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Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

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Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#261

Post by Vinnl »

JoshMnem wrote: post #185
groby_b wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was funny. Mozilla used to make that more prominent. Most users didn't care, because they still didn't know what that weird icon meant . That was ultimately the downfall of RSS - the web tech scene never managed to communicate to the average user what RSS was good for, what it did, and how to use it. The issue isn't "not knowing about RSS/ATOM". You don't need to. The same way e.g. you don't need to know what th…

It wasn't done the right way in the past. Sometimes an implementation is 80% right and you just need to do a few things to get to 100%. It needs a better name than RSS/Atom. It should sound like English: "Subscribe to this website with ." (same icon) "Really Simple Syndication" and acronyms cause non-technical people to shut down. It's a foreign language. (Edit: "Atom" would be a good name, because it's plain English…

"Feed" is pretty common. But you still will only know what it means if you know what it is :)

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#262

Post by Grumbledour »

Since we are talking RSS: For years I have tried to find a good RSS reader for my android phone and have failed so far. The feature that mostly kills it for me is, much to my surprise, layout. For applications made for reading text, they all seem to hate the idea of letting the user actually decide how he wants that text displayed.

If you can even change the font size, often there are only predefined options, only works on certain views (article but not list etc.). Forget about changing the font itself or the colors aside from light/dark themes. It is ridiculous!

Do any of you know of a reader app, that lets me really customize that stuff why also being somewhat minimalist? The best thing I found so far is Palabre, but it also clutters the screen with useless header images, buttons and "Similar content" sections.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#263

Post by fooker »

Grumbledour wrote: post #262

Since we are talking RSS: For years I have tried to find a good RSS reader for my android phone and have failed so far. The feature that mostly kills it for me is, much to my surprise, layout. For applications made for reading text, they all seem to hate the idea of letting the user actually decide how he wants that text displayed. If you can even change the font size, often there are only predefined options, only wo…

Make one? This sounds easy enough to do.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#264

Post by sergiosgc »

jeofken wrote: post #189
JoshMnem wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When was the last time you bought a ThinkPad? This is my third one and suspend works. The Trackpad is great, with three buttons. 24 Gb of RAM, 11+ hour battery life in Linux, and a 4-year at-home next-day repair plan. It was $1,900 including tax, shipping, and support. Macs are much more expensive for worse specs. This computer "just worked" out of the box, and there is full freedom to tinker with the system. I think…

Im actually going to make the order for a new thinkpad today, to run NixOs on. What specs and model do you have? Are there any tips, or something you wish you knew? My config reaches >€2500 quite fast.

I have a 5th gen X1 Carbon. Great machine in every aspect but RAM, and runs Linux flawlessly. It has 8GB RAM, which is more than enough for Linux plus developer containers, but not quite enough for running VMs; and it is soldered to the motherboard and thus non-upgradeable.

My setup cost ~1.5k€ (base setup plus larger NVRAM, better screen) although if you add touch screen, 3G and other bells and whistles you get to 3k€ pretty fast. I wouldn't add any hard requirement over the base machine.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#265

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

dalbasal wrote: post #237
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #181

Anyone who talks about revival of RSS without talking about how it will be sustainable is just ignorant or naive, because the main reason it became what it became has everything to do with money. Content providers centralized because centralized attention is more valuable than aggregation of decentralized attention in an ad driven economy. Just because you want RSS to make a come back doesn't mean it has any chance o…

Economics certainly was central to the story, past or future, but I wouldn't state it quite so strongly. Hopefully I'm not ignorant or naive. Let's start from examples: youtube, facebook, twitter. The platforms' ad businesses definitely benefited from being centralised and proprietary. But, all three "won" their respective platform wars before those lucrative ad businesses existed. They won because that is where peop…

> Podcasts are the best example. They were the way to distribute certain content. Users adopted podcasts because the content was there, even though the UX was/is clunky. It happened to be decentralized and rss-based.

I would argue that podcasts are as decentralized as emails are "decentralized". When was the last time you downloaded a Podcast from a self-hosted server? Most people download podcasts through iTunes, SoundCloud, etc. because...centralizing makes sense economically. In this environment, RSS is virtually meaningless because the whole point of RSS was to have an open standard in a world where everyone ran their own RSS servers. Once it becomes centralized you're better off just distributing content as a centralized feed like Twitter.

> The fact that podcasts work better economically for content makers than youtube... that was incidental.

Nothing's "incidental". There are always reasons behind everything. Let's dig in further to see what's going on. When was the last time you've sat through a shitty Podcast that's 1 hour long? You probably haven't. Now think of how long most Podcasts are. Yes, they are mostly "long-form" content that are 30 minutes to 1 hour long.

Now think about the last YouTube video you watched. How long was it? Probably like 3 minutes to 5, or maybe you watch a conference livestream or tutorial that's 1 hour long, but those are exceptions. Most people go to YouTube to watch bite sized videos. This is why ads don't work as well on Youtube compared to Podcasts. Why would you watch a 30 second ad just to watch a 2 minute video? Naturally, if you have the same content, people will watch the videos WITHOUT ads. And this is where the "race to the bottom" begins.

So are Podcasts absolutely superior to videos? No. Podcasts have their own drawbacks. Because Podcasts are long form content, listeners don't want to end up wasting their precious 1 hour. Therefore it's really hard as a podcast publisher to get people to listen to their podcast. Which means initial "acquisition" is much harder for Podcasts compared to YouTube. But once you "acquire" the listeners it's worth it because they have "chosen" to listen to you on an on-going basis. Which is why I asked earlier when was the last time you sat through a shitty podcast. It is much harder to build an audience for a Podcast compared to Youtube, you really need to be able to produce super high quality content.

My point is, these different types of medium each have pros and cons. But there are always very good reasons if you look behind the scenes. Nothing is "incidental". And again, this all comes down to money.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#266

Post by luag »

Grumbledour wrote: post #262

Since we are talking RSS: For years I have tried to find a good RSS reader for my android phone and have failed so far. The feature that mostly kills it for me is, much to my surprise, layout. For applications made for reading text, they all seem to hate the idea of letting the user actually decide how he wants that text displayed. If you can even change the font size, often there are only predefined options, only wo…

I personally just use the mobile web version of Feedbin.

3 theme options 2 article list options You can show/hide 4 interface elements (feedname, date, summary, image preview)

6 fonts options 9 type sizes

It's enough for my needs.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#267

Post by QAkICoU7IDNkpFu »

Grumbledour wrote: post #262

Since we are talking RSS: For years I have tried to find a good RSS reader for my android phone and have failed so far. The feature that mostly kills it for me is, much to my surprise, layout. For applications made for reading text, they all seem to hate the idea of letting the user actually decide how he wants that text displayed. If you can even change the font size, often there are only predefined options, only wo…

After years of looking around I found https://www.inoreader.com/ (also available as app). _Finally_ a decent replacement for Google Reader IMO.

UI on the site is a bit clunkey IMO, but the app at least has some customization options (font-type, font-size, different layout sizes, open tabs inside the app or direct them to an external browser, etc)

No affiliations, other than that I'm a happy user!

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#268

Post by dalbasal »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #265
dalbasal wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economics certainly was central to the story, past or future, but I wouldn't state it quite so strongly. Hopefully I'm not ignorant or naive. Let's start from examples: youtube, facebook, twitter. The platforms' ad businesses definitely benefited from being centralised and proprietary. But, all three "won" their respective platform wars before those lucrative ad businesses existed. They won because that is where peop…

> Podcasts are the best example. They were the way to distribute certain content. Users adopted podcasts because the content was there, even though the UX was/is clunky. It happened to be decentralized and rss-based. I would argue that podcasts are as decentralized as emails are "decentralized". When was the last time you downloaded a Podcast from a self-hosted server? Most people download podcasts through iTunes, So…

I suppose we disagree on your last point, and that colours a lot of the rest. I don't think it all comes down to money. Some of it does.

I certainly don't see a straight line from FB being an excellent way to sell ads and facebook being the most popular platform. FB won because FB was where people posted and read posts. No one even knew that facebook would be such a great ad platform at that point. I don't think users cared much. This is what I mean by incidental. Not coincidental and not without consequence, just not having a determining cause and effect relationship.

...incidentally (yep, again), twitter and youtube are not great ad platforms, by comparison. That's in large part why podcasts are comparatively better, economically, in some cases, for content makers. Youtube sets a low bar.

Control for content quality, length, viewer loyalty or whatever you think is relevant and you'll still rarely find direct youtube ad revenue good relative to television, radio or most comparable mediums. low bar.

Anyway, my larger point is that the same rules apply for open, decentralised, democratized or other characteristic you/me/we would like our FB-killer to have. It must win the platform game. The platform game is determined by users, chickens, eggs, internal economics, external economics, UX paradigms, early adopters, people, stuff.... That will determine the success of rss-based ideas just like it determined FBs success.

I don't think this is reducible to "it's all about the money," or at least not reducible to a way that preserves much meaning..

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#269

Post by ino »

xelxebar wrote: post #173
askvictor wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget Google. In fact, it's not just RSS; it's other open standards (e.g. XMPP) that they embraced initially, then dropped.

FWIW, YouTube still has RSS available: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNELID https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=USERNAME https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=YOUR_YOUTUBE_PLAYLIST_NUMBER You used to be able to go into your subscription manager and download an OPML file with the RSS feeds for your subscriptions. I'm unable to find that buton anymore though.

Youtube used to have an rss feed for a search term, it was very useful.

Now we have to web scrape the results page because their api requires authentication and who wants to use that for results that are public anyways. I sure don't.

Rss worked great and they removed it. Boo.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#270

Post by zbentley »

Jaruzel wrote: post #207
awat wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you hit it head on with this. It seems to be a control thing first and foremost. The worst nightmare is that you will grab their content in a text only format with no ads.

It's a very blinkered view. There's plenty of RSS feeds with text based adverts at the bottom of each article, and as most RSS reader apps show the article content in HTML, normal image based ads can work as well. So it's totally do-able to include advertising in RSS. A layperson wouldn't know how to strip the advert out either.

Yes, but advertisers (you know, Google's actual customers) don't like it, because they get less control over the appearance of their ads, and way fewer metrics/information about click rates etc.

It might also just be less effective than in-page advertising. Google and its peers probably know the truth of that, but I don't know if there are any reliable comparative studies in that area that don't fall into the "we tried to cram exactly the same strategy/campaign/content we would put in a banner ad into an RSS feed and got no uptick in sales" trap, but I'd love to read up on that area.

Regardless, the bandwagon effect of "traditional" online advertising is such that RSS is at best an (at present) tiny new frontier that would require advertisers to re-learn or change a lot of their content strategy, and at worst an actively advertiser-hostile platform.

Those are just observations; not statements of should/should-not.

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