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

81–90 of 99 posts

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#81

Post by gmiller123456 »

In order for RSS to be useful, I think it needs to stay an "underground" tech. It used to be very popular, with everyone promoting their feeds, lots of clients, and lots of interested users. The problem with it, as you found out, was there's a lot of stuff in those feeds you're not interested in. And publishers were all too happy to put crap in their feeds in the hope that it might get a click.

I think what really put an end to RSS was sites like Digg.com (not sure if they were the first, but they're the first I remember), where people would submit stories and users would vote on whether they were good or not. Aggregators existed before, like Slashdot.org, but were curated by editors. Reddit.com and others followed, and RSS feeds became much and much less popular. I kinda view the result of the "social aggregators" as an RSS feed with the content ranked.

There's a disincentive to publishing an RSS feed, as the content creators would much rather you visit their home page so they can serve you some ads. And with people visiting their home page, they're more incentivized to keep the crap headlines to a tolerable level. Of course the downside of RSS not being mainstream anymore is that smaller/independent publishers that don't make money on clicks either don't know it exists, or don't think the effort is worthwhile.

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#82

Post by kjs3 »

trowawee wrote: post #74
kjs3 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that a client issue, not an RSS issue per se ? Accept a lot and have some rules to filter it? That's kinda what I like about RSS...I have the power to decide what ends up in my feeds, not what some algorithm decides I should see.

Not really; definitionally an RSS feed is just a big list of everything a site publishes. Sure, the rules-based approach will work, and I assume anyone who's been using RSS for a while has built up a set of filter rules that amount to a personal algorithm for their feed. But it's a big initial investment in time and effort to set those rules up. If you subscribe to a bunch of personal blogs, you're fine. But if you s…

[flagged]

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#83

Post by escape_goat »

kjs3 wrote: post #82
trowawee wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really; definitionally an RSS feed is just a big list of everything a site publishes. Sure, the rules-based approach will work, and I assume anyone who's been using RSS for a while has built up a set of filter rules that amount to a personal algorithm for their feed. But it's a big initial investment in time and effort to set those rules up. If you subscribe to a bunch of personal blogs, you're fine. But if you s…

[flagged]

When you ask someone a question, their answer isn't a rebuttal and you don't give them hints, come on. Really needlessly obnoxious. He replied to you in good faith.

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#84

Post by dotancohen »

protonscientist wrote: post #77
jesushax wrote: post #68

>Funnily enough, the old.reddit.com view does have a to the RSS feed. Maybe that's not a coincidence! Aaron Swartz, one of the co-founders of Reddit, was also one of the developers of RSS. Most people already know his story, but for those who don't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

You can also tack ".json" to the end of most Reddit URLs to get it in JSON format which is much easier to work with when scraping content. It's hardly documented anywhere online as well but interesting that they offer both.

This is terrific, thank you!

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#85

Post by deafpolygon »

The first mistake is expecting to fill your feed with content a la social media (reddit, whatever).

I treat RSS like I would treat buying a newspaper. I know I'm not always going to get the best articles. I only put stuff on there that I would actually look at each morning (not always read, but actually look). Then I skim the headlines for things I want to read, read them, and then put my "newspaper" away. If I find a few articles that are really good, I star them (save) for reading later. Unstar when done.

In order for this to work, you need to be very aggressive with what goes in your RSS feed list. I also use RSS to keep track of things that don't post very often- but I'm going to forget to visit their site on a "regular" basis (think; once a month, once every 2 weeks).

Social media feeds aren't going to work, because that's always going to be a firehose.

Examples of feeds I have in my RSS:

- bbc global news (my daily snapshot of world happenings)

- local news in English (i'm an expat)

- wikipedia featured articles (once a day)

- a few blogs of related interests that I don't often visit

That's pretty much it. Each morning, I get about 50-75 articles in my feed. I skim and read maybe 10-15 relevant ones and I am done for the day.

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#86

Post by thefz »

The author fundamentally does not understand that RSS is the opposite of whatever social stuff they have consumed so far. Yes you need to pick your sources,yes you have to comb through articles, nobody will do that for you. And it needs to stay this way

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#87

Post by mananaysiempre »

kevincox wrote: post #12
rawling wrote: post #6

> A page can declare an RSS feed using a tag in the something like this: > ... > But browsers won’t surface that to you. Do they not? I thought FF put an icon in the address bar.

It used to. Now you need an extension for desktop. And I have yet to find an extension that works on mobile. Chrome is basically the same except that mobile doesn't support extensions at all.

I’ve stopped using Chrome when they locked non-official builds out of Sync, but people say they’ve added an RSS reader recently?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34106173

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#88

Post by marniewebb »

I used Yahoo! Pipes to help manage the firehouse part of RSS. I filtered on keywords, used it manage duplicates across feeds and a few other things. It would be great to have that kind of functionality in a reader.

Bookmarked https://pipes.digital/ but haven’t yet played with it.

Edit: fixed link

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#89

Post by fuzzygroup »

The problem with feed discovery is very, very real. Lots and lots of feeds exist that don't have link tags. I wrote Scott's Feed Finder to probe for them. Yes I'm biased but its a very solid feed discovery tool:

https://scottsfeedfinder.com/

And don't even get me started on ranting about podcasts that don't clearly label their feed.

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#90

Post by vidarh »

kjs3 wrote: post #65
trowawee wrote: post #32

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 lon…

Isn't that a client issue, not an RSS issue per se ? Accept a lot and have some rules to filter it? That's kinda what I like about RSS...I have the power to decide what ends up in my feeds, not what some algorithm decides I should see.

It is absolutely a client issue. For a while (before their API limits became an issue), I dealt with Twitter with a Bayesian network, and it took very little training to massively improve the experience.
Post reply on HN