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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

#311

Post by lordgrenville »

Kye wrote: post #307
lordgrenville wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stuff like Bloomberg, Thomson-Reuters, etc is valuable to a specific type of professional and will always have a niche audience. That isn't really what the discussion is about. Reporting on corruption and injustice is critical to a society, but doesn't have any monetary value. The way I see it, we already have a way we choose to fund that kind of thing: non-profits/NGOs. Some media outlets (Vox, The Guardian) are alr…

ProPublica seems to break a couple of huge stories every year operating as a nonprofit. The fact that they aren't ad funded means they don't have to churn out lots of Content to keep eyeballs coming, so I know every story I hear from them is worth my attention.

Yeah, it's a good example.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#312

Post by taborj »

kinix wrote: post #284
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…

I often ponder about the current push towards federation in tech such as Mastodon, and wonder if the issue isn't more around the issue of finding the sites in the first place, rather than being able to access sites via RSS. RSS is usually a default in many web publishing tools (wordpress, hugo etc). As someone getting into RSS more recently, I've definitely struggled to find decent sites to follow (though trawling ha…

Building a list of RSS feeds takes time. I find that when I stumble across a new site (regardless of how I got there), I poke around to see if the content is interesting. If so, I seek out an RSS feed for it.

Note there are ways to get an RSS feed from some sites without them (RSS-Bridge[0] is what I use), but the experience is much better if the site natively produces one.

In time, you'll find yourself with hundreds of feeds on a variety of topics.

[0] https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#313

Post by botolo »

I think the comments here are mixing two different issues: information delivery and creators rewards.

For information delivery, RSS is great and the author of the article is right.

Creators reward is an issue that needs to be solved in any case. Ads help but you need a lot of traffic to make it worth it and they disrupt the reading experience.

Hopefully crypto and tipping will solve this, but I still need to see a good implementation of this.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#314

Post by jamesponddotco »

ddevault wrote: post #201

Feedly seems nice but it's a total non-starter due to the lack of an email-based signup. I have none of the social media accounts it wants you to log in with and it'll be a cold day in hell before I share that much personal information with an RSS reader anyway. But a brief reading of the privacy policy will tell you that Feedly is a data hoarder and has every intention of selling that information: https://feedly.com…

I use, and recommend Feedbin[1].

The interface is pretty good, privacy is respected as far as I can see, service is hosted on their own hardware, not in the cloud, the author is very responsive when issues arrive, and the code is available for self-hosting[2].

It is also how I keep up with people on Twitter, and YouTube, without having to access Twitter or YouTube.

[1] https://feedbin.com/

[2] https://github.com/feedbin

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#315

Post by ryankrage77 »

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…

> 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

This exactly describes my experience on this website.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#316

Post by taborj »

pankajdoharey wrote: post #280
aiilns wrote: post #193

Earlier 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…

The blog itself seemed like an example of content marketing, As is evident from "I challenge you to signup for Feedly" at the end of the article.

Yeah, I can't decide if that was a "this is convenient" or "I'm getting paid to hock this service." Either way, there are other ways to get RSS feeds; I run my own FreshRSS server, but there are apps for your phone/tablet that can use instead.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#317

Post by taborj »

Andrex wrote: post #57

I'm moving from Feedly to self-hosted Tiny Tiny RSS soon: https://tt-rss.org Would be fun if others did the same and posted about their experiences!

I used tt-rss for a long time, but about 6 months ago I moved over to FreshRSS.

But either way, self-hosted RSS is the way to go. Nobody can take it away from you...

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#318

Post by tomjen3 »

You can do this: most rss feed readers allow you to add a website and it will find the feed for you. You can do this with youtube channels too, because youtube publishes an RSS feed for each channel.

There are also RSS feeds for HN, which I know because I arrived here via one of them.

Edit: This should have been in reply to a comment that I now can't find.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#320

Post by tomjen3 »

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…

The parties in that case would be the venues, cinemas, concert halls, etc. They don't to control any platform, they want that information to be freely available. They want lots of sites to show case them (remember, comoditize your complements).
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