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Ask HN: Is RSS dead?

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Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?

#201

Post by sys_64738 »

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…

Familiarity. Centralization. Time saving. No ads.

These are the major strengths of RSS.

If it’s dead or not, just leave it be for us.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?

#202

Post by sys_64738 »

scarface74 wrote: post #29
thinkingkong wrote: post #10

RSS the protocol, or RSS the experience? The Protocol is alive and kicking, as far as being available, but it's been more or less killed by publishers not promoting it out of the box. AFAIK ad revenue is basically the reason. The replacement set of broadcast tools is still Facebook, Twitter, Direct, and Newsletters. Newsletters are really the new feed.

I have yet to find a website that I feel should have an RSS feed that doesn’t have one.

If a webpage publishes discreet articles then it should do RSS. Any site I go to has to have RSS for me or I stop visiting. My time is important.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?

#203

Post by jasode »

mumblemumble wrote: post #200
jasode wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>, but I wouldn't call it worthless. Well yes, of course you wouldn't! A techie HN discussion participant like you is not the demographic I was talking about when I qualified my sentence with "For many normal people, ..." In the most complimentary way I can convey it, you are example of "not normal" in the context of dealing with a higher threshold of pain regarding any RSS inconveniences. Again to emphasize for prod…

When you use terms like "pain", that suggests that RSS is significantly worse than other options in this respect. I'd argue that it's quite the opposite. Facebook always gives you a blurb. Twitter gives you no more than 280 characters minus the length of a link. Pinterest gives you a picture. RSS/Atom remains the only option where it's at all common to get the whole article without clicking a link and taking a shotgu…

>When you use terms like "pain", that suggests that RSS is significantly worse than other options in this respect.

Sorry for not being clear. The "pain" of RSS or "pain" of Facebook/Twitter is multi-dimensional and so it's not just comparing 1-for-1 annoyances such as "extra click to get to the real publisher website" being equivalent with RSS vs Facebook.

>RSS/Atom remains the only option where it's at all common to get the whole article without clicking a link and taking a shotgun blast of JavaScript to the face.

Yes that's true but the other "pain" that normal mainstream users don't want to deal with is setting up a separate RSS reader/app. They already have Facebook loaded because that's where there friends are. They also don't want the pain of finding relevant RSS feeds and curating them. Facebook already gives them suggested articles passively. And it's irrelevant if Facebook's newsfeed algorithm is bad; the selling point is that it's passive and automatic and the typical non-HN user doesn't have to bother configuring anything. So for normal typical websurfers, RSS theoretically is a solution for news aggregation, but it also creates new problems they don't want to deal with. Yes, HN techies are happy to fine-tune RSS feeds; but regular users have no interest in that.

And if you want to mention how RSS is the option that sometimes provides full text, you also have to be fair and mention that the real websites are the option that sometimes provides video. A lot of normal mainstream web surfers love rich content like video for consuming news.

Again, I keep trying to focus the discussion on the mass psychology and habits of non-HN mainstream users but people keep talking about the benefits that HN techies enjoy. We are already in this HN forum and already know what the benefits of RSS are. Thus, it doesn't actually add productive discussion to the OP's actual question.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?

#206

Post by mdoar »

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…

Me too. RSS is the way to absorb lots of information

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?

#207

Post by copperfitting1 »

I use Feedly myself which pulls in articles via RSS. I even got into this thread with an RSS link. Frankly, it's a great resource to keep up with different blogs and sites without having them all live in your bookmarks bar.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?

#208

Post by diablo1 »

timbit42 wrote: post #74
diablo1 wrote: post #2

It's only dead insofar as most blogs don't have a decent RSS feed to begin with. I've scoured the web looking for high quality RSS feeds that are updated regularly, and have even shared an OPML file with close friends who happen to really like RSS too. The amount of effort was astonishing gathering those RSS feeds, but it was worth it.

WordPress supports RSS and 35% of websites are WordPress. Just add /feed/ to the domain name to access it.

Yes but not many of those are not updated regularly, and the content is sometimes very thin and not written well and doesn't have sources for various claims.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?

#209

Post by diablo1 »

smabie wrote: post #140
diablo1 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but if you look around Hackernews there are plenty of blogs that have a high quality RSS feed. I'm not sharing my own personal preferences on here with others for privacy reasons. By high quality, I mean the content is exceptional and not blogspam and the content is updated regularly. Bonus points if the RSS feed is not a list of 'summaries' and includes the full content of each post. Even more bonus points if th…

Privacy reasons? You created your account 3 days ago and have a couple posts. Moreover, I don’t understand how mentioning blogs hurts your privacy.

Yes. Privacy reasons. Sometimes privacy is about consent, and I do not consent to sharing the blogs that I follow.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?

#210

Post by stijnsanders »

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.

Ooh, i stumbled across this one site that I wanted to add to my feed reader, didn't find tags in the header, but a " rel="nofollow">https://api.w.org/"> tag. I'm not sure it is their intention to open up the WordPress back-end, but I found how to get the list of articles from it, so added support for it to my own feed-reader: https://github.com/stijnsanders/feeder#feeder
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