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RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google
81–88 of 88 posts
Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd much prefer correct sitemap.xml to an RSS. Please let me keep up to date with your site/blog/homepage without scraping it!
[flagged]
Omit internet tropes.
Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google
#83How else to notify readers? RSS is quite good. Corporations do not like it though, because they want to control spread of information. They prefer you re-enter page, be targeted with more ads, or spoonfed with their news algorithm on-site. However RSS only works, if someone knows about your page. YouTube is quite good with RSS though. You can have channel RSS, be notified about new videos, while channels still are di…
There’s non-corpo reasons you might not want to expose all the content into an RSS feed. https://ciechanow.ski/ can only really be appreciated from the browser. In the salad days of blogging, it was as much about what kind of fun shit you could do with HTML or CSS as it was about writing and distributing your thoughts. The Yamauchi family office website could have just been a templates squarespace page, but they opte…
This is exactly why I built https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wire-rss-news-reader/id1438331...
Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google
#84I've been toying with LLM based agents for staying on top of feeds lately. Staying on top of the fire hose was always the challenge with RSS readers, a lot of interesting low frequency stuff from people you follow gets buried under the non stop feed of stuff from high volume news that is actively trying to drown everyone out with many updates per day. Back in the day I solved it by simply not using RSS feeds for high…
> a lot of interesting low frequency stuff from people you follow gets buried under the non stop feed of stuff from high volume news that is actively trying to drown everyone out with many updates per day. Every major RSS reader supports folders. Your problem is that you engage with RSS as if it were a social media feed, with it's single monolithic reverse-chronological feed. Just don't do that. Stick all the high vo…
> Even for sites that don't offer granular feeds, every major feed reader offers filtering options, a lot of them offer fairly complex regex filtering.
This is true to some degree, but regex filtering or really any strictly logical filtering is often too coarse or too fragile to work well in practice for all but the most dedicated RSS gardeners.
What I’d really like to see is some sort of fuzzier logic that gives the user a more semantic interface to filtering and/or ranking feed items.
Take, for example, the feed for a medium-sized newspaper where you want to filter for/prioritize articles about your local area and particular topics of interest. Those news feeds are often very high volume and don’t make good use of tags or other metadata that can be consumed by strictly logical filtering systems. So a fragile, badly-behaving filtered list is what you’re likely to get. Whereas a fuzzier, more semantic interface (local LLMs?) would be far more reliable and easier to use.
Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree to disagree. I think many platform did support RSS, or API, but at some time it was dropped. It is not that hard to provide RSS. It is not like it has to be implemented from scratch. It is just dropped by platforms. There must be reasons for dropping. One may argue it is not worth it, but even to drop functionality there needs to be a decision from management. The management always think about money. Is RSS or…
Also, scraping was a problem for publishers: if your site was popular, copy-cats would show up republishing your work with minimal credit. That said, this seems quaint in the modern era where trillion-dollar tech companies are doing that to publishers now, too.
No. That wasn’t a concern with RSS for publishers. Most publishers have RSS still or feeds. Scraping index pages continues to be trivial.
Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s non-corpo reasons you might not want to expose all the content into an RSS feed. https://ciechanow.ski/ can only really be appreciated from the browser. In the salad days of blogging, it was as much about what kind of fun shit you could do with HTML or CSS as it was about writing and distributing your thoughts. The Yamauchi family office website could have just been a templates squarespace page, but they opte…
This is exactly why I built https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wire-rss-news-reader/id1438331...
Why is it that I discover the first decent baby feeding tracker right as my last baby has aged out of needing one? SMH
Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, scraping was a problem for publishers: if your site was popular, copy-cats would show up republishing your work with minimal credit. That said, this seems quaint in the modern era where trillion-dollar tech companies are doing that to publishers now, too.
No. That wasn’t a concern with RSS for publishers. Most publishers have RSS still or feeds. Scraping index pages continues to be trivial.
Yes, it was a concern. You can say that some people made their peace with it but if you’d been there at the time, it was absolutely mentioned.
Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google
#88Same experience. RSS is by far the most requested resource in the server logs. Sometimes up to 70% of the total traffic is coming from RSS. That said though, I wonder how much of that traffic is biological and how much is bots. I also wonder how much is dead traffic. Dead as in people who add a ton of stuff in their RSS readers but don’t actually read. RSS is a bit of a black box when it comes to this but maybe that'…
I have 220k unread items in my feed reader.
Anything good?