Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

RSS Is Better Than Twitter

gizmodo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 259 posts

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#201

Post by adolph »

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…

Outlook supports RSS

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/what-are-rss-feeds-...

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#202

Post by mchmarny »

Every couple of months I search for a better news reader… cycle through Flipper, Feedly, NewsBlur, & 4-8 others… once more acknowledge how good Google Reader really was, and go back to scrolling through Twitter/Reddit

I’d probably pay large amount of money now for a news reader w/ these 4 features * Extract stories from my feed/lists on Twitter & Reddit and aggregate comments on these from people I follow * Learn from my ‘more/less like this’ on individual stories * Allow me to tag sources and create auto-tagging filters * Clean/intuitive Web UI & mobile client

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#203

Post by oliwarner »

spc476 wrote: post #199
oliwarner wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh? It's not like teams of elves are tripping over hand-coding this stuff. And even if they were, JSON parsers tend to be way more strict than RSS readers (which are actuakly very liberal interpretations of XML). But again, nobody in their right mind is manually generating or templating this stuff. And if you are, there are a dozen RSS-gen libraries for every single language. Let one of those handle it for you. Doing…

Of the three formats I support, RSS, Atom, and JSON, the RSS feed is the smallest. RSS: 33,228 Atom: 43,433 JSON: 36,137

I'll be honest —and it'll make me sound like an arrogant dbag— but that doesn't pass my sniff test. "jsonfeed" is lighter than equivalent RSS for several small reasons.

Can I see?

(To be clear to anybody reading this out of context: I'm not claiming that JSON is best —far from it— just that I would expect it to be a few bytes lighter in transit.)

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#204

Post by WCityMike »

mchmarny wrote: post #202

Every couple of months I search for a better news reader… cycle through Flipper, Feedly, NewsBlur, & 4-8 others… once more acknowledge how good Google Reader really was, and go back to scrolling through Twitter/Reddit I’d probably pay large amount of money now for a news reader w/ these 4 features * Extract stories from my feed/lists on Twitter & Reddit and aggregate comments on these from people I follow * Learn fro…

While there are definitely areas where it sorely can be improved, check out Inoreader.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#205

Post by cinquemb »

salutonmundo wrote: post #150
dguo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox used to have built-in RSS support, but it was removed in Firefox 64: https://www.zdnet.com/article/end-nears-for-rss-firefox-64-t...

Using debian stable, so I still have 60.6.1esr... not looking forward to this.

Yeah, I didn't know this because I run a customized nightly I forked, so I'll be keen on keeping all the files relating to this feature when I eventually merge with the upstream nightly so I can still have my cake and eat it too.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#206

Post by guybedo »

mchmarny wrote: post #202

Every couple of months I search for a better news reader… cycle through Flipper, Feedly, NewsBlur, & 4-8 others… once more acknowledge how good Google Reader really was, and go back to scrolling through Twitter/Reddit I’d probably pay large amount of money now for a news reader w/ these 4 features * Extract stories from my feed/lists on Twitter & Reddit and aggregate comments on these from people I follow * Learn fro…

Hey i'm working on a News Aggregation platform / RSS reader, aktu.io. It doesn't have the features you need but if you'd like to give it a try anyway, would love your feedback.

You can check out the main features here: - https://aktu.io/about - and here https://medium.com/@julien.aktu/rss-less-noise-more-informat...

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#207

Post by russellbeattie »

If you look at both Twitter and RSS superficially, you can easily decide one is better than the other. If you've ever tried and failed to create your own "perfect" news reader as I have, you'll realize both suck, and have for over a decade now and they're never going ever improve. The real issue isn't the pros and cons of one platform vs. another from an informational or social perspective, the real issue is much more fundamental: Information overload.

I wrote about this, oh, 9 years ago [1]. And then a few years later as well [2]. I did an analysis of the quantity of news items, posts and tweets coming through my custom feed reader and realized it was - and always will be - impossible to keep up, no matter how I organized, grouped, condensed, summarized and displayed it all.

The basic, undeniable fact is that most RSS sources are filled with repetitive information which are nearly impossible to group or update properly. And if you follow any more than a few dozen accounts on Twitter, you are going to miss most of their posts on a daily basis (regardless of their quality, there's just too many). Most of Twitter, in fact, is simply people talking to themselves. (And Facebook is basically useless in terms of gaining any actual knowledge.)

All news feeds - whether they are from RSS, Twitter, FB, Insta, SnapChat, WeChat, TikTok or anything else - are simply not scalable. So pick which you enjoy most, limit the number of sources to only those most important or useful to you, and get on with your life. Until AI gets to the point where it can sort through all the information out there for you - a la Apple's Knowledge Navigator - the only difference between any stream of data is superficial at best.

1. https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/drinking-from-the-fireho...

2. https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/but-how-do-you-keep-trac...

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#208

Post by spc476 »

oliwarner wrote: post #203
spc476 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of the three formats I support, RSS, Atom, and JSON, the RSS feed is the smallest. RSS: 33,228 Atom: 43,433 JSON: 36,137

I'll be honest —and it'll make me sound like an arrogant dbag— but that doesn't pass my sniff test. "jsonfeed" is lighter than equivalent RSS for several small reasons. Can I see? (To be clear to anybody reading this out of context: I'm not claiming that JSON is best —far from it— just that I would expect it to be a few bytes lighter in transit.)

Sure.

    http://boston.conman.org/index.atom
    http://boston.conman.org/index.json
    http://boston.conman.org/bostondiaries.rss
Each one contains the full text of the past 15 entries.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#209

Post by sbmassey »

h1d wrote: post #187
imartin2k wrote: post #40

Lots of things changed between when I started to heavily and systematically consume content online (in about 2006), and today. But one thing didn't: RSS is still the crucial cornerstone of my online content consumption. For me, RSS never was dead or less relevant than in the past. On the contrary: Since I keep adding feeds on a very regular basis, it's still growing in importance. Fortunately, 95 % of blogs and media…

Calling RSS dead only sounded like marketing from media sites as they got scared of being consumed outside of their platform but it was never dead from consumers' perspective.

A lot of journalist types seem to have switched to Twitter in the aftermath of Google Reader. But yeah, RSS never died in the real world.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#210

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN