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I Still Use RSS

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121–130 of 370 posts

Re: I Still Use RSS

#122

I think my digital life would be a mess without an RSS feed reader. Because of its existence I do not need to touch Twitter, Reddit, YouTube[1], or any Mastodon instance, for example, as I can just have the updates that interest me from these networks in the comfort of my Feedbin[2] feed. While Hacker News does not provide an interface that notifies you when someone replies to you, hnrss.org provides an RSS feed for…

Thanks I'm an RSS nut too but didn't know about hnrss. Super useful to keep track of replies.

Yeah, I found so many cool projects that did not get any atention on Show HN because of hnrss.org. Definetely a feature Hacker News itself should add — they do have RSS for the front page[1], though, with a volume of about 3460 articles per month.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

Re: I Still Use RSS

#123
Use rss more and more. It’s part of the open web no borders for sharing. Using rss in a own program is so much better than scraping. Scraping is a failed option for sites that do not have a decent api or RSS feed. Wordpress offers rss by default which fits the gpl philosophy of Wordpress.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#124
In 2020 I fell into a deep and unproductive habit of excessive YouTube binging. It was RSS that broke me out of it. I can subscribe to the worthwhile channels that would otherwise spur me to visit the site (and hence be subjected to the endless recommendation algorithm); yes, YouTube channels still support RSS! Then I can watch the video in my reader and be done with it. No "one more video", no morbid curiosity to check the comments. I can watch what I want and move on with my life.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#125
post #70
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the topic of your blog?

I don't write very often but when I do it is usually tech or math. I didn't link to it here because it might look like self-promotion. In case you are interested to take a look, please see my profile for the link.

Hey! I read some of your articles a couple of days ago :) I liked your blog.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#126

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…

I don't think it's a grey area. They could show you ads in the HTML, they choose not to, and instead choose to let outside companies execute arbitrary code on your machine to track you. "Sites want you to go to the full URL so someone else can track your web use" sounds way less innocent and, to me, downright hostile. No one should feel morally obligated to allow that to happen.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#127
post #4

I provide an RSS feed for my blog. From my access.log, I see that there is a decent number of subscribers to my feed. Here is the data I could pull from it: Feedly 91 subscribers Inoreader 16 subscribers Feedbin 6 subscribers NewsBlur 4 subscribers The Old Reader 3 subscribers BazQux 2 subscribers WordPress 2 subscribers ------------------------------- Total 124 subscribers I get about 4000-6000 hits to my website on…

It is unfortunate that it's so tough to track RSS viewers. I'm always tempted to convert the feed to cut-back version just so I can see what posts are actually popular.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#128
I have been building an RSS reader for developers called diff.blog. It has been growing steadily over the last 2 years and crossed 1000 users recently. Would love if you folks could give it a try and give some feedback!

https://diff.blog

Re: I Still Use RSS

#129

Im a podcast/youtube addict, yet I havent found a good use of youtube's RSS feed. I'd love for channels and playlists to be as simple as podcast feeds, but YT doesn't want to be a file server. 1) They block you from watching outside of youtube, so you still need the site to watch 1a) Or do a unix'y combination with youtube-dl; file management; etc 1b) Or use a service or tool that comes, gets broken, goes; (podsync,…

I still find YouTube's feeds useful (though not ideal) because I can get updates for a handful of channels that I want to watch instantly. If I just go to their site I have to go to every channel to see if their are new updates, or hope it shows up on the main page (which it may or may not do, half the time it just shows me old videos hoping I'll rewatch it or randomly suggests new channels I don't care about because I watched a single video on that topic so obviously I must only want to see that topic for like a week). Just knowing "your author published a new video" instantly without having to do the YouTube song and dance is pretty nice.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#130
RSS it's a great reminder that the web can be federalized but standard at the same time for readers; and not a big centralized monolith like Medium, Facebook, or Twitter.

Kinda the opposite side of social media where an Machine Learning algorithm selects items for your feed of what in the best interest of the metrics they try to improve (retention, CTR, etc).

One of the things that I will be always be thankful to Aaron Swartz.

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