RSS is wonderful
quakkels.com
quakkels.com
Frequently the type of content that gets syndicated via RSS is long form and non-commercial.
It turns out that these two properties produce a pretty good signal to noise ratio which filters out precisely the kind of trash that has ruined the web over the last decade or two (long form content at least has the possibility of teaching you something or presenting an idea with some kind of rigor; and since RSS isn't great at monetization, the worst offenders in media tend to deprioritize it).
Of course RSS is a very imprecise filter, but it's basically the antithesis of a Twitter or Facebook feed, where everything is short form and you tend to see whatever serves the platform's commercial interests (i.e. their definition of engagement).
This matters to me because at a certain point I realized -- I have basically never read anything short form on social media which enriched me in a meaningful way.
I have learned a lot from studies, reference works, long form analysis, and books -- basically all the quality knowledge I possess has come from one of these sources.
At best social media has given me occasional links to these things (scattered among an ocean of junk information).
It's mostly because of how RSS originated with blogs I guess, and who was involved in designing it. But for whatever reason it has been far more valuable to me than any other form of content syndication online.
At least with Twitter's "Latest" feed, you get everything in chronological order, without manipulations from the algo (AFAIK).
As far as the signal-to-noise ratio goes on Twitter, depending on the quality of people you follow, you will also get exposed to many amazing long-form articles.
But 90% of my viewing is on channels I'd never subscribe to, because doing so would overload my recs with similar channels, which I don't want.
I suspect having large follower counts of Twitter seems to induce some sort of brain rot. I’ve found many of my formerly good follows, once their profile has gotten bigger, have started to spend more time retweeting outrage baiters, dunking in various internet morons, or succumbing to talking in generic Twitter clichés. It’s like the platform trains you into being insufferable if you engage with it too much.
People selection bias themselves all the time to their own circles where they drive away anybody not as obnoxious as them in the same ways.
It used to be common for ingredient sellers to issue recipe books that would extoll the value of their goods, trash their competitors', and the recipes would usually include the ingredient even if it didn't do anything for the particular food you were trying to make. (E.g. "our flour is pure, unadulterated, and not bleached using toxic ingredients unlike our competitors who also eat babies", which was a more effective marketing tactic before the existence of food regulatory authorities curbed the worst excesses.)
The recipe on the side of the box is a much smaller-scale version of this.
Some examples from cookbooks: https://www.maangchi.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/mul-naen...
https://www.cookbookdivas.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Cel...
I also wouldn't be surprised if the fluff is there because it was originally written for web and chanced upon finding a publisher
It's a lot easier to just try a new recipe when it's not tied up inside a 100-comment Reddit thread debating its nutritional value.
Just recipes; no stories, no bloat.
> About this site
> Founded to provide a simple online cookbook without ads and obese web design. See the story of this site unfold in three videos:
> https://odysee.com/@Luke:7/a-demonstration-of-modern-web-blo...
> https://odysee.com/@Luke:7/the-war-against-web-bloat-continu...
> https://odysee.com/@Luke:7/soydevs-destroyed-epic-style-by-b...
I'm not sure i agree with Luke on everything, or even that his tone is always conductive to productive discussion, but there is definitely a lot of merit in creating small and fast websites without any unnecessary bloat nowadays.
The "Website Obesity Crisis" presentation also has stuck with me ever since i ran into it: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
I like the look and feel except for the Gay Spa Asian video suggestions lol
https://cookpad.com is a pretty good site for recipes. Unfortunately it's mostly only popular in Japan. IIRC, they want you to pay if you want to be able to sort results by rating
- Cookpad has infinite scrolling
- The only way to change the site language is a link in the footer
- As a result, just when you're about to click this essential link so you can read the site, more content loads in and it disappears
Took me five or six tries to finally scroll+click fast enough and defeat the infinite scrolling boss, thus unlocking the epic "now I can read this website" loot. Stupid beyond belief and I will never visit Cookpad again because of this.
Not just recipes, but in-depth articles about utensils and above all, ingredients, too. And tips on where to buy them in Los Angeles ("Koreatown", mainly, as I recall).
Also some stories, about occasions (mostly gatherings of the site owner's music club) where the dishes have been served. But they're on separate pages; you needn't see them unless you want to.
Dunno about any RSS feed though.
Google gets all the “credit” for killing RSS, but there’s plenty of dismay to be spread around!
May be a random thought but I feel like social media is crowded and having multiple platform is going to kill the "SHARING" part and it has now become "what gets higher ranking" kind of a stuff.
Imagine if all social media posts were having RSS feeds and with one application we could all scroll through different feeds!
It seems these giants get big with the help of standards and then they kill them once they have enough momentum. "Embrace, extend, extinguish" is not only a Microsoft thing.
things like http2/3 and quic for one. and their influence on the browser market aswell.
AOL and Compuserve — let’s use numeric addresses so it’s kinda like phone numbers, right?!
Also, whatever MSN tried to be when it first escaped from the lab.
Didn’t Novell have some kind of email-substitute messaging product that they tried to jam into their proprietary TCPIP competitor, as well?
This means don't use Facebook, don't promote Facebook, don't use Facebook logins in your app, etc.
* all reddit subreddits can be turned into an rss feed by adding ".rss" after the URL, e.g. https://reddit.com/r/news/.rss
* YouTube still supports RSS, but it is well hidden and I am worried that it will be silently removed at some point.
* HN supports RSS!
* many major news sites still offer RSS, though it's often hard to find the feed. Reuters shut it down about 1.5 years ago
These are the results that I get in my RSS reader, they seem very different from https://www.reuters.com:
newsboat 2.10.2 - Articles in feed 'Reuters News Agency' (10 unread, 10 total) - https://www.reutersagency.com/feed/?taxonomy=best-regions&post_type=best
1 N 2021-10-20 06:44 1.2K Reuters exclusively reports Renault sees bigger production hit from chip shortage; market reacts 2 N 2021-10-18 06:52 1.3K Reuters exclusively reports India presses Qatar for delayed LNG as power crisis mounts
3 N 2021-10-18 06:50 1.4K Reuters reports Fortescue’s Forrest says Australia must commit to carbon cuts to keep green energy advantage
4 N 2021-10-18 05:15 1.3K Reuters reveals U.S. to lift restrictions Nov 8 for vaccinated foreign travelers; market reacts
5 N 2021-10-18 04:00 2.5K Reuters impact: U.S. lawmakers say Amazon may have lied to Congress, Senator Warren urges breakup, India retailers want probe after Reute 6 N 2021-10-15 06:56 1.4K Reuters reveals how the illicit copper trade is sapping South Africa
7 N 2021-10-15 06:46 1.4K Reuters exclusively reports Italy considering extending bank merger incentives to mid-2022
8 N 2021-10-15 06:43 1.9K Reuters first to report Evergrande’s $1.7 bln Hong Kong HQ sale flops; CEO in Hong Kong for restructuring, asset sale talks
9 N 2021-10-14 11:44 1.9K Reuters ahead with key Turkish Central Bank news; market reacts
10 N 2021-10-14 08:38 1.5K Reuters ahead with news of German economic growth downgradeThe reason I unsubscribed from Reuters.com feeds in the first place was that the volume was too much and I didn’t have the time to scroll through the feed(s) looking for stories that interested me. From a quick look, I noticed these reutersagency.com feeds have a lot fewer stories – one of them had no new items since June!
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/jqlks2/where_did_o...
I am not sure you can filter. Maybe you could obtain something more specific building a special RSS feed through the API ( github.com/HackerNews/API )?
https://hnrss.org/newest?points=50 (100 and 150 also supported)
It bugs me when people link to the version derived from the form with the trailing slash after the subreddit name, instead of e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/news.rss
That one works fine, people, so y u do dis?
Personally I feel like the precedence is more obvious with the slash, so it's clearer to figure out how more obscure combinations work, like:
https://reddit.com/r/news+worldnews/.rss
That being said, I also hate needlessly ugly URLs. If someone leaves in the tracking garbage then I hate it (like this):
?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=sharehttps://drive.google.com/file/d/1EGr60iRZoCMWoFNZC6cXk7shb9q...
"For all the great content that doesn't have a feed"
[1]https://sniprss.com Disclaimer: I built it :)
Edit: ah OK, it's slightly different: SnipRSS allows you to curate arbitrary content from the web into a single RSS feed, whereas the tools I referred to periodically check a single source and generate an RSS feed from that. Sorry for the confusion.
Primary users are those curating content who have little technical experience and those who don't want to write selectors but are happy with a browser extension.
An RSS reader that lets me keep things in my task bar as a small popup, and shows notifications, is all I want.
It depends on the use case.
One may use RSS just as preview, to decide what to read and what not, rather than use it as replacement of a website.
Using RSS as preview, actually, while it may seem just an irrelevant layer of indirection, can actually prevent excessive consumption :)
Rather like the HN front page. A similarity underscored by Firefox uses (or at least used last I looked) for RSS feeds.
* newsboat (command line) for desktop: https://newsboat.org/
* Feeder on android (which also scrapes the full article content in most cases): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsense...
Both are definitely not bloated, though I don't know if there is any decent notification functionality in newsboat. It is open source though, so maybe it's not that hard to add. You can configure it to auto refresh so I've just kept it open when I've been following the news obsessively.
You just need the right tools. Miniflux[1], which I will never get tired of recommending at every occasion, has a scraper built-in, so you just need to enter one or two css selectors and it fetches the text for you, ready to be consumed in its excellent, HN-inspired web interface or in your client of choice.
If you can't be bothered to self-host there is a hosted option which is only 15$/year.
Miniflux is the reason I'm a heavy RSS user today (I follow just over 300 feeds at the moment) after years of being intrigued by the possibilities of the standard but ultimately unable to stick to it due to wrong/inadequate tooling. Miniflux was my turning point.
[1]: https://miniflux.app
I have been in love ever since. It’s an amazing rss reader and doesn’t even need an app
This sounds like it couldn't possibly matter but it's actually quite easy for a full text RSS feed to be the vast majority of bandwidth for a site.
There’s definitely some good options on the Mac side. I use Reeder, which does exactly what I want it to and little more, and there’s NetNewsWire which feels like it’s been around for a million years at this point.
> In practice, getting fulltext is rare
This is very true, and unfortunate. The app I use has an option to pull the text from the linked page (much like a browser’s Reader Mode), but it’s not perfect and often totally mangles things like image galleries. It’s a shame, because I find a lot of the feeds I follow have content I want to read but their websites are unreadable; for every three lines of text there’s an embedded video or “articles you may be interested in”. It destroys my ability to take the article in.
The script I use to fetch RSS will optionally perform two extra steps: fetching the full-text (finding the link using a given XPath expression), then de-cluttering that HTML (removing banners, menu bars, etc.).
The result is another RSS feed, which can be published somewhere, subscribed-to in a reader, etc. (I actually transform them to Maildir, since my preferred reader is mu4e)
This means that they are providing their audience with no option but to have a social media account (where their interests can be tracked and cross-referenced, data mined etc), not to mention that they endorse and promote particular for-profit private companies (which is in general not done lightly, unless there is a partnership or other disclosed interest)
New open source tools like this engine, especially if they integrate more with this other wonderful piece of tech, the email client could create a more healthy information retrieval environment. The time to think anew about how to evolve a positive digital life is now and the pieces of the puzzle are all around us.
- HTML/CSS/JS allow for much more sophisticated, expressive presentations than simple markup, using video/images/canvases and whatnot.
- News is much more frequently updated now than in 2005. With RSS, the update cycle is not in control of the content creator.
- RSS is largely incompatible with paywalled subscriptions.
But it doesn't have to be. It really comes down to the clients having so many different ways to authenticate and therefore a complex UI. Consumers and producers also struggle with how to manage so many subscriptions.
Full disclosure: just started working for a company trying to streamline paid podcasts.
You can even use the same tools to prevent login sharing such as checking how many IPs the URL is fetched from etc.
[1]: https://havenweb.org
I'm not entirely sure what the benefit of one over the other is, unless some RSS readers/podcast apps have issues with Basic Auth or maybe it's just easier to fit into existing code server-side.
I am not sure what you mean with the second point, the timing of updates is under the full control of the content creator no?
The third point is quite relevant. Some sites ask that you subscribe to get updates (via email). Obviously they want to have better visibility of their audience rather than have a large set of passive (lurkers). That is a legitimate choice.
1. RSS readership can’t be effectively tracked, and regular readers may transition to RSS, so RSS content becomes a black hole of readership.
2. RSS can’t easily be monetized via ads or a paywall (although some sites have managed it, like Ars Technica).
It sucks, but most sites have to make money somehow, and RSS just isn’t very conducive to that.
Not possible as long as the pages are not walled behind a login.
Driving more traffic means more money. It’s a self-made problem by the content creators.
but its more a client-side issue, the degree to which the social graph of a person (e.g their list of email or phone contacts) is easily accessible / allows forwarding with comments etc. maybe the problem is that client app functionality has remained stagnant over decades?
also consider that a lot of that easy social media virality is actually part of the problem
Make RSS provides as much data as publisher/provider/broker want, enforce a common set of metadata when (re)sharing content so stats can made and funnels be monetized and add a mandatory opt-in et voilà.
What ?
What does this mean? To me, "mandatory" implies compulsory, while "opt-in" implies optional, i.e. not compulsory.
Without a way for authors/producers/adnetwork to extract values from the RSS format there's no incentives for them to use it. So give them what they want if we want.
Big words for what is just UTM added to the specs.
I am saying this tongue in cheek because I doubt people would opt-in if there's nothing for them in it. They opt-in for facebook and google because they get gmail/googlesearch/facebookfeed but with RSS they already have everything they want.
RSS is hard to monetize without putting it behind a paywall.
Chrome came, all other browsers lost, then finally Google killed Google Reader and we had nowhere to go. That's how I believe it happened.
What's still worse is that Chrome DOES NOT SUPPORT RSS natively.
That's a very generous understatement:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/10/18134541/google-plus-pri...
I tried opening this link in Chrome and Firefox, and it looks exactly the same in both.
Remember the little blurb in the header about how "this RSS feed doesn't provide its own styling so we've added our own"?
It seems to have gone away now too.
Chrome is the reason for many failures of the web experience. Support Firefox, it is equally as good IMO.
I'd like us to not see a day where we get "Only supported on Chrome" warnings.
Chrome just displays xml. Edge does the same. And Firefox, displays it as if it was mangled html, so no xml tags are shown.
Increasingly they look like a tired alibi for a dystopic status-quo
I stopped using RSS altogether because at some point, every RSS button I clicked started taking me to a page with XML markup. Previously, clicking the button would add the site to my feed. I didn't understand how RSS worked, so over time I just stopped clicking the button.
RSS being killed is a part of the commodification/privatization of knowledge. RSS simply gives users too much freedom.
"What if we thought of some of the most lucrative tech companies as essentially tax collectors, but privately-run (and thus not democratically accountable)? Economists call this rent-seeking, and what we’re seeing with a lot of tech companies is that their telos is little more than “rent-seeking as a service”. It’s basically baked in to their business model. Once you’ve fully developed the technology underpinning your service - be it coordinating food delivery, or processing payments, or displaying intrusive ads to people who just want to read a goddamn page on the Internet without being entreated to buy stuff - then your whole schtick then becomes collecting taxes on a whole ecosystem of economic activity."
That quote is absolutely right with the MO of a lot of tech companies these days. They don't actually innovate on tech itself---that's too risky and expensive. Instead, they innovate on business models to make themselves toll operators on everyday life.
Presumably it will probably last so long as advertising pays the bills for those for whom podcasts are a directly commercial endeavor. At which point they'll go behind paywalls and/or die.
So true. When you look at most of the unicorns most of their tech could have been done 10 or 20 years ago.
Considering their size the innovation output of giants like MS, Google or Apple is really low.
On one hand, freedom is sacred, especially freedom of speech, information, etc.
On the other hand, private property is sacred, whether it is physical or intellectual.
Yet intellectual property laws directly impede the free flow of speech/information. So what'll it be, private property or freedom?
"There is an emerging global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology and politics. We have called this orthodoxy `the Californian Ideology' in honour of the state where it originated. By naturalising and giving a technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures, the Californian Ideologues are able to assert that social and political debates about the future have now become meaningless.
The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism and is promulgated by magazines such as WIRED and MONDO 2000 and preached in the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and others. The new faith has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, 30-something capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats and even the President of the USA himself. As usual, Europeans have not been slow to copy the latest fashion from America. While a recent EU report recommended adopting the Californian free enterprise model to build the 'infobahn', cutting-edge artists and academics have been championing the 'post-human' philosophy developed by the West Coast's Extropian cult. With no obvious opponents, the global dominance of the Californian ideology appears to be complete."
As far as I understand, in a libertarian world the state would not enforce property rights but you would have to go a court and sue. I think the result would be the same as we have now. The party who can afford more lawyers or lobbyists will most likely win.
I'm not sure this is doable without government regulations.
I'm not sure it is doable with government regulations, as to do it properly would require politicians who're both clueful, and not captured by vested interests.
that doesn't need much regulation, just an elementary ethical / moral code
but you are right about the limited role of governments in resolving this. this is not a complex / high risk / long term project where you need them. actually just the people in this thread could probably solve this from a technical perspective.
the elephant in the room is the publishing industry. one could excuse an initial decade of them being dazed and confused, but its 2021 and they should wake up and smell the coffee.
But it does require them to be clueful.
Does anyone think that Joe Biden or Boris Johnson could give a coherent explanation of RSS (or any other piece of computing technology)?
Do you think that Joe Biden or Boris Johnson know enough about computer technology -- or any technology -- to employ staff who're competent? Do you think they can tell the difference between people who really know what they're talking about, and plausible-sounding bullshitters?
Particularly when the plausible-sounding bullshitters are executives from Big Tech companies who're trying to persuade a government to do something which is in the interests of Big Tech but not in the interest of the general public?
I don't, and I think many world leaders could easily be bamboozled by bullshit. Their thought processes would be something like: "This person is from Google/Microsoft/Facebook/Intel/etc, and that company provably knows a lot about technology. They know what they're talking about, and if I say they're wrong, I risk looking stupid (as I fully admit I don't understand the technology). So my best bet is to go along with them."
But as long as browser manufacturers don't really care, I don't see much chance of anything changing. Bookmarks haven't changed one bit in 25 years, despite offering so much potential for improvement. And it's not just Google's fault either, even Firefox removed that little bit of RSS integration that they had some years ago, when they really should have done the opposite and made it more useful and flexible.
While RSS replaced web sites (particularly aesthetically), they are less nefarious than social media companies and search companies whose only goal is to use the content of others to sell ads and their own products.
Both Google and FB are often blamed for the current state of things, but the ways in which they impact open standards such as RSS differs.
* Hard to keep users on your site - in an RSS reader you just open the next interesting article, most likely from another site. So it reduces page views.
* Harder to serve ads - RSS readers show the text of the articles, not all the other stuff on the page of the publisher
* Easier to steal content - other sites have an easy way to take your content and republish it on another website.
* Harder to track your users - most rss readers just show the content, not all the javascript nonsense required to track the user.
* Harder to monetize - for profit sites like to keep their readers behind a paywall, but how likely is it that you'll pay for a new site, if your RSS feed shows content from 20+ news sites? You can't pay for all of them, so you'll most likely pay for none.
If you want RSS to succeed, it needs to bring value to the publishers.
rss does bring value to publishers: viewers/listeners. that publishers want more than that is a separate issue.
publishers should support a lively rss ecosystem (actually evolve next-gen tech based on its principles) and draw revenue on the basis of visibility (and as you say, esteem and influence) this provides
people have always been paying for content. we have normalized the exception and abberation that is the "pay-with-your-private-data" business model
Podcasts basically proof the point: there’s nothing wrong with rss, and publishers will use it, if it is in their interest.
And podcasts are even more special, because their main purpose is to be consumed without any interface, often even without any internet-connection. So the whole setup is already against classical advertisement.
[1] SSB: An Identity-Centric Protocol for Subjective and Decentralized Applications, https://conferences.sigcomm.org/acm-icn/2019/proceedings/icn...
I think the idea is super interesting but it's not surprising that Google/Facebook and other ad networks made it less relevant.
RSS is trivial to monetize, there are other reasons why Google/FB killed it such has having to educate people first, or not wanting to promote a free standard that would have not allowed them to monopolize the market
A lot of sites have "solved" this nonissue by not including text in their feeds, instead only providing a link to the article on their site. A quick and easy way to make me unsubscribe immediately.
Illegal, immoral, but can't deny they're interesting projects!
Edit: For any over-eager MPAA agents who might be reading this: I'm not actually running these applications :)
[citation needed]
The internet was developed under the radar of a lot of powerful institutions -- both corporations and governments -- and gave unprecedented power and control to individuals.
The whole history of how the internet has developed from 2000 onwards is the powerful institutions attempting (mostly successfully) to castrate the internet and make it a place that doesn't threaten their power any more.
I want the old internet back, though I expect what I'm more likely to get is a jackboot stamping on a human face forever.
This is what adds a lot to the social feel of SM, everyone can see who follows who.
This social feel is part of the reason why non-tech folks use SM over traditional Blogs to post online. If the goal is to move people back on to the more traditional web, then it is necessary to create this social feel.
Now, the anonomity of RSS also has advantages, but similar to how the OP added "Webrings" to RSS, social proof could be added to RSS with another tool. So that all subscriptions can remain anonymous if wanted, while still providing the social feel.
Disqus is a little bit like that for comments. Disqus is also proof of concept for the OP that such "organic" additions to the standard blog concept.
Can we give this person another chance and maybe, in the spirit of the weekend, allow a contradictory opinion to appear in this discussion?
If I may, for a moment: filter bubbles are a useful but also dangerous thing, and if we allow ourselves to silence small irritances eventually, like with opiate dependency, we will find ourselves in the situation where the smallest pains are now grave and world-ending issues that stop everything and must be addressed/stopped immediately. I often disagree with the downvoted comments as well, however still upvote and vouch when they're rational yet contradictory.
Two sided discourse is one of the most important things to me, and in a way I think that we are losing the ability to disagree with each other, and that is a suboptimal outcome of our heightened ability to filter our data streams to weed out opinions we don't like. It's not enough for some people to disagree now, you must pursue the dissenter until you've destroyed their will to continue.
Surely it does not need to be spelled out how this can result in a chilling effect of outside thought and rational debate.
It doesn't, it just starts a pointless offtopic meta discussion. The forum guidelines explicitly ask you not to do that because it's boring. The votes, on average, tend to sort themselves out without such 'interventions'.
I wonder if it may be the case that these rules have good reason to exist, and if so, then the discussion you are looking for seems to have happened at least once before, a long time ago.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Is it not possible that the "forum guidelines" are wrong?
Also, you should be required to give an actual reason other than "I disagree".
I know that's not what "the rules" say. "The rules" are wrong.
But that doesn't mean I want to shut him or her up.
It's also what's leveraged to keep users consuming content and to return for more.
You see who follows who, who has many followers that might be worth following, etc etc... the closest the web had to that was the visitor counter? Or like you said the comments box like Disqus?
As an anecdote:
Many years ago I used to visit a "technews site" that used spread theories/inside info about the tech industry (mostly just copied from forums in the form of "leaks"), very mediocre with no basis for 80% of the content, and the whole thing about it was fanboyism around AMD vs NVIDIA vs INTEL and PC vs CONSOLES, all the engagement happened in Disqus comments - spreading memes, making fun of eachother, insults, etc.
I stopped visiting that site because it was trash, sometimes they got things right though. A few weeks ago I was watching some game trailer, and in the part of the Tech Reviewers quotes, there they were - WCCFTech! "I thought, wow, how the hell did they get to be side by side with the big boys?" And I knew the answer, fanboyism + FUD and a comments section to let people vent. Good for them.
- When you upvote an item, you connect stronger to users that also posted that item and to RSS feeds that posted this. For example, if you upvote "Post 43: Intentionally Making Close Friends — Neel Nanda"(https://linklonk.com/item/827619236936941568) then you will get connected to 6 users that upvoted that article and the RSS feed https://www.neelnanda.io/blog?format=rss
- The recommendation algorithm shows you other items upvoted by users and feeds you are connected to.
- At the top of you recommendations you see content from users and feeds that you are most strongly connected to (ie, those who have posted more useful content for you).
With this mechanism you discover users and feeds that post great content just by rating content, without having to know the users personally. Yet, when you see your recommendations you know that they are coming not from random people, but from people who found useful for you content before. I think, that is a more meaningful version of social proof than the aggregate counts of likes in the traditional social media.
You are right, to keep track of user to user connections is more expensive than only to keep track of the number of likes each item has received (Reddit).
But ultimately someone has to track how trustworthy each of the users is to every other user.
Either every user has to track it for themselves in their head. Or we can try to offload some of that work to the computer. LinkLonk is an experiment to do just that. So yes, this computation is expensive, but it is also the main value proposition.
Benefits of RSS:
+ Removing people who only read and discuss titles.
+ Removing reactionary first comments.
+ Removing posts that try to engage.
+ Removing people who come clicking trough Fb and Twitter.
Why does everyone overlook this?
Sites with feeds can link to them in their metadata using <link rel="alternate" href="...">. This would cause a subscribe button (usually the orange RSS logo) to light up in the user's browser. Clicking it would automatically submit the URL to the user's preferred feed reader (or if there were multiple linked feeds, let the user choose one).
the un-user-configurable and un-opt-out-able straightjacketed sorting algorithms in these walled gardens are all about getting users 'hooked' and creating FOMO
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5005
You best bet is subscribing to a server hosted RSS client like Feedbin which being always on can check more often, can subscribe via Websub/Pubsubhubub or tailors their schedules for refetching via caching, ttl or analysing the posting schedule.
Communities have to be centralized - or at least appear so. Human beings simply are shit at cooperating with people outside of their in-group. An in-group requires a close-knit simple structure identifying with one or more ideas or people. People need to put their faith in centralization: central leadership, central consensus, a place, a thing, an idea. If you tell people "we're going to build a community of loosely-knit people and groups", they will not have much faith in the idea and the community will be weak. As much as you like the idea of decentralization, you have to hide the idea of it from the users, and simultaneously provide things to make them feel closer and directly connected.
Twitter incentivises this spontaneity, but I do think there should be some middle ground here.
The comment a bit further up about content farm bots leveraging rss makes me a little wary
True super talents over there at Firefox.
I find it useful for simple filtering, but of course it being email you can also filter at the receiving side, as well as the sending side.
I haven't found a good Android based RSS reader that does that, though I haven't really looked.
https://github.com/adamsanderson/brook
I could imagine adding a collector feed or folder that just watches for keywords in the title or perhaps content.
Anyways, if you have an interest or would just like to explore what that might look like, open an issue. It's mostly feature complete for me, but I poke at it every now and then.
* No pagination, and in practice it's very inconsistent how many recent posts are included. This makes the feeds only useful for new things, not as an archive.
* I don't actually want the full post content in the main feed, a description for every item would suffice. For a blog like WaitButWhy, the RSS XML is huge.
For your second gripe, perhaps a separate "excerpts" feed would do it. I know some podcasters publish the same content over multiple feeds for this kind of customization.
That being said, for some reason that escapes me, some news sites don't make it easy to see a list of articles at all (looking at you, https://cbc.ca/news). And when writing this comment, I see that if you scroll down far enough you can see more articles in this really annoying tile format (the app is better but I hate downloading a ~300 MB app when a <10 MB RSS reader is all I really want).
TL;DR: somehow it isn't just RSS but even somewhat publicly funded news sources seem to prey with the "get you stuck in an endless cycle of scrolling while you're trying to find the content you want" trap.
RSS is such an underrated technology. It sure could use an update such creating a push protocol instead of pulling the world and be more dynamic with a standardized basic content selection API (something like querystring?last_updated=10&tags=subject1;subject2).
And the honesty of the feed is so precious. I want to be able to build my own algorithm. Too bad good RSS clients aren't around and a lot of platforms terminated their RSS feeds.
1) I don't think doesn't recognise relative paths in the tag, which HN uses and is entirely valid, e.g.:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="rss">
3) ...and once you fix those problems you will likely get a 503 for requesting the feed too often during testing :)
[Edit: and no, I'm not _just_ complaining; expect some pull requests over the next few days.]
Then they slowly faded away from mainstream adoption. Once Mail.app removed RSS, it seems like RSS were no longer part of my life lol
These days, I love Twitter and Reddit, not sure I'd be able to go back to RSS.
I really appreciate the transparent nature of RSS, but so long as Twitter has a "Latest" feed - a feed that lists all tweets in chronological order, I'm good.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor+linux+programming.r...
(Or you could add each to your RSS reader individually)
Also I wish that https://apnews.com/ had an RSS feed (I know that you can create a feed from it using 3rd party services).
I like it very much.
One thing I'd say to content creators, is it is so simple to implement and only takes one click to find and keep a consumer of that content for life. Without it, someone has to bookmark you, remember you, etc.
Kudos to Wordpress for keeping the dream alive.
These days, if you poll a "RSS" feed do you sometimes get an Atom feed? You don't see many explicit references to Atom anymore...
And with OPML's ability of 'inclusion' (to any remote tree or branch), it makes creation, curation and 'harvesting' the fruit, a joy.
The feed should also start empty and only show things I tell it to.
I personnally use fraidycat (https://fraidyc.at/), a slightly different "news" reader. Contrary to all other readers it doesn't give you an infinite flow of all posts, but rather a reverse chronological list of who has updates. It's the same paradigm as most IM apps, but instead of people it's sources and instead of messages it's posts.
Fraidycat can parse a lot of sources and all the ones I care about (including youtube channels, twitch channels, facebook public pages) are properly handled
The big things you can get into RSS-land; it's worse with smaller stuff like some random artists tour page.
It was supposed to stream full texts.
[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/
Since then I've used Feeder, it's similar (also free, no ads, can scrape full articles) but is missing a few things that I liked about Flym. It was easy to export my list of feeds (OMPL file, I think) and import into Feeder: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsense...
I also like Feeder for Android, free, no ads, scrapes full articles in a wonderful way: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsense...
Bonus: If anyone uses it, you'll increase the global user base by several percent.
For non written content RSS is still huge (it's how podcasts work https://podcasters.apple.com/support/823-podcast-requirement...). Incidentally there are some very good podcast clients, and some treat an RSS feed as podcast with a missing media download/stream.
The problem isn’t that these things became impossible, the “problem” for ad companies is they couldn’t do it in their preferred obnoxious, overdone, and intrusive style.
* RSS is awesome
* OP wrote an "RSS Discovery Engine"[1] that
"[...]works by taking the URL to a blog, or any site with an RSS feed, and examining all the posts in the blog’s RSS feed for links to other sites. When a link to another site is found, it’s inspected to see if it also has an RSS feed. If the new site has an RSS feed, then it’s added to the results list.[...]"
It frustrated me enough to look at ways I could support RSS and introduce a new means of discovery, but as it turns out, RSS is a finished spec and the authors requested that any changes to the spec happen under a new protocol and a new name. I ended up creating a new feed spec I've been cobbling together that supports better discovery. Check it out, https://readme.loud.so/
the TL;DR is that feeds can be treated as a show feed with a singular show, or as a network feed with multiple shows, allowing for a feed player consuming the new feed to provide UI elements that let a user select which of the network's shows they'd like to subscribe to, as well as a means to prompt the user when a new show is added to the network feed.
Also big shouts out to the podcast2.0 community who has been very welcoming along the way, they are doing great things within the confines of RSS as it stands.
https://medium.com/@everywheretrip/an-introduction-to-podcas...
This is, indeed, fascinating. It's cool that they have a micro-payment idea with Bitcoin lighting network.