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Comment by apostacy | Hacker News Reader

That is pretty cool.

But unfortunately that is not really a solution. It is like saying that it is ok that a website removed screen-reader support, because you have a screen reader that can still parse the website anyway. The problem is RSS not being made available at all.

RSS being made available less and less, and they have less of an incentive to do so. And I am saddened that a lot of the good work Mozilla did was abandoned by them and that the web is regressing.

Additionally, having to make your own scraper is really not a solution to RSS not being available. Scrapers are very high maintenance, and can easily break with updates.

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Sure -- not saying it's as good as presenting make-for-rss posts -- may be helpful in some cases though. At least I'll know that content changes, and if I don't like the virtual feed, I can just link out to the source and view it directly.

I appreciate you sharing. I didn't mean to shoot you down or anything.

No problem -- I didn't take it that way at all!

as far as i can see, RSSHub does exactly that, and supports as many as 536 scraped sources (of varying caliber) at https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub/tree/master/lib/routes.

It's not an outlandish amount of work, if lots of people chip in with their favorite source.

I see what you are saying, but I still think it is a far cry from having content providers simply providing the feeds themselves.

In the same way that I don't think that YouTube allowing users to submit closed caption transcripts, or machine generating them, any substitute for the content creator providing them in the first place. I'm sure in the near future, smart TVs will be able to machine generate closed captions from the audio, but I still don't think we should let television producers off the hook for providing captions.

RSS should be the default. And it is not hard to generate RSS.

I happen to think that big platforms only reluctantly adopted RSS over a decade ago because it was a "standard", and because they felt that it was popular enough to justify the traffic from it. But they do not like RSS. It works against their analytics, their ads, and their control of the presentation.

And while it is cool that people are crowd sourcing scrapers, I think the real solution is to promote RSS itself and encourage more platforms to simply provide it. And organizations like Mozilla taking Facebook's position that RSS is obsolete has been profoundly unhelpful to the web.

Maybe what we need is an accessibility equivalent to the SSL Server Test. Input your domain and it gives you a letter grade on how accessible your site is. RSS access should be heavily weighted, of course.

When I look for an RSS feed, it's usually to see if it's updating, not because of any accessibility concerns. A lot of times, I'll find broken feeds. However, if a site is really giving me trouble with navigation, I'll rely on the RSS feed for reading purposes.

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