[HN Gopher] This is the year of the RSS reader?
___________________________________________________________________
This is the year of the RSS reader?
Author : alexzeitler
Score : 415 points
Date : 2022-12-23 13:32 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.niemanlab.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.niemanlab.org)
| 40four wrote:
| I've tried twice now, and for the life of me, I have absolutely
| no idea what this post is trying to say. For an associate
| professor of _communications_ , the writing is absolutely
| atrocious. I can't make heads or tails of this rambling multitude
| of grammatical errors, passive aggressive insults, and buzz-word
| saturated soup.
|
| I get that it one of a collection of predictions about how media
| in 2023 will look. But besides the title invoking the usual,
| repetitive conversations we have about the 'State of RSS', I have
| no idea why it's here. I might bookmark this just as an example
| of how _not_ to write a post. Especially if you don't want to
| confuse your reader, and actually express a clear thesis.
|
| Regardless, I'm an every day user of NetNewsWire on my phone, and
| I hope their prediction is right. It is about the only way I
| consume my news at this point. Even if RSS doesn't have a
| revival, it's fine. As long as all the major news orgs continue
| to provide RSS feeds, I will be here consuming them.
| jacktribe wrote:
| ChatGPT summarized: "Something something Twitter bad."
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > I've tried twice now, and for the life of me, I have
| absolutely no idea what this post is trying to say.
|
| It's answering the question: "Each year, Nieman Lab asks some
| of the smartest people in journalism what they think is coming
| in the new year. Here are their predictions for 2023."
|
| > For an associate professor of communications, the writing is
| absolutely atrocious. I can't make heads or tails of this
| rambling multitude of grammatical errors, passive aggressive
| insults, and buzz-word saturated soup.
|
| Is that true? Heads or tails? Seemed trivial to understand this
| for me.
|
| > I get that it one of a collection of predictions about how
| media in 2023 will look,
|
| Oh, and you still don't get that it's saying that 2023 will be
| the rise of the RSS reader? I thought that was pretty obvious.
|
| > I have no idea why it's here
|
| Here on HN? Because someone shared it and people upvoted it.
| That's how HN works.
|
| Or do you mean on the site? I think we've discussed that
| already.
|
| > Especially if you don't want to confuse your reader, and
| actually express a clear thesis.
|
| I don't think it was meant to convince you of anything. It was
| merely predictions. A simple question, and simple answers,
| shared online. It's not complicated.
|
| > I might bookmark this just as an example of how not to write
| a post.
|
| I'm doing the same for your comment, for similar reasons.
|
| Note: Don't like the tone of this comment? Just reflecting the
| energy you put out.
| jovial_cavalier wrote:
| I agree with GP.
|
| "The difference, going into 2023, is that even the Inbox Zero
| people are going to have a reason to complain. Left without a
| better way to quickly zoom in and zoom out on the state of
| the universe (also known as the world according to Twitter),
| I predict those people will reach a point of frustration in
| even their ability to manage email."
|
| What does this even mean? This is a massive non-sequitur. I
| stopped reading here.
| sprkwd wrote:
| That is totally written by a robot.
| HNDen21 wrote:
| It means the person is getting paid by the number of words
| in the article.. so adding a bunch of fluff to increase
| that count
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Is that true? Heads or tails? Seemed trivial to understand
| this for me._
|
| I understood it, too. But then, I have a degree in
| Communications.
|
| People on HN think that just because they can understand
| written source code that they can automatically understand
| any writing.
| [deleted]
| symlinkk wrote:
| People, including the person reading this comment right now,
| just see "RSS good" in the title and click the upvote button.
| itsjustmath wrote:
| I was looking for solutions to get RSS feeds of twitter and
| YouTube profiles and came across this useful tool:
| https://rssbox.fly.dev/
| kevincox wrote:
| For YouTube, the channel page has auto-discovery links. So you
| should just be able to paste the channel URL
| (https://www.youtube.com/@examplechannel) into your feed reader
| and it will find the right link.
| pentagrama wrote:
| I will not be surprised if Google relaunches Google Reader in
| 2023. Without fanfare, and as a simple, limited and low-effort
| product as Google Podcasts (https://podcasts.google.com).
|
| It will be a nice experiment for them, they don't dominate on the
| Social Media or Newsletters field, and a RSS reader challenges
| that field in some ways. Also a act of redeeming the killing of
| that product 10 years earlier (for a mostly nerdy/vocal
| minority).
|
| If successful obviously they will put ads on them later (Google
| Podcasts remains ad-free for now).
| gmuslera wrote:
| It would be a good April Fools event, a few of their good
| products were launched in that date, like gmail.
|
| Or a Halloween one, the launch of Google Zombie Reader.
| HissingMachine wrote:
| So the whole opinion piece hinges on unpopularity of Twitter?
| Bold move.
| delecti wrote:
| I'm a happy user of an RSS reader, but the chance of having a
| "year of the RSS reader" died with Google Reader, and nothing has
| come along to make it any more likely. Most people want
| centralization and to not have to mess with things.
| vesinisa wrote:
| 2006 called and want their headline back ..
| frouge wrote:
| What we need to revive RSS is have a true integration into
| browsers. Your bookmarks would display the numbers of unread
| posts and there is probably more great stuff to do.
| TrevorAustin wrote:
| Without having dipped into the code before, how hard would it
| be run a fork of Chromium that did this?
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| That was removed from Firefox in version 64
|
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks
| Springtime wrote:
| Vivaldi has had an in-built RSS client for years now, taking
| after Opera's original feature years back.
|
| Edit: link since I notice they have a page about it.
| https://vivaldi.com/features/feed-reader/
| kevincox wrote:
| Honestly just returning the icon that appeared when the site
| had a feed would be a huge win. Browser integrated feed-readers
| and bookmark notifications were nice but dedicated RSS readers
| are probably going to be better. You can click the feed icon
| and the browser can redirect you to your preferred feed reader.
|
| There are extensions that do this but having it built-in would
| make it widely available and easier to set up.
| 1attice wrote:
| THE YEAR OF, THE YEAR OF ----------------------- (a poem)
|
| This is the year of the RSS reader, said Hacker News.
|
| This is the year of the Linux desktop.
|
| This is the year of IPv6.
|
| This is the year of ____ battery technology that is ____ times
| better than Li-ion for ____ application, but is impractical
| because it _______
|
| This is the year of the portable fission reactor.
|
| This is the year of the tokamak; this is the year of the
| stellarator; this is the year of quantum supremacy.
|
| This is the year of not quite-yet.
|
| This is the year that we finally expose those weird woke people.
|
| This is the year that we finally expose those flagrant futurist-
| fascists.
|
| This is the year that there was another shooting, and then
| another, but we were fascinated by the ghost guns, not the torn
| flesh.
|
| This is the year we invented "freedom of reach", because it
| rhymed, and there is no tax on superfluous fine distinctions.
| Nor, it would seem, on rich mens' folly.
|
| This is the year, this is the year, this is the year.
|
| This is the gyre, this is the gyre, this is the gyre.
|
| We love the merry-go-round; for when it goes fast enough, it
| really feels like you're getting somewhere.
| nitin-pai wrote:
| I don't know about the "year of..." but RSS readers are
| definitely the best option to consume information in a manner
| that leaves the individual with control, while being exposed to a
| broad range of thinking. And consuming content from a broad range
| of media.
|
| I do hope 2023 becomes the year of the comeback of RSS.
| jfengel wrote:
| I don't understand the love of RSS readers. The basic concept
| is trivial; you could write one in five minutes. It doesn't
| seem radically different from any of thousands of news
| aggregator type web sites, including HN.
|
| I read upthread that Google Reader had a social mechanism for
| recommending feeds to friends. That's great for discovery, but
| it still hardly seems earth-shaking.
|
| It feels an awful lot like a rose-colored-glasses situation,
| where something existed that wasn't horrible but doesn't
| reappear because it wasn't all that great, either. What is it
| I'm missing?
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I don't think the tech is the interesting part. Most websites
| I want to read don't even post the whole article on an RSS
| feed, and you're at the mercy of every website offering a
| feed.
|
| The better solution is a post-RSS smart reader where you can
| drop links into it and it figures out how to turn the website
| into a feed and it caches all the content so the origin never
| needs to be available.
|
| We over cling to RSS the same way we over cling to IRC
| instead of looking for ways to build on the good parts. Then
| we're always stuck reminiscing and over glamorizing a past
| that wasn't as good as we remember.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _It doesn 't seem radically different from any of thousands
| of news aggregator type web sites, including HN._
|
| It allows you to tailor your aggregation, and create you own
| aggregation of topics if there isn't another aggregator out
| there.
|
| Are you into kumquats, ancient Mesopotamia, and The
| Buzzcocks? You're not going to find a web aggregator for
| that. But you can put together several RSS feeds into your
| own aggregation.
| jfengel wrote:
| Couldn't I just subscribe to kumquats, ancient Mesopotamia,
| and The Buzzcocks groups on Facebook? Yeah, I know "the
| algorithm" means that I'd miss some things and have other
| things injected into my feed, but it doesn't sound like the
| total content is radically different.
|
| I understand the idea of wanting to feel more control by
| seeing precisely and exactly the groups you asked for, but
| I feel like it's not really a radical change in terms of
| content.
| vanilla_nut wrote:
| Facebook shoves content I don't care about in my face,
| and frequently hides content from pages and people that I
| do care about (who don'y pay Zuck's troll toll or play
| visibility optimization games like emphasizing useless
| Story content).
|
| My RSS reader (FreshRSS, self-hosted, and NetNewsWire on
| macOS/iOS) shows me all posts from all feeds I've chosen
| to subscribe to. Nothing more, nothing less. No ads, no
| murky VC cloud funding -- I self host on my own raspberry
| pi -- and no privacy concerns.
|
| Social media is kind of like a flaky RSS feed with
| comments from people I don't know or care about that
| sometimes doesn't show me content I DO want to see but
| also constantly shows me ads, tries to manipulate me into
| spending more time browsing, and hoovers up as much data
| as humanly possible. Oh, and it changes the UI every 6-8
| months in seemingly random UX a/b tests in the name of
| "optimization." And it radicalizes my older relatives
| politically.
|
| That seems like a pretty shitty RSS feed to me.
| lexoj wrote:
| Then you need to check Facebook everyday to not miss
| stuff, whereas with RSS you have full control WHEN you
| consume your feeds.
| musictubes wrote:
| Most of the sites that I follow do not have a presence on
| Facebook. Plus it's nice to have the info sent to you
| unencumbered by the nonsense/ads/privacy concerns on
| social media sites.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Couldn 't I just subscribe to kumquats, ancient
| Mesopotamia, and The Buzzcocks groups on Facebook?_
|
| Sure, you could. I can't. I'm locked out of Facebook. And
| in spite of sending a photo of my government ID into
| Facebook's customer service black hole, nothing has
| changed.
|
| RSS gives me the freedom to aggregate information without
| relying on some faceless tech company to decide when I
| can have it, and when I should be cut off.
| _ix wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're missing. I think aggregators are
| great for a lot of things, but I primarily use it for
| discovery. I infrequently contribute (like this, I guess?).
| After discovery, RSS is really convenient to continue
| consuming that source's content, regardless of its appearance
| on an aggregator a second time.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > It doesn't seem radically different from any of thousands
| of news aggregator type web sites, including HN.
|
| RSS lets me subscribe to everything jfengel (say) posts, not
| just the minority of jfengel posts that make it onto HN. That
| matters for those who are jfengel fans.
|
| Edit: of course, it's also useful if jfengel only posts about
| once a month. You don't want to miss anything, but neither do
| you want to visit the blog every day to see if there's
| something new. Facebook is terrible at this -- I regularly
| find that I've missed something that a friend who is an
| occasional FB user has posed.
| ghaff wrote:
| >of course, it's also useful if jfengel only posts about
| once a month.
|
| I think that's the point a number of people on this thread
| are missing. Newsletters, for example, are fine if there
| are a handful of people who publish regularly/frequently
| who you want to follow. They're less useful if you want to
| follow what 50 people who may only publish something once a
| month are writing.
| weberer wrote:
| Its not about discovery or aggregation or being social. Its a
| way to keep up to date with things you explicitly subscribe
| to. You have a bunch of sites that you like, which puts out
| periodic updates. Like a weekly webcomic, or a news site, or
| local weather alerts. Then you subscribe to those feeds. Then
| whenever they make a new post, it shows as an update in your
| reader. Think Twitter, but instead of 280 character posts,
| they're previews of other webpages.
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| It's about the locus of control. HN, or other aggregators,
| are about the crowd curating your feed; RSS is about you
| curating your feed. The unit of attention, namely some
| headline, is either presented to you by The Algorithm
| (whether human-powered or otherwise) if on a modern
| aggregator, or your own previous choices if using RSS.
|
| In modernity, we might call that latter a "filter bubble",
| but in the parlance of the 00s, we thought of it as a
| "personal newspaper".
| jfengel wrote:
| Isn't your source of RSS feeds the curation? Is that very
| different from Facebook or Twitter showing you the people
| you subscribe to?
|
| I know Facebook and Twitter play stupid games with "the
| algorithm", injecting stuff you didn't ask for and hiding
| stuff from your friends, but in the end it's not as if you
| were just being force-fed solely stuff you had no interest
| in.
|
| So wouldn't an RSS feed be just as much of a filter bubble,
| based on who you choose to subscribe to? You might feel
| better knowing that you were seeing it in a simple
| chronological order without the algorithmic opinion, but it
| doesn't seem like a solution to filter bubbles.
| Veen wrote:
| I don't think anyone is claiming that RSS a solution to
| the filter bubble problem. But the benefit of RSS is that
| you create your own filter bubble, rather than relying on
| someone else's (often malicious) algorithm to do it for
| you.
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| >Isn't your source of RSS feeds the curation?
|
| Like I said, RSS is about you curating your feed. Using
| RSS, you don't see headlines from anything you didn't
| choose to see.
|
| >in the end it's not as if you were just being force-fed
| solely stuff you had no interest in
|
| That's trivially true. That said, if the choice,
| regarding seeing shit I'm not interested in/calculated
| ragebait/for-profit spam/etc, is between seeing it
| "never" and seeing it "sometimes, when someone else wants
| me to see it", the choice seems obvious.
|
| >it doesn't seem like a solution to filter bubbles
|
| I don't think it is either; that said, I still think it's
| better. Part of the conceptual transition from "personal
| newspaper" to "filter bubble" was the increasing
| prevalence of calculated ragebait/for-profit spam/etc on
| aggregators -- the pressures present in aggregators, and
| the inevitable comment sections, help shape content to be
| more ragey or spammy, to get that all-important
| _engagement_. That shaping happens everywhere on the
| aggregator -- here on HN, for instance, dang goes around
| silencing non-HNish comments with impunity and without
| appeals. This isn 't a bad thing, but it is a shaping of
| the aggregator's content by shaping the aggregator's
| culture. If one spends all one's time on an aggregator,
| consuming that shaped culture, one's perspective can
| easily start to skew. With a "personal newspaper", one is
| more aware of the artificiality -- it's not a site
| itself, it's just the sum total of the RSS feeds of blogs
| X, Y, and Z. A "filter bubble"'s ostensibly organic
| culture, and ostensibly broader curation, helps one
| convince oneself that it's a community with justified
| beliefs.
|
| RSS doesn't really afford that kind of escalation. If HN
| were dang's blog, the pressure he exerts would only
| affect the comments section of that blog. Sure, audience
| pressure can help make an RSS'd source more extreme, but
| if that pressure happens it's got to be occurring on the
| site's own commenting infrastructure, which means local
| moderation can sort it out. At a minimum, there's no
| chance of the contamination hopping RSS feed sources (at
| least, via RSS itself).
| musictubes wrote:
| With Facebook and Twitter you subscribe to people and
| brands. It is trivially easy to make a social media post
| so they tend to be more numerous and less
| useful/informative. RSS is usually used to subscribe to
| blog posts/articles which tend to be more in depth.
| Someone upthread mentioned a magazine and I think that is
| a good comparison. Curated long form writing about
| subjects that interest you makes it quite a bit different
| than social media.
|
| RSS is also handy for following blogs or websites that
| only post intermittently.
|
| RSS and filter bubbles could go either way. Nothing
| stopping you from filling your feeds with folks that
| don't think the way you do. Most of us don't have the
| patience to wade through thoughts contrary to our own.
| That's the real issue when it comes to popping your
| filter bubble, not which tool you use to get the info.
| kgwxd wrote:
| For me the biggest selling point of RSS is never having to
| rescan over feed items I've already read, or decided to skip,
| to find the new stuff. Another big one is that there's an end
| to the list. Neither of those are a huge deal for low-volume
| feeds but for HN and Reddit, they're priceless to me.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >consume information in a manner that leaves the individual
| with control
|
| This is both the main feature, and the biggest obstacle. The
| people with the money do no want the individual to have
| control. Thus it has always been and shall always be.
|
| Folks are banging on Elon because they feel he's using Twitter
| to manipulate, but it's not like Twitter was different pre-
| Elon. Elon simply gave The Man a face, voice and smell.
|
| Back in the blogosphere (I hate that word) days, a lot of RSS
| was floating around. It wasn't very good, as RSS
| implementations varied a lot. But when it was working well, it
| was so good. If I have a complaint about returning to RSS it
| would be that we will return to the days of clickbaity
| headlines.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| > we will return to the days of clickbaity headlines
|
| We entered those days and have yet to leave. If anything, the
| rise of social media (at RSS's expense) turbo-charged
| clickbait headlines, since now it's easy to measure
| engagement around those stories, both in terms of views and
| in terms of comments/likes/shares/etc.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Gated through fewer sources providing much more analytics
| definitely changes the game there.
| imadj wrote:
| > If I have a complaint about returning to RSS it would be
| that we will return to the days of clickbaity headlines
|
| Wait, what do you mean? Clickbaiting (and borderline
| misinformation) has been getting only worse ever since
| deltarholamda wrote:
| Fair enough, "return" is not the correct word here. Maybe
| "we will solidify the importance of clickbaity headlines"?
|
| I first noticed the up-tick of clickbait headlines in the
| salad days of RSS. Due to this, I tend to ignore headlines
| these days, because I was trained to assume the headline
| was complete nonsense. So my internal metrics are a bit
| wonky.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Is it also going to be the year of the Linux desktop?
| zzzzzzzza wrote:
| someone please make a gpt based rss feed summarizer. i use rss
| but it would be great if gpt could just read all the titles for
| me and give me a summary.
|
| would be great if you could give it feedback after reading over
| the feed yourself and highlight areas you think it missed or got
| right
| thirdplace_ wrote:
| I built a small tool that helps to discover feed urls. It uses
| various hardcoded and dynamic rules:
| https://discovery.thirdplace.no/?q=https://www.tek.no
|
| It's FOSS and has an http json api.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| One of the problems with RSS is lack of a feedback loop from mere
| reader to content creator. Said another way, RSS doesn't have a
| reply function and that makes it harder to iterate around user
| feedback. Some of which can be very valuable.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _One of the problems with RSS is lack of a feedback loop from
| mere reader to content creator._
|
| That's a feature, not a bug.
|
| It's the difference between publish/subscribe and social chat.
|
| When people unsubscribe, there's your feedback. Just like with
| newspapers.
| cosmojg wrote:
| Email? Response blogs? This has been a solved problem for a
| while now.
| pbowyer wrote:
| > One of the problems with RSS is lack of a feedback loop from
| mere reader to content creator. Said another way, RSS doesn't
| have a reply function and that makes it harder to iterate
| around user feedback. Some of which can be very valuable.
|
| Did any RSS readers build commenting into them - or even the
| viewing of comments? I remember subscribing to a blog, and then
| having to visit the site to view the comments or post a
| comment. And then subscribing to a separate RSS feed to
| subscribe to the comments for any post that I wanted updates
| on.
|
| For me that was where RSS fell short.
| musictubes wrote:
| Most RSS readers will only show whatever the author wants to
| share via RSS. Often times you need to click through to the
| actual blog to read the rest. That's where you can comment.
|
| Unread is the RSS reader I use on iOS and iPadOS. It does
| scrape the site and give the entire article. I love it but
| now I wonder if it's a good idea to circumvent the wishes of
| the blogger. I use Newsblur as the aggregator and tie Unread
| to it. The Newsblur portal to my RSS feeds works well enough
| in the browser on computers.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| If you want it, just add a link to a feedback page on the
| bottom of your posts.
| jerf wrote:
| I think the biggest thing holding back the development of the
| next generation of social networks is this pernicious belief
| that it is _mandatory_ to put some sort of public comment
| section on everything, where anybody with a pulse (or the
| technical wherewithal to fake it adequately enough) can slap
| anything they want down next to your content. Context matters,
| and this has a certain inevitable effect even on the original
| content.
|
| It is a tool. It has times and places. It is not mandatory, nor
| is it always a good thing. It is quite often a really, really
| bad thing. It can always be adjoined to a piece of content,
| like we're doing right now. It is not mandatory for the
| original poster to host it.
|
| If you want a social network that works that way, you are
| spoiled for choice. If you are unhappy with those social
| networks, consider the possibility that much of your
| unhappiness may in fact stem from this very idea. If it seems
| like everywhere you go is kind of a cacophony of regression-to-
| the-mean discussion, insults, lowest-common-denominator... this
| is the root cause.
|
| It is not a bad thing that "replying" to the creator of an RSS-
| based blog is exactly as hard as they choose to make it, up to
| and including making it impossible.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| This is why I charitably say "_some_ of which".
| rinze wrote:
| I completely agree. I used to have a Wordpress blog with
| comments enabled, and that brought me a few headaches at some
| point.
|
| Later on, I moved to Pelican, which is a static generator,
| and below every article there's an info box that indicates
| that no, there's no commenting system, and lists a couple of
| ways someone can reach me if they wish to discuss that
| particular article. So far, it's working.
| Avamander wrote:
| Some of the best info and discussions I've stumbled upon
| were under someone's article in the comments.
|
| It's not always just for the benefit of the writer, I mean.
| lolinder wrote:
| Why does user feedback need to happen on the same channel as
| new content notifications? In my mind keeping a distinction is
| a huge advantage because it puts the creator in charge of how
| they interact with their audience.
|
| They could add a comment section to their WordPress blog. They
| could cross-post to Reddit. They could have an email dedicated
| to comments and feedback. They could do none of those things
| because they really don't care what the audience thinks.
|
| Because RSS/Atom doesn't integrate two-way interaction, there
| are no preconceived notions of how the second direction ought
| to work.
| gpanders wrote:
| >They could have an email dedicated to comments and feedback.
|
| Some technical blogs I follow use this. They create a public
| mailing list that they treat as their "public inbox". Anyone
| can send an email to it, and all messages are publicly
| viewable. No signup or account required either since it's all
| just email.
|
| I'm a fan of this solution personally.
| tracker1 wrote:
| On a similar note, however, how many sites have explicitly
| removed comments at this point?
|
| I know there was a Gab browser extension that would effectively
| make all sites have comment sections, and there are other
| similar attempts, but none seemed to gain any significant
| traction.
| vidanay wrote:
| I don't want content creators to shape their content according
| to feedback and popularity. I want content creators who shape
| their content according to their interests and desires and
| experiences.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| I feel like there's been an extremely strong push in our
| current culture against actual artistic visionairies that's
| being driven by toxic and infantile "fan communities" that
| screech endlessly on the internet about anything they don't
| like.
|
| Art apparently isn't about a creative realizing their unique
| vision, its about doing things mouthbreathers like. People
| seem to be viscerally offended when someone unapologetically
| makes something that isn't for them.
|
| Bring back gatekeeping.
| JonathanBeuys wrote:
| Then why did you write this feedback?
| reaperducer wrote:
| Because posting in a forum doesn't make you a content
| creator, and this isn't an RSS feed?
| bsnnkv wrote:
| I had a nice conversation last week with someone on HN
| discussing how I went about making items on my RSS feeds
| commentable.[1]
|
| I think with a little bit of creativity it's still possible to
| innovate quite a bit with/on top of RSS.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33978500
| charles_f wrote:
| Email address for feedback at the bottom of the post? Easily
| fixed problem.
| pixelmonkey wrote:
| I used to be a big fan of RSS readers, and I even built one, of
| sorts, as a startup at one point in 2009. But these days, I tend
| to just use Instapaper.
|
| I have the plugin installed in all my browsers, and if I'm
| looking for something to read, I swipe thru my saves using the
| Instapaper Chrome web interface, Android app, or (most commonly)
| iPad app. I have Instapaper and Readwise synced up, which adds a
| little extra incentive (highlights) for doing things that way.
|
| How do I find stuff to Instapaper? These days, it's TechMeme,
| Hacker News, Lobste.rs, Reddit, Twitter, Google News, Apple News
| (on iPad). Heavily weighted to the first four sources, with #1-#4
| being maybe 80% of my saved links that come from aggregators.
|
| Recently I have been beta testing Readwise Reader. It's probably
| as good a reading experience as I could currently imagine (it's
| sort of Instapaper on steroids, and it even syncs with
| Instapaper). But, even still, I find the entire category a little
| tired.
|
| The big issue is source quality. It's harder to find a small
| group of regular bloggers that might make a curated RSS reader
| experience worthwhile. When I was younger, I'd read Joel Spolsky,
| Paul Graham, and dozens of developer blogs, and that was
| "enough". These days, to get the same sort of volume and quality,
| I'd need to curate hundreds (maybe thousands) of sources. It's
| also sad, but true, that the average blog on the internet is
| simply no longer publishing new posts. That is, the typical blog
| with an interesting archive is likely abandoned in terms of new
| posts going online, or has the publishing rate reduced to an
| annual trickle. So it's not worth my time to predict and curate
| the exceptions.
| pwillia7 wrote:
| Chrome in Android has a built in RSS reader in chrome now labeled
| the 'following' tab in your new tab page. I've been using this
| with great success lately. The key for me was to pick only a few
| really high quality sources instead of 99999 sources.
| https://9to5google.com/2021/10/08/chrome-rss-web-feed/
|
| There's a flag for desktop too. You can enable 'Feed' in the
| sidebar, but it doesn't work for me on any platform at the
| moment.
| kevincox wrote:
| > pick only a few really high quality sources
|
| That's an interesting point of view. I tend to find that the
| high quality sources I tend to follow are very low volume. So
| I've subscribed to hundreds of personal blogs, YouTube channels
| and similar to produce a steady (but not high volume) flow of
| good content.
|
| Most of the higher-volume sources that I have considered
| following are either low quality or most of the content isn't
| within my interests.
|
| Basically I tend to prefer 100 good sources that post a few
| times a year than 2 sources that post daily. Of course this
| isn't a hard rule, it is just the collaboration that I have
| seen. There are obviously some teams that put out high-quality
| content on a regular schedule.
| Jackevansevo wrote:
| How long will this feature last until it inevitably gets
| canned?
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| The longevity of Chrome features generally seems to be much
| better than that of Google products in general. I can only
| think of a few major removals: FTP, NSAPI and the ongoing MV2
| debacle, Chrome apps, Gears; I don't remember if any variant
| of NaCl ever shipped as non-beta, and I'm sure Dart-
| in-<script> never did.
| bombolo wrote:
| It needs some adoption first... no point in canning something
| nobody uses. It'd be too simple.
| pwillia7 wrote:
| yeah they'll have to wait until they ship physical RSS
| readers out
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't know. For a "few" high quality sources you can just
| check the sources directly. For me, the big win for RSS in the
| blogosphere world was you could follow a lot of sources that
| published pretty sporadically but sometimes had interesting
| things when they did publish.
| pwillia7 wrote:
| Yeah, I still have quiterss setup like that, but this is my
| alternative to doom scrolling Reddit/pop news sites. I use
| this Chrome extension and the feed mode to be more selective
| about my news. https://archive.is/
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Why would I use RSS when HN does it all for me?
| berniedurfee wrote:
| I use an RSS reader for HN! A couple other feeds, but that's
| it.
| gumby wrote:
| > We are just at peak newsletter via email delivery
|
| The thing that makes substack work for me is that every one has
| an RSS feed. Otherwise it would simply be another thing for me to
| ignore.
| clircle wrote:
| The best thing about rss is that after i read my 30 unread
| articles, i can just close my laptop and walk away. Who ever said
| that twitter was going to make rss obsolete has never experienced
| this digital freedom.
| firatsarlar wrote:
| https://theoldreader.com/ ?
| nashashmi wrote:
| Google had such a great opportunity and still does to support and
| enhance rss with Google reader.
|
| They had Google news. They had YouTube. They had Google buzz and
| Google plus. And Google books. They were the king of media!
|
| But there was no media Barron to tie and visualize the peices at
| Google. And that wad the biggest loss to google.
| seydor wrote:
| This year is the year of TV. Tiktok brought the continuous, low
| effort video feed to everyone. TV will take this even further
| with continuous video feeds. Probably twitter will start
| autoscrolling like a teleprompter as well . The demand for
| feeding tubes and catheters will also skyrocket.
| dang wrote:
| Related ongoing threads:
|
| _Ask HN: What RSS Reader do you use in 2022?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34108413
|
| _It 's time for an RSS revival (2018)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105558
| senectus1 wrote:
| I setup a selfhosted RSS reader called FreshRSS... I migrated
| from reader to feedly to this and have never been happier.
|
| Self hosting services via docker has been a game changer for me.
| haolez wrote:
| Sim e I've started using hey.com, I'm more prone to subscribing
| to newsletters than to use RSS readers.
|
| I'm not affiliated. Just a happy customer.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I've tried out RSS a couple times, but the intermittent support
| for full article makes it not a tenable alternative for me. Is
| this a solved problem, and I just haven't found it yet?
|
| Also, what do "Inbox Zero people" have to do with any of this? Is
| this a reference to people reading more newsletters now? I
| honestly don't understand.
| sunsetMurk wrote:
| 'inbox zero' in this context is for the RSS reader's inbox, not
| email.
|
| I remember my satisfaction w/ hitting "no new stories
| available" back in the 'Google Reader' days!
| sherlock_h wrote:
| Funny timing - I just switched all my email newsletter
| subscriptions that I used to read on Gmail Web to Inoreader.
|
| The reason was fairly simple - I wanted a better way to organize
| my newsletters and make it feel more "reading list" like than
| "task list" like. On email, unopened newsletters always felt like
| tasks.
| kevincox wrote:
| My simple solution is to filter them all into a "News" folder
| that doesn't notify. Then I can just open it whenever I have
| some spare time.
| kshay wrote:
| Agreed--I love RSS, but don't really see "organizing
| newsletters" as its killer app, or experience "newsletters
| come via email" as a pain point. Filters seem to serve
| basically the same purpose.
| kevincox wrote:
| Yeah, I see RSS and newsletters as largely equivalent
| technologies. The have minor technical differences but 99%
| of the read differences are social.
|
| Pro Feeds:
|
| 1. Once you subscribe the publisher has no way to contact
| you. Email relies on the publisher being honest.
|
| 2. Provides some history (or full history with
| archiving/pagination atom extensions)
|
| Pro Newsletter:
|
| 3. Push based system by default (Feeds can use WebSub but
| it isn't that common).
|
| 4. ~everyone already has it set up.
|
| At the end of the day they both transmit blobs of HTML to
| you with some minimal metadata.
| throw0101a wrote:
| When saying "RSS" are we talking about the protocol/file format,
| or using it proverbially for 'syndication'/feeds?
|
| Any reason(s) to use RSS (0.9x/1.0/2.0) over Atom (RFC 4287)?
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Yes, Atom is fine (preferable, even...at least to me). We're
| probably stuck with "RSS" as the generic term, though, for much
| the same reason we still say "making a record" for music or the
| floppy disk icon for "save".
| tomrod wrote:
| Syndication. Virtually no one refers to a protocol or file
| format in common jargon and dialect.
| kevincox wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they are doing the latter. I'm not aware of any
| feed readers that don't accept Atom and you will get much more
| consistent results as it is more clearly specified.
| perardi wrote:
| As someone who has used RSS since NetNewsWire looked like this...
|
| https://ranchero.com/images/nnw2/nnwtoolbarhidden.png
|
| ...get off my lawn, kids.
|
| And then let grandpa here hitch up his britches even higher:
| people still lament the end of Google Reader for a reason.
|
| In retrospect, it was the least toxic social network. You added
| your friends, their recommendations bubbled up in the interface,
| so you saw cool new stuff. Was that perfect? Of course not--you
| were still in a filter bubble, and what bleeds, leads. But, it
| surfaced interesting stories, it let you follow news sources you
| wanted to see, and it did so without the screaming madness of
| Twitter and Facebook.
| 4926394057 wrote:
| Ah, it's hard to see those 15 unread items from Aaron Swartz.
| What an optimistic time that was for the internet.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| As someone who has used RSS since NetNewsWire looked like
| this... https://www.coolaboo.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/07/cuneifor... ...get off my lawn, kids.
|
| In retrospect, the end of Google Reader was nothing compared to
| the neolithic revolution.
| manchmalscott wrote:
| Akregator still looks exactly like that, I guess if it works,
| it works.
| Kiro wrote:
| 1. You're a kid yourself if you were that late.
|
| 2. No-one used the social features.
| tomrod wrote:
| I stopped appreciating RSS after "below the fold" content
| started being hidden by default.
|
| It was when the Internet died. We have been basking in the
| glory of a dead innovation ever since.
| toastal wrote:
| I don't mind so long as there is a summary/abstract for me to
| assess if it's worth my time, and their site is accessible.
| Press a button from the feed reader and now elinks opens up
| for me to read it. Some site's this is better. But with
| malice or carelessness others don't cater to a TUI (no skip
| link, navigation is duplicated for mobile for no reason,
| etc.) well or on the GUI they'll pile in targeted
| ads/trackers (though blocked) but will also hide a bunch of
| useful stuff carelessly behind JavaScript, like image loading
| or the entire article (which if your primary site purpose is
| content, you should be obligated to make sure at least the
| noscript situation is covered as folks don't want to trust
| code execution for what is likely a one-off read).
| hedora wrote:
| There are tools like five filters that follow the links, and
| download the whole story. O think RSS is unusable without
| them.
| [deleted]
| tomrod wrote:
| Which tools do you recommend?
|
| Feedly does not do this (at least, not by default?), and I
| consider the experience substandard.
| ESMirro wrote:
| On Apple devices Reeder 5, NetNewsWire and Feedbin all
| use the Mercury parser API (hosted by Feedbin) to extract
| the full article text. I believe Fiery Feeds also
| includes this functionality (with a subscription)
| although I am uncertain of the process used. Lire is yet
| another reader that includes this functionality by
| default.
|
| Of those above I recommend Reeder 5 if you don't care
| about web accessibility and Feedbin if you do.
| tshell wrote:
| If you're on a Mac or iOS, NetNewsWire can fetch and
| extract the whole article for an individual item, or you
| can set it to automatically do it for an entire feed:
| https://netnewswire.com/help/mac/5.1/en/reader-view
| incanus77 wrote:
| Same here -- first piece of Mac software that I ever paid for,
| in 2002. Still use it.
| zeckalpha wrote:
| And NNTP before that...
| tracker1 wrote:
| Still a fan of NNTP... thinking of doing something similar
| with HTTP and Cloudflare workers (and adjacent service).
| Durable Objects for incrementing counters per group, and R2
| for header/body storage. Not inherently distributed to
| separate servers, but an open enough API that it would be
| similar and allow for other implementations. Only thinking
| CF, in that I wouldn't have the issues of trying to self-
| scale in the same way something that could be simple if it
| gained wider usage.
| qw wrote:
| With "nntp//rss" you could get the best of both worlds. It
| contained both an NNTP server and an RSS aggregator, with a
| web interface for administration.
|
| It's no longer maintained, but it was a great concept
| jdfellow wrote:
| Gnus having NNTP and it's "nnrss" module means its my default
| newsreader.
| hinkley wrote:
| The way I mitigated this problem was to periodically check
| places like Reddit or Slashdot, noting which sources were
| cropping up for things I found interesting, and then adding
| those to my feed reader, skipping the middle man.
|
| Once a week or when I ran out of feed I'd go hunting for more.
| The friends aspect diminished greatly but I had plenty to read.
| webwanderings wrote:
| Be humble grandpa! There were people who used to use Google
| Reader without any of its social network shenanigans. And of
| course, there were people who have been using RSS readers
| before Google Reader was even born. But, no RSS reader has ever
| reached the ceiling of common usage, which is not a bad deal.
| lolinder wrote:
| I don't think OP was referring to any social features beyond
| what RSS specified:
|
| > In retrospect, it was the least toxic social network. You
| added your friends, their recommendations bubbled up in the
| interface, so you saw cool new stuff.
|
| This is just "subscribe to people's blogs". That's still the
| ideal social media for me.
| ryanf wrote:
| No, Google Reader had a social layer where you could add
| friends, see items that they recommended, and comment on
| them. It was really great, but it was ruined by the
| migration to Google+ before Reader was actually killed.
| smeej wrote:
| Was this the same as Google Buzz?
|
| My friends and I loved Buzz and lamented its loss. We
| tried Google+, but it couldn't even really do what Buzz
| could do, and it certainly didn't have any other killer
| features, so it didn't take.
| ghaff wrote:
| In my circles, which admittedly may not be representative,
| RSS is/was a tool for people whose job it was in part to
| proactively ferret out a wide range of information and
| insights from obscure corners of the internet--so
| journalists, analysts, and the like. Which just doesn't
| describe a mainstream audience.
|
| While it's satisfying to blame Google, the killing of Reader
| always seemed like a natural effect of RSS not being popular
| than its cause. It's not like there aren't other RSS
| alternatives. And, of course, social media does a pretty good
| job--for all its faults--of surfacing those various tidbits
| with or without RSS.
| skybrian wrote:
| It was successful enough that a much smaller business than
| Google would have tried to keep it going, probably as a
| subscription service. But for Google it was a rounding
| error, and the code base needed a rewrite.
|
| It seems hard to argue that it would have become more
| successful, given that its successors are pretty good but
| they're small businesses.
| ghaff wrote:
| Right. And the problem with rounding error businesses at
| large companies is that:
|
| 1. They're a distraction and
|
| 2. It's probably very career limiting to work on them.
|
| Someone at IBM told me years ago that if something wasn't
| going to be a billion dollar business they weren't
| interested. And Google walked away years ago from
| organizing the world's knowledge if advertising wasn't
| attached.
| fanso99 wrote:
| There is an argument to be made that these... micro
| services were a part of a bigger offering from Google.
| Maybe by itself Reader wasn't a billion dollar business,
| but together with other niche features Reader attracted
| an influential and wealthy audience.
| drtz wrote:
| > There were people who used to use Google Reader without any
| of its social network shenanigans.
|
| I was even blissfully ignorant to the existence of these
| social features in Google Reader until this moment.
| [deleted]
| kcplate wrote:
| Same. I am glad of that too. I loved it and probably
| wouldn't have if the social aspect was in your face.
| JKolios wrote:
| Google killing of Reader was the symbolic point where the
| business plan of the internet moved from "Let's sell stuff to
| users!" to "Let's sell users to advertisers!".
| mfer wrote:
| I'm going to disagree with that.
|
| It was when business plans from moved from letting users
| control what they consume to being in control of what users
| consume.
| [deleted]
| Gigachad wrote:
| This is exactly what users want. Tiktok is so successful
| because you don't have to pick the content you consume. RSS
| on the other hand is far too manual and too much bad
| content gets mixed in with the good.
| smeej wrote:
| Why did they want to do that, if not to be more effective,
| in the long run, for advertisers?
| mfer wrote:
| There are a variety of motivations. These include...
|
| The biggest is that they are trying to maximize
| revenue/profits. In controlling the flow of information
| to people they are in better control of that. A lot has
| been studied about this.
|
| I didn't realize there were other motivations until FB
| started to publish studies they carried out on people.
| Some of those (which they published awhile ago) were
| around the manipulation of users emotions and their
| ability to target voting groups (to increase people going
| to vote in target groups) around elections.
| hamburglar wrote:
| Yeah I can think of a few. That sort of influence is one,
| benefiting advertisers is another, positioning themselves
| to get a cut of all transactions is another. Is there an
| alternate universe where in order to get your content in
| front of users, it has to be AMP and in order to be AMP,
| it has to meet a new requirement that all payments must
| be done through a payment framework that lets google
| control the user experience ("purely for the end users'
| benefit" of course)? Probably.
| smeej wrote:
| I hear what you guys are saying, but "maximize
| revenue/profits" _means_ "benefit advertisers so they
| come to us instead of anybody else." "Getting a cut of
| all transactions" _means_ benefitting advertisers who
| sell anything through the site.
|
| It's all advertising all the time.
| sirmike_ wrote:
| YOU are 100 percent correct.
|
| Generally speaking when Google prevents and limits what end
| users can control -- the offending product gets worse and
| eventually dropped.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Google Reader was a free product, subsidized by google ads.
| tomrod wrote:
| Google Reader was a service that brought in good will,
| subsidized by people trusting Google to "not be evil" and
| provide useful services. This subsequently turned into
| people using Google's money-making products, like ads.
|
| At least to most I've spoken with on the subject (a few
| dozen, so informal straw poll), killing Google Reader
| turned people's opinion of Google from scrappy startup to
| untrustworthy behemoth.
| kcplate wrote:
| > At least to most I've spoken with on the subject (a few
| dozen, so informal straw poll), killing Google Reader
| turned people's opinion of Google from scrappy startup to
| untrustworthy behemoth.
|
| You can add me to that informal poll. I moved to Feedly,
| but Google Reader was my go to for a whole lot of years.
| My opinion of Google changed the day they announced its
| demise. I am probably an outlier but the _only_ way I
| want to consume content on the web is via RSS feeds.
| Allows me to curate what I see and if subscribed sites
| start delivering me poor content, I drop them from the
| feed list.
| tomrod wrote:
| +1
| incanus77 wrote:
| Right, but it was an early step in Google's now-classic
| playbook of undercutting existing paid solutions by
| subsidizing a free, shiny alternative, driving the paid
| versions out of business, then either turning their product
| into a surveillance nightmare or shutting it down.
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| So is Mail, Maps, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Youtube, etc.
|
| What's your point?
| [deleted]
| college_physics wrote:
| Indeed, spot on. And given the internet _is_ the computer
| this is (as good as any) a representation of the fatal
| bifurcation that has essentially destroyed the potential of
| digitization for at least a generation (and maybe forever)
| enos_feedler wrote:
| Agreed. And that while I am not claiming Apple as a savior
| here or anything, imagine how bad it could be if we didn't
| have at least 1 company still in the business of selling
| computers. At least to SOME degree. Things could be a lot
| worse
| numpad0 wrote:
| I don't know, to me it feels like it was 10 years ago.
| b33j0r wrote:
| Thank you for making my exact comment. I was too stressed out
| today and you nailed it ;)
| glenstein wrote:
| The light social layer on top of stories was super interesting.
| You could comment on articles with your friends. There was a
| lot of potential there.
| musictubes wrote:
| Newsblur has this feature although I don't think it's used
| much.
| snapplebobapple wrote:
| This is where that gab project from a couple years ago was
| amazing (although the most generous thing I can say about the
| user content created by it was that it was not amazing lol).
| it had an extension you would install and it would overlay a
| comments section on any webpage on the internet.I would love
| to see something like that but with properly threaded
| comments and an easy way to subscribe to specific communities
| commenting, or ideally, federated but you could choose the
| communities you wanted to overlay moderation from. even
| better if it has support for easy account switching so you
| could bin your comment into the proper group for the level of
| moderation it would pass.
|
| activity pub almost does this but comment threading has been
| universally garbage on every instance I have tried (how hard
| is it to thread stuff like comments on hacker news are
| threaded????) but the method is wrong in that you scroll
| activity pub feeds instead of surfing the net and finding the
| rich and interesting comment sections for what you are
| seeing.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| This!
|
| Instead, you create a link with a comment in Signal to a
| group of friends, copy that to a few other Signal groups who
| are mutually exclusive of those other groups, then paste into
| a few Discord groups...
|
| Literally a manual social network.
| toastal wrote:
| If you're wise enough to use Signal, why would you also be
| using Discord?
| chrisweekly wrote:
| It's the original FB problem all over again: if that's
| where all the people are, you don't really have much
| choice if you want to reach them.
| chpatrick wrote:
| Much like Reddit, or you know, Hacker News.
| yreg wrote:
| For me RSS worked very well at a time when mobile data
| connection/wifi was not ubiquitous yet. For a year or two,
| every morning when I came to school I went directly to that one
| place where there was the one Wi-Fi router. I downloaded all
| the new articles in my NetNewsWire feed and then read them over
| the day.
|
| The tech is nice, but I have no desire to use it anymore. I no
| longer follow specific blogs. Now I just open hacker news or
| reddit any time I want to read something.
| rsynnott wrote:
| The bit I find fascinating about Reader, and its impact (I'm
| convinced that its death resulted in an immediate strong surge
| towards social media centralisation), is that it was entirely
| contingent; it didn't have to happen. There are many parallel
| universes where Google (a) didn't make an rss reader so
| dominant that it became The RSS Reader and then (b) kill it. In
| a healthier market with a bunch of widely used readers, things
| would have been very different.
|
| (Reader's impact was particularly dramatic because a lot of
| ostensibly separate products like NNW started using it as a
| backend...)
|
| And, if, as seems at least plausible, over the next year or so
| Twitter crumbles and decentralised social media (whether in the
| form of Mastodon et al, blogs or something else) comes back,
| again, totally contingent! An idiot buying Twitter and breaking
| it wasn't some sort of historical inevitability, just a weird
| high-impact thing that happened.
| the_duke wrote:
| It think you got things very mixed up here.
|
| Google Reader was shut down in 2013.
|
| At that time Facebook was THE hugely dominant social network,
| with Twitter solidly established, and Instagram rapidly
| becoming popular.
|
| Google Reader was well past it's prime, most "regular" users
| had already moved to those platform, outside of the more
| hardcore Tech circles.
|
| Google Plus was also really struggling,so they probably
| wanted to push the user base on to their "real" social
| network.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Yeah, the RSS ecosystem was never the leading 'social
| network' by number of users, but it used to be systemically
| important, in a way that it isn't today. Keeping track of
| what was happening in many fields (particularly tech, but
| also others) used to be primarily via RSS, now Twitter (and
| in some cases moving to Mastodon, now).
| wink wrote:
| The most fascinating bit for me is that people actually used
| any of the social features of Google Reader. I just read my
| feeds and interacted with nobody, and that wasn't too
| uncommon in my circles.
| hinkley wrote:
| I never used Reader but I did use another one that also
| folded, a year or two before Reader went away. Then it got
| bought and came back, changed, and that stutter interrupted
| my process and I never really recovered. I set up Feedly and
| then don't use it.
|
| I think I'm from the generation(s) that expect to spend a lot
| of time in a browser window instead of hopping between
| applications triggered by notifications. So the moment I put
| something into an app, if it's not situation dependent like
| Apple Fitness, or team chat for work, it's just too much
| friction to make it a habit.
| Maxburn wrote:
| Podcasts are all RSS too, lots of hidden use of RSS out there.
|
| https://podcastindex.org/
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| I got a Firefox extension that looks for rss in a page and
| gives you a little icon in the titlebar. Some webmasters don't
| even bother to put the link in their page visibly.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I got a Firefox extension that looks for rss in a page and
| gives you a little icon in the titlebar._
|
| This used to be the default condition for all web browsers.
| Even Safari did it.
|
| I forget which browser dropped that feature first. My guess
| is that it was Google Chrome, and everyone else just did the
| same thing because following is easier than leading.
| Maxburn wrote:
| Nice, I wonder why they wouldn't surface that? Speculating
| they got it included in their CMS and decided they didn't
| want it.
| kevincox wrote:
| Back in the day all major browser provided their own "feed
| available" icon so including an extra icon on your site was
| pointless. The browser's icon was consistent across sites
| instead of the user needing to look around for a feed link
| on your site.
|
| Of course now most popular browsers don't show this icon so
| it is more important to advertise it yourself. (Although
| there are extensions to bring this icon back)
| dageshi wrote:
| It's on by default in wordpress I think, but most site
| builders either don't know or have forgotten, most probably
| have no clue it's running.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| I'm sure you're right
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| Pretty sure if there was ever "the year of the RSS reader" it was
| somewhere between 2005 to 2013.
|
| RSS is too lean, it's a format, the majority of people don't know
| what it is or how to use it. A lot of sites don't even support
| RSS anymore. Like IRC, its userbase is tech people. Sorry guys,
| you don't make up the rest of the world...
|
| It's an outdated concept, we all know people don't surf the web
| anymore. And the larger it will get, the less likely people will.
| Have you tried using RSS, just measly collecting your favorite
| sites with the off chance that they support it? It's a mess and
| no surprise it died as everyone flocked to Facebook, Twitter,
| etc.
|
| People need some sort of platform and that's why ActivityPub /
| Fediverse is a lot more promising. Social networks aren't the
| problem, just the one's we've been using.
| college_physics wrote:
| If technology was at the service of the individual rather than
| the other way aroud, RSS would have been a centerpiece of our
| information universe, with something like ActivityPub the path to
| enhance information exchange in a bidirectional way when that is
| applicable...
| pletnes wrote:
| I'd just like to give miniflux a mention. Web-based, self-hosted
| or SaaS. Available and synced across devices, no fluff, great UX
| / UI in my book. Not as snappy as some desktop keyboard driven
| ones, but I love it.
| pmarreck wrote:
| if we can figure out how the people putting out RSS feeds can
| make money, then yes, this could be the year of RSS again.
|
| It's time to switch business models back to something sustainable
| and not something that incentivizes addicting you
| nomdep wrote:
| Journalism is a curious profession: you are taught how to write,
| but your knowledge of any other field is high school level at
| best, and that is what you write.
|
| I think it should be a master degree, not an independent career
| anymore.
| svnt wrote:
| I agree with this wholeheartedly: if someone "wants to be a
| writer" the best thing they can do is read and experience life
| until they understand something so well they don't want to do
| it anymore.
|
| Then maybe they can write about it.
|
| What we have instead is people selected for syntax, network,
| and ego, vomiting as loudly and often as possible.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Journalism is a curious profession: you are taught how to
| write, but your knowledge of any other field is high school
| level at best, and that is what you write._
|
| You demonstrate a high school-level knowledge of journalism.
|
| What you describe are "generalist" reporters. They are
| necessary, and ubiquitous. But there are also very many
| specialist reporters, who have specific knowledge of the areas
| in which they write. The guy who reports at the Pentagon is not
| the same person who writes car crash stories.
|
| You also presume that once someone gets a journalism degree,
| that's all the education they have or ever will have. Many
| (most?) journalists have multiple degrees. They also engage in
| continuing university-level education, either on their own, or
| paid for by their employer.
|
| Also, experience is a great teacher. Do you today know only
| exactly the same about of computer skills you had when you
| graduated from high school 20 years ago? No. Just like a
| journalist learns over time from experience and furthering his
| education.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Some intros on how to build your own RSS feed (structure of the
| XML file):
|
| https://www.xul.fr/en-xml-rss.html
|
| https://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_rss.asp
|
| However, I notice that JSON feeds are also an option and might be
| preferable for various reasons (i.e. Python's json module makes
| parsing easy, etc.):
|
| https://www.jsonfeed.org/version/1.1/
|
| As far as Twitter, I'm not sure it was ever that great of an
| information source. Musk has at least said they're trying to
| improve Twitter search, but who knows what it will look like.
| It's still pretty weak at present.
|
| Why corporate media journalists and politicians flocked to
| Twitter in the past is unclear, unless that it was that Twitter's
| structure was deliberately designed for propaganda distribution.
| The low character count and leader-follower structure helps with
| the standard propaganda routine, which typically involves
| reducing complex arguments and ideas to the point that a small
| child could understand them, and then repeating that dumbed-down
| argument over and over while browbeating anyone who raises
| objections.
| kevincox wrote:
| I'd recommend just using Atom. It is as widely supported as RSS
| but far better specified so your readers will have a consistent
| result.
|
| JSON Feed is fine but provides very little benefit and isn't as
| widely supported. Having multiple feed links for the same
| content will give some users analysis paralysis. (What we
| really need is an update to the auto-discovery spec that says
| "these two feeds have the exact same content, if you support
| both formats only show your preferred format to the user")
|
| I wrote up a guide for my recommended RSS Best Practices which
| while not aimed at how to create your own feed contains enough
| information to do that.
|
| https://kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-practices/
| ihuman wrote:
| JSON Feed is in a catch-22. Not many websites use it (and
| none can use it exclusively) because not as many clients
| support it. Few clients support it because not many websites
| use it. While an auto-discovery spec would be great, having
| multiple feeds is currently the only way to add JSON Feed and
| break the cycle.
|
| > What we really need is an update to the auto-discovery spec
| that says "these two feeds have the exact same content, if
| you support both formats only show your preferred format to
| the user"
|
| You could do that right now by having 1 URL that changes what
| type it returns based on the request's "Accept" type.
| However, I don't know if any websites/clients actually do
| that, or if it would break older clients.
| kevincox wrote:
| Yeah, it is a catch-22, but there is little reason to break
| it IMHO since it doesn't bring much extra to the table. My
| feed reader does support it but I would still recommend
| Atom. It is more mature, has more features and extensions
| and is supported everywhere.
|
| The main thing JSON Feed seems to have going for it is that
| it isn't XML which honestly isn't a very compelling
| argument.
|
| The accept type is a good idea. Unfortunately few static
| site hosts (which is common for RSS feeds) support this.
| And many CDNs don't either. It also doesn't play the best
| with HTTP caching.
| notpushkin wrote:
| Ideally you'll want to make both. RSS is most widely supported,
| while JSON Feed is (arguably) easier to parse.
| voisin wrote:
| I would like an RSS Reader that I pay for once rather than
| subscribe to, and which allows me to filter out keywords of my
| choosing. That's it. I hate that for this feature with Feedly I
| would have to pay monthly.
| BruceEel wrote:
| Cool, what does your list of favorite feeds look like? Please
| share.
| weberer wrote:
| https://hackaday.com/blog/feed/
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
|
| https://api.quantamagazine.org/feed/
|
| https://www.wowhead.com/news/rss/wotlk-classic
|
| https://alerts.weather.gov/ (chose your region)
|
| https://www.pine64.org/feed/
|
| https://www.factorio.com/blog/rss
| BruceEel wrote:
| Awesome, thx!
| kevincox wrote:
| I have built my list up over time. Generally I will discover
| new stuff from hacker news or other aggregators (which I browse
| once I am caught up on my feeds). I add things to my list very
| often, but also am quick to unsubscribe if I'm not enjoying the
| content.
|
| The types of content I tend to follow are:
|
| - Videos. YouTube, Nebula, PeerTube and a few other sources.
|
| - Blogs. These are mostly personal blogs that I have found
| interesting articles on. A few company blogs too.
|
| - Social media searches. This is more for productivity but I
| follow a bunch of searches across various social media sites to
| stay up to date on specific topics.
|
| - Comics
|
| - Software releases.
|
| I have very few high-volume sources. I much prefer quality
| content from hundreds of sources instead of frequent content
| from a few big sources like news sites.
|
| I realize I didn't answer your question but that is sort of
| intended. Each person's favourite feeds will be different and
| depend on your interests. The best way to get stared is just to
| start subscribing to the things that you are enjoying today.
| Then over time you will build up a list of things that interest
| you. Especially when getting started it makes sense to over-
| subscribe, you can always prune down if you had a "false
| positive".
| lonk11 wrote:
| The process you are describing can be automated a bit.
|
| Imagine your feed reader automatically subscribes you to
| feeds of articles you liked (star/thumbs up/favorite). Let's
| say you start subscribed to an HN feed of items that got more
| than 100 upvotes:
| https://hnrss.org/newest?points=100&count=100 Then you find
| the OP link and like it in your feed reader:
| https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/12/this-is-the-year-of-the-
| rs... Your reader automatically subscribes you to the source
| feed of this article:
| https://feeds.feedburner.com/NiemanJournalismLab
|
| You like more content => you get subscribed to more feeds
| automatically.
|
| Your feed reader can also take care of unsubscribing you from
| feeds that are posting too often or are not posting
| interesting to you content. If you don't like the content of
| a feed for awhile then your connection to that feed becomes
| weaker and the content from that feed is ranked less
| prominently. The content from feeds with a high signal-to-
| noise ratio (ie, how often you like content from that feed)
| is ranked higher for you.
|
| This is how my little project https://linklonk.com works. If
| you'd like to give it a try: "thumb up" a few items from the
| above HN feed: https://linklonk.com/feed?url=https:%2F%2Fhnrs
| s.org%2Fnewest... and then check your recommendations on the
| home page.
|
| Through this mechanism I am currently subscribed to 201 RSS
| feeds and I know that I won't miss content from high "signal-
| to-noise ratio" feeds. Here is a sample of my top feeds:
|
| https://blog.piekniewski.info/feed/
| https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/rss/
| https://karpathy.github.io/feed.xml
| https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/feed/
| https://www.inference.vc/rss/ https://openai.com/blog/rss/
| https://stratechery.com/feed/
| https://medium.com/feed/@yonatanzunger
| https://rachelbythebay.com/w/atom.xml
| https://openai.com/blog/rss/
| https://randomascii.wordpress.com/feed/
| https://computer.rip/rss.xml https://timharford.com/feed/
| https://idlewords.com/index.xml https://www.youtube.com/feeds
| /videos.xml?channel_id=UC9-y-6c... - Computerphile videos
| https://www.granolashotgun.com/granolashotguncom?format=rss
| https://daringfireball.net/feeds/main
| BruceEel wrote:
| Ah, your approach makes a lot of sense. Me, I've put together
| a number of Twitter lists over the years, to serve as faux-
| newsfeeds. Well, it doesn't work very well and right now it
| leads more often to aggravation than discovery. So, here come
| 2023 and RSS. Thanks for the hints!
| kevincox wrote:
| Note that you can use third-party services to create feeds
| for Twitter users. (example https://nitter.net/) This can
| provide a good way to get some content into your reader,
| then you can add/remove feeds based on how you are enjoying
| them.
| superkuh wrote:
| Here are the ~thousand feeds I subscribe to formatted in HTML
| with links to the site and the RSS feed:
| http://superkuh.com/feeds9.html
|
| Here are the ~thousand feeds I subscribe to formatted in opml
| for direct import into feed readers:
| http://superkuh.com/2022-11-04-feedlist.opml
| BruceEel wrote:
| Ah, I didn't know about OPML. I like that it's readable and
| editable so you can make adjustments before importing.
| Thanks!
| toastal wrote:
| Coincidentally, I got Newsboat+Podboat mostly set up today on
| NixOS to disconnect from the feed cycle that wants me to
| continually engage. The sad fact was learning after not having
| subbed to anything after two years to find a lot of news
| channels, like AP and Reuters, have stopped publishing feeds.
| sergioreus wrote:
| RSS Feeds are an easy way to stay up to date with your favorite
| websites, such as blogs or online magazines. If a site offers an
| RSS feed, you get notified whenever a post goes up, and then you
| can read a summary or the whole post.<a
| href="http://hundredyearscalender.com/>100 years calander</a>
| Group_B wrote:
| Any recommendations for an RSS reader?
| stinkytaco wrote:
| I use Newsblur, mostly. It feels a bit dated at times, but does
| what I want it to do and has an email address that you can send
| newsletters to to read like feeds. I've been meaning to switch
| over to miniflux for a while, but can never really get up the
| momentum. It seems nice.
| ihuman wrote:
| I know NetNewsWire and NewsBlur have already been mentioned,
| but I use both of them together. I use NewsBlur on Windows, and
| NetNewsWire with my NewsBlur account on Mac/iOS. NetNewsWire
| also supports iCloud, Feedbin, Feedly, and other services (and
| locally without syncing).
| leokennis wrote:
| https://feedbin.com/ for a reader designed with admirable
| restraint, resulting in a lack of feature creep.
| Fileformat wrote:
| NewsBlur - I'm on a paid plan since I'm a packrat with almost
| 700 feeds. It is a pretty busy interface but has tons of
| functionality. Their mobile app is also pretty good.
|
| https://newsblur.com/
| nortonham wrote:
| what do you do with 700 news feeds?!
| kmfrk wrote:
| I moved all my stuff to Thunderbird a while ago, and unless you
| have more specific demands, having a basic self-run RSS reader
| beats just about all fancy hosted solutions out there. Old-
| school e-mail works well a lot of the time too.
| hairofadog wrote:
| On the Apple ecosystem, Reeder remains my favorite:
| https://reederapp.com
|
| It's got a simple and clean user interface, and it stores the
| feed in iCloud, so no need for a third-party server
| application.
| AwaAwa wrote:
| Feedbro extension on Firefox
| lexoj wrote:
| I prefer a daily digest so I use this tool which I built, easy
| to setup:
|
| https://github.com/piqoni/matcha
|
| It generates markdown locally but Obsidian is also on my phone
| so its also mobile.
| kevincox wrote:
| I use an RSS-to-email service to email them to me. Then most
| feeds get sorted into folders for reading later. A few got to
| my inbox for more urgent response.
|
| I currently use an RSS-to-email service that I operate but I
| used other services for almost a decade before that. There are
| a handful available ad supported and paid or you can self-host.
| stevekemp wrote:
| I personally prefer to read my feeds via my email client, and
| hacked up an RSS to email script:
|
| https://github.com/skx/rss2email/
|
| Having the feeds in your mail client makes sorting, and
| searching trivial. Plus you get the content archived for future
| reference.
| MintPaw wrote:
| I've heard nothing but bad things, and had nothing but good
| experiences with Thunderbird.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| I use @rss2tg_bot that channels RSSes to a telegram chat.
| semasad wrote:
| Reader: https://readwise.io/read
| strunz wrote:
| I use FreshRSS and host my own after Google Reader died -
| https://freshrss.org/
| ink_13 wrote:
| I like The Old Reader: https://theoldreader.com/
|
| It's largely a reimplementation of the Google Reader
| experience.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I can't find any pricing info, what's the deal?
| darreninthenet wrote:
| I use the free version and for my needs it's fine
| (basically 100 feed limit and after a while old posts drop
| off the feed, I'm not sure how long).
|
| For 25 dollars a year you get 500 feeds and one year
| retention (up to 1000 posts per feed) and you can pay more
| for a larger number of feeds.
| nitin-pai wrote:
| I've been using miniflux, and it's quite cool. David Winer's
| Feedland is nifty too.
| tommoor wrote:
| NetNewsWire if you're on macOS/iPhone
| onnnon wrote:
| I use this as well, source on GitHub:
|
| https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire
| psteitz wrote:
| I use Feedly, which is more a scraper, but can be pointed at
| RSS sources.
| berniedurfee wrote:
| I use Feedly for RSS exclusively. Works great, simple and
| clean.
| musictubes wrote:
| I like Newsblur on the web. Also use Unread on iOS/iPadOS with
| Newsblur as the aggregator.
| Neurogodzilla wrote:
| Inoreader
| nortonham wrote:
| if you like the cli on linux/unix then newsboat is great
| saturn_vk wrote:
| I've been using my aggregator since google reader died:
| https://github.com/urandom/readeef
| timetraveller26 wrote:
| newsboat if you want something for the CLI
| einpoklum wrote:
| > RSS readers may need their own ecology of analytics > in order
| to be commercially desirable and worthy of > tech investment.
|
| Those sound like the criteria of it's going to be the year of
| large investments going down the drain amidst a lot of hype.
|
| ----
|
| Anyway,
|
| Twitter has 396.5 Million users (Monthly Active Users):
| https://backlinko.com/twitter-users#twitter-users
|
| 4.3 Billion people use email: https://wpdevshed.com/email-usage-
| statistics/
|
| so 9 times as many. Also, most users of Twitter probably don't
| even notice the latest Musk controversies, since those things
| aren't the tweets they follow. So, it seems to me like the author
| is mostly looking just past her own nose.
| moolcool wrote:
| This is the year of the linux desktop
| luoc wrote:
| But how do I get that all caps scifi font to my reader? It's just
| not the same...
| LightG wrote:
| Two RSS threads on HN frontpage today? Great! RSS never went away
| but I hope it becommes much more prominent again. The last lost
| decade of walled-garden social has been a relative disaster.
| semasad wrote:
| The main problem I found with RSS in these days is the lack of
| access to they. I want access the RSS of NYT, where I find it? I
| want X blog, where? After the web migrated from RSS to paywalls,
| I have no option to just choice some news webs/blogs and focus on
| that.
| FrontAid wrote:
| > I want access the RSS of NYT, where I find it?
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/rss
| kevincox wrote:
| If you paste https://www.nytimes.com/ into your feed reader it
| will likely discover
| https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml
| automatically. This tends to work very well for most blogs and
| many sites. I often just assume that there is a feed available
| and past article URLs into my feed reader, most of the time the
| feed is automatically discovered.
|
| Back in the day browsers had icons that would light up when a
| feed was available, however all of the most popular browsers
| have removed this feature. You can add it back with an
| extension easily if you are so inclined.
| semasad wrote:
| Sure, NYT is an easy one, but if you try some more
| "expensive" (they really do not enjoy your free read) like
| Bloomberg the your RSS feed will keep small.
| [deleted]
| ro-ka wrote:
| With Feedbin (which I use, guess others work similar), pasting
| the website URL is enough. It'll scan for feeds and that's it.
| charles_f wrote:
| I agree with you, sites tend to hide the link nowadays, even
| when it's there, and that's frustrating.
|
| Most modern client manage to discover them anyhow though
| weberer wrote:
| Generally they have a RSS icon along side the Twitter,
| Facebook, etc icons. It looks like a wi-fi symbol. They're also
| often linked in the footer.
| riwsky wrote:
| What a coincidence--this is also the year of the Linux desktop!
| yreg wrote:
| And that desktop is Steam Deck.
| rcarmo wrote:
| <looks at his 200-odd feeds in Reeder>
|
| Really? I must be a trendsetter then.
|
| The article gets some things right, but RSS as a private,
| protected medium just never took off, and I don't think it ever
| will--but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
| firefoxd wrote:
| 2022 made me rethink my stance. My goal used to be to create as
| much as possible in the best quality I could muster. Give it all
| and make it available for free for all on the internet.
|
| Now that everything you write is used to train an AI that will be
| used to generate the content, I don't feel the need to
| contribute. Plus they'll use this content for their own
| commercial benefit. I don't feel the same way anymore about the
| internet.
| Mark33 wrote:
| The panic about right wing intrusion of social media ownership
| keeps getting to new highs, now even predicts a come back of RSS
| because woke people don't want to be seen using Twitter any
| more... #fail #them
| longnguyen wrote:
| I think the reason RSS is not appealing to content creators is
| because authors don't "own" the email list. And it's quite
| difficult to have paid content delivered via RSS (still pretty
| much open/sharable)
|
| But from reader perspective, RSS is awesome. You don't have to
| deal with all the email subscriptions double opt-in etc. The
| ability to unsubscribe/resubscribe in one click is fantastic. And
| you have number of good RSS readers to fit your need.
|
| Pro tip: you can add "/feed" to any Substack publication to
| subscribe to its RSS feed
|
| To my surprised, RSS is still my most requested feature for my
| little SaaS[0]
|
| I wrote a short blog post on how to read RSS on Kindle here[1]
|
| [0]: https://ktool.io
|
| [1]: https://ktool.io/blog/read-rss-on-kindle
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > authors don't "own" the email list
|
| Well, what does this gain them? People still can count how many
| readers they have, and still have a dedicated readership (and
| no antagonistic middleman filtering them). What difference does
| the list of those people make?
| longnguyen wrote:
| Segmentation. You can send offer to a segment of your
| audience. I don't think you can do that with RSS unless you
| have a sophisticated setup where each reader has a slightly
| different feed url.
| AJ007 wrote:
| Email isn't ideal for content creators either. It costs money
| to deliver the content and delivery is not guaranteed. If has
| the knowledge and resources, or they have a heavily engaged
| audience, great, but that's not a pretty small group.
|
| Add in the ever growing panopticon of privacy legislation (yes,
| that's an oxymoron) and doing anything with email has become
| onerous to sole and/or non-commercial operators (because email
| qualifies as PII.)
|
| That said, email and RSS are fantastic. They work. For the most
| part you aren't paying a tax to the mega-platforms to reach
| your audience. Both should be supported and their use
| encouraged.
| longnguyen wrote:
| Hard to say. It's definitely more expensive to send emails,
| yes. But the upside is well worth it IMO.
|
| For example, some services allow you to send content at a
| specific time based on audience's timezone. This increases
| open rate.
|
| Or you can choose to resend the same email to audience who
| haven't opened the first time.
|
| This could boost sales.
|
| I'm not sure RSS can achieve that (there might be solution I
| don't know about)
| dorgo wrote:
| >Or you can choose to resend the same email to audience who
| haven't opened the first time.
|
| I know there used to be tricks to find out whether an email
| was opened. But my impression was that Gmail and others
| prevent this nowdays?
| layer8 wrote:
| On the other hand, users who prefer RSS can consume emails
| in much the same fashion, by auto-filtering into separate
| folders, or by using one of the existing email-to-RSS
| tools. For users, RSS and email are both fine in the sense
| that users can always convert one into the other, depending
| on their preferences.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I was recently sent a message that I was going to be
| unsubscribed from a list because they thought I hadn't
| opened my emails. I did read the emails but just don't
| allow tracking pixels.
|
| At first I thought it was nice of them to unsubscribe me,
| but then I realized that they are probably doing it because
| keeping me on their list makes their stats worse since I
| don't allow them to track me.
| georgehotelling wrote:
| > I think the reason RSS is not appealing to content creators
| is because authors don't "own" the email list. And it's quite
| difficult to have paid content delivered via RSS (still pretty
| much open/sharable)
|
| I think ActivityPub is interesting as an RSS replacement for
| these reasons. The content is pushed out to an address, so you
| get much better insights into who your audience is.
|
| Right now Mastodon is the the biggest ActivityPub software[1]
| so it's encouraging people to post microbloggy content, but
| that could easily be the inroad to a more RSS-like reader.
| WordPress's ActivityPub plugin allows people to syndicate their
| blogs directly to the Fediverse, and other longform platforms
| can follow suit.
|
| 1: https://fediverse.observer/stats
| [deleted]
| charles_f wrote:
| > And it's quite difficult to have paid content delivered via
| RSS (still pretty much open/sharable)
|
| Excerpt that you can then read fully on the website after
| authentication?
| longnguyen wrote:
| Not the best UX for readers IMO. That defeats the purpose of
| a RSS "reader".
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Not the best UX for readers IMO. That defeats the purpose
| of a RSS "reader"._
|
| Works fine with the New York Times.
|
| The Times RSS feed includes a headline and a summary. If
| I'm interested in the article, I press F19 and it opens in
| my browser.
|
| Since I'm a subscriber, I'm logged in already, and it just
| appears.
|
| Pressing one button doesn't seem like much of a burden.
| vel0city wrote:
| I still see a lot of value of having a tool that aggregates
| new items and snippets from all the content creators I
| enjoy, even if it's only previews/snippets in the tool. It
| shows me there's new content and if it's content I might be
| interested in.
|
| Also, it seems to me one could provide authentication
| tokens I'm the request for the feed. I don't see why one
| couldn't have a complete stream for subscribers and a
| minimal stream for previews for the unauthenticated
| requests.
| hedora wrote:
| Paid content with RSS has been solved for a long, long time. It
| is how paid subscriber feeds for podcasts work.
| svnt wrote:
| I'm not familiar with this -- how is it solved?
| hutattedonmyarm wrote:
| Some provide a unique feed with an unguessable URL (very
| convenient, but easily shared).
|
| Some require auth with Http BasicAuth (I think that's
| mostly podcast and I don't think it's used very much)
|
| Some show a preview snippet in the feed and you can view
| the whole article/thing after opening the link and
| authenticating
| kevincox wrote:
| > Pro tip: you can add "/feed" to any Substack publication to
| subscribe to its RSS feed
|
| For most readers you can just paste the main URL or the URL of
| any article and it will autodiscover tehe feed without any URL
| futzing required.
| longnguyen wrote:
| Nice. I didn't know. I thought my discovery was cool xD
| kevincox wrote:
| Yeah, auto-discovery has fallen into the realm of obscure
| once browsers removed their RSS icons. I would recommend
| grabbing an extension that will add it back for you. Then
| you can see if a site has a feed just by glancing at your
| URL bar.
|
| A few sites don't support it but most with feeds do.
| Including YouTube channel pages (but not videos) Wordpress,
| Tumblr, Blogger and more.
| Avamander wrote:
| Are people still working on improving the standards behind
| RSS/Atom? Or did that fizzle out with the rise of social media?
|
| For example one thing I've wondered about are signed feed
| entries. At some point I'd like to be more certain about the
| author of the media I'm reading, while also being able to prove
| I've not modified anything. I guess I'm kind-of describing Signed
| Exchanges but less restrictive, maybe it could be done in
| conjunction with GPG?
| AstixAndBelix wrote:
| Newsletters and RSS feeds are not the same thing. If I send a
| newsletter to a list of subscribers then, as long as their email
| server receives the email, they can retrieve it and read it
| whenever they want. But most importantly, if I don't set up an
| archive of all the newsletters, then only the people who
| subscribed will ever be able to read it.
|
| On the other hand it's impossible to achieve the same level of
| one-timeness with RSS. You either publish the feed for a limited
| amount of time (and the subscribers have to get lucky and
| synchronize their feeds during this time window), or you publish
| the feed indefinitely (which maybe you wouldn't want to do)
| kevincox wrote:
| This is a very niche difference. In general once you send
| something "to the public" you can't expect that it stays
| private. So if you need to keep items on your feed for a few
| weeks after publishing it will have a near-zero difference to
| the availability of that piece and be picked up by almost all
| subscribers.
| charles_f wrote:
| > it's impossible to achieve the same level of one-timeness
| with RSS.
|
| No it's not (not that I can really think of why you'd want
| that). Generate user-bound rss feed urls with GUIDs or a signed
| "start date" that provides only entries since that date. That
| can also allow you to track how many times that url gets
| retrieved and eventually block it if it's too many.
|
| Or have the rss reader only send an excerpt and have people
| auth before they access the content on your website.
|
| >most importantly, if I don't set up an archive of all the
| newsletters, then only the people who subscribed will ever be
| able to read it.
|
| On the other end once the email left your box, you don't
| control it anymore, and I can give you a well hidden hack that
| allows someone not subscribed to read it if they know someone
| subscribed.
| MobileVet wrote:
| The first thing we did when we entered mobile in 2004 was build
| an RSS reader for 'dumb' phones. It was the perfect way to bring
| information to very limited phones. All the extra stuff was
| stripped away, just the content remained. The phone could handle
| it in a way that the WAP browsers would fail.
|
| It is hard to see the value, beyond advertising / affiliate
| sales, to just about anything that has been added to the modern
| web experience since that time. I still use 'reader mode' on
| Safari to bring it back to the basics.
| olivermarks wrote:
| I alway liked RSS readers and look forward to a renaissance, but
| the idea Twitter no longer has utility is absurd.
| uses wrote:
| I was just thinking about how much world-class content is
| available between podcasts and email newsletters, and it's all
| free. Whereas if you wanted to say, read an article on the web
| from the same sources, you're looking at a huge paywall. The
| "podcast app" market is heavily saturated with many great
| competitors. Yet the "newsletter reader app" just...doesn't
| exist? I'm stuck using iOS Mail with its lack of reading options,
| no saving my place or otherwise bookmarking. I just can't believe
| nobody's made something to fill in this need?
| okaleniuk wrote:
| Is managing email really an unsolved problem? I mean, every email
| client has already way too many "organizing thingies": folders,
| filters, bookmarks, categories, labels, stars, flags, and
| archives. What value RSS brings alone except from being different
| and therefore having its separate tab in a client?
| kevincox wrote:
| No, I don't think there is much fundamental difference. Some
| RSS readers support inbound emails as a feed source and I get
| my RSS feeds delivered via email. I think the main reason
| newsletters are "winning" over RSS right now is that everyone
| has an email address but not everyone has a feed reader
| configured. It provides an easy onboarding where you can start
| getting it in your inbox available on all of your devices and
| once that becomes annoying you can easily set up filters to
| organize.
| RavingGoat wrote:
| I thought email was dead. I treat email like I treat voice
| messages, they are just out there waiting to be deleted without
| ever being read/listened to. Do people actually use email still
| outside of a work situation?
| Hackbraten wrote:
| A federated near-instant messenger, not being controlled by a
| single corporate entity, designed on top of a well-defined
| Internet standard, with both commercial and open-source
| clients existing for every platform?
| kkfx wrote:
| The year of RSS reader will be when users decide to be users
| again instead of lusers (from Simon's Chronicles CL definition),
| witch unfortunately it's not something really in agenda...
| sudo_navendu wrote:
| I love using RSS to subscribe to blogs. Many of my favorite
| personal developer blogs have RSS feeds, and I have them on my
| blog. I'm currently using Readwise to get all my feeds in one
| place. This filters out a lot of noise prevalent in social media
| like Twitter.
| miiiiiike wrote:
| The "Year of RSS" people have been sounding like the "Year of
| Linux Desktop" people for a while now. It's not coming back. It
| just isn't.
| ravenstine wrote:
| It only has a shot of coming back if enough people decide that
| Google searches are pointless. We might be getting there,
| actually. I'm not optimistic, but the idea that Google search
| results suck seems to be more mainstream in the last year
| outside of the HN crowd.
|
| Oh, I say this because Google and other search engines that
| derive from it are unlikely to yield results that are worth
| reading or subscribing to. If this were the Google of 2006, RSS
| _might_ have been something they 'd bake into their results.
| They'd never allow that today. It's all about serving ads on
| GPT generated bloogs now.
| contravariant wrote:
| I'm not sure it ever left. There are still RSS feeds around,
| though it would be better if their use was more widespread.
| asicsp wrote:
| Seems like RSS comeback gets discussed often:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=RSS
| olol wrote:
| "just because of Elon Musk mucking up Twitter"
|
| i get that the tv says we're supposed to hate him... but is
| anyone ever going to explain why? because he's racist? bc the tv
| said so? bc he doesn't support the ghost of kyiv? lol
| parrellel wrote:
| All politics aside, he's showing himself to be incompetent in
| really surprising ways.
|
| This whole time he's been trading on his personal brand of
| futurism and technical acumen, and this Twitter business lets
| everyone see behind the curtain, and it's really easy to be
| angry when someone is shown to be such a hollow fraud.
|
| No more benefit of the doubt for him.
| hed wrote:
| I tried to set this up earlier this year, but what I realized I
| really wanted was RSS + change detection for some discussion
| forums and other sites that didn't offer RSS.
|
| That companies like feedly didn't seem to offer this
| functionality but were trying to emphasize social networking and
| tagging my articles (for who?) made it easy to walk away after
| the trial.
| thirdplace_ wrote:
| For sites that don't offer feeds you may want to check out rss-
| bridge: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/
| Animats wrote:
| So why is there no RSS feed link on the Neiman Lab page?
| ihuman wrote:
| There is an RSS feed link in the footer. There's also a "link"
| tag to tell your browser that there's an RSS feed available for
| the page.
| Animats wrote:
| Oh, right. A tiny "RSS" in dark grey type on a light grey
| background at the bottom of what looked like an infinite
| scroll.
| [deleted]
| alar44 wrote:
| I still have no idea what RSS is used for.
| charles_f wrote:
| I hate newsletters. They break my workflow, and I don't want to
| redesign my workflow for the handful of bloggers who insist on
| making a newsletter instead of a feed.
|
| I'm just not using my email in the same way I use news or blogs.
| I made a couple of tentatives to build a mail to rss system and
| stopped both times because I lacked the motivation, then
| suggested it to feedly while I was using them and they added it
| to the product... While I was moving to self-hosted miniflux.
| DevX101 wrote:
| I setup filters in gmail to archive my newsletters, add the
| label 'Newsletters', and forward them to my RSS reader app (in
| this case Readwise (paid), which has a personalized email that
| accepts inbound traffic). Any new newsletters I sign up with
| myname+news@gmail.com. That suffix means it still arrives at my
| email address, but I can use that recipient to create filters.
| I never see these emails unless I click on the 'Newsletters'
| label.
|
| This keeps my inbox clean.
| longnguyen wrote:
| You may find this service useful (not an affiliate, just found
| it recently) https://kill-the-newsletter.com
| gpanders wrote:
| I'm a happy user of https://notifier.in/ for this purpose.
| marban wrote:
| RSS is alive and kicking. I created a little Web 2.0 phenomenon
| named Popurls and recently launched https://biztoc.com -- ~65% of
| the site is still RSS driven.
| codazoda wrote:
| Tell us greenies a little more? I don't use RSS for writing or
| reading, but maybe I should.
|
| Is this consuming other RSS feeds? Is it publishing a feed and
| 65% of its traffic comes from feed consumers?
|
| That would be nice, since I don't want to be at the whim of
| search engines anymore (for blog type content).
| [deleted]
| jawns wrote:
| Here are just some of the reasons why RSS fell out of favor...
|
| 1) It's great for consumers of content, but not so great for
| content producers or RSS reader vendors, in terms of monetization
| or even analytics.
|
| 2) It's great for tech-savvy folks, but not so great for mass
| market reach, and the incentives to make mass market reach
| feasible are low.
|
| 3) It worked better back when most content was free. Paywalls are
| a more sustainable business model, but aren't very compatible
| with RSS.
| wffurr wrote:
| 1) Newsblur has been a nice lifestyle business for Sam Clay. I
| suppose it won't ever be a billion dollar unicorn, but it works
| beautifully for consumers of content.
| seydor wrote:
| going around in circles is bad news
|
| In reality, content will be over in 2 years. AI is just better
| content, well sourced, well written and quantifiably intentional.
| Humans no longer need to apply for making content just like we
| dont hunt for meat
| Veen wrote:
| > better content, well sourced, well written and quantifiable
| intentional
|
| I've not seen AI create "better content" than even a moderately
| competent human, let alone an expert writer and researcher. How
| do you know AI content is well-sourced when it's generated by
| an AI which makes it up based on a statistical model? Well-
| written is somewhat subjective, but ChatGTP is repetitive,
| overly verbose, and the opposite of intentional.
|
| AI content will be great for repetitive copy like eCommerce
| descriptions, simple business and sports reports, and maybe API
| documentation, but it won't replace human writers in most
| contexts humans care about.
| seydor wrote:
| Cgpt is great at writing like a good copywriter, which is
| already above average human. When journalists lose their
| advantage, it becomes a matter of putting out there novel
| ideas, which models can do, too. The 'journalism' of the
| future will be basically curation of ideas.
|
| And if we have an overabundance of good content then
| attention will shift away from it because it gets boring.
| Veen wrote:
| I am a professional copywriter and technical writer, so I
| have a dog in this race. But I don't agree that Cgpt is
| anywhere near a professional standard. It can produce
| mostly coherent and correct English, but not concise,
| creative, or empathetic English. It's good enough to
| replace human writing in some scenarios, but far from all.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-12-23 23:01 UTC)