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I Miss RSS

wilcosky.com

131–140 of 314 posts

Re: I Miss RSS

#131
post #34

To be honest, I don't. Websites like Reddit or Hacker News are better because they provide popularity scores into the links, helping me filtered out junk links.

> because they provide popularity scores into the links, helping me filtered out junk links.

Which you can also do—and better—with RSS.

hnrss.org allows you to get a feed with posts over N points. Example: https://hnrss.org/newest?points=300

Adding `top.rss` to a subreddit’s URL gives you a feed you can further manipulate with `t` and `limit`. Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallpapers/top.rss?t=month&limit=20 lists the top 20 posts from the past month in `r/wallpapers`.

Re: I Miss RSS

#132
post #3

I miss having a standard for uniform syndication that could be read and updated IN-BROWSER. RIP Firefox RSS feeds.

Dropping support for RSS feeds was an ill decision from them; thankfully there are extensions to restore and extend the functionality. https://nodetics.com/feedbro/ https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/

I have been using Feedbro for the past 6 months - it's great!

Re: I Miss RSS

#133

When I see articles like this, my reaction is always: when did RSS go away? I have close to 200 sites in my Feedly list, and I have trouble keeping up with all the articles I get from RSS every day. I think that what the author really means is that he misses RSS feeds from Twitter. I don't use Twitter, so from my perspective, RSS is as present and useful as it was 20 years ago.

How did you aggregate so many sources to read articles from? What is your discovery process? Do you have any recommendation where I can read good stuff from?

Not the OP, but these days I find new things (mostly blogs) through four different mechanisms:

1 - Hacker News - If there's an interesting article linked, then I'll consider adding the site to my feed (using feedbin since the great Google Reader apocalypse).

2 - Blog referrals - Sometimes existing feed items will link to other articles sites (sourced from, similar problem, etc) and I'll sometimes add those sites.

3 - Search Results / Organic - If I'm investigating a particular problem/issue/topic and find a good blog, then I'll add it to my feed.

4 - Topic Specific Aggregators - in some cases there are people that produce topic specific post summaries (such as the .Net Morning Brew https://blog.cwa.me.uk/ or Michael Tsai https://mjtsai.com/blog/ ) that link articles - again, if the articles are good, or I notice I've visited the site before, I'll sometimes add it to my feed list.

Just checking my OPML, I have around 600 sites (more than a few are likely no longer posting) in my current reader - accumulated over the last 20 years or so - that I've found specifically interesting (mostly professionally, and a few hobby based ones as well). I still get around 60 or so new items per day, and probably skim 20, read 10 in detail, and mark the rest as read.

Like the linked article discusses here, it's no longer possible to easily get a feed from major social media sources - which limits the usefulness of RSS from a purely social perspective (but I've never tried to use it that way) - but if you treat it as a personally curated source of sporadic content, then it's great. In many respects Moderate post volume (quality over quantity) is something I find more useful in what I choose.

On the aggregator front, I try to avoid anything that's too noisy (low signal to noise) - and I definitely minimise subscribing to news sites as the volume is just too high (I tried rss subscribing to The Verge when it was new, but there were too many articles I don't read). For example, i wouldn't use a RSS feed of Hacker News because I probably only look at 1 in 10 articles on it.

RSS is still heavily used for information I find really professionally useful (IT) - but I don't know about other industries.

Possibly the only bugbear I have around the RSS ecosystem these days is that some authors don't include the full content in the RSS feed - which makes offline and mobile consumption more difficult / annoying - I suspect that in some cases it's a result of default choices - and in others it's a deliberate decision as a trade off against improved analysis a site gets from a browser hit.

Re: I Miss RSS

#134

When I see articles like this, my reaction is always: when did RSS go away? I have close to 200 sites in my Feedly list, and I have trouble keeping up with all the articles I get from RSS every day. I think that what the author really means is that he misses RSS feeds from Twitter. I don't use Twitter, so from my perspective, RSS is as present and useful as it was 20 years ago.

Did you try using Leo, the AI-powered Feedly's robot that supposedly can do smart filtering? I'm curious how good it is.

Re: I Miss RSS

#135
post #93
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is what I found looking at my server logs a few months ago: Feedly: 7min Feedbin: 15min Bloglovin: 30min Dreamwidth Studios: 30min Feed Wrangler: 30min NewsBlur: 30min BazQux: 40min inoreader.com: 1hr theoldreader.com: 2hr pine.blog: 24hr https://www.jefftk.com/p/looking-at-rss-user-agents

Also worth mentioning the obvious, feedly etc is updating all the users on their platrom with a single call to your site (every 7 minutes in your case). No doubt they scale the update frequency by how popular it is on their platform / frequently updated / however often the ai decides it is needed.

Should also depend on whether a push extension is used, then the reader can fetch the feed less often. The feed of that blog seems to be a plain RSS feed without that.

Re: I Miss RSS

#136
Since my browser removed the two-click feature for sending a site's feed URL to my RSS reader, I now do a bit more manual work to find RSS URLs myself.

Twitter lost its native RSS support, but Nitter provides RSS links. Example: https://nitter.net/eff/rss

Reddit provides RSS for most listings, including search results. All you have to do is append .rss to the path part of the URL. Example: https://old.reddit.com/r/hackernews/search.rss?q=web&restric...

GitHub provides Atom feeds in various places. Example: https://github.com/drwetter/testssl.sh/releases.atom

When I don't know if a site offers a syndication URL, I fall back to viewing the page source, and searching for these telltale strings: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"

Re: I Miss RSS

#137
I went to add an RSS button to Safari from the Mac App Store, and the only option is two bucks.

I pay for software all the time but this offended my sensibilities. Not the paying for it, although I admittedly didn't, but that RSS has fallen so far that there's no free extension. Desktop Safari is a minor browser, but not so tiny that this should matter.

Substack supports RSS, so I'm cautiously optimistic about a revival. But that was a sobering reminder of its moribund state.

Re: I Miss RSS

#138

Since my browser removed the two-click feature for sending a site's feed URL to my RSS reader, I now do a bit more manual work to find RSS URLs myself. Twitter lost its native RSS support, but Nitter provides RSS links. Example: https://nitter.net/eff/rss Reddit provides RSS for most listings, including search results. All you have to do is append .rss to the path part of the URL. Example: https://old.reddit.com/r/ha…

I use a reader that automatically pulls feeds from Twitter and other social media like Reddit. Just need to plop the URL into the feed field and they figure it out. I pay for it, but it's pretty nice for getting back to the old Google Reader feel.

(https://bazcux.com)

Re: I Miss RSS

#139

Sort of obvious why RSS went away. It is really hard to put ads into RSS. Sure you can just add a update but that's not really feasible (and could be filtered). So the large sites just started removing it and it helped them capture ad sales.

That, analytics and auth. Which is a shame.

I can’t deal with most news sites now because I’m usually reading them on my phone. There’s just so much garbage between ads, scroll locked videos and JavaScript breaking the pages. AMP was supposed to help with this stuff but it breaks all the time too.

I know I’d happily pay for plain text content that I can format myself but I’m guessing there’s just no market for that sort of thing.

Re: I Miss RSS

#140
post #48

The author paints it as some kind of conspiracy, but the simple truth is that RSS waned in popularity once push notifications became popular and widespread. Every user's RSS reader polling every website for changes every few minutes for all eternity is horribly inefficient and unfeasible to do on most platforms and devices today (especially on mobile). Pub/sub is the clear way forward, but it's just sad that there is…

I'd assume that somebody who misses RSS will also be happy with pulling only few times a day and not every few minutes. That's why push became so popular but with a different subset of users. Everybody goes through a push-positive phase but some (like me) come to a conclusion that this is unhealthy and distracting in the long run - hence the fond memories of technology like RSS.

Switching back to Linux after ten years on Mac, I had completely forgotten how much I love it when my computer does _not_ notify me about anything. I have no notification system installed. It’s been a few months and I haven’t missed anything, but I feel more relaxed and focused while using the computer. Notification are mind pollution.
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