Feeds are not fit for gardening | Hacker News Reader

Feeds are not fit for gardening

v5.chriskrycho.com

17 pointsluu6 comments

Gardens suck. It's easily the worst part about the Web, New or Olde. Worse than UI dark patterns. Worse than user tracking. It's no contest.

Stop "updating" content destructively. Nobody raids my bookshelf when an author or publisher decides to put out a new edition of their best-selling work.

Stop lying about the identity of your resources. Previously:

> I wish SE followed closer to the print tradition instead of the modern Web millieu and clearly identified its microeditions as exactly that: distinct editions of the same text. (Yes, that means there are possibly dozens [or hundreds—maybe even thousands] of different editions [...] No, that's not a problem.)

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38835224>

(Assigning the same identifier to multiple resources is a problem.)

> That in turn means that the existing feed specifications serve reasonably well to publish new items but very poorly to notify subscribers about changes to existing items.

That's a jaw-dropping misunderstanding. RSS items are not the content; they are notifications for something else. The content is elsewhere. When you have some content-object that changes, those changes appear as a train of RSS items. The RSS item is not the thing that it's about.

Your expectations and mental model are wrong, not the feed semantics.

I think this take is not really correct, althouth it is the “modern” way RSS is used. You can have the content in the RSS feeds, and some sites do (I am pretty sure axios does this).

I think what really prevents this is the ad-driven web, and a focus on fancy web tech over more-plain text content.

Not sure why the downvotes. The RSS feed for Axios does indeed include the entire story. Check for yourself: https://api.axios.com/feed/top/

It's very convenient to have that all incorporated into your RSS reader. The only thing really stopping more sites from doing this is ad revenue.

I know, for example by blog does it too. But it doesn't change the fact that RSS is for notifications, not (primarily) for distributing content.

The article specifically says it prefers not to be featured on HN at this time:

> Given its preliminary, work-in-progress status, I would appreciate it very much if you do not share this to social media, Hacker News, etc.—call it part of the contract for “working with the garage door open”. Thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com