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I Miss RSS

wilcosky.com

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Re: I Miss RSS

#181

Post by Masema »

behnamoh wrote: post #160
taude wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just logged into my Feedly for the first time in a couple years (maybe longer). I had moved all my RSS from Google Reader to Feedly back when all that went down. Turns out, most of the blogs I subscribed to back in the day are now defunct or not updated much. I think that's why I eventually stopped going to my Feedly for RSS aggreggation, and instead for the few moments a day I want to read news/waste time, I just…

Here's HN's RSS: https://news.ycombinator.com/rss Let's hope it will not go defunct anytime soon.

There are also custom feeds with more features available from https://hnrss.github.io/

One of those feeds is how I came across this post.

Re: I Miss RSS

#182

Post by karaterobot »

anyfactor wrote: post #109
karaterobot wrote: post #82

When I see articles like this, my reaction is always: when did RSS go away? I have close to 200 sites in my Feedly list, and I have trouble keeping up with all the articles I get from RSS every day. I think that what the author really means is that he misses RSS feeds from Twitter. I don't use Twitter, so from my perspective, RSS is as present and useful as it was 20 years ago.

How did you aggregate so many sources to read articles from? What is your discovery process? Do you have any recommendation where I can read good stuff from?

Pretty much what gavanm said with his #1. The process is usually that I see some interesting article on a site like HN, then say "hmm, I'd like to read more by this person, but I will probably never remember the website address, so I'll just add it to Feedly."

Re: I Miss RSS

#183

Post by karaterobot »

dgudkov wrote: post #134
karaterobot wrote: post #82

When I see articles like this, my reaction is always: when did RSS go away? I have close to 200 sites in my Feedly list, and I have trouble keeping up with all the articles I get from RSS every day. I think that what the author really means is that he misses RSS feeds from Twitter. I don't use Twitter, so from my perspective, RSS is as present and useful as it was 20 years ago.

Did you try using Leo, the AI-powered Feedly's robot that supposedly can do smart filtering? I'm curious how good it is.

Not yet.

I saw that they also have some kind of tool that lets you scrape websites that don't have native RSS feeds, but it is only at the "super duper" pricing tier, whatever that one is called.

Re: I Miss RSS

#184

Post by cheaprentalyeti »

dpeck wrote: post #171
mro_name wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet it scared the shit out of Zuck and still does today. Add websub and few more and you have a social network, duh. Decentral. People owned.

this is what Reader was and has always made me even more confused as to why Google killed it off. They had the right start for a unique take on content focused/small group discussion based social networking and the tossed it for “circles”

Google itself is part of Big Tech Social Control. They're not willing to engage in services where they're not ultimately in control, like RSS. They suffered in the short term, but if you've struggled to find the RSS feed for a website or a podcast lately, that's exactly what they were trying to achieve.

Re: I Miss RSS

#185

Post by mmahemoff »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #84

Sort of obvious why RSS went away. It is really hard to put ads into RSS. Sure you can just add a update but that's not really feasible (and could be filtered). So the large sites just started removing it and it helped them capture ad sales.

Email ads are more effective than RSS. The reader's email address is known (obviously!) and the content can be targeted individually. RSS is typically a single feed for everyone.

Premium RSS is possible, with individual links per user, but it's much more complicated than just typing your email address into a field (something you already do when you pay for anything). Also, chances of the link being shared around is high and aggregators often inadvertently leak premium links. In contrast, someone's inbox is about as private as it gets.

Re: I Miss RSS

#186

Post by gen220 »

gavanm wrote: post #133
anyfactor wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you aggregate so many sources to read articles from? What is your discovery process? Do you have any recommendation where I can read good stuff from?

Not the OP, but these days I find new things (mostly blogs) through four different mechanisms: 1 - Hacker News - If there's an interesting article linked, then I'll consider adding the site to my feed (using feedbin since the great Google Reader apocalypse). 2 - Blog referrals - Sometimes existing feed items will link to other articles sites (sourced from, similar problem, etc) and I'll sometimes add those sites. 3 -…

> i wouldn't use a RSS feed of Hacker News because I probably only look at 1 in 10 articles on it.

The popular HN RSS feed generator linked elsewhere in this page allows for a ton of customization! You can filter by points and raise the floor until you get a reasonable number of articles per week.

> Possibly the only bugbear I have around the RSS ecosystem these days is that some authors don't include the full content in the RSS feed

My RSS reader (miniflux) has a handy feature for getting around these. It even works for naïve paywalls (like the New Yorker’s, for example). It basically cURL’s the original address of the content and allows you to specify the content with a CSS selector. It’s some trouble to configure initially, but very handy!

Re: I Miss RSS

#187

Post by grahamjpark »

gtsteve wrote: post #7

I still use RSS. I use Feedly to curate various RSS feeds and many website still have them, or at least the tech focussed ones. I used to be subscribed to more but some RSS feeds have such high traffic it's difficult to follow them, such as the BBC news feed. Feedly has a nice new feature [0] that makes an RSS feed out of a standard website, so that might be worth considering if you have some news sources that don't…

I’m using NetNewsWire which works great but is iOS and Mac only. I’ve considered Feedly, but I would have to do the pro plan because of the cap on number of feeds. I haven’t switched because I have a hard time justifying the cost. I would rather that money go to the people creating the content.

Re: I Miss RSS

#188

Post by gen220 »

mmahemoff wrote: post #185
zitterbewegung wrote: post #84

Sort of obvious why RSS went away. It is really hard to put ads into RSS. Sure you can just add a update but that's not really feasible (and could be filtered). So the large sites just started removing it and it helped them capture ad sales.

Email ads are more effective than RSS. The reader's email address is known (obviously!) and the content can be targeted individually. RSS is typically a single feed for everyone. Premium RSS is possible, with individual links per user, but it's much more complicated than just typing your email address into a field (something you already do when you pay for anything). Also, chances of the link being shared around is h…

You can mitigate link sharing by counting the feed reader hits per link (anything more than two standard deviations is probably a shared link, which you can set a revocation policy for). You can reject requests to content that don’t have a non-revoked referrer. This way, they can only get your content by copy-pasting content and rehosting the feed, which is an unavoidable risk.

In any case, as Netflix’s early history shows, depending on your cost structure, link sharing is likely a net positive. It’s probably only worth prosecuting the feeds that get shared with 100s of people.

It definitely is more complicated, but the tools to make it simple are easy to build! Maybe we’ll see growth in this space. One can dream

Re: I Miss RSS

#189

Post by esotericsean »

karaterobot wrote: post #82

When I see articles like this, my reaction is always: when did RSS go away? I have close to 200 sites in my Feedly list, and I have trouble keeping up with all the articles I get from RSS every day. I think that what the author really means is that he misses RSS feeds from Twitter. I don't use Twitter, so from my perspective, RSS is as present and useful as it was 20 years ago.

I used to just have RSS feeds saved in my Firefox bookmarks. I didn't know Twitter had or has any sort of RSS feeds.

Re: I Miss RSS

#190

Post by marcosdumay »

soheilpro wrote: post #170

The sad truth is, nobody bothers to add support for RSS if they write a new custom blog engine. I've started to keep a list of all the websites that I've tried to subscribe but didn't support RSS: https://angel.co/blog https://blog.close.com https://blog.messagebird.com https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us.html https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us.html https://bloggingfordevs.com/blog https://business.insta…

Interestingly, all blog engines I have ever tried support RSS. I don't know if I have it set on any of my sites (they don't have any content or traffic anyway), but the option is always there.
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