The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS • Hacker News Board

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#171

Post by jonnytran » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 4:47 PM UTC

> He pointed out that Twitter was basically a better RSS feed, since it could show you what people thought about an article in addition to the article itself. It allowed you to follow people and not just channels.

This is why I absolutely LOVED FriendFeed. Not only could you follow arbitrary RSS feeds and FriendFeed users, but you could group feeds into "imaginary users". This was great because you could follow anyone you wanted, even if they didn't use FriendFeed themselves.

So what happened to FriendFeed? Acquired by Facebook and then killed.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#172

Post by blocko » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 4:53 PM UTC

erikb wrote: post #138

paulddraper wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider working email in there somehow.

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

Why's that?

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#173

Post by wenbin » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 5:03 PM UTC

ijustwanttovote wrote: post #89

wenbin wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

So far so good :)

June, 2018: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/listen-notes-3-0

Dec, 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15825900

But one comment that I heard again and again is: It's meaningless to build a podcast search engine, because Google and Apple can easily build something similar :)

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#174

Post by erikb » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 5:16 PM UTC

blocko wrote: post #172

erikb wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why's that?

Why's what?

And probably also: Are you aware that the request to work in email somehow is a joke with about 90% certainty?

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#175

Post by CharlesW » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 6:03 PM UTC

bmn__ wrote: post #114

The article downplays the significance of Atom. Today, nearly all Web feeds are available as Atom. Hackers, learn from this. Specs matter. https://web.archive.org/web/2004/http://diveintomark.org/arc... Atom exists precisely because RSS is a clusterfuck that could not be salvaged.

Regarding the "The myth of RSS compatibility" article, at one point RSS was evolving and changes broke stuff. But the article overstates the case, and the RSS spec has been boringly frozen for almost two decades now.

> The article downplays the significance of Atom.

Does it? Atom Syndication Format seems like a vestigial feed format, so I'm interested in cases where it's used and RSS isn't also available.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#176

Post by WorldMaker » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 7:16 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #147

abtinf wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

EWh. There are still RSS alternatives and at least most sites (if by no means all) still have RSS feeds. Now, you might argue that "But Google Reader was the de facto standard and mainstream audiences didn't know to just use something else." However, unless they were reading RSS in the background through a portal like Yahoo!, mainstream audiences weren't using RSS long before Google Reader was killed (if ever). Expli…

There were a lot of Google Reader users that didn't know anything about the details of RSS: they already had an account at the time because they were using Gmail, and they'd automatically see "shared" stories feeds they could subscribe from friends/contacts that were also Gmail users, and from those social feeds they'd see articles from other feeds they could subscribe directly. All without knowing anything about RSS or how to find an RSS feed on a webpage they visited.

Google Reader nailed the social experience around RSS, and there definitely was a high point where RSS feeds were used by a lot of people on Google Reader that didn't understand and didn't need to understand RSS feeds to take advantage of them. It was just that weird news app "next" to Gmail on their browser tabs.

At least that was my anecdotal observation. A lot of college friends that I tried to convince to use RSS for ages before suddenly used RSS because it was already lit up on their Gmail account and they were seeing the stuff I was sharing at the very least.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#177

Post by kakarot » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 7:56 PM UTC

nsriv wrote: post #169

rcxdude wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Any chance you've open-sourced this solution? I've been looking for something self-hosted for ages.

I can't speak for OP but I use Tiny Tiny RSS: https://tt-rss.org/

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#178

Post by rhizome » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 8:07 PM UTC

ihuman wrote: post #40

mi_lk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does hn decide what articles to put on rss?

They're in the same order as the front page

I think it's actually /newest. I don't remember the RSS feed ever rearranging stories up and down the list.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#179

Post by PaulHoule » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 9:10 PM UTC

Like almost every article about RSS it seems more concerned with people writing than it is with the needs of the readers. That was always the problem with David Weiner and his pals.

For instance what the exact format is does not matter. Supporting RSS, Atom and a few similar formats from a reader perspective is just no problem compared to parsing bad HTML, dealing with JS Hell, etc.

The real issue is a lack of innovation on the part of feed readers, particularly that we still see the "here is a list of all your feeds" viewed separately and no effort to make a workflow where you can make it so your time is not wasted by articles from Tedium and sensationalistic sites like Fox News and the New York Times, etc.

see

http://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/ http://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/

the machine learning technology to do this is ten years old and if the kids out there weren't so interested in word embeddings, functional programming and other fads, they could bring this to the people.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#180

Post by bitcuration » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 9:57 PM UTC

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…

RSS reader is used mostly as a updater of the source/site who I care about. When I read, I most of time would still go to the site but RSS allows me to quickly get a summary if I'm interested to go to the page. This is to me the best use of RSS reader, is to keep in touch with the sources. Not much a reader per se.