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

I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

reedybear.bearblog.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 248 posts

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#181

Post by rmnclmnt »

dqv wrote: post #81
rmnclmnt wrote: post #9

Love RSS, been using (and paying for) miniflux for a few years now. Do someone knows a way to retrieve RSS feeds URLs for any podcast that would be hosted on major platforms? (Spotify, Apple Music) I subscribed to podcast having some hosted website (where they are publishing the RSS feed from) but most of them don’t

Pocket Casts usually lists the RSS link when you share a podcast from the app. https://pca.st/podcast/170a7610-948e-0135-9d21-5bb073f92b78 Under "more ways to listen" it has RSS as an option.

Thanks!

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#182

Post by _Algernon_ »

beretguy wrote: post #141
_Algernon_ wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I don't know, it's almost kind of like saying that newborn babies are illiterate by choice. Not everybody cares about computers or how to use them, they just want to find that restaurant address or read this news article or whatever. They don't have time or interest to learn how to use computers. I don't know how to replace transmission in my car. It's not by choice - I just don't have time and money to learn how to…

I'm literally mentioning adults in my comment. Adults have agency. Babies don't. Weird choice of comparison.

As for the car analogy:

You're right, but you also accept the consequences of that choice which is mostly limited to having to pay for a mechanic every once in a while.

The consequences of tech illiteracy is much worse (more comparible to actual illiteracy):

- Lower employability.

- Easier to get scammed / have data leaked or hacked.

- Easier to get manipulated by platforms (social media are comparable to priests interpreting the bible to people before literacy was common).

- On a societal scale, when enough people are affected, the above leads to instability, proliferation of dis- and misinformation on a societal scale.

- Per av above, destabilising of democracy.

I'm sure people argued the same about people not having to learn to read / write during the enlightenment. Im happy they did not win out.

Tragically, it appears we are going the opposite direction this time.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#183

Post by lern_too_spel »

dist-epoch wrote: post #95
beretguy wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people also decide Most people didn't decide. Most people were tricked into using chrome. Most people are not computer literate.

When Chrome appeared HN was full of comments like "I switched all my family to Chrome, I recommend you do too".

At the time, Chrome was far and away the most secure browser available. It still is the most secure browser in many respects but not by enough of a margin to outweigh its disadvantages in some cases, like mobile, where its lack of extension support hurts security for those who know what they're doing as well as usability.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#184

Post by jhot »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #78
defrost wrote: post #8

As a general PSA, youtube channels have an RSS feed to alert you when a favourite creator releases a new video. The form is https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC2wdo5v... where channel_id is the channel hash code which is buried in the source for the "nicely named" channel: https://www.youtube.com/@CuttingEdgeEngineering and can be found without source diving via (say) FeedBro (RSS browser extension)…

I worry about YouTube RSS feeds getting popular and Google killing them. Every time I see them discussed publicly I have this "Ssshh! Keep it on the down low!" reaction. I browse YouTube anonymously, have an ad blocker setup that pretty much eliminates all ads, and track my "subscriptions" with RSS. It's highly usable. I use a fork of tt-rss and actually embed the YouTube videos in the reader pane so I never see any…

I run pinchflat [0] to automate yt-dlp and file management behind the scenes. Also can integrate with sponsorblock to remove in-video ads.

0 - https://github.com/kieraneglin/pinchflat

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#185

Post by devmor »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #36
devmor wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God wouldn't that be simple and novel? Check a box when you bookmark a website and your browser polls it every so often for updates and gives you a little badge like a mobile app icon. No need for JS workers or push servers.

I wouldn't mind if browsers want to offer that feature in addition to RSS. But I also don't want to be forced to use my browser's bookmarking feature - RSS helps to decouple that.

The implication is that your bookmarks would read an RSS feed provided by the website for notifications

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#186

Post by _Algernon_ »

freetanga wrote: post #129
_Algernon_ wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Just for reference: - 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024. - 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level). I would argue than everyone who is stuck a below 6th grade understanding of a language they use everyday can hardly be tech literate ( which in itself requires good reading and abstraction capabilities) Is it their fault because they choose to be like this? The…

We have a tool for people who can't deal with the responsibility and freedom of adulthood. They have guardians who make the decisions for them (parents in the case of minors or a guardian assigned to them).

The american education system being abhorrent is a separate issue but adapting society to fit the lowest common denominator isn't a solution.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#187

Post by palata »

magpi3 wrote: post #156
palata wrote: post #10

I have been doing that for plaintext emails. Whenever I receive an HTML-only email (that my email reader cannot open), I send a kind email to the company, asking if they could consider adding a plaintext version next to it. I clearly explain that they can keep the HTML version as a default, and that some people need plaintext for accessibility and security reasons. I often receive answers, that surprised me! People s…

Honest question: wouldn't it be simpler for text-only email readers to have plugins that runs HTML-only emails through a command that converts the HTML to text?

I don't think so. If you print the HTML, it's often full of " ", images and links unrelated to the actual content. It's hard to extract the meaningful part of that pile of stuff in a trustworthy way (and you wouldn't want to lose information).

Also many of those emails are autogenerated. So the template has to be done once, and that's it. And it should be trivial for whoever composes the HTML email to copy-paste the important part into a text-only version. Maybe it would actually help them think about what the important part actually is.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#188

Post by palata »

_heimdall wrote: post #126
palata wrote: post #3

RSS is great. Most blog engines support RSS by default. Podcasts typically use RSS (even if the app goes to great length to hide it). I sometimes wonder why there is so much push for "federation" and so few for... well just simple interoperable solutions that just require a client to connect to whatever server it wants with a well-known protocol.

It comes down to a push versus pull architecture. RSS is pull based, you aren't notified when a feed is updated. Most people today want push based with a feed, with all the bells and whistles of a social feed that is updated instantly. Federation comes in mainly because push based systems require a server managing who follows who, what is posted, and who to notify of updates. That's a lot of information for one centr…

Right, those are good points.

Still I can't help but to wonder whether those notifications are needed or not. Except for instant messaging, I generally don't want notifications. Like I don't need to be told that a new podcast is available, I'll see it next time I open the app.

I would like to at least have the choice to use RSS instead of having to go through a complicated federated system.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#189

Post by geor9e »

My favorite RSS reader is Feedbro. I see hackernews front page posts, friends facebook posts, friends nitter (x) posts, friends substack posts, youtube subscriptions, all in one chronological feed. And a browser icon shows how many posts are waiting to be viewed. There are some paid services that scrape other sites to RSS for you too (like zapier).

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#190

Post by geor9e »

palata wrote: post #10

I have been doing that for plaintext emails. Whenever I receive an HTML-only email (that my email reader cannot open), I send a kind email to the company, asking if they could consider adding a plaintext version next to it. I clearly explain that they can keep the HTML version as a default, and that some people need plaintext for accessibility and security reasons. I often receive answers, that surprised me! People s…

I don't mean to sound super callous - but what? I have so many questions, as someone who uses screen readers a lot. How are you browsing HN - it's not like websites maintain a separate .txt file for the blind. When you click "Read aloud" in a browser (or whatever the inbuilt screenreader calls it), thanks to the structure of the html DOM it can find the main txt. Since your email client can't open most emails, you still have no idea what people said to you? Coworkers ignored, bills unpaid. Instead, you've just been scolding the senders for years, and admit you've not had one single success from it? Even if everyone changed, and you got dual format back for every email, would the senders be manually creating both, or would they just let software convert one to the other? If software, then as a general computer science infra question, for scaling, should that computation be run on the 99% of cases that never use it, or should it just be run at the 1% of endpoints that use it? Are you on an ARPANET PDP-10? You're shifting the burden onto hundreds of non-technical email writers, shaming them for not catering to your niche desire for dual format emails (gmail doesn't even do this), when your email reader could just enter the 90s era. Hackers make computers do things despite it all. If you created that email client, there are many open source tools for you to do html2txt in one line. pandoc for one.
Post reply on HN