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Comment by worble | Hacker News Reader

> This forced publishers to put useless blurbs, redirecting to the HTTP version, which was a bad user experience and just sucked.

Is this that bad? I personally don't mind this at all, I subscribe to RSS feeds so I can easily tell at a glance who has an update in one place. If they then want to redirect me for the full content, then so be it, especially if the alternative is me loading every single one of those sites every day to check anyway.

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I do mind such RSS feeds that just try to force people to load the webpage. With the vast majority of my RSS feeds, I never have to leave Emacs’ Elfeed RSS reader to consume daily news. If a feed won't let me see the full content in RSS, then I am more likely to delete the feed than become a pair of eyeballs for the website’s advertisers.

I work on a project to convert partial feeds into full-text versions. It pulls in the article content from each feed item and then creates a new full-text feed. Feel free to try it out here: http://ftr.fivefilters.org/

If somebody chooses to make their (complete) writing available only on their site, I can choose not to read it (and often do!) But I don't think it's right to pull it from their site and repackage it.

Absolutely agree. I just can't get why in every discussion about RSS somebody mentions that y it's dead because publishers had to give away content for free. Feed could contain full article, but don't have to.

Agreed. The RSS can easily be equivalent to a Tweet with a link attached. I like Thunderbird on desktops including RasPi, have yet to explore cross platform + floss mobile or web readers, but have built my own little youtube-like stack with RSS that is similar to YT’s feed format and can aggregate them, in the iSpooge Live project in Clojure + ClojureScript.

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