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Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

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sametmax

Most of the problems the author mentions are, to me, the actual reasons I love RSS.

No filtering. No comments. No proposal. No central way to find them.

It's not the absence of curation.

It's my curation.

It's easy: I like a site, I want news, I get the RSS. I delete it when it's not to my taste anymore.

The basic, deterministic, manual aspect of it is what's right with it. Not what's wrong.

Another weird idea is that RSS should be for everybody. No. It speaks to a certain kind of people, and that's fine.

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> No filtering.

Shameless(-ish) plug for my project, siftrss: https://siftrss.com/

You add a source feed, include/exclude items by keyword or regex match, and get a new filtered feed to subscribe to. Because it produces a normal RSS feed like any other, it works with all RSS readers.

It's totally free. No ads, no account, no email capture, nothing but totally disposable RSS feed filters.

Hmm, you might want to know (or already do) that Feedly just added keyword filtering - brings in some competition :)

I did see that a while back—I'm actually a Feedly user myself!

I haven't looked at their implementation much, but I imagine it only works on Feedly itself whereas siftrss is meant to be totally agnostic to what reader you use. The tool also supports regex, so you can do some slightly richer matching with siftrss.

It actually works everywhere, you just have to create the Mute Filters in Feedly. Petr from Feedly

Nice! I may use this to add more feeds to my ruby news aggregator at http://rubyland.news , cool?

Hmm, I wonder if there's a way to use it to turn a Medium feed into something useful. (By default, a medium feed is not, as it contains all comments by the author interspersed with actual stories/posts, with no obvious way for software to distinguish).

Cool indeed!

As for Medium feeds, it's all about whether or not you can find a pattern in the data to exploit. For instance, maybe links for comments contain "/c/" whereas links for posts contain "/p/" or something similar. There is, of course, no guarantee that there is anything to exploit or that what is exploitable won't change—that's the joy of dealing with third-parties! :)

Does siftrss do anything like Full-Text RSS [1] to transform partial web feeds into full feeds? Quite a few of the websites I subscribe to only show summaries of the articles.

[1] http://fivefilters.org/content-only/

Nope, currently siftrss is geared totally toward filtering the content which exists in the feed already. The goal is to keep the tool good at doing that one thing.

That is a neat idea, though!

> Another weird idea is that RSS should be for everybody. No. It speaks to a certain kind of people, and that's fine.

Well, that's fine as long as that group of people is big enough for the sites I care about to consider it worthwhile enough to actually add an RSS feed :)

Adding an RSS feed is easy. Individual writers and hosts have no good reason for not including them. For groups / publishing houses that are not techinically bent generally use publishing platforms that generally support them. For the minority thats excluded from the above, hey, just a shout out and someone will be ready to help (me included). But thats not the real problem, the lack of ads on rss feeds (which is its biggest appeal to me) warrants the lack of attention rss feeds get.

Easy is something else than no effort at all. Wordpress by default comes with RSS feeds enabled, but e.g. Jekyll doesn't - and I've seen many static sites even by tech-savvy people or for software libraries that hadn't enabled them. That means I have to contact site owners to enable their RSS feeds before I'm able to subscribe to them. And that's just when they're using a package like Jekyll that already has RSS support baked in.

As the OP, I love RSS.

But let's not pretend it's always easy.

You gotta take in consideration the filters, the configuration, the cache, if you support rss and atom, the routing, and how you integrate it in your design.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

RSS IS easy. Filtering, caching, routing, fancy features are not. I’m okay with a poor RSS feed over none.

That's because the author is a tool of the global ad-tech agenda, writing articles with click-bait headlines. RSS isn't a particularly profitable utility to inject ads into, or suck personal info out of (less cookies, no pixels, makes an MBA yawn in meetings), so I guess that means it's "dead" right?

Oh noes! Markdown is dead!

Oh noes! SOAP XML is dead!

Oh noes! RESTful JSON is dead!

How the fuck would a non-coding journalist know the difference?

Ars technica does something nice: for a very low fee (European perspective) you get the full articles in your RSS.

Plus they remove tracking and ads on the web page.

Should be win/win since we all hate tracking, ads and never click on them anyway and still actually want to reward sources we read, right?

Ars is the only news site I actually have a subscription for. I'd always appreciated their journalism, and learning about the fulltext RSS feed was the feature that got me to sub. I'd love to see more sites offering that option.

Danny Crighton has a CS degree from Stanford. I'm not entirely convinced by the article either, but your criticism would be a bit more credible if you managed to avoid being factually wrong.

You can have a CS degree and never code.

I had one of those around (in a manager position of course) that told me in a meeting: "I don't see why you make it seems like it's hard and needs planning to get an app for project X. It's just some embedded html and with HTML5 you get geolocation so it'll be easy and quick. Besides our contractor already has an app so he just needs to add some javascript to it".

What in the article required being an active programmer?

Perspective

That said, i have encountered many a myopic active programmer...

Well Said !

Certainly not in Portuguese universities, unless you got the degree with some "help", like a few of our politicians.

I'd avoid saying anything at all if the article wasn't factually wrong about RSS being a disused format.

And there's nothing factually wrong about RSS providing weaker data to ad-tech survellance. The only reason it's being pushed back onto the front burner, is because the Facebook election botch has got everyone spooked about analytics trackers, and lots of richer sources are going dark, putting RSS back on an even footing with the usual web tracker data sources, because everyone is blocking thirdparty scripts and resources.

Meanwhile, pretty sure the guy is operating as a tool for a paycheck sourced from the industry the article serves, and having qualifications only helps to support such theories, since credibility makes the opinion of a stooge all the more valuable. Maybe I should lump you in with him.

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