[HN Gopher] I Still Use RSS
___________________________________________________________________
I Still Use RSS
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 462 points
Date : 2021-02-03 15:17 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (atthis.link)
(TXT) w3m dump (atthis.link)
| 13415 wrote:
| I personally find these articles amusing because I'm still
| wondering whether I should start using RSS. I've always kept in
| the back of my mind over the years that I really should check out
| which RSS reader is the best so I have it ready when I need one.
| SimeVidas wrote:
| If you want to give RSS a go, here's a collection of over 900
| feeds for web developers: https://github.com/simevidas/web-dev-
| feeds
| oxplot wrote:
| I run rss2email on a schedule on Github Actions and get feed
| right in my inbox.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| "I curate my own content"
|
| Twitter replaced much of the RSS use in the mainstream back when
| the upheaval happened and the move from blogs and feeds went on.
| You pick the sites and content writers you want to follow and
| visit their posts when they tweet out the updates. It's not too
| complicated. You choose who to follow, we are all not at the
| complete mercy of an algorithm on our feeds. It's worked out
| quite well for like what, 7-8 years now? I even have created
| specific accounts to read RSS feed content and push it to
| twitter. And yes that's thanks to the basic data
| sharing/formatting technology of RSS that makes it powerful -
| whether there's reader apps out there or not.
| throwaways885 wrote:
| I'm so happy websites have kept RSS around, because even if it's
| mostly used for machine-to-machine feeds nowadays, we obviously
| piggyback on top of it and benefit. It could've been so easy for
| big sites to replace it with proprietary APIs for GitHub, YT,
| etc...
| nmz wrote:
| What I particularly like about rss feeds, is that I can keep up
| with anything whatsoever, It is perfect for any serialized
| content, what I find important is not the notifications, that is
| just a side effect. But about choosing what to stay up to date
| with. you have control over the content you consume, when you
| want it. The same way you'd use a bookmark in books.
|
| I've also recently switch my rss feed client into just my email
| client, installing rss2email, throwing all the content to email,
| means I can use any phone whatsoever and have exactly the same
| content.
| susam wrote:
| I provide an RSS feed for my blog. From my access.log, I see that
| there is a decent number of subscribers to my feed. Here is the
| data I could pull from it: Feedly 91
| subscribers Inoreader 16 subscribers Feedbin
| 6 subscribers NewsBlur 4 subscribers The Old
| Reader 3 subscribers BazQux 2 subscribers
| WordPress 2 subscribers
| ------------------------------- Total 124
| subscribers
|
| I get about 4000-6000 hits to my website on a normal day. It
| increases by 5 to 10 times if a post hits the HN front page. When
| I publish new post, I see from the HTTP referer information in
| the logs that about 30 or so hits come from users who find a link
| to my post in their feed reader. These are very small numbers but
| they are good enough to keep the feed alive.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Something I'd be curious about: how many of the hits on a new
| post are by RSS readers before the post hits HN vs. after? I
| know RSS is the most reliable way for me to notice a new post
| on blogs that update infrequently, and I wonder how many HN
| submissions come from people seeing a new post in their feed
| readers.
| avian wrote:
| I have about the same distribution of RSS clients on my blog as
| well. Feedly seems to be the largest, with about 10x reported
| subscribers than their competitors. Newsblur, The Old Reader
| and Inoreader are all about the same, but far behind. Then
| there's a sea of various self-hosted readers like the
| TinyTinyRSS and desktop programs.
|
| Note that these are all self-reported numbers from the user
| agent string - as far as I can tell, Feedly might be inflating
| their numbers to give an impression of a large user base and to
| appear on top of lists like this.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I came here to say exactly this: my numbers are similar to
| yours (and from headers only, like you[1]), and a decent
| proportion of my views come from feed clients. My blog
| generator takes care of the feed for me; I haven't thought
| about managing it in years.
|
| [1]: https://www.yossarian.net/snippets#vbnla
| D13Fd wrote:
| It is unfortunate that it's so tough to track RSS viewers. I'm
| always tempted to convert the feed to cut-back version just so
| I can see what posts are actually popular.
| dmje wrote:
| Feedburner was always the way. Then Google bought it and I'm
| not sure what happened next
| COGlory wrote:
| What is the topic of your blog?
| susam wrote:
| I don't write very often but when I do it is usually tech or
| math. I didn't link to it here because it might look like
| self-promotion. In case you are interested to take a look,
| please see my profile for the link.
| andredz wrote:
| Hey! I read some of your articles a couple of days ago :) I
| liked your blog.
| xnx wrote:
| How do you identify Feedly subscribers? Isn't there a single
| request from Feedly that it uses for all of its users?
| susam wrote:
| Here is what I see in my access logs:
| [30/Jan/2021:12:58:03 +0000] "GET /blog/rss.xml HTTP/1.1" 200
| 22757 "-" "Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html;
| 91 subscribers; like FeedFetcher-Google)"
| [31/Jan/2021:12:58:04 +0000] "GET /blog/rss.xml HTTP/1.1" 200
| 22757 "-" "Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html;
| 91 subscribers; like FeedFetcher-Google)"
| [01/Feb/2021:12:58:13 +0000] "GET /blog/rss.xml HTTP/1.1" 200
| 22757 "-" "Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html;
| 91 subscribers; like FeedFetcher-Google)"
| [02/Feb/2021:12:58:19 +0000] "GET /blog/rss.xml HTTP/1.1" 200
| 22757 "-" "Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html;
| 91 subscribers; like FeedFetcher-Google)"
| [03/Feb/2021:12:58:30 +0000] "GET /blog/rss.xml HTTP/1.1" 200
| 22757 "-" "Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html;
| 91 subscribers; like FeedFetcher-Google)"
| justusthane wrote:
| So feedly tells you how many subscribers they have when
| they hit your feed. That's neat of them.
| jlelse wrote:
| Not only Feedly does this. Most of those feed readers do
| it.
| avian wrote:
| In fact, Feedly was the only large centralized feed
| reader that didn't do subscriber count reporting via UA
| string for the longest time. They made you do a GET
| request on some API endpoint if you wanted to get your
| subscriber count.
|
| They implemented it some time back, but it's still kind
| of buggy - at least for my blog. Two or three different
| IPs periodically do a GET on my feed URL with the Feedly
| UA and they all report different subscriber counts.
| IceWreck wrote:
| I use FreshRSS as my client. Most news sites have feeds. For
| those that dont, there is RSSBridge which helps you make them or
| extend truncated feeds.
| meremortals wrote:
| I've been loving Fraidyc.at for RSS
|
| While https://rssbox.herokuapp.com/ is great, I wish more
| websites allowed RSS rather than resorting to hacky workarounds
| armoredkitten wrote:
| I have tried feed readers on and off over the years, and never
| really stuck with it. It just felt like too much coming in with
| no rest. (This was largely before social media...now that
| sentiment feels quaint.)
|
| But I've recently gotten back into feed readers, and what I've
| realized is that I think a lot of my frustration was from news
| websites, which are just a constant stream of new content. Now I
| stick to a few blogs, HN top posts feed, and a couple other low-
| quantity feeds, and things are much better. I read the news
| directly off their websites once in the morning, and for the rest
| of the day I just rely on picking up major news via Twitter, etc.
|
| Anyway, if you're looking for a nice, simple feed reader, I can
| recommend Liferea on Linux. I didn't have much luck finding a
| web-based client I liked, but recently I've started using a self-
| hosted instance of Miniflux, and I can also recommend that as
| well.
| kixiQu wrote:
| I really liked https://fraidyc.at/ because of how it gave
| frequent/infrequent posters equal space. I switched to miniflux
| for reasons, but I wrote a user script to reorder unread
| entries to simulate that.
| https://maya.land/userscripts/miniflux/round-robin-sort/
| hobs wrote:
| Youtube RSS still works well, me and my buddy use it to monitor
| things instead of using whatever interface youtube has decided
| today, combine that with youtube-dl and you have a great
| experience.
| williamsmj wrote:
| I've found the github "recent activity feed", but is there really
| no RSS feed for https://github.com/notifications?
| paxo wrote:
| I actually make my own RSS feeds using RSS-Bridge. It is a
| trivial process if you a bit of PHP. Then, I'd hook them up to my
| FreshRSS aggregator fork.
| runningmike wrote:
| Use rss more and more. It's part of the open web no borders for
| sharing. Using rss in a own program is so much better than
| scraping. Scraping is a failed option for sites that do not have
| a decent api or RSS feed. Wordpress offers rss by default which
| fits the gpl philosophy of Wordpress.
| jlelse wrote:
| Same. And there are still a lot of people blogging as well:
| https://jlelse.blog/blogroll
| royjacobs wrote:
| I'm happily using Feedly ever since Google Reader got shut down.
| I genuinely would be missing out on a lot of content if people
| would stop providing RSS feeds, especially for blogs that only
| update very sporadically.
| john-tells-all wrote:
| Seconded. I've been a very happy user of Feedly for years.
|
| If someone posts an interesting, valuable article, what's the
| probability they'll post more? Very high! I'm happy to
| subscribe to their content and enjoy their insights!
|
| Related: I now subscribe to Hacker News users via
| http://hnapp.com/
|
| Example: Jeff Geerling http://hnapp.com/?q=author%3Ageerlingguy
| Fogest wrote:
| I personally went the self-hosting route using FreshRSS and
| quite enjoy it. I couldn't really justify the monthly Feedly
| costs when I had server resources sitting around being wasted.
| bad_username wrote:
| Feedly is best of both worlds - you can use it as a plain
| linear feed reader, or let it use AI to sort your stuff by
| popularity and even discover feeds by keywords. Its price is on
| the steeper end tho, if you want to go pro.
| coldpie wrote:
| I pay for Feedly not because I'm interested in any of the Pro
| features, but because Google Reader taught me that you should
| pay for things you like so they will stick around.
| cbradford wrote:
| +1 Big fan of feedly. I pray they never get bought by Google or
| someone that will shut them down.
| genericacct wrote:
| I might be wrong but my impression is that feedly exists
| precisely because google closed its google reader service and
| offered to export your subscriptions to feedly. It would be
| majorly funny if they bought it "back".
| ghaff wrote:
| >I genuinely would be missing out on a lot of content if people
| would stop providing RSS feeds, especially for blogs that only
| update very sporadically.
|
| For me, that's the real value of RSS even if, truth be told,
| I'm more inclined to just find stuff through Twitter, here,
| etc. these days. I agree on Feedly. For all the hate on Google
| shutting Reader down, I've always seen it as an effect of not
| many people using RSS rather than a cause.
|
| (I'm also sympathetic to the srsly Google? How much effort
| would it have taken to keep it going? argument. But, as has
| frequently been mentioned, working on Reader would probably
| have been career suicide or at least a guarantee of stagnation
| for anyone involved given the way Google operates.)
| fxj wrote:
| I am using inoreader.com and never looked back. Even the free
| version is great. I use the paid version and it gives me all
| what I need. I can only recommend it.
| cecida wrote:
| Visited, signed up, kicked the tires, installed it on my
| phone, and just upgraded to a supporter account. Has some
| very useful features.
| eisa01 wrote:
| Agree, especially handy with the support for email
| newsletters!
| giomasce wrote:
| Just reached this HN entry via my self hosted tiny tiny RSS. Long
| live RSS! Fortunately RSS took off enough before social networks,
| so that many website still more or less support it.
| davepeck wrote:
| RSS was and still is lovely plumbing. Given the expanse of its
| podcast offerings, I wonder if NPR is (quietly) the world's
| largest purveyor of RSS feeds?
| ju3030 wrote:
| I was actually wondering about that when I saw an RSS app on the
| store. To me it's like an icon that indicates a pre-2012 website,
| interesting
| axegon_ wrote:
| So do I. Mind you, no words can express how much I miss google
| reader. Mid-last year I got motivated to start building it myself
| but eventually moved away since it's way too much for a single
| person to handle.
| idolaspecus wrote:
| When we industrialized food production we all started eating too
| much and too shitty and now practically all of us have overweight
| and unhealthy bodies. Feeds, push notifications, aggregators, to-
| do apps, notes apps, etc are all artifacts of the exact same
| process happening to our minds. It is so incredibly easy, so
| trivially easy, to spend 15 minutes on the internet and locate an
| effectively infinite amount of high-quality shit to read or watch
| or listen to. There's really too much for us to handle, so we
| build tools and services to help us manage all that information
| streaming towards us. But what we've forgotten is that we don't
| need to manage all the information out in the world, all we need
| to manage is however much we can ingest and digest. The
| bottleneck in our informational lives is absolutely not inventory
| management, _it 's the bandwidth between our ears, which is the
| same is it's always been_.
| stargrave wrote:
| I have got many URLs in newsboat: wc -l ~/.newsboat/urls -> 367.
| And nearly all of them are shared in recfile:
| http://www.stargrave.org/links.rec that is linked from
| http://www.stargrave.org/Links.html. Mostly it contains various
| personal blogs.
| monkeydust wrote:
| I recently got back into RSS.
|
| I am running https://miniflux.app/ on one of my boxes and its
| been great.
|
| Typically, most days I keep on top of my news/interest in close
| to real time but there are days where this doesnt happy, just too
| busy.
|
| So I jump into miniflux which is pulling in news and I can
| quickly in a few minutes scroll and get a good feel for what's
| going on, what I have missed and explore further anything
| interesting.
| nkellenicki wrote:
| I still use RSS. One thing I've discovered is that nearly every
| site offers an RSS feed. I presume they're not aware of this, and
| that whatever CMS they use (WordPress, etc) offers it out of the
| box. Often times it takes a simple "View Source" to find it.
|
| RSS doesn't seem to be dying, it's just that it's no longer
| mainstream since Google Reader died. I run my own instance of
| TinyTinyRSS on my server and couldn't be happier.
| kibwen wrote:
| In 2020 I fell into a deep and unproductive habit of excessive
| YouTube binging. It was RSS that broke me out of it. I can
| subscribe to the worthwhile channels that would otherwise spur me
| to visit the site (and hence be subjected to the endless
| recommendation algorithm); yes, YouTube channels still support
| RSS! Then I can watch the video in my reader and be done with it.
| No "one more video", no morbid curiosity to check the comments. I
| can watch what I want and move on with my life.
| nreece wrote:
| RSS is dope. At Feedity, we love how feeds make it immensely easy
| and valuable to monitor hundreds and thousands of news sites,
| blogs and what not.
|
| With our rebranded and revamped platform, New Sloth
| (https://newsloth.com), we continue to generate feeds for public
| sources and aggregate content across channels, all neatly
| collated in one place, making it super useful for busy
| professionals and savvy businesses to stay ahead of the crowd and
| make informed decisions.
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| You can get an RSS feed of replies to your HN comments:
| https://hnrss.org/replies?id=YOUR_HN_NAME
| loopz wrote:
| QuiteRSS works well. It's for both Windows and Linux.
|
| https://quiterss.org/
|
| No affiliation, just a satisfied user.
| 0066cc wrote:
| Original author here, QuiteRSS is also an excellent choice I
| should have mentioned!
| superkuh wrote:
| I second that. If you have a lot of feeds, thousands, then
| QuiteRSS is one of the readers that will work reliably. It can
| be ram heavy with 1k+ feeds but it does the job.
|
| In the article the author mentions one way to get RSS feeds
| from a youtube channel. This is how to get it from a youtube
| username,
| https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=USER_ID
| kevincox wrote:
| The YouTube channel pages are also marked up properly so most
| tools will auto-discover the feed URL.
| Nition wrote:
| Lots of discussion on feed readers but basic support should be
| built in to browsers really.
|
| Doesn't have to be a full "reader", it can just have a little RSS
| icon that shows a (1) etc for new items, which shows the links to
| the posts when clicked. Show up a little marker on the same icon
| when a site has a feed you can subscribe to. Manage your feeds in
| the settings somewhere.
| duckmysick wrote:
| Firefox used to support RSS, but they removed it in late 2018.
| awhow wrote:
| Thunderbird supports RSS...and NNTP.
| _peeley wrote:
| If you're an Emacs user, I'd really recommend checking out elfeed
| (https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed). You can subscribe to RSS
| feeds just by adding a line to an org-mode file, and then
| organize and tag all your feeds with all the usual org-mode
| features.
|
| Also, I think the author is being a little pessimistic about the
| state of RSS. It might not really be "mainstream", but almost
| every blog I visit has a feed, also Substack offers feeds,
| YouTube channels, Reddit, etc. I only just started writing my own
| self-hosted blog, and within a week or so I got an email asking
| me if I have an RSS feed. RSS is very much alive and well, if
| niche.
| worker767424 wrote:
| There's a joke about Emacs being a great OS that has everything
| except for a decent text editor.
| rasengan0 wrote:
| this just works: https://feeder.co/
| riedel wrote:
| Actually the best user experience I get by using the telegram
| messenger as a feed aggregator. I use Manybot to only post the
| links, which plays nicely with telegram's instant preview feature
| (pretty much like reader mode/readability). Love this way to read
| feeds (also syncs across devices, etc)
| TrianguloY wrote:
| As many others here I've been a rss users since the Google reader
| days, but I use it on my android mobile phone only.
|
| I use inoreader and News+ [1] because it allows to automatically
| sync each hour and notifies me of new content to check (and it
| shows the list of posts with the title, the first few sentences
| of the content and a picture if any, which allows to quickly
| check if I want to read it or not).
|
| I'm happy with it, but it was the first option I tried, and I
| feel like I'm missing others. Does anyone know of another good
| alternative? It should have this 'sync each hour and notify if
| changes' feature, preferably dark/black mode and the title + cut
| description list.
|
| [1]
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.noinnion.a...
| ansonhoyt wrote:
| Had to give this a +1 before skimming on with my feeds (Feedly).
|
| I feel my RSS feeds can largely be configured to serve me. The
| configuration is transparent. I am in control of what internet I
| consume regularly.
|
| With my social media feeds, the configuration is limited and
| opaque (e.g. what exactly does "Not interested in this tweet"
| do?). I don't feel I have much control. I severely limit social
| media...too many chances to disrupt me.
| sideproject wrote:
| Love RSS - it's too simple. :) I run a small tool called Newsy
|
| https://www.newsy.co
|
| Which converts your un-used domain into a content aggregator.
| Originally I wasn't planning to do RSS and instead offer an API
| access. But none of my users ever asked for an API access, but
| they all wanted RSS feeds.
| jamesponddotco wrote:
| I think my digital life would be a mess without an RSS feed
| reader. Because of its existence I do not need to touch Twitter,
| Reddit, YouTube[1], or any Mastodon instance, for example, as I
| can just have the updates that interest me from these networks in
| the comfort of my Feedbin[2] feed.
|
| While Hacker News does not provide an interface that notifies you
| when someone replies to you, hnrss.org provides an RSS feed for
| that[3], so I know when I get a reply. I also have a separate
| feed for Ask HN[4] and Show HN[5], so I never miss anything that
| may interest me, even if other people do not care about it. Heck,
| I found this post because it showed up on my feed reader!
|
| As a system administrator, I can use RSS to keep up to date with
| security issues in Ubuntu Server[6], WordPress[7], and CVEs in
| general, but also to follow commits in SourceHut repositories[8]
| and releases for pieces of software I use daily, but do not have
| repositories for my Linux distribution.
|
| I sure as heck hope it never go away.
|
| [1] In the YouTube case, with RSS, mpv, and youtube-dl, I never
| even have to see their web interface.
|
| [2] https://feedbin.com/
|
| [3] https://hnrss.org/replies?id=${YOURUSERNAME}
|
| [4] https://hnrss.org/ask
|
| [5] https://hnrss.org/show
|
| [6] https://usn.ubuntu.com/usn/rss.xml
|
| [7] https://www.exploit-db.com/rss.xml
|
| [8] https://git.sr.ht/~${USERNAME}/${REPO}/log/rss.xml
| jjav wrote:
| Same here, RSS is the center of all my internet content
| consumption. How else could one keep track of things? There
| isn't any substitute.
|
| I get HN via RSS but didn't know about the replies feed, cool!
|
| I use rss2email to turn everything into effectively a mailing
| list, so convenient.
|
| Very sad that craigslist broke their RSS feed a few months ago,
| so I can no longer shop for anything advertised there for sale.
| prepend wrote:
| I've never had as peaceful a work life as back when I used
| yahoo pipes to organize all the RSS feeds from GitHub and Jira
| and others into a unified view of what's happening in all my
| projects.
|
| It broke due to a fluke because a network engineer decided to
| try to implement a software based firewall that blocked rss
| files. This was such a weird error but the engineer didn't know
| what rss or curl was if that tells you something. I changed
| jobs before fixing it and by the time I cared about such things
| again pipes was gone.
| cecida wrote:
| God, Yahoo Pipes is a blast from the past. Yahoo did so many
| things that were new and interesting, but never seemed to be
| able to bring them altogether into a cohesive product.
| dmje wrote:
| Pipes was radical. Loved it.
| onli wrote:
| I don't want to spam the project, but since you mention Pipes
| like that: I tried to bring it back with
| https://www.pipes.digital/. Can't do everything the original
| could and some things it just does differently, but merging
| RSS feeds and filtering them is exactly the main thing I use
| it for myself.
| PascalW wrote:
| Thanks I'm an RSS nut too but didn't know about hnrss. Super
| useful to keep track of replies.
| jamesponddotco wrote:
| Yeah, I found so many cool projects that did not get any
| atention on Show HN because of hnrss.org. Definetely a
| feature Hacker News itself should add -- they do have RSS for
| the front page[1], though, with a volume of about 3460
| articles per month.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
| [deleted]
| alsetmusic wrote:
| Reeder (Mac, iOS) is one of the first apps I install on any new
| device where I didn't migrate everything with Apple's setup
| assistant. It's absolutely crucial to my digital life that I
| have an RSS client, as it's the first step in my chain of tools
| for consuming content. I usually won't bother bookmarking a
| site that has periodic updates but no RSS feed as I deem such
| sites not to be worth the effort.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| I use RSS to read HN!
|
| and about 170 other sites, at last count.
| Bolderman wrote:
| Me too. Using Tiny Tiny RSS on my NAS for years now. Love it!
| akmarinov wrote:
| I found this post via RSS!
| thenoblesunfish wrote:
| Newsboat! It works great (make sure to turn on the multi-
| threading option to update faster).
| asdff wrote:
| Newsboat is excellent. Pairing it with a cron job to silently
| update your feeds is a good move too. No more refreshing feeds
| yourself or dealing with the autorefresh feature throwing in
| unread feeds out of order in the middle of you scrolling
| through your articles.
| tekromancr wrote:
| Gonna paint with a REALLY broad brush here; but I think that a
| LOT of the same people I see lamenting the web closing off into
| silos are the same people who, over the last decade or so, helped
| push everything into said closed silos.
|
| this thought is a result of a conversation I had with an investor
| I was building a site for. He was really upset that over the
| years his RSS habits had gotten less and less useful to him. I
| find a little ironic justice that people who built this closed
| off ecosystem in pursuit of 10x returns are also feeling some
| pain as a result.
|
| Guess I am just petty. Also I really fucking miss Trillian, RSS
| readers, and podcasts that didn't care where you were listening
| to them from; and I don't think I will ever stop resenting this
| industry for breaking that.
| baby wrote:
| I still use RSS daily too, and I keep a list of my cryptography
| feeds here if this interests anyone:
| https://github.com/mimoo/crypto_blogs
| vishnu_ks wrote:
| I have been building an RSS reader for developers called
| diff.blog. It has been growing steadily over the last 2 years and
| crossed 1000 users recently. Would love if you folks could give
| it a try and give some feedback!
|
| https://diff.blog
| javchz wrote:
| RSS it's a great reminder that the web can be federalized but
| standard at the same time for readers; and not a big centralized
| monolith like Medium, Facebook, or Twitter.
|
| Kinda the opposite side of social media where an Machine Learning
| algorithm selects items for your feed of what in the best
| interest of the metrics they try to improve (retention, CTR,
| etc).
|
| One of the things that I will be always be thankful to Aaron
| Swartz.
| kgwxd wrote:
| To me, one of the most important features of RSS is not having to
| reskim over titles I've already dismissed. I don't even mind that
| most feeds don't have any content, the links are good enough for
| my needs.
|
| I really wish AP and Reuters would bring back RSS, I'd no longer
| have any reason to open a site just to skim headlines. Some might
| argue that is the reason news sites stopped offering RSS, but I
| don't think it really lowers my engagement with a site, I very
| often click around after opening an item that caught my
| attention.
| k1m wrote:
| If you're okay with feeds generated from the home pages of
| those sites, the Feed Creator project I work on can generate
| feeds for them:
|
| * Reuters:
| https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/index.php?url=https%3A%2F...
|
| * AP:
| https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/index.php?url=https%3A%2F...
|
| Relying on the underlying HTML attributes of the page to
| generate the feed does make these feeds much more brittle, but
| it's one option when the sites choose to switch off their own
| feeds.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Thanks, I'll give them a try.
| PStamatiou wrote:
| Likewise I've recently gotten back into RSS - thanks to this new
| breed of RSS readers (feedbin and others) that also let you
| subscribe to email newsletters. So handy to get that clutter out
| of my inbox. Wrote a bit about this recently:
| https://paulstamatiou.com/hello-rss/
| nanna wrote:
| I use emacs elfeed for my feeds, however I found it frustrating
| that my different feed categories - news, views, tech, podcasts,
| etc - all get jumbled up out of the box into one massive rss
| firehose.
|
| Eventually I realised I could simply use bookmark.el to quickly
| create filtered search versions of my feeds based on their
| respective tags, and now I'm much happier. After setting it up, a
| `C-x r l` (bookmark-menu-list) later and I get a list that looks
| like this RSS: Daily News @24-hours-ago
| +unread +news RSS: News @1-weeks-ago +unread
| +news RSS: Not news @2-weeks-ago +unread -news -hn
| RSS: tech @2-weeks-ago +unread +tech
|
| Bookmark.el was written in 1993 by a Karl Fogel in 1993, and it
| still interoperates nicely with a random newer package like
| elfeed.
| stevekemp wrote:
| RSS is awesome! I never got the hang of using a read-application,
| instead I use rss2email to get copies of posts delivered to my
| inbox.
|
| There are a few different tools for getting the feeds to email,
| my own is a pretty simple golang application I run in a docker-
| container:
|
| https://github.com/skx/rss2email/
| knubie wrote:
| I would actually like the opposite of this. Having newsletters
| and other such "no-reply" emails go directly to an RSS feed.
| 4926394057 wrote:
| Here's what I use to do exactly that; https://kill-the-
| newsletter.com/
| stevekemp wrote:
| I could almost imagine running a small service that presented
| the contents of an IMAP folder as a feed, but I can't imagine
| actually using such a thing!
| jamesponddotco wrote:
| Feedbin[1], my feed reader of choice, has that. They give you
| a random email address that you can use to receive
| newsletters in your feed and automatically have them tagged.
|
| [1] https://feedbin.com/
| ecliptik wrote:
| Newsblur[1] has this feature as well and it's a nice
| addition to any RSS reader.
|
| 1. https://blog.newsblur.com/post/146752875548/newsletters-
| in-y...
| peruvian wrote:
| A ton of people still use RSS, they just don't know it. For
| example, podcasts.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I use RSS too, with Thunderbird. It takes a bunch of cutting and
| pasting to subscribe to youtube channels that have a name, but
| other than that the experience is so far superior to anything it
| feels like cheating. While I wouldn't object to going to a site
| like Twitter in principle, in practice the relentless onslaught
| of A/B testing, hatred of privacy and lowest-common-denominator
| means that it hostile to me.
| type0 wrote:
| NewsFlash is a good reader on Linux - https://gitlab.com/news-
| flash/news_flash_gtk or NewsBoat if you prefer the cli interface
| https://newsboat.org/
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| I also still use RSS:
|
| http://www.mattowen.co.uk/files/rss.jpg
|
| My home-grown 'reader' - Importantly, it only shows what's
| _currently_ in each feed - there 's no history, which removes the
| stress of 1,000 of unread articles piling up.
| djhworld wrote:
| I've mentioned this on HN before, one pattern I've noticed is a
| lot of sites tend to truncate their RSS feed so you have to click
| through to see the full article etc. This is mostly OK but kinda
| frustrating, as in the before-covid times I used to ride the
| London Underground a lot where no celluar signal is available in
| the tunnels - so my offline RSS reader would be useless.
|
| So I wrote a little web service accepts an RSS feed, and then
| crawls each link in it, parses the HTML to extract the text using
| one of those text extraction libraries, and then "republishes" a
| new version of the feed (with the full article) which I then
| subscribe to in my RSS reader so I can read the articles offline,
| e.g.
|
| example.com/rss?feed=foo.net/artcles/rss
|
| I've never open sourced it though because I guess it's a bit of a
| grey area - the sites want you to go to the full URL so they can
| show you ads etc
| jedimastert wrote:
| On the one hand, I hate that as a user. On the other hand, I'd
| _love_ to know how many people actually read a story.
|
| I haven't found a good solution, but I just suck it up and
| serve the full text anyways
| dmje wrote:
| I'd like that. This pattern you mention bugs me.
| _jal wrote:
| I still heavily use RSS, but usually unsubscribe from feeds
| that truncate (unless it is a very long article).
|
| It isn't a religious thing - the vast majority of the time, the
| truncation is way too short to properly advertise the content.
| The mystery doesn't move me to click-through, quite the
| opposite - it is annoying, so I remove the annoyance.
|
| I understand the tradeoffs for folks who want to be paid via
| ads, but the utility just isn't there for me - I do not lack
| for reading options, and if something is really good, it'll
| find me some other way.
| _wldu wrote:
| Hugo, and other static site generators that support RSS, can
| easily be modified to provide the full content.
| MayeulC wrote:
| Some RSS readers implement something similar. I currently use
| nextcloud news, that does this:
| https://github.com/nextcloud/news/pull/563
|
| Basically, for feeds where I have "full text" enabled, it
| fetches the article page with mozilla's "reader mode"
| implementation and extracts the full text.
|
| It isn't really usable with aggregators such as planet
| kde/gnome, though.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| I have used both of those methods when publishing... I do
| hesitate on the full article approach, but I don't run ads.
| (And to be clear, I do provide a whole-article feed)
|
| One thing I don't like about the whole article RSS is that I
| get requests to narrate my whole website or blog experience, in
| addition to the normal writing about stuff.
|
| In effect the full-article RSS audience has its own
| experiential needs, which include "tell me about what you added
| to the non-blog sections, tell me about the new tools in the
| sidebar, or the new article footer format, or even hey I never
| heard about the new design," and so on. Sometimes I also alter
| the CSS for a single post, when it makes sense.
|
| Some of this narration is just expected if your main format is
| traditional, plain blog. But personally my blogs tend to evolve
| and incorporate other stuff. And for sites with even more of an
| experiential aspect than my own, I can see why RSS could drive
| the publishers a bit mad, increased exposure or no.
|
| Because of this experience, personally I would rather try
| reading via a page-download tool or format, even automated w3m
| or something, and see if that's an improvement. You'd get the
| full article in plain text, but you'd also get some of the
| other stuff around the site, including links which you may even
| be able to mark for later download.
| giobox wrote:
| This would largely have saved RSS for me. I'd argue there was a
| glorious era in late 2000s where you could almost replace your
| browser with a good feed reader and get vast majority of
| news/info this way. It was just so nice to have a single UI
| surface for all news stories rather than poking through many
| different websites.
|
| I understand my using the sites that way contributes nothing
| really to their bottom line, I never saw any ads, but that of
| course was half the appeal. The early days of "web2.0" people
| often just naively dumped everything in the RSS feed.
| asdff wrote:
| There are a few services that get full text from RSS feed
| items for you
| danShumway wrote:
| > I've never open sourced it though because I guess it's a bit
| of a grey area
|
| For whatever it's worth, I do click-through RSS feeds on my
| blogs just because I was too lazy to set up full text feeds and
| figure out how stuff like video would work and whether or not
| it would be a better end-user experience to alter the content
| in some way on style-heavy pages. Right now I'm constructing
| the feed myself. But if someone ever wanted to use a tool like
| you're describing on my blogs, I would have no objection. Don't
| feel guilty about scraping a site I build or building tools to
| do so, if anything it would make me feel less guilty about
| never getting around to setting up full-text RSS feeds. :)
|
| I don't run ads or analytics anyway, but even if I did, as far
| as I'm concerned anyone who has the right to visit a page also
| has the right to download it, and to use automated tools to
| download it on their behalf[0].
|
| I don't see any moral difference between using an adblocker and
| scraping a web page. Both are hitting the same endpoints and
| selectively displaying content that the user wants to see.
|
| [0]: https://anewdigitalmanifesto.com/#right-to-delegate
| kgwxd wrote:
| I don't think it's a grey area. They could show you ads in the
| HTML, they choose not to, and instead choose to let outside
| companies execute arbitrary code on your machine to track you.
| "Sites want you to go to the full URL so someone else can track
| your web use" sounds way less innocent and, to me, downright
| hostile. No one should feel morally obligated to allow that to
| happen.
| efwfwef wrote:
| I never subscribe to feeds like that, unless I guess I really
| care about the source, but it hasn't happened so far.
| netghost wrote:
| That's an interesting use case. My POV has always been that the
| site itself is the best representation of the content and
| completely ignore the feed content.
| Fogest wrote:
| For me it also depends on the content. Some sites I'd rather
| just read from in the feedreader such as a news site, but for
| things like YouTube videos I would rather watch on YouTube
| than watch via the embedded player.
|
| However I find news sites are the most common offenders of
| the truncating which I guess I can understand.
| k1m wrote:
| I've worked on something similar for some years:
| http://ftr.fivefilters.org
|
| An older version available on BitBucket:
| https://bitbucket.org/fivefilters/full-text-rss/src/master/
| alrs wrote:
| I'm a huge fan. Here's my Docker-ized take:
| https://github.com/alrs/full-text-rss-docker
|
| EDIT: full-text-rss + newsboat + nyt screenshot:
| https://lsngl.us/@alrs/105652475456016345
| k1m wrote:
| Oh that's fantastic! I've been meaning to look into
| providing a Docker version at some point, will definitely
| look more at how you've done things here.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Are you also behind the other fivefilters.org tools? I use
| Push to Kindle often and I've paid for the Android version.
| Thanks!
| k1m wrote:
| Thank you. Happy to hear it's been useful for you. And yes,
| I work on Push to Kindle too.
| ribadeodev wrote:
| This is literally the only reason I can see somebody using this
| pattern. The similarities with a paywall are remarkable.
| naravara wrote:
| > I've never open sourced it though because I guess it's a bit
| of a grey area - the sites want you to go to the full URL so
| they can show you ads etc
|
| I honestly would not mind much if sites just included ads in
| their .RSS feed? Some bloggers I follow have their rss
| 'sponsored' and will do a sponsor post once a week. If ad
| insertion is really so important a site could just have labeled
| ads as part of the content stream. It's not ideal, but I'd
| prefer it to a feed that only has 2 or 3 teaser sentences and
| then forces me to click through.
|
| I actually took Wired and Slate off my RSS feed just because I
| got annoyed at how often I would click through and get a
| paywall. Usually I was using up my free articles just to see
| what the article was about without reading it.
| acdha wrote:
| Newsblur has a setting per-site which allows you to have it use
| either the feed body or attempt to pull in the full text. When
| I was commuting on the subway (prior to ubiquitous underground
| coverage) here in DC, I used that heavily. One nice thing is
| that downloading it on your client avoids the site having to
| get in the middle of the copyright concerns about replicating
| their servers.
| shakna wrote:
| One of the reasons I went from placing a full article in my RSS
| feed to truncating it into a descriptor and leaving the link as
| the "source of truth" was I found that there a bunch of
| intentionally crippled readers, like Thunderbird, that strip
| all the markup and turn my article into an unreadable mess.
|
| Traffic to both the feed and to the main site increased
| noticeably when I reduced it to a descriptor.
| pedro1976 wrote:
| Maybe my side project rss-proxy [0] might be interesting for you.
| It automatically transforms static HTML markup to RSS, so ideally
| you would not need to write a parser manually.
|
| [0] https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy
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| justnotworthit wrote:
| Im a podcast/youtube addict, yet I havent found a good use of
| youtube's RSS feed. I'd love for channels and playlists to be as
| simple as podcast feeds, but YT doesn't want to be a file server.
|
| 1) They block you from watching outside of youtube, so you still
| need the site to watch
|
| 1a) Or do a unix'y combination with youtube-dl; file management;
| etc
|
| 1b) Or use a service or tool that comes, gets broken, goes;
| (podsync, youcast)
|
| 2) Adding rss feeds one by one is tedious. Podcast Addict for
| android helps, but can't mark as read, and other limitations. So
| I still need the site to manage subscriptions
|
| 2a) There's no way to get a "my user" RSS that has all my
| subscriptions, even if I wanted that
|
| 3) etc etc etc.
| Arnavion wrote:
| >1) They block you from watching outside of youtube, so you
| still need the site to watch
|
| My workflow is to have a feed reader and a terminal next to it
| running an endless loop of "read line -> run youtube-dl with
| the line". I copy-paste the URLs from my reader to the
| terminal.
|
| >2) Adding rss feeds one by one is tedious. Podcast Addict for
| android helps, but can't mark as read, and other limitations.
| So I still need the site to manage subscriptions
|
| I don't subscribe on Youtube so there's no subscription state
| or watched-video state that I need to keep in sync with the
| website. Both those states are in my feed reader.
| SamWhited wrote:
| I still find YouTube's feeds useful (though not ideal) because
| I can get updates for a handful of channels that I want to
| watch instantly. If I just go to their site I have to go to
| every channel to see if their are new updates, or hope it shows
| up on the main page (which it may or may not do, half the time
| it just shows me old videos hoping I'll rewatch it or randomly
| suggests new channels I don't care about because I watched a
| single video on that topic so obviously I must only want to see
| that topic for like a week). Just knowing "your author
| published a new video" instantly without having to do the
| YouTube song and dance is pretty nice.
| feralimal wrote:
| RSS is the best. Research content, have it delivered to you
| without any intermediation.
|
| No wonder Google tried to kill it.
|
| And hats off to WordPress for maintaining support for it!
|
| I couldn't agree more than with the first line: "I firmly believe
| the Internet, and what it stood for, peaked with RSS."
| efwfwef wrote:
| The bigger problem for RSS, in my opinion, is the weird XML
| format. I remember setting it up for my websites and it was a
| huge pain, had to find a library to do it, there weren't many,
| ended up using something of poor quality but that works.
|
| If the schema was super simple, and used JSON, I bet a lot more
| websites would use RSS.
| timbit42 wrote:
| RSS was created before JSON was.
|
| It's built into WordPress.
| efwfwef wrote:
| I know, that's why there needs to be a new format that
| current developers can just use. And let client supports both
| formats. Maybe, that's what I should do. It's a
| developer/server issue I'm talking about, not a client issue.
| awhow wrote:
| There is jsonfeed (https://jsonfeed.org/)
| xiaomai wrote:
| I still use rss too (switched to using a self-hosted tt-rss after
| trying out a ton of Google Reader alternatives). I love RSS and
| mourn the fact that it's not more popular. The main problem with
| RSS becoming so niche is that lots of blogs/etc. no longer
| support RSS (I guess I need to look into one of those mailing
| list -> RSS things).
| k1m wrote:
| If the website is still accessible, it's possible to generate
| an RSS feed using the main page URL. I work on a project called
| Feed Creator that does this. You give it the page URL and the
| item selectors: http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/
| kixiQu wrote:
| The most popular newsletter services do make them, though --
| blah.substack.com/feed , for instance (don't remember Revue's
| or Buttondown's off the top of my head)
| 0066ccfan wrote:
| amazing article i give 10/10
| 0066ccfan wrote:
| best thing i've ever read
| Saint_Genet wrote:
| I kind of think everyone recommending their favorite rss reader
| is missing the mark. During the google reader days, rss was
| provided by everyone, and blogging-like publication was how you
| did things. The internet just isn't like that anymore and no
| matter how nice your reader is that's not how things are
| published.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Common CMSs continue to automatically generate RSS. Even if the
| website no longer advertises its RSS overtly, the RSS feed is
| there in the HTML source if you look for it. Yes, there are
| some sites out there without RSS, but for the vast majority of
| sites I'm interested in following, an RSS field remains
| available.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| Is _RSS_ really so obscure as the site suggests?
|
| Every website I am interested in updates from provides a feed.
|
| Apparently _YouTube_ content creators receive more money if they
| have more subscribers, but I don 't subscribe and simply use the
| _RSS_ feed; it 's easier.
|
| Perhaps _YouTube_ also factors in the number of _RSS_ requaests
| they receive.
| kevincox wrote:
| IIUC YouTube compensation is based entirely off the number of
| ads watched/clicked through on your videos. (Saving special
| one-off contracts that YouTube may offer)
| devlopr wrote:
| In order to reach a level where youtube would compensate a
| user you need to reach 1,000 subscribers.
|
| If everyone used rss feeds new creators would never get paid.
| diegocg wrote:
| Yeah, RSS is used pervasively. Despite not being a mainstream
| technology in the way people expected it to be, it's still
| alive because there is just no replacement.
| nicbou wrote:
| I suspect that it's only there because WordPress includes it.
| jacurtis wrote:
| The fact that Wordpress adds it automatically is a huge win
| because half or more of all websites are Wordpress. So there
| are a lot of content creators that don't even know what RSS
| is and yet you are able to subscribe to them because
| Wordpress automatically provides a full-text RSS feed for
| every Wordpress blog.
|
| I built my personal blog on a static site generator
| (Gridsome) and had to add RSS to my site intentionally.
| Luckily there is a plugin that provides this functionality
| easily now, but you still have to know about RSS, decide to
| offer it, and then install the plugin and configure it to
| compile your RSS feed with each site build. So it is
| something the developer or maintainer of the site has to
| think about (at least initially, now that it is configured it
| updates automatically).
|
| I am not a huge fan of Wordpress, but I am grateful that they
| continue to offer it "automatically" for all Wordpress sites.
| This means that I am able to subscribe in my feed reader for
| small sites that might not even think about RSS.
| spians wrote:
| As a maintainer of an RSS reader app which has its own
| inventory for suggested feeds, one of the uphill battles is
| sudden removal of RSS support from various sites. I have a list
| of feeds which are updated once a month and everytime some
| sites (both niche and big ones) drop RSS support (Reuters and
| YouTube removing option to export subscriptions as OPML are
| major blows in last few months).
|
| The reason for these removals is also never given. If you look
| at those sites now, you'd feel RSS support never existed and
| nobody used them. So the reason for removal could be anyone's
| guess. Perhaps RSS icon didn't look good with other social
| media icons on home page, server serving the RSS feed shut down
| and no one bothered to check, forgot to add RSS option in new
| design/refactor or some PM didn't find RSS feed engaging enough
| and actively killed it.
| asveikau wrote:
| Perhaps people working for these publishers forget about it,
| maybe there are bugs or small maintenance issues, and they
| opt to remove support rather than fix it or monitor it for
| issues.
| SamWhited wrote:
| "Another use-case I was surprised to develop was managing
| collaborative projects"
|
| This is one of the biggest under appreciated things with RSS I
| think! I used to have issues with a project having out of date
| dependencies that included some critical security features. I
| added the GitHub releases to a folder in my RSS reader and now
| know almost instantly when there's a new release and whether it's
| security critical or not. That would have been lost in a
| disordered social media feed where it might get buried under tons
| of other contents and I can't mark things as important, filter
| them out into tags or folders, etc. Right now several of us can
| just all have that in our feeds and create an issue to upgrade,
| investigate, etc. when new releases of dependencies come out, but
| I've thought it might be fun to put that feed directly into an
| issue tracker at some point too so issues get made for any new
| dependency update to be investigated.
|
| Email and RSS still manage to do better than anything else at
| keeping my messages organized and important stuff at the top,
| after all these years.
| blakesterz wrote:
| This quote is exactly right:
|
| "Having only the content I want to see only be shown when I want
| to see it with the freedom to jump between readers as I please,
| all with no ads? For me, no other service comes close to the
| flexibility, robustness, and overall ease-of-use that RSS
| offers."
|
| I always wonder why they aren't as popular now. It takes more
| work to add site to a reader, and more effort to even use one I
| suppose. And maybe it's also missing the social aspect that
| people seem to love?
|
| I assume they'll be popular again some day like vinyl and static
| web sites.
| breischl wrote:
| >I always wonder why they aren't as popular now.
|
| IMO it's a lot of reasons.
|
| A big one, that was the case even before social media, is the
| inherent geekiness of it. "RSS" is an acronym after a geek's
| heart, most people don't like it.
|
| The subscription process is complicated. Go to the site, find
| the feed (which one? There might be a bunch! eg, main feed,
| topic feed, comments-per-post feed, etc), take that URL and
| paste it into your feed reader, then look at that and... you
| got linked back to the site you were on? Yay... There have been
| various attempts to streamline this via in-page "add to reader"
| widgets back in the day, browser plugins, etc. But it was never
| as frictionless as the Facebook/Twitter/Reddit "follow" button.
|
| Responding to things is harder. There's no
| comment/like/whatever button right there, you have to go to the
| site, figure out what's going on there, maybe sign up for yet
| another damn account if you want to comment. Some sites don't
| even have comment sections! Or maybe they point you to FB or
| Twitter anyway. Again there were partial solutions back in the
| day, but nothing as easy as modern social media.
|
| Last for today, it's not nearly as addictive. Some people
| (including the author and myself) like that about it... but it
| doesn't drive adoption nearly as well.
|
| >I assume they'll be popular again some day like vinyl and
| static web sites. I think they'll always be niche-popular with
| geeks, long-form content creators, open web advocates (the "EFF
| crowd" I guess) and so forth. But I don't think it'll ever be
| mainstream. At best it could serve as the substrate for
| something else that becomes mainstream.
|
| Anyway, just my 2 cents from hanging around this space for a
| decade+.
| MereInterest wrote:
| As far as I can tell, because RSS requires the cooperation of
| actors who have no incentive to cooperate. If I use an RSS
| reader to support content, then it is under my control when I
| read it, if I read it, and what format to read it under. I can
| view the content however I'd like, and no tracking is there.
|
| All of these are unambiguously good things for me, and are
| anathema for the advertising industry. I cannot use RSS to read
| a site unless that site provides an RSS feed. Sites whose
| primary goal is to bring in ad revenue, rather than building a
| community, have no incentive to provide RSS feeds.
| gspr wrote:
| > As far as I can tell, because RSS requires the cooperation
| of actors who have no incentive to cooperate.
|
| Do you mean in the sense that content providers want to
| dictate more than just information delivery to consumers, or
| something else?
| kgwxd wrote:
| I'm perfectly happy just getting headlines with links, which
| seems most common these days, at least for what I subscribe
| to. It requires I go to their site to get the content where
| they can (try to) shove anything they want in my face and run
| whatever trackers they normally do.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| This why I personally gave up RSS. I used to enjoy reading
| things in my RSS reader where I could set things up to be
| clear to me.
|
| Once they started providing only links back to the WWW
| browser where everything was hard to read I gave up and now
| I just suffer reading in the WWW browser and frankly don't
| read nearly half as much online content as a result.
| jacurtis wrote:
| I understand that perspective. And I agree that it would
| be nice if all sites offered the full-text content in the
| feed. But on the flip-side, I still use RSS feed readers
| (Feedly) daily and simply click through the content.
|
| The value of the RSS feed reader is still there because
| it allows you to monitor potentially hundreds or
| thousands of sites for content and then skim through to
| see if any new content was created today that interests
| you.
|
| This makes it particularly useful for monitoring personal
| blogs or sites that only publish a few times per month or
| year. I personally LOVE reading people's personal blogs,
| but since most people only publish a post a few times a
| month (or less), I am unlikely to check their website
| every day. I also don't want to give them my email
| address and have them clutter my inbox with new posts. So
| the feed reader is nice because I can go once a day and
| see what new content exists. I skim through the posts and
| click through on a handful of content that interests me.
| If the content is long, I add it to my "Pocket"
| (getpocket.com) to read later.
|
| In the feed reader I usually get a preview of their
| content (the first few paragraphs). I can read the
| content and click through if desired. So the feed reader
| still provides value for monitoring all these sites that
| have sporadic posting schedules.
|
| I understand the value of reading the content entirely in
| the feed reader, but I don't mind clicking through the
| content once I know it is something that interests me.
| The feed reader allows me to skim, filter, and screen
| content so that I am only clicking through on interesting
| content (similar to how HN works, we still have to click
| through content). If content is interesting, there is
| value in supporting creators by visiting them on their
| site to get the experience that they designed and
| potentially supporting them with an ad or two. If ad use
| is egregious then I might retaliate by blocking ads for
| their site or simply removing them from my feeds.
| netghost wrote:
| So I take the opposite view of preferring to read on the
| actual pages.
|
| I'm curious though, I've built a feed reader that caters
| to my preference, but I'd like to make it useful to more
| folks. If you could automatically open articles in
| "Reader Mode" (FireFox supports this for instance) would
| that make reading in the browser more palatable to you?
| kgwxd wrote:
| To me, the time saved not having to rescan headlines
| alone is worth it. Even if the title was just "New
| Article" for every item and I had to open each one to see
| what it was, the time saved would still probably be worth
| it.
| iFreilicht wrote:
| Aren't there RSS-readers that offer something like the
| reader-mode you get on web-browsers?
| lightbulbjim wrote:
| News Explorer has scraping modes for sites that only
| publish headlines.
| dmje wrote:
| Yeh, Reeder on mac supports this I think
| MereInterest wrote:
| Absolutely the same, and that's how I usually use RSS feed
| a anyways, as a source of headlines. Even there, though, it
| means that my choice of which articles to read isn't
| influenced by their snazzy new (and slow) layouts, their
| eye-catching (and emotionally jarring) images. It means
| that my daily habit is to check my RSS reader, rather than
| refreshing their site to see if anything has been posted.
|
| With a limited amount of attention, even just exposing the
| headlines through RSS means that it is more my choice where
| to distribute my attention, rather than having my attention
| be drawn elsewhere through dark patterns and marketing
| tricks.
| johndhowell wrote:
| "I always wonder why they aren't as popular now. It takes more
| work to add site to a reader, and more effort to even use one I
| suppose"
|
| I know for me, I didn't know what RSS truly was until like..
| last year? I remember seeing the icon and all that on various
| sites growing up but I never clicked them as I didn't know it
| was a straight feed of content.
|
| Whereas last year I read some article or blog about it dying
| and I decided to look it up. Now it's the only way I read or
| watch any content becuase it's exactly what I want: straight
| content with no bs.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Probably for same reasons as why slot machines with minimalist
| aesthetics don't exist
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| > Having only the content I want to see only be shown when I
| want to see it
|
| I would rather not do my own content discovery and content
| curation: I see those as literal chores that have to be done
| before I can consume content.
|
| Like all chores, I'm not keen to do them. Despite years of
| practice, I'm still not confident I am great at them on my own,
| and I have the option to employ someone more skilled.
|
| Twitter has done a good job of these chores, making discovery
| and curation easier (like the parent article, I feel frustrated
| that Twitter is now broken from this point of view); TikTok
| does a great job, surely better than I could do myself.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > I always wonder why they aren't as popular now.
|
| 1) Google makes really quite good RSS reader (Google Reader)
|
| 2) Everybody switches to it, competition atrophies
|
| 3) Google shuts it down
| sgtfrankieboy wrote:
| Google shutting down their RSS reader didn't really have an
| impact.
|
| They shut it down back in March of 2013. If you look at the
| trends graph[1] for RSS it was dying out for years.
|
| [1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%
| 2F0...
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Long-term Google trends graphs are kind of useless because
| they're a percentage of queries over a period of time when
| the demographics of the user base was changing as millions
| of new people got on the internet.
|
| Here's the one for javascript:
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=javascr
| i...
|
| Clearly javascript has been slowly dying out. But wait,
| that can't be right.
|
| They're also a poor proxy for usage because the existing
| user base with feeds already set up doesn't have to do a
| search query to continue using it, so if a large number of
| them lose access at once, it's barely a blip because they
| wouldn't be doing searches for it either way.
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| Who's not? =)
| [deleted]
| ogre_codes wrote:
| Just installed Net News Wire the other day after I'd added links
| in my browser to a bunch of new blogs and realized there was a
| better way. One of them didn't support RSS! So it's likely to
| just get dropped.
| 0066ccfan wrote:
| i heard the guy who wrote this article is really cute and good at
| linux
| [deleted]
| acdha wrote:
| There's a modest but healthy community at newsblur.com which has
| the nice property of existing in both hosted and self-hosted
| forms: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur
| cybert00th wrote:
| Oh I so sorry
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Same. I actually built a personal Python app that turns RSS feeds
| into a daily newsletter when I quit most social media. It's been
| fantastic, in part because it's NOT infinite. It typically gives
| me something between 1-10 links and... that's it.
|
| There's nothing to "check" and it's not watered down with
| provocative crap that an algorithm thinks would make me stick
| around longer.
| beefman wrote:
| I've been using Newsblur since Google Reader shut down in 2013.
| It's a great service with many useful features
|
| https://clumma.newsblur.com
|
| I pipe my Reddit likes into it. Unfortunately almost all of the
| blogs I used to read are inactive, and I haven't found good blogs
| to replace them.
|
| It would be awesome if HN supported RSS.
| netghost wrote:
| RSS lets me see the content I care about without black box
| algorithms getting in the way.
|
| This is so important to me that I wrote a feed reader as a
| browser plugin so I don't need to worry about a service
| disappearing some day.
|
| If you're curious it's Brook[1], and if you like hacking on
| things, it's open source[2]. There's a branch that works on
| Chrome, but I really like Firefox's support for showing content
| in a sidebar.
|
| [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-
| re...
|
| [2] http://github.com/adamsanderson/brook
| StavrosK wrote:
| I really like this, well done! I was actually thinking of
| getting something like it the other day.
|
| Can I suggest keyboard navigation (basically "go to next
| unread") and "only show unread items"? It would be great to be
| able to press a key and go to the next unread feed.
| netghost wrote:
| Oh, of course. That makes a ton of sense, I'll think about
| how to do that shortly.
|
| If you're on Github adding an issue would help me remember,
| if not I'll try to keep it top of mind until I put the kids
| to bed.
| StavrosK wrote:
| Done, thanks!
| Moru wrote:
| Oh, finally something that just works in a sane way, thankyou!
| I was searching on RSS in firefox plugins, never thought of
| searching on FEED.
|
| Is it possible for it not to add an RSS feed you already have
| in the list?
| netghost wrote:
| I should work RSS into the title... feed encompasses RSS,
| Atom, and then a few other tricks I use to get feeds of
| content.
|
| It _should_ tell you you're already subscribed if the feed is
| in your list. It gets a bit tricky with redirects and non
| canonical urls.
|
| If you use github, drop an issue there detailing what you're
| seeing. If not, then let me know in a DM or this thread.
|
| Also thank you for using Brook, you now account for 2% of the
| world wide usage ;)
| stiltzkin wrote:
| I have been testing quick updates with RSS using
| @TheFeedReaderBot for Telegram, i recommend it.
| mthwsjc_ wrote:
| > GitHub allows you to add an activity feed of your followed
| accounts/organisations by clicking the feed icon at the bottom of
| your account page. - wow!
| tantalor wrote:
| One the best parts of RSS is you can read a blog in your
| preferred typographical style instead of, for example, white text
| on a black background.
| frouge wrote:
| The sites I followed have become bookmarks :(
| 2shnuckery wrote:
| Yes, that is also another feature coming with Opera 12
|
| But... _uh_ 'A majority of people want to equate negative
| social control with acts of physical violence and to know that
| actions are taken against.' -What is maybe way more
| important... (-;
| bilekas wrote:
| Nothing wrong with RSS! Podcasts are primary served through it
| too!
| dmje wrote:
| I was an early user of rss and blogged for years, then got sucked
| into social media like everyone else. Recently I've ditched that
| and got back into writing a bit and using Reeder / Feedly again.
| It is such a pleasure! Really just echoing this article, but to
| be able to do this at _my_ pace and with my preferences as to
| what I choose to focus on or skim over without some bottom-
| feeding algorithm choosing for me is a really welcome breath of
| fresh air. I really hope there 's a resurgence, the mode of
| reading presented by rss is so much more user and life focused...
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Not lamenting 'Reader' but yes, RSS - still useful/killer because
| of the basic/core technology that underlies
| _wldu wrote:
| One really neat feature of RSS is that users don't have to
| provide email addresses or visit the site (be tracked) to see the
| material.
| rascul wrote:
| I also still use RSS.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
| COGlory wrote:
| There's also this:
|
| https://hnrss.github.io/
|
| Which lets you set filters so that you only see posts with a
| certain amount of activity, so you aren't spammed with every
| single HN submission in your feed.
| otsaloma wrote:
| hnrss is great. This is what most news sites get wrong, they
| might have RSS, but it gives you every new article and that
| can be over a hundred per day. And then they eventually
| conclude that no uses it and thus RSS is bad, when it's just
| their thresholdless implementation that's bad.
| chenster wrote:
| Long live the RSS!
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(page generated 2021-02-03 23:00 UTC)