Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I Still Use RSS

atthis.link

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 370 posts

Re: I Still Use RSS

#341

Post by ubermonkey »

frankfrankfrank wrote: post #313
ubermonkey wrote: post #312

I've been a heavy user of RSS for a really long time. I can't imagine a world without it, and it frustrates me that it never took off with regular people in the way it has with those in the technical world. Initially I just used NetNewsWire -- a beloved reader for the Mac that's had an amusing development life cycle -- but I moved to Google Reader and a variety of clients when that existed. When Google killed Reader,…

I get the sense that you may not be old enough to remember when the majority of people who used the internet used RSS feeds to consume their news and information consumption. That all changed with mostly facebook and Zuckerberg's charge to have "Facebook replace the internet". We are now totally shifted from a distributed consumer driven information market to a centralized autocratic supplier system (it's not even a…

I'm 50.

There was NEVER a point when RSS was used by the majority of Net users, since it was introduced (just before the turn of the century) YEARS after the general public got net access (ie, the September that Never Ended, now over 10,000 days ago). It has always been the province of the somewhat nerdy.

The closest it ever got to mass adoption, ironically, was the support it got by way of Google Reader.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#343

Post by ksec »

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…

Interesting.

I am not sure if there are many doing something similar to mine. My pattern is to Open all my interested Links in New Tabs. That is why I thought RSS Reader should always be within a Browser or as Web Services like Feedly.

I do offline Reading for long articles only. And Saved via Reading List on Safari that does automatic downloading. But it is quite problematic for me because most of the time I need to look up something related while I am reading on things that I dont understand or assumed wrongly. And this is still best done on a PC with Browser.

So I now only listen to Music, Reading Novel or WebComic / Manga for offline.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#344

Post by breischl »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #322
breischl wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, my bad, you're right. It was wildly popular, random people on the street were talking about RSS, everyone in the general non-blogging populace was swapping their favorite feeds, it was amazing. That's probably why Google shut down Reader right at the height of that amazing, broad-based popularity and basically nobody talks about it anymore.

Even if RSS was popular, how could advertising companies like Google and Facebook make money off of it? Those companies have no incentive that I know of to give their user a reliable (a.k.a non-personalised) feed that let them chose whether they'll get to click through or not. No, they want you to click through first , so you get to see the ads before you even start doom scrolling.

Google had a reader app, in fact the market-dominant reader app. They could sell advertising next to it, like they do with everything else (probably did, I'm not sure). They also owned a publishing platform (Blogger) and an RSS metrics platform (FeedBurner) that had paid tiers. So they actually did monetize it. Just not enough to bother with.

Facebook for a while was trying to be the commenting system for blogs. Which is not exactly RSS, but they were in an adjacent space and using it to drive traffic.

And yet it still died, or rather has slowly faded away back to the niche market that I originally mentioned.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#346

Post by type0 »

breischl wrote: post #320
dialamac wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.apple.com/rss/ Open this on an Apple or android phone. On iOS this will even prompt you to open the App Store to find a feed reader (#1 is still Feedly). RSS icons were ubiquitous like fb and Twitter icons a few years ago, and anyone could use them. It wasn’t a geek thing, it’s just a market that faded. I’ve never had the feed icon not work on a phone in the last 10 years or a typically installed browser…

Lol, my bad, you're right. It was wildly popular, random people on the street were talking about RSS, everyone in the general non-blogging populace was swapping their favorite feeds, it was amazing. That's probably why Google shut down Reader right at the height of that amazing, broad-based popularity and basically nobody talks about it anymore.

> it was amazing.

It was, even Firefox users were using it. That's probably why Mozilla had to remove that functionality. /s

Re: I Still Use RSS

#347

Post by pinjasaur »

swilliamsio wrote: post #317
genmon wrote: post #281

RSS onboarding is a struggle for new users. RSS, unlike commercial products, lacks a "front page" to explain the benefits and how to get started. Two things that can help: 1. Have a prettified RSS feed that tells new users what it is, rather than showing raw XML. For example here's mine: http://interconnected.org/home/feed 2. (plug) Link to https://aboutfeeds.com which is a one-pager RSS explainer site, providing lin…

That's awesome. How did you do that?

I wondered the same thing. Turns out, there's a whole language for XML stylesheets: XSLT[1]. The stylesheet used to style that page is http://interconnected.org/home/static/styles/pretty-feed-v2.... (will probably want to view source).

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/XSLT

Re: I Still Use RSS

#348

Post by stffrdhrn »

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…

I used to live in London (8 years ago) and I did exactly this because of the Jubilee line. I had written a perl program rss.pl that I would give several URLs to generate custom RSS feeds for those websites that provided poor, summary only, feeds. I had it running in a crontab and just posted the feeds to my own webserver. This brings back memories. I live in Tokyo now where there is internet access everywhere so I retired my perl program.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#349

Post by tn1 »

2112 wrote: post #236
tn1 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aww man, I just wrote my own replies fetcher script in php the other day before I heard about hnrss

Care to ( can you ) share what that looks like ?

Certainly. Here's the whole thing: https://pastebin.com/ZZAscpyk

I host it on a generic cPanel webhost.

It's not very robust, there's no error checking, and it only grabs the first page of replies, but it's sufficient to prompt me to look at all the comments if needed.

If I ever become a celebrity then I will revisit this script :-D

Re: I Still Use RSS

#350

Post by benrapscallion »

iFreilicht wrote: post #44
AlecSchueler wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Aren't there RSS-readers that offer something like the reader-mode you get on web-browsers?

NewsBlur does this
Post reply on HN