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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?

#251
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…

Agreed. Imagine having an RSS feed for all the posts here on Hackernews and just reading that instead. I come here mainly for the comments - and not usually to debate or discuss even - a lot of times to contextualize the content in question because inevitably someone more knowledgeable will post their thoughts about it. RSS is not a panacea and it is no replacement for social platforms.

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

#252
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…

> it's a feed of news curated by google supposed to match our interests Really? I've always found it to be awful, majority things I am not interested in. I just checked, and only 2 in 10 were mildly interesting to me. Three of them were about sports, which is way off the mark for me. Does it optimise based on my interactions with that application in particular, or is it meant to be linked with the rest of my google a…

Are you logged in your google account while using google search? Also, do you often search using your phone?

It's been really accurate for me, providing news about things that are not especially "mainstream", like word embeddings, anything related to KDE or updates on games I'm currently playing. I do a lot of searches on my phone, maybe that's the reason.

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

#253

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…

More and more i find myself wondering when it was we allowed Google to take over control of the net...

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

#254
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…

I think HN might be the only place I read the comments. Missing the hell stew of a comments section is a feature as I see it.

Agreed. I was glad when npr.org removed their Disqus comments sections. Disqus comments on news websites tend to be very nasty and stain websites more often than not IMO. Disqus comments on local news sites are an absolute cesspool.

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

#255
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…

> it's a feed of news curated by google supposed to match our interests Really? I've always found it to be awful, majority things I am not interested in. I just checked, and only 2 in 10 were mildly interesting to me. Three of them were about sports, which is way off the mark for me. Does it optimise based on my interactions with that application in particular, or is it meant to be linked with the rest of my google a…

Probably because you turn off tracking search history and targetted ads in your Google account's privacy settings

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

#256
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Podcasting feels like an alternate reality where none of the massive players took over and everything stayed federated.

Yep. It's perplexing that a YouTube for podcasts (with centralized ad serving and similar profit sharing) hasn't emerged. The space is endearing - maybe that's why it is so vibrant?

Well, distribution is fairly centralized [ADDED: in practice through iTunes/Google Play/etc.] and the hosting of the actual podcasts is cheap enough that throwing them on S3 or wherever isn't really a burden for most people. And advertising, when it exists at all, tends to be native advertising.

> The space is endearing - maybe that's why it is so vibrant?

That's true but arguably YouTube at least started out that way as well. I suspect that there are a number of factors; no single one I can think of (except maybe the hosting costs and that seems an unsatisfactory explanation by itself) really captures it.

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

#257

I use my own RSS reader since around 8 years now. It has evolved quite a lot. Before I was using aKregator. I started with a simple CherryPy project and a SQLite database. It is now using Flask, SQLAlchemy and React: https://www.newspipe.org/ I have something like 200000 articles in the database. And the oldest article is from February 1995!

Oh a whim I decided to grab an account. Very cool!

I'll likely use this.

Because I have never really used an RSS reader before I'll likely not have any biases as a user which I think is good.

I think one recommendation is that while Newspipe is pulling in a new feed for a new user, on the home page it should give a message like, "your posts will appear here"

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

#258
I describe myself as the last "old" using RSS because after Google Reader went away, I found Inoreader. It's a clone, with tons more filtering features and (importantly) the ability to follow Twitter feeds and searches as well.

I recently discovered HN RSS, which is awesome for showing comments: https://hnrss.org/newcomments?q=kubernetes+OR+k8s

And here's the trick for seeing all new tweets with relevant hashtags but not retweets: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23kubecon+OR+%23cloudnativecon...

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