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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?

#411

Post by Jhsto »

Animats wrote: post #397
amerine wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the OPs point is that there are very valuable first-party sources of information with RSS feeds that you shouldn’t ignore. Basically, there is gold out there.

Facebook and Twitter both used to have RSS feeds, and stopped supporting RSS to force people to use their ad-heavy client interfaces. But that's not where the good stuff is. While "social" has dropped RSS, it's still doing great for real news.

There is still the option to make your own client or just buy something like Tweetbot which has no ads.

But I hear you. I find Twitter unusable without 3rd party client, and I think that is affecting my experience in an indirect way as well. I think the fact most people see ML picked tweets has caused fewer people responding to what I share now versus 4 years back.

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

#412

Post by cpeterso »

RSS was not discoverable for non-techy users, in part because browser support was clunky and publishers were reluctant to send readers away from their websites (and ads). But these days publishers rely on Twitter and Facebook as a "worse is better" method to syndicate links to their content. Twitter and Facebook are discoverable and sharable.

I feel like there is some opportunity to create new personalized social software or services using RSS in a post-Facebook world.

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

#413

Post by conesus »

Cyranix wrote: post #386
noam87 wrote: post #60

I've been a (paying) user of NewsBlur ( https://newsblur.com/ ) since Google Reader shut down and haven't looked back. p.s: In HN spirit, it also happens to be one developer's side-project-turned-profitable-business, and the "social" features a totally non-intrusive, but there if you want to know what people are sharing and commenting on.

I've been using Newsblur for years now. I love it most of the time, but it still has a lot of UI bugs/quirks that are occasionally frustrating. I might have to work up the energy for another round of GitHub issues.

Yes you should do this. I’m about to hire somebody to work on the NewsBlur web issues while I attend grad school. I have a strong feeling that a lot more is about to happen once I start hiring other developers to build it further.

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

#414

Post by Arkanosis »

noam87 wrote: post #60

I've been a (paying) user of NewsBlur ( https://newsblur.com/ ) since Google Reader shut down and haven't looked back. p.s: In HN spirit, it also happens to be one developer's side-project-turned-profitable-business, and the "social" features a totally non-intrusive, but there if you want to know what people are sharing and commenting on.

A big plus for me is that NewsBlur is free software (MIT licensed): https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur . It also comes with a nice API that can be used with several clients : https://newsblur.com/api .

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

#416

Post by eswat »

reificator wrote: post #9
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 been using Feedly ever since Google Reader died, it's still the first place I look. I do wish I could have an easier time getting YouTube playlists in there[1], but video is really the only sore spot there. [1]: Playlists will now only give the top n videos in a playlist, so you basically have to follow a channel feed instead.

As a compromise I’ve used PodSync[1] to feed specific channels into Pocket Casts so I can avoid having to go to YouTube.

[1]https://podsync.net/

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

#417

Post by avhon1 »

pmlnr wrote: post #354
gglitch wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate on this, please?

Firefox used to display and RSS icon in the url bar if the site had a feed, allowing you to subscribe you to "live bookmarks" - feeds: http://johnbokma.com/firefox/rss-and-live-bookmarks.html This is completely hidden from the UI by now.

In Firefox, if you click the hamburger menu and select "Customize...", one of the things you can drag into either the menu or the button bar is an RSS feed indicator/subscribe button.

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

#418

Post by [deleted] »

pmlnr wrote: post #354
gglitch wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate on this, please?

Firefox used to display and RSS icon in the url bar if the site had a feed, allowing you to subscribe you to "live bookmarks" - feeds: http://johnbokma.com/firefox/rss-and-live-bookmarks.html This is completely hidden from the UI by now.

[deleted]

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

#420

Post by jlgaddis »

Animats wrote: post #323

The key thing to know about RSS is that most of the real news sources, those that have actual reporters who go out and find news, have RSS feeds. Reuters, the Associated Press, the New York Times, the BBC... Here's Reuters Top News.[1] Just the news, no ads, no clickbait. Reuters is useful because their RSS feed contains a readable story summary. Many RSS feeds just have a truncated sentence and a link. Both CNN [2]…

CNN's web site and RSS feed both suck but, fortunately, they have a nice text-only version [0] of the site. It's the only way I read CNN.

[0]: https://lite.cnn.io/en

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