Twitter is the new RSS | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is the new RSS

techfounder.net

13 pointspytrin23 comments

No, it's not. RSS is a way to make sure you don't miss stuff from authors who produce new content relatively rarely. Twitter drowns such content in a torrent of crap.

Indeed. I use both, but for quite different purposes. Twitter to get sense of what is going on right now and RSS to keep tabs on my favorite blogs, some of which may post very rarely. Twitter just has too much noise to be suitable for the second purpose, and tends to lose tweets after a few days. Also not all blog authors tweet, but every blog I know has access through RSS.

For me, Twitter is neither a useful communications channel, nor a social network, nor an information discovery method. I find it aggressively useless -- picking signal out of the 140 character noise is net energy negative -- whereas I find enormous amounts of great information via Reader.

A world with Twitter and without a decent RSS aggregator is a poorer one.

My main use case for Twitter is to find out whether other people are experiencing/noticing something too (and if so, what's the scope). For example, a site outage, or something that is happening locally such as a power outage.

Yeah, that makes sense. Still, I rarely care enough about anything that I need to find out about it RIGHT NOW.

Exactly. With Twitter, it's impossible to make sure I've at least glanced at the important stuff. With RSS, I can go through my list a couple of times a day, and know that I'm caught up.

What Twitter is awful at – awful – is ensuring you see content from people who don't update frequently. RSS is valuable not for following content gluttons like Hacker News, but for following blogs by people who update only once every three months, or even more rarely.

News gluttonry never needed RSS anyway – generally you only need one source of neverending news as-is. RSS is for more selective reading, and its advantage lies in how it gives equal weight to people who don't publish often as it gives to people who post 50 new entries a day.

So True. It makes me wish there was a list of high quality people who post rarely.... Or an aggregated twitter feed for slow posters.

Now that I think about it, it would be awesome if Google released stats from Google Reader since they are killing it anyways. It could probably be used to identify high-quality, but slow updaters, among other things....

I disagree - for me Twitter is more a social network than a "news source". It's hard enough to keep track of my current timeline (I already can't read a backlog of more than 6 hours! Sucks!), I don't even want to imagine how my TL would look like if I'd follow even one major news site.

You can use lists to manage that.

None of the clients I've used have passable lists support. Bitlbee (my current client of choice) doesn't have /any/ lists support.

It could be interesting if we could follow someone only for some hashtags. This would be an interesting way to filter the feed.

On a side note. Interestingly Twitter is retiring their public RSS feed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5543246

If you just follow some people maybe. But with 100+ Follows it may be quite time-consuming if you're trying not to miss something.

The OP is right.

Twitter has replaced RSS for most people, most of whom never used RSS in the first place.

That does not mean that Twitter is superior to RSS, though. I loathe Twitter and love RSS. It makes me upset that Twitter is winning, but that doesn't mean that the OP's headline is wrong.

A new RSS should be about open standards and not about a single entity locking down all data. Also, Twitter has too much noise. Even if you're careful about following people who tweet good things, quite often you end up seeing "pooping"-style tweets.

Having said that, Twitter should really be doing what Prismatic is doing. I find the discover tab to be largely a #fail. With all the data that Twitter has about me, they should be surfacing interesting things, but they don't.

true and not true.

rss is has no single "owner of platform" and poses no rate limits. twitter has both.

For me twitter is more an indicator of what's happening now than anything useful for what's happened over the past couple days. It's more or less the internet equivalent to the water cooler