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It's time to head back to RSS?

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

#191

Post by pmlnr »

manicdee wrote: post #73
sago wrote: post #55

RSS is awesome. Bring on its resurgence. But. It is fundamentally not fit as a Facebook or social media replacement because of it's lack of simple commenting support. It suits some curmudgeonly old farts like me, perhaps. But even I want to feedback sometimes or join in the discussion (hence this comment). Are there solutions that a content creator can provide, via RSS, without requiring its readers to install partic…

RSS for headlines and federation of feeds, Disqus for comments.

webmentions and microsub, please. Disqus is just another silo, it has nothing to do with RSS and federation.

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

#192

Post by singingfish »

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”,…

Absolute hell is a bit of an understatement ;)

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

#193

Post by pmlnr »

modernerd wrote: post #87

Yes. But please not RSS. At least newer initiatives like JSON Feed have maintainers who respond to requests for improvements. RSS feels like an abandoned standard. I tried to submit an improvement to the author directly to explicitly allow HTTPS URLs in light of upcoming iTunes changes to enforce HTTPS; they said by email that of course HTTPS resources are valid in their view, but they weren't prepared to actively up…

Does it matter, really? RSS, Atom, JSON, microformats, whatever; there are libraries that can parse any of these. What matters is the idea behind them, the technical implementation is secondary. Please don't revive the format wars.

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

#194

Post by cmbailey »

nanodeath wrote: post #7
jingwen wrote: post #3

If you miss the clean UI and keyboard shortcuts of Google Reader, I highly recommend BazQux Reader. The front end tech is also pretty interesting: it's built with Ur/Web. [2] [1] http://bazqux.com [2] https://github.com/bazqux/bazqux-urweb

The Old Reader[1] has been my go-to. Looks similar. [1] https://theoldreader.com/

I'd been on The Old Reader ever since Google Reader shut down. Tried Bazqux thanks to a post here on HN and switched because it's much faster. Very noticeable with a lot of subscriptions (I have over 100).

Only relative downside is that there's no integration with Firefox's "Subscribe to this page" button, which TOR has. That means you need to use a javascript bookmark to subscribe to new feeds, which feels kludge-ey in comparison.

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

#195

Post by eXpl0it3r »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #168
mosselman wrote: post #76

I completely agree. When did RSS go out of style anyway? The other day I wanted to subscribe to an author's posts on Medium, but I couldn't find a RSS feed anywhere, so I never did. Seems like a loss for the author to me, seeing as gaining influence and credibility is probably the goal of many who write posts. It would also seem as if Medium doesn't want to add RSS as it would take control away in terms of recommendi…

That's the actual problem. I don't get why everyone is putting such a strong emphasis on the google reader shutdown. It's the fact that everyone stopped providing RSS feeds. Probably because you can't put 500 tracking pixels and ads and scripts in them, so they hope by shutting them down people will visit the page directly more frequently. Which might actually work out in general.

I have not experienced this. In my experience only niche, self-built websites offer no RSS feed. Plus there are other ways to make your RSS feed "useless" by only providing a title and the opening sentence, that way people will have to visit your site for the full content.

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

#196

Post by JeremyNT »

toasterlovin wrote: post #5

If you haven’t tried RSS as your main mode of information consumption in a while, you should give it a shot. I went all-in on RSS recently and it’s been great. Way more thoughtful, long form content. Smaller dose information sources (Twitter, etc.) are useful in their own way, but I’ve found that the amount of time required to create a unit of media is a pretty good reverse indicator of how likely it is to use the ba…

I've had pretty good results subscribing to a few select Twitter feeds via RSS. Some people do put useful content on Twitter, but the Twitter UI makes it very difficult to identify and extract.

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

#197

Post by awiesenhofer »

fwdpropaganda wrote: post #118

Can anyone clarify to me: why do people use web RSS readers, as opposed to local applications?

For me personally it's mainly about synchronisation. I use feedly on my phone, tablet and laptop and never have to see or archive a story twice. Plus i can star/save an interesting story on my laptop and read it on my phone later, say while commuting.

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

#198

Post by awiesenhofer »

wyclif wrote: post #186
_pctq wrote: post #164

Funny, I've set up a RSS reader again just this week. Prior to that, my main source of information was google feed (when you sweep right on android main screen - for those who don't know it, it's a feed of news curated by google supposed to match our interests). I totally loved it, as it properly detected my interests and shown articles about them even from websites I don't know about. But lately, I saw more and more…

A lot of people don't seem to be aware of it, but you can "tune" Google News by adding or deleting sources. I've tweaked mine quite a bit and it works well as a lazy news source. It's not as finely granulated as my RSS consumption, and it won't replace my RSS reader, but it's better than I at first thought it would be after adjusting the defaults.

After having to remove "recommended" news sources and articles all the time I decided to "tune" it by deinstalling the Google Search App altogether therefore removing News. I use feedly instead now and am quite happy with the added battery runtime.

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

#199

Post by fuchur »

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.

Can we stop calling it podcasting? Nothing about the iPod or iTunes was special enough to warrant coining that term.

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

#200

Post by icebraining »

mosselman wrote: post #169
twelve40 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It went out of style for the mainstream because they haven't (yet) figured out how to lace it with ads.

That is a keen observation. I guess rss is a technology from simpler and more explorative times of the internet instead of the current oppressive and commercialized phase we are going through now.

Eh, the surveillance was weaker, but I'm not sure about the commercialization. RSS is from 99/00, the era of Punch The Monkey flash banner ads and dozens of popups and popunders.

From what I can tell, RSS was the equivalent of today's OpenGraph. It was a tool for a company (Netscape) to slurp content into its portal. It's just that AOL then blundered when they bought Netscape and removed support for RSS, which then became a de-facto standard format.

In fact, as RSS popularity wanes, a feed reader that can reader OG tags is probably a good idea.

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