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“We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

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Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#61

Post by selfhoster11 »

polote wrote: post #50

Is RSS really a technology or a part of the failed attempt of having a semantic web (the real web 3.0) ? RSS is easily replaceable by just scrapping a website, technologically speaking it doesn't make sense to have everyone making a request to website every minute. We could have a central service responsible for that, but I guess it will centralized and some people don't like that

Scraping is measurably less efficient and reliable on the client side. Its "API" (page layout) varies without notice, where RSS will remain the same.

I can only condone scraping if the official API is so convoluted that scraping the page is literally the easier option to program against.

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#62

Post by notyourwork »

mdp2021 wrote: post #31
kelseyfrog wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure. Take vhs rewinders for example. VHS cassettes and players were obsoleted by DVDs and DVD players respectively but there is no analogous new tech to the rewinder. It was a dead end. Maybe I'm splitting hairs.

> Maybe I'm splitting hairs Not enough split, not really hair ;) The rewinder became obsolete, replaced by random access. Your need to seek remained. Your need to watch videos remained, relevant technologies got replaced etc. One's need for "informational pull" remains - there is no dead end.

Sadly, I think today's analog would be mobile push notifications from specific applications.

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#64

Post by eloeffler »

arvigeus wrote: post #29
eloeffler wrote: post #11

Is there a current and well functioning tool that pulls full articles from the links inside most RSS feeds that only publish teasers? When I first discovered RSS for me, I wanted news to read on the road. It was before Smartphones became ubiquitous. Unfortunately most news sites only published a few lines of text per article. Now, I would like to do the same when there is no network coverage. But I still don't know a…

Some self hosted RSS readers do that. I use Miniflux and you can set css selectors to fetch original content. It does not work when the article is a link to something (like this thread on HN)

Nice, thank you! I'll check out if it's viable to host that locally on my phone.

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#65

Post by selfhoster11 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #26
rendall wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would trust the web developer of this unnamed NGO you heard about 3rd or 4th hand to do what now?

I extend to them the same default I extend to every random site maintainer on the internet: an assumption of basic competence until shown evidence to the contrary. It is, perhaps, giving too much credit. Perhaps the average is lower than I think it is. But if it is, we would arrive at the same situation, because a developer that struggles below the average will struggle to maintain an RSS feed. We could anticipate th…

> assumption of basic competence

Basic sysadmin/tech competency != Basic webmaster competency. Whoever maintains their WordPress site may not even know the logs exist, and if they do know, not have access to them. Server literacy is not widespread.

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#67

Post by karaterobot »

SahAssar wrote: post #42
superkuh wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? The idea of RSS was to escape complicated, centralizing, proprietary platforms like twitter. In order to read the post in this discussion's twitter link I'd have to execute their code on my machine. There's no way to access twitter via text. I certainly hope that most RSS users are shying away from such a terrible platform.

RSS was first released/specified in 1999, so to say that the idea was to escape platforms like twitter is rewriting history (myspace didn't even launch until 4 years later, friendster three years later). The idea of RSS seems to (originally and still in some ways) to be able to keep track of updates to many different sites from one application. My point was rather that twitter is a place where brands listen and also…

> RSS was first released/specified in 1999, so to say that the idea was to escape platforms like twitter is rewriting history

But they said "proprietary platforms like Twitter", not Twitter, so they would not be wrong in making that statement. Except, in an unexpected twist, RSS was actually initially developed to be used on Netscape's proprietary portal. It was not until a bit later that the open standards, anti-monopoly group won out.

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#68

Post by saurik »

mdp2021 wrote: post #46
kgran wrote: post #33

I got the same argument after I asked why there's no more RSS/Atom feed of the news section in my municipality's website. Some positive people tell me that RSS is not dead and it's still everywhere. Unfortunately, especially after modern redesigns, RSS gets dropped as "obsolete technology". The sad thing is that this doesn't only happen to optional websites which I could choose not to follow out of principle like blo…

For «Governmental [and] municipal» information, you should be vocal as a community and/or individual community members. "Look you could visit n websites per day - and get lost in formatting, though already to visit all potential sources is impossible -, or there is this old simple thing that automatically lets one know that source S has these news..." It could be that already the representatives are unaware of the po…

Most local government websites are maintained by a handful of compliance specialists that provide hosted solutions; if your government even has an IT department (as a nearby city to me does) it is probably more a cause for concern than anything else (they seriously assign unchangeable passwords to people that follow a pattern based on your name so you can guess anyone else's password... it is crazy).

https://carcd.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Sloane-DellOrto...

But so like, if you want to lobby a local government to add some feature to their website, they aren't even effectively going to be able to do it; but if you can convince a company like Streamline to add it to their offering, then you'd suddenly experience like half the local governments in California all getting that feature at once.

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#69

Post by nomemory »

This hurts.

RSS is the only way I know, without having to scrap things by hand, to get an aggregate of "news/articles" from the sites and blogs I follow, and I consider to be of good quality.

I prefer to filter my information like this, instead of having to rely on some algorithm, or endlessly scrolling in a "social medial wall" full or clickbait articles, immortal/vintage memes or exuberant rants.

If RSS dies, what is the alternative then? I understand that technically speaking it's not a good solution, but let's have something else before killing this.

PS: I've clicked on this link from a RSS reader (just a simple browser extension... that keeps me posted every morning).

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#70

Post by fartcannon »

DamnInteresting wrote: post #38
eloeffler wrote: post #11

Is there a current and well functioning tool that pulls full articles from the links inside most RSS feeds that only publish teasers? When I first discovered RSS for me, I wanted news to read on the road. It was before Smartphones became ubiquitous. Unfortunately most news sites only published a few lines of text per article. Now, I would like to do the same when there is no network coverage. But I still don't know a…

For what it's worth: When I first launched my Wordpress-based website back in 2005, I initially had it set up to post full articles to the RSS feed. Soon, however, a major downside appeared: It became absolutely trivial for other sites to reproduce my content, and they did in droves. My writings appeared all over the web on generic Wordpress sites, usually attributed to other people. After grappling with the problem…

HN is not the place to fanboy over things, but your stories never fail to surprise me. Thanks for continuing on and making the podcast, too.
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