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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?

#121

Post by DragonCot »

And this is exactly why I built my "Hack the Planet" website. http://dragons-tech.blogspot.com/2021/07/subscribe-to-newsle...

HTP is an internal project for the company I work for, but it could be spun up to match any topic. I called it "Planet" in honour of the old Planet software which I really miss.

The big issue I see with feeds is that you are forced to accept whatever is generated from the feeds. HTP, although it reads all the feeds, checks to see if the feed matches certain requisites before displaying it. So personal blogs (like mine) won't be included in the end result if I'm just talking about my breakfast and the cat. But it I mention something that is topical, then it will. It's an additional layer of processing that keeps everything relevant.

Add to that the ability to pick out trends and themes and allows you to focus on just those topics of interest and it starts to get really useful. In fact the Internal site was the primary source of news and details for the PrintNightmare and Log4j issues.

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

#122

Post by WorldMaker »

Semiapies wrote: post #88

I almost never find something I want to follow that doesn't have a feed. As someone pointed out to me, most of the RSS nostalgia is really more Google Reader nostalgia. I found that weird as it wasn't the first or the last RSS reader I used, but it was the reader that made RSS closest to mainstream. And for many people, it was the only reader they ever used, and so they're completely unaware of the ecosystem of web-b…

It's not just pushing web-based readers: I think the largest thing behind Google Reader nostalgia was social. It was Google's biggest social network to date in terms of daily active usage. (They'll throw stats that Google Plus did "better", but who is nostalgic for Google Plus, exactly?) That's why it got the closest to breaking mainstream: it wasn't just "go out in the wilds and hunt for RSS feeds on blogs" like most web-based readers appear to be to a new user, but "hey, follow my Gmail email in Google Reader and I'll share some cool things I read and then you can also yourself subscribe to where I got that". It was the conversation around stories. It was the network effect of all the Gmail users at the time.

Web-based readers today are better than Google Reader was in terms of features and data sources supported, etc. (I'm partial to and pay for Newsblur myself.) But none of them have the network effects or "social scene" of Google Reader at its peak. Likely none of them ever will. They are competing today with Twitter and Facebook. Those are the spots where people share and comment on the articles they read today.

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

#123

Post by lonk11 »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #32

I think broadly RSS needs tools to make content prioritisation and find better. Certain feeds like news sites put everything in their feed and they do a terrible job of surfacing what is likely to be valuable. It would be nice if the high volume sites could be tamed some how and its not going to come from them and its not something RSS/Atom deals with. Customised feeds, filtering and people who liked this liked that…

You are describing the project I'm building: https://linklonk.com

You connect to RSS feeds when you "thumb up" or directly submit a link that this feed posted. The more of the content you like from the same feed - the more other content from that feed will be prioritized. So feeds that post too frequently naturally go down in the ranking. And feeds that have a high signal-to-noise ratio are at the top.

On LinkLonk I am subscribed to 202 RSS feeds (you can see your subscriptions here https://linklonk.com/feeds), and I don't get overwhelmed by too much content.

You also connect to people who like the same content as you did. In that case each user is similar to an RSS feed (a user has "channels"). The more in common you have with a user - the more content you see from them.

No obnoxious adverts, no trackers and it's free. Would love to get any feedback (email in profile).

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

#124

Post by netghost »

> Open PRs for browsers with provided-by-us code to integrate RSS again, with UI elements that make existing feeds visible and supports subscribing via a feed reader

Please please please don't reinstate the "support" browsers had, it was effectively useless.

As someone who's built their own browser extension for tracking and reading feeds, I really don't want the confusion of a half feature. The browser is GREAT at navigating pages and rendering them, but when we start bundling in other services (ahem Pocket in firefox?) it feels like cruft.

I'd much rather browsers focus on building out solid features that support building amazing websites and extensions.

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

#125

Post by onli »

voisin wrote: post #120
rambambram wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell me more? What things would you filter on?

For example, if I have no interest in Node, it would be nice to take the HN RSS feed and filter words like Node in the title or content. Or if I really can’t stand sources like LiveStrong for health news I’d like to filter out that domain.

There are services that can do that. https://www.pipes.digital/ is mine and filtering feeds is probably its main use case. There is also https://siftrss.com/ and I know that some RSS reader have similar functionality, like https://blog.feedly.com/leo-and-mute-filters/.

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

#127

Post by nicbou »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #102
nicbou wrote: post #9

I added RSS to my websites, because my timeline thing ( https://github.com/nicbou/timeline ) uses them to retrieve posts from my websites. However, I see the death of RSS as the symptom of a larger problem: when platforms get big enough, they restrict access to their data. RSS feeds disappear, but so do other machine-readable endpoints. If it wasn't for GDPR, there would be no way to export that data. GDPR gave us cl…

This is why people use scrapers that turn this information into an RSS feed. So no, even without GDPR, this information would still be available. You say that the industry has incentive to kill RSS, and yet Google has just added a Follow button to Chrome for RSS feeds. Go figure.

Scrapers take more effort to implement, use more resources, and require constant maintenance.

Chrome is not the industry. It's a web browser built by a content aggregator, not a website.

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

#128

Post by hombre_fatal »

Semiapies wrote: post #91
rjzzleep wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of NY times content is non interactive. The reason why they don't want RSS isn't because RSS sucks, it's because everyone is trying increase user retention time in their apps to make shareholders happy.

All paranoid conspiracizing aside, the NYT has a metric fuckton of different RSS feeds that all work perfectly fine. RSS is primarily a notification system and only secondarily a content-delivery one.

Though this is one reason why we can do better than RSS: the implementer (or HN commenter) isn’t the one that should get to decide what I primarily or secondarily use my “feed reader” for. In this case, my local post-RSS feed reader is absolutely a way for me to store content for consumption on my own time, not just a notification service.

You’re right about RSS. I just see a better solution for this idea of a content-delivery system being one implemented as a smart client that can handle all websites rather than a dumb client that hopes every website in 2022 implements RSS. That way there’s no “you’re just using it wrong.” ;)

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

#129

Post by xtagon »

Not really interested in joining, but I definitely agree that some technologies get forgotten despite their merits.

Greg Young of the "event sourcing" crowd pointed out that RSS is natural way for event subscribers such as read model projections to subscribe to append-only event logs. Makes sense, but wouldn't have thought of it myself.

I think one reason this happens is that some technologies are less visible to the general public. RSS is not completely invisible, because a lot of browsers show an RSS icon when you visit a page that includes RSS feeds, but it's still subtle. Another example of a less visible technology would be the Semantic Web. A web page that you visit might be marked up semantically using RDFa or microdata, but the visitor could never know it unless they are looking for it.

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

#130

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

onli wrote: post #93
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #77

What percentage of users that find RSS useful are not computer nerds? Whose grandmother actually wants RSS? It seems ridiculous to be obsessed with a protocol or file format. If you need to solve a problem, then solve the problem. It doesn't matter what technical means you use to solve it. If you're just trying to implement some specific technical thing because you're in love with the idea of it, that's never gonna g…

I'd argue that this is for many about solving a problem. RSS is a stand-in here for a technology that enables users to consume contents from distributed authors with a client they prefer, with the default option of not having an algorithmic sort order that serves only the content platform. This is something also someone's grandmother could want if it enables here to follow her interests online, whatever they may be.…

> a technology that enables users to consume contents from distributed authors with a client they prefer, with the default option of not having an algorithmic sort order that serves only the content platform

Yeah that last part's the problem. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. RSS doesn't have a viable business case. Average users need a reason to invest themselves in it, and business owners need to see that it generates its own source of revenue [greater than whatever else they've got going on]. Even if you have answers for both of those things, you have to show people it for them to accept it ("show me the money")

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