RSS is undead • Hacker News Board

Re: RSS is undead

#201

Post by daveFNbuck » Mon, Apr 09, 2018, 3:33 PM UTC

The complaint that prioritization is needed is bullshit. You can already achieve that through multiple RSS feeds once your feed has become too big for users to follow. You can even do categorization, which is what is really wanted/needed here.

More importantly, this is already solved by RSS readers. All the online RSS services I've tried have algorithmic feed ordering options for those who want it. This means that users who want algorithmic sorting/filtering can not only get it but also have their choice of providers.

More importantly, people like me who prefer to manually prune their sources and only subscribe to things they're actually interested in seeing can still do so. You can get a quick overview of what's trending and I can do a deep dive into what I like. Everyone wins.

Re: RSS is undead

#202

Post by digi_owl » Mon, Apr 09, 2018, 3:34 PM UTC

naravara wrote: post #169

stryk wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

Ah yes, G+, that resulted in the + being removed from the search field.

All thanks to an ex-MS "cookie licker" (the term was used by Google people after he left the company).

Re: RSS is undead

#203

Post by digi_owl » Mon, Apr 09, 2018, 3:35 PM UTC

BeetleB wrote: post #193

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…

>I see Google Reader mentioned a lot when virtually anything RSS-related comes up. As someone who relied on RSS for years, and did not use Google Reader, this equivalency between RSS and Google Reader annoys me greatly. Google didn't kill RSS. RSS is alive and well - almost all sites have a feed. I used to have an RSS reader set up on my own server. For people who do not want to do that, just use an RSS software on y…

I get similar annoyance with how gmail and email is now "synonymous", much thanks to the heavy handed nature of the gmail "spam" filer (anything not from a big name provider gets automatically binned, apparently).

Re: RSS is undead

#204

Post by Crespyl » Mon, Apr 09, 2018, 3:37 PM UTC

eitland wrote: post #161

downer63 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Ars is the only news site I actually have a subscription for. I'd always appreciated their journalism, and learning about the fulltext RSS feed was the feature that got me to sub. I'd love to see more sites offering that option.

Re: RSS is undead

#205

Post by digi_owl » Mon, Apr 09, 2018, 3:38 PM UTC

The one big thing for me with RSS is that it provides me a way to see what exactly is new, when it is new.

Re: RSS is undead

#206

Post by da02 » Mon, Apr 09, 2018, 3:41 PM UTC

stryk wrote: post #153

jeremyjh wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

Prison? Are you talking about marriage or a soul-less corp. job? May I ask what were you in for? Was it a low-security "resort" prison?

Re: RSS is undead

#207

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Apr 09, 2018, 3:46 PM UTC

pythonaut_16 wrote: post #190

lunchables wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just as likely the inability to monetize those users. Was there any indication that RSS viewership was dropping? I've been using RSS uninterrupted, every day, since the early 2000s. First on Google Reader and then, and now, using Tiny Tiny RSS. I always find these articles about RSS being dead to be pretty funny, considering I'm usually reading them via RSS.

Is there an active site for that? https://tt-rss.org/ seems to be gone/down.

[deleted]

Re: RSS is undead

#208

Post by FussyZeus » Mon, Apr 09, 2018, 3:49 PM UTC

> It’s wonderfully idealistic, but the reality of RSS is that it lacks the features required by nearly every actor in the modern content ecosystem, and I would strongly suspect that its return is not forthcoming.

Maybe every actor thinks RSS is a problem, but I as a consumer of content love it for all the reasons they find it problematic.

It seems like the author is conflating what's bad for their industry and their marketing dept. and what's bad for the consumer. Consumers don't want intrusive advertising, we don't want analytics, we don't want social interaction. We want content. Full stop.

There's a healthy and lively debate to be had about what needs to happen to allow news to work for both the people who make it and those who consume it, but currently, every discussion along those lines that I read like this are always written solely from the point of the publisher. No one is asking the important questions, like:

1) Did anyone ask the consumer why the "pivot to video" strategy failed? I can tell you in one sentence: No one on the consumer end wanted it.

2) Were consumers ever asked if we wanted our data shared with all manner of companies and possible bad actors? We answered anyway by ramping up adblock usage and noscript usage.

All of these articles read so impressively tone-deaf to the wants and desires of the people they allege to be serving, and then they wonder in thinkpieces why news as an industry is dying.

Re: RSS is undead

#209

Post by CaptSpify » Mon, Apr 09, 2018, 3:55 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #74

SllX wrote: 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.

Every RSS reader I've used had a "click here to go to the original article" button. Does that not do what you want?

Re: RSS is undead

#210

Post by jbigelow76 » Mon, Apr 09, 2018, 4:07 PM UTC

stryk wrote: post #153

jeremyjh wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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?

Somebody did, The Old Reader (theoldreader.com natch) was setup to be as close to Google Reader as possible. I've been a paying user since it launched shortly after the Google Reader shut down, very happy with the service.