I never stopped using RSS but I'm glad that more people are starting to use it.
It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
241–250 of 376 posts
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 insti…
I do a lot of things for free because I have the luxury of a job that pays well. Not everyone has that kind of freedom and if someone wants to put food on the table, then money has to be a factor. Otherwise you'd lock a lot of things to only people who have extra time to take risks on activities that won't get them anything in return. Saying not everything should be about money is a pretty privileged position.
Not every activity needs to be a viable way to make money. If you're struggling to put food on the table, maybe you should explore other avenues for making money besides blogging. If you want to write, there are lots of ways to get paid for writing.
Everyone has activities they enjoy that don't produce any income. Just because people enjoy an activity doesn't mean that there has to be a way to make a living from it. People enjoy playing video games, riding horses, sailing, painting. For most people they will not be able to support themselves with these things and we generally don't think that we have to go out of our way to make it possible for them to, so why is blogging different?
The general order of business goes "Here is something people are willing to pay money for -> You can do this and make money" not "Here is something I want people to pay me money for -> Pay me money for this"
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#243RSS 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…
Agreed. The RSS can easily be equivalent to a Tweet with a link attached. I like Thunderbird on desktops including RasPi, have yet to explore cross platform + floss mobile or web readers, but have built my own little youtube-like stack with RSS that is similar to YT’s feed format and can aggregate them, in the iSpooge Live project in Clojure + ClojureScript.
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you gotta connect the dots with UBI here. You wouldn't have to monetize if you didn't have to monetize.
While I agree with this take on UBI. There are middle grounds to explore. The streaming and game services seems to point at monthly subscription fee from an aggregator as a working model. Not sure how they distribute royalties though, I suspect there are many models I won’t agree with based on what they incentivize. Then there are the Kickstarter/patreon. Where money is given more in support than for a specific produ…
I'm keeping my eye on a few people, like Abbadon who makes "Kill Six Billion Demons" and Andrew Kelley the creator of Zig.
But really I think we need a major reconfiguration of our global economic structure.
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#245I don't know why people says that RSS is dead... It is very much alive. I am still using it for everything.
Just because it stagnated and is not as popular as social networks does not mean it is dead.
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#246RSS 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…
Thing is, RSS didn’t “die”. It only ever filled a couple of niches, and arguably it is more popular than it ever was because not only are people still continuing to use RSS readers, podcasts are arguably more popular than they’ve ever been (this period of time with the coronavirus possibly excepted).
I get that when people think of “RSS”, they’re thinking of tech that downloads text and maybe some images into a reader, but it’s just another means of syndicating media. The same places that disseminate the full text continue to do so because they’re not invested in making money directly off the writing, and the same places that have an investment in you going directly to the site continue to operate their feeds in that manner. If you have a browser extension that can discover it, or are willing to do a bit of guesswork, it’s amazing how many new sites launched in the last year that might not expose it on the website (because the webmaster didn’t think it was important to expose even when the CMS has it) actually have a feed you can pass off to a reader.
I don’t think RSS is ever going be competitive with a service like Instagram or Reddit for what they do, but the full value of these services doesn’t lie entirely within a feed and wouldn’t be neatly exposed within the constraints of the RSS or Atom specs to begin with. It’s different, and therefore have other, albeit less popular than social media, uses.
If someone prefers a stream of photographs to a stream of blogs and news sites, and that’s a lot of people, then RSS isn’t going to be competitive for their attention. If somebody prefers the discussions on Reddit and the semi-randomness of sources, RSS isn’t going to be competitive for their attention either. If you don’t care about an image stream (with comments, reactions, stories and whatever else Instagram has), and you can do without the Reddit commentary, well, you may very well have a use for RSS. Or maybe not. If it hasn’t gone away yet (and it really hasn’t), I have a hard time believing it is going anywhere in the near future.
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#247I found this article via RSS.
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#248Funny how there was a post earlier today about "is there a search engine that filters out popular media and such. Well you just answered it with this post.
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#249RSS 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…
This is it exactly. Realtors sued Zillow for essentially publishing MLS data. They lost, thank god.