RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried • Hacker News Board

Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried

#101

Post by sudont » Sun, Jan 02, 2011, 6:59 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #88

sudont wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, once I've found some new source of content it's nice to put its RSS feed into a reader This is why most linkblogs are now twitter feeds. Even Andy Baio’s is still a subset of what he twitters. My problem in RSS feeds is importance, some sort of metric of popularity would be good. A lot of times I’ll remove a feed for curatorial purposes to have that site drop some major project that goes viral, and I then fin…

"It would be a lot better to create some XML encapsulation of what the front page of the NYT does in terms of curatorial importance." RSS would be a critical tool for anyone trying to solve that problem. A lot of the complaints here are that RSS isn't what RSS isn't. OK, that's great, but those are more "entrepreneurial opportunities" than problems with RSS. Toss out RSS (and I assume by extension Atom and all simila…

RSS is strictly linear, largely chronological.

The NYT front page, while changing day-to-day still has a layout that embodies importance. There needs to be some sort of semantic interpretation of how important something is other than h1’s. How do we replicate the 144pt super-important headings while removing presentation from content?

The web was built for rationalist minds and papers, and the separation of html elements furthers this goal, yet hampers any sort of human-ness of communication.

RSS is great for a blog, but bad for newspapers. Check out NYT’s RSS feed. Every article ticks in at an equal level of importance and requires the viewer’s mental acuity to discern what’s #1. Not so with their web-front or printed sheet.

Syndication, while essential, needs to be extended.

Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried

#102

Post by draebek » Sun, Jan 02, 2011, 6:59 PM UTC

Lack of a browser button doesn't put me off using RSS, as many have pointed out. There are browser extensions and GreaseMonkey scripts for me to add feeds to Google Reader.

I'd be more concerned that RSS is dying because many content providers--from big media to bloggers--seem to prefer to only show me a short excerpt, or even a title in their RSS feeds. I don't want to leave Google Reader to read your articles! When I have to open every single RSS item's link (in a new tab) from Reader, that either discourages me from visiting your site... or discourages me from using RSS, as it adds little to no value, and indeed just introduces frustration.

The other reason I avoid RSS is for sites like HN and Reddit, where the order of links, their scores, and their ages are important. Maybe RSS should be updatable (which may be what PubSubHubbub is designed for?).

Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried

#103

Post by patio11 » Sun, Jan 02, 2011, 7:03 PM UTC

RSS saves me from having to load up 100 different sites several times a day just to check what’s ‘new’.

Everything wrong with RSS in a nutshell: this is a problem real people don't have.

Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried

#104

Post by geekfactor » Sun, Jan 02, 2011, 7:03 PM UTC

troels wrote: post #100

thebooktocome wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time you can copy the site's URL into Google Reader and it will try to find the proper RSS feed. It works for blogs hosted on Blogger and Wordpress, at least; not sure how it does it.

"not sure how it does it." The same way that some browsers do it. There is a meta-tag in the page, which describes which feed formats are available, and where to find them.

to be precise.

Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried

#105

Post by StavrosK » Sun, Jan 02, 2011, 7:12 PM UTC

tmgrhm wrote: post #85

angrycoder wrote: post #34

I have used RSS for years now. I check google reader about as often as I check hacker news. I start my morning off with a cup of coffee while I read my feeds using Reeder on the iphone or ipad. Not once have I used any of the RSS features of a browser. I really don't see the point. I guess google doesn't either.

The thing annoying me about this (sensationalist) article is just that… nobody wants to use their web browser for RSS: they want to browse with it. It also cites the lack of a reader in Chrome as a sign of RSS' impending doom, while ignoring the fact Google also run a (really good) RSS service for free called Google Reader, which is much more intuitively named than RSS and whose name is easier to understand than the…

For me, the best solution is Opera's. It gives you a sort of summary of the feed when you click on it, and asks you where you want to add it (Opera RSS reader, Google Reader, etc). I click Google Reader and it's added automatically.

Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried

#106

Post by mmphosis » Sun, Jan 02, 2011, 7:14 PM UTC

Okay, I haven't really used RSS before. I'm diving in. In Safari Version 5.0.3 (6533.19.4), I view all of the RSS Feeds by choosing the following (buried) menu item:

Bookmarks > Bookmarks Bar > View All RSS Articles

I can't find a "View All RSS Articles" button. By default, I hide the "Bookmarks Bar" toolbar (because I want as much vertical screen real estate as I can get.) The "View All RSS Articles" item does not appear in the "Bookmarks Bar" toolbar when I make this toolbar visible.

I am looking into the NetNewsWire app for Mac. http://netnewswireapp.com/mac/

No RSS feed for Wikipedia portal:Current events? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

Hacker News RSS is broken? http://news.ycombinator.com/rss

Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried

#107

Post by joeyh » Sun, Jan 02, 2011, 7:15 PM UTC

nakkiel wrote: post #41

Lagged2Death wrote: post #31

The implementation of RSS in Firefox was always an "ultra-lite" version that I doubt will be missed by any serious RSS enthusiasts. A full-featured RSS reader feels a lot like a mailing list, so I think it's appropriate to keep RSS in Thunderbird rather than Firefox. In some respects, a web-app RSS reader (like Bloglines or Google Reader) is better. You can access your feeds from any computer, the read/unread status…

Agreed. I once wrote a Python script that would parse RSS feeds and write emails in a maildir (or whatever is supported by Python); one was then able to read news from an MUA which was comfortable (Mutt by then). I lost that script when I did a 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda' before quitting my last job and realizing 2 minutes later that I forgot to backup many useful scripts I wrote over the course of my year and half…

The canonical one is called "rss2email"

Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried

#108

Post by frou_dh » Sun, Jan 02, 2011, 7:16 PM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #103

RSS saves me from having to load up 100 different sites several times a day just to check what’s ‘new’. Everything wrong with RSS in a nutshell: this is a problem real people don't have.

Well hopefully real people might one day branch out from the Yahoo! homepage and make it a problem.

Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried

#109

Post by smcl » Sun, Jan 02, 2011, 7:16 PM UTC

stanleydrew wrote: post #62

mechanical_fish wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so, actually. I'd be hard put to make that comment's point any more elegantly. In person, the right response to the original sentence would be a polite cough, followed by a brief but significant silence, followed by a slight but detectable face-saving change of subject. We can't do those things on the web, but in this case "um... what?" is an artful alternative.

I question the comment's usefulness to this discussion, not the elegance with which it was made (although I think I disagree on that as well). The comment, to me, is a distraction. Not purposeful I'm sure, but it's had that effect. The fact that the community would vote it up to the point where it might be the first comment someone reads when seeing this thread is disappointing.

> The comment, to me, is a distraction

Perhaps a little reflection is in order, you were originally unhappy that the comment I made might have distracted from, or derailed, any possible discussion. Then, rather than turning the other cheek, you opted to kick off a discussion which has ironically created a genuine distraction.

update: This reply was a little bit cheeky and I subsequently sent stanleydrew an email to apologise.

Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried

#110

Post by DrJokepu » Sun, Jan 02, 2011, 7:20 PM UTC

thirdsun wrote: post #78

angrycoder wrote: post #34

I have used RSS for years now. I check google reader about as often as I check hacker news. I start my morning off with a cup of coffee while I read my feeds using Reeder on the iphone or ipad. Not once have I used any of the RSS features of a browser. I really don't see the point. I guess google doesn't either.

i couldn't agree more. Breakfast, Coffee and Reeder is my morning routine. And a browser's RSS features are indeed too limited - third-party web- and mobile apps are much more sophisticated when it comes to RSS. What I'm more worried about is the trend to only show an excerpt or introduction of an increasing number of articles. Given the fact that most of those sites rely on ads, it's fair to do that though.

Excerpts only in RSS annoy the hell out of me and here's why: I usually read my RSS feed in Reeder on my iPhone during my morning commute. There's still no mobile reception on the London Underground (I'll resist the temptation for now and save that rant for another time) meaning that all I can read is what have been cached by Reeder before I left home. Which means that I'm unable to read posts that only have excerpts in RSS. They should figure out some other way to monetize their RSS feeds; I particularly like Daring Fireball's approach of having sponsored RSS-only posts every now and then (that are actually interesting to read).