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It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

danielmiessler.com

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Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#221

Post by [deleted] »

k1m wrote: post #199
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

[deleted]

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#222

Post by nl »

bastawhiz wrote: post #88
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 is why Google killed it. Is this true? It certainly doesn't feel like it. Reader was a first party branded reader. Google could put ads on Reader relevant to your interests (which they'd have been more keenly aware of than if you weren't using Reader), and they didn't have to pay out the publishers. Google killed Reader, I think, for the second reason you mentioned: publishers were neutering their feeds. Reade…

Google says they killed Reader because of declining usage[1], and there was little reason to doubt that at the time. It's very true that people were switching to mobile consumption and no longer reading lots of news all at once.

I was a heavy user of Reader (and did huge amounts of work on RSS/Atom/etc), and I agreed with this assessment at the time.

More and more publishers were just putting headlines in RSS, so you had to click through anyway, and commercial blog sites were publishing a much larger volume of content, most of which I ignored. But I didn't want to unsubscribe, because occasionally there was something good.

Given that, I was finding much better content through aggregators like HN or via Twitter/FB.

Maybe they could have iterated and built something different, but what they had really wasn't useful.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2013/06/why-google-reader-got-the-ax/

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#223

Post by [deleted] »

KajMagnus wrote: post #77
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.

> Micropayments have been tried. They all failed Would be interesting to read about that — you happen to have any links? I websearched for "failed micropayments" and found: "One type of micropayment that does work — one you might not even think of as a micropayment — is in-app-purchases (IAP). IAP are a huge source of revenue [...]" And: "One reason users don’t like micropayments for content [to read] is it requires…

[deleted]

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#224

Post by zelly »

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 meant "content" as in cultural content--articles, Q&A submissions, blog posts, takes, memes, recipes, how-tos, tutorials. Content that makes up >80% of G search results. At one time, there was a price for such content because you could only get it from a print publication or from broadcast television. Now that there are no barriers to posting, we see how many people actually want to publish content even if they have to pay out of pocket to host it (i.e., making the price of their content negative since the consumer gets to freeload bandwidth without ads and consume content).

> Pricing news content is hard because it has a different value to different people and often the value is only apparent after it has been consumed.

You're suggesting that journalism is a public good because the value is captured by society as a whole as opposed to by the individual newspaper subscriber. I wouldn't argue against investigative journalism being important for democracy etc., but why does it need to cost anything (even by the public)? What about the whole Harvey Weinstein/MeToo saga which started after some individuals made some tweets without being paid by a journalism company to do so. There is no shortage of outraged citizen activists who will do "investigative journalism". I don't know why their free work should automatically be considered inferior just because they don't have a journalism degree and aren't being paid by a journalism company.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#225

Post by nl »

geerlingguy wrote: post #191
Crespyl wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

You realise what the most successful thing built on top of that open social graph was, right?

Cambridge Analytica.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#226

Post by gregn »

This article is completely wrong. Slashdot, Digg and Reddit were already at 100% of full-power way before Google Reader ever shut down. And him citing that the causes are unknown is so completely naive. It's obvious. And it was obvious at the time to many who used RSS in 2012. Google is in the ad business, and RSS doesn't do adds. Not really, and not then. They realized they were competing with themselves and closed it; it's that simple. God, I feel like I got baited to reading that post because there was no new or insightful information whatsoever other than the title line. We should bring back RSS, and make the web more about conversations and communicating, than listicles and click-bait. 5-10MB of Javascript per page load, 1px tracking images, endless stupid ads, and now every single site that I go to has a pop-over that I should sign up for something, which gets in the way of the content that I am only going to spend 30 seconds reading anyway and then never return to that site ever again. The web has very quickly become a cesspool of non-information. It's like a bad shopping mall.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#227

Post by zelly »

KajMagnus wrote: post #77
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.

> Micropayments have been tried. They all failed Would be interesting to read about that — you happen to have any links? I websearched for "failed micropayments" and found: "One type of micropayment that does work — one you might not even think of as a micropayment — is in-app-purchases (IAP). IAP are a huge source of revenue [...]" And: "One reason users don’t like micropayments for content [to read] is it requires…

Sure, just look around, do you see any successful micropayments processing companies? Do you use any of them? If any of them were successful, you wouldn't be asking this question.

There was a wave of micropayments startups about 6 years ago. The only one I remember is Flattr. The crypto bubble came and gave new hope because maybe the reason micropayments failed before was the credit card processing fees. Nope, still didn't work. I don't use Brave Rewards and have never heard of anyone making more than pennies with it.

Xanadu was one of the original visions of the internet from the 1960s. It sounded like a lot of the idealistic plans people come up with for micropayments where content creators can collect micropayments from viewers. Of course it didn't work.

Micropayments is an absolute cemetery of a business model.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#228

Post by zelly »

ericflo wrote: post #122
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.

What about games? People pay tons of money for them, and they are content too. When Cyberpunk 2077 comes out later this year, try telling people it's worth $0. I think the difference is social norms. The internet having no real built-in payment mechanism has obliterated the norm of paying for most content. Games have held the line, but things like Google Stadia and Apple Arcade are working to change that.

A game is intellectual property like a movie. If I copy and paste 1/5th of your game, you can sue me and win. If I copy and paste 1/5th of your blog post, as long as I put quote marks around it, I'm safe.

Games won't become free until it's easy for commoners to make them. Even with Unity and all the easy plug and chug game dev resources, it's still hard and requires multiple people with different talents.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#229

Post by 6510 »

gregn wrote: post #226

This article is completely wrong. Slashdot, Digg and Reddit were already at 100% of full-power way before Google Reader ever shut down. And him citing that the causes are unknown is so completely naive. It's obvious. And it was obvious at the time to many who used RSS in 2012. Google is in the ad business, and RSS doesn't do adds. Not really, and not then. They realized they were competing with themselves and closed…

I completely agree except that I think google did it intentionally. They did a fine job shutting down other things in similar ways like newsgroups.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#230

Post by 6510 »

varenc wrote: post #189
VLM wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Their headlines in my aggregator are advertisement.
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