Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here are a couple of options: * https://news.ycombinator.com/rss * https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/
How does hn decide what articles to put on rss?
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The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
41–50 of 192 posts
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#42I 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…
As long as those sources have an RSS feed (that is usable, looking at you Medium), sure. But, most sources that _most_ people (not geeks) like... don't. The comment above where someone said "RSS isn't dead, I have a business scraping pages to make RSS feeds when they didn't have one already"... yeah, exactly.
I recently built a new OPML set of feeds from scratch, in different areas like Linux, ham radio, science, general news, and shopping/deals. Easily 95% of these sites offered RSS or Atom feeds. The main offenders were national news sites, for which there were plenty of alternatives.
Only a couple are available yet annoying, like the forum at eham.net, which offers a feed that essentially gets you unsorted forum replies mixed in with new topics. So every day's updates are full of "Re:" entries. Anyway that's been the only speed bump so far. I was surprised.
Also, since I monitor niche subreddits on Reddit, their generalized feed availability means I can automatically get amazingly wide access to a variety of niche topics (e.g. shorthand writing).
Part of my experiment was aimed at figuring out whether RSS is useful to me. It really is, though careful culling of unwanted or unneeded feeds is important. It's kind of like maintaining a plain-HTML links page. Still valuable in its simplicity, but also requiring ongoing refinements to continue to be useful.
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#43I still use RSS to power my little podcast syndication platform.
While I was building it I did notice it had become harder to find a poscasts RSS feed but they definitely all still used it. I suspect it is used more as a business to business/platform to platform transport these days.
Certainly beats building thirty API integrations for people who want to roll their own syndication for their podcast.
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#44The title article is missing "and re-rise". I use it regularly and I am happy how it gets the job done : no social stuff, no ads.
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#45I 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…
As long as those sources have an RSS feed (that is usable, looking at you Medium), sure. But, most sources that _most_ people (not geeks) like... don't. The comment above where someone said "RSS isn't dead, I have a business scraping pages to make RSS feeds when they didn't have one already"... yeah, exactly.
yep RSS sure isn't the most user friendly solution, and i guess it's always been the problem #1 with RSS.
But it's getting better, or at least not worse?, there's now many good web-based RSS readers that do a great job at helping people find and subscribe to sources but it's still not facebook-easy.
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#46As I point out occasionally, most hard news sources have RSS feeds. The New York Times, Reuters, the BBC, CNN, and Fox News all have RSS feeds. The Hill, Roll Call, and Politico have RSS feeds. The Congressional leadership has an RSS feed. NASA and the ESA have RSS feeds. The National Weather Service has RSS feeds. New York City and the LAPD have RSS feeds. If it matters, it's probably in an RSS feed. It's social med…
Stuff that the creator/producer wants syndicated will probably have an RSS feed still. As social media platforms benefit from content lock in as opposed to syndication, the publisher (the platform) has no incentive to offer RSS.
I am not particularly bothered by the lack of RSS on social platforms.
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#47I 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…
As long as those sources have an RSS feed (that is usable, looking at you Medium), sure. But, most sources that _most_ people (not geeks) like... don't. The comment above where someone said "RSS isn't dead, I have a business scraping pages to make RSS feeds when they didn't have one already"... yeah, exactly.
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Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#48I 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…
by the way, i'm trying with Aktu to improve the RSS experience, well at least mine :-)
I've always missed a few things that i tried to add to the platform. I mostly wanted to reduce the noise in my feeds and i also wanted to have a way to be exposed to news outside my feeds.
So i built Aktu in a way that same-story articles are automatically grouped together, which helps reduce the noise: instead of having 10 articles about Apple's new hardware event showing up in my feeds, i now have just one big story with references to all the articles... So at the same time, if i want, i can now easily check tens of arictles about that story, articles from my own feeds but also from sources i don't follow.
There's a lot of features that i plan on adding but i'm open to suggestions and would love to hear from longtime RSS users what cool features would be great to add!
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#49Also use it every day, but there is something to be said about the issues with it, mainly that it’s invisible to most people. It’s very much a techie thing and I think the only reason it’s still around is because it’s default in a lot of site software. It’d be interesting to see what kind of engagement larger news organizations get from RSS links.
> ... it’s invisible to most people.
that's a really general statement but I'm going to bite. Tech need not be up front and in everybody's face. I think HTTP is the same. It seems reasonable that most people don't know or care what http is or what it's doing at the beginning of urls. Or why it sometimes has an 's' on the end. And I'm even more confident saying that 'most people' don't know about how amazing TCP over IP is.
I'd like RSS/feeds of strongly typed content to be more invisible and prevalent. We're living in the HTML dark ages here.
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#50This is a remarkable deep-dive into the history of RSS and the ideas and vision behind it, and how those camps diverged. But despite beginning the article with Kevin Werbach's prediction that syndication was going to become a dominant business model on the web, this never quite came to pass, and RSS took on the role of moving media between aggregators and consumers, rather than between authors and aggregators as originally intended.
With the shift in usage to the edge, RSS found itself in the company of adhoc webpages that disseminated the same content but supported scripted adtech to enable just-in-time display advertising -- advertising which, over time, became a significant source of publisher revenue. RSS was often surfaced in a different user-agent and unable to clearly accommodate scripted ads, so first-party RSS feeds were practically giving away the content for free. With time, this greatly contributed to the waning appetite of commercial publishers for RSS, despite it remaining popular in circles were the content was meant to be spread wide at no cost. Although many news organizations still offer RSS feeds, they're not really marketed prominently, and remain a loss leader to make savvy readers happy.
Since alternate business models never achieved the same uptake, efforts like Google's AMP (and its offshoots like webpackage [1]) are a practical take on the syndication concept again, where the usage of adtech is assumed from the start, and the surfacer of the content becomes decoupled from its author.