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RSS: there's nothing better

davidyat.es

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Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#61

Post by cJ0th »

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…

This (probably correctly) assumes that the average user stays 'dumb' forever. The 'intelligent' user would understand the benefits of rss, demand them from their news outlets and be willing to pay, if necessary, an appropriate amount of money for it.

This will probably never happen but I maintain the view that if you want the web to become a better place you have to find ways to educate the (average) user.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#63

Post by pingiun »

4lch3m1st wrote: post #36

Just deleted my Facebook account in about two weeks ago and started consuming news through RSS and through Podcasts and some YouTube channels (which are also, surprisingly, RSS). I've never felt better. This might be a stretch, but this has been a good alternative to the way I was consuming online media, indeed less useless info seems to be reaching me. However, it all depends on the material you're subscribing to.

Podcasts are RSS too. Possibly the only application of RSS that became and stayed popular.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#64

Post by keypress »

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…

Brother did a holiday blog in wordpress. New posts sent out email pings. That was fine, if you don't mind a torrent of notifications in your inbox.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#65

Post by onli »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #56
onli wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to use the past tense here, I work on a project based on RSS feeds right now :) I'm not sure what I look at with the feedparser code. Looks like a bunch of format support libraries? https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html says to use rfc822, and in practice for me that means just giving the date string to my chosen languages date object. You have a point with item updates, RSS was not really made for that. The…

My point about date string is that, if people really honored the "specification" from the first place, why the `datetimes` directory has eight different files :-) I have personally seen lots of websites with Korean date & time format ("YYYY년 mm월 dd일 hh시 mm분 ss초", see `korean.py` there) and I'm not sure if they are now gone. (And yes I did have my own aggregation engine back then---it was at least born after feedparse…

Ah, possible. I also use a normalization library (for both atom, jsonfeed and RSS), it might mask the worst of these occurrences.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#66

Post by coldtea »

matchagaucho wrote: post #54
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…

Even before it's demise, a lot of content publishers were only publishing headlines and abstracts via RSS, with the intent to drive clicks to hosted articles. The inability to publish ads inline RSS ultimately killed it. If and when the news bundling model re-emerges, something like RSS will gain favor again.

>The inability to publish ads inline RSS ultimately killed it.

Huh? There's no such inability.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#67

Post by keypress »

4lch3m1st wrote: post #36

Just deleted my Facebook account in about two weeks ago and started consuming news through RSS and through Podcasts and some YouTube channels (which are also, surprisingly, RSS). I've never felt better. This might be a stretch, but this has been a good alternative to the way I was consuming online media, indeed less useless info seems to be reaching me. However, it all depends on the material you're subscribing to.

You could do Facebook over RSS at one time. Requires more effort to rig it all up on your part.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#68

Post by h43z »

After the death of google reader I looked around for a new reader and finally decided for newsbeuter an open-source RSS/Atom feed reader for text terminals. Since I always read the article on the source site newsbeuter is perfect for me. newsbeuter does the heavy lifting of downloading and storing and I just have to press 'o' to open the article in my browser.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#69

Post by grape911 »

I don't understand where this "RSS is dead" mantra came from. RSS does what it is supposed to do and indeed there is nothing better yet.

E.g. I don't have Facebook, Twitter nor YouTube accounts (since they collect a lot of personal data about you). I use RSS to subscribe to YouTube channels. Both Twitter and Facebook used to have RSS. Now I use third party services to follow couple of pages I'm interested in: http://feed.exileed.com (supports Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and some other) or https://twitrss.me (Twitter only). I don't have Reddit account, instead I subscribe to subreddits via RSS. Any blog on LiveJournal, Blogger supports RSS. Any website built with WordPress or Drupal has RSS support out of the box. Many forums have RSS option. Even Wikipedia watch list has RSS. I'm not even talking about any news site. With some knowledge of JavaScript and Apifier.com you can turn any page into RSS feed.

Indeed there is still no any other technology that can do all this better.

(I use Inoreader.com to read RSS. It has many features, the only downside is that their free plan is quite limited.)

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#70

Post by izacus »

corobo wrote: post #32
smsm42 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Google killed the Reader, I switched to Feedly and still using them. Useful enough so I have paid subscription. Still using them after four years, nothing better around as far as I can see. Facebook certainly not even in the same galaxy, and I have no idea why Twitter even mentioned in that topic. IMHO RSS and accompanied readers are still the best for keeping oneself informed.

Feedly killed RSS for me. The way their mobile app scrolls[1] articles just absolutely ruined the experience and I couldn’t find any better app/service before giving up on RSS entirely [1] https://i.imgsir.com/G0jR.gif - weird entire page scroll going on instead of just scrolling normally. Makes it impossible to skim read the titles

Pretty much any RSS client these days can connect to Feedly API so you don't need to use their app.
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