[HN Gopher] "We removed the RSS feed since this technology becam...
___________________________________________________________________
"We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete"
Author : nanna
Score : 247 points
Date : 2021-12-13 13:55 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| l0b0 wrote:
| "X is obsolete" for any X which is not literally marked
| "obsolete" in the relevant reference is just a convenient lie.
| The real reason is going to be either "I don't _like_ X " or "I
| don't _understand_ X ".
| [deleted]
| SahAssar wrote:
| Seems slightly ironic that the hashtag #RSSaintdead hasn't been
| used since 2015
| superkuh wrote:
| Is it? The idea of RSS was to escape complicated, centralizing,
| proprietary platforms like twitter. In order to read the post
| in this discussion's twitter link I'd have to execute their
| code on my machine. There's no way to access twitter via text.
|
| I certainly hope that most RSS users are shying away from such
| a terrible platform.
| SahAssar wrote:
| RSS was first released/specified in 1999, so to say that the
| idea was to escape platforms like twitter is rewriting
| history (myspace didn't even launch until 4 years later,
| friendster three years later). The idea of RSS seems to
| (originally and still in some ways) to be able to keep track
| of updates to many different sites from one application.
|
| My point was rather that twitter is a place where brands
| listen and also a place where a lot of web devs talk. If RSS
| is to continue being seen as relevant twitter would be a good
| place to advocate for it.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > RSS was first released/specified in 1999, so to say that
| the idea was to escape platforms like twitter is rewriting
| history
|
| But they said "proprietary platforms _like_ Twitter ", not
| Twitter, so they would not be wrong in making that
| statement. Except, in an unexpected twist, RSS was actually
| initially developed to be used on Netscape's proprietary
| portal. It was not until a bit later that the open
| standards, anti-monopoly group won out.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| "like Twitter" != "specifically Twitter".
|
| Put positively: RSS anticipated Twitter and preemptively
| routed around it.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| This highlights, in an interesting way, one of the downsides
| to RSS as a technology in the era of centralized services.
| Really, of all decentralized services in the era of
| centralized services.
|
| When you want to make a pitch to somebody that RSS is
| valuable, you don't have direct statistics on its global use.
| You can pull access logs for your own servers, but if you're
| trying to justify to a boss the investment of setting up an
| RSS service where you don't have one already, you're going to
| have to use someone's proxy numbers on how popular it is.
|
| Meanwhile, Twitter's access logs are a direct signal on the
| popularity of Twitter. Their story for telling potential
| investors how many users they have is very short.
| boring_twenties wrote:
| https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
| dqv wrote:
| I can't really trust Twitter to have accurate searches like
| that. The tag search misses tons of tweets IME.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The hashtag #AirpodsAintDead hasn't ever been used, though. One
| must conclude that they, sadly, are.
| b6dybuyv wrote:
| I think the world would be a better place if in these cases,
| instead of tweeting a rant and then submitting it to HackerNews,
| the OP took the effort to explain to that NGO why he thought RSS
| was a great tool and why they should keep using it.
| LocalH wrote:
| Nothing says they didn't do both. Tweeting and getting it on HN
| both help with public awareness.
|
| Edit: In fact they did, the OP commented below:
|
| >Hi all, OP here, happily surprised to see this on the front
| page. Apologies for posting it as a tweet. Text below.*
|
| >I've asked the NGO to reconsider their decision, but this
| isn't about them. It's about a systematic decline in the usage
| of RSS such that even major human rights organisation don't see
| it worth the relatively trivial effort to maintain a feed.
|
| >I honestly think we need a concerted campaign to advocate for
| RSS. To educate people about its benefits and how to use it. To
| lobby platforms and websites to adopt RSS and champion notable
| one's who do. RSS is the back-to-the-future technology we need
| to keep up with the world in a private, decentralised and
| sanity-respecting way. If anyone agrees, get in touch and let's
| do something?
| dewey wrote:
| What makes you believe they didn't do that?
| StillBored wrote:
| Reminds me a bit of OFX, you know that technology that lets you
| download statements/etc from financial institutions to your own
| personal financial applications. Thereby avoiding giving random
| 3rd parties access to all your financial information.
| npx13 wrote:
| RSS is by far the best and easiest way to keep up with sources
| you want to follow. Using RSS to get updates from curated Twitter
| lists is the only way to just get updates from accounts you want
| to follow on Twitter and maintain your sanity. I recommend
| NetNewsWire.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| As much as I pine for the days when RSS was ubiquitous, I trust
| them to have the access logs to conclude that nobody is using
| their RSS feed.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| I wouldn't say I trust them, but I would say it's the most
| likely explanation.
|
| It _could_ be that they 've failed to understand how RSS could
| help their organization achieve its goals. But it's probably
| just that RSS isn't worth it to them.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Defining a demographics.
| Maxburn wrote:
| Too true, these days the audience is people typing google into
| the browser omni bar.
|
| Plus "we couldn't figure out how to monetize RSS"
| rendall wrote:
| You would trust the web developer of this unnamed NGO you heard
| about 3rd or 4th hand to do what now?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I extend to them the same default I extend to every random
| site maintainer on the internet: an assumption of basic
| competence until shown evidence to the contrary.
|
| It is, perhaps, giving too much credit. Perhaps the average
| is lower than I think it is. But if it is, we would arrive at
| the same situation, because a developer that struggles below
| the average will struggle to maintain an RSS feed. We could
| anticipate them cutting whatever corners they can justify
| cutting to decrease their workload.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| > assumption of basic competence
|
| Basic sysadmin/tech competency != Basic webmaster
| competency. Whoever maintains their WordPress site may not
| even know the logs exist, and if they do know, not have
| access to them. Server literacy is not widespread.
| nicbou wrote:
| I wish that government entities used it, or at least released a
| changelog for certain pages. Following coronavirus guideline
| updates in Berlin has been very difficult.
|
| For now I use Wachete to achieve this.
| dqv wrote:
| This is one of those things where I would have expected the
| opposite in your country vs the US, my country. Here pretty
| much everything important has an RSS feed. The Internal Revenue
| Service, Health and Human Services, even my local news.
| nicbou wrote:
| The Berlin government is not good at digital services.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| The US has a reputation abroad for being cutthroat and
| business oriented, but in reality US public administration
| can be remarkably civically minded. For example, look at the
| wealth of data that the NOAA gives away for anyone to do what
| they please with. Whereas their European counterparts are
| mostly just unhelpful, or they gouge you with fees.
|
| The most glaring exception I can think of is not making it
| easy to file tax returns, for the benefit of companies like
| Intuit.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| The town I live in publishes their updates via their Facebook
| page. :|
| dqv wrote:
| No! Facebook always surfaces news like two weeks after it
| happens, so you always have to check the individual
| Facebook pages to get timely updates.
|
| It's time to move towns ;)
| HamburgerEmoji wrote:
| RSS was assassinated for being too powerful, too potent a threat
| to centralization.
| 0x456 wrote:
| Even more sad when a Tech journal doesn't have an RSS feed, but
| posts to Facebook and Twitter instead. For example
| https://www.thenewatlantis.com/
| LinkSake wrote:
| I've the same issue with some local news webpages and government
| sites, but I've been using PolitePol[1] to generate the feeds;
| they're not great but get the job done. Right now I'm looking for
| projects like RSSHub[2] or RSS Bridge[3] to have a similar
| service but self-hosted and without the restrictions of the free
| tier of PolitePol.
|
| I think in the future RSS will be a community driven effort, not
| something that the website themselves care to implement.
|
| [1] - https://politepol.com/en/ [2] -
| https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub [3] - https://github.com/RSS-
| Bridge/rss-bridge
| [deleted]
| dabinat wrote:
| How is social media an alternative to RSS? There's no guarantee
| users will actually see what you post.
|
| I think the big problem with RSS is that non-technical users
| didn't use it. I see this as a marketing failure - browser
| support was never great and it was too hidden / non-obvious as a
| feature.
| can16358p wrote:
| What is wrong with saying "we are removing RSS because we're a
| for-profit company and we can't monetize it"?
|
| That would be brutally honest and probably get much more respect.
| thirdplace_ wrote:
| Relevant: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
|
| It is a feed generator for sites that don't have it.
| donatj wrote:
| The general upside of Wordpress powering all-the-things is that
| usually means there is an RSS feed if you poke around hard
| enough.
| kevincox wrote:
| I haven't noticed a WordPress blog where the RSS feed wasn't
| properly advertised. Does it depend on the theme to include the
| appropriate link tag? Or maybe it is just sampling bias where I
| don't notice that WordPress sites are actually wordpress if
| they don't advertise the feed.
| TimothyBJacobs wrote:
| It is up to the theme to output a visual link to the RSS
| feed, but unless disabled, WordPress itself will always
| output a `<link rel="alternate" ...>` tag with an RSS feed.
| superkuh wrote:
| It doesn't help that even Firefox have recently removed
| RSS/Atom feed autodiscovery and no longer display the icon if
| there's an RSS head entry. You have to manually type it by
| knowing common URLs or look at the source. Firefox also
| removed even the ability to even render RSS feed xml. Now it
| just asks you to download it like a file. These were very
| unhealthy choices for a community browser but completely
| sensible for a JS virtual machine and DRM portal to stream
| media and buy things.
| kevincox wrote:
| Yeah definitely. Now you need an extension which accesses
| every site that you visit. And of course few mobile
| browsers support extensions anyways.
|
| So on mobile half the time I paste the URL into my feed
| reader to see that RSS isn't supported.
| dialcortez wrote:
| Reading this form an RSS reader! Any interesting products using
| RSS? Maybe a monetized feed? gated substack's like feed? Sadly, I
| don't know of any solution using RSS other than news feeds.
| glitchdout wrote:
| Vimeo did the same. I used to subscribe to and watch their Staff
| Picks. Now I don't.
| Anthony-G wrote:
| I suspect the NGO in question simply has no idea of how many
| people were using their news-feed. If it's not in the Google
| Analytics report, it's not being used.
|
| Many modern website managers (unlike the "webmasters" of two
| decades ago) are either unaware that web server logs exist and
| can provide useful information about web requests (in a privacy-
| respecting manner) - or they might not have access to them.
| [deleted]
| idworks1 wrote:
| An advantage of RSS is that most companies that remove it, only
| remove the link from the website. Even bloggers who somehow feel
| the need to remove it, remove it from the share options but leave
| the link tag in the source code intact. The link remains
| functional.
|
| The best technology are silent and boring.
| badwolf wrote:
| Every time this comes up, the discussion always rapidly becomes
| "Those idiots aren't using the web the way _I_ want to, in my
| text only command line! "
| kevincox wrote:
| I hate to say it but they are largely correct. The technology
| isn't obsolete but it is very unknown outside of podcasting, but
| even these day most people just get their podcasts relayed
| through a big service that may not even let you subscribe via
| URL.
|
| I run an RSS-centered service and approximately 0 of my non-tech
| friends know what RSS is. They get their news from the YouTube,
| Facebook, Instagram... homepages where the algorithm picks some
| stuff that they want you to see. When I explain that it is easy
| to curate what you follow with no ads, no raking and no
| "algorithm" they are generally on board and are happy to
| subscribe to some comics, YouTube channels and maybe a web comic
| or two. But the awareness is basically zero.
|
| I think the following things would help get RSS into the
| spotlight:
|
| 1. Highlight that Google News uses RSS.
| https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9545...
|
| 2. We need to get "Subscribe" buttons back into browsers. Right
| now you need an extension to detect sites that have feeds. Not
| only is that a huge step for most users but the most popular
| mobile browsers don't support extensions. (And even Firefox for
| Android only supports a whitelist on stable right now) IIRC
| Chrome on Android is experimenting with a very polished-over
| version, so it will be interesting if this gains traction and
| helps convince sites to maintain their feeds.
|
| 3. We need awareness. A lot of people are being made aware of the
| downsides of big services recommending them content, but very few
| are aware of the alternatives. Just helping out a few friends who
| are interesting in taking more control over their news can be a
| good start. And remember that it isn't all-or-nothing. I
| subscribe to a lot of feeds but still browse Hacker News and
| Reddit. I don't think I need to completely remove the algorithm,
| but I like to get most of my news "reliably" then when I run out
| I go into "discovery mode".
|
| That being said it is a huge uphill battle and right now it looks
| like things are going the other way. I'm not hugely active in
| this "fight" but it is good to support when you can.
| nerdjon wrote:
| I hate to admit it, but I kinda just... stopped looking at my RSS
| feeds about a year ago. It wasn't intentional, it just kinda
| happened?
|
| I was (am?) paying for Feedly and then I used a separate app on
| my phone to consume it (Hated the Feedly UI and I wanted the app
| I have been using since google reader).
|
| But I costantly found myself with a huge number of unread feeds.
| They became unmanageable. I would look at headlines and only
| click a small subset of what I was seeing (likely under 1%).
|
| I think I ended up replacing it with Reddit, Hacker News, and
| Apple News. Plus the few sites I actually cared about I just
| regularly checked on my computer.
|
| That being said, I did just open it and scroll a little bit and
| saw some stuff that I actually would have liked to see. So maybe
| I should get back into it.
|
| It is sad to see the tech basically disappearing, but almost no
| one outside of tech knows it exists. I can't remember the last
| time I actually saw an RSS feed button and I used to have to go
| digging for it.
|
| I may just need to curate my list of feeds more, or categorize
| them. I don't know, but I wish Had a better solution to all of
| the unread stuff.
| kgran wrote:
| That's why I like websites that offer RSS feeds by tags,
| author, search queries, threads, etc. Also, there are news
| readers that offer different types of filtering as well.
| Personally, I use newsboat, though it's a CLI program, so
| probably not suitable for everyone.
| mackrevinack wrote:
| i find myself in the same situation where theres hundreds of
| unread articles for a site and after a while i usually mark
| them as read just so i don't have to look at the counter icon.
| what i would like is an option to turn off that counter for
| certain sites where i know im just going to scroll through the
| top 20 articles and then go onto something else. it would be a
| lot less work
| cema wrote:
| Surveillance capitalism? What does it even mean?
| dorianmariefr wrote:
| Couldn't there be a proxy that generates an RSS feed, like
| Twitter to RSS feed or Facebook to RSS Feed
| oxplot wrote:
| I have all my feeds sent to email with a hand rolled setup which
| I did in a few hours one day. I also made a youtube and twitter
| feed to RSS which then gets sent to my email along with the rest.
| Oh and one HTML to RSS based on CSS query selectors for sites
| that don't have feeds.
|
| TL;DR I have my youtube, twitter, feed, etc sent to my email
| which I consume linearly and efficiently without having to visit
| literally 50 websites and also don't miss a thing because I
| didn't check one day.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Maybe RSS could become a paid service - then the people who want
| it could be the ones paying for it.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| RSS is obsolete because it does not enable tracking and
| advertisements.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Obsolete?! Replaced by what?!?!?!? I think obsolescence implies
| replacement!
| zozbot234 wrote:
| ActivityStreams (the foundation of ActivityPub and other
| fediverse tech) is pretty much RSS on steroids. I wouldn't call
| the latter 'obsolete' though.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I'm not so sure. Take vhs rewinders for example. VHS cassettes
| and players were obsoleted by DVDs and DVD players respectively
| but there is no analogous new tech to the rewinder. It was a
| dead end. Maybe I'm splitting hairs.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _Maybe I 'm splitting hairs_
|
| Not enough split, not really hair ;) The _rewinder_ became
| obsolete, replaced by random access. Your need to seek
| remained. Your need to watch videos remained, relevant
| technologies got replaced etc. One 's need for "informational
| pull" remains - there is no dead end.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > One's need for "informational pull" remains
|
| It clearly doesn't - since so few people are using RSS.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| What people "need", in the sense I used the term, and
| what people /want/, are not the same thing, Chris. And
| what people /do/ is a third thing, because it takes
| knowledge and notion of an option to take it.
|
| Product optimality and market offer, "efficient" and
| "available", "need" and "want", do not overlap. People do
| not "need" palm assistants that work as mirrors (glossy
| displays): they buy them. One can eat mud for ignorance
| or for lack of alternatives.
|
| Average Joe, Median Jack, Typical Maude and Random
| Randall are frequently laymen (layconsumers).
| cgriswald wrote:
| I don't think that follows. People need proper nutrition,
| but they can get by for an unreasonable time on sugar
| cereal and microwavable Salisbury steaks. The prevalence
| of cheap, nutrient poor meals is not an indication that
| people's need for nutrition doesn't remain. It's only an
| indication that suppliers would rather make a cheap,
| highly profitable good with marketing to convince people
| it fills a need than to go the less profitable route of
| actually providing for that need.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| If there was such limited market demand for RSS when it
| was available that almost everyone's dropped it, then
| maybe it's not a solution that people actually need or
| want.
|
| I get that people think it's a great idea, but in
| practice it seems not to be.
| cgriswald wrote:
| That's a big if.
|
| I'm not convinced suppliers genuinely attempted to
| provide useful RSS feeds. Even during the hay day of RSS,
| many feeds were simply stubs meant to get me to their
| website--even for websites to which I was already paying
| for the content.
|
| Regardless, demand for a particular solution is much
| different than demand to meet a particular need. To
| suggest RSS is 'obsolete' suggests its been obviated by a
| technology which meets the same need. I don't see that as
| being the case. It is far more likely to me that RSS
| doesn't meet the needs of the supply side.
|
| Solutions can also be dropped for lack of profitability
| or other supply side concerns even where demand for that
| particular solution is high.
|
| You can see this in action today. Ask yourself why
| Spotify doesn't support RSS for its podcasts despite it
| being extremely popular for fetching podcasts.
| notyourwork wrote:
| Sadly, I think today's analog would be mobile push
| notifications from specific applications.
| grozzle wrote:
| The belt drive of the laser in an optical reader, and to some
| extent the servo motors actuating hard drive heads, were the
| direct successors that obsoleted the VHS rewinder. The wide
| data bus providing random access to persistent solid state
| memory has already obsoleted one and is nearly done with the
| other.
| ttybird2 wrote:
| Atom feeds obviously.
| belorn wrote:
| RSS is replaced by personalized feeds that people see by
| logging into specific platforms and participate through the
| intended user engagement. That is how those companies earn
| money.
| criddell wrote:
| That isn't usually how NGOs raise money.
| belorn wrote:
| Yes, but I have seen a pattern in many websites for clubs,
| non-profits, student projects and other non-commercial
| places. They follow trends that they see in popular
| services. The idea that RSS is dead is unlikely to have
| originated from the NGO.
| criddell wrote:
| If the NGO tells you that RSS is rarely used compared to
| other methods, I would probably believe them. There
| really isn't any reason for them to lie about it.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| That's not a replacement, much like lobotomy is not a
| replacement for anything.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| ...Getting information through the lens of a virtual
| secretary which has a sub-animal intellectual size. Apart
| from all the social and intellectual implications, that is
| still not a replacement for information update pull.
| gpvos wrote:
| Of course. Yet, that is what is happening.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Replaced by social media.
| fouc wrote:
| As long as social media has RSS feeds, then we're good!
| gpvos wrote:
| Keep dreaming.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I'm guessing they think that social media and a subscription
| email newsletter are adequate replacements. But they are not.
| criddell wrote:
| We can't really know looking in from the outside. Presumably
| they know how often their newsletters are sent out and how
| many social media followers they have and how often the RSS
| feed is pulled.
| TacoSteemers wrote:
| I do believe that online feed readers will only pull the
| feed once per x minutes for all their subscribers, instead
| of pulling the feed n times per x minutes.
|
| For example, all of Feedly's subscribers will only count
| for one pull.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I was thinking accidental denial of service attack by badly
| scripted bot crawling their site every 15 minutes was an
| adequate replacement, but they didn't agree with that.
| nathcd wrote:
| I'm a very happy daily RSS user, but we ought to be upfront about
| its ginormous deficiencies:
|
| - every day I deal with broken links and broken images because my
| feed reader doesn't know from which URL it should resolve
| relative links
|
| - there's no pagination mechanism, or way for a client to ask for
| "all posts since last Friday". If you want your feed to always
| have all posts available, you need to include the entirety of
| your archive in every feed response.
|
| - if I want to follow any link I get kicked back out to a bloated
| web page
|
| - lots of posts include iframes, or content that only makes sense
| with JS enabled
|
| - XML
|
| Despite this, I still love RSS. It's what we've got and we should
| continue to make the most of it. But it also sucks, and it's not
| any surprise that mostly only technical people use it. I think
| feeds are pretty much doomed to keep breaking and disappearing.
| Many of the replacements or pseudo-replacements that people come
| up with seem fine, but the problem - as always - is getting
| people to actually use it, which mostly never happens.
| oauea wrote:
| > - every day I deal with broken links and broken images
| because my feed reader doesn't know from which URL it should
| resolve relative links
|
| > - lots of posts include iframes, or content that only makes
| sense with JS enabled
|
| These are the fault of broken RSS feed generators. The RSS feed
| should contain a textual summary of the article.
|
| > - if I want to follow any link I get kicked back out to a
| bloated web page
|
| This is working as intended and not an issue. I don't think any
| alternatives would make sense.
|
| > - there's no pagination mechanism, or way for a client to ask
| for "all posts since last Friday". If you want your feed to
| always have all posts available, you need to include the
| entirety of your archive in every feed response.
|
| Agree that this sucks.
|
| > - XML
|
| Really?
| nathcd wrote:
| > These are the fault of broken RSS feed generators. The RSS
| feed should contain a textual summary of the article.
|
| "Should" indeed. But a standard that isn't followed isn't
| exactly helpful to me.
|
| > This is working as intended and not an issue. I don't think
| any alternatives would make sense.
|
| Yeah, I agree that an alternative doesn't make sense for RSS
| in particular, but it's not hard to imagine an only-slightly-
| more-featureful syndication system where individual feed
| items are directly addressable.
|
| It's just a shame that I've got this really nice,
| personalized feed reading interface, and I get pulled out of
| it every time I follow a link.
| q1w2 wrote:
| I'll add another - Chronological ordering within the day isn't
| very useful. I'm more interested in what other readers (of my
| type) have found "important/interesting/insightful/etc", so I
| care about the likes/upvotes/etc...
|
| I don't want _everything_ every day. I want to read the X most
| important articles that day, with X being different each day
| depending upon how much time I have.
|
| RSS cannot really provide that prioritization.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Before the big social media companies slurped up most of the
| traffic, there used to be a lot of experimentation with this
| kind of filtering/aggregation. Nowadays with much better ML
| libraries, I see no reason why you couldn't train a
| classifier on your own preferences. Unfortunately most of the
| devs that are interested in RSS type stuff tend to not know
| much about machine learning so there's not much of it going
| on.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _I don 't want everything every day_
|
| Exists: mynews.com/rss ; mynews.com/world/rss ;
| mynews.com/economy/financial_commentaries/rss ...
|
| > _I 'm more interested in what other readers (of my type)
| have found_
|
| Could be done: mynews.com/rss?u=q1w2 (upon cookie
| authentication)
|
| But does a service properly clusterizing users exist? I do
| not know any... (I know about extremely badly implemented,
| clumsy attempts to automatically corner registered users into
| some sketchy profile.)
| nathcd wrote:
| > I don't want everything every day.
|
| Yeah! I'm with you. Although I don't use it, I really like
| some of the features of https://fraidyc.at/. For the majority
| of feeds I follow, I don't need to keep track of unread
| status, and high-frequency feeds would be much more bearable
| if they were grouped together to avoid taking over an
| aggregated listing. I feel like a lot of client defaults tend
| to hew too closely to email clients or something.
| mantaraygun wrote:
| > - every day I deal with broken links and broken images
| because my feed reader doesn't know from which URL it should
| resolve relative links
|
| I have a restrictive whitelist configuration for uMatrix and in
| most cases I don't bother to whitelist images when I read
| articles. I've found that the vast majority of the time, the
| images are stock images that only tangentially relate to the
| subject of the text and add no real value. I guess they're
| included because editors feel images are essential even if
| they're unrelated.
| lf-non wrote:
| A lot of us are happy to just use RSS for the aggregated
| listing. I really don't mind going to the original site in a
| browser to read the article.
| nanna wrote:
| Maybe try another reader? What are you using? None of these are
| issues for me in my feed reader, Emacs Elfeed. (XML aside,
| though I can't say I've ever had to view any feed's source.)
|
| https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed
| anonymousiam wrote:
| RSS is my preferred way to stay up to date. The only reason to
| remove it is to force consumers onto a platform that can push
| more advertisements. So it's not so much obsolete, but it is
| less profitable.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| What's wrong with XML? It has its flaws, but so do JSON, YAML,
| and all the other formats.
|
| In fact, for a standard, I like XML despite its verbosity
| because it supports schemas, essentially a machine readable
| specification. Also, the entire web runs on HTML, which is
| poorly defined XML, so why not?
| nathcd wrote:
| All formats do indeed suck, but not equally (YAML does suck
| equally, though). Your point about HTML is the best argument
| for XML though, since every client needs an 8 million LOC
| HTML parser anyway.
|
| It was probably a mistake to resurrect this flame war about
| serialization formats. XML works, it's just a bummer.
| tantalor wrote:
| > there's no pagination mechanism
|
| Atom has this: <link rel="next"
| href="http://example.org/index.atom?page=2"/>
|
| https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5005
| nathcd wrote:
| Nice, good to know. Do you know if many common clients
| support it?
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| Apparently open standards can "become obsolete technology" now.
| Zealotux wrote:
| Now here's a startup idea: generate a RSS feed for any website.
|
| $1 a month, $10 if paid annually :o)
| dewey wrote:
| There's a lot of services doing that already, it's a very small
| market. There are also a bunch of open source projects doing
| that already. I built one myself
| (https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge) but there are better and
| more powerful ones on Github.
| haunter wrote:
| FetchRSS is basically this https://fetchrss.com/prices
| akvadrako wrote:
| https://inoreader.com does that for about that price.
| 0x456 wrote:
| I still miss Yahoo Pipes.
| smugglerFlynn wrote:
| RSS users aren't seem to be concerned with the single most
| popular way content creators make money: by displaying ads.
|
| While there are RSS-compatible solutions for that (like AdSense
| in-feed ads), it is obvious that there is not enough financial
| incentive for content creators and platforms to continue
| supporting RSS. From consumer perspective, I'm writing this from
| Safari on iPad, and there is no way to see that RSS is present on
| the page, neither there is a way to subscribe to RSS without
| special plugins. Which tells me demand on consumer side also does
| not justify keeping these features up.
|
| The only reason RSS is alive today is because it's dirt cheap to
| implement, and is supported out-of-the-box by most web
| development frameworks.
| eloeffler wrote:
| Is there a current and well functioning tool that pulls full
| articles from the links inside most RSS feeds that only publish
| teasers?
|
| When I first discovered RSS for me, I wanted news to read on the
| road. It was before Smartphones became ubiquitous. Unfortunately
| most news sites only published a few lines of text per article.
|
| Now, I would like to do the same when there is no network
| coverage. But I still don't know a good tool for that...
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| For what it's worth: When I first launched my Wordpress-based
| website back in 2005, I initially had it set up to post full
| articles to the RSS feed. Soon, however, a major downside
| appeared: It became absolutely trivial for other sites to
| reproduce my content, and they did in droves. My writings
| appeared all over the web on generic Wordpress sites, usually
| attributed to other people. After grappling with the problem
| for a few months I gave up and switched the RSS to only publish
| intros, and that mostly resolved it.
|
| Sure, it is always possible for a human to copy and paste my
| articles' text to their CMS, or for someone to write a simple
| scraper to extract the desired content. But both of those
| solutions introduce various hassles, and they require a human
| to fully accept that they are stealing content, which much
| fewer people are willing to do.
| fartcannon wrote:
| HN is not the place to fanboy over things, but your stories
| never fail to surprise me. Thanks for continuing on and
| making the podcast, too.
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| On this day a fartcannon made me feel appreciated. Thanks!
|
| Edit: I hope this didn't come off as flippant; it is
| refreshing to receive encouraging words without the all-
| too-common "but I don't like how you do such-and-such".
| fartcannon wrote:
| Not at all flippant! As for 'constructive' compliments, I
| think the old information superhighway analogy of the
| internet is applicable because there sure is a lot of
| roadrage on the net.
| eloeffler wrote:
| Yes, it totally makes sense.
|
| I hold no grudge against news sites or anyone who chooses to
| publish teasers either. And be it only because they need
| statistics on which articles are more or less popular. Or ad
| revenue...
|
| Unfortunately the negative effect for my end remains.
| Sometimes there is no ideal solution for everyone, I guess.
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| Indeed. As is too often the case, a few bad actors ruin an
| otherwise elegant solution.
| blairbeckwith wrote:
| The premium version of Unread[1], an iOS and iPad OS feed
| reader has this feature. It's also a generally beautiful
| reading experience.
|
| [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/unread-an-rss-
| reader/id1363637...
| kevincox wrote:
| I'm not affiliated but I use both of these services and seem to
| do a good job:
|
| - https://morss.it/
|
| - http://ftr.fivefilters.org/
| davegauer wrote:
| I'm always interested to hear what people think regarding full
| text feeds versus headline/summary feeds.
|
| I hand-edit my feed, so the brief summary is easiest for me to
| keep up to implement. I've also always felt that it was a bit
| wacky to send, like, everything I've ever written as one huge
| XML document just so people could check for updates...
|
| On the flip side, I have no problem with any automated service
| that downloads the full article for real human
| readers/subscribers. I have no advertising or tracking, so
| arguably they're saving me bandwidth. :-)
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Newspaper project for Python might help.
| beagle3 wrote:
| NewsBlur does (for paying customers for sure; perhaps free
| users too)
| arvigeus wrote:
| Some self hosted RSS readers do that. I use Miniflux and you
| can set css selectors to fetch original content. It does not
| work when the article is a link to something (like this thread
| on HN)
| eloeffler wrote:
| Nice, thank you! I'll check out if it's viable to host that
| locally on my phone.
| tmsbrg wrote:
| https://github.com/Dither/full-text-rss
|
| https://github.com/alrs/full-text-rss-docker
| afrazkhan wrote:
| Yup, Inoreader.
| sumthinprofound wrote:
| Inoreader (paid pro version) will also allow you to create
| feeds for sites that do not publish via rss.
| Hard_Space wrote:
| > Inoreader (paid pro version) will also allow you to
| create feeds for sites that do not publish via rss.
|
| I am a paid pro subscriber on Inoreader, and use it 2-3
| hours a day for my work. I should mention that it provides
| a very limited number of certain types of feed (custom-
| created RSS, Twitter feeds, etc.), and you'll run out of
| them almost immediately if you want to follow a lot of
| places.
|
| That said, Inoreader lets you plug as many RSS feeds as you
| like in, far as I can tell, and I've _really_ loaded it up.
|
| But do watch out for the limits, because the next grade up
| from 'Pro' is 'Call sales'. It's not very granular.
| sumthinprofound wrote:
| Just checked Inoreader's pricing plans and it looks like
| pro level gets you 20 custom-created rss feeds before you
| need to call for custom pricing.
| neiman wrote:
| This shows ignorance more than anything. "people we know don't
| use RSS, hence no one uses it, hence it's obsolete".
| comeonseriously wrote:
| Oh come on. How much maintenance could it actually be to keep it?
|
| Honestly, I would not be surprised if some "I want everything to
| be modern" web dev convinced the powers that be that it was
| obsolete because he couldn't be bothered with it.
| indymike wrote:
| RSS feeds are not obsolete. People have pointed out WordPress,
| but there's another place where RSS is the infrastructure:
| Podcasts.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| ... in another news item brought to me by RSS, RSS is declared to
| be an obsolete technology.
|
| Yawn.
| sp332 wrote:
| ActivityHub (formerly known as PubSubHubBub) is also acceptable.
| No social media intermediary required, and it's actively
| developed.
|
| Edit: I meant WebSub above. ActivityHub is cool too but not quite
| in the same space.
| kevincox wrote:
| Do you mean ActivityPub (used by the "fediverse" such as
| Mastodon) or WebSub (which was formerly known as PubSubHubbub).
|
| The former isn't really an equivalent. It requires being always
| online to receive updates which means that you need to use a
| service or run your own. It isn't as nice as RSS which can fall
| back to very occasional polling from my own devices. RSS is
| also way simpler with a polling rather than subscribing and
| push.
|
| In my opinion the best option for public publishing is Atom
| (RSS 2 is also ok) with WebSub support. This provides a really
| solid set of features.
|
| The only reason I would really recommend ActivityPub is if you
| need private posts. Otherwise RSS/Atom will be the simpler
| solution.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > The former isn't really an equivalent. It requires being
| always online to receive updates which me/ans that you need
| to use a service or run your own.
|
| ActivityPub is the "push" counterpart to the more
| foundational ActivityStreams, which works no different than
| RSS.
| hammock wrote:
| RSS is not dead for the simple reason that pretty much every
| podcast relies on it to get distributed to all the major
| podcasting platforms (iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, etc).
| kevincox wrote:
| There is a huge difference between RSS as a backend service
| such as those podcast providers as opposed to being "consumer
| facing" such as other podcatchers or feed readers. For the
| former compatibility isn't a major concern, it just needs to
| work well enough for those use cases and users can't access the
| content directly (if they don't know the URL or it is IP
| locked).
| randmeerkat wrote:
| Between this, paywalls, and a lack of interoperability between
| messaging services, I feel like the internet has become a bleak
| place.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| marban wrote:
| News aggregators are my main business since 2001 and all I can
| say is that reports of the death of RSS have been greatly
| exaggerated. Recently launched https://biztoc.com where 75% is
| still RSS, the rest being APIs and custom scraping. Yes, support
| is not increasing but drops among established sites are very
| rare. (Coindesk most recently)
| nomemory wrote:
| This hurts.
|
| RSS is the only way I know, without having to scrap things by
| hand, to get an aggregate of "news/articles" from the sites and
| blogs I follow, and I consider to be of good quality.
|
| I prefer to filter my information like this, instead of having to
| rely on some algorithm, or endlessly scrolling in a "social
| medial wall" full or clickbait articles, immortal/vintage memes
| or exuberant rants.
|
| If RSS dies, what is the alternative then? I understand that
| technically speaking it's not a good solution, but let's have
| something else before killing this.
|
| PS: I've clicked on this link from a RSS reader (just a simple
| browser extension... that keeps me posted every morning).
| bartread wrote:
| Well, and also, isn't it basically free to implement an RSS
| feed for a website on every common content management platform,
| blog generator, etc.?
| mfer wrote:
| > If RSS dies, what is the alternative then? I understand that
| technically speaking it's not a good solution, but let's have
| something else before killing this.
|
| Instead of focusing on a technology, let's focus on a problem.
| This is where users and potential users of RSS have a
| communication problem with publishers of content.
|
| It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds. So, you could
| have metrics on that. But, the tech giants shifted from RSS
| streams (which empower end users) to high control system that
| operate differently (social media news feeds that empower
| corps). This lead to a drop is RSS subscriptions.
|
| So, why today is it useful to a publisher to have RSS on their
| site? This is a question that needs addressing and marketing so
| that people know why. The business case for them is lacking.
|
| I want RSS. I also realize the usefulness and communication
| around that needs improvement.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > Instead of focusing on a technology, let's focus on a
| problem.
|
| This would be good, but it seems most people are too focused
| on RSS and not much on the actual usage. The point of RSS is
| to receive changes in a structured way. RSS is just a tool
| for this. But there are also other ways and other tools for
| this.
|
| > It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds.
|
| No, this was never the case. Newsfeeds were always a
| minority-feature. The mass of user used to be bigger, but not
| to the level where it could be called a mass medium.
|
| We don't need to communicate better to the publisher to force
| our will onto them. Instead, we should find ways to ease
| their work and help them satisfy our demands. For example,
| there was a movement for embedding semantic and structural
| data right into a document. Something came out of this, but
| maybe we should light up that flame again and move it more
| into a direction where it could be used for our feedreaders.
| Or just adapt the feedreader to better support the already
| existing structures?
|
| This could easily sold with support for accessibility, and
| everyone would win here. Thinking about, how is the state of
| accessibility-technologies today? Could it be used for easy
| and reliable parsing?
| tdeck wrote:
| RSS is very much alive in the podcast world.
| rch wrote:
| With podcasts the ads are naturally served as part of the
| audio content. That model doesn't work with text feeds, and
| there may even be parents on including ads in line with
| text.
| thiht wrote:
| > It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds
|
| Uh, really? When I was younger I came across RSS a few times
| but could never figure what it was or how it worked. When I
| clicked RSS links, big walls of XML appeared. And when I
| looked for what it was, all I could find was something along
| the lines of << it's to syndicate content >>. Or in French:
| << c'est de la syndication de contenus >>. I don't know if
| the term << syndication >> is widely used in English but in
| French it didn't (and still doesn't) mean anything to me.
| Also in French the term happens to be close to our word for
| worker unions (syndicats) so it confused me even more. All
| this to say RSS didn't make sense to me and I'm pretty sure I
| wasn't the only one. Still today almost no one I know uses or
| used RSS one day.
|
| I like RSS now that I understand what it is and that I have a
| proper reader but it's still been perverted with ads, feeds
| without any content, etc.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| The masses may never have consumed RSS feeds directly, but
| there was a lot of stuff like "Portals" and "Home Pages"
| that consumed them indirectly that were pretty well
| consumed by the masses. Companies like Yahoo! relied on RSS
| feeds well before companies like Google turned news
| acquisition and scraping into its own business, closer to
| the search engine arm than not, and mostly divorced from
| RSS.
| is_true wrote:
| I use the sitemap.xml when sites doesn't have a RSS feed. It's
| not the same but it usually works.
|
| For some sites there's also a sitemap for news that includes
| extra fields, like title, tags and description
| rob74 wrote:
| > _I prefer to filter my information like this, instead of
| having to rely on some algorithm, or endlessly scrolling in a
| "social medial wall" full or clickbait articles,
| immortal/vintage memes or exuberant rants._
|
| Well, that's the whole point - RSS lets you circumvent all (or
| most of) the mechanisms that Facebook, Google, Medium etc. etc.
| have implemented to monetize content. So they are directly
| interested in killing it off sooner rather than later. And if
| the big players don't support it, the
| people/organizations/whatever who still maintain their own
| blog/news site are also more likely to see it as obsolete (or
| have web devs who tend to follow the "new shiny" and will
| advise them that RSS is obsolete).
| jolmg wrote:
| > RSS is the only way I know, without having to scrap things by
| hand, to get an aggregate of "news/articles" from the sites and
| blogs I follow
|
| I haven't signed up for any so I'm not sure, but don't some
| places have "newsletters"? I kind of assumed they served the
| same function but with email. Of course, if it does serve the
| same function, the bad part about it in comparison to RSS would
| be that you have to give them an email address.
| FanaHOVA wrote:
| The missing thing is centralized queuing. I can easily create
| a queue of all articles from RSS feeds, but it's hard to
| centralize all links posted in a newsletter. I do this for
| engineering blogs of different companies today, for example.
| chris_wot wrote:
| What's the human rights rig using now? Facebook?
| r00fus wrote:
| I always thought Twitter's goal was to Embrace, Extend and
| Extinguish RSS.
|
| The alternative to RSS is Twitter (which is preferable to many
| orgs as you can "unsend" or manage engagement).
|
| Sucks for freedom of access though.
| polote wrote:
| Is RSS really a technology or a part of the failed attempt of
| having a semantic web (the real web 3.0) ?
|
| RSS is easily replaceable by just scrapping a website,
| technologically speaking it doesn't make sense to have everyone
| making a request to website every minute. We could have a central
| service responsible for that, but I guess it will centralized and
| some people don't like that
| RNCTX wrote:
| TTL is a thing.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _RSS is easily replaceable by just scrapping a website_
|
| A custom analysis by the user - maybe tech illiterate -, from
| every user, for every, supposedly complex, website, instead of
| some xml-izing wrapping over 'SELECT * FROM news ORDER BY
| pubdate DESC LIMIT 100'?!
|
| > _a request to website every minute_
|
| RSS takes less bandwidth than doing the same operation through
| direct visit. And of course, one is not supposed to do it that
| frequently; though again, some browsing agents may load pages
| more frequently than every minute.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Scraping is measurably less efficient and reliable on the
| client side. Its "API" (page layout) varies without notice,
| where RSS will remain the same.
|
| I can only condone scraping if the official API is so
| convoluted that scraping the page is literally the easier
| option to program against.
| dethos wrote:
| That is a complete nonsense. RSS is one of the most useful tools
| for those that don't have "social media" accounts.
|
| Don't expect people to keep coming back to your website/blog just
| to check if there is new content/news. If it doesn't provide a
| feed (Atom or RSS), the most probable scenario is that I will not
| remember to comeback any time soon.
| api wrote:
| > RSS is one of the most useful tools for those that don't have
| "social media" accounts.
|
| That's why RSS is dying. It doesn't facilitate in-depth
| surveillance or algorithmic timelines designed to be
| addictive... err I mean "maximize engagement." RSS is a user-
| friendly technology not an advertiser-friendly or surveillance-
| friendly technology and surveillance driven advertising is the
| business model of the Internet.
| derbOac wrote:
| I think the original idea of Twitter was basically to allow
| people to have "personal RSS" feeds without having technical
| knowledge or having to start up a blog. That plus built-in
| aggregation. So personal RSS for nontechnical folks + built-
| in aggregation.
|
| It's a little ironic to me, then, that this concern is being
| posted on Twitter of all places.
|
| I agree with the concern, I think RSS (or something closely
| related, like a decentralized version) should be maintained
| as a communication method, but I think there's a usability
| issue that's driving it.
| kgran wrote:
| I got the same argument after I asked why there's no more
| RSS/Atom feed of the news section in my municipality's website.
| Some positive people tell me that RSS is not dead and it's still
| everywhere. Unfortunately, especially after modern redesigns, RSS
| gets dropped as "obsolete technology". The sad thing is that this
| doesn't only happen to optional websites which I could choose not
| to follow out of principle like blogs or niche websites on
| technology and such. Governmental, municipal, local news websites
| do this, after which I lose easy and convenient access to this
| relevant information.
| DannyBee wrote:
| Y'all need to lean into the game a bit. Most of the time,
| things don't win or stay just because they are good. They win
| because of good marketing, etc. RSS, the brand, is a loser at
| this point. It is viewed as old, tired, and obsolete. It
| doesn't matter if it is the right tech. That's not a state you
| can grow from.
|
| At this point the right answer (IMHO) is to create a new thing
| that is very similar, but has a new brand. Market the hell out
| of it and subsidize the hell out of it.
|
| Trying to prevent the existing brand from dying is a fools
| errand.
| jaredsohn wrote:
| >create a new thing that is very similar, but has a new brand
|
| Use the blockchain and make it a part of web3
| shockeychap wrote:
| I'm trying to figure out if this is serious or parody. You do
| know that RSS is a spec, not a brand, right? Right?
| jacobr1 wrote:
| If we use the term brand to mean, "reputation," then yes,
| adoption is a function of reputation. Reputation can be
| justly granted (due to things like the functional value it
| provided) but it also can be disparaged regardless of the
| merit of the argument.
|
| If enough people think that RSS sucks, is too old, died
| with GReader, has no user-base, or whatever other story,
| why would they invest their time and effort in supporting
| it? If the problem isn't technical, then it might need some
| kind of marketing solution to get over the historical
| baggage in the zeitgeist.
| shockeychap wrote:
| Okay, I get that "brand" means "reputation", but why
| should a highly useful technology be worried about it's
| "brand". Is the "car" brand out of vogue? What about
| HTML? I mean, that stuff was used in crickety old sites
| from the 90s! Should we throw away our hammers, because
| screws are all the rage?
|
| This whole notion of RSS' "brand" being the problem just
| reeks of a used car salesman trying to convince me that
| spare tires are for chumps.
| wutwutwutwut wrote:
| > Okay, I get that "brand" means "reputation", but why
| should a highly useful technology be worried about it's
| "brand".
|
| Things with a reputation of being dead gains lower
| interest and support.
| katmannthree wrote:
| It's serious, the person you replied to is talking about
| how to revive a dying _thing_. Whether you want to call it
| a spec or a brand or a product does not really matter in
| this context, RSS has elements of all three. Their point is
| that trying to get people to change their minds on RSS is
| going to result in wasted effort, and that if you want RSS
| to live you need to market the hell out of a functionally
| equivalent replacement to the spec that appeals in some way
| to the relevant decision makers.
| DannyBee wrote:
| Exactly right.
|
| All things you are trying to get others to use have a
| brand, whether implicit or not. Heck, it's usually even
| valued separately from the technology (good will, etc).
|
| RSS, the spec may be fine. I've implemented RSS readers,
| heck, i use newsblur every day still.
|
| RSS, the brand, is a goner.
|
| The OP (and twitter post) is complaining that others
| consider the _brand_ dead, and are arguing that the use
| case it covers are unmet by other things, and that the
| _spec_ is still good stuff. Those are all very orthogonal
| things.
|
| It's great that the spec is still the right thing! But
| the brand is dead, so you won't get anywhere without
| fixing that.
| awiesenhofer wrote:
| This is probably the most on point comment in all of these
| RSS discussions.
|
| Just publicly dropping the "old" XML-based version and
| introducing the "new" JSON-based version would probably bring
| a brand new flair and growing adoption to feeds. (Nevermind
| json feeds existed for years)
|
| Now we just need someone to pull it off...
| mdp2021 wrote:
| For <<Governmental [and] municipal>> information, you should be
| vocal as a community and/or individual community members. "Look
| you could visit n websites per day - and get lost in
| formatting, though already to visit all potential sources is
| impossible -, or there is this old simple thing that
| automatically lets one know that source S has these news..." It
| could be that already the representatives are unaware of the
| possibility and of the relevant simple solution.
| saurik wrote:
| Most local government websites are maintained by a handful of
| compliance specialists that provide hosted solutions; if your
| government even has an IT department (as a nearby city to me
| does) it is probably more a cause for concern than anything
| else (they seriously assign unchangeable passwords to people
| that follow a pattern based on your name so you can guess
| anyone else's password... it is crazy).
|
| https://carcd.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Sloane-
| DellOrto...
|
| But so like, if you want to lobby a local government to add
| some feature to their website, they aren't even effectively
| going to be able to do it; but if you can convince a company
| like Streamline to add it to their offering, then you'd
| suddenly experience like half the local governments in
| California all getting that feature at once.
| artembugara wrote:
| You might find useful this article about how to use google news
| RSS parameters:
|
| https://newscatcherapi.com/blog/google-news-rss-search-param...
|
| You can replace the original RSS with the "mirror" from Google
| News
| kevincox wrote:
| Doesn't Google News use RSS in the backend? I guess the problem
| is just that the original RSS URLs are not made public?
| Thristle wrote:
| Obsolete? RSS is the only way i can get a list of new youtube
| videos from my subscribed channels.
|
| Go over your feed? useless!
|
| go over my subscribed feed till i get back to last video i saw?
| way too much work and that feed was known to fail (just like
| clicking the bell)
|
| the only working solution is RSS feed for every channel i want to
| follow and automation to add those to my different playlists
| rado wrote:
| I discovered this post by RSS.
| eadmund wrote:
| Me too! It ain't dead yet ...
|
| Now, if only there were a good way to sync elfeed and an
| Android feed reader!
| maliker wrote:
| I've been working around this "death of RSS" by making my own
| feeds via scraping (using fetchrss.com/manual).
|
| It's more fragile than using supported RSS feeds, but it gets the
| job done.
| carrja99 wrote:
| Quick! Someone reinvent rss as blockchain tech!
| mehdix wrote:
| I still maintain an Atom feed on my website and any website I
| operat, and still curate my offline feed list and reader. I also
| urge you to do so. It's a remnant of the good old Internet.
|
| Moreover, I enjoyed writing an XSL stylesheet for my Atom feed.
| It has amazing results, and I wonder why people don't do that.
| winternett wrote:
| It's also a great way to back up bulk content from feed sites I
| create into intuitive files for migration ETC... It's far more
| readable than JSon by bare eyes as well.
|
| Retiring RSS was a scheme, just like removing headphone jacks
| on modern cell phones, which was really a ply to make new
| insecure bluetooth and wireless headphone sales more money.
|
| I get weary of how many unreasonable and dreadful turns tech
| makes to re-invent wheels that are already installed and
| working fine.
|
| RSS was also a great way of sharing content from sources
| without copying and pasting. It's a real tragedy it's barely
| used/accessible any more... And it's just a personal opinion,
| but OAuth is also mostly a engineered and tedious end product
| of retiring RSS that really was only introduced so that
| platforms can put an incremental price tag on data access.
| mehdix wrote:
| > Retiring RSS was a scheme, just like removing headphone
| jacks on modern cell phones, which was really a ply to make
| new insecure bluetooth and wireless headphone sales more
| money.
|
| Not only that, a headphone jack does not support DRM and
| therefore is a loophole in a closed system fully controlled
| by manufacturer.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| https://nitter.kavin.rocks/DanielNemenyi/status/147038527938...
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| RSS is the only thing that's keeping the web usable for me. I
| only read this post because it appeared in the hacker news feed
| from my RSS reader newsblur (highly recommend).
| Arnavion wrote:
| Somewhat off-topic, but my personal static-site blog has an RSS
| feed, auto-generated by the same build script that compiles the
| markdown to HTML via pandoc. I don't particularly care if people
| read the entire article in their feed reader instead of in a
| browser, so I _want_ to include the full article content in the
| feed But it feels silly to have two copies of every article in
| the output, where one copy of each article is in one giant
| feed.xml file, so currently I only put the title and URL for each
| article in the feed.
|
| ~15 years ago I had solved this problem on an unrelated website
| by having the feed be the source of the content and have the feed
| transformed into (X)HTML by the browser automatically using XSLT.
| But I don't think that's in favor these days, especially since
| not all browsers support it.
|
| What do other people with static-site blogs do?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Is there a problem with the higher-quality feed other than that
| you feel silly for providing it?
| Arnavion wrote:
| I'm fine with doing it if that's what everyone else does, but
| I'm just checking that there isn't a cleaner way.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| Personally I hate when articles are in the feed in full. I'd
| much rather be able to open the articles I want to read in tabs
| in a browser, and skip past the ones I'm not interested in
| (marking them as read when I do so). I'd rather have a title,
| URL, and maybe a short summary in the RSS feed.
| NylaTheWolf wrote:
| I literally found this thread THROUGH my RSS feed.
|
| Hell, I've only been using RSS for few weeks and I actually love
| it. It's pretty overwhelming at times, but I definitely don't
| regret giving it a go at all.
| KronisLV wrote:
| Recently added RSS/Atom/JSON feeds to my blog:
| https://blog.kronis.dev/
|
| Honestly, i largely agree with the claim that RSS is dying.
|
| For example, on Windows i wanted to find a decent RSS reader to
| use, since recently coming to like the technology myself for
| consumption of news (since all of the sudden everything can just
| be boring text, as opposed to annoying and attention catching
| images, styling etc., allowing em to focus on the content), which
| turned out to be hard.
|
| In my search, i found the following readers: -
| Feedly (https://feedly.com/) not really an option for me, since i
| want downloadable software, which is also why i use Thunderbird
| instead of web mail clients - Newsblur
| (https://www.newsblur.com/) same as above - Inoreader
| (https://www.inoreader.com/) same as above - Feeder
| (https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/feeder-rss-
| feed-reader/jlkhefogiiibhgblliimeleiiiijbkjj) not an option,
| Windows Store app, i avoid that - Omea Reader
| (https://www.jetbrains.com/omea/reader/) by JetBrains, but
| requirements list Windows XP, so not updated in a long time
| - RSSOwl (http://www.rssowl.org/) based on Eclipse and fails to
| launch with new JDK versions - QuiteRSS
| (https://quiterss.org/en/screenshots) the layout absolutely
| breaks because image dimensions are not constrained, no one wants
| the header of the news story to fill up the entire screen -
| RSSGuard (https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard) in the end i
| stuck with this, because just got tired because of so many bad
| options out there
|
| Apparently Google Reader was also pretty good but was retired.
|
| How is RSS supposed to survive if there is no good software for
| it out there? Give me something like LibreOffice that you just
| download, install and it works in surprisingly sane ways most of
| the time.
| sneak wrote:
| > _not really an option for me, since i want downloadable
| software, which is also why i use Thunderbird instead of web
| mail clients_
|
| > _How is RSS supposed to survive if there is no good software
| for it out there?_
|
| There _is_ good software for it out there. Most people don 't
| want to use/run/download/install local software, they'd prefer
| an API client on their device and a service that does the heavy
| lifting for them.
|
| I don't like that model either, but most people do, and they've
| chosen it, for better or worse. I don't think that the claim
| that there's no good software out there is a valid one - it's
| just software that you personally have disqualified. SaaS is
| still software, and much of it is very high quality. You just
| don't get to run or modify it.
| KronisLV wrote:
| Fair enough, saying: "...if there is no good _desktop
| software_ for it out there? " would be more accurate.
|
| I'm perfectly fine with most of the industry moving along to
| other forms of content consumption, i'll simply stick to what
| works for me, or choose not to consume the content if that's
| not possible and there's no real need for me to do so.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| >> For example, on Windows I wanted to find a decent RSS reader
| to use
|
| Microsoft Outlook and Thunderbird [1] support RSS feeds.
|
| In the mail folders pane, there is a folder named "RSS
| Subscriptions". Right-clicking on the folder shows "Add a New
| RSS Feed" option that lets you paste in an RSS URL.
|
| After you have subscribed to an RSS feed, each feed shows as a
| folder under "RSS Subscriptions". Clicking on the feed folder
| shows the feed's content.
|
| [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-subscribe-news-
| feed...
| KronisLV wrote:
| Thanks, this is exactly what i needed!
|
| The trick was to go to File > New > Feed Account, as
| described in the linked page. Seems like the discoverability
| of the feature could be slightly improved, such as
| Thunderbird creating one such account by default.
|
| That said, the reader functionality itself seems excellent!
| It displays the items like it would any other e-mail which is
| nice from a consistency standpoint, but also not only resizes
| the images to a reasonable size, but also displays them at
| the bottom of the actual text!
|
| That alone puts it at the top of my short RSS reader list.
|
| Edit: It seems that it's a bit buggy. I just added a feed
| account and added a feed to it, retrieved the items and
| browsed some of them. Then i removed the feed account, which
| i later re-added, the feed still being there. Not only was
| that a bit odd, but attempting to open this feed hanged the
| entire program. Oh well, these things happen. The feed could
| not be removed while the program was running, but disappeared
| after the next restart, as expected.
|
| Seems like the format support is also decent, both RSS and
| Atom feeds work, but not the less common JSON feed format.
| Also, there are some problems with ordering feeds, since
| Thunderbird won't let me drag and drop feeds to re-order them
| for a particular account. The only way seems to be to use
| sub-folders which isn't necessarily what you might always
| want. But hey, it works otherwise.
| tech234a wrote:
| Feedbro (a browser extension) might be another option for you
| to consider[1].
|
| [1]: https://nodetics.com/feedbro/
| davegauer wrote:
| > which is also why i use Thunderbird instead of web mail
| clients
|
| Thunderbird is a great feed reader! I doubt I would be using
| RSS/Atom feeds at all if had to check a separate client
| application. Having them show up when I check my email makes it
| incredibly easy to see if an author I follow has posted
| anything.
| KronisLV wrote:
| That is a very fair point, as another commenter led me to
| discover!
|
| Now, in my eyes, having separate applications for separate
| types of information consumption (e.g. reading news vs
| communicating with others) isn't a bad thing, quite on the
| contrary, but that depends on each person.
| rexreed wrote:
| RSS right now is the only viable solution for a particular
| service I use that aggregates financial news and reporting across
| a range of sites. I appreciate the simplicity and power in RSS
| also the built-in capability to process RSS feeds in PHP and
| other libraries.
| grozzle wrote:
| The whole (non-Spotify, ugh) podcast ecosystem would like a word
| about RSS being obsolete.
|
| Patreon (and to a greater extent, the podcasters I support) keep
| making real money out of me and millions of others every month
| for personalised RSS feeds for content. That RSS feed is the
| delivery vehicle. It's very reliable, I can use it in any app,
| much good, so benefit, wow.
| sneak wrote:
| Most of the listeners of podcasts have moved on to technologies
| that do not rely on RSS. RSS was like podcasting 1.0. Now
| people consume podcasts on integrated, centralized platforms.
| ydlr wrote:
| I was under the impression that Apple Podcasts was the most
| popular podcast platform. It absolutely does rely on RSS. I
| assume most others do, as well.
| Kagerjay wrote:
| Not true. I wrote my own RSS distribution feed for my
| podcast, codechefs.dev.
|
| Every major service integration (Spotify, iTunes, google
| Podcast, pocketcasts)
|
| subscribes to an RSS feed. That's how it knows when a new
| episode is uploaded. Those MP3 assets are not hosted on
| Spotify, iTunes, etc, I host them on my own s3 bucket
| distributed with mp3 links in the RSS. I'm sure if your a
| really big podcaster like Joe Rogan things may be different,
| but everyone else uses RSS feeds
|
| "Integrated centralized platforms" like anchor.fm etc just
| publishes an RSS feed to those same services and hosts the
| mp3s for you on an S3 bucket
|
| Moving away from RSS doesn't solve anything
| oauea wrote:
| > The whole (non-Spotify, ugh) podcast ecosystem would like a
| word about RSS being obsolete
|
| Off topic, but it's insane how Spotify insists on advertising
| podcasts to paying users. Worse, they advertise podcasts of
| American right wing extremists, and call it "Something you
| might like" or similar offensive wording. I'm not even
| American, and I'm subjected to unwanted foreign political
| content on my music player's home page.
|
| I contacted their support about this, and apparently they are
| getting paid to advertise these podcasts to their already
| paying users.
| mfer wrote:
| This is a great example of RSS being useful while almost no one
| realizes is. People have podcast players. There are podcasts.
| They subscribe to them. RSS is the technology behind the scenes
| that powers it which almost no one notices.
|
| I bet that most podcast listeners don't know what RSS is or how
| it impacts their ability to listen to podcasts.
|
| Podcasts also present a different problem from most news.
| People want to listen to a podcast and know about episodes. A
| platform can't easily come in and alter the flow of episodes
| coming without consumers noticing and being annoyed. This works
| for RSS.
|
| With other news the aggregating platforms want to manipulate
| the flow of information for their benefit. If I look at my home
| in Twitter I might see posts from hours or days ago at the top.
| It's about engagement and they manipulate the order and display
| of posts to aide that. Their business model doesn't fit well
| with RSS as a backing technology.
|
| Note, I can't stand the manipulation of my news feed. I just
| understand the business and other factors behind it.
| soco wrote:
| I read my news (yes including HN) on the Feedbro extension
| for Firefox, I wouldn't bother to go over most of newssites
| otherwise. 5/5 highly recommended.
| gpvos wrote:
| I think there are lots of people who think RSS is _only_ for
| podcasts.
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