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Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

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Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#21

Post by onli »

planb wrote: post #14

You are focusing on the consumption side and your proposed steps seem like a good way to bring back easy consumption of RSS feeds. But the problem lies elsewhere: the blogs I regularly visit still have RSS feeds, but most content now isn’t in blogs anymore. For-profit sites have crippled or completely dropped their feeds to make users see ads. Many people that would have been bloggers a decade ago just publish thread…

Valid points!

My hope is that the one would follow from the other. If consumption is easy and awareness better, creators would want their content available via a feed. Think Youtube: With ads integrated into the videos every feed subscriber is a money source, both for the platform and for the creator.

I know a podcast I like but never listen to it, because it's behind a strange podcast platform without a feed. If they had that they had at least one listener more, and more listeners would mean more potential for advertising. Simple awareness could help here.

Also, I think it's somewhat of a misconception that ads are impossible to add to feeds. The article itself can contain them, the feed can even have special ads, there are no rules against that. Sure: We are talking static ads like banner ads, not Javascript-tracker-driven dynamic adspaces, but that's a direction the web should go to anyway. There has been technology and industry in that direction in the past, why shouldn't it exist again?

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#22

Post by Skyy93 »

planb wrote: post #14

You are focusing on the consumption side and your proposed steps seem like a good way to bring back easy consumption of RSS feeds. But the problem lies elsewhere: the blogs I regularly visit still have RSS feeds, but most content now isn’t in blogs anymore. For-profit sites have crippled or completely dropped their feeds to make users see ads. Many people that would have been bloggers a decade ago just publish thread…

You would need a monetizing option for RSS Feeds, but is this really something that we want?

Enjoy your new RSS Feed about Quantum Mechanics, featured by BIGCOMPANY, we sell the shitty products you like.

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#23

Post by hombre_fatal »

Most people don’t use RSS because most people don’t prefer to consume the web that way nor that sort of content. They are scrolling social media and aggregators, not pruning their long form content subscriptions.

Even in the heyday of RSS how many of us just had an overgrown 10000+ unread RSS reader that we simply stopped using?

Promoting RSS seems backwards to me because that ship has sailed. Like promoting IRC when people have chosen solutions like Discord and then refusing to acknowledge why people prefer Discord. RSS (and IRC) didn’t just fall out of favor because people refuse to see how amazing it is nor is it just because of ads.

The answer to the post-RSS world is something more like a better, polished Fraidycat that can track content on any website. We can do better than RSS: a solution that doesn’t rely on everyone implementing it.

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#24

Post by onli »

clscott wrote: post #5

I think the issue might be that ATOM is the less ambiguous feed specification and RSS should be just left to languish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(Web_standard)#Atom_compa...

RSS and ATOM are completely interchangeable, the format does not matter here imo. If ATOM had completely took over and everyone used it now instead of closed platforms, I'd be happy. As it is my message would be "Use one of the two, these are the technical differences, in practice it does not matter as all readers support both".

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#25

Post by _zllx »

Lots of people are saying it's a collective nostalgia or a blast to the past to consider using RSS. Even in my daily life I hear this from other people. It's not just nostalgia, I've been using it since my last year of high school as a gen Z. I don't see how people can repeatedly check websites or put faith in twitter or whatever non-RSS users do to get their new information. RSS is very practical, it's just a server/app repeatedly checking websites for me, in an XML document that fits a standard. Use createfeed.fivefilters.org to make given HTML conform to RSS with CSS selectors if need be. Why check websites when this app can do it for me?

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#26

Post by mrjay42 »

For info:

As many websites are built by clever people and/or based on somewhat ready-made frameworks, when you DON'T see the RSS/Atom icons appear -> take a look at the source of the website and search (ctrl-f) for the word "rss" or "atom" or "xml" -> you might end up finding a surviving RSS link in there.

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#27

Post by gglnx »

billpg wrote: post #10

One thing I've noticed with podcasts, is that my reader will download the full RSS every day, listing hundreds of episodes, just to see if there's a new one. I get why they do this as a new listener will want to start off with a full list of episodes and may want to pick up a show from the start. It would be useful if an RSS could specify a separate URL to query that will only list new episodes, returning an empty RS…

Some podcast clients support rfc5005: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5005

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#28

Post by dig1 »

billpg wrote: post #10

One thing I've noticed with podcasts, is that my reader will download the full RSS every day, listing hundreds of episodes, just to see if there's a new one. I get why they do this as a new listener will want to start off with a full list of episodes and may want to pick up a show from the start. It would be useful if an RSS could specify a separate URL to query that will only list new episodes, returning an empty RS…

IMO, this is not a problem of RSS but how that particular feed endpoint is implemented (assuming your reader will append entries). Usually, popular news sites (that provides RSS/Atom) will have e.g., "/rss/all" endpoint to get all the news for that day, and these entries are refreshed a couple of times per day. Also, they will provide "/rss/latest" refreshed every couple of minutes or so, so it's up to your reader to check that endpoint frequently, parse and populate only the newest entries.

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#29

Post by Nextgrid »

I was thinking the other day about RSS-based social media.

Imagine a service that offers a social media experience comparable with Twitter/Insta/Tumblr with rich clients, but under the hood it's all RSS, so not only can you subscribe to third-party feeds out of the box but your "profile" is also an RSS feed that other people outside of the platform can also subscribe to.

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#30

Post by onli »

mikepurvis wrote: post #19
billpg wrote: post #10

One thing I've noticed with podcasts, is that my reader will download the full RSS every day, listing hundreds of episodes, just to see if there's a new one. I get why they do this as a new listener will want to start off with a full list of episodes and may want to pick up a show from the start. It would be useful if an RSS could specify a separate URL to query that will only list new episodes, returning an empty RS…

This should be doable just using existing Cache-Control/If-Modified-Since headers, shouldn't it? Basically both sides just need to treat the "age" of the feed document as being equal to the newest entry in it.

Right! This is actually done in blogging platforms, at least in the old ones like Wordpress (last I looked, and I think) and Serendipity. I wouldn't guarantee though that this code still works or that readers do use it...
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