Hacker News Reader

Comment by mceoin | Hacker News Reader

Google Trends for RSS is pretty telling: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rss

Personally, I think it's a big loss that we have moved away from the RSS format specifically, and the open web generally.

View on HN

Oh look, Google Trends for Javascript is pretty telling: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=javascri...

Facebook has an aardvark-shaped graph: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=facebook

Android is on decline: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=android

Touché! Hadn't thought to check JavaScript.

Anyone have a better source for actual RSS usage?

Twitter seems to be having a harder time: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=twitter

But Instagram is still in ascendance: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=instagra...

I wonder if you can really draw conclusions from any of this?

Nobody has moved away from RSS, it's just not as trendy, but major blog platforms ship with RSS by default. Every time I want to add a blog to my list I can find an RSS link (on some rare occasion there is no such link, and an email to the website developer is enough, actually I'm suspecting that most blogs have a RSS feed nowadays because at one point they received requests to create one)

Facebook and Twitter killed theirs though. I find that deplorable.

I honestly feel like the solution to that problem is to ignore content from Facebook and Twitter, but I suppose I'm in the minority.

RSS is nigh-unusable for many sites now because they only put the first few sentences of an article in the feed, then "continue reading on our site <link> [where we can show you our ads]". It makes sense from a business perspective, because RSS has no good way to embed ads. However, it greatly diminishes the value of RSS -- reading ALL of your content in one easily-organized place.

The best alternative that I've found is Feedly, which can show ads inline.

It depends, you can embed ads and content in a feed, or some content and no ads. I think depending on what you're reading, academic, non-profit, ad-supported, etc.. the published RSS feeds add more value than take away for both parties.

Of course there is this trend of not giving more than the title/first sentence but those feeds all belong to that weird, hostile, parallel universe where advertising / tracking / consumerism of closed tech is seen as an efficient way of sharing information to the reader. Lots of content is produced there but is it worth reading it? doubt it, unless you want to be sucked into their world. I'm pretty happy with what is outside and consider the "sane" part of the internet.

I built my own reader, in which I have a Mercury API integration. This allows me to click a link and scrape the source article, so I can read the rest of it inline (and with no ads)

https://mercury.postlight.com/web-parser/

I'm a fan of this for sites that don't include the full-text of the article:

http://fivefilters.org/content-only/

It sucks that the content producer doesn't get any ad revenue, but it also sucks that the only way they can get paid involves tracking me and building a profile despite my wishes.

On the other hand, I've found that non-profits / independently-funded researchers produce most of the best RSS feeds, and I happily donate to the non-profits.

Moving to snippets was a bummer when many RSS sites stopped doing full feeds (I remember it being kind of a wave), but eh, ultimately it's been fine and it's still scads better than the alternative of having to visit each site individually, often dealing with autoplay this and popup that.

As someone who hosted RSS, but not ads, the reason for doing that was primarily bandwidth related. Serving unchanging content to clients every five minutes is just wasteful. A lot of RSS clients are shit.

that's why we had feedburner. Is it still a thing?

> RSS is nigh-unusable for many sites now because they only put the first few sentences of an article in the feed

It has always been like that for some websites, and I haven't seen an increase of these kind of RSS feeds.

NewsBlur, the reader I mainly use, can fetch that linked web page for you with a single click.

A lot of large news websites have abandoned RSS. ABC News is one example, although their page layout is quite nice (maybe the best I've found among news sites) so I guess they want people to just visit the site

http://abcnews.go.com/

Sure, the platforms support it, but most readers don't use it. I still use RSS, but the majority of my readers follow my blog via email or Facebook.

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).

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.

At one point every site on the internet had a visitor counter, and don't forget about web ring!

The RSS feed is the guestbook of web 2.0, it comes along for the ride with the shitty page generator.

Apparently TCP is over too: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=tcp

That's probably a reflection of the fact that most new "protocols" are APIs built on HTTP, so no one's talking about TCP/IP even if it's still there under the hood. Compare it to API and you'll see it follows TCP down for a while as fewer people work on native software, then heads back up around 2012 with web and mobile apps becoming the norm.

If that's true, then the web is dead: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=web

With everything becoming centralized, the nice stuff is being ignored. I use theoldreader.com to keep up with stuff that is posted on websites, like HN, Reddit, etc.

Can someone name any major publications that don't have an RSS feed for me?

Please?

I don't really care, but can you get your Facebook or Twitter feed via RSS?

There are a lot of services that do Twitter to RSS like twitrss.me and queryfeed.net. Queryfeed also does some Facebook things.

Nope, those have been a walled-garden since day 1. But every blog post shared on those platforms likely has an RSS feed. Reddit publishes RSS feeds for every sub. Digg did RSS. WikiNews has RSS. So-on.

That's not true. Both had RSS up until 2012 or so. They were hidden to the average user though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com