If it wasn't for podcasting, I wonder if RSS wouldn't actually be dead by now.
It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
171–180 of 376 posts
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#172Site aggregators and RSS don't contradict each other. In fact, I'm reading this very post through my HN RSS feed.
RSS is not only great for providing _content_, but also for learning/trivia/facts. That's why I've created Tip of the Day [1], which provides daily tips on different topics (e.g. logical fallacies, chemical elements etc.). It's open source, so other topics can be added by anyone.
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#173For me, I joined twitter, followed all the authors I loved, and then my RSS reader became redundant. It wasn't deliberate, it wasn't terribly conscious. I got the same content, a whole lot more personality, and even some interactions and discussions with the author and other readers.
I heard this same sentiment a ton when Twitter first got big. But there are things that RSS is incredibly useful for that Twitter is terrible for, and vice versa.
For RSS, I use it to follow company and engineering feeds: every web browser and every major product all have feeds. e.g., I follow the Safari, Google Chrome, and Firefox browser feeds to learn about current and upcoming updates. And the best part is I can read them only once a week, and they do not disappear from my "timeline".
OTOH, I stopped subscribing to news via RSS years ago. Trying to make sense of every single headline some news site published--usually dozens per day for most of them--is impractical. And while there's a lot of blog authors I like to read, I just can't keep up with them either. Better to just set aside some time once a week and skim their sites.
The thing about Twitter I never liked is the feeling that I had to be on it all the time, every second, or I would "miss" something. But screw that, I have things to do, and I'll catch up when I catch up.
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#174You can read content from Hacker News, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and a lot of other platforms using an RSS reader. You can even receive newsletters there.
I wrote about the process here: https://blog.mironov.live/how-to-build-your-personal-news-in...
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
RSS and bookmarks bypass Google, meaning less money for the browser. Yes Firefox is funded by ads (Google ads). It seems to me that Mozilla executives has no fortitude. They prefer revenue rather then invention and what's best for the user. KaiOS is becoming the third biggest mobile OS, guess what it's FirefoxOS, but Mozilla was too afraid to give it a shot. Then there's the Rust programming language that is taking t…
> RSS and bookmarks bypass Google Bollocks! Google - and any search engine - cannot help you find an exact web-page you found after hours of researching while web-surfing earlier. And RSS feeds are for when you’re already interested in a content source. Google searches help you find something new: they won’t help you automatically be informed of new posts. They just save you the time of having to manually sort-out ne…
> that’s why some content authors, like Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, as an example, only provide their full RSS feed to paying subscribers
This is false. I am not a paying subscriber, but I still get the full content of Daring Fireball articles in my RSS reader. In fact, the RSS feed is one of the links on the site’s sidebar. https://daringfireball.net/feeds/
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#176RSS is dying (or dead) because it was incompatible with the dominant business model on the internet -- advertising. This is why Google killed it. This is why lots of professional publishers hated it. With HTTP you'd be able to earn money via embedded ads but you'd earn exactly $0 via RSS since the feed was stripped of ads, just content. This forced publishers to put useless blurbs, redirecting to the HTTP version, wh…
Micropayments have been tried. They all failed. The fair market price for content is $0. What is happening is that the only publishers that will exist shall be only those who create it for free. There is simply a glut of content out there because the barrier to creating content is completely gone.
The legions of small publishers making a living on substack beg to differ.
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#177As someone who is a heavy user of RSS feeds (check my cryptography RSS feed[1]) and has had to implement RSS feeds for my websites: 1. we need to move away from XML. JSON would be a much better modern candidate. 2. we need better support in all web-first programming languages, and possibly in web frameworks. 3. we need to have a stricter set of rules on how to use HTML5 tags like articles, sections, and such. An RSS…
For #1, check out JSON Feed (https://jsonfeed.org/). It’s at least supported by Feedly, and it’s probably supported elsewhere too.
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#178RSS is dying (or dead) because it was incompatible with the dominant business model on the internet -- advertising. This is why Google killed it. This is why lots of professional publishers hated it. With HTTP you'd be able to earn money via embedded ads but you'd earn exactly $0 via RSS since the feed was stripped of ads, just content. This forced publishers to put useless blurbs, redirecting to the HTTP version, wh…
+1. This is one of the areas where the profit motive leaders to a worse user experience in a competitive environment.
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#179As one that loves and RSS and hated that many websites don't offer them anymore, I created a middleware that transforms the static HTML of most websites to an RSS/Atom feed. Its just a proof-of-concept, but maybe you like it :)
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#180One of the best parts about an RSS reader is that it doesn’t report every click back to Advertising Central to update the profile they keep on you.