I never stopped using RSS but Firefox has made it a bit more difficult to find out if a site offers RSS...
I personally still have the "Subscribe" icon (Firefox 59). I had to move it from "Customize" to my toolbar but it is definitely there.
RSS is undead
121–130 of 276 posts
Re: RSS is undead
#122I'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…
For machine learning there is the Arxiv Sanity Preserver, which can recommend new papers based on your library. http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/ It didn't really preserve my sanity, though. I'm reading those papers in my spare time, and it got me to read many more papers than I ever did before.
Not seen that before (my field isn't comp sci or ML), but it looks great! Obviously web interface is the way to go for a serious project, but I actually found it fun learning how to implement an interactive command line app. It's incredibly responsive and has a four-key interface, so if you are good at skim reading you can train it with a lot of papers in very little time.
Re: RSS is undead
#123> Instead, users want personalization and prioritization
All news sources I can think of implement prioritisation.
Do users really want personalisation? Do you remember your Dad saying pre-web "oh, I just want a newspaper personalised to me, so I don't read outside of my core interests" or did he just sometimes read, sometimes skip less immediately-relevant articles? I'm not sure anyone really wants to live in a bubble, just some tech companies decided they should.
Re: RSS is undead
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
> but maybe it's even harder to have an analytics system and use it responsibly?
I'd say it absolutely is harder--on the one hand, you have an opportunity for more money. On the other hand, you have the mass of users that have proven that they don't care enough to react against irresponsible use in any meaningful way.
Simple decision in a business context.
Re: RSS is undead
#125Most 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 tha…
That's because the author is a tool of the global ad-tech agenda, writing articles with click-bait headlines. RSS isn't a particularly profitable utility to inject ads into, or suck personal info out of (less cookies, no pixels, makes an MBA yawn in meetings), so I guess that means it's "dead" right?
Oh noes! Markdown is dead!
Oh noes! SOAP XML is dead!
Oh noes! RESTful JSON is dead!
How the fuck would a non-coding journalist know the difference?
Re: RSS is undead
#126Is there a real RSS reader for the desktop anymore, besides Thunderbird?
And one for iOS and Android?
I can only find frontends to online services like Feedly.
Re: RSS is undead
#127RSS 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…
Thanks for the twitrss.me link -- I don't use Twitter, but I follow a couple of journalists who do, and my RSS reader is much better than Twitter's website, with its semi-random threading and light-boxes. I've run NetNewsWire since forever, and it's easy to add a few Twitter feeds in their own folder. If I have time, I'll scan through them; if not, Command-K and they're all gone.
This article really overstates RSS's problems, and underestimates "users," who it seems to view as epsilon semi-morons attached to credit cards. On the reader side, it's simply not that hard to control the rate of things you receive, and to quickly scan them for things you want to read. On the publisher side, it's trivial to keep track of the number of people subscribed to your feed(s). And if you want to know how long each of them spent on each article, and where their mouse cursor and eyeballs pointed that whole time, then too bad -- you are part of what's wrong with today's media ecosystem.
Re: RSS is undead
#128I check Feedly daily.
Re: RSS is undead
#129Surely the issues with prioritization or filtering could be solved client side, ie with your RSS reader? Configure your software to hide things with tag X or word Y. You could even have up/down votes to train your RSS reader what is good and what is stuff you never want to see, and it could operate like a local spam filter.
Re: RSS is undead
#130Is there a real RSS reader for the desktop anymore, besides Thunderbird? And one for iOS and Android? I can only find frontends to online services like Feedly.
I used to use Liferea as a desktop application. Now I use TTRSS which has it's own web interface and Android (and others?) clients.