Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gripes with RSS after one week

blog.jez.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 99 posts

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#31

Post by trynewideas »

zwilliamson wrote: post #11
justinator wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well four years ago, they removed support for RSS, so less next level, and more um... a similar level than before.

Maybe a couple git reverts/rebases away from bringing it back? :)

Pocket is explicitly[1] their replacement for RSS/Atom features, and a Mozilla monetization vector, so: good luck!

1: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacement...

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#32

Post by trowawee »

The firehose issue is definitely a problem with RSS, especially if all you've ever experienced is algorithmic social media feeds. It's solveable, but it does require either a very specific approach (I quickly scan my unreads in Feedbin/Reeder, save whatever I want to read in depth, and then browse saved items later), or a reasonably large suite of rules applied to your feed (takes a long time to build, takes even longer to refine, and you will find yourself perpetually tuning them), or something like Feedly's AI assistant (but then you're still outsourcing your feed to someone else's algorithm, and avoiding that is supposed to be the point of RSS).

On some level, "I want to/am able to wade through the firehose" is a pre-req for RSS. I'm sure that's part of what limited the appeal even in the fabled golden age of Google Reader. Also, like most things, it's better if you pay for it. I've paid for two versions of Reeder now (about $15 total, I believe) and I pay Feedbin $50/year to act as my backend + web interface. The overall experience is better than any of the other modern RSS apps I've tried, and better than Reader was way back when.

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#33

Post by woodruffw »

Nice writeup. I share a lot of these gripes, as someone who's also on the publishing side: it continues to surprise me how many people actually do read my blog via RSS (based on statistics passed back through user agents), given how poor the discovery and client experience is.

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#34

Post by jasonpbecker »

I am pretty sure all of his problems would be fixed with Feedbin, which offers a great in-browser interface, shows all the feeds on the page when adding a URL, and helps with the firehose issue with filters.

I also prefer Reeder to a large degree over NNW myself.

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#36

Post by Havoc »

My main complaint is that feeds then to just be the first sentence or two. So you still end up opening a browser and getting bombarded with popups and cookie banners and what not.

Very tempted to try & combine this with something like FF reader mode and build a scraping & filtering layer inbetween that sends the full text to the reader.

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#37

Post by _eht »

Havoc wrote: post #36

My main complaint is that feeds then to just be the first sentence or two. So you still end up opening a browser and getting bombarded with popups and cookie banners and what not. Very tempted to try & combine this with something like FF reader mode and build a scraping & filtering layer inbetween that sends the full text to the reader.

cloudflare anti-scraping intensifies...

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#38

Post by skyfoxxy »

greggyb wrote: post #22

I like Inoreader[0]. The web app is plenty snappy for me, and supports basic vim nav keys, which is a lovely plus. The free plan's 150 feeds are sufficient for my use case. The mobile app also performs well. Mostly it just gets out of my way, which is all I really want. [0] https://www.inoreader.com

+1 for Inoreader. Been using it for a long while now

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#39

Post by blairbeckwith »

Havoc wrote: post #36

My main complaint is that feeds then to just be the first sentence or two. So you still end up opening a browser and getting bombarded with popups and cookie banners and what not. Very tempted to try & combine this with something like FF reader mode and build a scraping & filtering layer inbetween that sends the full text to the reader.

This is definitely annoying. I understand why larger publishers do it, but it drives me crazy when more independent writers/publishers do it.

It's enough of a problem that some RSS reader services have a feature that does exactly what you describe re: fetching the full article contents. Unread on iOS does this, as does Feedbin I believe, although you'll only find it on paid services/plans because of the ongoing costs associated with powering it.

Post reply on HN