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

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#191

Post by geerlingguy » Sun, May 17, 2020, 9:58 PM UTC

Crespyl wrote: post #71

nanna wrote: post #60

RSS seems to me to have use cases far beyond website updates, if it was extended a little. Event syndication. Say that I'd collect the event feeds from a load of cinemas, music venues I like around the world, why not, plus those of musicians. I want my RSS-based events reader to narrow down the date field to be this weekend, location to be my town, and ticket field to be available, and why not price to something I ca…

It's really not that RSS couldn't handle (/be extended to handle) this use case, it's that the parties publishing this information do not want you to have that much control over the feed . See how much effort Netflix puts into making their catalog hard to browse, to obfuscate the actual size of the catalog and promote specific things they need to show a large return on, or all the sponsorships/ad-deals/promotions tha…

Remember the heady days when Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, et all had almost open access to their 'social graphs', allowing people to grab content from one place, post to another, build connections using tools like Yahoo Pipes? I sometimes long for simpler days when companies were more open with their data. Didn't Netflix even have a more open api back in the day that you could rank and sort, and see new release dates, etc?

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#192

Post by dantondwa » Sun, May 17, 2020, 10:03 PM UTC

RSS works pretty well for me. Every single website I follow supports it, both the mainstream and the niche ones. I use on my desktop and phone NetNewsWire, which is a great, fast and simple piece of software. Overall, I’d say RSS is not the latest and greatest anymore, but it keeps working for me.

In fact, I use RSS for this website as well.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#193

Post by aiilns » Sun, May 17, 2020, 10:14 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…

Right now the top reply's first sentence is this: > Maybe the world needs an unmonetizable space.

I have noticed that people in hackernews generally tend to look things from a, excuse me for saying so, narrow business "make money" perspective. Or maybe it's somewhat US related, I'm not sure.

There are thousands of sites that don't live from advertising. Government, universities, and every public or even private institute has a site to provide information, news, announcements etc. There are also hobbyists' sites who are never going to make money from adverts.

Not everything should be reduced to a Facebook page.

Not everything should be about money.

First and foremost I think there is a need to recalibrate what matters and what actions that requires.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#194

Post by evantahler » Sun, May 17, 2020, 10:15 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…

I've seen a number of news RSS feeds that only give you the first paragraph or a summary in RSS, and to get the rest, you need to log into the site (paywall). I think this is quite an OK RSS business model - it's like a preview, and you pay to get the rest.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#195

Post by k1m » Sun, May 17, 2020, 10:15 PM UTC

pedro1976 wrote: post #179

As 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 :) https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy/

This looks interesting, thanks for sharing the link! I work on a project that's somewhat similar but users have to be explicit (using CSS selectors) about the elements that will be used to create the feed.[1] I like that yours appears to try to pick out the best elements without user input.

[1] http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#196

Post by topherPedersen » Sun, May 17, 2020, 10:20 PM UTC

Signed up for Feedly, now following danielmiessler.com, and added a super sweet RSS button to my WordPress blog, https://topherpedersen.blog.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#197

Post by saralily » Sun, May 17, 2020, 10:27 PM UTC

Some of us never left. Reading this is weird, like someone "rediscovering" your suburban house.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#198

Post by wasdfff » Sun, May 17, 2020, 10:31 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…

But the thing is, it’s not dead nor dying. I don’t think very many major websites have stopped their rss feeds. Maybe it’s just you that isn’t using it. There is rarely a webpage that I find that can’t be followed via rss, either natively which is most always the case, but there are also services that an rss-ize content.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#199

Post by k1m » Sun, May 17, 2020, 10:33 PM UTC

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #151

worble wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I do mind such RSS feeds that just try to force people to load the webpage. With the vast majority of my RSS feeds, I never have to leave Emacs’ Elfeed RSS reader to consume daily news. If a feed won't let me see the full content in RSS, then I am more likely to delete the feed than become a pair of eyeballs for the website’s advertisers.

I work on a project to convert partial feeds into full-text versions. It pulls in the article content from each feed item and then creates a new full-text feed. Feel free to try it out here: http://ftr.fivefilters.org/

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#200

Post by wasdfff » Sun, May 17, 2020, 10:34 PM UTC

saralily wrote: post #197

Some of us never left. Reading this is weird, like someone "rediscovering" your suburban house.

I’ve been hearing the death bell for RSS for over a decade and here I am not noticing any difference in the quanitity or availability of feeds. RSS is no longer mainstream and deep into the nerd territory, but claims about its death have been greatly exaggerated.