Hacker News Reader

Comment by interfixus | Hacker News Reader

There are decent readers out there. Liferea or Thunderbird will do in a pinch, and much as I hate to admit it, Netvibes is actually superb.

The tragedy isn't some Google tool being retired, the tragedy is the way feeds are slowly disappearing. It's a slow and creeping death, but it's a death. More and more sites are dropping their feeds and replacing them with some twitterish Facebook nonsense.

[edit: typo]

View on HN

They are not the same. With Google Reader you had a virtually infinity history of the feed while with feed clients you only receive articles from the current and past feed files seen. An article about this topic: http://blog.databigbang.com/tag/google-reader/

> The tragedy isn't some Google tool being retired, the tragedy is the way feeds are slowly disappearing. It's a slow and creeping death, but it's a death. More and more sites are dropping their feeds and replacing them with some twitterish Facebook nonsense.

It's certainly painful, made all the more painful by the death of Yahoo! Pipes which was helpful in turning these (once rare) non-RSS sites into something usable.

The closing of Reader signalled this change (which is why so many of us lamented it so much; not for the product itself, but for what it meant for the web). If you fight hard enough, you can still turn all of this garbage into RSS and toss it into your feed reader (I like tt-rss), but RSS as a mainstream tool is already dead (outside of a few niches, like podcasts, which are also slowly moving into walled gardens of their own).

You meant:

More and more sites are dropping their feeds and replacing them with their stupid 'sign up via email to receive updates' nonsense.

Sounds like you should be able to make an adaptor for these?

That would be a nice service. You get an email address, which you use to sign up to news, and the service converts the most promising links in the emails into rss.

Feedbin does this! (Though not with as much cleverness as your suggestion.)

https://feedbin.com/blog/2016/02/03/subscribe-to-email-newsl...

"You can now receive email newsletters in Feedbin."

Good idea, but requires a lot of manual work. Because I suspect that you don't only receive updates, but also some salesy stuff. Might be easier to write a crawler for blogs or websites that don't offer RSS.

Or worse, "Follow us on Facebook"

I usually don't visit websites that don't have RSS and tell that to the website owners. You should do the same. How else will they know that people care about feeds?

Unfortunately, people who come to a website via RSS almost universally have ad blockers turned on and usually are not site sticky. Maybe not the best group to attract to your site?

I think you're assuming everyone who runs a website is running it as a business. I don't have ads on my website or even analytics.

You are correct, I was making that assumption and should not. I tend to think money on HN posts but not as much on, for example, r/programming posts. I suppose I'm more susceptible to indirect marketing than I like to believe. Damn.

A discerning, technologically literate audience who never heard the term 'site sticky' before? No, you're right, no use for those.

A "discerning, technologically literate audience" is exactly who you don't want at your site -- for most non-technical sites. The person you want is some who really believes bud light tastes different than coors light. You want the person who will believe that a particular body spray is the only thing preventing them from meeting more men/women. These are the folks who pay the bills on the non-technical sites.

RSS users don't need ad blockers because obnoxious ads can't come through in a (full-content) feed, but this means that feed users have all the downsides for the site as if they did have ad blockers.

And feed subscribers are much stickier than most web visitors - you can't generally use a feed without subscribing to it, so anyone who uses a feed will see it again. The problem is that stickiness per se is not actually that valuable (especially when it's difficult to quantify). Feed users are so sticky that they will read everything you post but never leave the site by clicking an ad.

Believe me, I do. Also believe me, they don't care.

Google Reader had a very important social aspect as well

People keep forgetting this. Google Reader was the best social network for academically minded people that I have ever been part of. As one blogger after it's shutdown said: it was a social network for people who don't want to talk about themselves

That's a perfect way of phrasing why I think reader is the best social network Google ever made. Thank you.

One usecase of RSS is, ahem, porn (yes that's part of life, especially Tumblr). That's a non-trivial usecase which is the reason why I donated to TheOldReader but refuse to pay a subscription; and RSS readers stubbornly trying to share my RSS reading on a social network was a risk for me.

What features were those?

The sharing of RSS feeds, and arguably even better: the bookmarklet to share any page on the internet

RSS feeds were just never easy enough for most people to bother. And not just the proverbial grandma, most techies don't use RSS either. Sites will run analytics and see that nobody is clicking the feed button.

RSS certainly solves a real problem, so I think there is an opportunity for reinventing RSS with better UX. Don't ask me how though.

How do you get better UX than clicking an RSS link and it adding itself to your feed reader?

It isn't the protocol, it is that there is no profit in an open standard like that. Google killed their Reader because they wanted everyone forced into G+, rather than consuming content from around the Internet.

It is the same thing with messaging and VOIP. Nobody wants to use an open standard like XMPP or more recently Matrix because there is no money in using standards when you can lock users in to a walled garden.

By having your articles directly on your site, linked to via a "feed reader" that everyone already uses - twitter, facebook, reddit, etc.

I remember trying to get into RSS feeds a few years back. I passed them by - it was easier to just hit news.google.com or my multireddit or twitterfeed for news I was interested in. Sure, I didn't "get it," and yea fine I'm not the smartest guy ever, but I'm probably a good representation of the average net user - interested in efficient means at getting the news such as RSS, but also tremendously lazy. Why bother? I already have a twitter/reddit/gnews account.

Twitter is transitory, Facebook isn't chronological, Reddit puts you at the whims of other people.

> How do you get better UX than clicking an RSS link and it adding itself to your feed reader?

Well, you need to have a feed reader set up.

You need to signup for Facebook / Twitter as well. And there are browser based feed readers. The only downside is the lack of availability of web-based feed reader support in browsers.

That might be partially on the onus of the reader, but it would require you to at least install an extension to add their site as your default feed processor. That can be a UX loss.

> Sites will run analytics and see that nobody is clicking the feed button.

I barely ever click on any RSS buttons. Partially because sites nowadays don't even bother putting one in there, partially because TinyTinyRSS extracts the feed from the site's <head> automatically.

So running analytics on that button would be very misleading, especially for users like me ;-)

> RSS feeds were just never easy enough for most people to bother

Set up a wordpress site, you have RSS built in. Set up a drupal site, you have RSS built in. Set up on Squarespace and you have RSS built in.

Pretty much every off-the-shelf CMS has RSS with zero effort, you have to actively turn it off. It is only the people who put a bunch of work into building a site without a CMS that don't easily have RSS.

I don't know how you could improve the UX, considering most sites had an icon that directly linked to google reader. For a while, feed readers where also the app store category where all the innovation happened.

I don't want to live in the same internet as people who can't copy & paste an URL.

That was part of the problem the real number of RSS readers were hidden and silly analytics like this led sites to make bad decisions.

> The tragedy isn't some Google tool being retired, the tragedy is the way feeds are slowly disappearing

Can't it be both? They probably contribute to each other too.

Yeah, the Reader retirement probably did a lot of damage. But nothing fundamental, I believe. Feeds are dying from lack of interest. The proverbial 'general public' never could be bothered to spend those ten extra minutes getting to understand that orange icon with the stripes. Go out there and ask. Say "feed" to everybody. 99 percent of them will give you a blank stare in return. "What's the problem? We got Facebook".

> The proverbial 'general public' never could be bothered to spend those ten extra minutes getting to understand that orange icon with the stripes

Eh, the general public didn't care about smartphones for awhile either (email on blackberry? who needs it?)

The same can be said for VR right now, I think

RSS never got its chance. Google Reader seemed to have growth until it was killed

Google could win a little bit of confidence back from the dev community if they brought it back. I wonder how much it would cost them.

Admitting your mistakes is nothing to be ashamed of. When big companies do it and provide what their most passionate users (computer/tech addicts) want, it shows strength, not weakness.

What's facebook got to do with anything? I have never used an RSS feed and never felt the lack (though I have only a vague idea what it is).

My not using RSS has precisely nothing to do with my facebook account - and your attempt to diminish others usage of t'internet by saying "ugh it's those fucking drones just using facebook" is pretty arrogant.

> I have never used an RSS feed and never felt the lack (though I have only a vague idea what it is).

RSS is just another form of a customized news feed. You decide what blogs or blog categories you enjoy, and in one location, you see all the new posts about things you've followed. This allows you to customize your view of information in a different way than HN, Reddit, subreddits, Facebook, etc. and you don't need to give out your email address, receive e-mailed newsletters, or set up any accounts that have auto-subscribed mailing lists.

> What's facebook got to do with anything?

In some countries, such as Cambodia, Facebook is an important source of news reports. So far, media there remains uncensored, and Facebook is the easiest way for news to get legs, even moreso than the US I would say. Cambodia uses Facebook like the US uses Reddit and HN. There's some semblance of voting and comment threads, so it provides more features on top of the reputable newspaper websites.

However, Facebook is not really the best way to get discussion going. Threads are difficult to navigate and the loading is slow. I tried to show a few people Reddit while I was there, but for many reasons, that is a hard sell.

Anyway, I think some Americans use Facebook in the same way. They get a lot of their news from friends there and don't feel the need to seek out much else. It's too bad because yeah, you'll probably find more relevant information for you if you seek it out yourself, but at the same time I get why people use Facebook. You have your group of trusted friends and presumably there's some overlap in your interests. It's easy to look at news they've already vetted.

Agreed. Every time I see a feed disappear in favor of a Facebook/Twitter feed, my confidence in the future of the Internet drops a little bit..

And I open individual twitter accounts [1] from time to time and find all kind of interesting content - and a more pleasurable way to consume it.

[1] That I also follow but will miss from the timeline, of course.

I've been using Facebook to subscribe to websites mainly because I know I'll check Facebook more often. I keep forgetting to check my Feedly account.

However I've discovered that after liking a few pages and joining a few groups the quality of information in my Facebook news feed is getting watered down. I'm missing more of my friends updates.

Currently my Facebook feed has a duel personality which makes it a bit useless.

> a duel personality

One of these insightful typos :)

use the interest lists feature, make different lists for different topics, and bookmark them

Twitter used to provide an RSS feed, that's gone too.

If you google "twitter rss" you will discover four sites that will do that for you as a free service and a node program that will do the conversion for you as well... on the first page of results, anyway.

I switched from Reader to TT-RSS. Now there's no fear that anyone will start analyzing my subscription list, send me personalized ads or suddenly stop serving me.

I think there is a qualitative difference between a company officially supporting an open standard, vs the availability of third party tools that translate from whatever the company chooses to produce to the open standard.

I would go one step further and say that, especially for twitter, I prefer the 3rd party methods. If you depend on twitter to provide the RSS feed then when they withdraw it you're screwed. But if you're already using a non-TOS-compliant workaround, twitter has to go out of their way to break it and when they do people who care enough will find another way to get the content they want. Information wants to be free.

Would it be better if Twitter produced RSS feeds? Yes.

In the meantime, don't let the best be the enemy of the good.

The best is also the enemy of the worst. I basically have no use for twitter minus an RSS feed. Why would I bother trying a 3rd part application when twitter pulled the rug out from under me?

Twitter could shut down those four sites at any time. I also switched to TinyTinyRSS and also self-host a simple Twitter to RSS parser. Anyone savvy enough to set up TT-RSS can manage getting a Twitter API key and configuring this.

https://github.com/jdelamater99/Twitter-RSS-Parser

I tried that recently and discovered that Twitter now require a mobile number to obtain API access even for read-only, which was an immediate hard-stop.

>suddenly stop serving me. Those four sites are explicitly breaking Twitter API TOS, so I think you should have at least a little fear that they will suddenly disappear :)

Except syndication is explicitly forbidden by Twitter developer agreement and they can get shut down at any time.

I have no idea why you're being downvoted but what you say is true. And having to find workarounds to get twitter pushed to me at my laptop is very annoying.

thankfully most blogs are wordpress based and RSS comes enabled by default.

Really? I've yet to find a single blog of interest that's lacking an RSS feed (though it might be implicit instead of explicit — Feedbin usually finds the link if I drop in the URL).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com