Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

RSS: there's nothing better

davidyat.es

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 295 posts

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#271

Post by b0rsuk »

cJ0th wrote: post #61
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…

This (probably correctly) assumes that the average user stays 'dumb' forever. The 'intelligent' user would understand the benefits of rss, demand them from their news outlets and be willing to pay, if necessary, an appropriate amount of money for it. This will probably never happen but I maintain the view that if you want the web to become a better place you have to find ways to educate the (average) user.

Not necessarily. My brother, 6 years older, insists that RSS is dead, nobody uses it, and he's happy to follow the trend. He will happily chase whatever tech is fashionable to increase his perceived workforce market value. He is intelligent, but also cynical. His rationale in this and many other cases is "you shouldn't use it because people don't use it."

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#273

Post by pers0n »

You don’t have to put the entire post in rss, even Wordpress has that option. You can easily put in a snippet and if it’s interes enough people can click to read it, but yes, Web 2.0 was too open for the real world, capitalism prevails and so the $$$ comes first before anything else

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#274

Post by ino »

r3bl wrote: post #39
4lch3m1st wrote: post #36

Just deleted my Facebook account in about two weeks ago and started consuming news through RSS and through Podcasts and some YouTube channels (which are also, surprisingly, RSS). I've never felt better. This might be a stretch, but this has been a good alternative to the way I was consuming online media, indeed less useless info seems to be reaching me. However, it all depends on the material you're subscribing to.

YouTube is very friendly towards the RSS readers from my experience.

Was. They had a search term RSS feed which was very powerful and they removed it a few years ago. I'm still pissed.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#275

Post by Too »

robin_reala wrote: post #220
JoshMnem wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if Firefox could help fix the problem by putting RSS/Atom discovery into the browser in a prominent way.

It’s there, pick Customise from the menu and drag the RSS icon into the bar. But they’re not interested in actively working on it – suggested features like hiding it instead of greying it out based on feed presence are closed due to a lack of interest. I think ideally they’re want it to be an extension.

"in a prominent way"

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#276

Post by jraph »

jwilk wrote: post #26
0x006A wrote: post #4

so whats a good rss reader in 2017?

rss2email: https://github.com/wking/rss2email

I use rss2email with cron to send posts of my family's blog by email to people for whom straight RSS is not convenient.

This is especially nice for my grandmother, who has an iPad. I found no RSS reader there that is easy to use enough, free and ad-free.

I just wanted something I can just give a RSS link to and it fetches this link and shows content. And nothing else. This does not seem to exist.

My grandmother knows how to read and write emails. Blog posts are rendered properly using rss2email in her mailbox. And she knows how to click in the email to go to the blog and comments at times. This is actually even simpler and more optimal than a dedicated RSS App. One unique easy way to get news from the family using the tablet.

And the blog is easier than Facebook (I guess - never used it). There is just our content in the pages and that’s it. No irrelevant stuff around and no notifications.

If you are looking for ways to keep in touch with a group of people in which somebody is not really into computers, this may be one nice solution.

So, thanks to the authors of rss2email.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#277

Post by monkey88 »

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…

All the Wordpress sites still have a RSS feed. You just have to look at the code.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#278

Post by subroutine »

petepete wrote: post #52
subroutine wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

digg reader works fine for me. screencap: http://i.imgur.com/3GbYB61.png link: http://digg.com/reader

I wasn't aware Digg Reader existed, thanks. Now, will my 12 year old Digg account work?

Hah. Similar experience last year when I tried to sign up for digg reader and it said my email address was already in use O.o

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#279

Post by sridca »

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…

RSS is great, but for community voted sites like HN and reddit I wrote a tool to 'slow down' the links: https://github.com/srid/slownews

A live running version of mine can be seen at: http://slownews-naivete.herokuapp.com/

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#280

Post by grappler »

RSS is great, but: If I could add one thing to a standard RSS setup, it would be a volume knob for each subscribed feed.

Is a feed too noisy? You can unsubscribe. But what if you had another less-drastic option to "turn it down"? That's doable if you have some way of assigning scores to individual posts within the feed. Such scores could come from the feed publisher, other places like the reader's own social media accounts, or somewhere else. Have a user-determined threshold to determine what posts are worth showing the user.

Then by "turn it down" the user means "bump the threshold up" (and vice versa). Via trial and error a user could more or less adjust it to where they want it.

This could be built using RSS as one of the building blocks, but I don't know of anything like it.

Post reply on HN