Hacker News Reader

Comment by CobrastanJorji | Hacker News Reader

There's been a recent season of mourning the loss of RSS, but I remain confused about the whole thing because I'm still a happy RSS user. Sure, it's not exactly today's ascendant technology, but it still works fine, most of the websites and blogs I read still quietly support it, and there's a happy little ecosystem of RSS aggregator websites and programs. While I'm a bit sad that a lot of folks don't know about RSS (and also curious about how they even use the web), I'm not feeling any pain as a user.

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Google's reader was very popular, and when it was killed I think a lot of people didn't switch to an alternative.

I never really got into it properly (though I paid for and used feedbin for a while) not least because not everything supports it. Its main attraction to me is as being the one place I can go for everything, and if it isn't that, then.. meh, it's just another thing to check, and I gradually stopped.

Not that I don't intend to go back (as much as I intend to do a lot of things..) - it just needs more setup to be useful to me, email subscriptions to RSS for example, or perhaps even the other way around, have an email folder full of subs with rss forwarded there too.

Other things that annoyed me were latex not rendering, and the RSS article being just a tiny stub, or title only, linking to the real deal.

> email subscriptions to RSS for example, or perhaps even the other way around

There's actually quite a few powerful services to do this. I made a service called http://feedsub.com to do this a couple years ago. I'd also recommend http://mailbrew.com which has a nice digest format.

I think there's a lot of value in RSS as an underlying data layer for the web, and I think it's criminally underused on the consumption side nowadays.

For example, I'd very much like to see blogrings make a comeback, and there's probably room for a website community driven entirely by mailing lists and one of these RSS-to-email tools.

> email subscriptions to RSS for example

Feedbin does this, FWIW. You mentioned you had used Feedbin before, maybe they introduced the feature after you left? It's super useful, and justifies the cost of the subscription all by itself for me. All my newsletter subscriptions go into my Feedbin feed, and my email inbox stays nice and clean (and my real email address stays nice and private).

What I am was trying to express in my post was about the loss of centrality of RSS as a means of distribution of all kind of content. Yes RSS as a protocol works as well as it ever did, but RSS as a system is nowhere.

In 2003/4 which is the period I was writing about there was no Facebook or Twitter and online advertising was not the business it is now. Although publishing via RSS was still relatively new and not well adopted it seemed like a viable way of plugging content together.

Now so much content is in silo's. There are no usable feeds from anyone who cares about advertising because they don't want you to have their content, they want to capture you.

That's what I am getting at. Not whether you can still read some sites that continue to support RSS in a reader.

I don't understand the blame on ads. The ecosystem with the best RSS support is podcasts - almost every podcast has an RSS feed, and most people consume podcasts using a podcast player, which is essentially an RSS player. But lots of podcasts have ads. I don't see why text RSS feeds couldn't include ads as well. If that motivated more sites to have fulltext RSS feeds it would be a good thing.

The simplest response, although there are several, is control. If I am on your site you have (some) control over my experience and potentially information about me & what I do. If I consume your content via a feed I can (more easily) ignore your ads and you have less information.

Well, the site owner would have 0 control over what extensions I have installed. Asking me to disable them would most definitely result in me leaving.

This is why I caveated my statements. AdBlockers, Privacy guards, and so on change the game as more people use them. That said, I've seen no stats but I wonder if that's even a majority.

It's also worth remembering that they are a relatively new phenomenon developed in response to the snooping. There was a long period where companies like Facebook had it all their own way. And this is the period in which the damage was mostly done.

I'm not sure if it's a majority, however, I certainly recommend them everywhere I can. I've been using them since before Google reader shut down, so they've certainly been around a while.

Ads on a website can be personalized (which is why many RSS feeds for news sites only short the first three paragraphs and then force you to click through into their website). Ads in a podcast delivered by RSS feed are much harder to personalize since the user agent pulling the RSS feed is less identifiable than a browser. That's why podcast platforms offering personalized ads rely on their own walled garden of client apps, like Spotify.

Ever since I started using RSS, back in the Google reader days, I used it in list view and clicked on articles I was interested in. I still do this today. I run ad blockers, so I'm absolutely useless to the sites, but I want to see the article in the original format.

Could you give me an example of some of the high quality siloed content that isn't available via RSS? I haven't encountered any problems getting to any of the stuff I regularly consume, but I imagine it probably exists.

OK sure, but you can create usable feeds. There are services that will do this for you in like 5 seconds.

Agreed. Podcast apps are all built on the technology. RSS readers like Feedly still work, and there are lots of new blogs that use RSS.

But, the article seems to be describing something else.

Today k-Collector would not be possible. That alternative future where everyone started blogging and putting their content in RSS2.0 feeds that we could analyse to connect those conversations did not happen.

I honestly didn't understand the article. I gathered that he created some kind of tool that aggregated blog posts based on their tags and created an RSS feed out of that, maybe like delic.io.us did? But isn't that already being done by the RSS readers? So, I still think I don't understand the article.

I think this is about pingbacks and trackbacks, basically that you could (theoretically) treat blogs as a distributed forum with RSS and a few other technologies providing the topical or temporal links between them.

Looks like TFA’s tool was a way to surface these.

If the underlying RSS technology still works just fine and has momentum, then saying it is dying is going to kill that momentum. This sounds like a marketing problem more than anything else.

Which is to say: It is a problem to be solved with communication and coordination tools kinda like this (but much lower urgency)

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/09/what-heartbleed-can-tea...

Good point. There isn't even a good website for RSS. RSS.com is a podcasting service. RSS.org is the website of some guy who has these initials. The most official source is the wikipedia page, which obviously is a just neutral explanation, not trying to advertise it. There's a site called You Need Feeds[1], which is trying to advertise it, but it doesn't look official and doesn't show up on the first page when you google RSS (which according to keyword planner 10K to 100K people do in the US alone).

[1]: https://www.youneedfeeds.com/

I feel like it needs a group identity around it —- how about “Syndicalists”?

I think the difference between k-Collector and an RSS reader was that there was a public feed for every topic.

k-Collector was aggregating many feeds and building a browsable content database indexed by a community created taxonomy based on facets such as who, what, where, and when. Yes, each tag had its own RSS feed (I believe we also supported feeds for combinations of tags, it was definitely on the roadmap) but we were also connecting together related tags, forming tag groups, supporting filters. We were also starting to think about how to address the problems in shared taxonomy. It was a very fertile period.

Was it / it sounds similar to delic.io.us, in that users tagged web pages, including blog posts and each of those tags had their own feeds? It was glorious. If you wanted to know what was happening with some topic in the world, subscribing to its delicious tag was the way to find out.

del.icio.us was a social bookmarking site, i was a user back then for a while. While there were similarities, it didn't aggregate content per se. and was solving a rather different problem.

That's where I am confused.

As described, k-Collector seems to be solving a subset of the problem space that delic.io.us did. kConnect presents feeds of different blogs grouped by tag, while delic.io.us did the same, but for all websites, not just blog posts. What am I missing?

It sounds like a really interesting experiment, is why I'm so interested. Are you sure it can't be revived?

I'm also a happy RSS user—the only thing that bums me out is that almost every feed these days contains only the first 1-3 paragraphs of the article. I understand why—I'm not seeing their ads or visiting their site otherwise, but it does spoil the experience somewhat.

Thankfully many RSS readers have an equivalent to a browser's Reader Mode that fetches the page and strips all the crap out of it. It's not perfect by any stretch, but it beats getting blasted by cookie popups, newsletter signups, and autoplaying video.

I was just pondering.. one could add tokens to the links and dramatically reduce the number of ads and other cruft for RSS subscribers. Like say, do we even need a navigation menu? We look at every headline and are very likely to continue to visit if something interesting pops up. We are also much more forgiving if a bullshit article comes along. Its much better to have subscribers than visitors out of google. (The ratio depends on the content)

Personally I don't even parse the <content>, I just have headlines sorted by <pubDate> that open the pages in the browser.

Well if you run 3 ad blockers like me, you won't have to worry about any of that lol.

If mostly no one knows about it, or uses it, Slowly many website will turn this off, or move to just posting everything in a walled garden.

Except, Google Reader died in 2013, and RSS lives happily on. It's rare I come across a website without an RSS feed.

They don't advertise it, but it's there - I presume because whatever CMS they use supports it (WordPress, etc).

It's not popular, and I do worry that what you state will come to pass, but I remain thankful that nearly a decade later, it hasn't yet.

Me too, apparently some people cannot differentiate between Google applications and Internet standards.

Yeah apparently. I have no idea why this is the case, but it definitely is. Google did shut down reader, but that didn't shut down RSS. It's hard to take down an open standard like that with just the end of one app.

You can read RSS in Outlook for Office 365 (Inbox -> RSS Feeds folder -> Right click and Add a new RSS feed). Each new blog article is received in an email-like format.

I’m seeing more and more sites not support it that I would like to use it with and haven’t added a site to my reader in quite a while because I just stopped looking personally.

Just send an email and ask them. Include a minimal RSS tutorial. Make an example feed for their website. They are already parsing out html, copy pasting those lines of code into an XML takes very little effort. Make the feed auto discoverable and/or include an RSS icon or link some place.

It will surprise you how often people just do it. Its a fun thing to implement, 5-20 min and you have results that require little to no further attention, upgrades or maintenance.

Can anyone name at least one website that needs RSS but does not have it.

Twitter.

It used to have it, they turned it off. I self-host my feed reader and a little Twitter-to-RSS gateway for a few accounts.

Oh twitter. They used to have it way back in 2007 or so.

Real estate and job listings, for one.

Craigslist has RSS feeds.

Not anymore, unfortunately [0] :(

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24840310

Craigslist has been utterly disrupted by FB Marketplace where I live, unfortunately.

Medium

They still have them.

Yeah me too!! I still use and love RSS! That's why these posts are just ridiculous.

would love to know some offerings that are over the top gratis. some day I intend to write/host my own, but the site I went to in the reader aftermath has slowly ratcheted up their conversion to paid incentives/demands, and now I can't add new feeds.

If your main goal is "very very free," you can't do better than self-hosted open source stuff, and there's lots of competition there. You could also just run a local app that isn't even a website.

I've personally just been using Feedly's free tier, and it works fine. Every now and then they find a new way to say "hey, what if you paid for Feedly," but it hasn't bothered me too much.

Feedly limits how many accounts you can follow & it's less than 1/4 what I was subscribing too in Google Reader. I recommend not using Feedly.

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