Live data from Hacker News

RSS: there's nothing better

davidyat.es

121–130 of 295 posts

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#122
I agree completely.

It's the web at its best. There no need for a decentralized social network. We have the web.

We should return using RSS (or Atom) and find some other tools to help for forums / messages.

"Likes"? Are we sure we need them?

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#123
post #44

I wrote about this recently[1]. The "problem" with RSS, that essentially lead to it falling out of favour, is that it is pure consumption, not interaction. You can't "like" an update that comes to you via RSS, nor comment, nor easily share. It's difficult for sites to monetise it, or track, or promote their own agenda. It's not "social" and since every other site these days needs to be social, whether through aforeme…

Even before it's demise, a lot of content publishers were only publishing headlines and abstracts via RSS, with the intent to drive clicks to hosted articles. The inability to publish ads inline RSS ultimately killed it. If and when the news bundling model re-emerges, something like RSS will gain favor again.

   > Even before it's demise, a lot of content publishers 
   > were only publishing headlines and abstracts via RSS, 
   > with the intent to drive clicks to hosted articles.
yes, but that can be helpful as well: spiegel online (biggest german news site) has feeds for every subtopic; for an example for every sport an own feed.

i subscribe to ~20 of this subtopics and i'm sure i will never miss an article about one of that topics.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#124
post #95

I really miss Google Reader. Nowadays if I want to follow updates from my friends or events from some organizations, I almost certainly have to like/follow them on FB. But even doing this I cannot be sure that I will get news that I want - because despite I always use "Most Recent" sorting, FB is hiding some content from me. Many times I saw interesting post when accidentally entering FB "Top stories", from let's say…

>miss Google Reader Feedly

I use Reeder on my iPad and add RSS feeds individually to the app. There is a section where I can add a Feedly account to the app. Does that provide any advantages over directly adding the RSS feeds?

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#125
post #8

I've been seriously considering trying to consume the web solely by RSS again. All the news sites, the few twitter accounts I actually care about, HN. HN still provides RSS, and there are ways to get it for sites that don't support it, e.g. Twitter. Everything seems to be gearing more towards deliberately occupying as much of my time as possible, algorithmically selecting content that achieves this. I want out of thi…

Where is the HN RSS link?

Just add /rss to the URL [0]

Easiest way to find the RSS feed on most sites is to search for "RSS" in the page source; there's usually just one instance, and it's a direct link.

These days, many sites don't advertise their feeds, but it's still in the source (and is often broken in one way or another). If it is botched, a friendly email to their web admin with a link to the W3C Feed Validator [1] can go a long way; most times it's an easy fix for them.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

[1] https://validator.w3.org/feed/

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#126
post #44

I wrote about this recently[1]. The "problem" with RSS, that essentially lead to it falling out of favour, is that it is pure consumption, not interaction. You can't "like" an update that comes to you via RSS, nor comment, nor easily share. It's difficult for sites to monetise it, or track, or promote their own agenda. It's not "social" and since every other site these days needs to be social, whether through aforeme…

It has the same limitations as HTML.

For HTML, these limitations were circumvented by burying the platform under an ever increasing heap of javascript crap.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#127
>But, but, XML is gross! RSS is dead! 2007!

Favourite chapter. Never been fan of bashing xml in favor of json, both have their own advantages and xml gets the job done here. Wouldn't care if it was json.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brother did a holiday blog in wordpress. New posts sent out email pings. That was fine, if you don't mind a torrent of notifications in your inbox.

You choose to sign up for email updates then. WordPress doesn't do it by itself. WordPress also has RSS still.

a lot of pages that use wordpress underneath still have feed-urls; if you know the URL, you can subscribe to them, even it if's not advertised in the head.

if wordpress stops using RSS it will be really dead.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#129
post #8

I've been seriously considering trying to consume the web solely by RSS again. All the news sites, the few twitter accounts I actually care about, HN. HN still provides RSS, and there are ways to get it for sites that don't support it, e.g. Twitter. Everything seems to be gearing more towards deliberately occupying as much of my time as possible, algorithmically selecting content that achieves this. I want out of thi…

I actually read everything by RSS except HN, since the posts here often get better over time, thanks to comments, so they're less suitable for RSS, in my opinion. By the way, if you follow YouTube channels, not only do they still provide RSS feeds, as you can get a nice OPML file of all the channels you subscribe to: https://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager (scroll to the bottom)

What are you using to aggregate the feeds?

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#130
Is there a service that creates “bootleg” RSS feeds of sites that don’t provide one themselves? If not, why don’t we create one? An RSS feed of pure content, without clickbait, paywalls, like buttons, javascript tracking nonsense...
Post reply on HN