Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

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>Even the New York Times has RSS

The NYTimes is actually an example that undermines the ideals of RSS for the average web surfer who is not a tech geek.

The NYTimes RSS feeds are not full texts of the article such that a one can read the entire story within the comfort of the RSS reader. NYTimes only provides snippets and excerpts to bait people to click on to the real web page. For many normal people, this crippled functionality of article summaries in RSS is worthless to them.

Yes, many low-traffic WordPress sites still give RSS feeds of full text but that's not going to reverse the decline of RSS.

Again, I emphasize and concede that many hardcore web surfers (e.g. HN users in this thread) still find the limited RSS summaries useful because they don't have to "visit 100 websites" but that's not a problem the mass population has[0]. This "go-to-our-real-website-to-see-the-entire-article" amplifies the trend of RSS declining in popularity. If RSS is just "teasers", the typical web surfers would rather get their "aggregation" from Facebook or just use the NYTimes smartphone app which has enhanced rich content such as video, etc.

The publishers of popular mainstream websites simply don't have any economic incentive (i.e. ads) to give readers the full text in their RSS feeds.

I still contend that a bunch of RSS enthusiasts in this thread talking about how they use RSS doesn't answer actual the question the HN poster asked. The actual question is about mainstream trends and not about the habits of HN hardcore users. Take another look at the words used in the Ask HN question. HN users don't need to "hope" for a new web or smartphone RSS client. They're already using RSS right now!

[0] similar example previous comment from 9 years ago that makes a distinction between "normal mainstream" web surfers and hardcore RSS enthusiasts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060707

So, I do find that behavior annoying, but I wouldn't call it worthless. I still get a list of articles that I can skim through fairly quickly, and, while one more click to get to the full article is a (very) mild inconvenience, it hardly eliminates the value of the RSS Feed.

It is admittedly more of an issue in airplanes. But I'm disinclined to throw out the baby over a few hours per year's worth of bathwater.

>, but I wouldn't call it worthless.

Well yes, of course you wouldn't! A techie HN discussion participant like you is not the demographic I was talking about when I qualified my sentence with "For many normal people, ..."

In the most complimentary way I can convey it, you are example of "not normal" in the context of dealing with a higher threshold of pain regarding any RSS inconveniences.

Again to emphasize for productive discussion, a bunch of us HN geeks sharing anecdotes of how we're still using RSS in sophisticated and clever ways does not actually answer the OP's question.

When you use terms like "pain", that suggests that RSS is significantly worse than other options in this respect.

I'd argue that it's quite the opposite. Facebook always gives you a blurb. Twitter gives you no more than 280 characters minus the length of a link. Pinterest gives you a picture. RSS/Atom remains the only option where it's at all common to get the whole article without clicking a link and taking a shotgun blast of JavaScript to the face.

>When you use terms like "pain", that suggests that RSS is significantly worse than other options in this respect.

Sorry for not being clear. The "pain" of RSS or "pain" of Facebook/Twitter is multi-dimensional and so it's not just comparing 1-for-1 annoyances such as "extra click to get to the real publisher website" being equivalent with RSS vs Facebook.

>RSS/Atom remains the only option where it's at all common to get the whole article without clicking a link and taking a shotgun blast of JavaScript to the face.

Yes that's true but the other "pain" that normal mainstream users don't want to deal with is setting up a separate RSS reader/app. They already have Facebook loaded because that's where there friends are. They also don't want the pain of finding relevant RSS feeds and curating them. Facebook already gives them suggested articles passively. And it's irrelevant if Facebook's newsfeed algorithm is bad; the selling point is that it's passive and automatic and the typical non-HN user doesn't have to bother configuring anything. So for normal typical websurfers, RSS theoretically is a solution for news aggregation, but it also creates new problems they don't want to deal with. Yes, HN techies are happy to fine-tune RSS feeds; but regular users have no interest in that.

And if you want to mention how RSS is the option that sometimes provides full text, you also have to be fair and mention that the real websites are the option that sometimes provides video. A lot of normal mainstream web surfers love rich content like video for consuming news.

Again, I keep trying to focus the discussion on the mass psychology and habits of non-HN mainstream users but people keep talking about the benefits that HN techies enjoy. We are already in this HN forum and already know what the benefits of RSS are. Thus, it doesn't actually add productive discussion to the OP's actual question.

There are ways around this. I use ttrss and it has the option to fetch the actual page and replace the RSS content with it. It has a few bugs with formatting and such on some sites, but generally works well. There is a built in Readability plugin for it, but I also use a plugin called Mercury full text for some feeds that don't play nicely with Readability.

Mercury works better than Readability usually, but the downside is that Mercury uses a third party to process it, whereas Readability is all local. So some sites will block Mercury from accessing it, because it's seen as a bot (Forbes does this, as do a few other sites).

This combo works great for reading entirely in your RSS reader. I use my phone to download my feeds for offline before flights, so I can read the actual content as well without an Internet connection (assuming it doesn't have formatting errors).

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