91–100 of 187 posts
After GR shut down I bounced around with self-hosted solutions for a while (tt-rss, Fever) until landing on Newsblur, which has served my needs admirably.
There are decent readers out there. Liferea or Thunderbird will do in a pinch, and much as I hate to admit it, Netvibes is actually superb. The tragedy isn't some Google tool being retired, the tragedy is the way feeds are slowly disappearing. It's a slow and creeping death, but it's a death. More and more sites are dropping their feeds and replacing them with some twitterish Facebook nonsense. [edit: typo]
RSS feeds were just never easy enough for most people to bother. And not just the proverbial grandma, most techies don't use RSS either. Sites will run analytics and see that nobody is clicking the feed button. RSS certainly solves a real problem, so I think there is an opportunity for reinventing RSS with better UX. Don't ask me how though.
Set up a wordpress site, you have RSS built in. Set up a drupal site, you have RSS built in. Set up on Squarespace and you have RSS built in.
Pretty much every off-the-shelf CMS has RSS with zero effort, you have to actively turn it off. It is only the people who put a bunch of work into building a site without a CMS that don't easily have RSS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, the Reader retirement probably did a lot of damage. But nothing fundamental, I believe. Feeds are dying from lack of interest. The proverbial 'general public' never could be bothered to spend those ten extra minutes getting to understand that orange icon with the stripes. Go out there and ask. Say "feed" to everybody. 99 percent of them will give you a blank stare in return. "What's the problem? We got Facebook…
What's facebook got to do with anything? I have never used an RSS feed and never felt the lack (though I have only a vague idea what it is). My not using RSS has precisely nothing to do with my facebook account - and your attempt to diminish others usage of t'internet by saying "ugh it's those fucking drones just using facebook" is pretty arrogant.
RSS is just another form of a customized news feed. You decide what blogs or blog categories you enjoy, and in one location, you see all the new posts about things you've followed. This allows you to customize your view of information in a different way than HN, Reddit, subreddits, Facebook, etc. and you don't need to give out your email address, receive e-mailed newsletters, or set up any accounts that have auto-subscribed mailing lists.
> What's facebook got to do with anything?
In some countries, such as Cambodia, Facebook is an important source of news reports. So far, media there remains uncensored, and Facebook is the easiest way for news to get legs, even moreso than the US I would say. Cambodia uses Facebook like the US uses Reddit and HN. There's some semblance of voting and comment threads, so it provides more features on top of the reputable newspaper websites.
However, Facebook is not really the best way to get discussion going. Threads are difficult to navigate and the loading is slow. I tried to show a few people Reddit while I was there, but for many reasons, that is a hard sell.
Anyway, I think some Americans use Facebook in the same way. They get a lot of their news from friends there and don't feel the need to seek out much else. It's too bad because yeah, you'll probably find more relevant information for you if you seek it out yourself, but at the same time I get why people use Facebook. You have your group of trusted friends and presumably there's some overlap in your interests. It's easy to look at news they've already vetted.
There are decent readers out there. Liferea or Thunderbird will do in a pinch, and much as I hate to admit it, Netvibes is actually superb. The tragedy isn't some Google tool being retired, the tragedy is the way feeds are slowly disappearing. It's a slow and creeping death, but it's a death. More and more sites are dropping their feeds and replacing them with some twitterish Facebook nonsense. [edit: typo]
RSS feeds were just never easy enough for most people to bother. And not just the proverbial grandma, most techies don't use RSS either. Sites will run analytics and see that nobody is clicking the feed button. RSS certainly solves a real problem, so I think there is an opportunity for reinventing RSS with better UX. Don't ask me how though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter used to provide an RSS feed, that's gone too.
If you google "twitter rss" you will discover four sites that will do that for you as a free service and a node program that will do the conversion for you as well... on the first page of results, anyway. I switched from Reader to TT-RSS. Now there's no fear that anyone will start analyzing my subscription list, send me personalized ads or suddenly stop serving me.
Liferea and newsblur(https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur) are some good open source alternatives.
There are decent readers out there. Liferea or Thunderbird will do in a pinch, and much as I hate to admit it, Netvibes is actually superb. The tragedy isn't some Google tool being retired, the tragedy is the way feeds are slowly disappearing. It's a slow and creeping death, but it's a death. More and more sites are dropping their feeds and replacing them with some twitterish Facebook nonsense. [edit: typo]
RSS feeds were just never easy enough for most people to bother. And not just the proverbial grandma, most techies don't use RSS either. Sites will run analytics and see that nobody is clicking the feed button. RSS certainly solves a real problem, so I think there is an opportunity for reinventing RSS with better UX. Don't ask me how though.
It isn't the protocol, it is that there is no profit in an open standard like that. Google killed their Reader because they wanted everyone forced into G+, rather than consuming content from around the Internet.
It is the same thing with messaging and VOIP. Nobody wants to use an open standard like XMPP or more recently Matrix because there is no money in using standards when you can lock users in to a walled garden.
There are decent readers out there. Liferea or Thunderbird will do in a pinch, and much as I hate to admit it, Netvibes is actually superb. The tragedy isn't some Google tool being retired, the tragedy is the way feeds are slowly disappearing. It's a slow and creeping death, but it's a death. More and more sites are dropping their feeds and replacing them with some twitterish Facebook nonsense. [edit: typo]
You meant: More and more sites are dropping their feeds and replacing them with their stupid 'sign up via email to receive updates' nonsense.
I've been paying for newsblur ( http://www.newsblur.com/ ) ever since google reader bit the dust. It's pretty much a direct replacement. Interface has come a long way since day one and is sufficiently slick now (UI, keyboard shortcuts, etc) that I don't really notice it. Highly recommended by a (former) hardcore google reader user. If I recall correctly, got quite a good bit of press here on HN at the time.