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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”

#201

Post by WorldMaker »

thiht wrote: post #187
mfer wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, t…

> It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds Uh, really? When I was younger I came across RSS a few times but could never figure what it was or how it worked. When I clicked RSS links, big walls of XML appeared. And when I looked for what it was, all I could find was something along the lines of « it’s to syndicate content ». Or in French: « c’est de la syndication de contenus ». I don’t know if the term « synd…

The masses may never have consumed RSS feeds directly, but there was a lot of stuff like "Portals" and "Home Pages" that consumed them indirectly that were pretty well consumed by the masses. Companies like Yahoo! relied on RSS feeds well before companies like Google turned news acquisition and scraping into its own business, closer to the search engine arm than not, and mostly divorced from RSS.

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

#202

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

Arnavion wrote: post #170

Somewhat off-topic, but my personal static-site blog has an RSS feed, auto-generated by the same build script that compiles the markdown to HTML via pandoc. I don't particularly care if people read the entire article in their feed reader instead of in a browser, so I want to include the full article content in the feed But it feels silly to have two copies of every article in the output, where one copy of each articl…

Personally I hate when articles are in the feed in full. I'd much rather be able to open the articles I want to read in tabs in a browser, and skip past the ones I'm not interested in (marking them as read when I do so). I'd rather have a title, URL, and maybe a short summary in the RSS feed.

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

#203

Post by is_true »

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…

I use the sitemap.xml when sites doesn't have a RSS feed. It's not the same but it usually works.

For some sites there's also a sitemap for news that includes extra fields, like title, tags and description

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

#204

Post by wutwutwutwut »

shockeychap wrote: post #192
jacobr1 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we use the term brand to mean, "reputation," then yes, adoption is a function of reputation. Reputation can be justly granted (due to things like the functional value it provided) but it also can be disparaged regardless of the merit of the argument. If enough people think that RSS sucks, is too old, died with GReader, has no user-base, or whatever other story, why would they invest their time and effort in suppor…

Okay, I get that "brand" means "reputation", but why should a highly useful technology be worried about it's "brand". Is the "car" brand out of vogue? What about HTML? I mean, that stuff was used in crickety old sites from the 90s! Should we throw away our hammers, because screws are all the rage? This whole notion of RSS' "brand" being the problem just reeks of a used car salesman trying to convince me that spare ti…

> Okay, I get that "brand" means "reputation", but why should a highly useful technology be worried about it's "brand".

Things with a reputation of being dead gains lower interest and support.

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

#205

Post by nreece »

RSS may be obsolete from a marketing perspective (i.e. lack of visible RoI), but its growing in other areas like media monitoring, podcast delivery, RSS-to-newsletter etc.

* Shameless plug *: our super-easy feed builder at New Sloth (formerly Feedity) - https://newsloth.com, helps create custom feeds for any public webpage. Our API can auto-magically detect relevant articles in most cases. The platform includes an integrated simple feed reader and clusterer/deduplicator, specially aimed for knowledge workers with hundreds and thousands of feeds to monitor daily.

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

#206

Post by timbit42 »

api wrote: post #107
dethos wrote: post #86

That is a complete nonsense. RSS is one of the most useful tools for those that don't have "social media" accounts. Don't expect people to keep coming back to your website/blog just to check if there is new content/news. If it doesn't provide a feed (Atom or RSS), the most probable scenario is that I will not remember to comeback any time soon.

> RSS is one of the most useful tools for those that don't have "social media" accounts. That's why RSS is dying. It doesn't facilitate in-depth surveillance or algorithmic timelines designed to be addictive... err I mean "maximize engagement." RSS is a user-friendly technology not an advertiser-friendly or surveillance-friendly technology and surveillance driven advertising is the business model of the Internet.

I'm OK with not reading websites involved in in-depth surveillance or algorithmic timelines designed to be addictive. They're the poor quality news sources that no one should be reading.

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

#207

Post by betwixthewires »

awiesenhofer wrote: post #191
DannyBee wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Y'all need to lean into the game a bit. Most of the time, things don't win or stay just because they are good. They win because of good marketing, etc. RSS, the brand, is a loser at this point. It is viewed as old, tired, and obsolete. It doesn't matter if it is the right tech. That's not a state you can grow from. At this point the right answer (IMHO) is to create a new thing that is very similar, but has a new bran…

This is probably the most on point comment in all of these RSS discussions. Just publicly dropping the "old" XML-based version and introducing the "new" JSON-based version would probably bring a brand new flair and growing adoption to feeds. (Nevermind json feeds existed for years) Now we just need someone to pull it off...

The reality is nobody is ever going to pull it off.

RSS was great. I mean, it is great, but it used to be too. It didn't die in the public eye by accident. It was killed by the big boys who realized they can't make money off of you if they can't decide what content you see in front of you, you don't run their software on your device, and/or you don't have to sign up for an account to get the content.

Try to pitch a new syndication spec to anyone that controls a large portion of the information availability online, they're not stupid, they'll shoot you down because "we tried that already, it wasn't profitable enough."

The era of standardized protocols, freedom of information, ease of communication, interoperability, tools that empower the user, that era is dead. And it was too short lived. The internet we have today looks like something designed by Dr Strangelove. If you want to have sensible tools that work for you you're going to be swimming in a very shallow information environment with almost exclusively other zealous enthusiasts of whatever tool you think is better.

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

#208

Post by timbit42 »

dialcortez wrote: post #148

Reading this form an RSS reader! Any interesting products using RSS? Maybe a monetized feed? gated substack's like feed? Sadly, I don't know of any solution using RSS other than news feeds.

eBay auctions, YouTube, Torrent searches

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

#209

Post by betwixthewires »

nerdjon wrote: post #140

I hate to admit it, but I kinda just... stopped looking at my RSS feeds about a year ago. It wasn't intentional, it just kinda happened? I was (am?) paying for Feedly and then I used a separate app on my phone to consume it (Hated the Feedly UI and I wanted the app I have been using since google reader). But I costantly found myself with a huge number of unread feeds. They became unmanageable. I would look at headlin…

I've kind of done the same thing a month or so ago.

A few things happened: I no longer have the time to spend each day watching an hour or so of video content (most of my subscriptions are video), most of my subscriptions are usually uninteresting with the odd gold nugget buried in, I no longer care one iota about current events (if it's important I'll hear it from someone IRL) and my feed reader (Feeder if anyone's interested) updated to a new version, removed old releases from it's github and f-droid repo, a new release which breaks tons of features I was using and doesn't improve on anything whatsoever and just looks like a needless UI redesign.

That said, I love RSS and Atom. So much that I absolutely refuse to subscribe to anything any other way (well, I use ActivityPub for some social whatever). I'm beginning to realize though, I do not need a constant flow of information or content. I don't really think most of us do if we are being honest with ourselves.

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

#210

Post by 18pfsmt »

thiht wrote: post #187
mfer wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, t…

> It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds Uh, really? When I was younger I came across RSS a few times but could never figure what it was or how it worked. When I clicked RSS links, big walls of XML appeared. And when I looked for what it was, all I could find was something along the lines of « it’s to syndicate content ». Or in French: « c’est de la syndication de contenus ». I don’t know if the term « synd…

I use a desptop RSS reader to this day to keep of numerous podcasts. I wonder if people realize that podcast feeds are RSS. Even Spotify, and some other proprietary networks. Google still maintains Feedburner too, if a bit lazily.
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