Hacker News Reader

Comment by quantumwoke | Hacker News Reader

The article mentions the demise of Google Reader (rest in peace) as a turning point for the spread of fake news. I agree that there needs to be some counterweight to the deluge of news designed to influence public opinion. However, I don't think the tool to build that with is RSS.

I recently learned about jsonfeed [0] from Hacker News and built a news aggregator for my own personal use. I believe the future of news content is in aggressive, hackable aggregation tools for a variety of content. jsonfeed is a solid foundation to build on :).

[0] https://jsonfeed.org

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That makes no sense.

RSS and jsonfeed are just containers. Both may contain real or fake news.

Everybody can put up a feed in RSS or jsonfeed without any trouble.

jsonfeed is a much simpler and more hackable protocol than RSS. It's much easier to build scalable and sustainable aggregators that filter fake news in jsonfeed without the cognitive overhead of RSS. Without hackable tools we end up with the walled gardens of Facebook and Google Reader.

You sound like a buzzword machine.

A simple RSS feed can easily be hand written. But of course, you don't do that because there are so many mature tools to create or manipulate an XML feed already.

Whereas with jsonfeed there is not much yet because it is so new.

If you can hack JSON, you can hack XML as well. Even programmer novices can do this.

Edit: Reworded the last sentence that could be interpreted as a personal attack. Wasn't meant as such, I was going for the impersonal you.

Please be civil :). Avoiding ad hominem attacks is more conducive to discussion.

I have already justified my preference for jsonfeed. XML has proved many times to decrease developer productivity. To my knowledge open source projects that have dropped or diminished their use of XML have only become more popular over time. Extrapolating a little bit, switching to JSON can only be a good thing.

A key difference now compared to the early days of XML and RSS is there weren't great libraries out there to handle the processing, both output and input. Many people were rolling their own. That definitely wasn't great. It was similar to using JavaScript prior to the widespread adoption of JQuery. However, that's not the case anymore. I think there are possibly a lot of benefits to recommend jsonfeed over RSS (or, a better solution, in my opinion, Atom), but you can build yourself a bit of a straw man by ascribing the problems of early XML usage with the situation today.

I'm the first person to acknowledge unnecessary use of XML.

Historically, XML is infinitely better than the custom formats we had before, where might even have been in binary instead of textual (the horror). Of course they went overboard with XML (oh hello XSLT).

But RSS feeds are a prime example for a good use of XML. Standard, validated, machine-parsable, and easily extendable data structures. For example podcast feeds are just extended RSS feeds.

I don't think that projects got popular because they dropped XML but because they dropped unnecessary baggage.

What is your justification? You already know JSON and you don't wanna learn another notation? You know XML but the use of "<>" are too offensive?

If you're such a hacker why not just write a script for yourself that convert javascript to xml instead of making a new standard and fracturing things even more :P

Or would you care to share a hack you've done with jsonfeed that I can't do with my RSS reader?

I've written a couple of RSS aggregators. The main problem with RSS is that everybody thinks it's too complex, so they create a new syndication format, thus adding to the complexity.

RSS 0.9x was really simple, just XML and a half-dozen tags. But RDF was the new hotness, so RSS 1.0 was born, built around RDF and the Semantic Web. Then Dave Winer got annoyed at the complexity, and published a slightly cleaned-up up 0.9x as 2.0. Then a bunch of other people decided that this was a mess, and so they created a new XML format called Atom, which is only slightly more complex than 0.9x/2.0. (I'm leaving out some ancient politics and oversimplifying.)

When I was an author of feed readers, the only one of these formats that ever annoyed me was RSS 1.0, because RDF requires much more than a simple XML parser. Oh, and maybe 25% of webmasters are totally incapable of generating valid XML, so you needed to tell your XML parser to use a dodgy "recovery mode".

In practice, this has very little "cognitive overhead", because you just hand a URL to a library and it figures out what parser to run.

But as usual, it looks like people are frustrated with RSS 0.9x/RSS 1.0/RSS 2.0/Atom/etc., and think that the solution is to create yet another format that does the exact same thing. I'm sure somebody out there is writing a "robust jsonfeed" parser that can handle badly-mangled invalid JSON.

In 4 years, people will be saying, "The whole RSS 0.9x/RSS 1.0/RSS 2.0/Atom/jsonfeed mess is terrible, and we need to create a simple new syndication format based on _____!"

The point is you generally choose sources that you personally find to be reputable when you use an rss aggregator. It isn't just a craphose of random sources spread throughout your social connections. The basic problem with fake news is that anyone can create and distribute it.

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