It’s Time to Get Back to RSS • Hacker News Board

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#11

Post by apostacy » Sun, May 17, 2020, 4:20 PM UTC

This is why I was so heartbroken when Mozilla removed first party RSS support from Firefox, for what seemed like an extremely flimsy justification.[1]

RSS should be ubiquitous, and seen as an essential part of any service that serves structured incremental content. People should be emailing webmasters asking why there is no little orange icon.

It also serves as a back door form of accessibility. But I strongly suspect that RSS goes against the interests of big tech who don't like RSS, because companies like Facebook go through so much trouble to make it difficult to scrape or modify their content.

I just wish that Mozilla would stand up more to their corporate underwriters. Now RSS is relegated to add-ons, and is on the same tier gopher (no offense to gopher).

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17613051

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#12

Post by thelazydogsback » Sun, May 17, 2020, 4:21 PM UTC

bertman wrote: post #4

From the article: Not only will this reduce your anxiety and churn from constantly opening and closing various sites, but RSS also shows the content in a standard format, with less to distract you. Hmm, if you get anxiety from closing and opening tabs, you should probably go offline for a while.

I dunno -- bookmarking, checking up on sites, tab-management, etc., is all-in-all a pretty poor experience IMHO. There are plug-ins, but none are great and they are not interoperable.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#13

Post by thelazydogsback » Sun, May 17, 2020, 4:22 PM UTC

apostacy wrote: post #11

This is why I was so heartbroken when Mozilla removed first party RSS support from Firefox, for what seemed like an extremely flimsy justification.[1] RSS should be ubiquitous, and seen as an essential part of any service that serves structured incremental content. People should be emailing webmasters asking why there is no little orange icon. It also serves as a back door form of accessibility. But I strongly suspec…

Innoreader can make a virtual feed from changes that appear in any site -- a new feature I haven't tried yet. Used to use Google Reader, but now I pay for Inno, which I'm happy to do.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#14

Post by _curious_ » Sun, May 17, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

I agree with this OP/authors thesis...long live RSS!

But don't tell me the answer to anything is found in signing up for / purchasing a specific product, then it becomes a commercial :/

"It’s unclear what exactly destroyed RSS"

The driving force (well before Google decided to close reader) is that many professional publishers (those who made a living/ran a pubco, notsomuch indie bloggers) stopped supporting RSS because it was harder to monetize RSS content consumers for obvious reasons.

Even mid-late 2000s, I remember literally hacking constantly breaking RSS feeds from major sites or going back n forth with pubco support/webmaster requesting (at times even paying) for a custom feed because the format was so efficient.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#15

Post by pembrook » Sun, May 17, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

The reason RSS failed to reach mainstream adoption by users is because it is not user friendly at all. While I love RSS myself, no amount of tech nerd nostalgia is going to make it popular enough that your mom starts using it.

Most sites still have implemented RSS in a terrible way. For example, many blogs I follow only show excerpts in their feeds. So the feed is worthless to me. Others put every podcast episode they do every day in between their posts. Annoying and worthless.

Then, if you want to follow a site that publishes a lot of content, often you have to subscribe to everything or nothing. Sorry all mainstream tech news sites. I don’t want to read 1,000 low quality articles every day.

Then comes the UX nightmare of actually finding the feed on each website you visit. If the site even has one.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#16

Post by Thristle » Sun, May 17, 2020, 4:25 PM UTC

After google reader went dark i used "The Old Reader" and when they moved to pay only (or they closed? i can't remember) i moved to inoreader

its the only way i consume news/blogs. there is no way im checking 40+ websites every day for new content and that way i won't miss anything

if a site has no RSS or its RSS feed doesn't work right chances are i just won't use that site

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#17

Post by apostacy » Sun, May 17, 2020, 4:25 PM UTC

thelazydogsback wrote: post #13

apostacy wrote: post #11

This is why I was so heartbroken when Mozilla removed first party RSS support from Firefox, for what seemed like an extremely flimsy justification.[1] RSS should be ubiquitous, and seen as an essential part of any service that serves structured incremental content. People should be emailing webmasters asking why there is no little orange icon. It also serves as a back door form of accessibility. But I strongly suspec…

Innoreader can make a virtual feed from changes that appear in any site -- a new feature I haven't tried yet. Used to use Google Reader, but now I pay for Inno, which I'm happy to do.

That is pretty cool.

But unfortunately that is not really a solution. It is like saying that it is ok that a website removed screen-reader support, because you have a screen reader that can still parse the website anyway. The problem is RSS not being made available at all.

RSS being made available less and less, and they have less of an incentive to do so. And I am saddened that a lot of the good work Mozilla did was abandoned by them and that the web is regressing.

Additionally, having to make your own scraper is really not a solution to RSS not being available. Scrapers are very high maintenance, and can easily break with updates.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#18

Post by thelazydogsback » Sun, May 17, 2020, 4:26 PM UTC

pembrook wrote: post #15

The reason RSS failed to reach mainstream adoption by users is because it is not user friendly at all. While I love RSS myself, no amount of tech nerd nostalgia is going to make it popular enough that your mom starts using it. Most sites still have implemented RSS in a terrible way. For example, many blogs I follow only show excerpts in their feeds. So the feed is worthless to me. Others put every podcast episode the…

Other than the issue of posting abridged content, it seem like all the other issues can be handled with a capable client. It's better to post more (inlc. the podcasts, etc.) and then filter as you desire, no?

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#19

Post by PappaPatat » Sun, May 17, 2020, 4:26 PM UTC

Thristle wrote: post #16

After google reader went dark i used "The Old Reader" and when they moved to pay only (or they closed? i can't remember) i moved to inoreader its the only way i consume news/blogs. there is no way im checking 40+ websites every day for new content and that way i won't miss anything if a site has no RSS or its RSS feed doesn't work right chances are i just won't use that site

The Old Reader works like a champ.

I went the same route as you did, and have the same attitude towards sites that do not provide a RSS feed: they drop of my radar.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#20

Post by edhelas » Sun, May 17, 2020, 4:29 PM UTC

If we get back to RSS, can we at least all stick to Atom 1.0 :) ? It's way stricter, simpler and easier to use, and I never found a parser that was not accepting it.