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RSS is undead

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Re: RSS is undead

#111

Post by simias »

jeremyjh wrote: post #87
tw1010 wrote: post #25

This whole "RSS died" narrative illustrates a basic problem with how we understand the internet. Since there's no unified unbiased sort of "index", like GDP, to tell us just what proportion of users on the internet uses RSS anymore, we're stuck having to rely on socially propogated ideas about the state. This leads to all the typical problems with socially defined truth, such as drift as a consequence of incentives (…

Surely Google Reader had numbers that influenced the decision to shut it down?

I'm sure they had, but what these numbers were and how they interpreted them is not known AFAIK. Google might have considered that RSS didn't fit with their long term plan for how the web would be consumed, I'm thinking in particular of AMP which has a certain overlap with RSS but gives Google a lot more control.

Re: RSS is undead

#112

Post by mAEStro-paNDa »

discreditable wrote: post #98

> losing your logo, colors, and fonts on an article is an effective way to kill enterprise value Dropping the garbage styles is one of my favorite things about RSS. Using my TT-RSS via phone app is a lot speedier than the "enterprise value" provided by the native site. This article loads 3.97MB with an adblocker. In TT-RSS, I can load the homepage and a full-page RSS article from Ars Technica for only 600kb.

Exactly. In fact, this is a tremendous advantage that RSS has. The assertion that it needs some "sort of commerce layer" is not an issue of the technology, but a question of the industry of advertising and the structure of the economy. The problem of keywords as the author mentions is a cultural one, based on the way our society exchanges and prioritizes the information we receive.

Re: RSS is undead

#113

Post by sametmax »

Most of the problems the author mentions are, to me, the actual reasons I love RSS.

No filtering. No comments. No proposal. No central way to find them.

It's not the absence of curation.

It's my curation.

It's easy: I like a site, I want news, I get the RSS. I delete it when it's not to my taste anymore.

The basic, deterministic, manual aspect of it is what's right with it. Not what's wrong.

Another weird idea is that RSS should be for everybody. No. It speaks to a certain kind of people, and that's fine.

Re: RSS is undead

#114

Post by opencl »

gsich wrote: post #15
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.

They had a very simple reason, they can't show ads in the RSS feed.

Re: RSS is undead

#115

Post by JD557 »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #2

RSS is the core of my Reddit alternative. Still improving performance though http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/Newest I currently use it for personal bookmarking and posting stories to HN. It's based on tags, eg. http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/ByTag?Name=artificial-intellige... Ps. Performance is slow on the main page for sorting calculated columns ( eg. The Algorithm ), that's why I linked to the newest page

The "receive new content" modal is really annoying. It appears every time my mouse exits through the top of the page, so it pops up every time I change tabs.

Re: RSS is undead

#116

Post by tw1010 »

twic wrote: post #107
tw1010 wrote: post #25

This whole "RSS died" narrative illustrates a basic problem with how we understand the internet. Since there's no unified unbiased sort of "index", like GDP, to tell us just what proportion of users on the internet uses RSS anymore, we're stuck having to rely on socially propogated ideas about the state. This leads to all the typical problems with socially defined truth, such as drift as a consequence of incentives (…

Did you just try to apply category theory to semiotics?

After I wrote it I read it again, trying to get some grasp of the space of possible interpretations and associations people might think my ideas are stemming from. (The truth is that I have just formed a habit out of using this terminology, and don't always have an underlying unified geometric picture in my mind as I write it.) But your response is an interesting meditation on how often we users of the web (1) always read everything totally out of context, and thus (2) are especially adapted to always trying to infer what the actual network of associations the author intended to point to, but that (3) sometimes we make an incorrect assessment to the precise region of the map, and in fact (4) sometimes there is no such intended association at all.

I think that's what makes @dril so funny. He's incredibly skilled at walking the classification boundary of that mechanism.

Re: RSS is undead

#117

Post by mkirklions »

iagooar wrote: post #37

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.

Standard formats are working great in 2018.

RSS is the javascript of text.

Re: RSS is undead

#118

Post by ArekDymalski »

jeremyjh wrote: post #87
tw1010 wrote: post #25

This whole "RSS died" narrative illustrates a basic problem with how we understand the internet. Since there's no unified unbiased sort of "index", like GDP, to tell us just what proportion of users on the internet uses RSS anymore, we're stuck having to rely on socially propogated ideas about the state. This leads to all the typical problems with socially defined truth, such as drift as a consequence of incentives (…

Surely Google Reader had numbers that influenced the decision to shut it down?

I guess that the decision to shut the Reader down didn't appear due to lack of users, but rather ambitions to shape the internet-news-experience by more tightly controlled, proprietary apps like Google Currents/Newsstand or maybe even Plus.

Re: RSS is undead

#119

Post by sbaha88 »

Sligthly off-topic, but I've been working on a rss-like feed for newsletters: newsletterhunt.com. I may be wrong but I have a feeling that rss moved to newsletters

Re: RSS is undead

#120

Post by erpellan »

I don't see anything in RSS itself that would preclude using it for an algorithmically curated feed, any more than HTML does. It's just a protocol.
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