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RSS: there's nothing better

davidyat.es

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Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#171

Post by learc83 »

Franciscouzo wrote: post #166
icebraining wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually read everything by RSS except HN, since the posts here often get better over time, thanks to comments, so they're less suitable for RSS, in my opinion. By the way, if you follow YouTube channels, not only do they still provide RSS feeds, as you can get a nice OPML file of all the channels you subscribe to: https://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager (scroll to the bottom)

I use RSS for following YouTube channels, but the only problem I have is that I have to click on each video, I'd like a RSS client to create a custom playlist, at least for all the music videos. I used to use YouTube's email notifications, but they would skip some videos randomly, and I'd be left wondering what videos I missed.

Content creators can choose to disable notifications on specific videos.

Creators sometimes do this if they publish more videos than usual, or of the video is different from their normal content.

Also when you subscribe you now also have to click the bell next to the subscribe button to get all notifications.

YouTube itself also has a built in subscription feed that lists all videos published by channels you subscribe to. It also lists the channels with an icon next to each if they have unwatched video.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#172

Post by mabub24 »

jakub_g wrote: post #79
fredley wrote: post #8

I've been seriously considering trying to consume the web solely by RSS again. All the news sites, the few twitter accounts I actually care about, HN. HN still provides RSS, and there are ways to get it for sites that don't support it, e.g. Twitter. Everything seems to be gearing more towards deliberately occupying as much of my time as possible, algorithmically selecting content that achieves this. I want out of thi…

I stopped using RSS circa 2010 since RSS produces just too much content (well at least my reader did, as it was not archiving stuff until read, just like an email inbox). I was reading my RSS feeds almost as a full-time job and the unread count was only going up and up :) TBH, it's a bit like this now for me with HN and Twitter even without RSS. "This looks interesting... (click)(open in new tab)". One week later: 30…

I find the key to RSS is that you need to subscribe to actual content, rather than just a feed. A lot of the stuff on the internet is, frankly, just a barely curated feed of information pushed out a firehose. Unless you feel like you need to, don't subscribe to feeds from news organizations unless you're willing to skim and blast away lots of unread stuff. Most of that you simply won't read.

With RSS, I like subscribing to journals and organizations that publish substantial content (lots of text rather than ads) at steady but not explosive rates. RSS is pure consumption, so if you're using it to "follow a feed" I think you're doing it wrong. Though YMMV, of course.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#173

Post by 0x445442 »

matchagaucho wrote: post #54
leejo wrote: post #44

I wrote about this recently[1]. The "problem" with RSS, that essentially lead to it falling out of favour, is that it is pure consumption, not interaction. You can't "like" an update that comes to you via RSS, nor comment, nor easily share. It's difficult for sites to monetise it, or track, or promote their own agenda. It's not "social" and since every other site these days needs to be social, whether through aforeme…

Even before it's demise, a lot of content publishers were only publishing headlines and abstracts via RSS, with the intent to drive clicks to hosted articles. The inability to publish ads inline RSS ultimately killed it. If and when the news bundling model re-emerges, something like RSS will gain favor again.

Yep, most of the centralized web is a massive direct marketing platform.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#174

Post by acgIssues »

leejo wrote: post #44

I wrote about this recently[1]. The "problem" with RSS, that essentially lead to it falling out of favour, is that it is pure consumption, not interaction. You can't "like" an update that comes to you via RSS, nor comment, nor easily share. It's difficult for sites to monetise it, or track, or promote their own agenda. It's not "social" and since every other site these days needs to be social, whether through aforeme…

This is fine for most people; the "interaction" nowadays (likes, retweets, ...) doesn't really represent support but a lack of communication skill from the consumer.

When someone likes something without anything to say it's just a metric, doesn't bring value to a discussion.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#175

Post by hasbot »

tzahola wrote: post #151
Ascetik wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>miss Google Reader Feedly

Feedly is a load of crap. They are force-feeding (no pun intended) you their “””curated””” (read: sponsored) news sources while making it intentionally hard to add your own sources. Last time I’ve checked there’s not even a way to enter an RSS URL manually - you have to “search” for the given site, and hope that their magic algorithm picks up the presence of an RSS feed... Absolutely useless.

I've been using Feedly ever since Google Reader went away. It's easy to add my own sources. I don't know anything about force-fed news sources; I've never seen anything like that.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#177

Post by ronjouch »

nawtacawp wrote: post #156
ronjouch wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off-topic: what do you use for self-hosted email? I'm considering abandoning it and going back to gmail/fastmail, for the constant configuration hassle (DKIM/SPF, etc.) causing sent/received emails to be incorrectly marked as spam and/or refused :-/ Any "sane defaults, regular updates, impossible to shoot yourself in the foot" package to recommend?

I use https://mailinabox.email which handles everything you just mentioned.

Looks neat. Thanks!

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#178

Post by pmoriarty »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #56
onli wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to use the past tense here, I work on a project based on RSS feeds right now :) I'm not sure what I look at with the feedparser code. Looks like a bunch of format support libraries? https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html says to use rfc822, and in practice for me that means just giving the date string to my chosen languages date object. You have a point with item updates, RSS was not really made for that. The…

My point about date string is that, if people really honored the "specification" from the first place, why the `datetimes` directory has eight different files :-) I have personally seen lots of websites with Korean date & time format ("YYYY년 mm월 dd일 hh시 mm분 ss초", see `korean.py` there) and I'm not sure if they are now gone. (And yes I did have my own aggregation engine back then---it was at least born after feedparse…

This "Korean date & time format" appears similar to ISO 8601, an international standard for dates and times:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#179

Post by dade_ »

JoshMnem wrote: post #159
matchagaucho wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even before it's demise, a lot of content publishers were only publishing headlines and abstracts via RSS, with the intent to drive clicks to hosted articles. The inability to publish ads inline RSS ultimately killed it. If and when the news bundling model re-emerges, something like RSS will gain favor again.

> The inability to publish ads inline RSS ultimately killed it. Google (partly) killed it (by pulling people into Google Reader and then killing Google Reader). Most (all?) news sites still offer RSS feeds.

I wonder how many blog sites have a large number of RSS users and don’t even know they have an RSS feed. Most Wordpress sites have an RSS feed at ./feed, but many of the sites I follow don’t actually have an RSS link offered as an option.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#180

Post by dmitshur »

I was quite excited when I heard of https://jsonfeed.org/. I was surprised at how much more pleasant it seemed, considering the major feature is a simple switch from XML encoding to JSON encoding and not much more.

So it’s a bummer to not see it mentioned (not at all in the article, not much in the comments). Does that mean it didn’t really catch on, or what is its status?

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