I Miss RSS • Hacker News Board

Re: I Miss RSS

#211

Post by nickm12 » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 6:52 AM UTC

I certainly understand why various sites, including mainstream and social media sites, dropped their RSS feeds, but it's never made sense to me why browsers did (especially when browsers have so many features). It seems to me RSS is good for the web and therefore good for browsers.

That said, the UX of RSS was pretty terrible compared to social media. I think it could have been different—podcasts managed to make RSS mainstream and with a bit more tuning and standardization it probably could have worked. I really think the issue was that in the 2009-2015 period huge amounts of industry mindshare went into mobile apps and social media and RSS (or its eventual successor) were left half-baked.

Re: I Miss RSS

#212

Post by lobocinza » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 6:56 AM UTC

I got here via RSS.

Re: I Miss RSS

#213

Post by mfru » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 7:00 AM UTC

Apparently there are people keeping a clone of Google Reader alive: https://theoldreader.com/

(Not affiliated in any form and not a user of the service, just a random internet find)

Re: I Miss RSS

#214

Post by marban » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 7:02 AM UTC

News aggregators are my main business since 2001 and all I can say is that reports of the death of RSS have been greatly exaggerated. Recently launched https://biztoc.com where 75% is still RSS, the rest being APIs and custom scraping. Yes, support is not increasing but drops among established sites are very rare — Even all major crypto news sites sport a feed.

Re: I Miss RSS

#215

Post by emodendroket » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 7:18 AM UTC

unqueued wrote: post #154

jonp888 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's depressingly and irritatingly common to come across podcasts now which provide links to a dizzying array of podcast aggregation services but not to o their RSS feed, even though they definitely have one because it's how you feed data to these services in the first place. I suspect a lot of blogs only have a feed now because it's a default feature of the blog platform they use rather than because they see it as i…

I believe that there was an agenda to kill RSS, very much like how the auto makers in the United States conspired to kill public transit. I don't buy any of the arguments not to implement it. I don't think it is too expensive or confusing. I think it is too empowering to users and inconvenient to marketers.

Of course it's not "too expensive" or "too confusing" but the demand is practically nonexistent.

Re: I Miss RSS

#216

Post by psanan » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 7:38 AM UTC

nickm12 wrote: post #211

I certainly understand why various sites, including mainstream and social media sites, dropped their RSS feeds, but it's never made sense to me why browsers did (especially when browsers have so many features). It seems to me RSS is good for the web and therefore good for browsers. That said, the UX of RSS was pretty terrible compared to social media. I think it could have been different—podcasts managed to make RSS…

That also seems strange to me. For a majority of current browsers, based on Chromium, one can argue that Google has little interest in supporting RSS. But that doesn't apply to Firefox, for example. What's the explanation?

Re: I Miss RSS

#217

Post by pizza234 » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 7:48 AM UTC

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.

RSS feeds don't replace a website. Most of the websites don't publish their whole articles on the RSS feed, only a summary (or even just a line).

Therefore, RSS doesn't cause any advertisement loss, as the user needs to go to the website anyway (which, to be clear, is totally fine - RSS still works as filter/preview, which is very helpful).

Re: I Miss RSS

#218

Post by TekMol » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 7:56 AM UTC

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #90

TekMol wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How, exactly, does this system help with RSS in any way? You cannot make a Twitter-2-RSS bridge because Twitter block access to the data. In a decentralized system, access to the data is inherent. Even when The Pirate Bay remains up, that doesn't mean anybody's seeding That is where the financial incentives come into play. Seeding will be economically incentivised. If all the data is directly on the blockchain, nobod…

> In a decentralized system, access to the data is inherent. Well, yeah – but we already have that. It's called the Fediverse. No blockchain in sight. (In fact, it predates Bitcoin.) > That is where the financial incentives come into play. Seeding will be economically incentivised. The margin for any given piece of content will be low, so there's an economic incentive to honour takedown requests, no matter how fraudu…

    The margin for any given piece of content will
    be low

Not when the financial incentive rises the rarer (less shared) a piece of content gets. This will be baked into the protocols. Arweave already has this.

Re: I Miss RSS

#219

Post by pinkano » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 8:20 AM UTC

Android and Microsoft are reviving RSS slowly. There'll be a big RSS renaissance coming in the next few years.

Re: I Miss RSS

#220

Post by pinkano » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 8:21 AM UTC

karaterobot wrote: post #183

dgudkov wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes we do have RSS Builder, very handy :)