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It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

danielmiessler.com

351–360 of 376 posts

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#351
post #99
post #53

RSS is dying (or dead) because it was incompatible with the dominant business model on the internet -- advertising. This is why Google killed it. This is why lots of professional publishers hated it. With HTTP you'd be able to earn money via embedded ads but you'd earn exactly $0 via RSS since the feed was stripped of ads, just content. This forced publishers to put useless blurbs, redirecting to the HTTP version, wh…

Maybe the world needs an unmonetizable space. I keep hearing how RSS is dead for many years. My favorite blogs seem to be doing fine, its not like my newsblur stream of posts has decreased over the years. Many people are unhappy about non-monetized readers and authors just being happy off by themselves. The people most able to "fix" that are the happy readers and authors, and the readers are not very motivated to spa…

People say that RSS is dead, but actually I think it's doing pretty much the same, if not better, than before Reader shut down.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#353
post #246
post #53

RSS is dying (or dead) because it was incompatible with the dominant business model on the internet -- advertising. This is why Google killed it. This is why lots of professional publishers hated it. With HTTP you'd be able to earn money via embedded ads but you'd earn exactly $0 via RSS since the feed was stripped of ads, just content. This forced publishers to put useless blurbs, redirecting to the HTTP version, wh…

Thing is, RSS didn’t “die”. It only ever filled a couple of niches, and arguably it is more popular than it ever was because not only are people still continuing to use RSS readers, podcasts are arguably more popular than they’ve ever been (this period of time with the coronavirus possibly excepted). I get that when people think of “RSS”, they’re thinking of tech that downloads text and maybe some images into a reade…

I use userscripts to try and find those hidden feeds, but sometimes they still can't be found. Sites like that are the bane of my existence!!!!!!

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#354
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While RSS doesn't replace a site like Reddit, it's great that Reddit has RSS support built-in. Much of my browsing of the site at least starts off in a feed reader, to make it quick to find what I'm interested in. From there, I'll open links to the site proper, with all the comments and such that make the experience what it is.

Actually forgot about this! That said I do remember trying it some years ago; Reddit RSS just ended up providing too little signal for too much noise. I came to the same conclusion with Twitter RSS and certain types of Tumblogs.

Twitter RSS works fine if you want to follow certain users and/or searches, which is what I use it for.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#355
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing is, RSS didn’t “die”. It only ever filled a couple of niches, and arguably it is more popular than it ever was because not only are people still continuing to use RSS readers, podcasts are arguably more popular than they’ve ever been (this period of time with the coronavirus possibly excepted). I get that when people think of “RSS”, they’re thinking of tech that downloads text and maybe some images into a reade…

I use userscripts to try and find those hidden feeds, but sometimes they still can't be found. Sites like that are the bane of my existence!!!!!!

I mean if browsers hadn't gone out of their way to remove RSS discovery, it wouldn't be necessary. I don't remember if I mentioned this in my above post and I don't want to re-read every word I wrote, but I've got the NetNewsWire Safari extension which finds feeds for me. Pretty sure I also have some extension in my current Firefox install, but I haven't opened that in a while. Sometimes the feed really doesn't exist anymore, which is unfortunate.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#356
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dislike a lot Feedly, almost like Inoreader and kinda like bazqux. Not sure why though.

I used bazqux for a while and paid for the annual subscription. It just ended and I was looking around for free alternatives, and found CommaFeed, which reminds me a lot of Google Reader.

I really do like CommaFeed, but they seem to limit the amount of feed items.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is pretty cool. But unfortunately that is not really a solution. It is like saying that it is ok that a website removed screen-reader support, because you have a screen reader that can still parse the website anyway. The problem is RSS not being made available at all. RSS being made available less and less, and they have less of an incentive to do so. And I am saddened that a lot of the good work Mozilla did was…

Maybe what we need is an accessibility equivalent to the SSL Server Test. Input your domain and it gives you a letter grade on how accessible your site is. RSS access should be heavily weighted, of course.

When I look for an RSS feed, it's usually to see if it's updating, not because of any accessibility concerns. A lot of times, I'll find broken feeds. However, if a site is really giving me trouble with navigation, I'll rely on the RSS feed for reading purposes.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#358
post #58

Customizable HN feeds (inofficial): https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/ It's really easy to get posts on the frontpage only if they have more than x points: https://hnrss.org/frontpage?points=x Or contain certain keywords: https://hnrss.org/newest?q=git+OR+linux

I use this every single day.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#359
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually forgot about this! That said I do remember trying it some years ago; Reddit RSS just ended up providing too little signal for too much noise. I came to the same conclusion with Twitter RSS and certain types of Tumblogs.

Twitter RSS works fine if you want to follow certain users and/or searches, which is what I use it for.

No, I understand that basic premise, it's what I did too, it's just, well this is an old outstanding complaint I've had about Twitter and not so much Twitter RSS, and really the main reason I don't consistently use it anymore. Every now and then I re-install Tweetbot on my phone, create a new account, carefully curate a list of Accounts to follow based off whatever I'm thinking Twitter might be useful for this time.

I personally think it's really cool that I can follow people I respect and see a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, but inevitably some stupid controversy erupts and all of them have to get their opinion in on the subject.

The other problem I have is that generally, people tweet too much. It is too easy to compose a tweet and fire it off into the void and and while they're at it, about five or six retweets. RSS didn't improve this for me, I look for ways to make Twitter work for me, and it's just unworkable. The one time the list of accounts I came up with was political (that is to say rather than being constantly exposed to the abhorrent politics of people I otherwise respect for other reasons, I picked people who I respected in the field of politics), it was still an irredeemable crapshoot.

If Twitter works for you, I have no doubt Twitter RSS can also work for you, but Twitter doesn't work for me. Too much noise, not enough signal. Same with any kind of firehose feed, I think I even followed an HN firehose feed at one point six or seven years ago which just overwhelmed my reader within a week. I mean if you tried following Tumblogs as I did at one point in my youth, I tried to treat them like blogs, but what I didn't realize was that nobody was really interested in using Tumblr like a blogging platform. Your typical user that posted at all, was generally going through their feed and reblogging whatever they liked, and they'd do this 30 or 40 or 50 reblogs at a time. It was asinine, I gave it the old college try because a few of my friends really seemed to like it and I wanted to see what they saw, and it was just asinine.

Anyway it sounds like you're still using Twitter RSS, and, I mean this sincerely, kudos to Twitter that they're apparently still maintaining RSS feeds. I really thought that would have been killed off by now. More choices are generally better, so I'm glad that's still a thing.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#360

The reason RSS failed to reach mainstream adoption by users is because it is not user friendly at all. While I love RSS myself, no amount of tech nerd nostalgia is going to make it popular enough that your mom starts using it. Most sites still have implemented RSS in a terrible way. For example, many blogs I follow only show excerpts in their feeds. So the feed is worthless to me. Others put every podcast episode the…

High-volume sites are not a good use case for RSS. We already have various social ways to filter. Like the site you're on. I think RSS should be for high-quality niche sites where you care about every single post. I subscribe to 200+ feeds, but only read a dozen or so stories a week on them: http://akkartik.name/feeds.xml

Oh, I have to disagree, I think high volume sites are a great thing for RSS. In fact, I tend to think the more items in a feed, the better. No, I usually don't go through all of them at once, I'll go through several hundred at a time.
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