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The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

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Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#131

Post by chrismorgan »

raphlinus wrote: post #10
spc476 wrote: post #6

A 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!"

I've always said that RSS is Dave Winer's gift to the world.

I type prose naturally with curly quotes (I love my Compose key!), and the fact that they aren’t as commonly mangled as straight quotes has been a nice bonus. (OK, so occasionally it’ll become mojibake, but I find that to be rarer than improper HTML entity encoding, for the last few years.)

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#132

Post by toyg »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #123
clacke2 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With the EU parliament's recent voting in favour of requiring consent/royalties for "rich linking" (eg. previewing content without sending the user to the original site), I can see a renaissance for RSS as an accepted and practical means for federated personal news aggregation. That's funny, I see the same legislation as the death of all unauthorized RSS aggregation. The "link tax" provision isn't about links, it's…

But with RSS you're receiving content directly from the publisher's site. There's no third-party involved, and the publisher can provide as many text bites as desired. There is no problem there as long as no content aggregation web site is acting as middleman.

> as long as no content aggregation web site is acting as middleman.

That would imply people will go back to installing things, hunting for feeds, copypasting urls... As much as I like desktop tech, that boat has likely sailed, at least for the mass-consumer market. You might maybe get away with a mobile app, but you'd still need help from browsers to "subscribe" to feeds - something that was pretty awful the first time it was tried, and has been basically abandoned or removed since.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#133

Post by erikb »

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…

> LESSON: Never trust a big company that relies on advertising.

Let me rephrase that. Never trust people more powerful than you to consider your situation.

That is basically also a core principle of the distributed building blocks of the internet. It's just that to the masses and to the power hungry these options are not attractive.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#134

Post by erikb »

CharlesW wrote: post #21

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.

That's quite interesting. Do you have more stuff to read about it? I never really used podcasts so I always wondered how people listen to it and assumed people use spotify or something like that.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#135

Post by fredsir »

kakarot wrote: post #124
fredsir wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think 1., 2., and 3. is applicable to at least how I use my RSS reader. Also, I don't understand why that is not the norm... The way I use my RSS reader is that I scroll through the list of posts, and if it's something I wish to check back on later, I press the shortcut to send it to instapaper, and if it's something I wish to check now, I press the shortcut to open it in a new tab, and then I go on. When I'm…

It sounds like you are using RSS as a way to generalize your access to each provider, but only as a delivery mechanism. The viewing is still done in the browser. With the exception of web apps / extensions, it's my understanding that RSS feeds were originally meant to be consumed by a program specifically optimized for handling feeds, instead of a bloated, slow, unsafe web browser. In the end, your RSS flow could mos…

Well, that might be the intention, but I have never experienced an "RSS Reader" that have left me with the want to actually consume the content inside it. I much prefer opening say an article in a browser and reading it with "reader mode" if it has bad text-layout.

Also, my RSS reader is just a web app, not a native application, so when I get through my list of new posts in my feeds, I'm already in the browser.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#136

Post by erikb »

marban wrote: post #24

Since 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

Maybe someone is paying a PR company do push the topic because they plan to release a new product around RSS. Would certainly be interesting.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#137

Post by walterbell »

rimliu wrote: post #129
walterbell wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://money.cnn.com/2016/02/22/technology/apple-privacy-ic... > Apple's stance on privacy and security applies only if you don't back up your data to iCloud ... In the first half of 2015, police agencies around the globe asked to explore 4,472 Apple customer accounts, according to the company. Apple disclosed data to police on 1,886 them, of which 1,407 were provided to law enforcement in the United States. In thes…

This is no more surveillance than police coming to your house with a search warrant is though.

Occupants of a house are usually aware when a warrant is served.

"Exploration" of iCloud accounts is remote, e.g. ongoing surveillance in search of data to justify a warrant. It can be done by law enforcement from multiple countries globally, while searching of a house is performed by local law enforcement operating under local law.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#138

Post by erikb »

paulddraper wrote: post #59
carc1n0gen wrote: post #8

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

Consider working email in there somehow.

Sending oneself some nifty HTML email would certainly create some cringe, if one likes that.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#139

Post by erikb »

sbov wrote: post #18

I tried using twitter to get news before. But the news magazines I subscribed to on twitter tweeted out the same article more than once. It was rather frustrating.

Also nowadays they manipulate what you see. From one source you like you might only get 1 out of 100 posts into your stream, and another source you don't care so much about you get 10.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#140

Post by justtopost »

erikb wrote: post #136
marban wrote: post #24

Since 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

Maybe someone is paying a PR company do push the topic because they plan to release a new product around RSS. Would certainly be interesting.

Any casual HN browser has seen the scores of "Google is evil... and they killed Reader!" comments endemic to the discussions of any produt release or shuttering by the former tech darling. It was just a matter of time before some smart reader figured out how to leverage the sentiment with code and vc funding. Thats what we do.
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