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Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

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31–40 of 170 posts

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

#31
I totally support anything that promotes RSS, but I have to wonder if I live in a bubble.

I don't use social media except a single, oft-neglected Mastodon account and get all my info from RSS. According to Newsblur I have ~500 feeds subscribed and ~5000 unread items (can't keep up) every week.

I don't doubt that RSS is getting less popular, but perhaps due to moving in circles where RSS is popular I really don't feel like it's dying.

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

#32
I think broadly RSS needs tools to make content prioritisation and find better. Certain feeds like news sites put everything in their feed and they do a terrible job of surfacing what is likely to be valuable. It would be nice if the high volume sites could be tamed some how and its not going to come from them and its not something RSS/Atom deals with. Customised feeds, filtering and people who liked this liked that kind of surfacing without the obnoxious adverts has a decent chance of being niche popular with the right interface.

I am certainly interested in trying to improve this. There has to be a less privacy invading and engagement promoting system that can work and compete with the mess that is the big silicon valley sites.

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

#33
post #26

For info: As many websites are built by clever people and/or based on somewhat ready-made frameworks, when you DON'T see the RSS/Atom icons appear -> take a look at the source of the website and search (ctrl-f) for the word "rss" or "atom" or "xml" -> you might end up finding a surviving RSS link in there.

This is a big part of why I think that making feeds better discoverable could help a lot. Often the feeds are still there, but the browsers are not showing it to the site visitors.

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

#34
I was never a big consumer of RSS, but I built a number of feeds over the years. Most of the time we would build them and no one would use them (except maybe the guy in IT who pushed for the feature).

From posts like this, it seems like RSS still has a hardcore group of fans but it is not something everyday users ever found that useful.

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

#35

I love and miss RSS as much as the next hacker, but it's weird to see an increasing trend of technological nostalgia starting to emerge. To be clear, I also think the web has gone wrong and miss coherent and useful web search, exploring interesting user created content (people have mentioned the return of web rings) and curating my own news feed via RSS. But it's strange to me that when I started everything was about…

This is a feature of HN which seems to be increasingly populated by an older crowd that enjoys pining for an imagined golden age of technology. I’m in the same boat: I love plain text, RSS, and Vim as much as the next guy, but the trend of reminiscing about the superiority of ancient tech rather than musing on the future and how people actually use computers these days is woefully out of touch.

I also like mechanical calculators, horse drawn plows, and fine tinsmithing all for the skills and craftsmanship that go into each. And yet I wouldn’t think to start campaigning to bring back animal powered plowing. The new generation of technologists and programmers entering the workforce doesn’t give a damn about your ugly RSS feeds or your plain text productivity workflow or your finely tuned EMacs config and I think that mindset shift is going to be irksome to a lot of established old heads.

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

#36

Most people don’t use RSS because most people don’t prefer to consume the web that way nor that sort of content. They are scrolling social media and aggregators, not pruning their long form content subscriptions. Even in the heyday of RSS how many of us just had an overgrown 10000+ unread RSS reader that we simply stopped using? Promoting RSS seems backwards to me because that ship has sailed. Like promoting IRC when…

Agreed. The world is moving past static text content as a medium, which is what RSS/IRC are built for. I want more rich video/media oriented content like what the New York Times is producing, which takes advantage of user interactivity and new Javascript APIs. RSS isn't going to make that happen for me.

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

#37

Most people don’t use RSS because most people don’t prefer to consume the web that way nor that sort of content. They are scrolling social media and aggregators, not pruning their long form content subscriptions. Even in the heyday of RSS how many of us just had an overgrown 10000+ unread RSS reader that we simply stopped using? Promoting RSS seems backwards to me because that ship has sailed. Like promoting IRC when…

True, there is no point in accumulating feeds. News sites are the worst when it comes to this, personal blogs don't grow that fast.

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

#39

Most people don’t use RSS because most people don’t prefer to consume the web that way nor that sort of content. They are scrolling social media and aggregators, not pruning their long form content subscriptions. Even in the heyday of RSS how many of us just had an overgrown 10000+ unread RSS reader that we simply stopped using? Promoting RSS seems backwards to me because that ship has sailed. Like promoting IRC when…

The converse is equally true: most people don’t use RSS because the largest content platforms prefer to deliver monetizable algorithmic suggestions.

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

#40

Most people don’t use RSS because most people don’t prefer to consume the web that way nor that sort of content. They are scrolling social media and aggregators, not pruning their long form content subscriptions. Even in the heyday of RSS how many of us just had an overgrown 10000+ unread RSS reader that we simply stopped using? Promoting RSS seems backwards to me because that ship has sailed. Like promoting IRC when…

Agreed. The world is moving past static text content as a medium, which is what RSS/IRC are built for. I want more rich video/media oriented content like what the New York Times is producing, which takes advantage of user interactivity and new Javascript APIs. RSS isn't going to make that happen for me.

Most of NY times content is non interactive. The reason why they don't want RSS isn't because RSS sucks, it's because everyone is trying increase user retention time in their apps to make shareholders happy.
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