161–170 of 192 posts
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.
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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
Normally a rise and fall, etc, is only a title looking for eyeballs - what's most odd about this otherwise well researched article is that the last two paragraphs actually proclaim RSS's death, when this is clearly not the case. It's not as prominent without a flagship corporate app like google reader, as noted by the author, but it's nearly everywhere and there are a large number of very usable readers on mobile.
It is a good argument against corporate walled gardens, however.
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Interestingly, Bloomberg doesn't have RSS feeds.
They do: http://www.newslookup.com/rss/business/bloomberg.rss
This 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 orig…
> syndication was going to become a dominant business model on the web, this never quite came to pass This has happened in at least one media segment: podcasting. Ads are simply inserted in the medium proper, or the feed gets paywalled, or money is generated while producing the content (live shows). It is entirely possible to reproduce this achievement in other media sectors, it just needs to be done wisely: 1. a cat…
> They can license feeds to specific clients only
this is a bad idea.
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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…
Other than my own list of unread bookmarks, Google Readers signal to noise ratio (as a platform) was second to none. The feeds I followed would post 95% worthwhile content. A blog post is like a dinner speech, don't want to miss it. In social media the dinner speech is also available, only sandwiched somewhere between all the small talk and pleasantries. I never found a replacement, and quite a few people I followed…
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.
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I dont know if that’s true. If I could consume Facebook via RSS, I might follow it a bot more. When I wanted to respond or like, I would have to switch to the app.
> If I could consume Facebook via RSS You used to be able to do that. The problem (from fb's point of view) as the sibling comment points out is that you'd never visit facebook.com unless you wanted to actually wanted to interact with the content.
Back in 2006 I wrote an extremely detailed history of some of the infighting that shaped the history of RSS. It was a popular article at the time. For anyone interested in this bit of history, written at a formative moment, the article is here: http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-...
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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…
This is how I use RSS as well. I wound up writing my own self-hosted RSS reader which is extremely simple and supports this workflow.
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You can read it with: 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.
Cool, I'll use it, at least until the hosted site gets a take-down request :)