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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

#341

Post by SllX »

gspr wrote: post #337
SllX wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is news to me, and I’ll keep it in mind. Personally I’m not so sure I would boycott for the sake of effecting a policy change as I simply wouldn’t continue listening because the only thing that makes podcasts tolerable is that I’m filtering them through Overcast’s smart speed. Can’t stand talk shows at the pace of a normal conversation.

> This is news to me, and I’ll keep it in mind. Granted, I only have two immediate examples: * Season 2 of The Onion's hilarious true crime parody ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Fatal_Murder ) is exclusively on a platform called Luminary. I can't even figure out exactly what Luminary is, because they serve me with a special can of "Luminary is not yet available in your location" crap. Not that I care anyway.…

I woke up today, checked Hacker News and saw Joe Rogan setup an exclusive deal with Spotify or more specifically, Spotify setup an exclusive deal with Joe Rogan. I was thinking about this thread all day. I've never listened to any of his podcasts because there's so many podcasts out there that I'm more interested in I just haven't gotten around to trying the Joe Rogan Experience. I like the idea of someone that just gets someone into a room and let's them speak from the heart or shoot from the hip about whatever their pet issue, policy, thing they are known for is, but I also have plenty of other discussion format podcasts I'm subscribed to and working through the backlog of.

Luminary by the way is one of those "we're going to do podcasting but it's not really podcasting because we're going to lock things up behind our paywall." kinds of "podcasting" apps. Think of it as Spotify but without the music or (I believe) without the free tier. Mind I've never signed up, but I remember there were a big story last year, or maybe it was the year before? Either way, they aspire to be the Spotify of Podcasts and Spotify is also trying to be the Spotify of Podcasts. I think Spotify is probably winning that exchange.

The strange thing is, a lot of these podcasts could probably get away with charging more directly if they wanted to. Joe Rogan has literally millions of fans, and charging for episodes isn't exactly incompatible with RSS. It just means you need to authenticate for access to the feed which is fine. I do that with TechMeme Ride Home subscribing to their ad-free feed. I think I'm paying $5 a month for that at the moment. I also pay for podcasts that don't have a premium feed per se and can be found in every podcast directory, but are products of news and political commentary organizations to which I pay a monthly or annual sum to support, primarily because I enjoy their podcasts (and newsletters) so much. I get access to their websites and dead tree print editions, but really it's the podcasts I find I like the most out of the deal and am happy to pay for just those.

And Joe Rogan is bigger than almost all of those, so selling out to Spotify to try to be the next Howard Stern feels a bit like he's selling himself short. Welp, we live in a free society with free markets and he's free to do that if he wants to. I get that he's a controversial figure for some, but so are Howard Stern and PewDiePie and last I checked, they're doing fine.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#342

Post by pinkano »

ddevault wrote: post #303
pinkano wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Petr from Feedly, please let us know where in the Privacy Policy you read we're a data hoarder and selling information? We're doing the exact opposite and we can afford it with Feedly Pro, Pro+ and Business as they feed our business so we can stay profitable without the need to sell any customer data.

> We may share some or all of your personal information in connection with or during negotiation of any merger, financing, acquisition or dissolution, transaction or proceeding involving sale, transfer, divestiture, or disclosure of all or a portion of our business or assets. In the event of an insolvency, bankruptcy, or receivership, personal information may also be transferred as a business asset. If another compan…

Good point, this is valid only if a merger or acquisition happens so we're not selling anything or using your data in any way to give/sell it to 3rd parties.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#343

Post by nl »

tannerbrockwell wrote: post #338
nl wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"In December 2007, Reader linked up with Google Talk (the chat feature in Gmail) to display shared streams from friends. Within the context of feed reading, it fomented something of a Neolithic Revolution. Foragers, hitherto gathering headlines on a crude and solitary basis, became farmers, cultivating streams of information for their neighbors. Sharing increased 25% overnight." [1] [1]: https://www.buzzfeed.com/robf…

What they didn't point out there was that feature was a disaster for many users.

There was no separation of the chat friends and the people that you followed.

I've still got random people in my address books from that debacle.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#344

Post by dna_polymerase »

nojito wrote: post #321
dna_polymerase wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, you can. The company is the monopoly not the userbase.

No you literally can't..one of the legal tests is market share.

Oh so, you meant Apple's userbase not the entirety of RSS users?

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#345

Post by KajMagnus »

zelly wrote: post #227
KajMagnus wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Thanks for the reply, didn't know about Xanadu. Didn't come to think about Flattr.

> If any of them were successful, you wouldn't be asking this question

If you change from to: "successful" to "hugely successful in all English speaking countries" then I agree ... almost,

But there're also different continents and countries and different languages

... Which prompted me to now search for "Chinese micropayments" — and:

> "[the company's] growing profit margins are riding the wave of China's exploding media micropayment economy"

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/tencent-music-uses-ti...

Reading a bit more on different sites: Apparently this started 5 years ago and has been working well, in China. Micropayments. A little bit I got the impression it's currently being used primarily for tipping.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#346

Post by bonoboTP »

SllX wrote: post #322
gspr wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> podcasts are arguably more popular than they’ve ever been (this period of time with the coronavirus possibly excepted). There's been a worrying trend of some podcasts shifting to a "get our app" mode of delivery. I've been boycotting each one, and been encouraging the podcasts I donate to to explicitly keep the RSS delivery.

This is news to me, and I’ll keep it in mind. Personally I’m not so sure I would boycott for the sake of effecting a policy change as I simply wouldn’t continue listening because the only thing that makes podcasts tolerable is that I’m filtering them through Overcast’s smart speed. Can’t stand talk shows at the pace of a normal conversation.

I used to speed them up as well but I stopped doing it for now as I feel like the time is not only there to hear the words and the surface meaning (I can do that at 2x), but to digest it and take it further inspire thought in myself. I sometimes even pause and think.

Depends on the type of show of course. But if they are talking about some interesting deep topic, I find it useful to use that time to think more. It's kind of the difference between skimming and flipping through a book vs reading a paragraph and looking up, pondering a bit, then reading along, after a chapter standing up and walking back and forth a bit in the room, thinking.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#348

Post by reanimated »

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.

Well, there are still affiliate links, you can still promote your own products like courses or books and invite readers to subscribe to paid newsletter. Most of my subscribed authors have Patreon now and it generates much more than ads would.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#349

Post by reanimated »

taborj wrote: post #312
kinix wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Last month Inoreader introduced this feature too: https://blog.inoreader.com/2020/04/convert-almost-any-webpag...
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