Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

news.ycombinator.com

31–40 of 74 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#32
I feel RSS/Atom feeds are still an extremely important way to subscribe to informational updates online - particularlly for news following/reading. I have always been hopeful for projects like Zone (https://github.com/abouaziz/ZONE) to get more public interest, and RSS-social-reader products aimed at the facebook folks - such as http://newsbae.com, http://popurls.com, http://alltop.com, http://skimfeed.com, etc - will raise awareness of the need for the public to still want this simple service to exist.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#34
I fear the day that RSS will become so unpopular that developers won't support it anymore. RSS is the basis of my information aggregation and is a necessity for me. It allows me to read news at my own pace and to get all the news with a backlog so that I'm sure I don't miss anything.

RSS allows me to go directly to an article without having to navigate through the website. Some websites (TheVerge comes to mind) have a pretty nice design, but make it hard to get an overview of all the news and you easily miss things. With RSS I know that when I start my client all the articles they posted will be there and they will still be there when I start my client next month. I can manually mark articles that don't interest me as read, but keep others for when I have more time.

I follow about 50 sites, so if I had to check manually if any of them had updates (often in various sections, because they don't have a main overview that shows everything) I'd lose way more time. It's also synced over all my devices. I use the Reederapp in combination with Feedly, and it syncs over my Macs, iPhone and iPad. I have a backlog of about 500 articles, some months old, imagine having to go through a specific site and scrolling back page after page after page to get to that specific article you saw the title of 2 months ago.

I wish more sites would show the entire article in RSS feeds instead of a short preview. I understand the advertising reasons behind requiring users to click through, but with RSS you have a plain article that's optimized for reading without all the distractions of a website.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#36
I get my RSS fix on Feedly everyday.

I haves feeds grouped in the following Categories:

Tech News (all the major news tech sites which I check when I'm bored) Software (feeds from all the software I use so I get notified for updates etc). Photography (photography blogs I like to follow)

I still think its relevant and I actually find it very frustrating when I visit a site with content that could fit in RSS format but they don't publish a feed.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#37
BE SMART AND BECOME RICH IN LESS THAN 3DAYS....It all depends on how fast you can be to get the new PROGRAMMED blank ATM card that is capable of hacking into any ATM machine,anywhere in the world. I got to know about this BLANK ATM CARD when I was searching for job online about a month ago..It has really changed my life for good and now I can say I'm rich and I can never be poor again. The least money I get in a day with it is about $2,000.(two thousand USD) Every now and then I keeping pumping money into my account. Though is illegal,there is no risk of being caught ,because it has been programmed in such a way that it is not traceable,it also has a technique that makes it impossible for the CCTVs to detect you..For details on how to get yours today, email the hackers on : (atmmachinehackes @ gmail.com). Tell your loved once too, and start to live large. That's the simple testimony of how my life changed for good...Love you all ...the email address again is atmmachinehackes@gmail.com

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#38
My RSS feed is like my bookmarks, except I actually read, listen to and watch the content that arrives by RSS.

Rawdog generates a new homepage for me a few times a day. I don't even have to put up with other people's crappy design and can enjoy information presented in my OWN crappy design.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#40
My RSS reader (digg reader) is my most visited site/app, far ahead of the social sites and only closely followed by gmail.

I would say that the people who do use RSS use it a lot. There might not be many left, but I'd say they would fit the "power user" category.

On the other hand, you might be able to skip building RSS features (idk exactly what kind of feature you were suggested) as long as you provide some kind of endpoint where people can plug ifttt and the like to get the same result (you can create the recipe yourself and advertise it)

Post reply on HN