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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

Most people don’t use RSS because most people don’t prefer to consume the web that way nor that sort of content. They are scrolling social media and aggregators, not pruning their long form content subscriptions.

Even in the heyday of RSS how many of us just had an overgrown 10000+ unread RSS reader that we simply stopped using?

Promoting RSS seems backwards to me because that ship has sailed. Like promoting IRC when people have chosen solutions like Discord and then refusing to acknowledge why people prefer Discord. RSS (and IRC) didn’t just fall out of favor because people refuse to see how amazing it is nor is it just because of ads.

The answer to the post-RSS world is something more like a better, polished Fraidycat that can track content on any website. We can do better than RSS: a solution that doesn’t rely on everyone implementing it.

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Thanks for referencing https://fraidyc.at/ - I haven't heard about it before.

I agree that the way how RSS clients were designed 10 years ago wouldn't work well today, but that is an a problem with architecture and UX design of rss client. I don't think that it has anything to do with the RSS or ATOM XML data structure standard.

Having machine readable data in open format is useful so that anyone can use it, and create a it's own solution without spending too much time on interpreting the data. While with unstructured, javascript heavy sites one would need to build it's own little search engine to be able to process it and desing/train it's solution for reasonable information extraction, which increases barriers to entry.

The converse is equally true: most people don’t use RSS because the largest content platforms prefer to deliver monetizable algorithmic suggestions.

True, there is no point in accumulating feeds. News sites are the worst when it comes to this, personal blogs don't grow that fast.

Agreed. The world is moving past static text content as a medium, which is what RSS/IRC are built for. I want more rich video/media oriented content like what the New York Times is producing, which takes advantage of user interactivity and new Javascript APIs. RSS isn't going to make that happen for me.

Most of NY times content is non interactive. The reason why they don't want RSS isn't because RSS sucks, it's because everyone is trying increase user retention time in their apps to make shareholders happy.

All paranoid conspiracizing aside, the NYT has a metric fuckton of different RSS feeds that all work perfectly fine. RSS is primarily a notification system and only secondarily a content-delivery one.

Though this is one reason why we can do better than RSS: the implementer (or HN commenter) isn’t the one that should get to decide what I primarily or secondarily use my “feed reader” for. In this case, my local post-RSS feed reader is absolutely a way for me to store content for consumption on my own time, not just a notification service.

You’re right about RSS. I just see a better solution for this idea of a content-delivery system being one implemented as a smart client that can handle all websites rather than a dumb client that hopes every website in 2022 implements RSS. That way there’s no “you’re just using it wrong.” ;)

I don't care what you use it for. You can use SMS messages primarily to make a phone stuffed in your underwear keep vibrating, but if you want to complain that it's an inconvenient teledildonics protocol and client, that's on you.

Though, if you think you can code up a "smart client" that doesn't use puny RSS, but can "handle all websites" and will work better at tracking and delivering content to you than RSS does on zillions of websites (including new ones), you open up your editor and get at it, then. Have fun.

RSS is built for notification. You can get notifications of new rich-text content, videos, whatever. But notifications when you choose to get them, rather than push notifications. (If I got a push notification to my phone for every RSS article I read I'd go nuts.)

This is a very important part a lot of people miss, I think.

Some people get obsessed with trying to read everything through RSS and never going to a web page. I've never understood that.

I find invoking the NYT especially funny because they have MANY RSS feeds, letting you filter by sections.

That's because a lot of us like to read offline and via e-ink. It's replaced a newspaper for many folks who want to just relax and somewhat unplug for a bit.

You can get the NYT literally delivered to your door in completely offline form. I used to pick up a copy to read during lunch at work, back before smartphones.

The Sunday NYT is a bit of a challenge, mind you.

The news I'm interested in doesn't come in a newspaper though. Too niche.

I'd point to something like Feedbin's ability to pull remote content from the subscribed site, then. No idea how well it works on something with an e-ink display, though. You might look whether anyone's made a stand-alone RSS client aimed at offline reading that has that ability.

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