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It's time to head back to RSS?

wired.com

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Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#151

Post by gsam »

awiesenhofer wrote: post #105
grayrest wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When did RSS go out of style anyway? It went away when Google killed Reader. Reader had more or less killed off the independent RSS reader market. When it got shuttered, alternatives weren't well developed and people shifted more or less entirely onto Twitter. The Twitter shift had been happening already but the shutdown kind of forced the issue.

I think you and HN in general vastly overstates the gravitas of the Google Reader shutdown. I loved it too but the demise of RSS happened probably more because of people switching to Twitter, Facebook and others as their "aggregator" than by killing off one RSS-Reader.

Those services used to also carry RSS, but they silently removed them not long after Google Reader shut down. That might be unrelated, but still.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#152

Post by robk »

djhworld wrote: post #137
anomie31 wrote: post #35

Hey Wired, maybe RSS would be more popular if media outlets like you would put more in your RSS feeds than a title and single sentence for each article. But I get it. You need ads to make money, and just putting ads in your RSS feed is not enough because they're not "interactive" enough, or something. You need those "engagement" metrics that you generate by making readers press a button to read the full article. I wa…

This is my biggest gripe with RSS. Not the fault of the protocol, just the user experience. I mostly consume my feeds on the London Underground, so offline reading is perfect for that, but I tend to have to scroll through articles that are truncated because there's no point in reading them. You could argue that the infrastructure of the tube network is the problem, not the state of the modern web, but still, it sucks…

I had to write a Huginn agent that crawls my RSS and creates a private feed that then subsequently downloads the entire article, which I then can pump back into my reader. Sigh.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#153

Post by onli »

jobigoud wrote: post #144
forapurpose wrote: post #12

I'm interested in a reader that focuses on efficiency; like probably most people, no matter how much I try to cull them I end up with too many items in my list, more than I have time for. Let's say it takes an average of 2.5 seconds to read a feed item subject line, decide whether to read it[0], and nothing else - not opening or reading any articles. In half an hour of concentration you could do that with ~700 feed i…

Stress from bolded lines of unread articles can be overwhelming. In FeedDemon, a desktop based reader, there is a tool called the Panic button that is triggered when you have a lot of unreads (or that you can trigger manually). It displays the following message: You have 591 unread articles. This isn't email - you don't have to read everything. Perhaps it's time to hit the panic button and let FeedDemon mark articles…

Plug: I'm building a successor to Yahoo Pipes on https://www.pipes.digital, and this is a usecase I definitely want to support. Maybe give it a try? I'm always interested in feedback.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#154

Post by jon_richards »

princekolt wrote: post #135
thinkloop wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting you say that, I got into podcasts recently (a bit late I know) and found the space very confusing. It's kind'of all on iTunes, but not really, you can get them from their source sites, but also some apps have a subset. Understanding the model is not easy. I didn't know it was powered by rss until this thread. I am really pro federation, and I am not deterred, but I am an engineer on HN. I wonder why email…

The email protocols are hell. Absolute hell. I don’t think anyone truly groks how it works all the way down either. A big difference is that email has slowly been developed over a period of decades, and so a lot of great software (both libs and GUIs) were built on top of it, and “perfected” over the time. Maybe what prevented RSS from reaching the same level of development is that RSS is only composed by “creators”,…

An example: My server sends notification emails to the company automatically. Everyone is using gmail to view their emails.

When there is an update about a previous notification, I send an email with the in-reply-to header. Oh wait, gmail doesn't use that.

Alright, I'll just make sure that the subject line is exactly the same as the original notification (as gmail says to do). This works for a bit, but if someone hits reply-all, suddenly the subject line for the thread is now "Re: " and my followups no longer thread.

I'll just make sure that my followups always have "Re: " in them, so they thread whether or not people have been communicating on the thread. This mostly works, but if the update is a week or two later, gmail just decides they shouldn't thread.

This is on top of the fact that emails with similar subject lines occasionally thread together. This gets really annoying when you send automated emails where the subjects are the same except for an identifier of some sort (specifically to prevent threading).

And there's no way to give feedback to gmail about this. No way to forcefully thread or de-thread emails. You are just given the choice of gmail's threading or no threading at all.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#156

Post by addicted »

manmal wrote: post #149

To me, RSS and Twitter/FB/etc are very different things. With RSS you are „alone“ while reading it. There’s no one to discuss things with you. I‘m not really qualified to make this statement, but I‘d say RSS feeds don’t have a social component, leaving your limbic system (responsible for social interaction) widely out of the process. You process the info and that’s it. With Twitter, everything is attached to a social…

Well, one reason Google Reader’s closure was such a loss was because it added a social layer to RSS. And it was a completely optional and non-intrusive social layer. I really wish Google had tried to enhance Reader instead of killing it to promote Google+. Allowing the ability to post short messages in your shared feeds would have made it very Twitter like, only nicer.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#158

Post by mrmondo »

I agree with those that say RSS never went away, for the last 10 years or so I’ve noticed my dependence on RSS grow and it’s critical to my keeping track of news across a number of blogs and websites. I wrote a shitty little blog post on it last year: https://smcleod.net/thoughts/2017/09/22/return-of-the-rss.ht...

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#159

Post by chiefalchemist »

singingfish wrote: post #107

RSS never went away. Podcasting has made careers (e.g. deboarah francis-white, roman mars, andy & helen zaltzman, ollie mann and many others). The technological underpinning of podcasting is entirely RSS. And it ain't going away, or getting embraced and extended any time soon.

True. But it certainly fell from grace. Prior to social media it was (paraphrasing) "Follow me via RSS" than morphed into "Follow me on social." Even site where RSS is baked in (i.e., WordPress) stopped mentioning it.

It never went away, but it certainly (sadly) got a serious demotion.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#160

Post by iforgotpassword »

jon_richards wrote: post #154
princekolt wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The email protocols are hell. Absolute hell. I don’t think anyone truly groks how it works all the way down either. A big difference is that email has slowly been developed over a period of decades, and so a lot of great software (both libs and GUIs) were built on top of it, and “perfected” over the time. Maybe what prevented RSS from reaching the same level of development is that RSS is only composed by “creators”,…

An example: My server sends notification emails to the company automatically. Everyone is using gmail to view their emails. When there is an update about a previous notification, I send an email with the in-reply-to header. Oh wait, gmail doesn't use that. Alright, I'll just make sure that the subject line is exactly the same as the original notification (as gmail says to do). This works for a bit, but if someone hit…

Just don't use the web front end, access them using your favorite mail client using IMAP. Oh wait, google fucked that up too. Luckily most clients worked around the google bullshit over the years.
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