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It's time for an RSS revival (2018)

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Re: It's time for an RSS revival (2018)

#32
post #30

RSS fails miserably on 2 things: 1. Discoverability 2. Monetization Consider YouTube - it provides discoverability through the algorithmic feed. Giving creators a distribution platform they can't find anywhere else. It also provides monetization through ads, sponsorships and direct support to creators. Consider Newsletters - no discoverability built in, but it does support monetization. Pay to subscribe, and only you…

Authenticated or unique feed URLs are "a thing", but overall the difficulty in "monetization" is a feature to me.

I've been a heavy RSS user since 2005. It has served my purposes well and I'd just as soon it not be "disrupted", personally.

Re: It's time for an RSS revival (2018)

#33
post #30

RSS fails miserably on 2 things: 1. Discoverability 2. Monetization Consider YouTube - it provides discoverability through the algorithmic feed. Giving creators a distribution platform they can't find anywhere else. It also provides monetization through ads, sponsorships and direct support to creators. Consider Newsletters - no discoverability built in, but it does support monetization. Pay to subscribe, and only you…

>RSS feed can't limit only to subscribers.

This practice was common when RSS was popular and is still used today by newspapers and other media outlets.

An individual feed provides only a snippet view of the article which encourages you to visit the site where a subscription was required.

Re: It's time for an RSS revival (2018)

#34
post #13

Feeds are NOT just a way to craft a personal selection of news in a personal LOCAL UI, with optional full-text-search, local storage for articles, tagging etc BUT also a simple form of asynchronous/lazy push-pull notifications. For instance we can have feeds for: - all software project we use/follow, to get info about a new release without having to go to a site/read an ML etc and perhaps finding the Changelog direct…

Yes, some kind of asynchronous personal agent is a great idea. It is the ultimate anti-social media, your very own "super app" that handles your digital life for you. I want it

The issue here is that you can only in part, the other part are the others who offer good feeds or not... Like journals who do not offer feeds, some that offer them but not with full contents making them of little use, projects who do not offer release feeds and so on...

Even most banks, at least in EU do not offer decent AUTOMATIC export of transactions, most offer some kind of limited and limiting manual export but nothing more.

That's the real damn issue... We can have a super-simpler IT infra for the humanity instead of the immense gazillion of crappy crap we have, but we miss it because someone for a personal corporate/political interest want a limited and crappy state of thing to have some short-term power...

Re: It's time for an RSS revival (2018)

#37
post #30

RSS fails miserably on 2 things: 1. Discoverability 2. Monetization Consider YouTube - it provides discoverability through the algorithmic feed. Giving creators a distribution platform they can't find anywhere else. It also provides monetization through ads, sponsorships and direct support to creators. Consider Newsletters - no discoverability built in, but it does support monetization. Pay to subscribe, and only you…

You're not wrong. But I do wish more people were happy with those "failures", which basically describe the Internet of yore.

Re: It's time for an RSS revival (2018)

#39
post #20
post #15

Truthfully I have never used RSS, beyond having to support it in a piece of software. I've never really understood the appeal and I've never been able to make it fit into my life. Maybe I'm missing the point, I never read news or other such things, so perhaps there's just no use case for me.

In simplest terms, do you want to remember to visit 20 different sites each day or just remember to visit your RSS reader which aggregates all those sites?

There are other things you can use it for--including being the behind the schemes technology for podcasts. But, yeah, that was the primary not behind the scenes use case.

There's been a decline in low volume individual sites and a lot of people find sites like this one, Twitter, etc. provide sufficient discoverability for their needs in any case.

Re: It's time for an RSS revival (2018)

#40
Does anybody know why Randall Munroe (XKCD) has made a mockery of RSS on his site? I thought his joke was funny at first, but he has left it there and now the RSS feed from his site is worse than useless. Here's the content I get from his RSS feed on both my Android phone and my iPad:

"xkcd.com is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or below on a Pentium 3±1 emulated in Javascript on an Apple IIGS at a screen resolution of 1024x1. Please enable your ad blockers, disable high-heat drying, and remove your device from Airplane Mode and set it to Boat Mode. For security reasons, please leave caps lock on while browsing."

This behavior began several months ago. Previously I could access his content on the same devices.

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