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I Still Use RSS

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Re: I Still Use RSS

#31

Post by AlecSchueler »

kgwxd wrote: post #25
MereInterest wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, because RSS requires the cooperation of actors who have no incentive to cooperate. If I use an RSS reader to support content, then it is under my control when I read it, if I read it, and what format to read it under. I can view the content however I'd like, and no tracking is there. All of these are unambiguously good things for me, and are anathema for the advertising industry. I cannot use RS…

I'm perfectly happy just getting headlines with links, which seems most common these days, at least for what I subscribe to. It requires I go to their site to get the content where they can (try to) shove anything they want in my face and run whatever trackers they normally do.

This why I personally gave up RSS. I used to enjoy reading things in my RSS reader where I could set things up to be clear to me.

Once they started providing only links back to the WWW browser where everything was hard to read I gave up and now I just suffer reading in the WWW browser and frankly don't read nearly half as much online content as a result.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#32

Post by john-tells-all »

royjacobs wrote: post #7

I'm happily using Feedly ever since Google Reader got shut down. I genuinely would be missing out on a lot of content if people would stop providing RSS feeds, especially for blogs that only update very sporadically.

Seconded. I've been a very happy user of Feedly for years.

If someone posts an interesting, valuable article, what's the probability they'll post more? Very high! I'm happy to subscribe to their content and enjoy their insights!

Related: I now subscribe to Hacker News users via http://hnapp.com/

Example: Jeff Geerling http://hnapp.com/?q=author%3Ageerlingguy

Re: I Still Use RSS

#33

Post by hobs »

Youtube RSS still works well, me and my buddy use it to monitor things instead of using whatever interface youtube has decided today, combine that with youtube-dl and you have a great experience.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#34

Post by bad_username »

royjacobs wrote: post #7

I'm happily using Feedly ever since Google Reader got shut down. I genuinely would be missing out on a lot of content if people would stop providing RSS feeds, especially for blogs that only update very sporadically.

Feedly is best of both worlds - you can use it as a plain linear feed reader, or let it use AI to sort your stuff by popularity and even discover feeds by keywords. Its price is on the steeper end tho, if you want to go pro.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#35

Post by nanna »

I use emacs elfeed for my feeds, however I found it frustrating that my different feed categories - news, views, tech, podcasts, etc - all get jumbled up out of the box into one massive rss firehose.

Eventually I realised I could simply use bookmark.el to quickly create filtered search versions of my feeds based on their respective tags, and now I'm much happier. After setting it up, a `C-x r l` (bookmark-menu-list) later and I get a list that looks like this

  RSS: Daily News        @24-hours-ago +unread +news
  RSS: News              @1-weeks-ago +unread +news
  RSS: Not news          @2-weeks-ago +unread -news -hn
  RSS: tech              @2-weeks-ago +unread +tech
Bookmark.el was written in 1993 by a Karl Fogel in 1993, and it still interoperates nicely with a random newer package like elfeed.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#36

Post by stevekemp »

RSS is awesome! I never got the hang of using a read-application, instead I use rss2email to get copies of posts delivered to my inbox.

There are a few different tools for getting the feeds to email, my own is a pretty simple golang application I run in a docker-container:

https://github.com/skx/rss2email/

Re: I Still Use RSS

#37

Post by ghaff »

royjacobs wrote: post #7

I'm happily using Feedly ever since Google Reader got shut down. I genuinely would be missing out on a lot of content if people would stop providing RSS feeds, especially for blogs that only update very sporadically.

>I genuinely would be missing out on a lot of content if people would stop providing RSS feeds, especially for blogs that only update very sporadically.

For me, that's the real value of RSS even if, truth be told, I'm more inclined to just find stuff through Twitter, here, etc. these days. I agree on Feedly. For all the hate on Google shutting Reader down, I've always seen it as an effect of not many people using RSS rather than a cause.

(I'm also sympathetic to the srsly Google? How much effort would it have taken to keep it going? argument. But, as has frequently been mentioned, working on Reader would probably have been career suicide or at least a guarantee of stagnation for anyone involved given the way Google operates.)

Re: I Still Use RSS

#38

Post by djhworld »

I've mentioned this on HN before, one pattern I've noticed is a lot of sites tend to truncate their RSS feed so you have to click through to see the full article etc. This is mostly OK but kinda frustrating, as in the before-covid times I used to ride the London Underground a lot where no celluar signal is available in the tunnels - so my offline RSS reader would be useless.

So I wrote a little web service accepts an RSS feed, and then crawls each link in it, parses the HTML to extract the text using one of those text extraction libraries, and then "republishes" a new version of the feed (with the full article) which I then subscribe to in my RSS reader so I can read the articles offline, e.g.

example.com/rss?feed=foo.net/artcles/rss

I've never open sourced it though because I guess it's a bit of a grey area - the sites want you to go to the full URL so they can show you ads etc

Re: I Still Use RSS

#39

Post by throwaway2245 »

blakesterz wrote: post #15

This quote is exactly right: "Having only the content I want to see only be shown when I want to see it with the freedom to jump between readers as I please, all with no ads? For me, no other service comes close to the flexibility, robustness, and overall ease-of-use that RSS offers." I always wonder why they aren't as popular now. It takes more work to add site to a reader, and more effort to even use one I suppose.…

> Having only the content I want to see only be shown when I want to see it

I would rather not do my own content discovery and content curation: I see those as literal chores that have to be done before I can consume content.

Like all chores, I'm not keen to do them. Despite years of practice, I'm still not confident I am great at them on my own, and I have the option to employ someone more skilled.

Twitter has done a good job of these chores, making discovery and curation easier (like the parent article, I feel frustrated that Twitter is now broken from this point of view); TikTok does a great job, surely better than I could do myself.

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