Please Add RSS Support to Your Site • Hacker News Board

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#161

Post by jonahx » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 10:29 PM UTC

ddrager wrote: post #58

Having struggled with RSS in the past, I will give a few reasons of why I ended up removing RSS from my blog: 1. RSS traffic trickled down to almost nothing. Hardly anyone uses RSS any more as a daily reader^1. 2. Spammers were using my RSS feed to wholesale copy the content from my blog. Identical copies of my blog went up in several different locations, each with their own copy of ads from the scammers. Some of the…

> Identical copies of my blog went up in several different locations, each with their own copy of ads from the scammers.

Tangent but: Does google have any official way to combat this?

It seems like an easy enough problem to solve. As the content-creator, you could submit your content first to some kind of registry, so that google could identify you as the true author. Does anything like this exist? If not, why not?

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#162

Post by amelius » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 10:30 PM UTC

Can't this be automated by a service which "diffs" websites over time?

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#163

Post by mkl » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 10:33 PM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #155

jolmg wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet Pocket is a core part of Firefox instead of an extension.

And many times have I thought that Pocket should also be in an extension and wondered why Mozilla is taking on the first party responsibility for it - maybe they get some partnership money?

Mozilla owns Pocket.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#164

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 10:41 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #37

jandrese wrote: post #22

RSS seems to have died off as social networks decided that they wanted to capture the users and vertically integrate. RSS turns them into commodities, and that's the opposite of what they want. Plus it's difficult to monetize an RSS feed.

RSS isn't dead. Smart bloggers will always expose an RSS feed, because readers following your RSS feed are more likely to read your blog than traffic from other sources. Having an RSS feed is the slightly weaker version of the mailing lists. Mail which is also going strong — and the easiest way to build a mailing list btw, is to connect your RSS feed to Mailchimp. And RSS feeds are mandatory for podcasts too. Some bl…

[deleted]

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#165

Post by myfonj » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 10:43 PM UTC

ddrager wrote: post #58

Having struggled with RSS in the past, I will give a few reasons of why I ended up removing RSS from my blog: 1. RSS traffic trickled down to almost nothing. Hardly anyone uses RSS any more as a daily reader^1. 2. Spammers were using my RSS feed to wholesale copy the content from my blog. Identical copies of my blog went up in several different locations, each with their own copy of ads from the scammers. Some of the…

> RSS traffic trickled down to almost nothing.

Could you elaborate how you measured that?

While Google trends depicts decline in search frequency so it may correlate with actual usage, it could as well mean that the "RSS market" is stable and saturated ("everybody know about it, so no need to search for it").

If you came to this conclusion while looking at your access logs, keep in mind that single request from some web-based reader could "feed" hordes of subscribers. In scenario desktop RSS readers were completely abandoned and everybody used web-based RSS reading services, there would be just ~ services count × their check frequency requests, from which it would be really hard to abstract subscriber count, I guess.

Maybe there is exact way to determine this usage I'm not aware of? Are those services telling back subscribers count in their requests? Or do they publish this information in some standardized way? I really would like to know…

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#166

Post by rcarmo » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 10:47 PM UTC

Funny how RSS managed to take off originally by focusing on discoverability (education about meta tags, the infamous orange “broadcasting” icon, etc.) and these days it’s still plagued by lack of discoverability or misunderstandings as to its use and reach.

All the blogs/sites I ran/run/manage have RSS feeds, and I still sift through roughly a thousand items a day over breakfast using Reeder and Feedly. RSS is very far from dead - it’s just not a common enough use case to be the default way for non-technical (or, rather, “non-motivated”) people to read their news and other info.

When you have the motivation and interest in following specific topics or sites, it’s not that much of a landing curve to pick out an aggregator (Feedly seems to be the most popular).

I’d say that RSS is in extensive use by humans, and that most shortcomings in comments up to now have fairly trivial workarounds (like truncated feeds, which can trivially be worked around by a client like Reeder, which can fetch the original homepage and render it in a format similar to “reading mode”).

In general, I think RSS has tremendous return if you a) pick your sources carefully and b) spend a bit of time figuring out how to get a good UX.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#167

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 10:47 PM UTC

djhworld wrote: post #43

I tend to read my RSS feeds on the London Underground, where signal is non existent in the tunnels, and patchy in the stations. My app of choice (newsblur) lets you sync your feeds for offline browsing so I do this before heading home. Unfortunately a lot of feeds I subscribe to tend to truncate their articles with a summary or maybe just the first paragraph, with a link to continue reading the full article. I get wh…

[deleted]

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#168

Post by rcarmo » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 10:49 PM UTC

overcast wrote: post #47

What the heck is a good free or paid RSS reader these days? I paid for Reeder, and a few months later they discontinued support.

How so? I am running the latest Reeder on iOS, and it works great (always has, never found anything that was better overall in terms of reading experience).

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#169

Post by orf » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 10:55 PM UTC

jolmg wrote: post #153

orf wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they dont add a burden to the existing product? I assume you work in tech, maybe even as a developer. So you know full well that every single unused line of code, let alone an entire feature, adds a maintenance, security, documentation and testing burden. > and its never "the perfect use case" to remove features that work. It absolutely is, if it makes those features better and gives them a focused place to develop…

Yet Pocket is a core part of Firefox instead of an extension.

That's because Mozilla literally owns Pocket, and sure, it's also perfect for an extension. So you can see why they might be willing to take on that maintenance burden for an uptick in usage.

And I'm not sure how that invalidates anything I said above, or really is of any relevance at all.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#170

Post by ComputerGuru » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 11:01 PM UTC

jeena wrote: post #108

SamWhited wrote: post #11

Just as importantly, please add a meta tag that links to the RSS or Atom feed correctly so feed readers can discover it. Medium (which I hate and you should feel bad if you're using) finally added RSS feeds, but I still have to try and figure out what the hell they are every single time because they're not linked from anywhere and can't be discovered by my feed reader.

I have the problem that those meta links are kind of useless nowadays because Firefox removed the possibility to use Navigator.registerContentHandler() so I could redirect from the Feed button in the Firefox UI to TT-RSS. Now the button in the UI let's me download the Feed resource which doesn't make sense.

I believe the rss:// protocol could (still can?) be used to shell out to your reader.