Hacker News Reader

Comment by conjectures | Hacker News Reader

This made me nostalgic for RSS. Is anyone reviving that in a nice way?

It never went away. If you want experience similar to Google Reader - there are several clients (but better ones require paid subscription). RSS feeds are still there.

RSS feeds are still there

And so heavily truncated, spoiling the point in many (but not all) cases of having an RSS feed entirely.

Some RSS reader applications can fetch/view the page each RSS entry points to if the actual entries don't have the right information.

Certainly true enough! I'm just saddened, I suppose-that such a feature needs to exist in the first place.

It's frustrating, but not new; there were sites doing this back when Google Reader was big. I don't know if it's more prevalent.

> And so heavily truncated, spoiling the point in many (but not all) cases of having an RSS feed entirely.

I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, as a reader it's convenient to have the full text and images of the articles/posts so that I can look at them all in one place without much effort.

On the other hand, as a webmaster, I might have months or years worth of content on my site that I want visitors to look at, and if they never visit my site again after finding and subscribing to the RSS feed, odds are that they'll never see any of it. So truncating the entries is a good way to nudge readers into visiting my site if there's something that looks interesting rather than downloading full text and images for a bunch of articles that they might not even read, which would be a waste of bandwidth.

Well, it's up to the feed author what they want to include, and that's fine. To me, the point isn't "show all published content" in the feed, it's to notify me that new content is available. I don't mind clicking through if the content is worthwhile (which it is, because why else am I subscribed?).

ActivityStreams is essentially a revival of RSS. It is the foundation of stuff like ActivityPub, the Fediverse, and the upcoming Social Linked Data (SoLiD) effort led by the W3C. So I'd say that there's plenty of reviving going on.

Check out NetNewsWire which is a free (and open source) RSS reader for Mac and iOS, under active development:

https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/

NNW is fast and simple. Using it, I've come to feel that RSS doesn't need to be updated -- it just needs modernised tooling and a frictionless UX. Now I have a good reader, I spend as much time reading feeds as I do on social media. And I feel good about spending time reading and skimming, knowing that there isn't an engagement algorithm which is trying to steer me towards extreme responses.

It's still there, but support isn't great - a lot of sites don't have a feed, or it's waaaay outdated.

A lot of sites that do have a feed don’t make it easily discoverable. You can play around with three URL path, or you can use a browser extension to find it. If it’s a Substack site, the feed URL probably exists and is probably just /feed/, at least on the sites I’ve tried.

There's browser plugins that fix the feed discovery issue. For example:

Firefox - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/

Chrome - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-finder/ijdgeed...

To tack on to this, NetNewsWire on Mac OS X also provides a Safari extension.

Why does it need revival? I've been using feedly for like a decade now with no issues.

Newsletters are the new RSS. Different protocol, but simpler for non-technical users and a viable business model. Some recent apps (Stoop and HEY) make the reading experience more like traditional RSS readers too.

adding rss feeds to (say) google reader doesn't require technical expertise. email newsletters require your email address, which is obviously prone to abuse and spam. newsletters aren't the new rss, but rather an arguably inferior replacement.

ah, but newsletters allow you to serve adverts, which is really why RSS "died".

And charging a recurring fee is also viable now in the age of patronage. It's more standard than charging for a premium RSS feed and easy for publishers on various systems to set up.

Nothing stops you from putting ads in RSS.

I personally think RSS was killed when social networks shifted to social media...

"x is the new y" indeed means it's not the same thing, but a replacement (inferior or otherwise).

The fact someone took the time to understand why they should care about Google Reader, set it up, and regularly used it does require some technical interest/ability. That's why most internet users didn't know what RSS was even at the peak of the blogging and RSS revolution circa 2005, whereas today (or even back then), everyone intuitively understands newsletters.

I'm not saying they're better for everyone, frankly they are far worse for regular readers in my view, but they're the clearest successor.

RSS is still great to get the news and blogs, I use https://theoldreader.com/

Most recent blog post, 18 months ago. Most recent tweet, 13 months ago. I wouldn't rely on that service as a daily tool.

No news is good news, unless you're talking about an RSS reader.

It's a feature-complete paid service which has been 100% bug-free in the seven years I've been using it, yes, daily.

It is possible for software to be finished and only require minimal maintenance.

Wanna know how I landed on this post?

RSS.

What I can't figure out is why there's a persistent myth that RSS has somehow vanished from the internet...

Everyone removed the orange "XML" and blue "RSS" images from their sites and people assume RSS was removed as well. The link tags to the feeds still exist so feed readers and browsers can still easily find them.

Seriously, why does this question keep coming up? What am I missing?

Because it was convenient and powerful. Ever since Google Reader shut down I lost track of technology news. Yes, I can read the same sites/blogs I read before one by one, or subscribe to their newsletter, or follow them on Twitter... but it's not the same. And the tools that were available to replace Reader were always short in some aspect. Google Reader was killed in favor of Google+ (which failed horribly). After that RSS went downhill.

RSS readers were useful because you had all the news/posts in one place (instead of many browser tabs/newsletters/social accounts). You read, curated and shared from the same place, and you were able to easily choose what categories you wanted to read and when.

Would RSS be in a better place now if Google Reader had never existed?

Interesting to think that an attack vector against an open standard is creating the objectively best implementation and then shutting down after killing competition and consolidation.

That's a great question! I think over time RSS would have ended up where it is anyway because of what it is, you're very intentionally opting out of spending time on site to consume the content elsewhere which for the web of today is exactly what they want to avoid.

How did RSS go downhill?

Other commenters in here have mentioned their readers of choice; I can add mine: NewsBlur.

Turns out RSS is still in pretty common use, as far as I can tell, unless you can point to a handful of sites that aren't using either RSS or Atom.

Invariably, when the topic of RSS comes up, someone laments its "passing", which leads me to ask (again): where is this impression coming from? Is it the mere absence of Google Reader?

Is there a social aspect I never knew about?

I see you mentioned other tools being lacking, but I know NewsBlur, at least, provides all those capabilities. (Not sure about "curating", though; maybe you could define that a bit more? There is the "blurblog", which has its very own RSS feed, which lets you surface articles you like, and there's the "save" function.)

It was awesome having google.com/ig as a homepage. There hasn't been anything to replace it that I know of.

I still subscribe to feeds in a different tool but it's not the same.

Where did /ig take you?

Also, "not the same"... can you be more specific? (And which tool?)

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

It was a page you could fill with "widgets", basically RSS feeds that made up a dashboard where you could see the headlines of whatever websites you liked to frequent. You could drag & drop the widgets around to arrange the page like you wanted and then expand each title to see the short text of each article.

Inoreader is the only RSS reader I'm comfortable with, Thunderbird's also ok. They aren't "widget" pages though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com