The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS • Hacker News Board

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#151

Post by greatquux » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 1:27 PM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #105

Animats wrote: post #33

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…

I agree, I don't know where this idea that RSS died is coming from. RSS seems to be doing just fine. I use Feedly to subscribe to dozens of feeds. Before that I used Google Reader. I subscribe to more feeds now than I did then.

Yep. Feedly on the desktop and Newsify on iOS are a great combination.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#152

Post by asdff » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 1:42 PM UTC

krn wrote: post #95

Animats wrote: post #33

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…

Interestingly, Bloomberg doesn't have RSS feeds.

They do:

http://www.newslookup.com/rss/business/bloomberg.rss

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#153

Post by amyjess » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 1:44 PM UTC

Sadly, the article glosses over what a mess RSS 2.0 was. There were actually three different, slightly incompatible releases of 2.0. It's not really relevant anymore because so many years have passed, but it used to be that in order to parse an RSS 2.0 feed, you'd have to know when the feed was created and parse it differently depending on the creation time.

I read a post about the contentious history of RSS several years ago, similar to this one, and that bit really jumped out at me. I'll see if I can find it again.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#154

Post by whateveruser » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:00 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #132

tannhaeuser wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> That would imply people will go back to installing things, hunting for feeds, copypasting urls...

Nope. We could have a simple list of feeds, with a simple 'add' button next to the site name, even embedded in the app itself, as preferred/most read feeds list. Since this list contains no excerpts, and actual excerpts and feeds would be coming from publisher themselves, it shouldn't be an issue.

Of course, then we have questions like order of this list, how many and which feeds it lists and all, but it offers enough convenience that if made avoidable, we shouldn't have a problem with it.

Or since IANAL, this _may not_ be how the links and excerpts are considered, and I'm wrong, in which case, I'd like to know so I can correct myself.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#155

Post by bopbop » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:07 PM UTC

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…

This article is quite a poor example of the issue you are referring to - it's quite a detailed look at the technical history of RSS - but I love your regex spam queries.

Ask HN: $question_where_the_answer_is_my_own_business is my personal favourite.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#156

Post by scarface74 » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:34 PM UTC

matkins wrote: post #97

vhf wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shameless plug backing up the fact it hasn't gone anywhere: https://draft.li/blog/2016/03/21/rss-usage-on-the-web/

Amount of websites that offer RSS != Amount of users who still use RSS

As long as RSS is available and not being abandoned by publishers, why do you care about the number of users?

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#157

Post by RandyRanderson » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:36 PM UTC

bopbop wrote: post #155

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…

This article is quite a poor example of the issue you are referring to - it's quite a detailed look at the technical history of RSS - but I love your regex spam queries. Ask HN: $question_where_the_answer_is_my_own_business is my personal favourite.

They changed the hn title at least once. It was "rise and demise". Go here [0] and click on past:

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18002503

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#158

Post by upofadown » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:37 PM UTC

>That little tangerine bubble has become a wistful symbol of defiance against a centralized web increasingly controlled by a handful of corporations, ...

Just a quibble about terminology. Those handful of corporations do not control the web; they merely dominate it. It's an important distinction. Actual control is censorship, which is an important issue these days. The fact that a lot of people are using systems associated with a few companies is in the end relatively unimportant.

RSS is quite important simply because it is used to discover individual articles from lots of different sources. People who post things with RSS feeds are not raging against the dark but instead are routinely maintaining the light.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#159

Post by CharlesW » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:40 PM UTC

erikb wrote: post #134

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.

> Do you have more stuff to read about it?

Yes! Check out the deck and video from Edison Research's "The Podcast Consumer 2018" at http://www.edisonresearch.com/podcast-consumer-2018/.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#160

Post by lhball » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:44 PM UTC

Another tragedy is that RSS dropped in popularity at the same time that appreciation for the "open" web did. The great fake-news scare has greenlit walled gardens of the kind people never envisioned back when RSS started.

Content discovery for the everyday internet user consists of either Facebook, Google, or Twitter. And none of them are opaque about their SERPS / timelines.