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RSS is undead

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Re: RSS is undead

#161

Post by eitland »

downer63 wrote: post #125
sametmax wrote: post #113

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 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 j…

Ars technica does something nice: for a very low fee (European perspective) you get the full articles in your RSS.

Plus they remove tracking and ads on the web page.

Should be win/win since we all hate tracking, ads and never click on them anyway and still actually want to reward sources we read, right?

Re: RSS is undead

#162

Post by stryk »

naravara wrote: post #159
stryk wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see Google Reader mentioned a lot when virtually anything RSS-related comes up. I missed out on the whole RSS craze (prison will do that to you). But I have always wondered -- so many people lament the fact that Google killed it -- why hasn't anyone forked/cloned it's UI and feature-set? You don't want to just straight up copy it and wake the Google lawyers from their nests obviously, but why not make something tha…

> why hasn't anyone forked/cloned it's UI and feature-set? There are clients that kind of did, but one of the cool things about Google Reader that a lot of people miss is the social feed. You could share articles you found interesting and your shares would show up on the feeds of anyone who followed you as just another RSS source. It's just an extra folder of articles from your GChat friends that you can read at your…

That sounds like... a fantastic idea! Why would they kill that off?! No easy way to inject ads into I guess (at least that people would be willing to put up with).

Re: RSS is undead

#163

Post by Symen »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #140
JD557 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only sites and blogs, Mailchimp newsletters also support RSS feeds, which means that a lot of newsletters can be consumed by RSS readers. A agree that it never really died, it's just hiding.

It's hiding very well, thanks to browser manufacturers, unfortunately. Back in the day, my browser (from memory, any of the major browsers) alerted me, via an icon, when a site provided an RSS feed and clicking on that icon subscribed me to the feed. That was a much nicer situation than the 'View Source, CTRL-F "rss", Copy' dance I have to do nowadays.

In Firerox you can add the Subscribe button back to the toolbar using the personalization UI. They shouldn't hide this feature as much in my opinion, but it is still much better than manually looking for a feed URI in the source.

Re: RSS is undead

#164

Post by naravara »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #148
opencl wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's nothing stopping ads in RSS feeds, just tracking. Those should be separate things.

>There's nothing stopping ads in RSS feeds, just tracking. Those should be separate things.

Bingo. Plenty of my RSS feeds have ads, they just publish them as articles and say "This RSS feed is sponsored by. . ."

It's the same ad model as podcasts basically.

Other ones just give you an abstract or short blurb on your feed with a link to go back to the main site, which works just as well.

Re: RSS is undead

#165

Post by creatonez »

fxj wrote: post #89

I wish we could go back to the old protocols like RSS, email and SMS. They were open and you could use any client you like and they never had problems with walled gardens. Sometime you have to lose your freedom to really value it like RMS said.

While I mostly agree, I'm not sure going back to SMS is going to help solve a whole lot of problems-of-the-2010s. I'd rather break free from mass surveillance than embrace it, and standardizing new federated encrypted messaging protocols will do this.

Unfortunately, as EFF points out in their recent series about encrypted texting, a one-size-fits-all solution is difficult.

Re: RSS is undead

#166

Post by superkuh »

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

Same here. I had used RSS less frequently as I used aggregators like Digg and Reddit more. But after leaving reddit last month I found a lot of the old URLs had decayed.

No problem. Most had just moved URL slightly or changed format so finding them on the http site was easy enough. And while finding the new RSS URLs I often checked out the entire blogroll/webring/etc too and found new feeds to subscribe to.

For me RSS is wasn't ever dead. But it may have been left to itself in the nursing home for a few years.

Re: RSS is undead

#167

Post by jillesvangurp »

The reason RSS is still here, is that things like feedly, inoreader, and others that filled the google reader gap continue to have millions of loyal users and just about every blog and news publisher still publishes rss feeds because it is easy to do and you lose potential clicks if you don't. Google killed Google reader to make buzz work (failed) and the several other thingies they have been pushing since (also failing).

FB, twitter, and the "more of the same old shit" algorithms that they try to pass as machine learning are currently failing in the market. FB is losing users because it has nothing interesting to show to them and because they have been taken hostage by paying customers that depend on idiots clicking on click bait. Twitter is desperately trying to get rid of real time because they believe it is more "interesting" to keep week old tweets on top that are somehow "more relevant".

The branding thing is a bit disingenuous; this is really about ads and tracking. Good luck with that, blocking all of it like most serious users these days and also GDPR is not going to help your cause.

RSS as a publishing mechanism is fine. The firehose needs work though. It needs reliable filtering, curation, and aggregation. That's the gap filled by hacker news and other aggregators. And having access to the firehose is nice sometimes.

Re: RSS is undead

#168

Post by nathan_long »

> ...many of these challenges are ultimately problems with the underlying protocol itself...

> ...It’s an exhausting experience wading through articles from the style and food sections just to run into the latest update on troop movements in the Middle East.

> Some sites try to get around this by offering an array of RSS feeds built around keywords. Yet, stories are almost always assigned more than one keyword, and keyword selection can vary tremendously in quality across sites. Now, I see duplicate stories and still manage to miss other stories I wanted to see.

None of this is a problem with the protocol. The protocol just publishes a list of stories.

If people want a feed of the "most important" stories, you can build that. You can let people build their own personal feeds based on tags, popularity, or any set of rules imaginable, and you can de-dupe the items in that feed.

I used to subscribe to a podcast feed on The Conversations Network (no longer operating) which they let me personalize to include a mix of episodes from a variety of their podcasts. That was RSS.

RSS has nothing to do with how you determine which stories to publish on which feed.

Re: RSS is undead

#169

Post by naravara »

stryk wrote: post #162
naravara wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why hasn't anyone forked/cloned it's UI and feature-set? There are clients that kind of did, but one of the cool things about Google Reader that a lot of people miss is the social feed. You could share articles you found interesting and your shares would show up on the feeds of anyone who followed you as just another RSS source. It's just an extra folder of articles from your GChat friends that you can read at your…

That sounds like... a fantastic idea! Why would they kill that off?! No easy way to inject ads into I guess (at least that people would be willing to put up with).

>Why would they kill that off?!

It happened back when "Social" was a big thing and Google was trying to push everyone onto its erstwhile Facebook competitor Google+ and it's erstwhile Twitter competitor Google Buzz.

First they killed the social feed and made the button auto-post to your Google Buzz account, but Buzz being a version of Twitter, had a lot more noise to signal so nobody used it that way.

They probably eventually killed it because they preferred having their development resources put towards more exotic social media efforts than maintaining a thing that didn't really make any money.

This long article has more of the sordid details if you're interested: https://www.buzzfeed.com/robf4/googles-lost-social-network?u...

Re: RSS is undead

#170

Post by bo1024 »

adbachman wrote: post #139
randomsearch wrote: post #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 bubb…

Lots of personalization bubbles are fantastically useful. I prefer local news from my neighborhood over news from a neighborhood in another city in another state. I prefer technically detailed articles about software development over technically detailed articles about dog grooming. I choose feeds and sources that filter in my favor. Your dad always had the option of subscribing to the Wall Street Journal or People i…

Good point. Maybe the issue is user-controlled, opt-in style personalization versus opaque, algorithmic, A-B-tested-on-other-people personalization.

I'm definitely in favor of personally choosing what to subscribe to, but algorithms are very far from where I would trust them to make those choices for me.

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