Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who do you outsource yours to, or do you read with curl?
I use NetNewsWire. It’s free, open-source, and explicitly says not to send money. > First thing: don’t send money. This app is written for love, not money. :) https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/blob/main/T...
How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
181–190 of 265 posts
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#182I think the real issue is that the 'hobbyist web' is dead because there is no distribution Let's say you want to post about 'best way to clean your car windshield'. Why would you post it on a blog when nobody will read it when the TikTok algo will at least give you a pity test to a few hundred people So all that's left is Reddit and social media and the short form video apps (and Youtube) The other part of course is…
I wouldn’t say it’s dead. Rather, niche.
IndieWeb blogging products are alive and well. Google definitely scrapes and ranks (my blog gets good juice) and there are and increasing number of aggregators like Kagi small web, bubbles.town, ooh.directory.
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#183Interestingly I think Google's mishandling of RSS created an opening for Substack, which famously allows authors to export their mailing list at any time.
Substack provides RSS too which is nice
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#184The Internet in the early 2000s felt a little more special as compared to today, when 99.999 % of content is locked in a handful of walled gardens. I mean sure everything we had then is still possible but let’s be honest everything about the web is fine tuned to deliver ads to our eyeballs, browsers, operating systems and even protocols are being designed with ad delivery in mind. Even the privacy friendly browsers j…
What I don't understand about the "RSS can't support ads" argument is that most of my RSS feeds don't actually let me read the article. Just a headline and a snippet at most. So if I want to actually read the article I'm going to have to load their page.
Google dont care about ads on their page. They care about ads on google pages.
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#185The Internet in the early 2000s felt a little more special as compared to today, when 99.999 % of content is locked in a handful of walled gardens. I mean sure everything we had then is still possible but let’s be honest everything about the web is fine tuned to deliver ads to our eyeballs, browsers, operating systems and even protocols are being designed with ad delivery in mind. Even the privacy friendly browsers j…
What I don't understand about the "RSS can't support ads" argument is that most of my RSS feeds don't actually let me read the article. Just a headline and a snippet at most. So if I want to actually read the article I'm going to have to load their page.
> So if I want to actually read the article I'm going to have to load their page.
Right here, that's how HN RSS feed works.
I only follow HN through the RSS feed. But it only gives the title and links to content and comments.
But for HN use case, that's ok IMO. Based on title I can decide if the comments might be worth it and follow the link.
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#186And they shut down Google Podcasts, migrating it to YouTube Music. The podcast ecosystem is open and RSS-based. YouTube Music is closed.
Fun fact, youtube channels have proper Atom feeds that you can subscribe to from most feed readers out there.
Here's @realcountbinface's feed: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UClAxTtZ...
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#187With integration of AI , RSS feeds is the future
If you are already using agentic tools, making them crawl and summarize the news with some RSS feeds is super useful. If you use a vector database to store your feeds, you can do RAG against that content as well. Super useful for lots of things if you haven't tried this. This is one of those things that non technical users would be doing if only they knew how to do that.
You don't need social networks with their AI filtering any more if you have that. That stuff just became obsolete. People just haven't figured that out yet. Including most people that actually do use RSS readers.
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was also .001% of the content there is now. The Internet of 2000 was microscopic. Now everyone can create content, without any of the friction of hosting it. The vast majority of it is crap, but that was always the case. The main difference between now and 30 years ago is that the Internet is vastly more diverse. It isn't just other CS majors any more. Now everyone gets to wade in the vast crap pool looking for…
i don't think it's fair to say it was just CS majors, I'm a 90s baby and i was on the web in the 2000s when i was in middle school, I still remember reading web comics and forums, messaging people on MSN and playing MMOs with online friends, looking up gameFAQs to get past sticking points. This could just be me, but it felt more social and personal.
Yeah it feels like people aren't making friends online as much nowadays. Everyone is chasing clout, and if you get a rando who sends you a friendly message, it's quite likely a pig butchering scam.
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#189The Internet in the early 2000s felt a little more special as compared to today, when 99.999 % of content is locked in a handful of walled gardens. I mean sure everything we had then is still possible but let’s be honest everything about the web is fine tuned to deliver ads to our eyeballs, browsers, operating systems and even protocols are being designed with ad delivery in mind. Even the privacy friendly browsers j…
IDK, I ran an RSS feed that had ads 20 years ago (it was a niche hobby blog and every fifth post was an ad for supplies for that hobby). It made enough to pay for the hosting.
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#190The Internet in the early 2000s felt a little more special as compared to today, when 99.999 % of content is locked in a handful of walled gardens. I mean sure everything we had then is still possible but let’s be honest everything about the web is fine tuned to deliver ads to our eyeballs, browsers, operating systems and even protocols are being designed with ad delivery in mind. Even the privacy friendly browsers j…
> everything about the web is fine tuned to deliver ads to our eyeballs, browsers, operating systems and even protocols are being designed with ad delivery in mind. I use Firefox with uBlock Origin on Linux, and haven't seen an ad in years. It's not like ads weren't a thing 20 years ago. Pop-up windows were particularly bad. Javascript, in particular, has been constantly abused against the user ever since it was crea…
There's a difference. It was a matter of principle for a Web site (not) to use pop-up ads or ads in general. It would be highly inappropriate for a large and successful business to have (especially pop-up) ads in their product (unless ads was their business).
Another aspect of ads from the early 2000: they were individually made for particular places, rarely generating any controversy. For example, I used to be a moderator on a forum dedicated to ActionScript, and we had a sponsor, who, basically paid our hosting expenses, and that sponsor had a banner in the header of the forum advertising lessons in Web design / programming. The banner was designed to match the overall forum appearance, it didn't track anyone's browsing history, didn't collect cookies... it was simply a big and fancy button linking to the sponsor's Web site.
The problems really started with the "media buying" waterfalls, i.e. the automated ad delivery. Ad agencies automated their job by providing customers with (semi-, but increasingly fully-automatic) ways to design their ad campaigns. In order to make these campaigns at least somewhat effective, they needed to somehow automatically reproduce the situation similar to the one I described having in the ActionScript forum: they needed to find a good match between the audience and the ad, but they had to cut corners because of the automation and resort to the unsavory mechanisms of tracking users' behavior. The decrease in quality had to be compensated for by increase in quantity. And that's how we got here...