RSS and why I believe most people should come back using them
noghartt.dev
noghartt.dev
It's all well and good to say how awesome it can be, but there's so much friction to getting there that I don't care enough any more.
The difficulties of monetization and the (at least perceived) lack of control over repurposing, etc. are significant (and persistent) problems with RSS.
This all means content creators are incentivized to make feeds that only link to their ad-laden web content. At best they'll put a tiny snippet of content in the post's description but the common case is just an empty description. End users of RSS want to have the actual content inside their reader. Reader apps often have features to detect link-only feeds and then go fetch the web content and display it in a Reader Mode fashion. This is at odds with the co tent creator wanting to show their ads.
This feeds (pun intended) into the question of repurposing. If a site has an easy way to find all the latest posts it becomes relatively easy for a third party grab that content and repost it. This was an explicit function of the old Planet software. It would aggregate a bunch of feeds together into a "river of news" format.
But I still want to return to RSS. Is there a good - ideally minimalistic - RSS client that anyone here recommends?
Though I don't know of any services/cross-platform clients (for syncing state) that do that well
More seriously, a big shift in some of the modern RSS clients is feeding that completionism in tunable ways. I know Newsblur the best because that's what I've used for a number of years now, and it's got a number of tools like the ability to demote/mute certain tags or authors from given feeds or promote other tags or others to a "Focused" feed. It has a concept of "infrequently updated feeds" to bubble up those quiet but powerful feeds you might follow that you want to read first before diving into the river of whatever firehose feeds you also like to subscribe.
Some of the other modern RSS readers have their own similar tools.
The nice thing about RSS is that completion is still possible. All of the newer social media want to give you an illusion of infinite feeds that go on forever to keep you locked inside and "engaged". But RSS doesn't work on "engagement" and there's a natural end of new content each day.
The idea is that instead of showing feeds separately, there's an inbox where all new content lands. Then you look over that, and add only the articles you find interesting to your library. The other articles you can mark as read, and then they are removed from the inbox (directly to the archive).
This way you still keep up with all rss feeds, and it's much easier to filter which content you read.
Please let me know what you think. I'm always looking for advice on how to make the product better.
The website is lighthouseapp.io
Which you need to filter out precisely to avoid
>ensuring that every new update will be there for easy access, being notified about it
(notifications are a specifically obnoxious type of noise)
But then you get very little help with then in the RSS services
And you're missing on that whole important social aspect as well
My RSS reader links directly to HN comments hence how I arrived here. Other than HN most social discussions are not useful to me.
I have a blog. I post there one fairly long text once per month at most. I follow few other blogs. If I want to check updates I can open a browser and visit a specific blog once per week/month. Literally no effort.
I have all things I want to follow in one place - the Web. It works by typing domain names in my URL bar or by clicking bookmarks.
Having feeds send their output by email means I can use my existing way to keep state - if I've read an article it shows as read on any system I use for email (be it desktop, laptop, or phone). I can also easily search and filter feed items inside the mail-client if I want to.
I wrote/use rss2email, but there are no doubt a hundred different implementations of the idea, with the same name:
I have a good method for handling hundreds of RSS feeds in the Bazqux reader. Reading in gmail feels like a burden as I have yet to find a good flow to handle too much information.
That sounds like rather a lot of effort to me - remembering that a given blog exists, remembering its URL, remembering to check it every so often.
A buddy of mine just updated his blog after a 14 month hiatus. I forgot he even had a blog, and I would have definitely missed the update if it wasn't in my RSS reader.
For example, I'm subscribed to over 700 YouTube channels, but most of them only post one a week to once a quarter. I force notifications on for these, and it's always a treat when one of my favorites pops up in the feed.
There are very few YouTube channels that I want to watch daily, unless it's a series... or Simon Whistler.
Someone else here mentioned they follow 700 YT channels. I follow maybe 4, so I think we are from different planets.
I don’t think “if it’s important you’ll remember it” is applicable to everyone.
I also have over 1000 tabs open in my Firefox session.
- you need to remember all the names
- you have to navigate through incomplatible interfaces to get a list of articles
- you have to remember the last one you've read to make sure you're not missing anything
- you can't easily sync check/reading status across your devices
- you waste time polling sites without updates
...
Even for a few blogs that's wasted effort vs. opening a single list and reading through it
So like I said, no effort.
That's indeed the only difference. Otherwise the wasted effort still exists
Looking back I think it is because it was unclear what it was for. Was it for reading articles or was it for being notified of new content?
For me are both, it's work to reading articles and being notified about new content from the creators I'm following.
You can just have a notification reminder of something or use RSS readers to read those articles.
Have a lot of RSS readers through the web, some of in the web, other destkops, etc. You can see which ones fills better for you.
I like that it lets you specify to open pages as RSS or full webpage, some sites don't feed their RSS well so full webpage fixes it.
1. RSS isn't HTML. I know how to write HTML, I don't know how to write RSS. It's probably not hard, but it's one extra thing to learn.
2. You don't know what your website's RSS looks like until you use it. This is like using a screen reader. When you check your website, your articles, posts, etc. you check in the web browser. You edit it to look good in a web browser. You won't catch that something looks wrong in RSS unless you open it in a RSS client. And honestly, there are just way too way too many modes to view a single article! Desktop, mobile, tablet, RSS, screen reader, how it looks when you share it in Facebook, Twitter, how it looks on Google, on AMP. Nobody is going to check every single one of these.
3. The default RSS CMS implementation doesn't align with most publishers' interests. By default, CMS's will just put all of the content of an article as a RSS item. Most websites that make money off writing content need you to go to their website to see ads or buy things to make money. This is why social media thrives where RSS doesn't. Social media users only get the headline, and they may have long, verbose arguments about that headline, but they won't read the rest of the article unless they actually go to the website.
4. It's non-trivial to change this RSS implementation. The only reason why so many Wordpress websites expose a RSS feed despite that going against their interests is because the owner doesn't know what RSS is! If they knew, they would disable it right away! But you might be thinking, why disable it when you can just change it to look like social media? Because it's simply not that simple. Changing the HTML output of CMS's is very easy because that's a common use-case. Lots of documentations, tutorials, etc. Changing RSS or even a sitemap.xml is arcane knowledge. Personally I don't even know what is the point of having RSS feeds per article for the comments. Who uses this?
5. RSS clients have an unique, subpar experience. One thing that is immediately obvious if you check a RSS client is that it's fundamentally different from a social media feed since there are no huge, irrelevant images on every post. Imagine you see an article about something remotely related to Amazon, without a photo of Jeff Bezos under it. How can people consume content like this? You can get feeds from Youtube without Youtubers making stupid faces on the thumbnails! That's bad for click rates! In all seriousness, because of how ignored RSS is, you can end up in a situation where an article's HTML exposes metadata such as the article image, but the RSS feed has no image on it, or the article has widgets that require JS, but the RSS client can't run javascript, or the RSS feed needs CSS to make its text colored or something, but the RSS feed didn't get that, etc.
6. No discovery. Chrome could literally just show me a RSS icon in the address bar to say it's available (like Vivaldi does) but it doesn't, which means nobody knows you have a RSS unless you tell them, and most website owners won't tell their users about their RSS because they don't even know they have RSS to begin with. Most places you can search for RSS feeds are online clients, and if I'm using an online client I may as well just use social media. Why is it so hard for people to just put add some keywords/tags field in their RSS and then make a link aggregator that is like subreddits but it just pulls articles from a thousand different feeds and sorts them according to their tags automatically? That would be a win-win-win for everybody!
Honestly, I think it would make WAY more sense if instead of RSS, which has its own markup, its own URLs, etc., we just had local "feed clients" that you gave a URL to, and it just searched all <article> elements or rel=bookmark or something like that, found their respective URLs, downloaded the HTML of every article, and showed the <title>, <meta> description and image in a feed just like a search engine would, with a favicon too. We could even use the dreaded <meta keywords>. But of course HTML dropped the ball by making the <article> mean things that aren't actual articles and even things that don't have their own URLs, titles, or descriptions, so this would need its own schema/microformat, which nobody would implement because nobody uses this client yet, which is why RSS is the best we got even though it's just not as good as social media for a number of reasons.
That's even worse. I'm talking about putting a large image under the article's headline, the way every social media feed does it. Although I hate irrelevant images, the human brain can recognize images faster than it can read text. If articles had a relevant images, you would be able to find interesting articles just by glancing at a masonry grid on the screen.
But in order to do this, the RSS code needs to include the images in first place, and there is no guarantee it will even though the HTML side will usually have it properly marked up.