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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

#311

Post by bad_user »

I love RSS and I use an online RSS Reader (NewsBlur.com, but there are others).

However the article makes the mistake of saying that RSS is about "obtaining content from a website without having to visit the site itself". That's definitely not true.

RSS is about being notified of new articles. Subscribing to an RSS feed is like subscribing to a mailing list.

But it won't deliver the content reliably — many RSS readers restrict the HTML being rendered, for good reasons I'm sure, but they mess it up, there's no standard for what kind of HTML is accepted of course, so it only works well for textual articles, but rich text (e.g. images, CSS) is very problematic.

On my own website (alexn.org) I had many problems with rendering articles, due to images and code syntax highlighting, enough so that I decided to no longer render the entire article in the RSS feed, I prefer to deliver just a summary.

Being notified of new content, with a good summary, is all you need. If a website's readability is shitty, you can always invoke the browser's Reader View (Firefox, Safari) or open it with Pocket or whatever.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#312

Post by O_H_E »

jeofken wrote: post #232
pimeys wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should ask more questions in /r/thinkpad[0]. But here's a quick summary for the models that matter for tech people: - T4XX = 14", T5XX = 15", X2XX = 12" - The middle number is the last number of the year (T460/X260: 2016, T470/X270: 2017 etc.). - The T-series has had three models per year, the normal with no ending letters that has an external battery, allows you to replace parts and is mainly meant as a durable…

I wish Lenovo would let me find this out somehow! Thank you - you have made it much clearer, and now I know I will buy a T with replaceable battery. I wish laptop makers (and ALL other business) would make less cluttered, less designed websites. Danluu.com is the prime example of great design for me. I wish I could have found your great comment without having to bother people on HN. Thank you!

Yeah, Dell and Lenovo sites are an absolute mess

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#313

Post by gkya »

callumlocke wrote: post #254
gkya wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That'll probably die out as people understand that nobody gives a flying fuck to all that silly evil sorcery, except the guys who made them. The way analytics works today, most web publishers are basically living in a bubble that distorts the image of the outer world.

Can you expand on this? How do analytics distort publishers' perspective of what's popular? Not disagreeing, I just want to know what you mean.

Numbers don't tell much. You make a web page, say an interactive news article, and it's read (i.e. viewed top to bottom, but knowing even this is very hard, still let's assume that we can know) a hundred thousand times since it was published. What does this tell? That the interactive design helped make people read the article? How do you know if people would've read it anyways if it was a static HTML file, or just a normal page like others? How do you know people actually liked the design and did not just ignore it focusing on content? How do you know people came to play with the interface instead of reading the actual article? How do you know what percentage of those views are from people restoring their tabs?

If all you want is to say "Hey I got a hundred thousand views, put your ads here!", than that's useful. But if you really want to know if users are content or they care, those numbers are just mute. But knowing whether users really care or not can lead you to better, cheaper design decisions.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#314

Post by O_H_E »

na85 wrote: post #182
JoshMnem wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most podcasts that I've encountered lately don't have RSS feeds listed. You have to view source to find the URLs. The Internet needs to revive that open technology culture. Instead of Facebook/Twitter/G+/etc. subscribe to RSS feeds. Instead of Medium, use WordPress/Hugo/Metalsmith/etc. on Netlify/Surge/Github etc. Instead of Mac, use GNU/Linux. Etc.

>Instead of Mac, use GNU/Linux. Bought my first Macbook pro after being a linux/ThinkPad guy since 2008. I'm probably never going back to Linux on a laptop. I actually have working suspend and resume, plus it's Unix-like under the hood. Trackpad actually works without a bunch of ugly hacks since they deprecated synaptics drivers. no systemd, etc. I spend almost no time fiddling with my system nowadays. I want to use…

Interesting, I bought $200 Lenovo laptop: touchpad, suspend, and hibernate all work out of the box

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#315

Post by bhnmmhmd »

raldu wrote: post #272
originalsimba wrote: post #27

Did anyone else notice how corporations like Twitter and Facebook quietly tried to kill RSS in the past 10 years? RSS is a wonderful technology with embodies the spirit of the Internet. Facebook and Twitter are, by comparison, cancer. I often recommend WordPress to folks as an alternative for blogging, because it is free and has RSS functional out of the box.

Exactly! The social media platforms have effectively "devoured" and "engulfed" the very idea behind RSS in order to exploit the political economy of content publication, for monopoly. When Google Reader has been shut down in 2013, it had left millions of loyal fans behind who had loved and used the platform over the years. There had been a strong disappointment, especially in communities like Reddit, HN and Slashdot.…

Excuse me, but I need to put it out there: how exactly is RSS useful if the sources themselves (websites) are more and more biased? I believe nowadays, people are interested in "content", not in "source". As long as the content is valid and trustworthy, I don't care if it's on social media or an RSS feed.

As a matter of fact, my problem with RSS is that I can't be sure the websites I'm receiving their notifs are going to keep up the good work and are not "deviated" or "biased" after a while. RSS is solid, but it's also rigid, meaning that it relies on websites to deliver you content. Other alternatives (such as news aggregators) do the reverse: they bring you content based on your own interests and regardless of where that news was published in. I think this is way better than "blindly" trusting our favorite websites to tell us the truth.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#316

Post by naravara »

bhnmmhmd wrote: post #315
raldu wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! The social media platforms have effectively "devoured" and "engulfed" the very idea behind RSS in order to exploit the political economy of content publication, for monopoly. When Google Reader has been shut down in 2013, it had left millions of loyal fans behind who had loved and used the platform over the years. There had been a strong disappointment, especially in communities like Reddit, HN and Slashdot.…

Excuse me, but I need to put it out there: how exactly is RSS useful if the sources themselves (websites) are more and more biased? I believe nowadays, people are interested in "content", not in "source". As long as the content is valid and trustworthy, I don't care if it's on social media or an RSS feed. As a matter of fact, my problem with RSS is that I can't be sure the websites I'm receiving their notifs are goin…

A website has an editorial perspective and voice of its own. Their biases are known and can be accounted for when you read them.

News aggregators are having editorial decisions made by the vagaries of some opaque voting algorithm and get gamed by motivated actors and bots. If manipulative bias is your concern, aggregators are way worse.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#317

Post by eeZah7Ux »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #178
eeZah7Ux wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feedly is nice but centralized. We should have learned the lesson.

All feed readers are centralized, even one you run on your laptop. I learned from Reader's shutdown that a centralized service shutting down is no big deal. I can easily export my feeds from Feedly and move them somewhere else if the need arises. I learned from Google that if I want a nice centralized feed reader I need one that I can support. That's why I pay for Feedly.

> All feed readers are centralized, even one you run on your laptop.

Care to justify that statement?

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#318

Post by 1123581321 »

forapurpose wrote: post #13

I'll repeat my plea for an RSS reader that enables the user (i.e., me) to efficiently process 1,000+ feed items in maybe 20 minutes. Also, it needs to automate aspects of managing feeds (detect when the fail, maybe find a replacement, give me an interface for resolving the problem). By "process" I mean: Read the headline and sometimes the summary, decide whether to read the story, open the story (if I'm reading it),…

I do this with NewsBlur. First, I have filtered out about 75% of what I might see with its training tools. When I process my feed, I use j/k keyboard notification and s to save. Super fast.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#319

Post by ascepp »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #178
eeZah7Ux wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feedly is nice but centralized. We should have learned the lesson.

All feed readers are centralized, even one you run on your laptop. I learned from Reader's shutdown that a centralized service shutting down is no big deal. I can easily export my feeds from Feedly and move them somewhere else if the need arises. I learned from Google that if I want a nice centralized feed reader I need one that I can support. That's why I pay for Feedly.

Someone didn't learn.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#320

Post by frooxie »

thirdsun wrote: post #222
frooxie wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago, my favorite writers and artists had personal blogs. Today, many of them have moved to Instagram, Twitter and/or Facebook, making them inconvenient or impossible to follow using RSS. Apart from the migration to walled gardens, I also think it's a problem that 99% of web users haven't heard of RSS.

I really don't understand those artists and writers you mention. Why on earth would they not use their own platform to present their content? This doesn't remove the ability to promote and share your content elsewhere. Content creators really can have it both ways. Publish on your own site and link to, share or duplicate that content on Facebook, Instagram, Medium, Twitter, RSS, Soundcloud and any other service that…

> Why on earth would they not use their own platform to present their content?

I know one of them personally, and I think in her case, she may have had a few hundred people following her art blog, while on Instagram, she quickly amassed over 100,000 followers, so when she stopped updating the blog, she lost less than 1% of her fans.

It comes down to people knowing how to follow Instagram/Facebook accounts, while they haven't even heard of RSS.

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