RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News | Hacker News Reader

RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News

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236 pointssmacktoward96 comments

Most of the sources of hard news have RSS feeds. Reuters. The BBC. The New York Times. The Hill. National Weather Service. These are all crap-free. No ads. No "10 ways to waste your time and money". Just news.

I have an Model 14 Teletype tape printer from 1926 in a brass and glass case hooked up to the Reuters RSS feed. I've had this at steampunk conventions, and it usually lives in my living room. Push a button and get the news.[1] Or leave it on, and it starts up whenever Reuters posts something new. Technical details.[2]

[1] https://archive.org/details/Aethericmachine14 [2] http://www.aetherltd.com

> hard news

> The BBC

Have you visited the BBC News website recently?

They even have Daily Mail style headlines now, where a random word is capitalised for emphasis:

"Up to NINE terrible things happened"

I browse with an ad blocker, so those are actual headlines, not Outbrain/Taboola (ugh) links.

Yeah, they do those things. But they make up a minority of their magazine content.

They still do a lot of 'hard news' stuff (along with the vast majority of their output which is straight 'normal news'). For example, just this week: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/g4s_brook_house_i...

> But they make up a minority of their magazine content.

No excuse. That crap is paid for with my taxes. They don't need to lower themselves to that standard.

That shit permeates, you know? The news side will look like that eventually.

I'd have thought taxes + license fee would be enough to avoid the race to the bottom, but here we are.

Why not make a complaint where they can actually see it, then? http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/complain-online/

Try to steer their decisions with your voice.

REMEMBER TO USE CAPS!

I recall 10 years ago it wasn’t nearly as terrible. Did something happen to the bbc?

Best i can tell, there is a new generation of "journalists" coming onboard that have been trained in the style of "blogs".

And it seems to be far from unique to the BBC, you can notice it with all the national broadcasters (Though BBC being English and thus have a worldwide reach in its original form, is more noticeable outside of the UK).

Although I have to be honest, the tagesschau is still immune to this trend. Let’s hope it never arrives at http://www.tagesschau.de/

Blair made them compete on ratings which is retarded when you have a guaranteed income. Another thing he ruined.

That sounds like an awesome project to hack together. I look forward to making something similar one weekend.

Rebuilding a teletype properly is going to probably take you more than one weekend.

Yet some RSS feeds do contain ads/spam.

Indeed. But Facebook and Twitter beat RSS for tracking users.

edit:

> Perhaps most importantly, you don’t need to be constantly online and constantly refreshing your feeds to make sure you don’t miss anything.

That's misleading. If you are using a desktop client then you might miss items from a very active feed if it didn't connect to the web recently enough.

That was (to me) the biggest selling point of Google Reader: I could forget about if for two weeks but Google would happily and regularly download feeds while I was not connected. Feeddemon and others couldn't do that unless they connected to proxy-like services.

Of course that has some implications regarding privacy.

> Indeed. But Facebook and Twitter beat RSS for tracking users.

So RSS wins again.

Depends on the war you are waging.

I don't understand your comparison. The advantage of google reader was that it was a web app? But every other webbased reader had the same advantage, and since Google Reader's demise, we got an explosion of amazing readers, from free over self-hosted to paid.

`Feeddemon and others` refer to regular applications (see http://www.feeddemon.com/). Google reader was, to my knowledge, the dominant feed reader back then even though other services existed (and filled up the space when GR was discontinued) and had that same advantage.

> The advantage of google reader was that it was a web app?

Over regular client readers, yes.

what I liked about Google reader was that I could subscribe to friends feeds, curated by what they decided what was worthwhile to share (from their own rss feeds, mostly comp.sci stuff).

and most importantly, that it did just that (if unasked) without getting all Facebooky, playing mind games etc to draw you into more "social" "engagement".

There are plenty of alternatives to Google Reader around.

I use NewsBlur.

Another one is Bazqux.

Horrible name, but great little product: fast, stable, no nonsense and cheap ($19/year). Using it daily for years and haven't seen single outage or any problem.

Yep, I have to agree. It's decentralised, pub sub, no tracking, can use any client you want! Somehow the simplicity is just elegant.

The idea of a massive corp controlling what I see (and hence how I think) does not resonate with me.

I am not the developer behind it, but I want to advertise it: http://fetchrss.com/ is awesome.

I can fetch stuff from public Facebook pages I need (without having a fb account) and create a RSS feed of them. Then with ifttt.com I send updates to my mailbox: awesome.

Also, fuck Facebook and long live RSS and the open web.

Hmm... this looks really interesting. Gonna' try this with a few reddit links (/r/sub1+sub2...) to see how it handles that. For some reason my current reader is now having problems.

You realize, of course, that Reddit has a native option [0] for RSS right?

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/pathogendavid/comments/tv8m9/pathog...

There's also https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge. It's self-hosted and has many many bridges for different sites that don't do RSS.

At least you can sorT RSS feeds in a chronological order. I don't care what the algorithm believe, I just want to see the news in the order they came out.

Have to give it to FB, they do have that option.

The standard news feed can be sorted in chronological order, true. But if you are looking for a comprehensive feed of pages posts, you'll miss out here, as not all pages posts are conveyed to your news feed. Facebook does provide a comprehensive pages feed, but it cannot be sorted by chronological order.

As an aside, I also find it strange that the full feed of upcoming events for an area cannot be sorted by date.

They do, just not as a setting. Without extra browser extension, you need to either open the link directly or click it all the time. (Unless the changed that very recently? Would be weird, they have been working hard for years to make fb as unhelpful as possible for me)

An option which resets every time you visit facebook.com

You can bookmark facebook.com/?sk=h_chr which will force chronlogical sorting.

But you really really should not get your news from facebook.

Twitter is where I follow a specific event. Facebook is where I stumble across bullshit. RSS is where I read news, stories, and technical updates.

RSS is how I come here~

> RSS is how I come here~

Likewise.

I use a homegrown RSS reader that I host at http://www.weegeeks.com

It's not great and it's not pretty but it does the job.

I highly recommend Inoreader. It works almost exactly like Google Reader, but with extra enhancements like filtering feeds and following Twitter accounts as feeds.

Inoreader is the best. I was about to setup my own Tiny Tiny Rss server but luckily found Inoreader. It has everything I need and more.

I had to choose a replacement after Google Reader ended, and I chose the one with the best mobile app because I go back and forth a lot between laptop and cellphone. Inoreader it was!

BTW my list of crypto/security blogs I follow: https://github.com/mimoo/crypto_blogs

I like RSS and use it daily, however the main drawback is a lot of sites tend to truncate their articles and have a "read more" link.

Not so useful when you're in an offline environment like the London underground (where I usually catch up with my feeds at the end of the day)

Facebook and Twitter suffer from the same issue though

Most UK phone networks let you use the free Virgin WiFi in the underground now.

I'm on GiffGaff which isn't one of those networks supported.

Additionally I think the rigamarole of getting to the station, connecting to the wifi, swiping back to the article you couldn't read, downloading it etc is a real pain!

Giffgaff most certainly is supported (it uses O2's network). Some people report having to temporarily install the O2 app for a one-off registration.

It's no worse whether you're at the station or not, unless I've missed the point of what you wrote.

It's better if you can grab the whole article for offline use, though; back when I used RSS a lot - post Google Reader - I used an Android app which could get the whole article. But I've stopped just about all internet time-wasting except to main news headlines and HN, preferring to read books on a kindle.

Some self-hosted ROSS readers will fetch the full content or at least attempt to do so.

I was okay with social-curated news when my social feeds were chronological, but now that everyone's doing algorithms, you miss way too much if you aren't looking at something like RSS.

Personally, I use TinyTinyRSS on Sandstorm.io. There's a fantastic TTRSS client available for Windows UWP that works on Windows Mobile too.

I like TinyTinyRSS, but I wish there was a better web-client for it. The default one is way to slow and bloated. I'd still recommend using it though.

Definitely not a fan of the web client. In my case, I lucked out, the TTRSS app I use on my Windows Mobile phone was universal... It's excellent on desktop too. I never use the web interface.

I was never a fan of social feeds trying to show news rather than what friends are doing.

But I have to upvote for the TTRSS. The web client is always open in one of my tabs, and when I'm away from my computer I use the ttRSS Android app. I stuck it on one of my boxes and basically forget about it aside from checking for updates semi-regularly.

The idea that you get news from FB and Twitter is fundamentally flawed.

FB/Twitter are known to have algorithms designed to show you things that you will like (because people stop using Twitter/FB if they see stuff that makes them unhappy). While newspapers have this to a certain extent (all those "Drink 2 glasses of wine a day to live longer" articles) since they aren't targeted based on your individual preferences you still get a very wide variety of news sticking to only a single newspaper, and pretty much all the news if you mix in 2 or 3.

FB sure, as they have made it harder and harder to flip the feed to chronological.

But Twitter? I know they insert this whole "in case you missed" but most of the feed is still chronological. A very different problem is with having overly prolific retweeters in your feed, but that is a problem of your making, not Twitter's.

Twitter is slowly rolling out an algorithmic feed. It returns to chronological once you refresh, but sometimes I forget and don't realize until I start noticing things are out of order.

Is it possible to set Twitter (not a third party client) to show you all unread items- that is, to give you a gap-free view of your feed? Or is it still just "whatever was most recent, mostly"?

I don't believe Twitter is doing as much algorithmic targeting as Facebook is for sure, but I believe the likelihood of that changing is very high. They need to justify that $13bn market cap.

Hallelujah!!! Never gave it up. I felt genuine panic when Google Reader died

I use feedbin, and I love it. At this point I tend to stop visiting sites that don't support RSS.

> I tend to stop visiting sites that don't support RSS

Same here. If the site is interesting enough, I'll try and contact the owner and explain why RSS matters. Basically.. few people have the time to visit and sort through individual sites on a daily basis.

I try to visit sites without RSS but most of the time I don't even remember them.

Same and same. Feedbin is a great and very affordable service.

It's a shame that fewer and fewer sites offer feeds. Most of them still do, luckily, but I've had to dig up http://feed43.com about once every two months. Though I wasn't really aware that some feed readers could perhaps generate feeds automatically, I'll have to try that out sometime.

I've experienced the opposite effect - that RSS makes a comeback on the sites I care about and that have content worth reading.

Also, look at a site's source code. The RSS button may not be displayed but I often find the rss link buried in the html. Publishers may not even realize that their plug-n-play blogging platform is automatically creating feeds for them.

I was not aware of feed43. Thanks. But do I have to create my own? Can I not use feeds people have already created?

You can, but there's no easy way to discover them as far as I'm aware. As in, I've always made my own.

And this is why I run datente.com

And why I use RSS to drive a channel on Telegram

Agree with the item or not, whatever pops up next is next from wherever you've subscribed

It's great

and you don't need to download 15mb of garbage to read a few kb of news

That's a very good point!

One interesting thing is that a specific twitter search sorted by latest, often produces very decent localized news/reports during some events. One of the first things I turn to confirm the scale of an event, for example blackouts, fire, or meteoroid sightings.

Also there are specific feeds on twitter for some cities that report police/fire scanners. If you ever get a power outage you can track the scale within minutes, by looking at which addresses/intersections have stuck elevator reports.

I usually just check the power company's outage map.

Usually takes them sometime to update it, never fast enough.

It must depend on the power company. This one has it almost immediately.

The problem with RSS is that most feeds treat all items the same so the same prominence is attached to a nuclear strike on New York as is attached to a child scraping its knee.

I'm ok with that. I can eyeball a bunch of RSS entries very quickly, and I think a "NYC NUKED" headline will get my attention just fine. I'll attach my own level of interest.

To me that is another benefit of rss. I want to do my own 'manual' filtering, to decide myself what is important to me.

I do not want some algorithm to feed me. Especially not if that algorithm is commercially biased: its main goal is not to inform me, the goal is to make money from me.

The problem I've found with aggregating multiple feeds into a single chronological stream is that some feeds totally overwhelm others because they publish more frequently.

If Feed A publishes 10 articles a day and Feed B publishes 10 articles a year, the articles from Feed B get totally engulfed and pushed way, way, way down the list... effectively they become invisible.

My aggregator limits the number of items by feed and by domain. The problem is less of an issue if you add many more feeds and filter harder. Those rarely publishing do still get drowned out but it gives you plenty of other things to read. Thanks to volume, at times, if the slow publisher posts something awesome (they often do) it is reposted by the more spammy domains.

I do have other ideas to fix that issue but the ink is still wet on those.

While major news outlets pretty much always have separate feeds for different categories the real awesomeness of RSS was pretty much not understood:

There is the <category> element!

I aggregate many many thousands of feeds, I've never seen anyone use the category properly. I actually cant find any attempt at a specification that clearly describes it. (I might be confused by the versions and feeds using a mix of elements from different versions)

You know things are bad when w3schools[1] is the only one providing a full description of the difference between non hierarchic and hierarchic. On the domain attribute they are as stupid as everyone else. I'm not even sure how the domain attribute should be used. I do instinctively know that putting domain="syndic8" is wrong as it is not a domain. That however isn't stopping everyone from using it as an example in their version of the spec.

Anyway:

The <category> element specifies one or more categories the channel or item belongs to separated by commas. The element can ALSO specify the hierarchic location in a category. The value of the <category> element is then a forward-slash separated string.

So you could entirely have something totally like:

<category>local/traffic acidents,injury,children</category>

Where "local > traffic" is the hierarchy while "injury" and "children" are more like tags.

On the rare occasion I see a <category> element in an RSS feed they 99% of the time use "General". Using separate feeds to accomplish the same(?) is not great but it works.

Here is an OPML I bake myself for the guardian.[2] Their feeds do actually use categories complete with domains. Lots of them![3] Don't ask me how to consume this feedstock.

To me the weirdness of the lack of category is primarily in every properly structured site having them. If you are pulling the title, pubdate and content from your database it shouldn't take much effort to also pull the category and have a <category>pokemon</category> element in the news item.

Fun fact:

While it is missing from the w3 validator spec[4] the harvard.edu version of the spec[5] does mention the historic awesome "ratings" element. A thing from back in the days when non-corporate technology was still a thing. Namely The PICS rating system[6].

This hidden treasure was pretty much hated to death by loud mouth corporate propagandists. (I'm putting it mildly) The public rating your article is the worse kind of scrutiny when working for a mainstream propaganda outlet portraying it self as if news. The status quo eventually nailed the coffin shut by promoting it as a parental-oversight adult content filter which became the only surviving implementation.

Sadly the RSS spec only allows rating the channel rather than its items which spoils most of the theoretical awesome. :(

Thus therefore as the implication thereof, at least in theory, RSS has the most awesome tagging, categorization, rating and review system ever envisioned (not-seen) on the internet.

People just don't know how to technology.

[1] - https://www.w3schools.com/XML/rss_tag_category_channel.asp

[2] - http://opml.go-here.nl/theguardian.opml

[3] - view-source:https://www.theguardian.com/business/vodafonegroup/rss

[4] - https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html#hrelementsOfLti...

[5] - https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html#optionalChannelElemen...

[6] - https://www.w3.org/PICS/

RSS gives the user maximum control - but it lacks the social features. What we need is a way to connect our RSS feeds together.

"What we need is a way to connect our RSS feeds together."

Could you flesh this out a little? What is it that you want to see?

I would like to publish an output from my reading as RSS channels - then other people could subscribe to those channels making a full circle. I don't know what these channels would be - we could start with simple 'liked articles', then readers would count in how many 'liked channels' from friends a given article is and do other heuristics. But everybody would be able to make his own channels and then observe if people subscribe to them. In general it would be like a Facebook feed - but the algorithm would be executed on the user machine and defined by him.

Tiny tiny RSS allows you to do that... Although without subscriber count.

Google Reader did something like that - I had a lot of friends on there, and I don't remember the exact UI, but I could easily see things they'd "starred" and this formed a pretty cool secondary news feed of sorts. It was perfect.

TheOldReader.com is really good, and kind of duplicates the Google Reader experience. Only problem is, none of my friends use it!

https://www.w3.org/annotation/

I just invented this for that.

Even Shorter Syndication [ESS] AND No Nonsense Outline [NNO]

http://go-here.nl/ess-and-nno

Ill try a simplified explanation:

An NNO file is the end result of aggregation that can be used for the next session but is primal intend is publication/sharing.

It it s a comma separated text document that starts with a unix build time followed by a sorted list of items 1) feed url, 2) minutes before build, 3) title checksum

For example:

  1503411304088,
  http://example.com/rss.xml,223432,27,
  http://example2.com/rss.xml,453223,44,
  http://example3.com/rss.xml,5432242,125,
  http://example4.com/rss.xml,23143231,241

The file is build after the aggregator aggregates the users hundreds, thousands or millions of ESS, RSS and/or Atom subscriptions while reducing the result list by a configured amount. (say 3000)

When published a 2nd user can load the NNO into their aggregator which should fetch the top feed items listed in the NNO until they have a screen full of results. (scrolling loads more)

The 2nd aggregator can then proceed to fetch that users own subscriptions and/or parse additional NNO files into the result set.

When done they can publish their own NNO file to be used the same way.

Ideally the aggregators maintain their own manually unsubscribed feed list and implement a configurable filter like a word and a word combination filter, a Bayes filter, a machine learning implementation or some other filters. The news items displayed should have an indication about their origin (which NNO file) and they could provide an auto translate link or do inline-translation of headlines/articles.

Like you suggested, the point of the entire exercise is to have people access the internet without a multinational man in the middle.

I also coin ESS in the document, it is not required to make NNO work:

An ESS is a tiny comma separated text document with a unxi build date, an url for an RSS or Atom feed then, for each news item, 1) a publication date that is an offset in minutes from the build date and 2) a tiny check sum.

For example:

  1503411304088,http://example.com/rss.xml,
  0,27,
  3600,22,
  7890,142,
  23421,17

Like RSS is much smaller than the HTML document the ESS is much smaller than the RSS. The example is 71 bytes long. That is considerably smaller than a killobyte.

I would describe the problem with RSS with an analogy with juggling chain saws. :) When you toss the chain into the air it needs to land into your hand at the right moment for you to be able to toss it again.

When you request an RSS feed (or more like x per second) the results arrive with a random offset. The parser at times just sits there waiting for something to do then it is drowned in results arriving all at the same time. If that pile is large enough additional results arrive faster than the old ones can be parsed into the result set. Parsing feeds is not trivial the way it is with ESS. There are multiple formats (RSS and Atom), there can be multiple link elements with different attributes, the pubdate (or updated) has to be dug out and is not a number and lastly the feed can be quite huge.

With ESS you just take a substring (up to the first comma) and compare the number to a desired age or your oldest item.

If you or anyone else is interested in non-corporate technology just for the sake of making things great again feel free to contact me: gdewilde@gmail.com

Thanks,

check out inoreader

You mean the lost world of FriendFeed/Google Buzz/PubSubHub.

It seemed like a great idea, but the social features really didn't work. People dumped their RSS feeds, but the decentralized nature meant that attempts at flowing comments between sites ended up losing context.

I was the guy that really liked Google Buzz. I think it was it was tightly integrated with Gmail.

Well, reddit does offer rss support. So you could, for instance, subscribe to a mult (e.g. reddit.com/r/programming+python+nim/.rss) and discuss the articles you want to discuss with the community.

The cool thing about using reddit this way is that you can use your reader (like Thunderbird) to process your feeds according to rules. For instance, you could automatically delete all posts from /r/programming which don't feature Nim or Python.

RSS is feature complete. Like email. As soon as anyone tries to add something it ruins the whole thing by centralizing or proprietizing something or encouraging bad practices in there users or breaking something as simple as line breaks or copy/paste (outlookin' at you MS). Its fine that something else handle the social stuff, in fact, commenting tools often have rss feeds of their own.

I skipped RSS for sometime (actually forgot about their existence, my bad!) but I've stopped using facebook or similar platforms for a couple of reasons:

1. No matter how much I try to catch up, I'll still loose something 2. They are too distractive, less productive, and addictive.

RSS was a great way, is still a great way to catch on your fav news.

Thanks for bringing to notice :)

In case anyone here remembers Popurls fame, I've recently relaunched it under a new brand: https://medium.com/hvper/popurls-goes-hvper-2867b1b6b2bd

Absolutely! The RS reader on my Android phone is probably the most-used app.

(https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.madsvyat.s...)

Sad to note that apparently around the time HN renewed or changed a security cert configuration about a month or so ago, the app stopped updating this site's feed. Having removed and re-added it, the feed woke up on my phone, but my tablet stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the feed, even after reinstalling the app, manually removing config folders, caches etc., and restoring a backup of the config files from my phone.

I used to follow around 60 RSS feeds. Then Twitter became the place where stuff surfaced. A few months ago I got an iPad and started using Apple News and I've found myself visiting Twitter less. Twitter still surfaces more stuff, but that's not necessarily a good thing. Apple's news app fits my desires just about perfectly and it's getting better and better at showing me stuff I want to read.

I use RSS exclusively for its notification aspect. I still open the posts on the web (after filtering out the once that I’m not interested in).

Try http://talll.com for tech and http://filll.com for finance. Solid collection of rss feeds.

Really good share -- thank you!

Are there similar sites for other areas of interest, say history or science?

Miss the days when i filtered my newsfeeds with yahoo pipes. I could follow around 30 sites with only 10-15 news a day. Reading only the important news.

Not arguing with the point of this article. If you have to read FB to keep track of your friends, Social Fixer for Chrome cuts a lot of crap from it.

I use Google news with a custom filter for stuff about China. Just click on the bookmark once every morning. Don't get much noise, but sometimes hit paywalls.

I just use email newsletters from interesting companies and projects. RSS is not much better than FB and Twitter.

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