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RSS: there's nothing better

davidyat.es

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Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#231

Post by aylmao »

dleslie wrote: post #189
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…

And this is why Google Reader was amazing. There we were, my friends and I, reading RSS feeds and liking/sharing/commenting amongst ourselves. pours one out

I see this promise in Mastodon. Under the hood it's just Atom + extensions. If current blogging solutions had a mastodon extension; say if a Wordpress blog also automatically set up a Mastodon instance for you even if it's just a single identity one, you'd have liking/sharing/commenting by default.

Note: fairy new to Mastodon, not sure exactly if / how this would work, but I've been thinking about this lately.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#232

Post by madez »

baby wrote: post #208
fredley wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only one place to go for things, no 'endless scroll', once stuff is read it's read.

For me the hassle of checking different things in different place made it so that I would only check "a few" places. With RSS I'm crawling under a huge load of articles that I always have to clear up. I used to be extremely addicted to that, I used it to get through work stuff now and when I have weeks of articles pilling up in my feed I feel bad. I use it, and definitely love that, but it def. re-enforce addiction,…

For me it cured the addiction. On my view I could see if there are relevant news and if not get done very fast as to compared to visiting each site on my own. Then the occasional backlog made me realize that most isn't even relevant. That lead to a more healthy relationship with news.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#235

Post by hwu2whag »

Couldn't agree more, which is why I was so disappointed when apple removed the built in RSS reader from Safari. I now use RSS Not, but really much preferred the discreet version built into the OSX browser.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#236

Post by eikenberry »

The main problem I had with RSS was the fatigue of keeping up. I usually had dozens of new entries each day and it was always a constant struggle to keep up. I wanted a reader that allowed me to better manage the incoming stream, something like a score or rank system, better auto-expiring systems, maybe a Bayesian system. I'm not 100%, but none of the readers at the time offered anything but a time series. Has this improved?

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#237

Post by amelius »

breischl wrote: post #203
amelius wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook is kinda left out as most of their content is walled off, but then they're too evil to even consider going there anyways. Can't we have RSS scrapers that are operated by people, generating RSS streams of "inaccessible/paywalled/grey area" content in a collaborative effort? Something like bittorrent but for ASCII text.

For any content that's being sold as such (eg, news sites) that's definitely copyright infringement. For user-generated content, I'm not sure. Though I would not be even a little bit surprised if Facebook asserted copyright to anything put into it. In either case, probably violates the TOS as well. Technically it's achievable, but it would likely be forever relegated to mostly-illegal backwaters.

Yes, it's illegal. But if we don't at least acknowledge that we're in a fight, then we're losing the battle for sure. By the way, Uber and AirBnB also did many illegal things, and so did Google (see e.g. Google Books).

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#238

Post by slipmagic »

eikenberry wrote: post #236

The main problem I had with RSS was the fatigue of keeping up. I usually had dozens of new entries each day and it was always a constant struggle to keep up. I wanted a reader that allowed me to better manage the incoming stream, something like a score or rank system, better auto-expiring systems, maybe a Bayesian system. I'm not 100%, but none of the readers at the time offered anything but a time series. Has this i…

I was thinking that perhaps changing the UI to where it was like tinder, so that a user could swipe articles that they wanted to read later in one direction and ones they knew they wanted to skip in the other would be at least a faster way of going through things. Either that, or making it like Inbox by Google, where someone could snooze an article for later. Information could be collected based on that and sent to the publisher so they would know which content was popular and what was not (along with which articles were shared from the app, etc). A third option would be to use a messenger UI where a user delete/archive links or favorite them, and reply to messages with their thoughts and comments for things that they find useful. I currently have a setup similar to this, but it's not very elegant.

There could be a new feed given to the user, based on that, if they feel overwhelmed with their unfiltered one, but always switch over to the regular view/feed as needed. It could be even more granular, where some feeds are algorithmically sorted or ignored based on certain keywords set by the user and others are not.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#239

Post by ece »

JoshMnem wrote: post #153
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…

The thing that caused RSS to fall out of favor is that most people were using Google Reader to consume it, and Google killed off Google Reader.

No one has replicated Google Reader's scale definitely. Some combination of email/twitter/reddit/facebook has somewhat taken it's place, but they're not real substitutes if you were using Google Reader.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#240

Post by smarx007 »

eikenberry wrote: post #236

The main problem I had with RSS was the fatigue of keeping up. I usually had dozens of new entries each day and it was always a constant struggle to keep up. I wanted a reader that allowed me to better manage the incoming stream, something like a score or rank system, better auto-expiring systems, maybe a Bayesian system. I'm not 100%, but none of the readers at the time offered anything but a time series. Has this i…

I sort my subscriptions by the amount of new posts in a descending order. I then go through the biggest offenders individually and simply unsubscribe from those that abuse my RSS feed. I read RSS once a week and sometimes once a month (I am in academia, and "Deep Work" from Cal Newport had quite an impact on me). For example, Monzo bank's blog had 31 new entries when I checked it today and OKFN labs had just 4. I opened Monzo's feed and its signal-to-noise ratio was too low and I unsubscribed from it: c'est la vie. I think you can do this only when you take a look back at a week/month worth of material as opposed to running the hamster wheel of the twitter feed.
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