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Ask HN: Is RSS dead?

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Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?

#181

Post by vroomik »

timbit42 wrote: post #67
zenlot wrote: post #59

Opened this post using RSS in Inoreader. All my news comes via RSS. I use it for news sites, I use it for Medium and I also use it for Reddit. The nice thing about it, is that everything stays in one place, categorized and I can see unread counts. Especially useful while checking reddit feeds. There's no infinite scroll and I can clearly see/mark what's been read and what's not. I can come back later and continue fro…

I use it for eBay and Kijiji. Great for sniping.

I use Inoreader too, care to explain how do you use it for ebay? I've tried to add sub from ebay url to no avail..

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?

#183

Post by toyg »

sdan wrote: post #137
reaperducer wrote: post #95

I think a lot of people think RSS is dead because they never see it promoted anywhere. Pretty much every web site has a row of social media icons, but hardly ever is there an RSS icon in the row, even if the web site supports it. Frankly, I don't think most people who run web sites even know that the framework/CMS/rolfburger they're using automatically publishes RSS feeds for them. Yesterday I stumbled across an app…

I think it’s Wordpress that enables /rss on a ton of websites. I’ve recently needed to get RSS feeds and a good number of times I can find it via /rss or view the source of the site and search for xml.

One of the early advantages of Wordpress was precisely its excellent support of all formats of feeds out of the box, back in the hot days of the Rss/Atom feud.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?

#184

Post by toyg »

Rss / Atom is not dead, but it has become part of B2B stacks rather than being a standalone B2C format. Considering it’s XML, it was somewhat naive (in retrospect) to hope for anything different.

Btw, Podcasting is an interesting window on what an XML-powered web might have been: a multitude of different specialised clients and semantic aggregators, consuming content in agnostic formats, with no dependency on a handful of big browsers. Like a 1955 illustration of “Tomorrow World”, it still looks like a nice future, even though we know it will probably never happen.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?

#185

Post by jtvjan »

drdeadringer wrote: post #63
rodgerd wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify are trying to "fix" that.

Honest Questions: * Is Spotify trying to "fix" that now like iTunes tried to "fix" that 20 years ago? * Why should I "enjoy" Spotify as much as I "enjoyed" iTunes? [I didn't, not even a little bit]

iTunes hasn't tried to "fix" it. iTunes runs a podcast directory for discovering podcasts, but it still uses the podcaster's feeds to actually deliver episodes. The API for the directory is public, so any podcatcher can use it for their search functionality.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?

#186

Post by pankajdoharey »

cglong wrote: post #152
jasode wrote: post #19

By asking the question using the word "dead"[0] which has such offensive connotations, it will spur some to say "it's not dead" -- which isn't really going to be productive for what I think you're really asking. First, in one sense (but doesn't really answer your question) ... the old protocols like RSS (feeds), NNTP (news), IRC (chat), etc are never going to be "dead" because somebody somewhere will always be provid…

I think what's really prevented RSS from recovering after the death of Google Reader is the cultural shift toward content farms. Most news sites have started to publish as many articles as possible to drive as much ad revenue as possible; unfortunately, most RSS platforms still treat every entry in a feed as equally important as another. IOW, if you add something like Engadget to your feed reader, be prepared to be f…

In a certain sense Google Reader killed a lot of RSS feeds and users because it was an excellent passive content distribution platform which hurts the ad revenue stream f Google. Google requires maximal active engagement of people. If people start getting stuff news etc passively why would people go to the default search engine?

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?

#187

Post by artembugara »

2 weeks ago, I released a Python package (700+ stars on GitHub) that "automagically scrapes" the last news from more than 3k news sources. You just have to provide the base form of URL.

Behind the package is just a list of websites and their RSS URLs.

For example, the input is "nytimes.com" and the output is all the latest news.

So, it's quite alive.

GitHub: https://github.com/kotartemiy/newscatcher

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?

#188

Post by BillFranklin »

I wrote a fast feed aggregator a couple months ago. I’ve found I’ve read HN less because of it, and have read more of what I’m interested in. RSS feeds are fantastic, could still be improved though (eg pagination of feeds).

https://www.bilbof.com/following

It’s open source if you want to run your own: https://github.com/bilbof/feed

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?

#189

Post by kingludite »

cjmb wrote: post #129
reaperducer wrote: post #95

I think a lot of people think RSS is dead because they never see it promoted anywhere. Pretty much every web site has a row of social media icons, but hardly ever is there an RSS icon in the row, even if the web site supports it. Frankly, I don't think most people who run web sites even know that the framework/CMS/rolfburger they're using automatically publishes RSS feeds for them. Yesterday I stumbled across an app…

Yup, exactly this. I had a few emails recently asking if my site had an RSS feed. I have never used RSS and had no idea. Went into Squarespace settings, messed around for 2 mins, it gave me a button and set it all up for me. Honestly I thought it was already dead until I had those emails come in...

Email works!

When sending such emails I always include a tiny example of a minimum item rss feed. "If you take whatever code you have that spits out text files that are html documents it shouldn't take long to have it spit out text files that are rss feeds."

  
  
  
  hacker news
  https://news.ycombinator.com
  Description of website
 
  
  newest article title
  https:// link to article
  first few lines of article
  Publication timestamp according to RFC 822 like: Thu, 1 Apr 2060
  

  
  slightly older article title
  https:// link to article
  first few lines of article
  Date
  

  's here. -->
Then include this some place in the head of the index for auto discovery.
The number of items suggested in the email should depend on the type of website. If it is a news website 1 day should be fine. A busy forum the most recent 20 or 30 items. Be biased about it :0)

There is lots more to know about feeds but the above is really all they need to use it. Things like, pubDate is not required but a feed without it isn't worth much. RSS aggregators should accept RFC 822 dates with 2 year digits. They don't have to know that. Such details only make implementation less likely.

https://sputniknews.com/export/rss2/archive/index.xml for example had it up and running 20 min after the mail. They've dressed it up a bit since.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?

#190

Post by jasode »

reaperducer wrote: post #95

I think a lot of people think RSS is dead because they never see it promoted anywhere. Pretty much every web site has a row of social media icons, but hardly ever is there an RSS icon in the row, even if the web site supports it. Frankly, I don't think most people who run web sites even know that the framework/CMS/rolfburger they're using automatically publishes RSS feeds for them. Yesterday I stumbled across an app…

>Even the New York Times has RSS

The NYTimes is actually an example that undermines the ideals of RSS for the average web surfer who is not a tech geek.

The NYTimes RSS feeds are not full texts of the article such that a one can read the entire story within the comfort of the RSS reader. NYTimes only provides snippets and excerpts to bait people to click on to the real web page. For many normal people, this crippled functionality of article summaries in RSS is worthless to them.

Yes, many low-traffic WordPress sites still give RSS feeds of full text but that's not going to reverse the decline of RSS.

Again, I emphasize and concede that many hardcore web surfers (e.g. HN users in this thread) still find the limited RSS summaries useful because they don't have to "visit 100 websites" but that's not a problem the mass population has[0]. This "go-to-our-real-website-to-see-the-entire-article" amplifies the trend of RSS declining in popularity. If RSS is just "teasers", the typical web surfers would rather get their "aggregation" from Facebook or just use the NYTimes smartphone app which has enhanced rich content such as video, etc.

The publishers of popular mainstream websites simply don't have any economic incentive (i.e. ads) to give readers the full text in their RSS feeds.

I still contend that a bunch of RSS enthusiasts in this thread talking about how they use RSS doesn't answer actual the question the HN poster asked. The actual question is about mainstream trends and not about the habits of HN hardcore users. Take another look at the words used in the Ask HN question. HN users don't need to "hope" for a new web or smartphone RSS client. They're already using RSS right now!

[0] similar example previous comment from 9 years ago that makes a distinction between "normal mainstream" web surfers and hardcore RSS enthusiasts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060707

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