RSS: there's nothing better • Hacker News Board

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#201

Post by breischl » Sat, Nov 11, 2017, 4:11 PM UTC

JoshMnem wrote: post #182

dade_ wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if Firefox could help fix the problem by putting RSS/Atom discovery into the browser in a prominent way.

Don't they have that already? I remember it being a prominent feature for browsers ~10 years ago. Heck, even Outlook had a feed reader - still has it I think, though it's always sucked.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#202

Post by Semaphor » Sat, Nov 11, 2017, 4:13 PM UTC

el_duderino wrote: post #197

Semaphor wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they change things? Because when the great reader explosion happened after Google Reader died I evaluated tons of readers and decided on a newsblur.com subscription in the end. I remember Feedly catering to the "images are great"-Pinterest crowd.

Yeah. I suggest giving them another try. I actually thought they were the most popular RSS reader these days. It's very customizable (even for the free tier).

It looks better than then, true. But it's still trying to be so flashy. And I feel like they are trying to push all their useless social features on me. And there's a lack of customizability. I guess the free tier is better than what newsblur offers, but for me, newsblur is where I'm staying.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#203

Post by breischl » Sat, Nov 11, 2017, 4:14 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #164

sdfjkl wrote: post #59

RSS is the only sane way to follow multiple sites and people. There's blogs, news sites, Twitter, YouTube channels, etc. - only in my RSS reader (theoldreader.com) it all comes together. Some removed RSS feeds because they realised I don't have to load their horrible ad-infested Javascript crud to read someone's 160 characters, but if it has content worth reading, there's RSS scrapers that turn it into a feed (e.g. t…

> Facebook is kinda left out as most of their content is walled off, but then they're too evil to even consider going there anyways. Can't we have RSS scrapers that are operated by people, generating RSS streams of "inaccessible/paywalled/grey area" content in a collaborative effort? Something like bittorrent but for ASCII text.

For any content that's being sold as such (eg, news sites) that's definitely copyright infringement. For user-generated content, I'm not sure. Though I would not be even a little bit surprised if Facebook asserted copyright to anything put into it. In either case, probably violates the TOS as well.

Technically it's achievable, but it would likely be forever relegated to mostly-illegal backwaters.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#204

Post by acgIssues » Sat, Nov 11, 2017, 4:15 PM UTC

ghthor wrote: post #185

acgIssues wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This isn't true, it can be a crowd source quality control. Not as good as a direct share from one of my trusted colleague's, but it does work as a quality control given the right community makeup, the right web of users.

Which is difficult to control over a social network unless it's a closed community and still, it's used as a metric.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#205

Post by dreamdu5t » Sat, Nov 11, 2017, 4:19 PM UTC

dmitshur wrote: post #180

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?

XML is not a transport encoding like JSON. It is a hypermedia format that supports metadata. Even something as simple as an author attribute on a quote requires a standard on top of JSON.

“I can’t parse without programming” is a terrible reason to prefer JSON.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#206

Post by acemarke » Sat, Nov 11, 2017, 4:19 PM UTC

jingwen wrote: post #194

KORraN wrote: post #95

I really miss Google Reader. Nowadays if I want to follow updates from my friends or events from some organizations, I almost certainly have to like/follow them on FB. But even doing this I cannot be sure that I will get news that I want - because despite I always use "Most Recent" sorting, FB is hiding some content from me. Many times I saw interesting post when accidentally entering FB "Top stories", from let's say…

I found BazQux Reader (bazqux.com) and absolutely love it because it’s designed to mimic Google Reader :-)

Exactly. I'm extremely happy to pay $20/yr for BazQux . Like Pinboard, it's simple, does one thing well, and just _works_. I'm amazed that it doesn't seem to have gotten more mindshare as a replacement for Google Reader.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#207

Post by breischl » Sat, Nov 11, 2017, 4:22 PM UTC

onli wrote: post #141

eXpl0it3r wrote: post #137

I see no mention of push notifications as a sort of alternative. Technologically, the polling of RSS feeds to check for new content is a bit wasteful. What I'd like to see is a setup that uses push notifications to gather new content or maybe even a combination, where the push notification tells the RSS reader to grab the new content. Another interesting fact about RSS is, that it's the main distribution solution for…

RSS has that already, exactly that. It is enabled by Pubsubhubbub (PuSH), an (older?) alternative (used by Wordpress) is rsscloud.

Yep, sadly it didn't really get going until RSS was moving out of the mainstream. Really need setup, though.

Just noticed that it was renamed to WebSub and adopted as a W3C standard earlier this year.

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

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#208

Post by baby » Sat, Nov 11, 2017, 4:24 PM UTC

fredley wrote: post #74

baby wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an ex RSS addict I'm wondering why you think you can fix things by using RSS feeds. For me it actually takes more of my time.

Only one place to go for things, no 'endless scroll', once stuff is read it's read.

For me the hassle of checking different things in different place made it so that I would only check "a few" places.

With RSS I'm crawling under a huge load of articles that I always have to clear up. I used to be extremely addicted to that, I used it to get through work stuff now and when I have weeks of articles pilling up in my feed I feel bad.

I use it, and definitely love that, but it def. re-enforce addiction, not the contrary.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#209

Post by losteric » Sat, Nov 11, 2017, 4:25 PM UTC

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…

RSS is a protocol, applications could implement Twitter/tumblr's retweeting functionality on top of it... FB conversations would also work.

From the end-user's perspective, I don't think anyone is asking for features that are fundamentally at odds with using RSS to distribute messages. The resulting network would be much more distributed and harder to "monetize" (imo, good for users)

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#210

Post by dreamdu5t » Sat, Nov 11, 2017, 4:26 PM UTC

oeuviz wrote: post #127

>But, but, XML is gross! RSS is dead! 2007! Favourite chapter. Never been fan of bashing xml in favor of json, both have their own advantages and xml gets the job done here. Wouldn't care if it was json.

XML is not just a transport encoding like JSON. Apples to oranges. They are not comparable. It’s like comparing HTML or CSS with JSON. What’s he equivalent of XPath in JSON? There isn’t! They aren’t remotely solutions to the same thing.