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RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried

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

#181

Post by erikpukinskis »

philwelch wrote: post #132
erikpukinskis wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully appreciate the sentiment, I hate when people build stuff people don't need. But I want to dig a little at this. I think the fact that most people only have access to CNN or Time or Fox News or Cosmopolitan or Maxim or whatever... that there is not an easy way for people to get news aggregated from 100's of their peers and thought leaders in their affinity groups.... I think that IS a problem people have. It m…

Your comment reminds me of this Calvin and Hobbes strip: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_RbiRIw_w4rU/SNkssvl3KeI/AAAAAAAAAC...

Maybe it's too late, but I don't quite see the connection. Regardless, I consider Calvin to be "good company".

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

#182

Post by corin_ »

xenomachina wrote: post #179
corin_ wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hitting me where it hurts, a spelling mistake, I guess I should start proof-reading my HN comments. What about those who use RSS and use that button (like myself)? Won't they be "put off" by the loss of the button? If you stop using RSS because the button is no longer there, you clearly didn't actually care about RSS in the first place.

You're basically saying that it's ok to make any UI worse because users will either put up with it or stop using the feature entirely (which just means that they didn't care about the feature in the first place).

No, you're confusing two seperate points.

1.) Why is it ok to remove the button - because hardly anybody uses it.

2.) Why does Firefox removing the button not meant that "RSS is dying" - because people who currently use RSS will keep doing so, just without using the button.

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

#183

Post by 4chan4ever »

smcl wrote: post #11

"It gives less of a shite than a French man smoking a cigarette in public" Um...what?

Smoking is a little different in France and on the Continent than in the USA. It's possible that certain European smokers, going to a foreign country like the USA for the first time, would be ignorant of the written and unwritten rules of "smoker's etiquette" here in the U.S.A., where an adult can't light up within twenty yards of a kid without drawing down the passive-aggressive wrath of the nearest PTA mother.

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

#184

Post by codeup »

Groxx wrote: post #143
codeup wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should I have to do all that if RSS already exists? There's no reason to accept letting this working technology die. I agree that browsers are unnecessary for RSS though.

Because if you're that worried about Facebook tracking your browsing habits, accessing information via RSS will only prevent some tracking. The Like button is damn near everywhere, not just on news sites. The only way to prevent it is to prevent your browsing tools from communicating with Facebook at all , and hope the servers you're accessing aren't doing it behind the scenes. And/or anonymize your connection (TOR),…

Are you trying to pitch RSS against privacy enhancing technologies such as NoScript, TOR, etc.? The point is rather that more privacy is a neat side effect of RSS, not its primary purpose.

The primary purpose of RSS - aggregation of content -- works very well, irrespective of bad UI decisions which have nothing to do with RSS itself. And when you pull a full text RSS feed, you're probably far away from "Like" buttons and the like while reading content.

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

#186

Post by sid0 »

ianl wrote: post #24
corin_ wrote: post #20

I can't imagine that browser button pursuading anyone who doesn't already understand and appreciate RSS to start using it. Anyone tech-savvy enough to see it, and start googling to find out how to use it properly has certainly already heard of RSS. And on the other side, anyone who does use RSS, and anyone in the future who learns to use it, won't be put off using it by the loss of that button. The worse statement in…

3%-7% that use the button are most likely power users. It would be unwise to disenfranchise them as they are the ones who normally advocate your software to their friends (regular users).

Anyone who is a power user can simply add the icon back.

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

#187

Post by mcnemesis »

jerf wrote: post #168
mcnemesis wrote: post #148

am probably contributing late, but i have recently worked on something that might solve this "rss hunger" or at least provide a better alternative eventually. am calling my creation "razor" and it runs right in the brwser, is totally free, doesn't sacrifice privacy to corporations, is customizable by the user (only knowledge of regular expressions required - in case one wants to craft their own feeds) i've developed…

Thank you for demonstrating so clearly why we need RSS. If you don't get it yet, check back in two years. You'll be able to tell us all about why that doesn't scale and can't work and RSS is a lot better. You may not believe me yet, but I can wait.

well help by clarifying why. as i said, this might not be the best, but probably the difference between this and RSS is that razor isn't solely meant to create information feeds, it is a quicker and more succinct way of scraping the web for arbitrary information.

it solves the problem of having to build a new scraper tool every time you have some site you want to programatically pick something from.

maybe i didn't clarify its purpose well, or i gave the wrong examples? imagine using it to track malformed tags in web pages of your choice in real-time, this is another way it could be used.

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

#188

Post by sudont »

jerf wrote: post #169
sudont wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 elem…

It also has to be some sort of project that uses RSS, not something built into an RSS-replacement. It requires some sort of third-party interaction with your input to determine "importance". Leave it to the New York Times and at best their decisions about importance merely won't match yours; at worse they'll simply label everything "important", sort of like the way my HR department seems to reflexively tick that box…

You bring up a good point, importance is a human attribution to information, and a lot of people are either stupid or self-important. Impartial judgement is important, but NPR's music segments demonstrate that trending topics are middling and not truly important.

If the curator is strictly online popularity, news sites invariably turn into people magazine. You need some high-and-mighty news nerd to determine what's truly important. Sure, the curator's occasionally wrong or late, but it's a lot better than pointless water-cooler talk.

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

#189

Post by Groxx »

codeup wrote: post #184
Groxx wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because if you're that worried about Facebook tracking your browsing habits, accessing information via RSS will only prevent some tracking. The Like button is damn near everywhere, not just on news sites. The only way to prevent it is to prevent your browsing tools from communicating with Facebook at all , and hope the servers you're accessing aren't doing it behind the scenes. And/or anonymize your connection (TOR),…

Are you trying to pitch RSS against privacy enhancing technologies such as NoScript, TOR, etc.? The point is rather that more privacy is a neat side effect of RSS, not its primary purpose. The primary purpose of RSS - aggregation of content -- works very well, irrespective of bad UI decisions which have nothing to do with RSS itself. And when you pull a full text RSS feed, you're probably far away from "Like" buttons…

RSS is an exchange format, nothing more. Don't conflate it with some historical transmission methods, nor ignore cases where it's behind a paywall, nor embedded tracking images (since nearly any reader will allow images).

Privacy has nothing to do with RSS. Some feeds I subscribe to have JavaScript and Flash - where's the privacy there? Some are behind paywalls - I'm identified by logging in, and even more so by providing payment info to be able to log in.

Thus, by losing RSS, we would lose zero ability to read privately. It's only viewed as being without all the privacy-sniffing bells and whistles because most providers don't do so. RSS can lose all its currently-common privacy attributes while still being RSS. We should be worried about the loss of privacy online, which is rampant, not the loss of RSS (if it does die). And RSS is a particularly bad flagpole to gather around; anyone up in arms about it is much more likely to be up in arms about privacy than the reverse.

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

#190

Post by xenomachina »

corin_ wrote: post #182
xenomachina wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're basically saying that it's ok to make any UI worse because users will either put up with it or stop using the feature entirely (which just means that they didn't care about the feature in the first place).

No, you're confusing two seperate points. 1.) Why is it ok to remove the button - because hardly anybody uses it. 2.) Why does Firefox removing the button not meant that "RSS is dying" - because people who currently use RSS will keep doing so, just without using the button.

Your second point is flawed. The button makes using RSS more convenient. Removing it makes it less convenient. Saying people would not be "put off" by making it less convenient is naive at best.
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