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

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 249 posts

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

#211

Post by betwixthewires »

chrisseaton wrote: post #119
cgriswald wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that follows. People need proper nutrition, but they can get by for an unreasonable time on sugar cereal and microwavable Salisbury steaks. The prevalence of cheap, nutrient poor meals is not an indication that people's need for nutrition doesn't remain. It's only an indication that suppliers would rather make a cheap, highly profitable good with marketing to convince people it fills a need than to go t…

If there was such limited market demand for RSS when it was available that almost everyone's dropped it, then maybe it's not a solution that people actually need or want. I get that people think it's a great idea, but in practice it seems not to be.

Well, what it really comes down to is that there are 24 hours in a day and you can only look at one thing at a time.

If you're reading or watching video, you're either using RSS, or using Facebook or using twitter or tiktok or YouTube or whatever. If your screen time is already dedicated to doomscrolling your Facebook feed, it's not that there was a limited market for RSS, its that there's a limited market for content in general, and people moved to where the dopamine pathways get stimulated the most.

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

#212

Post by Arnavion »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #202
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.

That is a function of your reader client, not the feed itself. Configure your reader to display the "summary" instead of the "content" (as Atom calls them) of each entry.

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

#214

Post by 62951413 »

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…

Let's abuse this opportunity to shame a few companies into having a feed for their tech blogs. I nominate

imply.io/blog

anyscale.com/blog

blog.twitter.com

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

#215

Post by betwixthewires »

smugglerFlynn wrote: post #101

RSS users aren’t seem to be concerned with the single most popular way content creators make money: by displaying ads. While there are RSS-compatible solutions for that (like AdSense in-feed ads), it is obvious that there is not enough financial incentive for content creators and platforms to continue supporting RSS. From consumer perspective, I’m writing this from Safari on iPad, and there is no way to see that RSS…

You're right, we aren't concerned with ads. We don't want ads.

The problem isn't ads though, the problem is targeted advertising. there's absolutely nothing about RSS which prevents a person from sponsoring products, shilling merch, or any other form of advertising in line in their article or in the description of their video or even in their video or podcast.

Thinking these features disappear from client applications because of user demand is very naive. These client applications are usually designed by the same companies that want you to see ads because they sell ads to the sites you visit. RSS dying was no accident.

> The only reason RSS is alive today is because it’s dirt cheap to implement, and is supported out-of-the-box by most web development frameworks.

And thank god for that. Isn't that how it should be? User empowering tools should be frictionlessly available and ubiquitous. If they're used because they're always there, I can't come up with a more frictionless UX than that.

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

#216

Post by jacobr1 »

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…

This is the realm of perception not reality. The perception is that RSS has been deprecated like java applets or activeX controls. I'm not convinced we need to "rebrand RSS," but we do need to have some activity demonstrating its modern relevance.

Usefulness isn't a high enough bar. When choosing a technology, I might also want an active community, for support, for ecosystem tooling and integration, and more.

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

#217

Post by betwixthewires »

randmeerkat wrote: post #105

Between this, paywalls, and a lack of interoperability between messaging services, I feel like the internet has become a bleak place.

That's because it has, at least the wider "normie" internet has. If you want anything cool online, you're going to be interacting with a bunch of other Cool Thing™ enthusiasts and not much else. Want to use ActivityPub, Gemini, XMPP? That cute girl at the bar is not going to be available to you, you'll be interacting almost exclusively with dorks like me.

The modern popular internet that most people use is a 5 store strip mall with UX and design choices that seem like they were designed by Dr Strangelove.

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

#218

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

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…

> When I clicked RSS links, big walls of XML appeared

Putting a (small) tinfoil hat on, Google intentionally chose to botch the handling of rss links in Chrome because they couldn't collect ad revenue through text-only RSS feeds.

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

#219

Post by hammock »

kevincox wrote: post #93
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).

True but if we go around telling everyone "RSS is defunct" without being more nuanced someone is going to forget about those backend dependencies and bad things will happen

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

#220

Post by hpfr »

oauea wrote: post #123
nathcd wrote: post #115

I'm a very happy daily RSS user, but we ought to be upfront about its ginormous deficiencies: - every day I deal with broken links and broken images because my feed reader doesn't know from which URL it should resolve relative links - there's no pagination mechanism, or way for a client to ask for "all posts since last Friday". If you want your feed to always have all posts available, you need to include the entirety…

> - every day I deal with broken links and broken images because my feed reader doesn't know from which URL it should resolve relative links > - lots of posts include iframes, or content that only makes sense with JS enabled These are the fault of broken RSS feed generators. The RSS feed should contain a textual summary of the article. > - if I want to follow any link I get kicked back out to a bloated web page This…

>> - every day I deal with broken links and broken images because my feed reader doesn't know from which URL it should resolve relative links

> These are the fault of broken RSS feed generators. The RSS feed should contain a textual summary of the article.

Footnote relative links are quite common in blog posts, and my RSS reader punts me out to a browser to view them. Given that most blogs I follow provide full-text feeds, it's a bit disappointing I can't easily navigate that last (textual) portion of content.

Post reply on HN