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RSS is undead

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Re: RSS is undead

#11

Post by plugger »

nreece wrote: post #9

RSS never died. On the contrary, its usage for content aggregation & monitoring has been increasing over the years, specially in the business world and niche markets. I'm speaking from my own experience running a growing & profitable startup, Feedity - https://feedity.com , that helps with custom feeds for unstructured sources like webpages. Our upcoming API and content explorer (a different kind of 'feed reader') ha…

+1. I start each morning in the office by firing up my RSS aggregator. Have been since the early days of Google Reader. I can skim through my feeds in minimal time, especially when compared to any other alternative.

Re: RSS is undead

#12

Post by croisillon »

OT: what has become of TechCrunch? I'm on a wide screen (1920 pixels), don't expect me to read paragraphs with 16px font! So I scroll down without really reading and I see "view comments", I scroll down a bit further and I see there is more stuff so maybe they buried the comments and I don't even need to click? I scroll further and... lose the whole article to land automatically on the homepage. Such a layout is plain horrible and I won't return to TC for a few more years.

Re: RSS is undead

#13

Post by Aissen »

No one has mentioned NewsBlur yet. It's fantastic as an RSS reader, and provides intelligence training (filtering) for only subjects you might be interested in, allowing you to tame high-rate RSS feeds quite easily: http://newsblur.com/

Re: RSS is undead

#14

Post by erikrothoff »

At https://feeder.co onboarding is one of our largest hurdles to solve. For a lot of reasons we're lucky to get a lot of users who are completely new to RSS. This means we have a huge job in educating what RSS and what it's not. We've seen that a lot of large sites have stopped advertising their RSS feeds on their homepages, making it harder to detect via the standard means.

Also, we've never stopped growing and are approaching profitability on one full time employee so don't believe the RSS-is-dead hype.

Re: RSS is undead

#15

Post by gsich »

unicornporn wrote: post #7

RSS never (un)died for me. I run FreshRSS[1]. It works well on shared hosting and it runs on SQLite (no migration troubles!). The best thing about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds. Every and service that I use has an RSS feed, except for Twitter. I use https://twitrss.me/ to follow users. If you don't find a feed, sometimes you just have to dig a little. You learn at which URIs the most commons CMSes…

Twitter offered a RSS feed directly. But they disabled it, with their "new" API, because of some bogus reason.

Re: RSS is undead

#16

Post by stanislavb »

croisillon wrote: post #12

OT: what has become of TechCrunch? I'm on a wide screen (1920 pixels), don't expect me to read paragraphs with 16px font! So I scroll down without really reading and I see "view comments", I scroll down a bit further and I see there is more stuff so maybe they buried the comments and I don't even need to click? I scroll further and... lose the whole article to land automatically on the homepage. Such a layout is plai…

yeah, it seems that with the goal of being modern, their usability has dropped enormously. I always feel confused whenever I happen to open a TechCrunch article.

Re: RSS is undead

#17

Post by JetSpiegel »

> solving RSS as business model. There needs to be some sort of a commerce layer around feeds

> I would gladly pay money for an Amazon Prime-like subscription where I can get unlimited text-only feeds from a bunch of a major news sources at a reasonable price. It would also allow me to get my privacy back to boot.

Facebook had a scandal over selling private data, so move to RSS for the privacy! RSS doesn't allow tracking (from Amazon), let's turn it into HTML.

Re: RSS is undead

#18

Post by etu »

unicornporn wrote: post #7

RSS never (un)died for me. I run FreshRSS[1]. It works well on shared hosting and it runs on SQLite (no migration troubles!). The best thing about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds. Every and service that I use has an RSS feed, except for Twitter. I use https://twitrss.me/ to follow users. If you don't find a feed, sometimes you just have to dig a little. You learn at which URIs the most commons CMSes…

Did RSS ever die?

I've migrated from Google Reader to TTRSS when I was forced to make a change.

Then a few months ago TTRSS started to act up and started making bold claims like "your database doesn't respond" so I moved over to FreshRSS which was a much bigger improvement than I thought that it would be to begin with.

Runs fine using Postgres as a database.

Re: RSS is undead

#19

Post by pbalau »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #8
dc_gregory wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we killed it :)

Back alive atm ( disabled RSS sync :p ) If anyone knows how to performantly sort on non deterministic computed columns ( eg. the ranking algorithm for votes of posts + comments) in MS SQL server -> https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/203331/slow-calculat... i'd be very happy :p, it's killing my "trending topic" performance... Edit: added non deterministic

You don't do the calculation on the fly, you do it at data mutation time (if the column should be the same for every client) or in a separate "thread" (eg, a script). Basically, you pre calculate the column and simply add it to your table, indexed.

Re: RSS is undead

#20

Post by gregknicholson »

JetSpiegel wrote: post #17

> solving RSS as business model. There needs to be some sort of a commerce layer around feeds > I would gladly pay money for an Amazon Prime-like subscription where I can get unlimited text-only feeds from a bunch of a major news sources at a reasonable price. It would also allow me to get my privacy back to boot. Facebook had a scandal over selling private data, so move to RSS for the privacy! RSS doesn't allow trac…

> solving RSS as business model. There needs to be some sort of a commerce layer around feeds

RSS is not a business model. Selling things people actually want is a business model.

If you can't persuade someone to pay for your content (perhaps via willingly watching adverts), then it's not economically viable content. If you care enough to continue publishing it, great, but it's out of your own pocket.

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