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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”

#91

Post by DamnInteresting »

fartcannon wrote: post #70
DamnInteresting wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On this day a fartcannon made me feel appreciated. Thanks!

Edit: I hope this didn't come off as flippant; it is refreshing to receive encouraging words without the all-too-common "but I don't like how you do such-and-such".

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

#92

Post by grozzle »

The whole (non-Spotify, ugh) podcast ecosystem would like a word about RSS being obsolete.

Patreon (and to a greater extent, the podcasters I support) keep making real money out of me and millions of others every month for personalised RSS feeds for content. That RSS feed is the delivery vehicle. It's very reliable, I can use it in any app, much good, so benefit, wow.

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

#93

Post by kevincox »

hammock wrote: post #66

RSS is not dead for the simple reason that pretty much every podcast relies on it to get distributed to all the major podcasting platforms (iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, etc).

There is a huge difference between RSS as a backend service such as those podcast providers as opposed to being "consumer facing" such as other podcatchers or feed readers. For the former compatibility isn't a major concern, it just needs to work well enough for those use cases and users can't access the content directly (if they don't know the URL or it is IP locked).

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

#94

Post by RNCTX »

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

TTL is a thing.

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

#95

Post by kevincox »

artembugara wrote: post #51

You might find useful this article about how to use google news RSS parameters: https://newscatcherapi.com/blog/google-news-rss-search-param... You can replace the original RSS with the "mirror" from Google News

Doesn't Google News use RSS in the backend? I guess the problem is just that the original RSS URLs are not made public?

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

#96

Post by chrisseaton »

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.

> One's need for "informational pull" remains

It clearly doesn't - since so few people are using RSS.

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

#98

Post by FanaHOVA »

jolmg wrote: post #89
nomemory wrote: post #69

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…

> 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 I haven't signed up for any so I'm not sure, but don't some places have "newsletters"? I kind of assumed they served the same function but with email. Of course, if it does serve the same function, the bad part about it in comparison to RSS would be that you have to give them…

The missing thing is centralized queuing. I can easily create a queue of all articles from RSS feeds, but it's hard to centralize all links posted in a newsletter. I do this for engineering blogs of different companies today, for example.

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

#100

Post by mfer »

nomemory wrote: post #69

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…

> 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.

Instead of focusing on a technology, let's focus on a problem. This is where users and potential users of RSS have a communication problem with publishers of content.

It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds. So, you could have metrics on that. But, the tech giants shifted from RSS streams (which empower end users) to high control system that operate differently (social media news feeds that empower corps). This lead to a drop is RSS subscriptions.

So, why today is it useful to a publisher to have RSS on their site? This is a question that needs addressing and marketing so that people know why. The business case for them is lacking.

I want RSS. I also realize the usefulness and communication around that needs improvement.

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