Podcasting is RSS. That means that 26% of Americans (I don't have worldwide stats handy) depend on RSS every month.
So, more Americans use RSS every month than use Twitter.
The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
21–30 of 192 posts
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#22> After all, The Onion is a publication that relies on syndication through Facebook and Twitter https://www.theonion.com/rss That didn't take long to find. Why use that as an example?
I think you misunderstood the point there. Facebook and Twitter is what drives traffic for The Onion. They can and do syndicate via RSS. But it doesn't help them reach most of their readers.
From a user’s standpoint, who cares? Just because most people don’t use RSS, doesn’t really matter. Every continuously updated news site and blogging site still supports it - as well as HN.
Once I start finding sites that don’t support RSS, then I worry.
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#23I'll say it: I miss RSS.
How do you “miss it”? It hasn’t gone anywhere.
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#24Since the discussion about RSS is popping up every month now, I'll just repeat myself that RSS is still doing great in terms of publisher support. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17684481
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#25I might be biased here as i've built a news aggregator/RSS reader (https://aktu.io) but imho RSS was and still is the best way to get news from sources you like.
This is so obvious when you compare RSS to social platforms... I mean Facebook was great to share stuff with your friends and get updates but now it's become a huge mess where you get a little bit of everything, you're not even sure you'll ever see all the publications from sources you like/follow thanks to obscure algorithms, and to make things worse, priority is given to images and videos...
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#26What a well written piece! Thank you for that!
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#27We need to write some software that generates low-quality articles like this and then submits them to hn automatically. Candidates:
. $x is dead
. the rise and fall of $x
. new battery breakthrough claims to $x
. Ask HN: $question_where_the_answer_is_my_own_business
. create_rand_product_name($technology)
. Study reveals random_food() risk of random_quality()
.
. A random_quality() RayTracer in random_tech()
. ??? suggestions welcome
This would then force hn to have some sort of filtering/moderation.
Randy's law 247: The easiest way to fix a non-trivial system is to abuse it.
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#28I'll say it: I miss RSS.
How do you “miss it”? It hasn’t gone anywhere.
Shameless plug backing up the fact it hasn't gone anywhere: https://draft.li/blog/2016/03/21/rss-usage-on-the-web/
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#29I'm subscribing to this blog out of spite.
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#30A point not mentioned was Dave Winer's refusal to clarify if excerpts in his version of RSS feed needed to be plain text or contain HTML (either as HTML tags or entity encoded). He just kept saying "Keep it simple, people!"
There's no concept of an "excerpt" in RSS, but if we're talking item descriptions, the RSS 2.0 spec says that HTML is allowed and provides examples.