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

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#181

Post by clarkmoody » Sun, May 17, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

DevX101 wrote: post #53

RSS 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) client sends request for content with some header with payment information attached. 2) server verifies payment transferred. 3) server responds to client with content after payment verification.

This is exactly the recently-proposed LSAT protocol[0]. It uses the HTTP402 response code to prompt for payment over the Lightning Network in exchange for a cryptographic bearer credential that may be used in future requests to the server.

[0] https://lsat.tech/

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#182

Post by HunOL » Sun, May 17, 2020, 9:29 PM UTC

worble wrote: post #80

DevX101 wrote: post #53

RSS 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…

> This forced publishers to put useless blurbs, redirecting to the HTTP version, which was a bad user experience and just sucked. Is this that bad? I personally don't mind this at all, I subscribe to RSS feeds so I can easily tell at a glance who has an update in one place. If they then want to redirect me for the full content, then so be it, especially if the alternative is me loading every single one of those sites…

Absolutely agree. I just can't get why in every discussion about RSS somebody mentions that y it's dead because publishers had to give away content for free. Feed could contain full article, but don't have to.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#183

Post by pjmlp » Sun, May 17, 2020, 9:32 PM UTC

> We all mourned when Reader died and took RSS with it, but it's time to return to what made it great

I did not, I just kept using native clients like Outlook. No big deal.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#184

Post by DaiPlusPlus » Sun, May 17, 2020, 9:36 PM UTC

j-f1 wrote: post #175

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/

That's not the "full feed", that's $19/yr and mentioned here: https://daringfireball.net/members/info

> However, paying supporters do get access to a few members-only perquisites, including separate full-content RSS feeds for articles and the Linked List (my daily list of links and blurbs related to Mac, web, and design nerdery).

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#185

Post by messo » Sun, May 17, 2020, 9:40 PM UTC

lildata wrote: post #95

I believe Mastodon should support RSS, at least some users would use it at first as a feed aggregator as then progressively switch to the social media aspects of the platform.

This! I would love to be able to add some blogs to my mastodon feed.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#186

Post by encom » Sun, May 17, 2020, 9:40 PM UTC

gmoore wrote: post #5

I love RSS - it's how I found this article :) I've been using The Old Reader every since Google reader shut down...I love it.

Though I don't use it for reading HN, I've been using The Old Reader since Google Reader shut down. It's basically a copy of Google Reader as it was.

https://theoldreader.com/

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#187

Post by Zhyl » Sun, May 17, 2020, 9:40 PM UTC

niemenmaa wrote: post #102

Zhyl wrote: post #44

Haven't seen newsboat be mentioned so far. I've written a bunch of scripts that help subscribe to feeds (e.g. search YouTube for keyword and add RSS feed for channel of the top hit), scripts to curate (e.g. extract 'topics' from BBC articles that are only available on the page and not in the RSS feed) and consume (watch videos with mpv, open images in feh, add long videos to a backlog). It's one of the best news expe…

Care to share your scripts? Avid newsboat user here also!

They're very messy - they've built up slowly over the last year or so. Will add some comments over the next few days!

https://github.com/daharka/newsboat_scripts

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#188

Post by bane » Sun, May 17, 2020, 9:47 PM UTC

RSS is dead, but API-drive API access to data on a monthly subscription is all over many industries. Why not just sell access to an RSS feed on a subscription?

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#189

Post by varenc » Sun, May 17, 2020, 9:55 PM UTC

VLM wrote: post #99

DevX101 wrote: post #53

RSS 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…

Maybe the world needs an unmonetizable space. I keep hearing how RSS is dead for many years. My favorite blogs seem to be doing fine, its not like my newsblur stream of posts has decreased over the years. Many people are unhappy about non-monetized readers and authors just being happy off by themselves. The people most able to "fix" that are the happy readers and authors, and the readers are not very motivated to spa…

For the blogs and writers you follow that use RSS, are they really choosing to forgo a meaningful monetization opportunity?

Unless a blog really has ~50,000+ daily uniques, or a lucractive audience niche, I suspect there’s not much opportunity to monetize even if they wanted to.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#190

Post by marcus_holmes » Sun, May 17, 2020, 9:56 PM UTC

Dotnaught wrote: post #121

zelly wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fair market price for content is $0. That's a gross oversimplification. Lots of content isn't worth anything but some is. If you're a stock trader, for example, certain timely information is well-worth paying for. And there's a market for that served by Bloomberg, Thomson-Reuters, and so on. The term "content" obscures the differences by suggesting its all interchangeable. That's certainly in the interest of the…

I think journalism is going to have to clean up its act a lot before I'm willing to trust it enough to pay for it.

I'm seeing more credible journalism done by bloggers than the mainstream media at the moment.