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Please, expose your RSS

rknight.me

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Re: Please, expose your RSS

#61

Post by fLaMEd »

stefan_ wrote: post #40
forrestthewoods wrote: post #11

RSS doesn’t move the needle. Only a super tiny, insignificant number of people care about RSS. Social aggregators like HN and Reddit won. RSS lost. I have a blog and try my best to maintain the RSS feed. But if we’re being honest it’s a waste of time. I stopped using RSS readers when half my subs required me to open a browser tab to go to the actual website to view the actual content. Webcomics were particularly anno…

RSS users are the Linux gamers of the podcast & blog world - tiny amount of people but all the problems in the world.

Ok, as both of these… this made me laugh

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#62

Post by charles_f »

microflash wrote: post #58
forrestthewoods wrote: post #11

RSS doesn’t move the needle. Only a super tiny, insignificant number of people care about RSS. Social aggregators like HN and Reddit won. RSS lost. I have a blog and try my best to maintain the RSS feed. But if we’re being honest it’s a waste of time. I stopped using RSS readers when half my subs required me to open a browser tab to go to the actual website to view the actual content. Webcomics were particularly anno…

> I stopped using RSS readers when half my subs required me to open a browser tab to go to the actual website to view the actual content. The RSS client that I use, InoReader, has an option to fetch full content if it is just a blurb. So, I have to never deal such annoyances.

FreshRSS and Miniflux both have the option. The former can even let you customize some css filters to cleanup the stuff it retrieves.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#63

Post by rambambram »

dugite-code wrote: post #43
ramijames wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was intentional. RSS is a way to sidestep advertising. Guess who makes the most widely used browser today.

> It was intentional. RSS is a way to sidestep advertising. I would argue that's only a part of the story. After all RSS quickly morphed into Link with a short blurb and image just like any modern link aggregation site rather than a full page of content. The big issue was RSS was it prevents site lock-in like Facebook ect. Even Reddit pushes people to the comments to try keep you on the site as much as possible in or…

I'm willing to advocate in favor of the short blurbs. I follow a lot of 'dev blogs' by RSS and my homegrown feed reader also only shows the short blurbs. I do this because all these people crafted their (personal) sites, made it beautiful and personal, and I'm wanting to visit their site to pay hommage and look at what they made (whether that's a cool logo, a nice color scheme, etc.) exactly in the way they made it. My ad blocker already blocks the ads I don't want to see (if there are any externally loaded ads).

It also has the benefit of the site owners now being able to see somebody is subscribed to the feed. I'm visiting their website and they might see my traffic in their visitor statistics. To make this even more clear to the site owner, I add an URL parameter called /?rss_ref=heyhomepage.com

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#64

Post by rambambram »

jmduke wrote: post #4

One hackneyed reason that some folks give for not wanting to expose their RSS is wanting some level of legibility into their subscribers. I recently learned that many large RSS readers actually expose high-level analytics numbers [^1] so you can get an estimate of RSS readership that way, too. Would love for more readers to support this functionality: as far as I can tell across all of the RSS feeds my product expose…

Exposing the number of subscribers from large RSS readers is a nice addition, but it also slightly nudges one to centralization.

I try to let site owners know I'm subscribed to their feed by adding an URL parameter like /?rss_ref=heyhomepage.com They might or might not see this RSS referrer in their own visitor statistics. I also do not consume all the article's content solely in my reader, but I show a short summary and then click the link to the article. This way I can enjoy their (personal) site and they can see my traffic more clearly.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#65

Post by rambambram »

ramijames wrote: post #36

The fact that RSS was suppressed will never cease to make me angry.

Suppressed by who? Google might have killed their newsreader, but RSS never stopped, because it's not dependent on Google (hurray!). I'm very happy Wordpress automatically adds a feed to every site on the internet.

I see it as a filter. All the stupid clickbait content goes somewhere else, and all the quality content - where the individuals who made it have skin in the game - sits nicely in my feed reader. It's a blessing in disguise, if you ask me.

Yes, you have to put extra energy in curating a nice collection of feeds. But isn't that valid for everything good in life? This energy compounds and pays back in no-time.

Long live RSS, long live the open web!

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#66

Post by rambambram »

bastawhiz wrote: post #54

>> if you're going to add an RSS button, please ensure it looks like an RSS button and is in RSS orange > This is an excellent idea and I have done so here. I don't know if this was sarcasm or whether it's just a bit silly that literally the next line of text on the page is a link (the link?) to subscribe—with the RSS icon—in white on magenta.

I also chuckled. The orange does something extra for visibility, but I can't stand that color (even though I'm Dutch). The 'Wifi icon on it's side' is enough for me.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#67

Post by rambambram »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #11

RSS doesn’t move the needle. Only a super tiny, insignificant number of people care about RSS. Social aggregators like HN and Reddit won. RSS lost. I have a blog and try my best to maintain the RSS feed. But if we’re being honest it’s a waste of time. I stopped using RSS readers when half my subs required me to open a browser tab to go to the actual website to view the actual content. Webcomics were particularly anno…

Talking about RSS in terms of 'winning and losing' is exactly why I use RSS over the mainstream social media. Not everything is a competition.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#68

Post by rambambram »

Please, also expose that you're subscribed to a blog's feed. I sometimes sent an email to site owners to compliment them with a nice article I just read. Sometimes I leave a short comment here on HN to let somebody know I subscribed to their feed. I hope it encourages people that put energy and heart into quality content to keep making that content. I try to not overdo that here on HN, because it adds little to the general discussion.

What I also do with my homegrown RSS reader (see https://www.heyhomepage.com if you're interested) is adding a parameter to the links I click, like /?rss_ref=heyhomepage.com Site owners get my traffic and they can easily see where it comes from if they happen to look at their visitor statistics.

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