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Comment by LoSboccacc | Hacker News Reader

RSS has no analytics. that's the big weakness. RSS has been stripped of content even in most other blogs, substituting it for links back to the main sites, which is a workable compromise for webmaster but not one that helps readers. yahoo pipes where a stopgap for a while, until yahoo pulled the plug.

I think what's needed is an intrusive format that delivers metrics and tracking. sure it'd be another tool for control and manipulation, but we'd at least have back the ability to read our news centralized.

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RSS doesn't need analytics. If you want analytics, put them on the links in the feed. If you want to know that people are reading the link at all, either put in an invisible pixel, or just include a paragraph with a [more...] link.

RSS feeds that provide a paragraph (or less) and a "more..." link make me unsubscribe immediately. I'm most often reading my feeds when offline or on the go, and not having the full article makes it worthless.

Readers don’t need/want analytics though, so this is a friction between content accessibility and businesses tracking usage

> RSS has no analytics.

Great! Another selling point.

I agree, but realistically speaking that is why it’s being fought by content providers whether we the techies like it or not

Let it be fought by them all the time. Useful websites will have an RSS feed. It's a nice filter, IMO.

that's kind of an ivory tower argument. "let's people don't have nice thing, we know what's best for them." meanwhile, most normal use don't gives a damn if the site track their behavior and post relevant ads, as long as they get quality content and ads aren't abusive they believe it's a fair bargain.

No, more like "instead of trying to tame bad actors making compromises, we refrain from them and tell others to do so too".

"ads aren't abusive"

"believe"

Believe it or not, some people make high-quality content on the internet with the expectation of compensation.

The current state of advertising is ethically and technically questionable in many ways. But the idea of advertising as a revenue model is not.

Ethical advertising is pretty much a unicorn. I don't deny that it's possible but I would struggle to find even a single example of it in the wild.

I guess Deck Network was an example of that. Most of the 5-6 ads I intentionally clicked ever was theirs. There were also similar networks like Carbon.

As there were quite a few analytics companies for RSS when it was more popular, your comment couldn’t be further from the truth. The founder of one of the most popular RSS analytics firms (FeedBurner) later went on to be the CEO of twitter in fact.

As a frequent RSS user, I don't mind when feeds use links back to the main site. I personally use RSS to notify me when a new article is posted.

As a frequent RSS user, I want to read the content in my preferred environment with my preferred contrast, colors and font. Many years ago I decided to not follow people who only put a crippeled version of their content into my RSS reader. If they don't want to be read, that's ok, they're pleanty others with better content anyway which I gladly read instead.

Any chance you know of a good list of full uncrippled rss feeds?

I'm not quite sure what you mean, aren't list of things to read very personal and dependent on the taste and interests of the person?

My website has full feed: https://jeena.net/all.atom and so have blogs like Kottke http://feeds.kottke.org/main Marco Arment https://marco.org/rss Scott Hanslemann http://feeds.hanselman.com/ScottHanselman and most of the personal blogs you can find out there.

But as I said, I most probably didn't quite get the question.

But otherwise there are plugins like https://tt-rss.org/oldforum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=1539 to replace the short content in a RSS feed with the full content from the Website.

Embedded images?

I don't think the big weakness is lack of tracking, really, I think the big weakness is consumer adoption. The average person (outside of the journalist/influencer-types that continue to bemoan the loss of Google Reader) doesn't care to use feeds. Podcasts (based on feeds) are still held back by the idea that you have to figure out how to subscribe to a show.

RSS is a protocol, not a service. Email doesn't have analytics, nor does html or http or any other protocol. Analytics is functionality you connect to services or tools, generating logs of how you use something. It's not on the same level of abstraction as a protocol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

How come it doesn't? I'm a paying subscriber of Ars Technica so I have unique personified URLs to access various of their feeds. You also can include images from the web into the feed and most of the clients will gladly render it. There are myriads of tricks you can use to collect data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

That's what feedburner was for and looking back it's so obvious why google bought them.

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