HN Gopher Feed (2017-11-10) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
The Case for RSS
84 points by mpweiher
https://www.macsparky.com/blog/2017/11/the-case-for-rss___________________________________________________________________
doctornemo - 30 minutes ago
Hear hear! I've been arguing this for several years now, most
recently: https://bryanalexander.org/2017/07/07/i-defy-the-world-
and-g... . Facebook's algo is deeply messed up.
gklitt - 28 minutes ago
I?ve been hacking on a Twitter client that batches your tweets and
lets you consume them in a more pull-oriented daily digest format,
with the ability to customize rules for which subset of tweets get
included in the digest. In my personal usage I?ve found that this
makes Twitter feel more like a manageable RSS feed, and limits the
impact on my attention because I only get updates once a day. Is
this something people would be interested in using if I released
it? Any feedback on the idea?
ekanes - 25 minutes ago
I'd like this, would pay for it, and would ideally consume it by
email if possible.
toasterlovin - 25 minutes ago
Yes, please!
nkantar - 21 minutes ago
I would like to try this out. :)Try as I might, I just don't
spend enough time actively using Twitter to make it all that
interactive, but I'd still like the ability to catch up in a
read-only manner.
jmh530 - 13 minutes ago
Sounds interesting. I'm a long-time RSS user and never made the
jump to twitter. My gripe with twitter is that it seems like
there is too much noise and too little signal. I suppose at this
point my RSS has a lot of noise, but I'm perhaps more attuned at
how to filter it out (but I do it heuristically).
dannysu - 12 minutes ago
It's a good idea, and I do the same.Except I actually just have
Twitter via a RSS feed. I wrote some code that generates RSS from
Twitter lists and I consume it and filter it just the same as any
other RSS feeds.
hopesthoughts - 4 minutes ago
Do you plan on releasing the Twitter list RSS feed generator?
It's something I've wanted for a while.
lj3 - 9 minutes ago
I used a twitter digest for a while. I found it frustrating. Most
tweets are part of a larger conversation thread which aren't
visible in a digest. I found myself opening more than half the
tweets in a digest individually to read the whole conversation.
hopesthoughts - 5 minutes ago
Well i'd be interested in using it if it had an RSS feed lol.
That's just me though.
strict9 - 20 minutes ago
It's a good case! Though I don't use dedicated readers as I used
to, it's a great format and important part of the open web.I still
hold on to customizable aggregator protopage.com, though I wish
iGoogle hadn't gone away. Also regularly check the fixed-selection
aggregators like alltop and popurls, though the latter seems to
have been abandoned.Posts like this encouraging desktop clients are
fine, but where is the slickly designed web client for RSS feeds?
Until I find it, I'll stick with protopage.
hughw - 15 minutes ago
Is Feedly slick? I like it
strict9 - 12 minutes ago
Turns out I had an account with a bunch of follows from years
ago. Thanks for the reminder!
ptc - 16 minutes ago
Yeah VSS can be quite misleading, =p
oeuviz - 16 minutes ago
Huge fan of feedly.com here. I would for sure reduce my consumption
of web news in favor of print if it wasn't for feedly. Just helps
me organise and read content so it is usable for my own purposes.
marban - 13 minutes ago
As someone who's been working with RSS aggregation since its
inception I can say that even if there's a steep decline from a
trend perspective, the support from almost any major site is still
alive and kicking. For those who remember popurls 1), I've recently
launched a new site at http://www.hvper.com and 90% from it is
based on pure RSS. So long for its death.1)
https://medium.com/hvper/popurls-goes-hvper-2867b1b6b2bd
strict9 - 5 minutes ago
this makes my day. I still use popurls, though it's covered in
cobwebs and seems like abandonware. glad to see you have a new
project up and running.
webwanderings - 1 minutes ago
Used popurls for long period of time in history. It is an
illusion (the grid reading that is). Don't think I will go back.
The river of news per folder hierarchy (Google Reader) is better
in a long run. It takes some effort upfront in organizing
information and priorities, but it yields better reading results
later.
mceoin - 45 minutes ago
Google Trends for RSS is pretty telling:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rssPersonally,
I think it's a big loss that we have moved away from the RSS format
specifically, and the open web generally.
lj3 - 16 minutes ago
Google Trends don't necessarily equate to usage. I keep hearing
rss feeds are dead, yet nearly every site on the internet has an
rss feed, save for Twitter and Facebook (for obvious reasons).
nikisweeting - 11 minutes ago
RSS feeds are pretty trivial to implement, so it's worth it for
most sites even if they only get a few dozen users from RSS.
Semiapies - 2 minutes ago
If that's true, then the web is dead:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=web
Deimorz - 6 minutes ago
Haven't seen it mentioned in here yet, but I've recently started
using Inoreader (https://www.inoreader.com/) as my RSS reader and
am quite happy with it so far. I haven't tinkered with it very
deeply yet, but it seems to have a lot of great features for
organizing feeds, viewing in different formats, and so on.
account0099099 - 44 minutes ago
I bet if someone re-wrote the specification using JSON or YAML,
everyone would start using it again.
ece - 31 minutes ago
Everyone is still using it, they're just getting their feeds
differently (or going to the website directly) and Facebook might
just be the lone big publisher to stop publishing feeds.
da_chicken - 26 minutes ago
No, the problem with RSS is two fold:1. You have to get users to
clickthrough to get your ad revenue, but you also need enough
content in the RSS to encourage them to click at all. It feels
like you put effort into this thing that prevents users from spot
checking your website, which reduces your revenue. And you're
hosting the RSS feed, too, so it costs bandwidth!2. Twitter is
easier to use (for you and your audience), is where the audience
is, and is "good enough".
giobox - 17 minutes ago
Twitter is absolutely what eventually killed my RSS usage.
Human curated links in my Twitter feed, vs the firehose of
articles that often fill up the RSS feeds of many sites.
toomuchtodo - 7 minutes ago
Could any service not offer this curation? Try Pocket for an
example.
aaronpk - 43 minutes ago
http://jsonfeed.org
[deleted]
giobox - 34 minutes ago
I really like jsonfeed, but I just can?t envisage it getting
anything like the ubiquity RSS enjoyed in the mid 2000s, when
even Safari had a pretty reasonable feed reader built in. Back
then my main way of following news/blogs was to combine the RSS
feeds of my favourite sites, giving me a single view onto all
the news I cared about.What killed it for me personally though
wasn?t the slow death of widespread RSS, but weirdly Twitter.
Twitter can be a great news link replacement for RSS if you
used RSS the way I did, as the links the people you follow
share have been curated by those people themselves. I started
to find a much better ?hit rate? for content I wanted to read
by seeing what influencers in industries I have an interest in
share, rather than the hosepipe of stories that RSS was
providing. I found I was still getting all the content I wanted
without having to wade through all the noise, at which point I
just stopped using RSS altogether.I do however agree it is
another sad indicator of a dying open web though.
s73ver_ - 41 minutes ago
RSS was never difficult, and just about every language out there
already has RSS libraries.
MBCook - moments ago
The biggest problem is the number of people who rolled their
own XML generators or use broken templates to generate the XML.
mceoin - 38 minutes ago
I suspect you might be right.Personally, I think the main reason
RSS failed to get bigger adoption was a UX problem. Clicking on
RSS and getting a page of code is just too confronting for most
people. Thus it never managed to get the same adoption as other
republishing buttons like Pin, Like or Share.
[deleted]
giobox - 21 minutes ago
Safari in Mac OS X did a pretty nice job of rendering the feed
for a basic feed reader back when it still had the big blue RSS
link button in the URL bar, no raw XML to speak
of:https://www.askdavetaylor.com/0-blog-pics/safari-rss-
view.jp...I used to use this A LOT back in the day, often
finding it preferable to many site's native UIs.
lj3 - 12 minutes ago
Hell, just finding the RSS feed on some sites is like going on
a scavenger hunt. I really wish the html spec itself had a
standardized way of defining the rss file for a site, like they
do for favicon.
[deleted]
hopesthoughts - 1 minutes ago
I use the RSS feed finder user script. If it really can't
find it, I use the feed autodetect bookmarklet. Both work
well for me.
kazinator - 9 minutes ago
The main problem with RSS is that it is simply not
discoverable.The related UX problem is that major browsers
didn't have a built-in reader, so there is nothing with which
to discover RSS.To use RSS, you have to get some add-on like
Brief for FireFox, or third-party app for Android. Or else use
some website like Google Reader (I think that's dead
now?).Before you do that, in the first place, you have to know
what the heck RSS is, and what are the benefits: why should you
be installing this additional stuff for interacting with some
hidden aspect of the web.Browsers need to make it discoverable
by alerting users, like by bringing up a bubble: "Hey, user!
This web page's updating listings are available in a condensed
RSS feed [learn more.] You can register the feed into my
built-in feed reader, and then not only browse the items
conveniently, but be alerted of new ones, search through the
items, and delete ones you don't want."*When we were recently
looking, on Craigslist, for a bunch of different types of items
simultaneously, I showed my wife RSS. From the beginning: how
it is the condensed version of a web-site, and how you need a
program to deal with it (went through an installation of Brief
on Firefox). Then how you add feeds to the reader, and go look
at them through the Brief toolbar button, etc. Then
configuration: explaining how Brief just surfs the RSS
periodically the same way that a human being refreshes a web
page, and that the frequency can be configured, as well as how
long the items are stored.So after that she was using it daily,
no problem, and mostly liking the convenience of just checking
the feeds for what has dripped in, and being able to erase the
duds, as if it were an e-mail inbox.
ravenstine - 34 minutes ago
RSS is difficult to implement? Since when?Sure, it's XML. And
had I been the one to design it from the start, I would have gone
with JSON. But come on.RSS has been losing ground because, deep
down, people love the algorithms. I personally hate how
algorithms artificially mangle content that I would have seen
anyway if my "timeline" was chronological; it's annoying to me to
have stories from hours or days prior to appear near the top of
my feed because everyone has already seen the same thing by now
and new comments are worthless/unseen after a givens tory is ~1.5
hours old.
spaceseaman - 27 minutes ago
> RSS is difficult to implement? Since when?He didn't say that
- just that people find JSON exciting. There are many things
that have been rewritten in JSON just to become popular again,
or things people have done long before but are exciting because
they're now JSON.
webwanderings - 3 minutes ago
> If you?re not careful, every time you open your RSS reader,
there will be 1,000 unread articles waiting for you, which
completely defeats the purpose of using RSS.No, it does not.The
point of RSS is that you subscribe all your interests which you
consciously come into contact with. You then have a steady stream
of content waiting at your fingertip.The solution for "1000 unread
articles" is to have a shift of perspective in your mind, that it
is okay if you cannot get to all the knowledge and information in
the world. This is, as long as you have prioritized your reading
lists properly.
lj3 - 2 minutes ago
Does anybody here know of a good native RSS program for Windows,
Linux and/or Android? All of the ones I've tried are buggy or ugly
or just unfriendly to use. My Reeder envy has gotten so bad, I've
been running Reeder in a VMWare instance.
strong_silent_t - 39 minutes ago
I love RSS and shout-out to newsblur.com for keeping the dream
alive. It is wonderful to use a system that isn't being optimized
around the needs of advertisers.
blakesterz - 22 minutes ago
newsblur! I've been happy with that as well since Google dumped
Reader.
briandoll - 37 minutes ago
Been really enjoying using Feedbin (https://feedbin.com/) to keep
a curated list of things I actually want to read, but often miss
via Twitter or even Facebook.