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The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

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Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#81

Post by abtinf »

MikeGale wrote: post #62

I still use RSS and it's, in many ways, better than the web stupidity that surrounds us. The title is misleading. People who captured the feedreader market, killed the competitors then dropped it did a lot of damage. Maybe deliberately. LESSON: Never trust a big company that relies on advertising. RSS is a way to escape the nonsense that has come with those, who have no idea what the web can be, but have flooded in a…

Having worked at a giant company, I know there are many competing motivations, teams, and personalities involved - companies are not uniform entities.

Still...

Google Reader did more to destroy my perception of Google's reputation than everything else evil they've ever done. Conspiracy to suppress wages for tech workers, James Damore, the Snowden revelations - all of those bugged me, but not like Reader.

They killed Reader, I suspect to support Plus, just as the walled gardens of the social networks turned into iron curtains, destroying the only viable alternative decentralized content distribution mechanism. And now we get to live in that world.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#82

Post by kovek »

dang wrote: post #72
MikeGale wrote: post #62

I still use RSS and it's, in many ways, better than the web stupidity that surrounds us. The title is misleading. People who captured the feedreader market, killed the competitors then dropped it did a lot of damage. Maybe deliberately. LESSON: Never trust a big company that relies on advertising. RSS is a way to escape the nonsense that has come with those, who have no idea what the web can be, but have flooded in a…

OK, we've rolled back the claim of the title using a representative phrase from the article. All: let's focus on something other than the title now—it's a pretty interesting piece for anyone who doesn't know the history (as I didn't).

I wonder how much you learn from hacker news submissions. Thank you, dang!

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#83

Post by wenbin »

ehnto wrote: post #43

I 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.

You can find the rss feeds of (almost) all podcasts in the world here: https://www.listennotes.com/

Or use the API: https://www.listennotes.com/api/

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#84

Post by epistasis »

abtinf wrote: post #81
MikeGale wrote: post #62

I still use RSS and it's, in many ways, better than the web stupidity that surrounds us. The title is misleading. People who captured the feedreader market, killed the competitors then dropped it did a lot of damage. Maybe deliberately. LESSON: Never trust a big company that relies on advertising. RSS is a way to escape the nonsense that has come with those, who have no idea what the web can be, but have flooded in a…

Having worked at a giant company, I know there are many competing motivations, teams, and personalities involved - companies are not uniform entities. Still... Google Reader did more to destroy my perception of Google's reputation than everything else evil they've ever done. Conspiracy to suppress wages for tech workers, James Damore, the Snowden revelations - all of those bugged me, but not like Reader. They killed…

In terms of tech evilness, those aren't really comparable, they're more political.

Reader's shutdown, after monopolizing neAly RSS tech and in order to push their own flavor of the year (Plus), was a classic tech evil

The other evil that Google is perpetrating is AMP. Reader followed an "embrace and extinguish." AMP is a full on "embrace, extend, and extinguish."

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#85

Post by daveFNbuck »

com2kid wrote: post #60
guybedo wrote: post #25

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…

And yet here we are on Hacker News, a social platform for news stories. 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.

These both serve different purposes. RSS is for sources you like and want to see everything from. Social aggregators are for getting exposed to things from sites you're not already aware of or aren't usually interested in.

I want to read every XKCD comic, so I subscribe to its RSS feed. I like to read a little tech news when I'm bored, so I go to Hacker News.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#87

Post by tomhoward »

RandyRanderson wrote: post #27

We 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() . ??? su…

Or, just let the system work as it has very well for many years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18003343

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#88

Post by shakna »

com2kid wrote: post #60
guybedo wrote: post #25

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…

And yet here we are on Hacker News, a social platform for news stories. 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.

And I'm here because this story appeared in my RSS feed.

I 'consume' other people's thoughts and opinions via HN, after 'consuming' the story via my feed.

Different purposes.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#89

Post by ijustwanttovote »

wenbin wrote: post #83
ehnto wrote: post #43

I 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.

You can find the rss feeds of (almost) all podcasts in the world here: https://www.listennotes.com/ Or use the API: https://www.listennotes.com/api/

I was planning to build something similar to your app, but you built exactly what I was looking for.

How is the audience feedback so far?

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#90

Post by kakarot »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #76
nreece wrote: post #20

RSS never died. On the contrary, its usage for content aggregation & monitoring has been increasing over the years, specially in the business world and niche markets. I'm speaking from my own experience running Feedity - https://feedity.com , a growing startup that helps with custom feeds for unstructured sources like webpages.

I've been wondering why Feedly, which I use exclusively to follow webcomics, has been hammering me with ad copy about "the news you need to stay on the cutting edge" lately. (RSS is, like, objectively the best way to follow multiple webcomics. I don't understand why it's not more popular.)

I use RSS for webcomics as well as visiting the actual websites, but a few things:

1. You miss out on the aesthetics each comic's website brings to the table

2. Sometimes you miss things like "hidden panels" or blog posts you're interested in.

3. No advertisement money going towards the artists (Not a big deal if you support them by buying merch and the comics don't need a lot of bandwidth)

I would really love to develop a reader that focused on webcomics, having both a dynamically curated section as well as all of your subscribed comics. Newspaper-like layout. Customized borders around each comic to add back some of the flair each comic's website offers. Quick links to the artist's blog/website/comic permalink. Text/image-only advertisements interleaved between comics, with 100% revenue going back to artists. Even merch advertisements which occasionally appear under an artist's comic, offering links to their storefronts.

Basically an open source Funny Papers for the web, which would offer content discovery for artists through its curated/related sections, as well as revenue from advertisements. It would update daily and could be used to follow both new and old comics serially.

I just need someone to help me build it because I'm juggling too many things to devote all of my attention to it.

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