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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”

#231

Post by shadowgovt »

rendall wrote: post #229
adrianmonk wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say I trust them, but I would say it's the most likely explanation. It could be that they've failed to understand how RSS could help their organization achieve its goals. But it's probably just that RSS isn't worth it to them.

Given that RSS done right is a self-maintaining gimme, I would question the professional judgment of anyone who actually takes the time to remove it.

Self-maintaining code is a very rare thing.

In general, if they were truly seeing no uptake on it, they could just be justified removing it to decrease their security surface (https://www.acunetix.com/vulnerabilities/web/wordpress-plugi...).

I'd have to know which NGO and what their circumstances are to have a more concrete opinion. With no additional information, I can construct a hypothetical scenario where a reasonable site admin would yank RSS.

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

#232

Post by mackrevinack »

Thristle wrote: post #52

Obsolete? RSS is the only way i can get a list of new youtube videos from my subscribed channels. Go over your feed? useless! go over my subscribed feed till i get back to last video i saw? way too much work and that feed was known to fail (just like clicking the bell) the only working solution is RSS feed for every channel i want to follow and automation to add those to my different playlists

i started moving a lot of my youtube subs to rss recently as well. i was subbed to 190 channels on youtube but somehow im supposed to be able to keep up to speed with them all using only a single view where they are all mixed together

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

#233

Post by CRConrad »

criddell wrote: post #90
belorn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but I have seen a pattern in many websites for clubs, non-profits, student projects and other non-commercial places. They follow trends that they see in popular services. The idea that RSS is dead is unlikely to have originated from the NGO.

If the NGO tells you that RSS is rarely used compared to other methods, I would probably believe them. There really isn't any reason for them to lie about it.

But they might not realise that by repeating the claim that it's dead, they're contributing to killing it.

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

#234

Post by webmaven »

slightwinder wrote: post #127
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…

> Instead of focusing on a technology, let's focus on a problem. This would be good, but it seems most people are too focused on RSS and not much on the actual usage. The point of RSS is to receive changes in a structured way. RSS is just a tool for this. But there are also other ways and other tools for this. > It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds. No, this was never the case. Newsfeeds were always a min…

> > It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds.

> No, this was never the case. Newsfeeds were always a minority-feature. The mass of user used to be bigger, but not to the level where it could be called a mass medium.

True, but that minority included a very influential segment (journalists, podcasters, and bloggers).

The turning point of when the blogosphere lost out to the centralized walled gardens of social media was probably around 2009 (though it wasn't obvious at the time); that was the year of the FriendFeed (an aggregator of your social accounts across multiple sites into one profile/timeline) acquisition by Facebook and of Farmville's explosive growth. After that point, Facebook and Twitter started being treated as infrastructure by startups and media organizations, a trend that accelerated during the 'Arab Spring' of the 2010s.

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

#235

Post by rcxdude »

lf-non wrote: post #120
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…

A lot of us are happy to just use RSS for the aggregated listing. I really don't mind going to the original site in a browser to read the article.

Yup, the only information I need in RSS is a post title and a URL, maybe a date. Literally never read content from my reader (indeed my current custom reader doesn't support it). It's still nice to get blog posts, webcomics, youtube videos and more all through the same reader.

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

#236

Post by giuliomagnifico »

Damn is the only way (because I think is the best way) I follow a lot of news/articles, this thing is absurd, and you know who is the guilty?! ...Google, when X years ago dismissed Google Reader, because a lot of people was thinking that RSS is/was G.Reader.

I can't imagine if Facebook will close Facebook, that "is internet" for a lot of people, not us obviously.

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

#237

Post by nanna »

hpfr wrote: post #221
nanna wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe try another reader? What are you using? None of these are issues for me in my feed reader, Emacs Elfeed. (XML aside, though I can't say I've ever had to view any feed's source.) https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed

Can you view relative links (for footnotes) in Elfeed? That hasn't been my experience.

No, I don't think so. Fair enough.

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

#238

Post by nanna »

q1w2 wrote: post #152
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…

I'll add another - Chronological ordering within the day isn't very useful. I'm more interested in what other readers (of my type) have found "important/interesting/insightful/etc", so I care about the likes/upvotes/etc... I don't want everything every day. I want to read the X most important articles that day, with X being different each day depending upon how much time I have. RSS cannot really provide that priorit…

Doesn't feedly do something like this?

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

#239

Post by smugglerFlynn »

betwixthewires wrote: post #215
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 applicatio…

Problem with targeted advertising is that it won’t magically go away because end users don’t want ads. This whole business model has at least four more sides: content creators, content platforms (like Facebook/Medium), infrastructure services (like programmatic ad platforms), and advertisers.

This whole model is mostly frictionless for everyone except end users, who get abused by targeted ads.

(one can argue that even for end users this model provides value: an ability to browse all this content without paying to anyone; if we do not consider attention a form of currency, that is)

Maybe in the future we will shift from this ad-driven model, and that would resurrect RSS, semantic web and other good things which are now mostly gone due to advertisement-driven web. One can only hope.

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

#240

Post by culopatin »

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #218
thiht wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Look I don’t have sources but I remember Opera being the only browser back then that would handle RSS
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