RSS: there's nothing better • Hacker News Board

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#191

Post by shalmanese » Sat, Nov 11, 2017, 3:38 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #24

fredley wrote: 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)

hckrnews.com is the RSS style interface I used to read HN.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#192

Post by TheAceOfHearts » Sat, Nov 11, 2017, 3:39 PM UTC

leejo wrote: 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…

I find it surprising that someone would say it's not easily shared, since you can just copy the entry's permalink and send it to someone. I don't think it could be any easier!

Heck, I don't think I ever use a site's sharing button. The only exceptions are probably "retweet" on Twitter and "share now" on Facebook, which reposts content on your timeline in a way that can't be replicated by posting the URL.

On Chrome for Android there's the Web Share API [0], which they claim makes it easier to share content, although I'm unconvinced it's needed or really even desirable.

[0] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/09/navigator-...

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#193

Post by barkingtoad » Sat, Nov 11, 2017, 3:40 PM UTC

Arnt wrote: post #48

leejo wrote: 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…

What you try to say is (I think): RSS is better because it's totally foreign to clickbait. The goals sites try to reach using clickbait are goals not helped by RSS. Right? RSS is badly suited as a vector for virally driven waves of outrage. "Let's call it an accidental feature" as lwall once wrote.

To be more exact, RSS is headline-oriented, so it's about clickbait. It is not about sharebait.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#194

Post by jingwen » Sat, Nov 11, 2017, 3:42 PM UTC

KORraN wrote: 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…

I found BazQux Reader (bazqux.com) and absolutely love it because it’s designed to mimic Google Reader :-)

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#195

Post by waz0wski » Sat, Nov 11, 2017, 3:47 PM UTC

ronjouch wrote: post #134

icebraining wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-hosted TinyTinyRSS on a cheap VPS (alongside my email).

Off-topic: what do you use for self-hosted email? I'm considering abandoning it and going back to gmail/fastmail, for the constant configuration hassle (DKIM/SPF, etc.) causing sent/received emails to be incorrectly marked as spam and/or refused :-/ Any "sane defaults, regular updates, impossible to shoot yourself in the foot" package to recommend?

https://mailcow.email

https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign

https://mailinabox.email

FreeBSD-specific: http://www.purplehat.org/?page_id=4

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#196

Post by gumby » Sat, Nov 11, 2017, 3:48 PM UTC

I also use RSS as a way of publishing configuration and firmware updates to a set of users/devices. Works great: surfs infrastructure we already have, supports browsing past versions etc, and I didn't have to write any clients for looking things up.

This is for a rather large, global, corporate-internal system, not a commercial product, though I got the idea when thinking about solutions for a commercial product a few years ago.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#197

Post by el_duderino » Sat, Nov 11, 2017, 3:56 PM UTC

Semaphor wrote: post #169

InternetUser wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Google Reader as well, but switched quite seamlessly to Feedly. What's your problem with Feedly? I assume it's something about the aesthetic design of it, because it's very much the same as Google Reader.

Did they change things? Because when the great reader explosion happened after Google Reader died I evaluated tons of readers and decided on a newsblur.com subscription in the end. I remember Feedly catering to the "images are great"-Pinterest crowd.

Yeah. I suggest giving them another try. I actually thought they were the most popular RSS reader these days. It's very customizable (even for the free tier).

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#198

Post by OliverJones » Sat, Nov 11, 2017, 3:57 PM UTC

djhworld wrote: post #155

I mostly consume my RSS feeds on the London Underground, where 70% of the time you don't have cellphone or WiFi signal. While my preferred RSS reader NewsBlur can download everything up front, for offline use, I tend to find a lot of sites truncate their articles (with a 'Click here to continue reading!") or just post a headline and a one sentence summary. This makes me dislike using RSS, not because of the technolog…

Maybe what shows up in Newsblur is a "little" irritating. But trying to get the same quality of stuff from FB is just plain irritating, without qualifications.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#199

Post by OliverJones » Sat, Nov 11, 2017, 4:00 PM UTC

oeuviz wrote: post #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.

So what if XML is gross? Feed generators generate it. Feed readers consume it. Computer machine language is gross too. But only some of us need to look at it, while we can all use it.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#200

Post by Franciscouzo » Sat, Nov 11, 2017, 4:00 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #186

Franciscouzo wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use RSS for following YouTube channels, but the only problem I have is that I have to click on each video, I'd like a RSS client to create a custom playlist, at least for all the music videos. I used to use YouTube's email notifications, but they would skip some videos randomly, and I'd be left wondering what videos I missed.

That's interesting, my subscriptions only update once or twice a week so I never felt that need. How do you see it working? Create and play a playlist of currently unviewed videos?

Exactly, a "Make playlist" button on either a folder of YouTube channels, or on just a channel, that would make a custom playlist of all unviewed videos.