Hacker News Reader

Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

Remember when every Facebook page and profile had an RSS feed? And FB messenger was XMPP compatible so you could use it with bitlbee and your favourite IRC client. And you could email people @facebook.com and it would show up in their messages.

Google gets all the “credit” for killing RSS, but there’s plenty of dismay to be spread around!

View on HN

It is sad, but some good news for anyone considering trying RSS:

* 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

I unsubscribed from Reuters’ feeds a couple of years ago but it seems they still provide some feeds: https://www.reutersagency.com/en/reutersbest/reuters-best-rs...

I had no idea this existed. It looks like it's "reutersagency.com", which may be different from reuters.com?

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 downgrade

I hadn't come across this before but as best I can tell, it seems to be an initiative to combine country or region-specific Reuters sites into one global site. See https://www.reutersagency.com/en/coverage/changes-to-your-re...

The 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!

A feature I would love RSS readers to adopt is specific behaviors for high volume feeds with time sensitive content. I’d love to subscribe to a bunch of feeds that I can peek in on to get a “what is in the news right now?” snapshot that doesn’t populate an inbox or give me an unread counter.

Not sure if that is what you are looking for, but I developed nooshub.com for that reason. It has the functionality to group similar articles, and the stories you don‘t wanna miss usually produce large groups that are then presented as top news. There is also a „in a nutshell“ page for top news from all feeds and a „gems“ page for low frequency content that otherwise can get buried. Maybe it is what you are looking for and works for you, it takes a little bit to setup but once it‘s done it is like checking Twitter…

YouTube unfortunately removed the ability to export subscriptions to OPML last year [1], probably as part of their migration to the Polymer user interface. It is still possible to individually subscribe to channel RSS feeds though [1].

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/jqlks2/where_did_o...

It's possible to still get the channel list via Google Takeout.

Does HN have an RSS feed for stories with more than 50/100/150 upvotes? As of today I turn a Twitter feed that does the equivalent into an RSS feed.

I believe this is how the main RSS news.ycombinator.com/rss works. You should only get the "frontpage".

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 )?

I am using https://hnrss.org/frontpage?points=200&comments=200, not sure exactly what it does but it works for me to not miss out on anything (I think)

HN proper doesn't, but I run hnrss.org which can do this:

https://hnrss.org/newest?points=50 (100 and 150 also supported)

> all reddit subreddits can be turned into an rss feed by adding ".rss" after the URL, e.g. https://reddit.com/r/news/.rss

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?

Their wiki uses the slash: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss

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

Do you have to add ".rss" to both subreddit names? (I assume not) Is it more likely that their parser could break some day with or without the slash? RSS is fringe enough, so removing the slash is probably even more fringe.

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=share

Link to Reddit RSS wiki for more information: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss

That's a really sad development. If companies like Google or Facebook had been as big in the 90s I bet we wouldn't have E-mail but a set of proprietary, incompatible E-mail like services.

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.

another good example of this is Google's influence in regards to web standards.

things like http2/3 and quic for one. and their influence on the browser market aswell.

It's now extending into the very infrastructure of software development with kubernetes.

it's just Google externalizing their training costs.

We had a set of proprietary incompatible email-like services.

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?

All from at least 2.5/3.0 on was username@aol.com for email. They were also not good at security, as you could spoof emails coming from any domain if you used their smtp servers directly - but they had regular email addresses. I never used compuserve or prodigy, however ICQ used numerical user IDs.

The original email, from the 70's was a standardization of the set of proprietary, incompatible email-like services people had at the time.

anyone else ever have a UUCP bang-path email address? good times.

It's in the nature of capitalism to optimize and eat whatever resource is available to promote growth, companies are the result of this process and so is the forementioned EEE strategy. Noncompliance to said strategies is how you keep the sharks uninterested.

This means don't use Facebook, don't promote Facebook, don't use Facebook logins in your app, etc.

Well, I remember. That was when the word « standards » meant something.

Mostly it was the usual: large corporations use standards to gain a foothold when they're minor players, then either drop or proprietarily extend said standards to they can close it up when they get a dominant position.

Don't forget that you need to use OAuth for everything so even if they have a simple API, they can shut your whole app's access down at any time, not just individual users.

I was in school back then and had recently discovered email spoofing and thought of trying it with facebook email addresses and it would send the email message as messenger message from spoofed to the spoofee without it being visible on the spoofed's chat. It led to so many shenanigans over the holidays that winter.

It's all about platform lockin. Although RSS sorta lives on at facebook. You can go to "public" groups and get an RSS feed. Anything that requires a login though is inaccessible to RSS for privacy reasons(?) .

Totally!

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!

I'll give them one pinch of excuse, they probably thought they could design a better system. Start all new, from scratch, no more rss/mail/irc... It failed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com