RSS Is Better Than Twitter • Hacker News Board

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#121

Post by j7k6 » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 6:14 PM UTC

djhworld wrote: post #81

I personally quite like twitter, although I tend to lurk rather than actively participate (don't feel I have much to say I guess) In some ways my twitter feed is almost like RSS, and the people I follow tend to be interesting people who post interesting content or links to other content they've found.

That's similar to how I use Twitter.

Private Account, no followers, only selected accounts I follow to keep my feed clean of clickbait, useless discussions and the usual twitter outrage. It's a great tool, but I think I'm not using it as it's supposed to be ;) I'm just not interested in participating in useless discussions with trolls and people who try to sell me their product.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#122

Post by shdh » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 6:21 PM UTC

lazyjones wrote: post #87

RSS is like articles without comment sections, completely pointless nowadays. If you can't read corrections, conflicting opinions for something, you might just as well go watch TV. The whole point of Twitter is that it's commentary, not a feed of published articles.

RSS is a feed of subscribable information in a programmably ingestible format.

Imagine formatting your feed however you want, without distracting side content. A use case is using RSS for YouTube subscriptions instead of the horrible subscription page experience.

Many publications do not post full articles, but instead summaries or excerpts.

The HN RSS feed is simply a link to the original article and comments.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#123

Post by sys_64738 » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 6:41 PM UTC

hprotagonist wrote: post #2

Considering how i read HN and thus how i’m reading this — and that i don’t have a twitter account — i guess i have to agree! RSS is very, very nice. Especially for keeping track of all the journals I have to keep an eye on.

I found this via RSS feed to (inoreader). I simply couldn't live without RSS and don't think I'd want to. When I find new sites I always try to find their public (or secret) RSS feed but if none then they usually get ignored.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#124

Post by lazyjones » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 6:42 PM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #89

lazyjones wrote: post #87

RSS is like articles without comment sections, completely pointless nowadays. If you can't read corrections, conflicting opinions for something, you might just as well go watch TV. The whole point of Twitter is that it's commentary, not a feed of published articles.

90% of internet comments are low effort garbage that simply isn't worth anyone's time. The other 10% of high quality, high effort posts take more than 280 words, and need 5 to 20 twitter posts to get a full idea of their concepts. RSS is a different network of users, so it really can't be compared to Twitter. But those mega tweet 10 posts in a row threads would be far better served by a classic blog and RSS feed... R…

> 90% of internet comments are low effort garbage that simply isn't worth anyone's time.

In line with blog articles and TV. At least on Twitter, it's easy to block someone forever.

>The other 10% of high quality, high effort posts take more than 280 words

That's simply not true. You can often deliver important information in 140 characters.

> But those mega tweet 10 posts in a row threads would be far better served by a classic blog and RSS feed... Rather than 280 word chunks that have to be tracked and edited separately.

That's not a huge problem compared to the issue of content quality and it's even less important when you accept that your previous statement is simply not true.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#125

Post by Andrex » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 6:44 PM UTC

moogly wrote: post #109

zaphar wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was there during the turndown. As I remember, RSS had almost no impact on revenue positive or negative. That is why Reader was shutdown actually. Because not enough people used it to impact the bottom line and make it worth keeping.

I don't buy it, because then they would've killed Google+ way earlier.

Multiple factors go into the decision to kill a product; Google+ had a much larger investment and profile, it would make sense Google would be more skittish about killing it than Reader.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#126

Post by lazyjones » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 6:46 PM UTC

vshabanov wrote: post #103

lazyjones wrote: post #87

RSS is like articles without comment sections, completely pointless nowadays. If you can't read corrections, conflicting opinions for something, you might just as well go watch TV. The whole point of Twitter is that it's commentary, not a feed of published articles.

I did a feed reader which supports blog comments years ago ( https://bazqux.com ) and first thing many people asked me is how to turn comments off. There are some good blogs with good communities and interesting discussions in comments but the majority of comments on popular sites are plain junk.

> the majority of comments on popular sites are plain junk.

That's a questionable conclusion from your little project and the feedback of a (non-representative) few users. The counter-argument would be the success of Twitter and FB, where most of the "junk" comments are. Readers want to decide themselves what is junk and what isn't and 1 useful comment easily trumps 20 junk comments. Ask all the newspapers that added comments to their articles despite all the moderation problems that brought with it.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#127

Post by mattmcknight » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 6:48 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #105

jayalpha wrote: post #97

I love RSS feeds. You can convert Twitter to RSS: http://twitrss.me Websites that don't have RSS: https://feedity.com/ Email to RSS: https://zapier.com Hackernews RSS: http://hnrss.org/newest?points=300 You can even use RSS for finding a job: https://www.indeed.ca/jobs?q=millwright&l=Toronto,+ON&sort=d...

Are you aware of an open source/non-commercial email to RSS solution?

https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur is open source, commercial.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#128

Post by blunte » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 6:57 PM UTC

"the charming pop-ups that everyone uses because fuck you"

Between the cookie popups, the GRPD "choice" popups, and the sign-up-for-some-email-crap popups, each of which takes 1-2 seconds to appear - sometimes in parallel and sometimes in sequence - the web is a garbage fire.

There definitely needs to be a retraction of sorts in terms of technology and content delivery. I also think we have passed "peak information". On the internet, everyone has a voice. At first that was good, but now the signal to noise ratio is so bad that good, accurate, useful content is just rounding error. The same is also true for television/film as well as the commercial music industry.

That's not to say there are not still great people creating great content, but there are mass numbers of people polluting the mediums and making it increasingly difficult to find the good stuff.

The current rate of decline of value of the internet suggests that there will be some significant disruption this decade. I wish I had the solution (or knew who to bet on!)

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#129

Post by captn3m0 » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 7:01 PM UTC

burtonator wrote: post #68

knight17 wrote: post #3

I just wish Mozilla introduce subscribing to RSS as a first class feature in Firefox. If they can introduce and integrate Pocket, I think an open technology like RSS deserves a fair chance. But they'd need to invest a little bit to make it easy to subscribe—similar to following on Twitter/Instagram or Liking pages on Facebook—to receive site updates. Having to find and enter byzantine URLs is not the way to go althou…

I'm considering integrating RSS with Polar: https://getpolarized.io/ Ton on my plate now trying to focus on shipping mobile and a few other features too. I like the idea of Polar having data sources that are high quality and that the user can just easily subscribe to specific PDFs, research, or high quality content feeds. We're also going to add social content discovery which is sort of like a Twitter feed but just p…

Another +1 on this.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#130

Post by dewey » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 7:03 PM UTC

k1m wrote: post #100

jayalpha wrote: post #97

I love RSS feeds. You can convert Twitter to RSS: http://twitrss.me Websites that don't have RSS: https://feedity.com/ Email to RSS: https://zapier.com Hackernews RSS: http://hnrss.org/newest?points=300 You can even use RSS for finding a job: https://www.indeed.ca/jobs?q=millwright&l=Toronto,+ON&sort=d...

I work on a project which creates RSS feeds for sites which don't offer their own: Feed Creator - http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/ And one which converts partial feeds into full-text feeds: https://fivefilters.org/content-only/

Cool project, I was searching for something like this a while ago and then tried to build something similar. It's not as cool and full featured as yours though; you have to write your own plugins for each site. It was still fun to build though.

https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge