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I Still Use RSS

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Re: I Still Use RSS

#221

Post by SulfurHexaFluri »

diegocg wrote: post #90
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #80

Is RSS really so obscure as the site suggests? Every website I am interested in updates from provides a feed. Apparently YouTube content creators receive more money if they have more subscribers, but I don't subscribe and simply use the RSS feed; it's easier. Perhaps YouTube also factors in the number of RSS requæsts they receive.

Yeah, RSS is used pervasively. Despite not being a mainstream technology in the way people expected it to be, it's still alive because there is just no replacement.

Its still alive because most blog software generates one by default. I found out my blog has rss and I didn't even know

Re: I Still Use RSS

#222

Post by philsnow »

jedimastert wrote: post #113
djhworld wrote: post #38

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…

On the one hand, I hate that as a user. On the other hand, I'd love to know how many people actually read a story. I haven't found a good solution, but I just suck it up and serve the full text anyways

This exact problem applies to podcast analytics. "Downloads" is only a proxy for "listens" / ad impressions.

It seems to me like there needs to be a standard pingback endpoint (either in /.well-known or, better, right in the podcast/rss XML) that your client pings when it seems like you've consumed the content (scrolled through most of a web page, listened to 80+% of a podcast), but only if you've opted in to that.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#223

Post by joe-collins »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #80

Is RSS really so obscure as the site suggests? Every website I am interested in updates from provides a feed. Apparently YouTube content creators receive more money if they have more subscribers, but I don't subscribe and simply use the RSS feed; it's easier. Perhaps YouTube also factors in the number of RSS requæsts they receive.

This may say more about paid conversions than anything else, but Ars Technica's main feed, with truncated article previews, currently has 470k subscribers on Feedly. Their full-article feeds, available as part of their paid subscription, were estimated at only a few hundred users, when they briefly broke a few years back.

https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1371767

Re: I Still Use RSS

#224

Post by bloudermilk »

djhworld wrote: post #38

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…

Can you share which libraries you’ve had success with for the content extraction? I’ve always wanted to play around with one

Re: I Still Use RSS

#225

Post by thebigspacefuck »

I started using more recently. Any time you find an interesting article on Reddit or whatever, add it to your feed. After a while you don’t need Reddit or whatever anymore. The only problem I’m having is duplication where for example yahoo tech has an article from TechCrunch so I see both. Otherwise I cover way more articles in way less time and when I’m done I’m done instead of scrolling endlessly.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#226

Post by smusamashah »

Google/Chrome is responsible for slow death of RSS. Opera had a built-in RSS reader (and so many other cool things). So did IE back then.

Chrome never had a native RSS reader. Google Reader was amazing and simple, and then they killed it. Feedly use to be simple and sensible at the beginning and then it became bloated mess.

Google and its browser Chrome are responsible for leaving RSS to dust.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#227

Post by illusivesaint »

I could never get into RSS. It just seemed so crowded and chunky with all my other notifications blasting me I'd rather just seek it out when i wanted it. It's a cool concept and j love the idea but I'd rather have compartmentalized with different sites than an all in one.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#228

Post by musicale »

smusamashah wrote: post #226

Google/Chrome is responsible for slow death of RSS. Opera had a built-in RSS reader (and so many other cool things). So did IE back then. Chrome never had a native RSS reader. Google Reader was amazing and simple, and then they killed it. Feedly use to be simple and sensible at the beginning and then it became bloated mess. Google and its browser Chrome are responsible for leaving RSS to dust.

I suspect it was web sites that killed RSS by trying to monetize it.

I quit using RSS when sites stopped including full articles and instead just posted teasers.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#230

Post by Blikkentrekker »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #206
nicbou wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that it's only there because WordPress includes it.

Yeah, just looking at my RSS list, most of them I discovered from just checking the usual /rss endpoints that are completely unadvertised on the website where you see in the XML it's generated by Wordrpress. I have no doubt that it's the only reason most feeds exist. Any RSS reader really needs to be able to crawl websites to create its own feed as only consuming websites that support RSS is a pretty weak prospect.

None of the RSS that I follow are from blogs, however.

Most of it is from webcomics that I follow, YouTube channels, and media aggregator websites that inform me whenever a new episode is out of a television series I follow.

All of these websites surely added it themselves deliberately.

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