Reuters first to report | Evergrande's $1.7 bln Hong Kong HQ sale flops; CEO in Hong | Kong for restructuring, asset sale talks 9 N | 2021-10-14 11:44 1.9K Reuters ahead with key Turkish | Central Bank news; market reacts 10 N 2021-10-14 | 08:38 1.5K Reuters ahead with news of German economic | growth downgrade | soorajsanker wrote: | Totally! | | May be a random thought but I feel like social media is crowded | and having multiple platform is going to kill the "SHARING" | part and it has now become "what gets higher ranking" kind of a | stuff. | | Imagine if all social media posts were having RSS feeds and | with one application we could all scroll through different | feeds! | spaetzleesser wrote: | That's a really sad development. If companies like Google or | Facebook had been as big in the 90s I bet we wouldn't have | E-mail but a set of proprietary, incompatible E-mail like | services. | | It seems these giants get big with the help of standards and | then they kill them once they have enough momentum. "Embrace, | extend, extinguish" is not only a Microsoft thing. | gorgoiler wrote: | We _had_ a set of proprietary incompatible email-like | services. | | AOL and Compuserve -- let's use numeric addresses so it's | kinda like phone numbers, right?! | | Also, whatever MSN tried to be when it first escaped from the | lab. | | Didn't Novell have some kind of email-substitute messaging | product that they tried to jam into their proprietary TCPIP | competitor, as well? | tomcooks wrote: | It's in the nature of capitalism to optimize and eat whatever | resource is available to promote growth, companies are the | result of this process and so is the forementioned EEE | strategy. Noncompliance to said strategies is how you keep | the sharks uninterested. | | This means don't use Facebook, don't promote Facebook, don't | use Facebook logins in your app, etc. | marcosdumay wrote: | The original email, from the 70's was a standardization of | the set of proprietary, incompatible email-like services | people had at the time. | gilmore606 wrote: | anyone else ever have a UUCP bang-path email address? good | times. | kazen44 wrote: | another good example of this is Google's influence in regards | to web standards. | | things like http2/3 and quic for one. and their influence on | the browser market aswell. | musingsole wrote: | It's now extending into the very infrastructure of software | development with kubernetes. | spc476 wrote: | it's just Google externalizing their training costs. | pjerem wrote: | Well, I remember. That was when the word << standards >> meant | something. | masklinn wrote: | Mostly it was the usual: large corporations use standards to | gain a foothold when they're minor players, then either drop | or proprietarily extend said standards to they can close it | up when they get a dominant position. | foepys wrote: | Don't forget that you need to use OAuth for everything so | even if they have a simple API, they can shut your whole | app's access down at any time, not just individual users. | agumonkey wrote: | I'll give them one pinch of excuse, they probably thought they | could design a better system. Start all new, from scratch, no | more rss/mail/irc... It failed. | stjohnswarts wrote: | It's all about platform lockin. Although RSS sorta lives on at | facebook. You can go to "public" groups and get an RSS feed. | Anything that requires a login though is inaccessible to RSS | for privacy reasons(?) . | harshitaneja wrote: | I was in school back then and had recently discovered email | spoofing and thought of trying it with facebook email addresses | and it would send the email message as messenger message from | spoofed to the spoofee without it being visible on the | spoofed's chat. It led to so many shenanigans over the holidays | that winter. | Torwald wrote: | The problem with RSS [in the context of the OP] is that you can't | see other subscribers. | | This is what adds a lot to the social feel of SM, everyone can | see who follows who. | | This social feel is part of the reason why non-tech folks use SM | over traditional Blogs to post online. If the goal is to move | people back on to the more traditional web, then it is necessary | to create this social feel. | | Now, the anonomity of RSS also has advantages, but similar to how | the OP added "Webrings" to RSS, social proof could be added to | RSS with another tool. So that all subscriptions can remain | anonymous if wanted, while still providing the social feel. | | Disqus is a little bit like that for comments. Disqus is also | proof of concept for the OP that such "organic" additions to the | standard blog concept. | lonk11 wrote: | I am building https://linklonk.com and I think it adds a social | proof to content discovery while preserving anonymity. Here is | how it works: | | - When you upvote an item, you connect stronger to users that | also posted that item and to RSS feeds that posted this. For | example, if you upvote "Post 43: Intentionally Making Close | Friends -- Neel | Nanda"(https://linklonk.com/item/827619236936941568) then you | will get connected to 6 users that upvoted that article and the | RSS feed https://www.neelnanda.io/blog?format=rss | | - The recommendation algorithm shows you other items upvoted by | users and feeds you are connected to. | | - At the top of you recommendations you see content from users | and feeds that you are most strongly connected to (ie, those | who have posted more useful content for you). | | With this mechanism you discover users and feeds that post | great content just by rating content, without having to know | the users personally. Yet, when you see your recommendations | you know that they are coming not from random people, but from | people who found useful for you content before. I think, that | is a more meaningful version of social proof than the aggregate | counts of likes in the traditional social media. | nabla9 wrote: | RSS is good because it removes people and behaviour, not | because it attracts people. | | Benefits of RSS: | | + Removing people who only read and discuss titles. | | + Removing reactionary first comments. | | + Removing posts that try to engage. | | + Removing people who come clicking trough Fb and Twitter. | Torwald wrote: | RSS is good because it is an open web standard and not owned | by a single entity. | pacifika wrote: | I think you are on to something. But is t that was hn is? | libertine wrote: | I think you're right. It doesn't mean it's the _healthier_ way, | because with social comes the whole social-feedback system | attached to it (upvotes, dogpilling, etc), but it is indeed the | mechanic that seems to drive user engagement. | | It's also what's leveraged to keep users consuming content and | to return for more. | | You see who follows who, who has many followers that might be | worth following, etc etc... the closest the web had to that was | the visitor counter? Or like you said the comments box like | Disqus? | | As an anecdote: | | Many years ago I used to visit a "technews site" that used | spread theories/inside info about the tech industry (mostly | just copied from forums in the form of "leaks"), very mediocre | with no basis for 80% of the content, and the whole thing about | it was fanboyism around AMD vs NVIDIA vs INTEL and PC vs | CONSOLES, all the engagement happened in Disqus comments - | spreading memes, making fun of eachother, insults, etc. | | I stopped visiting that site because it was trash, sometimes | they got things right though. A few weeks ago I was watching | some game trailer, and in the part of the Tech Reviewers | quotes, there they were - WCCFTech! "I thought, wow, how the | hell did they get to be side by side with the big boys?" And I | knew the answer, fanboyism + FUD and a comments section to let | people vent. Good for them. | notriddle wrote: | The other reason is that using RSS involves copying and pasting | URLs. | | Why does everyone overlook this? | xenomachina wrote: | With an extension (or native browser support, which used to | be common) this is not the case. | | Sites with feeds can link to them in their metadata using | <link rel="alternate" href="...">. This would cause a | subscribe button (usually the orange RSS logo) to light up in | the user's browser. Clicking it would automatically submit | the URL to the user's preferred feed reader (or if there were | multiple linked feeds, let the user choose one). | 0des wrote: | Can any of the downvoters on this comment enlighten me about | what they are seeing in this comment that those like myself | don't see? It seemed like an otherwise normal comment, it just | contradicts what some of the rest of us might think. That's not | something that is wrong or worthy of being silenced. | | Can we give this person another chance and maybe, in the spirit | of the weekend, allow a contradictory opinion to appear in this | discussion? | cartesius13 wrote: | HN downvotes are not different from any other social media | platform. It doesn't matter what the rules says, people will | downvote things they disagree and that's it. It always comes | to this and I personally don't see how it could be any | different, even if I myself don't do it | Turing_Machine wrote: | Downvoting should cost _something_. Half a point, say. Or | you only get a limited number of downvotes per week. | _Something_. | | Also, you should be required to give an actual reason other | than "I disagree". | | I know that's not what "the rules" say. "The rules" are | wrong. | 0des wrote: | I find that more often than not, addressing it the way I | just did brings the comment back into discussion rather | than just brushing it aside. No need for leveraging rules | that may or may not be followed, sometimes an impartial and | rational third party inquiring buys enough 'hang time' for | an otherwise okay comment to reach more people before it is | returned to the gallows. | | If I may, for a moment: filter bubbles are a useful but | also dangerous thing, and if we allow ourselves to silence | small irritances eventually, like with opiate dependency, | we will find ourselves in the situation where the smallest | pains are now grave and world-ending issues that stop | everything and must be addressed/stopped immediately. I | often disagree with the downvoted comments as well, however | still upvote and vouch when they're rational yet | contradictory. | | Two sided discourse is one of the most important things to | me, and in a way I think that we are losing the ability to | disagree with each other, and that is a suboptimal outcome | of our heightened ability to filter our data streams to | weed out opinions we don't like. It's not enough for some | people to disagree now, you must pursue the dissenter until | you've destroyed their will to continue. | | Surely it does not need to be spelled out how this can | result in a chilling effect of outside thought and rational | debate. | pvg wrote: | _I find that more often than not, addressing it the way I | just did brings the comment back into discussion_ | | It doesn't, it just starts a pointless offtopic meta | discussion. The forum guidelines explicitly ask you not | to do that because it's boring. The votes, on average, | tend to sort themselves out without such 'interventions'. | [deleted] | Turing_Machine wrote: | > The forum guidelines explicitly ask you not to do that | because it's boring. | | Is it not possible that the "forum guidelines" are | _wrong_? | 0des wrote: | Forgive me for challenging you, but if the rules for | downvotes are not applied evenly, where is the bar for | which other rules must be applied evenly? It is saturday, | and presumably with the exception of Dang and a few | others, none of us are 'on the clock' so to speak when we | are here, despite what our procrastinations during the | week may indicate. If a topic on the front page list is | boring, you pass it up, and all is right with the world. | Why is this different with comments? (this is a | rhetorical question, but I'll receive the response if | you'd like to add one) | mattcwilson wrote: | Just a friendly observation from a third party that this | particular thread has in fact gone meta about HN, | commenter behavior, and the site rules. Which are pretty | clear. | | I wonder if it may be the case that these rules have good | reason to exist, and if so, then the discussion you are | looking for seems to have happened at least once before, | a long time ago. | Turing_Machine wrote: | If the point keeps coming up, perhaps it _needs to be | addressed_ rather than being modded into oblivion. | pvg wrote: | It has been addressed many times and there doesn't seem | to be an obvious way of further addressing it beside | doing exactly what the receipts-for-downvotes people | want. Neither the mods nor most HN users want that, | though and the arguments against it remain compelling. | pvg wrote: | Because the goal of the site is things of intellectual | curiosity and repetitive things are not that. Repeated | stories are usually duped off the front page and meta | about votes is far, far more repetitive than the | occasional story dupe or story that's not interesting to | some person or another. It would absolutely eat the place | alive. If you're interested, though, there is years upon | years of moderator and user commentary on this: | | https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true& | que... | krapp wrote: | The only rule regarding downvoting is to not complain | about being downvoted. Aside from that, everything is | fair game, including downvoting for disagreement. | Turing_Machine wrote: | Indeed. I don't actually agree with the original commenter. | | But that doesn't mean I want to shut him or her up. | leemailll wrote: | I think google tried this and failed | EleanorKonik wrote: | Man, this makes me miss StumbleUpon :( | productiveyogi wrote: | Super. That was such a good site. Tried looking for it a few | years back and got redirected to "similar" websites. | netfl0 wrote: | This makes me miss Web 1.0. | | https://sheldonbrown.com/ | causi wrote: | Dang, I miss when I could click on a category and read | everything in that category. Now you just have to punch terms | into a search box and hope you have the patience to get all | the way through an endless scroll of pages that may or may | not fit what you want to see. If you want to, say, make sure | you read every review of Sony headphones your favorite modern | review site did, you just can't. You just have to hope you | found them all. | rtkaratekid wrote: | I love that site. I've fixed a few classic bikes with its | help. | 14 wrote: | I have only had one experience with RSS and that was back in the | day with EZtv. I would subscribe to all my favourite shows and | when they would air on tv the RSS feed would find it | automatically and download the show. I remember someone asking me | how come I didn't have cable and was telling them that I just | stream my tv. Said look, loaded up my computer and went to my | downloads. What made it even better was since I am on the west | coast the show I wanted to show him had already aired on the easy | coast 3 hours earlier so streamers had already upped it | commercial free. So I had my show commercial free prior to it | airing locally. That was my experience with RSS and yes it was | wonderful. | krono wrote: | I'm not going to post links here, but Sonarr, Readarr, and | other "arr"s are FOSS projects that provide similar automation | for monitoring and downloading of shows and films. | | Illegal, immoral, but can't deny they're interesting projects! | | Edit: For any over-eager MPAA agents who might be reading this: | I'm not actually running these applications :) | hyproxia wrote: | >immoral | | [citation needed] | krono wrote: | There's no accounting for taste. | cabalamat wrote: | What's immoral is copyright law, which in practise (if not | in theory) is largely a way to allow big corporations to | rent-seek. | | The internet was developed under the radar of a lot of | powerful institutions -- both corporations and governments | -- and gave unprecedented power and control to individuals. | | The whole history of how the internet has developed from | 2000 onwards is the powerful institutions attempting | (mostly successfully) to castrate the internet and make it | a place that doesn't threaten their power any more. | | I want the old internet back, though I expect what I'm more | likely to get is a jackboot stamping on a human face | forever. | [deleted] | ourcat wrote: | OPML is the tree. RSS are the vines. Items (articles, podcasts | etc.) are the fruit. | | And with OPML's ability of 'inclusion' (to any remote tree or | branch), it makes creation, curation and 'harvesting' the fruit, | a joy. | upofadown wrote: | >But over the years RSS became synonymous with other protocols, | like Atom, that are designed to do the same thing. | | These days, if you poll a "RSS" feed do you sometimes get an Atom | feed? You don't see many explicit references to Atom anymore... | canyon289 wrote: | Should I take this to mean atom is irrelevant these days? Ive | been looking into creating an RSS Feed for my blog, but there | is Atom option as well so wasn't sure what to pick, and many of | the references I found are quite old | axby wrote: | I have seen this, and just now realized that my client | supported both RSS/Atom feeds and I didn't realize there was a | difference. | cblconfederate wrote: | I use twitter as my RSS because it allows chronological sorting. | It's great, no noise, only what i want, i can like stuff i want | to keep. Pity that everyone has abandoned RSS but OTOH RSS did | not evolve to keep up with the social media craze. Liking / or | some way to register reactions should be part of the spec. | ryukafalz wrote: | This discovery engine sounds like something that would be amazing | to have integrated directly into your RSS reader. I'm not sure | I'd use it standalone, but I absolutely would appreciate it | alongside my usual feeds. | maximedupre wrote: | That cool, I remember how RSS feeds were the shit even just a | decade ago. | | Then they slowly faded away from mainstream adoption. Once | Mail.app removed RSS, it seems like RSS were no longer part of my | life lol | | These days, I love Twitter and Reddit, not sure I'd be able to go | back to RSS. | | I really appreciate the transparent nature of RSS, but so long as | Twitter has a "Latest" feed - a feed that lists all tweets in | chronological order, I'm good. | saikatsg wrote: | RIP Aaron | throwaway984393 wrote: | > I think the ideal online community is decentralized | | Communities have to be centralized - or at least appear so. Human | beings simply are shit at cooperating with people outside of | their in-group. An in-group requires a close-knit simple | structure identifying with one or more ideas or people. People | need to put their faith in centralization: central leadership, | central consensus, a place, a thing, an idea. If you tell people | "we're going to build a community of loosely-knit people and | groups", they will not have much faith in the idea and the | community will be weak. As much as you like the _idea_ of | decentralization, you have to hide the idea of it from the users, | and simultaneously provide things to make them feel closer and | directly connected. | masswerk wrote: | I think, everyone who hosts a blog or thinks of hosting one | should think about RSS - it's not that difficult, even, if you | run custom software. (It's worth it. Even, if it's just a | statement about not surrendering to SM.) | mox111 wrote: | I used to blog quite a lot, but nowadays I often worry that my | ideas are far too sporadic and random to deserve a single, self- | contained blog post of their own, so I end up writing nothing at | all. | | Twitter incentivises this spontaneity, but I do think there | should be some middle ground here. | uallo wrote: | There is. Blog posts can be as long--or as short--as _you_ | want. Microblogging is a thing. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microblogging | karaterobot wrote: | Maybe we can just call a mulligan on the last fifteen years of | internet media. No blame, no finger-pointing. | chenster wrote: | Long live RSS! | UncleSlacky wrote: | As a regular downloader of BBC Radio podcasts, RSS has been a | godsend since they redesigned their site around the godawful "BBC | Sounds" mobile style. After the initial pain of tracking down | each programme's own site (which contains a link to its RSS feed) | and sticking them in Thunderbird, I can now easily download all | the podcasts I want even quicker than before the Sounds redesign. | [deleted] | beckman466 wrote: | i've heard the SSB protocol [1] be described as a "more advanced | RSS". it's basically a distributed social network built on the | ideas of RSS. | | [1] _SSB: An Identity-Centric Protocol for Subjective and | Decentralized Applications_ , | https://conferences.sigcomm.org/acm-icn/2019/proceedings/icn... | streamofdigits wrote: | How can we reverse the trend that a wonderful piece of tech such | as RSS is obliterated without any regard to implications? If you | have been using RSS readers you'll have noticed that over time | even quality sites (not ironic) slowly remove their RSS feeds and | leave only the usual social media links. | | This means that they are providing their audience with no option | but to have a social media account (where their interests can be | tracked and cross-referenced, data mined etc), not to mention | that they endorse and promote particular for-profit private | companies (which is in general not done lightly, unless there is | a partnership or other disclosed interest) | | New open source tools like this engine, especially if they | integrate more with this other wonderful piece of tech, the email | client could create a more healthy information retrieval | environment. The time to think anew about how to evolve a | positive digital life is now and the pieces of the puzzle are all | around us. | johnchristopher wrote: | Easy peasy. | | Make RSS provides as much data as publisher/provider/broker | want, enforce a common set of metadata when (re)sharing content | so stats can made and funnels be monetized and add a mandatory | opt-in et voila. | | What ? | cabalamat wrote: | > mandatory opt-in | | What does this mean? To me, "mandatory" implies compulsory, | while "opt-in" implies optional, i.e. not compulsory. | johnchristopher wrote: | Mea culpa. I meant mandatory as in "there MUST be an opt-in | mechanism for users to agree to sharing their metadata". So | the privacy conscious crowd can still read RSS items and | share them without automatically sharing metadata. | | Without a way for authors/producers/adnetwork to extract | values from the RSS format there's no incentives for them | to use it. So give them what they want _if_ we want. | | Big words for what is just UTM added to the specs. | | I am saying this tongue in cheek because I doubt people | would opt-in if there's nothing for them in it. They opt-in | for facebook and google because they get | gmail/googlesearch/facebookfeed but with RSS they already | have everything they want. | | RSS is hard to monetize without putting it behind a | paywall. | ako wrote: | Problem is that RSS is not in the interest of the publishers, | but mostly serves the interest of readers: | | * Hard to keep users on your site - in an RSS reader you just | open the next interesting article, most likely from another | site. So it reduces page views. | | * Harder to serve ads - RSS readers show the text of the | articles, not all the other stuff on the page of the publisher | | * Easier to steal content - other sites have an easy way to | take your content and republish it on another website. | | * Harder to track your users - most rss readers just show the | content, not all the javascript nonsense required to track the | user. | | * Harder to monetize - for profit sites like to keep their | readers behind a paywall, but how likely is it that you'll pay | for a new site, if your RSS feed shows content from 20+ news | sites? You can't pay for all of them, so you'll most likely pay | for none. | | If you want RSS to succeed, it needs to bring value to the | publishers. | hcarvalhoalves wrote: | Podcasts have been distributed via RSS forever, and it did | not stop publishers from growing followers, advertise or | charge for content. I call BS that RSS doesn't work for | publishers, it was killed by social media because "the feed" | turned into the main way to consume content on the web. | clairity wrote: | > "If you want RSS to succeed, it needs to bring value to the | publishers." | | rss does bring value to publishers: viewers/listeners. that | publishers want more than that is a separate issue. | cortesoft wrote: | Viewers/listeners are not valuable by themselves. They are | only valuable if the publisher gets paid for them, and they | get paid via advertising (or a subscription fee). RSS does | not provide advertising revenue for publishers. It could | work with a subscription model, I suppose, but I am not | sure there is the demand to sustain it. | clairity wrote: | you're looking at the situation too narrowly. publishers | & content creators _also_ want esteem and influence, | which they can bank to get paid later (perhaps through a | related but separate effort, like product 'reviews'). | spaetzleesser wrote: | RSS is definitely a problem for publishers that depend on | ad revenue and "engagement". In RSS it's difficult to | develop dark patterns to attract more attention. | grumbel wrote: | The biggest issue with RSS in my eyes is that it tries to | replace the Web instead of just being a better way of viewing | the Web. The info RSS provides should be extracted out of the | HTML itself by your Web browser, not a separate document | provided by the content creator. It should be like a cross | between Bookmarks and ReaderView on steroids. Leaving it up to | the content creator just makes adoption much harder than it | needs to be and is a large part of the reason why the semantic | web never really went anywhere. | | But as long as browser manufacturers don't really care, I don't | see much chance of anything changing. Bookmarks haven't changed | one bit in 25 years, despite offering so much potential for | improvement. And it's not just Google's fault either, even | Firefox removed that little bit of RSS integration that they | had some years ago, when they really should have done the | opposite and made it more useful and flexible. | RNCTX wrote: | I agree about the "replacing the web" observation, however I | think the nostalgia is warranted in that it's people | splitting hairs between the lesser of two evils. | | While RSS replaced web sites (particularly aesthetically), | they are less nefarious than social media companies and | search companies whose only goal is to use the content of | others to sell ads and their own products. | rpastuszak wrote: | The one-word answer to "why this keeps happening?" would be | "advertising". RSS makes it much harder to control ad | inventory. Obviously the bigger problem here is how content | creators/publishers are paid for their work. | | Both Google and FB are often blamed for the current state of | things, but the ways in which they impact open standards such | as RSS differs. | smusamashah wrote: | I always blame chrome for demise of RSS. When chrome came, all | other browser (firefox, opera, even internet explorer) had | native RSS view support. To this date, chrome opens RSS as XML | garbage e.g. open this in Chrome https://quakkels.com/index.xml | | Chrome came, all other browsers lost, then finally Google | killed Google Reader and we had nowhere to go. That's how I | believe it happened. | | What's still worse is that Chrome DOES NOT SUPPORT RSS | natively. | amadeuspagel wrote: | > I always blame chrome for demise of RSS. When chrome came, | all other browser (firefox, opera, even internet explorer) | had native RSS view support. To this date, chrome opens RSS | as XML garbage e.g. open this in Chrome | https://quakkels.com/index.xml | | I tried opening this link in Chrome and Firefox, and it looks | exactly the same in both. | julianlam wrote: | They do both look bad now (raw XML). However at least in | Firefox, there used to be some basic styling. | | Remember the little blurb in the header about how "this RSS | feed doesn't provide its own styling so we've added our | own"? | | It seems to have gone away now too. | cabalamat wrote: | Chrome doesn't care because either Google doesn't care, or | because Google is actively hostile to open web technologies. | thesuperbigfrog wrote: | Google killed their very nice (at the time) RSS product, | Google Reader, so they could push people to Google+, their | solution to compete with Facebook. | pphysch wrote: | I can see the rationale behind Google's (mis)judgment. | Social media was steamrolling RSS in popular adoption, | and seemed like the future. Sometimes, new technology | _does_ replace old technology. But there were a lot of | issues with planning and execution. | thesuperbigfrog wrote: | >> But there were a lot of issues with planning and | execution. | | That's a very generous understatement: | | https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/10/18134541/google-plus- | pri... | | https://www.zdnet.com/article/thanks-for-nothing- | jerkface/ | | https://mashable.com/archive/google-plus-history | systemvoltage wrote: | I absolutely _despise_ Chrome. It nags me into Google 's | ecosystem and it just feels wrong to use a window to the | internet owned and controlled by the biggest bully on the | internet - Google. | | Chrome is the reason for many failures of the web experience. | Support Firefox, it is equally as good IMO. | | I'd like us to not see a day where we get "Only supported on | Chrome" warnings. | scotty79 wrote: | > open this in Chrome https://quakkels.com/index.xml | | Chrome just displays xml. Edge does the same. And Firefox, | displays it as if it was mangled html, so no xml tags are | shown. | j_koreth wrote: | It's too bad too. Firefox used to support RSS till recently | I believe. I wonder if Pocket had anything to do with it. | beckman466 wrote: | > How can we reverse the trend that a wonderful piece of tech | such as RSS is obliterated without any regard to implications? | | RSS being killed is a part of the commodification/privatization | of knowledge. RSS simply gives users too much freedom. | | _" What if we thought of some of the most lucrative tech | companies as essentially tax collectors, but privately-run (and | thus not democratically accountable)? Economists call this | rent-seeking, and what we're seeing with a lot of tech | companies is that their telos is little more than "rent-seeking | as a service". It's basically baked in to their business model. | Once you've fully developed the technology underpinning your | service - be it coordinating food delivery, or processing | payments, or displaying intrusive ads to people who just want | to read a goddamn page on the Internet without being entreated | to buy stuff - then your whole schtick then becomes collecting | taxes on a whole ecosystem of economic activity."_ | | https://dellsystem.me/posts/fragments-86 | the_snooze wrote: | You're seeing this in the podcast space, where content is | normally distributed via RSS. You have big players like | Spotify buying up podcast productions and making them | exclusive behind their app. Luckily, right now open RSS | distribution is still the norm for the overwhelming majority | of podcasts, but who knows how long that'll last. | | That quote is absolutely right with the MO of a lot of tech | companies these days. They don't actually innovate on tech | itself---that's too risky and expensive. Instead, they | innovate on business models to make themselves toll operators | on everyday life. | ghaff wrote: | >Luckily, right now open RSS distribution is still the norm | for the overwhelming majority of podcasts, but who knows | how long that'll last. | | Presumably it will probably last so long as advertising | pays the bills for those for whom podcasts are a directly | commercial endeavor. At which point they'll go behind | paywalls and/or die. | wffurr wrote: | Paywalls and RSS aren't mutually exclusive. Ars Technica | offers full-text RSS feeds for subscribers. Substack | sites have RSS for public posts but also some subscriber- | only posts. Podcasts could work similarly; I'd be | surprised there weren't some already. | ghaff wrote: | Fair enough. Although I suspect that a bunch of new | subscription services is not what most people campaigning | for RSS are looking for. | coldpie wrote: | Patreon provides RSS feeds for creators, that's how | paywalls are done for most podcasts these days. | spaetzleesser wrote: | "They don't actually innovate on tech itself---that's too | risky and expensive. Instead, they innovate on business | models " | | So true. When you look at most of the unicorns most of | their tech could have been done 10 or 20 years ago. | | Considering their size the innovation output of giants like | MS, Google or Apple is really low. | pphysch wrote: | One of the great contradictions of the Californian Ideology: | | On one hand, freedom is sacred, especially freedom of speech, | information, etc. | | On the other hand, private property is sacred, whether it is | physical or intellectual. | | Yet intellectual property laws directly impede the free flow | of speech/information. So what'll it be, private property or | freedom? | bavell wrote: | What makes this specific to California instead of the US as | a whole? | beckman466 wrote: | they most militantly 'defend' their intellectual property | system and have also monopolized many communications | networks | pphysch wrote: | See here: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology | spaetzleesser wrote: | That's libertarianism, not specific to California. In | principle everybody has a lot of freedom but in practice | the powerful accumulate more and more power and freedom for | themselves at the expense of others. | [deleted] | cabalamat wrote: | > How can we reverse the trend that a wonderful piece of tech | such as RSS is obliterated without any regard to implications? | | I'm not sure this is doable without government regulations. | | I'm not sure it is doable _with_ government regulations, as to | do it properly would require politicians who 're both clueful, | and not captured by vested interests. | streamofdigits wrote: | well governments (and the massive number of associated | government funded sites) could start by always having RSS and | _not_ sending their citizens towards the social media | platforms with gratuitous links and endorsements. | | that doesn't need much regulation, just an elementary ethical | / moral code | | but you are right about the limited role of governments in | resolving this. this is not a complex / high risk / long term | project where you need them. actually just the people in this | thread could probably solve this from a technical | perspective. | | the elephant in the room is the publishing industry. one | could excuse an initial decade of them being dazed and | confused, but its 2021 and they should wake up and smell the | coffee. | cabalamat wrote: | > well governments could start by always having RSS [...] | that doesn't need much regulation | | But it does require them to be clueful. | | Does anyone think that Joe Biden or Boris Johnson could | give a coherent explanation of RSS (or any other piece of | computing technology)? | streamofdigits wrote: | you are giving the massive number of people _below_ the | figureheads at the very top an easy pass... government IT | is a major, major, segment and technology, protocol etc | choices they make can have huge influence. | ferdowsi wrote: | I don't think the trend can be reversed. I don't blame social | media, I think RSS is incapable on the supply side as well. | Quality content producers are not going to use RSS because | | - HTML/CSS/JS allow for much more sophisticated, expressive | presentations than simple markup, using video/images/canvases | and whatnot. | | - News is much more frequently updated now than in 2005. With | RSS, the update cycle is not in control of the content creator. | | - RSS is largely incompatible with paywalled subscriptions. | paulryanrogers wrote: | > - RSS is largely incompatible with paywalled subscriptions. | | But it doesn't have to be. It really comes down to the | clients having so many different ways to authenticate and | therefore a complex UI. Consumers and producers also struggle | with how to manage so many subscriptions. | | Full disclosure: just started working for a company trying to | streamline paid podcasts. | mawise wrote: | RSS works great with HTTP Basic Auth. This is the approach | I'm using with Haven[1] to expose private personal blog | content via RSS. In this manner, each user gets a dedicated | RSS link of the form: | https://name:token@example.com/rss.xml | | You can even use the same tools to prevent login sharing | such as checking how many IPs the URL is fetched from etc. | | [1]: https://havenweb.org | Crespyl wrote: | I've also seen some private/paid RSS feeds just using | tokens in query parameters (I think Patreon and Ars | Technica do this), eg | 'https://www.patreon.com/rss/foo?auth=...' | | I'm not entirely sure what the benefit of one over the | other is, unless some RSS readers/podcast apps have | issues with Basic Auth or maybe it's just easier to fit | into existing code server-side. | streamofdigits wrote: | On the first point, you only need to include a summary of the | resource for notification purposes. The idea is that the user | still visits the site to consume the actual content | | I am not sure what you mean with the second point, the timing | of updates is under the full control of the content creator | no? | | The third point is quite relevant. Some sites ask that you | subscribe to get updates (via email). Obviously they want to | have better visibility of their audience rather than have a | large set of passive (lurkers). That is a legitimate choice. | D13Fd wrote: | You're missing two big ones: | | 1. RSS readership can't be effectively tracked, and regular | readers may transition to RSS, so RSS content becomes a black | hole of readership. | | 2. RSS can't easily be monetized via ads or a paywall | (although some sites have managed it, like Ars Technica). | | It sucks, but most sites have to make money somehow, and RSS | just isn't very conducive to that. | ajvs wrote: | FOSS front ends like Nitter provide a RSS feed for Twitter | feeds. Invidious for YouTube and Teddit for Reddit also work, | though the original sites in this case still provide their own | RSS feeds. | fartcannon wrote: | Newpipe for Android is also good and available in the f-droid | market. | imglorp wrote: | How long until momma bird locks out whatever api nitter is | using? | RNCTX wrote: | https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge | | Not possible as long as the pages are not walled behind a | login. | Nextgrid wrote: | The point of Nitter is that it uses the API their official | web client (which is a JS SPA) is using. They can't lock | out Nitter without also locking their own frontend out. | [deleted] | hazelnut wrote: | Social media sites offer a simple way to share links with their | circle which drives back more traffic than just one user | consuming the content through RSS. | | Driving more traffic means more money. It's a self-made problem | by the content creators. | streamofdigits wrote: | thats a very good point, the ease of "propagating" the news | of an RSS update surely plays a role in decisions publishers | make | | but its more a client-side issue, the degree to which the | social graph of a person (e.g their list of email or phone | contacts) is easily accessible / allows forwarding with | comments etc. maybe the problem is that client app | functionality has remained stagnant over decades? | | also consider that a lot of that easy social media virality | is actually part of the problem | sam2426679 wrote: | RIP, Aaron Swartz | phgn wrote: | My personal gripes with RSS: | | * No pagination, and in practice it's very inconsistent how many | recent posts are included. This makes the feeds only useful for | new things, not as an archive. | | * I don't actually want the full post content in the main feed, a | description for every item would suffice. For a blog like | WaitButWhy, the RSS XML is huge. | hwers wrote: | To play devils advocate, the pagination on e.g. twitter is | really crappy too (non existent) | axby wrote: | I am a big fan of RSS but I strongly agree with both of your | points. I have only used it for checking out new things. Though | having the option to fetch the full feed without visiting the | website would be a great feature. I use an android app that | seems to do that by scraping the site, I love it. | | That being said, for some reason that escapes me, some news | sites don't make it easy to see a list of articles at all | (looking at you, https://cbc.ca/news). And when writing this | comment, I see that if you scroll down far enough you can see | more articles in this really annoying tile format (the app is | better but I hate downloading a ~300 MB app when a <10 MB RSS | reader is all I really want). | | TL;DR: somehow it isn't just RSS but even somewhat publicly | funded news sources seem to prey with the "get you stuck in an | endless cycle of scrolling while you're trying to find the | content you want" trap. | a1371 wrote: | For your first gripe, I think it wouldn't add anything over | crawling a website. If you only want to archive the content, | with semantic HTML you can easily know where the article is. It | seems like a solved problem when browser reader modes can | extract the data so well. | | For your second gripe, perhaps a separate "excerpts" feed would | do it. I know some podcasters publish the same content over | multiple feeds for this kind of customization. | ttepasse wrote: | Repeating myself: There is a spec for feed pagination. But it | depends on opt-in and small work by the feed publisher. | | https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5005 | kgwxd wrote: | I wish faster moving RSS feeds, like HN and reddit front pages, | kept anything that makes it there longer, maybe for a full day. | I'd like to be able to open my reader just once a day and have it | check all feeds and catch the full days activities but, the way | they work now, it'll only get what happens to be there at that | point in time. | armoredkitten wrote: | If you are into self-hosting, I've been using Miniflux for the | past six months or so and it's been great. There are lots of | options for RSS readers in that space, but the advantage is | that they can be checking feeds "in the background" without you | needing a dedicated program open. | timbit42 wrote: | This is why I keep my RSS reader open 24/7 on my desktop and | have it updating my feeds every 30 minutes. | ttepasse wrote: | In theory there is a spec which would enable full feeds via | paging, enabling RSS clients to go back in time until the | beginning of the feed. In praxis ... well ... specifications in | RSS-land ... | | https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5005 | | You best bet is subscribing to a server hosted RSS client like | Feedbin which being always on can check more often, can | subscribe via Websub/Pubsubhubub or tailors their schedules for | refetching via caching, ttl or analysing the posting schedule. | beckman466 wrote: | > I'd like to be able to open my reader just once a day and | have it check all feeds and catch the full days activities but, | the way they work now, it'll only get what happens to be there | at that point in time. | | the un-user-configurable and un-opt-out-able straightjacketed | sorting algorithms in these walled gardens are all about | getting users 'hooked' and creating FOMO | andrewgleave wrote: | SnipRSS.com[1] clips web content which may not belong to a feed | e.g. random web article, into your own RSS feed which you can | then curate and share etc. | | "For all the great content that doesn't have a feed" | | [1]https://sniprss.com Disclaimer: I built it :) | Vinnl wrote: | There are also many similar tools mentioned in the comments on | my Show HN for a similar tool: Show HN: RSS feeds for arbitrary | websites using CSS selectors [1]. | | Edit: ah OK, it's slightly different: SnipRSS allows you to | curate arbitrary content from the web into a single RSS feed, | whereas the tools I referred to periodically check a single | source and generate an RSS feed from that. Sorry for the | confusion. | | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27739568 | andrewgleave wrote: | The idea behind SnipRSS was to use OG and other metadata to | extract title, description and an image which can then be | edited in the app. | | Primary users are those curating content who have little | technical experience and those who don't want to write | selectors but are happy with a browser extension. | junon wrote: | RSS as a concept is wonderful. In practice, getting fulltext is | rare, and clients for RSS are either POC skeletons of | functionality, or they're bloated and include a bunch of shit | I'll never use. | | An RSS reader that lets me keep things in my task bar as a small | popup, and shows notifications, is all I want. | mrzool wrote: | > In practice, getting fulltext is rare, and clients for RSS | are either POC skeletons of functionality, or they're bloated | and include a bunch of shit I'll never use. | | You just need the right tools. Miniflux[1], which I will never | get tired of recommending at every occasion, has a scraper | built-in, so you just need to enter one or two css selectors | and it fetches the text for you, ready to be consumed in its | excellent, HN-inspired web interface or in your client of | choice. | | If you can't be bothered to self-host there is a hosted option | which is only 15$/year. | | Miniflux is the reason I'm a heavy RSS user today (I follow | just over 300 feeds at the moment) after years of being | intrigued by the possibilities of the standard but ultimately | unable to stick to it due to wrong/inadequate tooling. Miniflux | was my turning point. | | [1]: https://miniflux.app | derekzhouzhen wrote: | Notifications? I don't wand another distraction. I want to read | the news when I want to, because 99.9% of the things in the | world don't need my immediate attention. A half day delay is | fine. | deergomoo wrote: | > clients for RSS are either POC skeletons of functionality, or | they're bloated and include a bunch of shit I'll never use | | There's definitely some good options on the Mac side. I use | Reeder, which does exactly what I want it to and little more, | and there's NetNewsWire which feels like it's been around for a | million years at this point. | | > In practice, getting fulltext is rare | | This is very true, and unfortunate. The app I use has an option | to pull the text from the linked page (much like a browser's | Reader Mode), but it's not perfect and often totally mangles | things like image galleries. It's a shame, because I find a lot | of the feeds I follow have content I want to read but their | websites are unreadable; for every three lines of text there's | an embedded video or "articles you may be interested in". It | destroys my ability to take the article in. | calpaterson wrote: | It is often cost prohibitive to put the full text in the feed | because of all the clients that neither handle the inbuilt TTL | value, nor use http caching correctly. Large (in terms of | bytes) RSS feeds are one of the key places where etags and | conditional requests are useful but many clients just ignore | all that and repeatedly request the whole feed. | | This sounds like it couldn't possibly matter but it's actually | quite easy for a full text RSS feed to be the vast majority of | bandwidth for a site. | jhot wrote: | Miniflux enters the chat. | pizza234 wrote: | > In practice, getting fulltext is rare | | It depends on the use case. | | One may use RSS just as preview, to decide what to read and | what not, rather than use it as replacement of a website. | | Using RSS as preview, actually, while it may seem just an | irrelevant layer of indirection, can actually prevent excessive | consumption :) | approxim8ion wrote: | Sure, but it'd be ideal if clicking on it would load the | fulltext rather than jump to my browser and load the source | in its full, bloated glory, or at the very least with | formatting I can't control. | fxj wrote: | I use inoreader.com for reading my rss feeds but also for | finding new ones. They have a large RSS directory of all the | subscribed feeds of their users at their site which you can | search by keywords and create your own RSS feed or just | subscribe to them. | axby wrote: | I would agree until I found: | | * newsboat (command line) for desktop: https://newsboat.org/ | | * Feeder on android (which also scrapes the full article | content in most cases): | https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsense... | | Both are definitely not bloated, though I don't know if there | is any decent notification functionality in newsboat. It is | open source though, so maybe it's not that hard to add. You can | configure it to auto refresh so I've just kept it open when | I've been following the news obsessively. | mynameismon wrote: | Ironically, it doesn't parse Hacker News' RSS page. | mattcwilson wrote: | Good eye - send a pull request and help correct the oversight! | mynameismon wrote: | Wait, where? | lewiscollard wrote: | Playing with the code, I think there's actually three | problems here: | | 1) I don't think doesn't recognise relative paths in the tag, | which HN uses and is entirely valid, e.g.: | <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" | href="rss"> | | 2) The code does HTTP requests in more than one way (aio, | `get_response_content`, `get_request`, and whatever | feedparser uses internally), and only one of those sets the | User-Agent header properly, which is probably causing it to | get flagged as a not-nice bot | | 3) ...and once you fix those problems you will likely get a | 503 for requesting the feed too often during testing :) | | [Edit: and no, I'm not _just_ complaining; expect some pull | requests over the next few days.] | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: | Is there a way to "RSS" everything? I want to see a feed of | Videogamedunkey videos, artist tour pages, @dril's tweets, etc. | all just sorted chronologically. | | The feed should also start empty and only show things I tell it | to. | ttepasse wrote: | Youtube still has feeds; instead of using Youtube's | subscriptions I simply have a folder in my Feedreader. Some | Feedreader services also to have a Twitter integration but I | found that overwhelming. Also some have a Newsletter-to-RSS | gateway, which is rather practical. | | The big things you can get into RSS-land; it's worse with | smaller stuff like some random artists tour page. | rakoo wrote: | There are multiple projects that "RSS-ify" websites with no RSS | feeds. rss-bridge (https://github.com/rss-bridge/rss-bridge) is | one of them. | | I personnally use fraidycat (https://fraidyc.at/), a slightly | different "news" reader. Contrary to all other readers it | doesn't give you an infinite flow of all posts, but rather a | reverse chronological list of who has updates. It's the same | paradigm as most IM apps, but instead of people it's sources | and instead of messages it's posts. | | Fraidycat can parse a lot of sources and all the ones I care | about (including youtube channels, twitch channels, facebook | public pages) are properly handled | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: | I'll look into that. Thanks! | psdmm wrote: | ttHrk jsymt lmd@ lSlb@ Hrk@ htzzy@ bstmrr - | https://mesael.com/25/%D8%AA%D8%AA%D8%AD%D8%B1%D9%83-%D8%AC%... | apatters wrote: | I am a big fan of RSS one of the reasons (alluded to by this | article) is the type of content that tends to get exposed via | RSS. | | Frequently the type of content that gets syndicated via RSS is | long form and non-commercial. | | It turns out that these two properties produce a pretty good | signal to noise ratio which filters out precisely the kind of | trash that has ruined the web over the last decade or two (long | form content at least has the possibility of teaching you | something or presenting an idea with some kind of rigor; and | since RSS isn't great at monetization, the worst offenders in | media tend to deprioritize it). | | Of course RSS is a very imprecise filter, but it's basically the | antithesis of a Twitter or Facebook feed, where everything is | short form and you tend to see whatever serves the platform's | commercial interests (i.e. their definition of engagement). | | This matters to me because at a certain point I realized -- I | have basically never read anything short form on social media | which enriched me in a meaningful way. | | I have learned a lot from studies, reference works, long form | analysis, and books -- basically all the quality knowledge I | possess has come from one of these sources. | | At best social media has given me occasional links to these | things (scattered among an ocean of junk information). | | It's mostly because of how RSS originated with blogs I guess, and | who was involved in designing it. But for whatever reason it has | been far more valuable to me than any other form of content | syndication online. | maximedupre wrote: | > Of course RSS is a very imprecise filter, but it's basically | the antithesis of a Twitter or Facebook feed, where everything | is short form and you tend to see whatever serves the | platform's commercial interests (i.e. their definition of | engagement). | | At least with Twitter's "Latest" feed, you get everything in | chronological order, without manipulations from the algo | (AFAIK). | | As far as the signal-to-noise ratio goes on Twitter, depending | on the quality of people you follow, you will also get exposed | to many amazing long-form articles. | runnerup wrote: | Same with YouTube's "Subscription" tab. | maximedupre wrote: | Yep. I used to be an Instagram user. Stopped cold turkey | when they removed chronological feed. | bobthepanda wrote: | One interesting footnote about a specific type of longform | content; recipes are categorically not under copyright in US | law, but specific collections of them (like a specific cookbook | formatting) can be, and recipes are also theoretically | copyrightable if they contain "substantial literary | expression." Which is why most food blogs usually have a | longform essay of some personal anecdote right before the | actual recipe you're looking for. | daniel-s wrote: | https://based.cooking/ | | Just recipes; no stories, no bloat. | KronisLV wrote: | The context behind why and how the site was created should | be in Luke Smith's videos which are linked at the bottom of | the page, in case anyone missed it: | | > About this site | | > Founded to provide a simple online cookbook without ads | and obese web design. See the story of this site unfold in | three videos: | | > https://odysee.com/@Luke:7/a-demonstration-of-modern-web- | blo... | | > https://odysee.com/@Luke:7/the-war-against-web-bloat- | continu... | | > https://odysee.com/@Luke:7/soydevs-destroyed-epic-style- | by-b... | | I'm not sure i agree with Luke on everything, or even that | his tone is always conductive to productive discussion, but | there is definitely a lot of merit in creating small and | fast websites without any unnecessary bloat nowadays. | | The "Website Obesity Crisis" presentation also has stuck | with me ever since i ran into it: | https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm | 867-5309 wrote: | I always thought that was simply for SEO | bobthepanda wrote: | Even regular cookbooks these days will have a bit of fluff | before the recipe for this purpose. Though in a cookbook | pictures of food also serve this purpose. | | Some examples from cookbooks: https://www.maangchi.com/wp- | content/uploads/2015/01/mul-naen... | | https://www.cookbookdivas.com/wp- | content/uploads/2021/10/Cel... | doctorhandshake wrote: | I always thought it was to push the useful information as | far down the page as possible so you have to scroll by a | bunch of ads to get to it. | throwaway984393 wrote: | It's also a sales tactic. Mary Jo Rose is selling you her | story so that you will buy the idea that you should | subscribe and keep reading her posts even if you have | nothing to cook, and eventually use her Amazon link to | get 10% off paper towels. | bobthepanda wrote: | This is worse with web but is old as time. | | It used to be common for ingredient sellers to issue | recipe books that would extoll the value of their goods, | trash their competitors', and the recipes would usually | include the ingredient even if it didn't do anything for | the particular food you were trying to make. (E.g. "our | flour is pure, unadulterated, and not bleached using | toxic ingredients unlike our competitors who also eat | babies", which was a more effective marketing tactic | before the existence of food regulatory authorities | curbed the worst excesses.) | | The recipe on the side of the box is a much smaller-scale | version of this. | dgdosen wrote: | Good use of "signal to noise ratio" | graiz wrote: | RSS is really based on polling and that's not great. It also | doesn't provide a lot/any analytics back to the content site to | give attribution of content readership. | | I think the idea is super interesting but it's not surprising | that Google/Facebook and other ad networks made it less relevant. | tomcooks wrote: | Can't you track who subscribes to the RSS feed, because of that | polling you mentioned. | | RSS is trivial to monetize, there are other reasons why | Google/FB killed it such has having to educate people first, or | not wanting to promote a free standard that would have not | allowed them to monopolize the market | leephillips wrote: | Some readers support pubhubsubbub or whatever, so no polling is | required, if the site uses it. | derekzhouzhen wrote: | That's exactly the point; I don't want them to know I am | reading. | X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: | What's your favorite RSS reader? | derekzhouzhen wrote: | My own, of course. https://airss.roastidio.us | axby wrote: | I like https://newsboat.org, though it is command line and | since I started using an android RSS reader, I've stopped using | newsboat as much. | | I also like Feeder for Android, free, no ads, scrapes full | articles in a wonderful way: | https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsense... | timbit42 wrote: | QuiteRSS on desktop. Flym on Android. Both are free with no | ads. | axby wrote: | I used Flym for a while and went to download the source one | day, in fear of it suddenly disappearing, and apparently | updates are blocked by Google, and the dev gave up? I'm very | curious to know more about it: | https://github.com/FredJul/Flym | | Since then I've used Feeder, it's similar (also free, no ads, | can scrape full articles) but is missing a few things that I | liked about Flym. It was easy to export my list of feeds | (OMPL file, I think) and import into Feeder: https://play.goo | gle.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsense... | beardyw wrote: | Feedly. Occasional sponsored story. Android and desktop Chrome | synchronised. | throw_m239339 wrote: | well Google Reader back then was the best and obliterated any | single commercial reader's offering. Since Google nonsense | about Google+ and Reader's demise, well inoreader isn't that | bad as a RSS client. | imutemyteam wrote: | yes, as a member of the RSS, I agree that the Rashtriya | Swayamsevak Sangh is wonderful :P ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-10-23 23:00 UTC)