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RSS is undead

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Re: RSS is undead

#41

Post by gkya »

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…

The page almost looks perfect with JS disabled. If the major browsers were better at giving the user a way to use and maintain a whitelist of which web sites are allowed to run JS, maybe the websites become less JS-heavy. NoScript or UBlock don't even come close wrt UX to what xombrero was, and what qutebrowser is ATM (I've switched to it from Firefox, just awesome).

Re: RSS is undead

#42

Post by leejo »

Please stop claiming that RSS died, it didn't. Most of the new sites and blogs i come across usually have an RSS feed buried somewhere, so a more apt metaphor would be that it was buried alive, it didn't die. And please stop trying to feature creep RSS, it doesn't need any more "features". I already wrote about this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15675823

Re: RSS is undead

#43

Post by tw1010 »

leejo wrote: post #42

Please stop claiming that RSS died, it didn't. Most of the new sites and blogs i come across usually have an RSS feed buried somewhere, so a more apt metaphor would be that it was buried alive, it didn't die. And please stop trying to feature creep RSS, it doesn't need any more "features". I already wrote about this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15675823

"Died" means "no one is talking about it". But that could just as well be a consequence of it doing its job without fault, silently being a good boy in the background, rather than any depletion of use.

Re: RSS is undead

#44

Post by firexcy »

Intense RSS user as I am, I don’t think the recent hype of RSS practical and scalable for daily users.

Algorithm-generated feeds are mostly critisized for buidling filter bubbles and leading to dependency, but either can be avoided by simply switching to RSS. It is you who choose what to subscribe to in RSS, and it’s hard to imagine many people would offense themselves by subscribing to sources contrasting their own ideologies. And any experienced RSS user will understand the stress of out-of-control unread counts, which easily leads to the crumbling of your RSS-based reading system.

You may be like, “well, I’m nimble at selecting non-biased sources and spend a health time on my RSS feed.” Congrats, but one as rational and restrained as you is also unlikely to be solicited or tricked by News Feed. On the other way, you can’t expect one inclined to be biased and addicted to crappy stories to become less so just by using RSS instead.

And that’s without mentioning the high technical barrier of RSS that filters ordinary users away. For many popular content providers, there’s no full text output, even no conspicuous feed address. Shall I suggest my mom switching to RSS and subscribing to her favorite WeChat official accounts by setting up an Linux server running web crawler? I haven’t be nerdy enough to do that.

I do love the simplicity and transparency of RSS but don’t really think something invented in the 1990s can solve the problem of 2010s and decades to come. When the density of information available reaches a certain bar, you have to turn to something like algorithm. Being arbitrary and black-boxed is not inherently a problem. Haven’t we been happy with the works of DJs, curators, and food writers? What can be more arbitrary and black-boxed than we human? What needs be changed the most is not the tool people use to get information, but the mindset with which people live with the torrent of information in such a post-scarcity era of contents.

Re: RSS is undead

#45

Post by rubenbe »

Since google reader died, I've been self-hosting a TTRSS instance. I agree with the author that newspapers often have a waterfall of articles that's impossible to read.

One of the solutions I saw on a local traffic alert site was that you could create a personalized feed URL which would only send you a notification when e.g. here is an accident on that specific road.

This might be useful to solve the prioritization problem if you could create a custom feed based on your interests. Secondly this also provides the newspaper with some sort of analytics to incorporate "relevant ads" in the feed (I know I'm playing the devil's advocate here)

Re: RSS is undead

#47

Post by NicoJuicy »

erpellan wrote: post #32
NicoJuicy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good advice, thx!

Re: RSS is undead

#48

Post by dsr_ »

"How exactly do you find good RSS feeds?" the article asks.

Three steps:

1. Make sure your browser has the feed detector enabled. It used to be standard, now you need to go into settings and configure it.

2. Surf normally.

3. When you see interesting content and the Feed icon goes active, click on it. Now you've added a feed.

Eventually you should categorize and prune your feeds, but this is a good start.

Re: RSS is undead

#49

Post by gkya »

> RSS died. Whether you blame Feedburner, or Google Reader, or Digg Reader last month, or any number of other product failures over the years, the humble protocol has managed to keep on trudging along despite all evidence that it is dead, dead, dead.

What a stupid thing to say... All this indicates is that RSS users didn't like those apps. I use elfeed, which has upwards of 500 stars on Github, and it's an Emacs feed reader. Many other feedreaders exist that you can run on your computer. Furthermore, Feedly and NewsBlur, along with other services, seem to be quite lively. My rather unknown blog gets some requests referred from the Flipboard app regularly.

But a fact is that lots of incompetent site makers do not add RSS feeds to the websites they build. My uni's RSS feeds are going offline one by one as they redesign the web pages, and I have to maintain a scraper script to follow the updates. Many institutions' feeds are badly curated, e.g. a museum I follow, I figured out today that I wasn't getting any news because their RSS feed had a and some conditional comments before the actual feed. Some feeds include javascript and XML readers fail on them. And then there's the Wix or Squarespace or whatnot websites, and they are a total failure (especially because they can't do this RSS thing whereas even Tumblr does it easily).

I really believe we should somehow certificate programmers and some certain specialisations. That means ensuring that a "web developer" does know about the base specifications on which the web is built, and the most common best practices. If a web dev fails at making an RSS feed, that's a big problem.

Re: RSS is undead

#50

Post by gkya »

dsr_ wrote: post #48

"How exactly do you find good RSS feeds?" the article asks. Three steps: 1. Make sure your browser has the feed detector enabled. It used to be standard, now you need to go into settings and configure it. 2. Surf normally. 3. When you see interesting content and the Feed icon goes active, click on it. Now you've added a feed. Eventually you should categorize and prune your feeds, but this is a good start.

An alternate route is: view-source, search: "alternate".
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