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RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

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Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

#61

Post by nofriend »

protocolture wrote: post #8
danpalmer wrote: post #3

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…

>There's a ton of selection bias going on here. The data doesnt purport to cover any more than the 1 website. Its not like there are any generalisations about other websites derived from the data. Its just "These are where my hits come from"

the only reason anyone would be interested in this result is because of the implication that it generalizes to other sites.

Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

#62

Post by acdha »

renegat0x0 wrote: post #33
donohoe wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not that they don’t like it. It’s more like they don’t care, or it’s not on their radar.

Agree to disagree. 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…

Also, scraping was a problem for publishers: if your site was popular, copy-cats would show up republishing your work with minimal credit.

That said, this seems quaint in the modern era where trillion-dollar tech companies are doing that to publishers now, too.

Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

#63

Post by 1shooner »

PaulHoule wrote: post #57
PunchyHamster wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some parallel universe, the RSS is tightly integrated with browser and main way to "subscribe" to site's updates

In that parallel universe web sites stop publishing RSS because they are overwhelmed with the polling traffic. The world really does need something like ActivityPub as much as Dave Winer denies it. RSS has two polling speeds: too fast and too slow and it can even be both at the same time.

Is WebSub not a reasonable solution to this?

Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

#64

Post by cdrnsf »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #7

I've been toying with LLM based agents for staying on top of feeds lately. Staying on top of the fire hose was always the challenge with RSS readers, a lot of interesting low frequency stuff from people you follow gets buried under the non stop feed of stuff from high volume news that is actively trying to drown everyone out with many updates per day. Back in the day I solved it by simply not using RSS feeds for high…

I curate my subscriptions pretty heavily. I scan the feed and triage to my linkding instance. I have a headless app that fetches unread items, uses a voice model from Hugging Face to audio using piper and then adds them to audiobookshelf as a "podcast". I catch up on things when I'm on a walk or doing the dishes.

Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

#65

Post by xacky »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #48
renegat0x0 wrote: post #16

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…

In some parallel universe, the RSS is tightly integrated with browser and main way to "subscribe" to site's updates

Firefox and Safari used to have RSS built in, but removed.

Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

#66

Post by ajot »

renegat0x0 wrote: post #16

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…

Something I read here on HN some time ago and that can be of your interest: you can get specific Atom feeds from Youtube channels (only long format videos, only shorts, only live streams, only popular, etc)

>https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71192605/how-do-i-get-yo...

Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

#67

Post by bji9jhff »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #48
renegat0x0 wrote: post #16

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…

In some parallel universe, the RSS is tightly integrated with browser and main way to "subscribe" to site's updates

Wasn't that parallel universe our 15 years ago?

Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

#68

Post by johanyc »

nofriend wrote: post #61
protocolture wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's a ton of selection bias going on here. The data doesnt purport to cover any more than the 1 website. Its not like there are any generalisations about other websites derived from the data. Its just "These are where my hits come from"

the only reason anyone would be interested in this result is because of the implication that it generalizes to other sites.

No. I knew it's data point for one website only and I'm still interested.

Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

#69

Post by johanyc »

flir wrote: post #9
jillesvangurp wrote: post #7

I've been toying with LLM based agents for staying on top of feeds lately. Staying on top of the fire hose was always the challenge with RSS readers, a lot of interesting low frequency stuff from people you follow gets buried under the non stop feed of stuff from high volume news that is actively trying to drown everyone out with many updates per day. Back in the day I solved it by simply not using RSS feeds for high…

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.

Are there existing good implementations of that? Does Feedly have that?

Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

#70

Post by PaulHoule »

1shooner wrote: post #63
PaulHoule wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that parallel universe web sites stop publishing RSS because they are overwhelmed with the polling traffic. The world really does need something like ActivityPub as much as Dave Winer denies it. RSS has two polling speeds: too fast and too slow and it can even be both at the same time.

Is WebSub not a reasonable solution to this?

Yes. Superfeedr makes RSS feeds look more like WebSub feeds and it's a great product. 10 cents/(month*feed) is a bargain if you want to subscribe to 100 high volume feeds but prohibitive for the model of "I want to subscribe to 10,000 indy blogs"
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