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Please, expose your RSS

rknight.me

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Re: Please, expose your RSS

#11

Post by forrestthewoods »

RSS doesn’t move the needle. Only a super tiny, insignificant number of people care about RSS. Social aggregators like HN and Reddit won. RSS lost.

I have a blog and try my best to maintain the RSS feed. But if we’re being honest it’s a waste of time.

I stopped using RSS readers when half my subs required me to open a browser tab to go to the actual website to view the actual content. Webcomics were particularly annoying about this.

I mean I get it. The ideal RSS feed has no ads which means no revenue for people working hard to create interesting things I want to read! Alas.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#12

Post by kazinator »

diego_sandoval wrote: post #6
seeknotfind wrote: post #2

RSS can also be a bit inconsistent. Sometimes people put content in the feed. Sometimes it's a link. Of course, if it's in a link, programmatically scraping the content usually requires specialized code per site, unless you are okay with various random garbage in your data (e.g. generalized scrapers exist, but they might include header text from the site or similar). I suspect with the advent of LLM, there's finally…

> Sometimes people put content in the feed. Sometimes it's a link. This is the reason I gave up on trying to use RSS. If I'm going to have to follow a link anyway, I'll just save myself the time and go directly to the websites I want to read.

RSS solves the problem that web portals with updating content are web pages that you have to grok in their rendered form. RSS allows such a web page to offer a summary of the updating items in a more structured form that users can consume via a feed reader.

The idea is that checking an Inbox-like reader dashboard with 7 feeds is less time consuming than separately going to 7 websites and scrolling around.

RSS readers keep track of which items are new. They can filter items, mark them "read" and delete them. They offer searches through the items.

Using the original site instead of its feed doesn't guarantee you don't have to follow any links.

Look at this HackerNews: you have to click on links in the front page to get to the submissions, which are in different sites. Gee, how useless; if I have to click, I might as well just go directly to those websites and skip this HackerNews thing.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#13

Post by p4bl0 »

seeknotfind wrote: post #2

RSS can also be a bit inconsistent. Sometimes people put content in the feed. Sometimes it's a link. Of course, if it's in a link, programmatically scraping the content usually requires specialized code per site, unless you are okay with various random garbage in your data (e.g. generalized scrapers exist, but they might include header text from the site or similar). I suspect with the advent of LLM, there's finally…

NewsBlur has a switch to choose between two views : feed or text. The text view is generally able to fetch the full article on the website even if the feed only contains an abstract.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#14

Post by cromka »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #11

RSS doesn’t move the needle. Only a super tiny, insignificant number of people care about RSS. Social aggregators like HN and Reddit won. RSS lost. I have a blog and try my best to maintain the RSS feed. But if we’re being honest it’s a waste of time. I stopped using RSS readers when half my subs required me to open a browser tab to go to the actual website to view the actual content. Webcomics were particularly anno…

I don’t agree — RSS was only ever meant really to show the title and some few paragraphs, maybe a photo — exactly like Reddit does. I for one would hate to scroll through that much content.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#15

Post by schemescape »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #11

RSS doesn’t move the needle. Only a super tiny, insignificant number of people care about RSS. Social aggregators like HN and Reddit won. RSS lost. I have a blog and try my best to maintain the RSS feed. But if we’re being honest it’s a waste of time. I stopped using RSS readers when half my subs required me to open a browser tab to go to the actual website to view the actual content. Webcomics were particularly anno…

If the target audience for a blog is HN readers, then RSS is probably worth it (since HN readers use RSS, myself included).

The biggest issue I have with RSS is that by the time I find interesting blogs, they’ve stopped posting, so I never see updates in their feeds. But that’s an issue with blogs, not RSS.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#16

Post by colesantiago »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #11

RSS doesn’t move the needle. Only a super tiny, insignificant number of people care about RSS. Social aggregators like HN and Reddit won. RSS lost. I have a blog and try my best to maintain the RSS feed. But if we’re being honest it’s a waste of time. I stopped using RSS readers when half my subs required me to open a browser tab to go to the actual website to view the actual content. Webcomics were particularly anno…

> The ideal RSS feed has no ads which means no revenue for people working hard to create interesting things I want to read!

I don't see a problem with this at all, the best things on the internet are free and open source.

Everyone gets content for free and the author gets more views everybody wins.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#17

Post by GavinAnderegg »

I felt like this was aimed at me[1], so I added an RSS icon in my page's footer.

https://github.com/gavinanderegg/gavinanderegg.github.io/com...

I had assumed that an "application/rss+xml" link would be sufficient, but I get that folks would likely not assume that exists on all sites these days. As someone who reads blog posts mostly through RSS, I'm very happy to make this more explicit!

[1] https://mastodon.social/@gavinanderegg/111362850402497489

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#18

Post by joshmanders »

kazinator wrote: post #12
diego_sandoval wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes people put content in the feed. Sometimes it's a link. This is the reason I gave up on trying to use RSS. If I'm going to have to follow a link anyway, I'll just save myself the time and go directly to the websites I want to read.

RSS solves the problem that web portals with updating content are web pages that you have to grok in their rendered form. RSS allows such a web page to offer a summary of the updating items in a more structured form that users can consume via a feed reader. The idea is that checking an Inbox-like reader dashboard with 7 feeds is less time consuming than separately going to 7 websites and scrolling around. RSS readers…

> Look at this HackerNews: you have to click on links in the front page to get to the submissions, which are in different sites. Gee, how useless; if I have to click, I might as well just go directly to those websites and skip this HackerNews thing.

This analogy breaks down when you take into context what the purpose is for both sites.

HN: I want to discover new content that likeminded people find interesting.

RSS: I want to read what this person has to say specifically.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#19

Post by enasterosophes »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #11

RSS doesn’t move the needle. Only a super tiny, insignificant number of people care about RSS. Social aggregators like HN and Reddit won. RSS lost. I have a blog and try my best to maintain the RSS feed. But if we’re being honest it’s a waste of time. I stopped using RSS readers when half my subs required me to open a browser tab to go to the actual website to view the actual content. Webcomics were particularly anno…

I never actually expected my rss reader to provide a place for viewing the content. I treat it as a notification service. There is usually enough info in the subject line for me to decide whether I want to open the notification in a browser or dismiss it as read.

In addition to a few blogs, I use rss for news pages (including hacker news front page) and to get notified about new package releases in pypi and rubygems. For the package releases, I just mark them as read as soon as I upgrade my virtualenvs.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#20

Post by jraph »

diego_sandoval wrote: post #6
seeknotfind wrote: post #2

RSS can also be a bit inconsistent. Sometimes people put content in the feed. Sometimes it's a link. Of course, if it's in a link, programmatically scraping the content usually requires specialized code per site, unless you are okay with various random garbage in your data (e.g. generalized scrapers exist, but they might include header text from the site or similar). I suspect with the advent of LLM, there's finally…

> Sometimes people put content in the feed. Sometimes it's a link. This is the reason I gave up on trying to use RSS. If I'm going to have to follow a link anyway, I'll just save myself the time and go directly to the websites I want to read.

Isn't it throwing the baby with the bathwater? In such a case RSS already tells you if there is new stuff and what already. If you follow a dozen of websites, not having to visit all them each time is already useful.

Or are all your followed website producing new content such that there's always something new when you check it out?

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