It’s Time to Get Back to RSS • Hacker News Board

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#41

Post by awinter-py » Sun, May 17, 2020, 4:51 PM UTC

I'm with the author in needing better reading tools, but the 'firehose' of RSS isn't by itself the answer

aggregators solve a different variety problem vs RSS -- RSS gives you access to random sources that you curate yourself, whereas HN or link-heavy blogs give you access to a meaningful amount of high-impact articles from high-diversity sources (i.e. more different websites than you subscribe to in feedly) that everyone else is reading

at minimum, I need a tool that lets me tame the RSS firehose with some kind of ranking or priority queue, plus mix in some aggregator reading so I don't miss things

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#42

Post by sergiotapia » Sun, May 17, 2020, 4:53 PM UTC

apostacy wrote: post #11

This is why I was so heartbroken when Mozilla removed first party RSS support from Firefox, for what seemed like an extremely flimsy justification.[1] RSS should be ubiquitous, and seen as an essential part of any service that serves structured incremental content. People should be emailing webmasters asking why there is no little orange icon. It also serves as a back door form of accessibility. But I strongly suspec…

I don't understand why they removed support for it. Isn't RSS a "solved issue" - what possible updates can be made to it? Why couldn't they just keep it available and forget about it.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#43

Post by jdripper » Sun, May 17, 2020, 4:54 PM UTC

Thristle wrote: post #16

After google reader went dark i used "The Old Reader" and when they moved to pay only (or they closed? i can't remember) i moved to inoreader its the only way i consume news/blogs. there is no way im checking 40+ websites every day for new content and that way i won't miss anything if a site has no RSS or its RSS feed doesn't work right chances are i just won't use that site

+1 for Inoreader. It costs less than Feedly as well

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#44

Post by Zhyl » Sun, May 17, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

Haven't seen newsboat be mentioned so far. I've written a bunch of scripts that help subscribe to feeds (e.g. search YouTube for keyword and add RSS feed for channel of the top hit), scripts to curate (e.g. extract 'topics' from BBC articles that are only available on the page and not in the RSS feed) and consume (watch videos with mpv, open images in feh, add long videos to a backlog).

It's one of the best news experiences I've had and is an improvement over what I was used to with Google Reader and Feedly. I feel much more in control of my content consumption.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#45

Post by trynewideas » Sun, May 17, 2020, 4:57 PM UTC

awinter-py wrote: post #41

I'm with the author in needing better reading tools, but the 'firehose' of RSS isn't by itself the answer aggregators solve a different variety problem vs RSS -- RSS gives you access to random sources that you curate yourself, whereas HN or link-heavy blogs give you access to a meaningful amount of high-impact articles from high-diversity sources (i.e. more different websites than you subscribe to in feedly) that eve…

That was why the friend-of-a-friend social features of Google Reader were such a big deal for me — I got curation and aggregation from a person I trusted, and the people they trusted.

I didn't have to subscribe to anything to get content, I just had to follow people I knew, and even if they weren't sharing a lot, their first-level connections collectively shared plenty. The interface let me subscribe to whatever feeds they were sharing from, which is how I discovered a lot of content I never would've on my own, and in a lot of cases likely not through other aggregation methods either.

Add the content they were clipping content with the bookmarklet and even sites that weren't syndicating their content were getting my regular traffic via shares.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#46

Post by Zaskoda » Sun, May 17, 2020, 4:57 PM UTC

I would like to take one comment in this post to recognize Aaron Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#47

Post by znpy » Sun, May 17, 2020, 5:00 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #39

The single worst offense against the usability of Atom/RSS right now comes from Apple and iOS. If you click a link to an Atom feed in Mobile Safari, iOS will launch the Apple News app. Which will then show you an error message saying the content is unavailable. As far as I can tell there is no way for an installed reader app to take over handling of feed URLs. It just makes the entire feed ecosystem look broken for a…

I wonder if the EU could, in theory, take action about this behavior.

Apple is basically monopolizing the whole market for rss readers.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#48

Post by ghostwriter » Sun, May 17, 2020, 5:00 PM UTC

Is there an up-to-date alternative to Media RSS aiming at sharing feeds of media content (on-demand video, streaming video, photos)?

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#49

Post by Tepix » Sun, May 17, 2020, 5:01 PM UTC

Luckily RSS support was already commonplace in blogging software by the time of Google Reader's demise so at many places, it never disappeared.

I never used Google Reader, the corporation knows too much about me already, I don't want them to know what RSS feeds I subscribe to and what items I click on. Luckily there have always been alternatives.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#50

Post by tschellenbach » Sun, May 17, 2020, 5:01 PM UTC

If anyone wants to help, here's an open source project I worked on quite a bit: https://github.com/GetStream/winds Goal is to build RSS for regular users instead of the power user audience that RSS readers tend to cater to. I think this is part of the problem. The market for RSS shrank. All commercial RSS readers focused on the people who pay (IE the power users). Creating a user experience that is just not viable for most consumers. You end up in this vicious cycle because of that. RSS usage drops, RSS readers become more power user focused, sites drop support, continue the cycle.