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Comment by ferdowsi | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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