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RSS is undead

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71–80 of 276 posts

Re: RSS is undead

#73
post #40

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.

Analytics are a hell of a drug. Analytics gave us A/B tested clickbait and listicles. I appreciate it's hard to go cold turkey, but maybe it's even harder to have an analytics system and use it responsibly?

Re: RSS is undead

#74
post #28

> RSS doesn’t allow publishers to track user behavior. This is a feature, not a bug. > Analytics increases revenues from advertising, and that means it is critical for companies to have those trackers in place if they want a chance to make it in the competitive media environment. If you can't survive without tracking my behavior, then I guess you will die. Given the quality of writing I can expect from this "competit…

>> RSS also offers very few opportunities for branding content effectively.

> This is a feature, not a bug.

I know where you're coming from, but .. I'm one of the rare people who, for a while, read a significant number of blogs without RSS because I actually liked having the different distinctive visual styles to remind me who I was reading. It's a pity we can't have a little bit of styling without going bananas.

Re: RSS is undead

#75
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

Yep, in 2013 Google Reader was axed. Feedly alone went up 500k users in 48 hours, 3 million within a few weeks and 12 million by the end of the year. Given that this definitely represents active consumers and probably only represents a proportion of the total number of consumers, the numbers aren't trivial. They aren't facebook level (or even twitter level) but there's enough to say that RSS isn't dead.

Re: RSS is undead

#76
post #49

> 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…

But a fact is that lots of incompetent site makers do not add RSS feeds to the websites they build. ... 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.

I bet most of those older sites ended up getting RSS feeds by default as part of whatever Content Management System they had. And since it wasn't a feature actually requested at the time of deployment, the users of the CMS didn't miss it during a redesign. And since no one has been asking for it, and well-known tools like Google Reader are defunct, services like SquareSpace and Wix don't have it, and their customers are not web-savvy, and so aren't asking for it.

Hey, I wish just as much that more people were more competent at whatever it is they're doing, but saying that leaving out edge features that weren't requested is somehow the sign of a bad programmer or a bad engineer is plain wrong. Good engineers work to solve the problem posed, not their own fantasy work; they may try to convince that something is needed or a nice to have, or may refuse to work on a job they don't think is taking the right things into account. In the case of the former, stats most likely indicate that more traffic comes from AMP or twitter than it does from RSS feeds. And in the case of the latter it just means the customer gets someone else to do it.

RSS wasn't a specification on which the web was built. It's a useful addition, but the fact that the WWW existed before it, and continues to exist after RSS's heyday, means it's not considered critical.

Re: RSS is undead

#77
Does anyone have a good RSS feed reader for Firefox? I don't need to be able to read the actual feed in the reader, I just want a list that'll notify me when a blog I've subscribed to has a new post.

"Feeder"[1] looks like exactly what I want, but the requested permissions list is insane. Are there any that don't request to "Access [my] data on all websites"? I've tried a bunch and they all seem to - I guess so they can detect RSS links in web pages?

I know Firefox has the built-in Live Bookmarks thing, but it doesn't give a notification when there's a new post to read.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feeder

Re: RSS is undead

#78
Here are some things that would be useful for me, but that I don't currently know how to access easily.

* A feed for all updates to a news story for a given news source

* A feed for all updates and developments for a news story across all news sources.

* A feed for all updates for a given area for a given news source. More specific than 'news category', more general than one specific thread of events.

* Feed for all updates for a given area (as above) across all news sources.

* [Client] Functionality to subscribe to related or more specific feeds from a given feed.

* Functionality to see related commentary for a given item from given forums (for each story I'm interested in I will normally look at HN or reddit comments).

I'm sure all these exist, but I haven't dug deep enough to find them yet.

Re: RSS is undead

#79
post #77

Does anyone have a good RSS feed reader for Firefox? I don't need to be able to read the actual feed in the reader, I just want a list that'll notify me when a blog I've subscribed to has a new post. "Feeder"[1] looks like exactly what I want, but the requested permissions list is insane. Are there any that don't request to "Access [my] data on all websites"? I've tried a bunch and they all seem to - I guess so they…

Rss files live on the websites' servers just like the HTML files do. All feed readers will need access to data on all websites (it's not your data, it's the websites' data).

Re: RSS is undead

#80
post #68

I'm a PhD student, and one of the things you quickly become aware of is the fire-hose of new science that is published daily. The discovery/prioritisation problem is being "solved" by publishers recommending other articles (published by them) on their website, or sites like ResearchGate (basically Facebook for academics and researchers) doing the same with similarly obscure algorithms. I started a side project that p…

Interesting. I just happened to think of a new side-project for myself using RSS and Scrapy of which I'm familiar with Scrapy. Cool if you can parse RSS-feeds so easily with feedparser-library. Makes it probably quite easy compared to the Scrapy hacks I've done trying to navigate through a messy HTML-structure that has no unique identifiers whatsoever.

By the way you can easily put that thing into a Lambda without or with Serverless. I don't know do you need any data to be stored in S3 right now but it shouldn't take long to do it. =)

Using machine learning would be for my own project only in the far future but still, data science yo. Single layer neural network with one activation function or what was the great description someone gave here for linear regression.

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