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RSS is undead

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Re: RSS is undead

#31

Post by c12 »

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…

This makes me smile to hear. It looks like you have a great product - I remember maybe a year or two ago a similar provider went under due to lack of interest, but I think they were targeting the wrong market by aggregating users social media into a personal feed.

Re: RSS is undead

#32

Post by erpellan »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #21
pbalau wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's non deterministic because it has a time variation ( newer posts get ranked higher). Even then?

Don't modify the scores of old posts, start newer ones with a higher score.

Check out how reddit does it: https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algo...

The concept is that the time-based part of the score is immutable, fixed at post creation time.

That way you only have to recalculate when a score-modifying event occurs, not every time the page is refreshed.

Re: RSS is undead

#33

Post by c12 »

3pt14159 wrote: post #30
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…

When I created my personal website I thought: “Eh, if anyone asks for RSS I’ll make it then.” To my surprise I started getting asked after the second article! It didn’t take long to code up (relative paths to full urls was the biggest hurdle—but not exactly hard) and it’s kinda nice knowing that people can just follow the content without having to be lucky enough to see an article go by on Twitter.

I am guilty of emailing or otherwise attempting to contact authors for a feed link for their blog. It's often because I have become really engaged with one of their articles, read a few more and developed a hunger to see their fresh work.

Twitter is just a firehose, but my aggregated feeds are categorized and hand picked so I am far more likely to catch content I'm interested in on there and therefore be much more engaged with it.

Re: RSS is undead

#34

Post by erpellan »

Does 'RSS' also mean Atom feeds? The terms seem to be used interchangeably. I had thought Atom was supposed to be a better alternative to RSS but it doesn't seem to have landed. Is it necessary to always offer both? Most sites seem to.

Re: RSS is undead

#35

Post by im_dario »

Aissen wrote: post #13

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/

Thanks for the reminder. I just recovered my account and I'll give a try to the intelligent filtering.

Re: RSS is undead

#36

Post by c12 »

erikrothoff wrote: post #14

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…

I used to use the feedafever agrigator (until upgrading my servers PHP version stopped it working) I could give it a website url and it would attempt to identify the feed from it; probably first by looking for relevant meta tags and then resulting in checking obvious url paths.

Re: RSS is undead

#37

Post by iagooar »

RSS will never die, as long as podcasts are using it (and podcasting IS booming around the world right now). Many thought it dead even in the podcasting world, yet there is no viable alternative and there won't be in the next few years. A bit of a Javascript-y situation.

Re: RSS is undead

#39

Post by Semaphor »

erpellan wrote: post #34

Does 'RSS' also mean Atom feeds? The terms seem to be used interchangeably. I had thought Atom was supposed to be a better alternative to RSS but it doesn't seem to have landed. Is it necessary to always offer both? Most sites seem to.

Many sites offer both because common libraries and tools support both so it's easy. I don't think I've seen a reader that only supports one of the formats. IIRC from way back when, atom has a few more features but also some problems, but in the end, it doesn't really matter.

Re: RSS is undead

#40

Post by catach »

jsmeaton wrote: post #22

This seems like a weird article. People are advocating for RSS to avoid “the algorithm” and to increase privacy. Yet the author recommends adding analytics (tracking) and a way for publishers to indicate priorities. No. That’s the opposite of why people are again pushing RSS. If you want a read count, then add pingback urls and make the protocol support it so various feed aggregators can report true numbers. Curation…

> No. That’s the opposite of why people are again pushing RSS.

Maybe the opposite of why users are pushing for RSS, but without analytics content producers have reasonable justification for being hostile instead.

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