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Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

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Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#141

Post by marban »

alexmingoia wrote: post #140
marban wrote: post #78

News aggregators are my main business since 2001 and all I can say is that reports of the death of RSS have been greatly exaggerated. Recently launched https://biztoc.com where 75% is still RSS, the rest being APIs and custom scraping. Yes, support is not increasing but drops among established sites are very rare — Even all major crypto news sites sport a feed.

I’m curious, what is your business model? Biztoc.com doesn’t seem to have ads and it’s free.

It's backed by Mark Cuban — That's the business model so far.

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#142

Post by alexmingoia »

As someone who runs an RSS feed reader (https://sumi.news), I think RSS is terrible compared to email for notifying users of updates.

1. Email is more efficient. Email doesn’t require constant polling.

2. Email client support is superior. Everyone has an email service and can sync across devices.

3. Email is social, it allows subscribers to reply to the author.

4. Email is more reliable. Authors have a copy of all their subscribers, they aren’t tied to a URL. Subscribers can easily update their subscription if they want to change emails. Running an RSS client, I see many subscriptions break over time due to the feed URL changing.

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#143

Post by dusted »

I'm a long term user of RSS too, through Thunderbird of all things. My one beef with it, is that it seems terribly inefficient, that potentially millions of client will poll the resources "to check if there's something new". Potentially hundreds or thousands of requests per user, per day. It'd be a lot nicer if it was subscription based, since the content-provider knows when there's something new, they can then push it to their subscribers when it is relevant (and do other neat things like slower rollout to avoid congestion and bad user experience).

It'd be kinda neat if email clients natively supported digesting RSS feeds sent as email, presenting the same user-experience, but without the polling.

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#144

Post by rambambram »

onli wrote: post #116
rambambram wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's "nostalgia" or "going back to the past". I think it's people in their thirties and older that somehow start to realize the promise of 'social media' was there all the time. This whole RSS thing... it's never pushed to it's potential, I think. Thanks to walled gardens and other kinds of closed jails. Surrounded by a lot of buzz, hype and money to be made. Besides, I could say the same thing about el…

Pretty close. To be fair, the RSS-as-social-media was a thought I had a decade ago (more than a thought, there was a working prototype), but that doesn't mean it's not in my mind now.

I just saw your website with the Pipes software. Very cool! I'm going to subscribe to your feed.

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#145

Post by rambambram »

voisin wrote: post #120
rambambram wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell me more? What things would you filter on?

For example, if I have no interest in Node, it would be nice to take the HN RSS feed and filter words like Node in the title or content. Or if I really can’t stand sources like LiveStrong for health news I’d like to filter out that domain.

Thanks, clear to me now!

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#146

Post by pkrumins »

marban wrote: post #79
pkrumins wrote: post #18

I'm in, too. I and my team built several news aggregators ( https://TechURLs.com , https://DevURLs.com , https://SciURLs.com ) and they are all powered by RSS. Every month we have issues with some of the feeds as either RSS has been removed or broken, and in this case, we have to write HTML parsers that extract the news, which is very tiring.

I created the OG popurls which started the whole single page aggregator thing. https://biztoc.com is my primary project today.

Nice to meet you! All my URLs sites are inspired by popurls. Biztoc looks awesome as well. Congrats on raising money from Mark Cuban!

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#147

Post by WithinReason »

alexmingoia wrote: post #142

As someone who runs an RSS feed reader ( https://sumi.news ), I think RSS is terrible compared to email for notifying users of updates. 1. Email is more efficient. Email doesn’t require constant polling. 2. Email client support is superior. Everyone has an email service and can sync across devices. 3. Email is social, it allows subscribers to reply to the author. 4. Email is more reliable. Authors have a copy of all…

RSS is much better organized than an inbox

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#149

Post by onli »

rambambram wrote: post #144
onli wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty close. To be fair, the RSS-as-social-media was a thought I had a decade ago (more than a thought, there was a working prototype), but that doesn't mean it's not in my mind now.

I just saw your website with the Pipes software. Very cool! I'm going to subscribe to your feed.

Thanks :)

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#150

Post by onli »

dusted wrote: post #143

I'm a long term user of RSS too, through Thunderbird of all things. My one beef with it, is that it seems terribly inefficient, that potentially millions of client will poll the resources "to check if there's something new". Potentially hundreds or thousands of requests per user, per day. It'd be a lot nicer if it was subscription based, since the content-provider knows when there's something new, they can then push…

There are two standard that are used for the push setup you describe already! :) RSScloud and Pubsubhubbub/websub. I don't know whether Thunderbird supports it, but pretty much all the big RSS clients do.
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