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Just came in to say I read this in a RSS reader.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But if you care about what content is available, if you care about how people who create work you enjoy are able to make a living about it, if you care about things like who's the president of the US. Then it might behoove you to care about the fact that between them, Google, Twitter and Facebook control the majority of the referral traffic for the most popular 100 websites. A future where RSS prevailed over social media as a way of curating content for most people is a different world than the one we live in, and if you care about the world you live in, you might care about why RSS didn't prevail, even if it's still usable for the minority who prefer it.
As 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.
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.
Also 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…
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.
Tangentially, this is also a great argument in music business discussions against the finality of Spotify, Youtube and other centralized streaming platforms. People are doing just fine consuming podcast RSS feeds using players when the UX is smooth; there's no reason why that couldn't be the case for music or other verticals in general (direct artist-to-fan).
For podcasts you need one mp3, usually quite compressed. For video you usually need more than one source, adaptable stream quality and good seeking (because most people do not watch videos end to end but only view parts of it).
This is probably not insurmountable but I guess we need better tools for creators to abstract all of this.
Just came in to say I read this in a RSS reader.
Did you read it or get a link to it? That's a subtle but important difference. I love RSS and it seems to be available every where I want it to be, even if it's a bit hidden, but it's almost always just links, maybe a snippet. The only exception in my current list is Planet GNU.
https://github.com/damng/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content
This generates an RSS feed with the contents of the articles inlined and available at https://damng.github.io/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content/...
By-passes most soft paywalls. No Javascript. No Tracking. No 'social' media buttons. No modal dialogs. Just text you can read in a terminal based rss reader like canto.
I still use it every day. I run a python script through Cron that parses a list of feeds and caches new items in a sqlite database. Then it pulls the most recent 100 items out of the database and generates a static html page in which I read them
I 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…
I honestly have never used a feed aggregator, I used Slashdot, then Reddit, and now a mix of Reddit and HN.
Having a filter of some sort is really useful.