Gripes with RSS after one week | Hacker News Reader

Gripes with RSS after one week

blog.jez.io

67 pointsjez95 comments

The firehose issue is definitely a problem with RSS, especially if all you've ever experienced is algorithmic social media feeds. It's solveable, but it does require either a very specific approach (I quickly scan my unreads in Feedbin/Reeder, save whatever I want to read in depth, and then browse saved items later), or a reasonably large suite of rules applied to your feed (takes a long time to build, takes even longer to refine, and you will find yourself perpetually tuning them), or something like Feedly's AI assistant (but then you're still outsourcing your feed to someone else's algorithm, and avoiding that is supposed to be the point of RSS).

On some level, "I want to/am able to wade through the firehose" is a pre-req for RSS. I'm sure that's part of what limited the appeal even in the fabled golden age of Google Reader. Also, like most things, it's better if you pay for it. I've paid for two versions of Reeder now (about $15 total, I believe) and I pay Feedbin $50/year to act as my backend + web interface. The overall experience is better than any of the other modern RSS apps I've tried, and better than Reader was way back when.

Isn't that a client issue, not an RSS issue per se? Accept a lot and have some rules to filter it? That's kinda what I like about RSS...I have the power to decide what ends up in my feeds, not what some algorithm decides I should see.

Not really; definitionally an RSS feed is just a big list of everything a site publishes. Sure, the rules-based approach will work, and I assume anyone who's been using RSS for a while has built up a set of filter rules that amount to a personal algorithm for their feed. But it's a big initial investment in time and effort to set those rules up. If you subscribe to a bunch of personal blogs, you're fine. But if you sign up for, say, the NYT, the WSJ, and Bloomberg (not a crazy list) the day you set up an account on Feedbin, you'll have 200+ items by the end of the first day. Are you 100% sure you already knew every rule you want/need to filter those items? If not, are you a fast enough reader or willing to just mark as read and ignore stuff? I think a lot of people aren't, and social media has accustomed people to not thinking about stuff like this.

It is absolutely a client issue. For a while (before their API limits became an issue), I dealt with Twitter with a Bayesian network, and it took very little training to massively improve the experience.

In order for RSS to be useful, I think it needs to stay an "underground" tech. It used to be very popular, with everyone promoting their feeds, lots of clients, and lots of interested users. The problem with it, as you found out, was there's a lot of stuff in those feeds you're not interested in. And publishers were all too happy to put crap in their feeds in the hope that it might get a click.

I think what really put an end to RSS was sites like Digg.com (not sure if they were the first, but they're the first I remember), where people would submit stories and users would vote on whether they were good or not. Aggregators existed before, like Slashdot.org, but were curated by editors. Reddit.com and others followed, and RSS feeds became much and much less popular. I kinda view the result of the "social aggregators" as an RSS feed with the content ranked.

There's a disincentive to publishing an RSS feed, as the content creators would much rather you visit their home page so they can serve you some ads. And with people visiting their home page, they're more incentivized to keep the crap headlines to a tolerable level. Of course the downside of RSS not being mainstream anymore is that smaller/independent publishers that don't make money on clicks either don't know it exists, or don't think the effort is worthwhile.

This article seems to imply that RSS users need to manually locate the RSS feeds. In all the RSS clients I've used, I just add the site by the main URL and it automatically finds the RSS feed if there is one, and this almost always works.

Agree. I use NetNewsWire and always paste in the main URL. Hunting down the rss link is not a thing.

Two things happened in my first week:

- Using the iOS Safari share button to “Open in NetNewsWire” would silently fail if the blog didn’t have a feed. I went looking for my feeds later and they were missing. I tried a few more times before realizing, “oh, there’s just no feed.”

- Some sites I found had multiple feed links (one per kind of post: long post, short fragments, photo posts). NetNewsWire would always pick the first link in the page, disregarding all others, and not telling me that the page had multiple.

We can say “discovery is not a problem” but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask for it to be better. Half the value proposition of sites like Substack is making it dead simple for readers to understand how they can subscribe.

As someone who had never used RSS before and didn’t know how to expect RSS to work, it was the problem that grated me the most. If discovery isn’t seamless, only the people determined to use RSS will stick with it after their friends pester them to try it out.

I’ve used rss for a lot of years. But I’m pretty lazy and not particular about it. If only a snippet is contained in the feed item, I just click into the website.

Side note: I kind of wish these “rss is back” posts that were referenced in this article contained “hey here’s my rss subscription list.” Because I’d like to learn about new cool stuff to subscribe to.

Ditto, that’s what Feedly does as well

Additionally, the social features the OP mentions are helpful in determining which RSS feed is the right one since some sites have multiple.

This is what Feedbin does too.

I was going to say that Firefox does show when pages have an RSS feed present, but then I found out it's actually a long-forgotten extension I have installed: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/?ut...

Firefox used to have that functionality built in, but they removed it in late 2018

One of Firefox's most annoying interface changes,to me at least. I used this thing all the time. Maybe there was more to it (I'm sure I could dig up the Bugzilla) but I used this feature all the time & can't imagine it was a huge maintenance burden.

There was also an option to add an RSS feed as a live-updating bookmarks folder, but clicking on the icon just rendered the XML in a human-readable form, IIRC?

That's the way it worked. It updated when you expanded the folder. We used to include a live bookmark to the PortableApps.com RSS feed in Firefox Portable.

The first mistake is expecting to fill your feed with content a la social media (reddit, whatever).

I treat RSS like I would treat buying a newspaper. I know I'm not always going to get the best articles. I only put stuff on there that I would actually look at each morning (not always read, but actually look). Then I skim the headlines for things I want to read, read them, and then put my "newspaper" away. If I find a few articles that are really good, I star them (save) for reading later. Unstar when done.

In order for this to work, you need to be very aggressive with what goes in your RSS feed list. I also use RSS to keep track of things that don't post very often- but I'm going to forget to visit their site on a "regular" basis (think; once a month, once every 2 weeks).

Social media feeds aren't going to work, because that's always going to be a firehose.

Examples of feeds I have in my RSS:

- bbc global news (my daily snapshot of world happenings)

- local news in English (i'm an expat)

- wikipedia featured articles (once a day)

- a few blogs of related interests that I don't often visit

That's pretty much it. Each morning, I get about 50-75 articles in my feed. I skim and read maybe 10-15 relevant ones and I am done for the day.

I like Inoreader[0]. The web app is plenty snappy for me, and supports basic vim nav keys, which is a lovely plus. The free plan's 150 feeds are sufficient for my use case. The mobile app also performs well. Mostly it just gets out of my way, which is all I really want.

[0] https://www.inoreader.com

100% this. Inoreader is the aggregator I wanted to make for myself, but never did. It's got all the features I ever wanted. Been a paying customer for years now. They can be a bit slow on fixing bugs or cleaning things up (duplicates in search results, for example), but I love that it lets you enter your own CSS fixes. In general, it's a great example of a boutique web service that we all should admire and support.

+1 from me too. Inoreader also supports Twitter which tames an out of control media simply and plainly.

btw, https://vimium.github.io/ would let u use vim navigation on any web page

And Tridactyl as well for Firefox, not to mention qutebrowser, from which I write this very reply.

The annoying thing with such solutions for webapps is when there is a more fluent implementation of navigation in the context of the application. With j/k bound to normal scrolling, I then have to resort to link-hinting to navigate among articles in the feed. With app-native navigation, these can jump among articles.

A good vim-binding experience is not just j/k for scrolling up and down (:

+1 for Inoreader. Been using it for a long while now

>Funnily enough, the old.reddit.com view does have a <link> to the RSS feed.

Maybe that's not a coincidence! Aaron Swartz, one of the co-founders of Reddit, was also one of the developers of RSS. Most people already know his story, but for those who don't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

You can also tack ".json" to the end of most Reddit URLs to get it in JSON format which is much easier to work with when scraping content. It's hardly documented anywhere online as well but interesting that they offer both.

This is terrific, thank you!

As a recent returnee to the world of RSS feeds, I’ve been enjoying the miniflux client [1] self hosted with docker-compose. Fast, cross-platform, not fancy.

[1] https://miniflux.app/

I have been using osmo feed [0]. Rather than self hosting, it uses GitHub actions. I have my own usename.github.io/to-read linked to it, to access it from anywhere. So far I have liked this approach.

[0] https://github.com/osmoscraft/osmosfeed

Why do you need to host something in order to consume RSS?

You don't need to. But if you want to sync read state and favorites across devices, it's a good way. I self-host FreshRSS for this, works wonderfully.

Google Reader gives a good example of why one may want to host an RSS reader on their own.

1. Synced feeds, read/unread status, and consistent UI across all devices

2. Hosted feed reader for friends and family.

The author mentions the friction they imagine their friends or family would have using RSS feeds, so hosting the reader for them can reduce that friction and bootstrap cost (everyone already has a browser). Then they could always export their feeds and move to a different solution later.

This is an odd sentiment that I don’t have a counter argument for other than the beautiful UI of the app shown is worth hosting alone.

Welcome to the RSS club. Many issues you have noticed are a result of social media. Sites removed RSS after they wanted to push you to Facebook/other.

You may need RSS-bridge (GitHub) as middleware.

I use Yet Another RSS Reader (yarr, also on GitHub), which has very good mobile browser support.

I self host both in my home K8s cluster behind GitHub auth.

If you run your own NextCloud instance I highly recommend the News app as an RSS aggregator and the accompanying mobile app which I use regularly.

With regards content I have a few feeds I read everything in, and a lot I just browse through. The read everything list varies but always includes ArsTechnica.

Previously I used Nextcloud News and enjoyed it, but recent versions require 64-bit PHP [1], which I didn’t have on the Raspberry Pi. Never did figure out why this requirement was imposed just for the News app.

[1] https://github.com/nextcloud/news/issues/1423

Discovery: this has never been an issue for me. I simply assume that anything worthwhile has a feed, and add the base URL to my reader. Almost always tends to be true.

Clients: there are a lot. OP uses some iOS exclusive and the Instagram reader (I always found it the worst of all the post-greader ones, but it seems to appeal to IG and Pinterest people), self hosting is my favorite way.

I use Newsblur as my aggregator and it solves a few of the gripes. Adding feeds is as simple as pasting the url into the add field. Their web app is pretty good IMO as well as their native iOS app. I prefer using Unread on my iPhone to read my feed and am experimenting with NNW on the Mac but will probably keep using the web app.

I remember the moment when I added huggingface blog feed to my reader and realized that this feed has no content in it and links are specified with guid tag. Outside of tech blogs its very common nowadays to stumble upon malformed atom/rss feeds in the wild, some feel unmaintained or abandoned.

it's a very basic feature for modern RSS readers to detect this and fetch the full article. it's a shame that so many RSS programs treat their inputs as good enough for users.

i'll generalize my japanese reading assistant software for general RSS use soon as a result of pervasive quality problems like this. not to mention abhorrent disrespect for user privacy in most cloud software.

I use the Feedbro browser extension. It continuously fetches feeds in the background. The UI is blazingly fast (think HTML version of Gmail). It automatically marks viewed entries. It’s very configurable. It can find feeds on the current page. I love it. Much better than Feedly.

To some extent I agree with the article... (apart from the finding the feed link in the page, as most RSS readers do this automatically)

Where I do have issues is why a lot of news, blogs and article sites fail to actually use them, or even use them in a inconsistent manner. I've rolled my own feed reader ( https://dragonc.droppages.com/ - dedicated to Boardgames) because no reader has actually managed to lay things out as I wanted. But in making my own I found there is so much inconsistency in how it's implemented. Well yes, there is a standard but it seems that a lot of vendors don't even bother handling things because RSS just isn't accepted in general use. Some sites don't even bother putting the title of their site in their feed.

Everybody rolls their own RSS feeds these days. yes, some Blog style sites have it automatically as a by-product of the platform. Yet other news sites just don't even bother assuming that you'll be reading their site anyway. And for those, you have to do some creative grep/sed/awk processing to get out the interesting articles for your feed reader.

One thing I find cool is that Stackoverflow has feeds for every user. There are stackoverflow users which always post quality insightful answers and i subscribe to their feeds.

I’ve found that consuming Web content via RSS encourages more responsible use. The sweet spot between the fire hose and the desert is your own discretion. I couldn’t imagine subscribing to a feed like a news outlet that feels compelled to publish stories on every single event. I would however, subscribe to an individual’s feed, who aggregates news and other commentary on specific or a few related topics to compliment blog subscriptions and what not. The likes of John Gruber and Michael Tsai and Cory Doctorow seem to be among the few online who do this.

For example, I would subscribe to a heavily curated Linkhut (https://ln.ht) feed or something like someone’s micro.blog page that doesn’t consist of “status updates” a la Twitter/Mastodon.

In writing this, I’ve come to the realization that while I used to hate Twitter threads when they first became a thing…I still dislike the idea of them…but there is something worthwhile about fragmented, short-form streams of commentary that can point to larger bodies of work: concept maps, articles, Web books, PDFs etc.

Two uses for RSS feeds in conjunction with invidious and nitter:

1. You can subscribe to YouTube channels via an invidious instance without ever logging into google.

2. You can subscribe to anyone's twitter feed via a nitter instance without ever logging into twitter.

https://invidious.io/

https://nitter.net/

Nice writeup. I share a lot of these gripes, as someone who's also on the publishing side: it continues to surprise me how many people actually do read my blog via RSS (based on statistics passed back through user agents), given how poor the discovery and client experience is.

How are you tracking RSS reads? HTTP logs?

Yep, HTTP logs: most standalone RSS clients have a distinct user agent, and most of the web-based ones send a UA containing the total subscriber count.

For example, here's a log from today:

    8.29.198.27 - - [01/Jan/2023:00:04:42 -0500] "GET /feed.xml HTTP/1.1" 304 0 "-" "Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html; 99 subscribers; like FeedFetcher-Google)"

Interestingly, a few of the big ones (Feedly, Feedbin) have multiple subscriber counts for me. I'm not sure why that is.

So the author tried RSS for a week and wrote a blog full of complaint. I've been using RSS for several years or over a decade, my first RSS Reader was Thunderbird. I have only very small complains but not backbreaking like the ones experienced by the author.

Complaints are subjective. I’ve known people live years with their television on the wrong aspect ratio but don’t complain.

The firehose is really something you have to get used to and I’ll admit finding the right combination of tools to meet your needs can take a bit of trail and error.

I can about my workflow here: https://www.liamjbennett.me/posts/2022-12-23-workflow-2023/

I moved away from Feedly to Readwise Reader (https://readwise.io/read ) recently because not only does it help with the firehose it’s also pretty good at recommending other sites to follow.

I like to extracts URLs with this userscript: https://cable.ayra.ch/tampermonkey/view.php?script=rss_extra...

I am pretty sure all of his problems would be fixed with Feedbin, which offers a great in-browser interface, shows all the feeds on the page when adding a URL, and helps with the firehose issue with filters.

I also prefer Reeder to a large degree over NNW myself.

The client I use is Thunderbird and it works well. It's simple and just the same as going through my email. I can create saved searches and even group emails and RSS feeds (e.g. lwn feed and a mailing list) into the same inbox.

What if Firefox picked up the proverbial RSS feed torch and took it to the next level?

Well four years ago, they removed support for RSS, so less next level, and more um... a similar level than before.

Maybe a couple git reverts/rebases away from bringing it back? :)

Pocket is explicitly[1] their replacement for RSS/Atom features, and a Mozilla monetization vector, so: good luck!

1: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacement...

If they would just add the feed detection feature and add a link to subscribe in my RSS reader I would be very happy.

I don't know if I want them actually investing in their own reader. It seems unlikely to add much over the current landscape and just drain resources.

I wrote about this exact thing. If they gave me a Google Reader-esque product as part of their subscription service for VPN etc., it would get me to subscribe.

I agree. Their email client, Thunderbird, is an amazing open source product. They definitely have the background on how to build a top notch standalone client.

Thunderbird already has an offline Atom/RSS reader, and plugins that sync state with online RSS services like Feedly, so all the pieces are there.

Sorry, too busy peddling meaningless features like "Colonways" and advertising for Disney.

Firefox/Mozilla seem to have the reverse-Midas touch with anything they're involved with these days. No thanks.

The problem with feed discovery is very, very real. Lots and lots of feeds exist that don't have link tags. I wrote Scott's Feed Finder to probe for them. Yes I'm biased but its a very solid feed discovery tool:

https://scottsfeedfinder.com/

And don't even get me started on ranting about podcasts that don't clearly label their feed.

It isn't about RSS readers and article notifications, it's about all the other things being built on top of RSS like podcasting 2.0. All of these apps and their new features depend on RSS; https://podcastindex.org/apps

Some discussion; https://podcasting20.substack.com

I used Yahoo! Pipes to help manage the firehouse part of RSS. I filtered on keywords, used it manage duplicates across feeds and a few other things. It would be great to have that kind of functionality in a reader.

Bookmarked https://pipes.digital/ but haven’t yet played with it.

Edit: fixed link

Please don't hesitate to let me know whether pipes.digital worked for you!

I would encourage anyone curious to look into the beta for Readwise’s new RSS/RIL service, appropriately just called Reader.

I wish more people would just use freshrss. It is dead simple to setup with docker and it can run on the 10.88 a year racknerd blackfriday vps no problem. The pwa is quite decent and the webpage is great. Out your atuff in directories and set reasonable auto delete times so you dont end up with 20k unread items and life is good.

My main complaint is that feeds then to just be the first sentence or two. So you still end up opening a browser and getting bombarded with popups and cookie banners and what not.

Very tempted to try & combine this with something like FF reader mode and build a scraping & filtering layer inbetween that sends the full text to the reader.

This is definitely annoying. I understand why larger publishers do it, but it drives me crazy when more independent writers/publishers do it.

It's enough of a problem that some RSS reader services have a feature that does exactly what you describe re: fetching the full article contents. Unread on iOS does this, as does Feedbin I believe, although you'll only find it on paid services/plans because of the ongoing costs associated with powering it.

There are RSS readers like Tiny Tiny RSS [1] which are able to do exactly that (in this case using a PHP port of Mozilla's library [2]). Does not work in 100% of cases but is a really useful thing.

[1] https://tt-rss.org/

[2] https://github.com/fivefilters/readability.php

Yeah heard about that feature in ttrss. Last I looked into it I gave it a miss based on Reddit having a strong consensus that the dev is ahem unpleasant [0]

Doesn’t make the software bad I guess but I try to avoid drama like that where feasible

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/v3xtz7/comment/...

The app I use on Mac/iOS, News Explorer, will scrape the article for me and is quite often successful.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/news-explorer/id1032668306

cloudflare anti-scraping intensifies...

Should be ok from a residential IP, no?

The best RSS reader I used was back in 2006 I think it was and it was an Outlook plugin. It retrieved RSS feeds and displayed them as emails so ALL of the Outlook functionality (filters, read/unread, search) could be used. It was awesome. It also handled all RSS formats.

Reeder does the discovery for me. If I have a URL I can drop it into the app and it'll find all the RSS feeds (main, comments etc). There's also a browser extension to add straight from there, and it'll add your Read Later list, too, I think as a feed of its own.

http://RSS.app helps to generate feeds almost from any website even if it doesn't have native one.

Also, soon there are will be feature to send "news alerts" right to Slack, Telegram, Discord.

So it solves some problems.

You can try the RSS reader made by me: https://airss.roastidio.us web only, no login, open source. I believe it addresses some of the pain points you cited.

Since I already use Outlook at work as my mail client I read RSS in there, surprisingly useful as lightweight reader, mostly without images like I prefer it. Doesn't have any discovery though.

> A page can declare an RSS feed using a <link> tag in the <head> something like this:

> ...

> But browsers won’t surface that to you.

Do they not? I thought FF put an icon in the address bar.

It used to.

Now you need an extension for desktop. And I have yet to find an extension that works on mobile.

Chrome is basically the same except that mobile doesn't support extensions at all.

I’ve stopped using Chrome when they locked non-official builds out of Sync, but people say they’ve added an RSS reader recently?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34106173

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacement...

Firefox removed support for RSS back in 2018. It would've been great to get first class support from the browser but I understand their motivations for deprecating support.

You can see if there's a feed referenced in the page you're on by simply doing `curl <your page>|egrep rss\|xml` or just show source.

I confess I got in the habit of doing this... view source, crtl+f for 'rel=alte'... It made me feel embarrassed for the state of RSS support in the world.

The best experience I've had is using a browser extension that detects the tag, shows an icon, and lets me use it to subscribe with a custom /subscribe?url= link; but the extension I was using kept crashing on presumably non-spec feeds.

Bonus would be if someone came up with a protocol for your feed reader to advertise to the extension that it can handle subscribing to feeds to simplify configuring a custom reader.

Can anyone recommend an extension for FF?

Have used Google Reader, then Digg reader then free Inoreader now paid Inoreader.

What are the best feeds you like? Mine are

BBC

NYT ( via Readium)

Business Insider (not so much lately)

Hacker News

Slashdot

The author fundamentally does not understand that RSS is the opposite of whatever social stuff they have consumed so far. Yes you need to pick your sources,yes you have to comb through articles, nobody will do that for you. And it needs to stay this way

I’d love to see a podcast + RSS feed client app

Have you tried Atom:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard)

What benifits does this provide the author? It doesn't seem that atom would fix any of his problems.

OP is actually using it, see: https://blog.jez.io/atom.xml

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