Live data from Hacker News

Reuters killed their RSS feeds?

reuters.com

81–90 of 127 posts

Re: Reuters killed their RSS feeds?

#81
post #29
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this argument pretty regularly, but I don't understand it. Of course you can run ads in RSS feeds; you can put whatever you want in an RSS feed.

adds in RSS offer much less tracking, spying, etc... of course they are still ads, but that's not the same animal at all.

I'm not contending that dumb ads are the same as ads on the web. I'm saying that the killing off of RSS feeds is not due to lack of ability to advertise.

If it were simply about only showing "smart ads", Reuters could just continue to publish headlines and links without content in their RSS feeds, but they're not.

Re: Reuters killed their RSS feeds?

#82
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hogwash Email works fine. I am in months long conversations with academics and thinkers around the world. Signal works fine. Same story as above. What’s dying is your historical connectivity to specific ideas. That’s hardly a sign fascism and censorship are settling in. And really you’re saying it was impossible for anyone to blindly get addicted to an RSS feed, just reading whatever is posted to it? Good grief. Your…

Email is being replaced by Slack. Maybe RSS / Atom weren't good enough, but what they're being replaced with isn't better either. It's not just about RSS. It's about moving off open standards to closed properties. It's also more effort to integrate different sources as each one has a different API. Indeed, nor the world nor freedom of information will die here, but that doesn't mean it's a step forward.

> Email is being replaced by Slack

I don't know about this one. For example, I'm not going to invite every one of our clients to our Slack as a single-channel guest, nor am I going to be joining their Slack workspaces (if any of them even have one - most of them are in the Microsoft ecosystem). I'm also not going to do that with every vendor I'm in contact with, and so on — email is much more convenient. That being said, most of our internal communication within the company is on Slack, but that's a small slice of what emails are used for.

Re: Reuters killed their RSS feeds?

#83

There should be a way to integrate RSS with a payment model. People should be free to get content they want in any app of their choice based and still be able to pay for it.

There are ways. Lots of podcasts etc are RSS and behind paywalls. Agree we should make it easier and companies are starting to pop up that empower and enable the distributed internet rather than destroying it, even as spotify is making major moves in the other direction.

Re: Reuters killed their RSS feeds?

#84
post #76
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email is being replaced by Slack. Maybe RSS / Atom weren't good enough, but what they're being replaced with isn't better either. It's not just about RSS. It's about moving off open standards to closed properties. It's also more effort to integrate different sources as each one has a different API. Indeed, nor the world nor freedom of information will die here, but that doesn't mean it's a step forward.

Microsoft are leveraging their monopoly in the office world to force teams onto the world, rather than things like Slack, Trello, etc.

>Microsoft are leveraging their monopoly in the office world to force teams onto the world

I'm by no means a MS fanboy but I find your comment odd...

How are they doing this exactly? I'm genuinely curious where you're coming from...

Teams is bundled into O365 but you can use Slack, Mattermost or whatever other product you want.

Re: Reuters killed their RSS feeds?

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask average Joe what's an RSS feed and you'll know. Supporting effectively dead technology doesn't make financial sense for any company.

RSS isn't dead, it's just not popular (never has been). Teletype wasn't popular either, still it was essential to some. And while teletype clearly requires costly specialized hardware, RSS doesn't.

If you'd asked me a half hour ago I would definitely have said RSS' lack of movement was due to it being tired and shagged out after a long squawk, but then this Reuters thing happened and I can categorically assure any one who would like to know that RSS is not dead, it's just pining for the fjords.

Re: Reuters killed their RSS feeds?

#87
post #2

Is there an alternate source for this? It's how I got my news up until it shut down.

Is there an alternate source for this? It's how I got my news up until it shut down. You could always pay for the news you consume.

I tire of this suggestion. It made sense to me, so a few years I started subscribing to several newspapers, digitally.

Suddenly I was getting paper newspapers all the time. This became a safety / security concern because when I would travel, the newspapers would pile up. Nevermind the sheer amount of waste. Since I didn't actually ask for delivery, I had no mechanism to put my deliveries on hold. I contacted the various newspapers 3-8 different times to ask them to stop. Eventually they all only stopped when I cancelled my digital subscription and told them that was the reason.

I also wasn't very happy with the news I was paying to get. Even though I was paying, it was still riddled with ads, and heavy on the click-bait. I would find an article with a compelling subject, but felt the writing lacked substance. So I would go look up similar articles from other sources, and have to read 5 or 6 before I felt I had a good sense of enough of the facts to judge any of the articles by. There was never 1 outlet I could pay for that I consistently felt had a well-rounded, factual statement of a story. I'm not paying for 5 or 6 newspapers and doing that much work for every story I read, sorry. If only for my emotional health, I'll choose to remain ignorant at that point.

This was mostly local papers. I would be willing to try a couple of national papers if they didn't have similar problems, but as far as I can tell, they do - but at least it's less severe.

I probably should support some international news sources as they are a lot better in this regard (like Reuters, Al Jazeera, BBC) but I don't think I've ever been prompted to subscribe. I just checked Reuter's website and I don't even see the option. Is that even the business model with these sources? But that's all beside the point.

If I pay, will I get an RSS feed? No.

Re: Reuters killed their RSS feeds?

#88

why though?

No one wants 255556 notifications/news per day.

I'm not sure you're familiar with RSS. By default, you don't receive notifications for each item, nor do you have to explicitly mark them as read or scroll through their contents.

Re: Reuters killed their RSS feeds?

#89
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask average Joe what's an RSS feed and you'll know. Supporting effectively dead technology doesn't make financial sense for any company.

You can do that question for anything. TCP, HTTP, DNS ...

For those you, can show people that they do use it. For RSS, they don't use it.

I love RSS as much as most of older tech geeks, but I'm fully aware it's as relevant nowadays as usenet, and don't expect non-geeky surfaces to support it.

Re: Reuters killed their RSS feeds?

#90
post #69
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you're right, but this is an extremely optimistic view that does not have much historical precedent.

Looking at all of history, I'm very optimistic. Going way back to Cuneiform and the printing press, and the internet itself, they all point to a general principle of the breaking up of monolithic information sources over time. It might take a while, but it'll happen with the internet too.

What you describe in the digital age will be an illusion of freedom. Delivery of the bits will still be locked down tighter than ever. Delivery allows filtering. The future is very bleak.
Post reply on HN