31–40 of 88 posts
From my analytics, around 85% of visits to my sites are now from bots. It's hard to say if these are oldschool bots or people just browsing the web via chatgpt now, but the reality is that very few actually visit the actual sites I have anymore.
I think blogs should have a universal comment function, I'd love to engage ith the author but many blogs don't bother providing a basic textarea.
How else to notify readers? RSS is quite good. Corporations do not like it though, because they want to control spread of information. They prefer you re-enter page, be targeted with more ads, or spoonfed with their news algorithm on-site. However RSS only works, if someone knows about your page. YouTube is quite good with RSS though. You can have channel RSS, be notified about new videos, while channels still are di…
It’s not that they don’t like it. It’s more like they don’t care, or it’s not on their radar.
How else to notify readers? RSS is quite good. Corporations do not like it though, because they want to control spread of information. They prefer you re-enter page, be targeted with more ads, or spoonfed with their news algorithm on-site. However RSS only works, if someone knows about your page. YouTube is quite good with RSS though. You can have channel RSS, be notified about new videos, while channels still are di…
It’s not that they don’t like it. It’s more like they don’t care, or it’s not on their radar.
I think many platform did support RSS, or API, but at some time it was dropped. It is not that hard to provide RSS. It is not like it has to be implemented from scratch. It is just dropped by platforms. There must be reasons for dropping. One may argue it is not worth it, but even to drop functionality there needs to be a decision from management. The management always think about money. Is RSS or API monetized correctly? Free? No? Then we drop it, because data from algorithms serving user contents can be easily monetized. Just follow the money, the oldest truth.
How else to notify readers? RSS is quite good. Corporations do not like it though, because they want to control spread of information. They prefer you re-enter page, be targeted with more ads, or spoonfed with their news algorithm on-site. However RSS only works, if someone knows about your page. YouTube is quite good with RSS though. You can have channel RSS, be notified about new videos, while channels still are di…
It’s not that they don’t like it. It’s more like they don’t care, or it’s not on their radar.
Though some seem to go out of their way to make RSS impossible.
There's a ton of selection bias going on here. Terence writes mostly about open web standards and topics that would be of significant interest to folks with an RSS feed reader. Also, RSS readers are generally automated. I know I've had them around for years pulling in articles that I never read. Like a podcast "listen" is actually just an automated download, RSS traffic does not necessarily involve anyone actually re…
Same pattern as say a sub-reddit subscriber count compared to the number of nicks currently in an associated IRC channel, though IRC lurkers soften that distinction.
Same experience. RSS is by far the most requested resource in the server logs. Sometimes up to 70% of the total traffic is coming from RSS. That said though, I wonder how much of that traffic is biological and how much is bots. I also wonder how much is dead traffic. Dead as in people who add a ton of stuff in their RSS readers but don’t actually read. RSS is a bit of a black box when it comes to this but maybe that'…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just as a suggestion, but I've been thinking in terms of clustering. If I can figure out that five different posts from five different feeds are about one story, I can collapse them into a single UI element.
I did exactly this with Cohere language embeddings https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/use-language-e...
Same experience. RSS is by far the most requested resource in the server logs. Sometimes up to 70% of the total traffic is coming from RSS. That said though, I wonder how much of that traffic is biological and how much is bots. I also wonder how much is dead traffic. Dead as in people who add a ton of stuff in their RSS readers but don’t actually read. RSS is a bit of a black box when it comes to this but maybe that'…
It's not, if you add a tracking parameter in the posted URLs and you keep track of that in your analytics.
How else to notify readers? RSS is quite good. Corporations do not like it though, because they want to control spread of information. They prefer you re-enter page, be targeted with more ads, or spoonfed with their news algorithm on-site. However RSS only works, if someone knows about your page. YouTube is quite good with RSS though. You can have channel RSS, be notified about new videos, while channels still are di…