If anyone knows how to performantly sort on non deterministic computed columns ( eg. the ranking algorithm for votes of posts + comments) in MS SQL server -> https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/203331/slow-calculat... i'd be very happy :p, it's killing my "trending topic" performance...
You don't do the calculation on the fly, you do it at data mutation time (if the column should be the same for every client) or in a separate "thread" (eg, a script). Basically, you pre calculate the column and simply add it to your table, indexed.
The "receive new content" modal is really annoying. It appears every time my mouse exits through the top of the page, so it pops up every time I change tabs.
Same here. I had used RSS less frequently as I used aggregators like Digg and Reddit more. But after leaving reddit last month I found a lot of the old URLs had decayed.
No problem. Most had just moved URL slightly or changed format so finding them on the http site was easy enough. And while finding the new RSS URLs I often checked out the entire blogroll/webring/etc too and found new feeds to subscribe to.
For me RSS is wasn't ever dead. But it may have been left to itself in the nursing home for a few years.
> I think the solution is a set of improvements. RSS as a protocol needs to be expanded so that it can offer more data around prioritization as well as other signals critical to making the technology more effective at the reader layer.
Maybe it's a failure of my imagination, but I'm having trouble coming up with anything at the protocol level that wouldn't make RSS worse as a general protocol, though it might improve at specific cases.
Leave the protocol simple, let innovation happen at the client level, and then if necessary enhance the protocol to support generally effective solutions.
"4. Adding value to the Internet lowers its value.
On top of that Pubsub brings you a fully real-time solution (no need to pull hundreds of feeds each 15min, the articles comes to you) with roles, subscriptions, comments (also relying on Atom, see https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html) and many other things :)
You can still access Movim using any other browsers (Chrome, Firefox) on your phone and bookmark it on your launcher with a similar result :) The Android app is basically a wrapper around a WebView.
Cool, yeah, I'm "stuck" with my old, tiny smartphone but I'm quite reluctant to change it (I even refuse to call it an upgrade [shakes fist]). But it's really insecure and slow also... I have a similar problem with Firefox, no updates since 55.0.2.
But Movim looks really great, I should give it a go, thanks for the links!
RSS never (un)died for me. I run FreshRSS[1]. It works well on shared hosting and it runs on SQLite (no migration troubles!).
The best thing about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds.
Every and service that I use has an RSS feed, except for Twitter. I use https://twitrss.me/ to follow users. If you don't find a feed, sometimes you just have to dig a little. You learn at which URIs the most commons CMSes presents their Atom/RSS feeds (hello /feed/).
I always thought of a "marketing" "reason". Like "we want people on our site" which is not the case when a user reads postings with a RSS reader. At the same time they restricted apps more. Which, was probably because ads.
I've migrated from Google Reader to TTRSS when I was forced to make a change.
Then a few months ago TTRSS started to act up and started making bold claims like "your database doesn't respond" so I moved over to FreshRSS which was a much bigger improvement than I thought that it would be to begin with.
> Then a few months ago TTRSS started to act up and started making bold claims like "your database doesn't respond"
Oh, exactly what happened to me. All kinds of strange errors, especially after upgrades. I eventually gave up and found FreshRSS. Been running (and updating) it over a year, without a single problem.
> The best thing about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds.
Honestly, I don't think algorithmically curated feeds are a problem. The main problem is the goal of the given algorithm which is often trying to maximize someone else's profit rather than minimize your time reading the feed...
That being said, I am always amazed at the ability of my brain to go through my feed and filter the interesting out quickly.
> The main problem is the goal of the given algorithm which is often trying to maximize someone else's profit rather than minimize your time reading the feed...
True that. Sadly, that is the business model for the larger part of the internet. My use of RSS is partly a way of trying to escape that.
When I created my personal website I thought: “Eh, if anyone asks for RSS I’ll make it then.” To my surprise I started getting asked after the second article! It didn’t take long to code up (relative paths to full urls was the biggest hurdle—but not exactly hard) and it’s kinda nice knowing that people can just follow the content without having to be lucky enough to see an article go by on Twitter.
I am guilty of emailing or otherwise attempting to contact authors for a feed link for their blog. It's often because I have become really engaged with one of their articles, read a few more and developed a hunger to see their fresh work.
Twitter is just a firehose, but my aggregated feeds are categorized and hand picked so I am far more likely to catch content I'm interested in on there and therefore be much more engaged with it.
Thanks for the twitrss.me link -- I don't use Twitter, but I follow a couple of journalists who do, and my RSS reader is much better than Twitter's website, with its semi-random threading and light-boxes. I've run NetNewsWire since forever, and it's easy to add a few Twitter feeds in their own folder. If I have time, I'll scan through them; if not, Command-K and they're all gone.
This article really overstates RSS's problems, and underestimates "users," who it seems to view as epsilon semi-morons attached to credit cards. On the reader side, it's simply not that hard to control the rate of things you receive, and to quickly scan them for things you want to read. On the publisher side, it's trivial to keep track of the number of people subscribed to your feed(s). And if you want to know how long each of them spent on each article, and where their mouse cursor and eyeballs pointed that whole time, then too bad -- you are part of what's wrong with today's media ecosystem.
RSS never died. On the contrary, its usage for content aggregation & monitoring has been increasing over the years, specially in the business world and niche markets.
I'm speaking from my own experience running a growing & profitable startup, Feedity - https://feedity.com, that helps with custom feeds for unstructured sources like webpages.
Our upcoming API and content explorer (a different kind of 'feed reader') have received thumbs-up from some customers who opted for early-testing.
+1. I start each morning in the office by firing up my RSS aggregator. Have been since the early days of Google Reader. I can skim through my feeds in minimal time, especially when compared to any other alternative.
This makes me smile to hear. It looks like you have a great product - I remember maybe a year or two ago a similar provider went under due to lack of interest, but I think they were targeting the wrong market by aggregating users social media into a personal feed.
OT: what has become of TechCrunch? I'm on a wide screen (1920 pixels), don't expect me to read paragraphs with 16px font! So I scroll down without really reading and I see "view comments", I scroll down a bit further and I see there is more stuff so maybe they buried the comments and I don't even need to click? I scroll further and... lose the whole article to land automatically on the homepage. Such a layout is plain horrible and I won't return to TC for a few more years.
yeah, it seems that with the goal of being modern, their usability has dropped enormously. I always feel confused whenever I happen to open a TechCrunch article.
The page almost looks perfect with JS disabled. If the major browsers were better at giving the user a way to use and maintain a whitelist of which web sites are allowed to run JS, maybe the websites become less JS-heavy. NoScript or UBlock don't even come close wrt UX to what xombrero was, and what qutebrowser is ATM (I've switched to it from Firefox, just awesome).
Nope. I was using uBlock origin on Firefox with dynamic blocking and quite a bit of the provided blacklists enabled. I just gave quick uMatrix a look, and it does not seem fundamentally different to me. I like that I can easily add some globs and use version control on the blocklist without having to import-export my settings.
Qutebrowser is a very interesting browser. It's easily scriptable using a config file in python, but not only. It has a nice Emacs Customize like UI, and then it has a system reminiscent of CGI for running external scripts against web pages or on events. A definite improvement for me over whatever is available. I maintain a handful of websites with js enabled (HN, reddit, youtube, a couple more), and for the web apps I'm forced to use, I just start up Chromium temporarily. It's been lovely so far.
uMatrix works quite differently than uBlock, and the interface is much easier IMO. It also lets you manually edit rules by text if the GUI doesn't work out. For example, the following lines blocks any third-party loading of anything from Facebook or Twitter, but allows Google Fonts and Gstatic to load except for cookies
No one has mentioned NewsBlur yet. It's fantastic as an RSS reader, and provides intelligence training (filtering) for only subjects you might be interested in, allowing you to tame high-rate RSS feeds quite easily: http://newsblur.com/
It is not really meant for self hosting.
Newsblur is build to scale and basicly needs 3 servers/envirements (app, db, task) and also Sentry, Redis, Celery, RabbitMQ, Postresql, MongoDB and Elasticsearch running.
You certainly can - the code is on GitHub with install instructions. I considered self-hosting but it's cheaper to just pay the yearly subscription fee. Also I feel good about paying for a service that respects me by opening the source and by giving me the ability to export if I want.
NewsBlur is excellent, and a great way to collate all my feeds across categories (quant finance, ML/data science, CS/tech, science, humanities). I have been a happy subscriber since 2013, and I use it on an approximately daily basis.
At https://feeder.co onboarding is one of our largest hurdles to solve. For a lot of reasons we're lucky to get a lot of users who are completely new to RSS. This means we have a huge job in educating what RSS and what it's not. We've seen that a lot of large sites have stopped advertising their RSS feeds on their homepages, making it harder to detect via the standard means.
Also, we've never stopped growing and are approaching profitability on one full time employee so don't believe the RSS-is-dead hype.
I used to use the feedafever agrigator (until upgrading my servers PHP version stopped it working) I could give it a website url and it would attempt to identify the feed from it; probably first by looking for relevant meta tags and then resulting in checking obvious url paths.
> solving RSS as business model. There needs to be some sort of a commerce layer around feeds
> I would gladly pay money for an Amazon Prime-like subscription where I can get unlimited text-only feeds from a bunch of a major news sources at a reasonable price. It would also allow me to get my privacy back to boot.
Facebook had a scandal over selling private data, so move to RSS for the privacy! RSS doesn't allow tracking (from Amazon), let's turn it into HTML.
> solving RSS as business model. There needs to be some sort of a commerce layer around feeds
RSS is not a business model. Selling things people actually want is a business model.
If you can't persuade someone to pay for your content (perhaps via willingly watching adverts), then it's not economically viable content. If you care enough to continue publishing it, great, but it's out of your own pocket.
No, there's a difference between “economically viable” and “useful”. A labour of love may be very valuable to its author and its audience; it's just not a way to make money.
Certainly. What I meant was the content that was meant to make money but not inherently economically viable, i.e. all that clickbait ad-ridden stuff out there.
This seems like a weird article. People are advocating for RSS to avoid “the algorithm” and to increase privacy. Yet the author recommends adding analytics (tracking) and a way for publishers to indicate priorities. No. That’s the opposite of why people are again pushing RSS.
If you want a read count, then add pingback urls and make the protocol support it so various feed aggregators can report true numbers.
Curation should happen at the client, not the protocol. Tagging various feeds works well for me.
Analytics are a hell of a drug. Analytics gave us A/B tested clickbait and listicles. I appreciate it's hard to go cold turkey, but maybe it's even harder to have an analytics system and use it responsibly?
> but maybe it's even harder to have an analytics system and use it responsibly?
I'd say it absolutely is harder--on the one hand, you have an opportunity for more money. On the other hand, you have the mass of users that have proven that they don't care enough to react against irresponsible use in any meaningful way.
> react against irresponsible use in any meaningful way.
Not all reaction is direct. It's a bit like other polluting industries; you can keep doing it right up to the point where public opinion turns on the industry as a whole, and onerous regulations get imposed. I think GDPR is a taste of this.
I think that under-simplifies the dynamic: public opinion is changed slowly and painfully through consistent advocacy efforts that publicize abuses, while the abusing industries fight back and regain ground at least some of the time.
But yeah, more GDPR-like moves would be fantastic.
I just try to avoid screens and spend time with books in my free time. I still succumb to the infinite scroll thing with the reddit mobile app -- until just this weekend I didn't actually have the adequate lighting fixtures in every place in my home where I lay back to relax.
Which is why I suggested the middle ground of a pingback URL that clients or services can hit to give the publishers certain stats like aggregated counts. If certain publishers are not ok with those limitations there will still be a bunch of people writing blog posts that are not so concerned.
> there will still be a bunch of people writing blog posts that are not so concerned.
I assume that 80-90% of blogs already have RSS, just due to default configurations. Seems to me the context here is about pushing adoption and design significantly beyond that, both in terms of consumers and producers.
I can't say for certain that a pingback URL system would be acceptable, but I strongly suspect a dramatic comeback requires drastic measures.
Clients are supposed to be user agents, they shouldn't be doing anything in the interest of the publishers especially when it's hostile to the user. It's a shame browsers have lost site of that, let's not let RSS readers forget as well, that would be the real death of RSS.
We're currently working on an Open Source and good looking RSS + podcast app that has personalization built in. If that sounds interesting to you be sure sign up here to be notified when the beta is released: https://getstream.io/winds/
This whole "RSS died" narrative illustrates a basic problem with how we understand the internet. Since there's no unified unbiased sort of "index", like GDP, to tell us just what proportion of users on the internet uses RSS anymore, we're stuck having to rely on socially propogated ideas about the state. This leads to all the typical problems with socially defined truth, such as drift as a consequence of incentives (or just random mutations due to statistically insignificant data, amplified by mimetics). Just remember that fact-space is only correlated, but not bijective, to common-sense-space.
I'm sure they had, but what these numbers were and how they interpreted them is not known AFAIK. Google might have considered that RSS didn't fit with their long term plan for how the web would be consumed, I'm thinking in particular of AMP which has a certain overlap with RSS but gives Google a lot more control.
I guess that the decision to shut the Reader down didn't appear due to lack of users, but rather ambitions to shape the internet-news-experience by more tightly controlled, proprietary apps like Google Currents/Newsstand or maybe even Plus.
I think that's pretty likely, because compare the continuing grousing about Reader having shut down to, umm... those other services that Google shut down, whatstheirnames...
Of course anything Google shuts down gets an immediate scream of pain from some people, but most everything else they've shut down has died out since then.
(The other one I still hear about is Wave. Though that one seems to have a lot of people lamenting what could have been, rather than what actually was. For Reader, the complaints are about what actually was.)
Or just as likely the inability to monetize those users. Was there any indication that RSS viewership was dropping? I've been using RSS uninterrupted, every day, since the early 2000s. First on Google Reader and then, and now, using Tiny Tiny RSS.
I always find these articles about RSS being dead to be pretty funny, considering I'm usually reading them via RSS.
I see Google Reader mentioned a lot when virtually anything RSS-related comes up. I missed out on the whole RSS craze (prison will do that to you). But I have always wondered -- so many people lament the fact that Google killed it -- why hasn't anyone forked/cloned it's UI and feature-set? You don't want to just straight up copy it and wake the Google lawyers from their nests obviously, but why not make something that works the same way? Seems like that would be a popular project among the open source crowd.
> why hasn't anyone forked/cloned it's UI and feature-set?
There are clients that kind of did, but one of the cool things about Google Reader that a lot of people miss is the social feed. You could share articles you found interesting and your shares would show up on the feeds of anyone who followed you as just another RSS source. It's just an extra folder of articles from your GChat friends that you can read at your leisure.
And it's people selecting articles from their normal reading rotation, so it was refreshingly clear of clickbait. People usually shared stuff because they thought their friends would find it interesting rather than distributing content designed to "go viral."
Once the ecosystem fragmented nobody has the critical mass to replicate the social features. It was nicer than what Twitter or Facebook do because it wasn't in your face.
That sounds like... a fantastic idea! Why would they kill that off?! No easy way to inject ads into I guess (at least that people would be willing to put up with).
It happened back when "Social" was a big thing and Google was trying to push everyone onto its erstwhile Facebook competitor Google+ and it's erstwhile Twitter competitor Google Buzz.
First they killed the social feed and made the button auto-post to your Google Buzz account, but Buzz being a version of Twitter, had a lot more noise to signal so nobody used it that way.
They probably eventually killed it because they preferred having their development resources put towards more exotic social media efforts than maintaining a thing that didn't really make any money.
So, you are telling me that a person arrive to Google, broke the internet (by replacing the well behaved + with the annoying "") and then left to leave things worse than they were? Sad state of affairs...
When Reader was killed, I switched to Feedly and haven't looked back. It took Reader's feature-set (at least, the features I care about) and has continued to provide a robust application for consuming news. I never used the social bits of Reader, though.
I second that. I am an avid Feedly user and a paying customer. It really filled up the huge void in Google Reader. I use Feedly it to consume RSS feeds.
Although nowadays they hide the feature in the interface, it is possible to subscribe to a feed by just pasting it in input text box when you are looking for new content.
>I see Google Reader mentioned a lot when virtually anything RSS-related comes up.
As someone who relied on RSS for years, and did not use Google Reader, this equivalency between RSS and Google Reader annoys me greatly. Google didn't kill RSS. RSS is alive and well - almost all sites have a feed.
I used to have an RSS reader set up on my own server. For people who do not want to do that, just use an RSS software on your machine and update once a day.
I get similar annoyance with how gmail and email is now "synonymous", much thanks to the heavy handed nature of the gmail "spam" filer (anything not from a big name provider gets automatically binned, apparently).
I wish it was just a soul sucking corporate job. At least you get paid more than 33 cents an hour for doing those jobs. but alas, no this was actual prison, and nothing so luxurious as Bernie Madoff's Camp Fluffy. This was prison prison in Michigan City, Indiana (and the last 6 months I was transferred to Pendelton, IN). I was down for 3 years of a 6 year sentence for 2 charges: Conspiracy to Distribute or Manufacture, and Trafficking in a Controlled Substance. This was before they switched from a 'Class A-B-C-D' felony classification system to a 'Level 1-2-3-4' system, so my 2 charges were a Class C and a Class B (effectively a Level 3 and a Level 2 nowadays). TLDR; I was a drug dealer. For a long time. I was extremely good at it. I sold all of them, but the ones I ended up being charged with were Heroin (at least 10 grams, which bumped it up from a C to a B class) and 80mg OxyContins ("green hornets").
Incidentally, at the time, the laws were such that if my house had been located 200 feet closer to a school than it was, I would most likely still be in prison. I got lucky there, the laws were "within 1000 feet of a school" and my house was somewhere between 1100-1200, and even though I absolutely NEVER sold anything out of my house it would not have mattered. The prosecutor went so far as to send surveyors to my property and dig up the blueprints of my house from City Hall and measure out the property lines and distances. I think I saw steam shoot out of that lady's ears when my lawyer read the surveyor's report in court. She was pissed.
Well congratulations on making it out and getting out of that business. Were you assaulted in prison?
Why were you good at drug dealer? (I thought most drug dealers make little income...unless it's wholesaling.)
[I can only speak for what I experienced personally, and what facilities I was in and passed thru along the way. It varies from place-to-place and state-to-state based on many factors]
Assaulted no. Did I have to fight? You bet. Inside, if you don't protect yourself and/or stand up for what's rightfully yours then you're not going to have a good time at all. At some point someone who is bigger, stronger, tougher, whatever than you _IS_ going to attempt to take all your shit. It's more of a test than anything else, to see what you will let people get away with. If you don't stand up for yourself, well, prison is full of predators especially if you're in a medium or higher security facility. This does not apply if your charges are for anything to do with hurting children or extreme violence against women -- in that case they're never going to stop coming... ever.
Word from the older guys who had been in there for a long time is that prison isn't what it once was in the 70's and 80's. Bad inmate on inmate assaults is almost always gang related, forcible rape doesn't really happen [at least in the facilities I was in and passed thru along the way] because they don't really have to do that -- there are plenty of willing participants (with exceptions for internal gang retaliation, but it would have to be something major). Another big change that reduced a lot of violence was they started giving people additional criminal charges, "outside cases" to use prison parlance, for crimes they commit inside such as stabbings, murders, serious contraband, etc. instead of just doing internal institutional discipline. This also cut way down on inmate vs. corrections officer violence -- stabbing a guard now became attempted murder of a law enforcement official -- an A felony, 20 more years to your sentence minimum.
That's not to say it's fun or peaceful or anything, it's still prison, still a city within walls segregated intensely by race and where you grew up, and there are some truly messed up people in there. It's 90% boredom 5% loneliness, and 5% small bouts of intense violence. But if you carry yourself with dignity, don't do anything stupid, and don't back down when challenged (particularly over something petty) you'll be allright.
why hasn't anyone forked/cloned it's UI and feature-set?
Somebody did, The Old Reader (theoldreader.com natch) was setup to be as close to Google Reader as possible. I've been a paying user since it launched shortly after the Google Reader shut down, very happy with the service.
I tried The Old Reader as soon as it came up, but it was in an uncanny valley were it was not quite as good as Google's –or maybe I was just sad and feeling unappreciative– but recently I rediscovered it and became a paying user within the hour. I just wish I have saved my 500+ subscriptions OPML somewhere.
There is noway I could keep up with the number of sources I like to keep up with without RSS. Not providing a useable RSS feed as a site is a dealbreaker for me: I will not come back regularly, if at all.
I've been using the oldreader (what a blessing) since Google Reader died (what a shame).
Love the google auth integration (as soon as I log in to my gmail, all my subscribtions are available, no matter what machine I am on ATM), but I never ever thought about paying for the service since it is more then complete for me as it is.
Maybe I should since I truly appreciate it and have found 0 alternatives over the years (and no, I am not going to roll my own, nor host anything, nor install apps across all my devices).
Oh no, no, no, no. You're reading web things, you need it inside a browser. You middle click a link and it opens inside a new tab, just like that. Native clients and their embedded web views never work the way you expect them to be, and ugh, there's a link to something inside facebook and I'm not logged in... should I go back and right click -> "Open in browser", nah, forget it.
That's why I'm happy to rediscover the old reader. It is not only not a native app, it doesn't try to act like one.
This issue must exist only in poorly made apps, no? At least Android is designed such that it should be natural to navigate views across different apps as though they belonged to one. Apps aren't really emphasised under the hood as much as specific views are.
After I wrote it I read it again, trying to get some grasp of the space of possible interpretations and associations people might think my ideas are stemming from. (The truth is that I have just formed a habit out of using this terminology, and don't always have an underlying unified geometric picture in my mind as I write it.) But your response is an interesting meditation on how often we users of the web (1) always read everything totally out of context, and thus (2) are especially adapted to always trying to infer what the actual network of associations the author intended to point to, but that (3) sometimes we make an incorrect assessment to the precise region of the map, and in fact (4) sometimes there is no such intended association at all.
I think that's what makes @dril so funny. He's incredibly skilled at walking the classification boundary of that mechanism.
People who concerns their information source are keeping using RSS all the time. RSS can confirm you receives all the news you subscribed everyday and decide read which article by yourself.
I hate some new media who provides App only. App can increase DAU and maybe better for their KPI, but will lose serious reader.
> RSS doesn’t allow publishers to track user behavior.
This is a feature, not a bug.
> Analytics increases revenues from advertising, and that means it is critical for companies to have those trackers in place if they want a chance to make it in the competitive media environment.
If you can't survive without tracking my behavior, then I guess you will die. Given the quality of writing I can expect from this "competitive media environment", it won't be a great loss.
> RSS also offers very few opportunities for branding content effectively.
This is a feature, not a bug.
> They need to actively guide users to find where the best content is...
Let me stop you here. An RSS directory is nothing challenging. You can make one by hosting an old timey "list of cool sites" .html on your own website. Brent Simmons included one when he developed and maintained NetNewsWire before selling to Black Pixel. Modern day Podcast clients often include a directory or access to a 3rd party directory. Anybody can create a directory, stuff it with all the criteria they need to sort by tags or algorithmically push users to the highest bidder and ship it in an RSS client.
RSS is a good technology. In terms familiar to a newspaper or press corporation, it is a wire service, except one that goes from newspaper to reader rather than from the Associated Press (or whoever) to newspapers to readers. It does one thing, and it does it well, and doesn't support anything less than it needs to do it.
RSS clients range the gamut from inboxes (NetNewsWire) to news rivers (River5) to machine-curated digital newspapers (Apple News), each of them solid form factors and useful for different types of feeds, and the only reason that variance of form factors is even possible is right there in the name: Really Simple Syndication.
Dave Winer was right to freeze the spec, it's not perfect, but it is good enough. Letting newer iterations filter through would lead us to a situation like with the web, where the www went from a really great networked document browser to an application container. That's why when I visit a site like say, techcrunch.com in a browser with scripting disabled, almost nothing remains of the actual website, although surprisingly the entire article was fully readable, and perhaps more so than if I had enabled JavaScript to let all that Branding™ shine through.
Let me be clear, the only parts of RSS that died are the parts that Google and a few social corporations within 50 miles of each other owned because they all had a stake in getting you into their own walled gardens and keeping you there. The Open Web is great, open standards are great, until you need to convert eyeballs into dollars and the exchange rate isn't looking good because you're too open and didn't introduce enough artificial scarcity into your business model.
RSS never died, by and large the feeds that you subscribed to a decade ago in Google Reader are still alive and kicking, ever present and always underappreciated even at the height of Google Reader's popularity before Google decided to rebrand it to death.
>> RSS also offers very few opportunities for branding content effectively.
> This is a feature, not a bug.
I know where you're coming from, but .. I'm one of the rare people who, for a while, read a significant number of blogs without RSS because I actually liked having the different distinctive visual styles to remind me who I was reading. It's a pity we can't have a little bit of styling without going bananas.
The only reason I read articles on my various RSS feeds at their original source is when the article has some sort of meaningful multimedia component to it. By meaningful I mean something that enhances the content in some way that's valuable to me, and not be an auto-play video that was accurately transcribed in text.
Most RSS and read-it-later applications do a really poor job of playing embedded videos never mind displaying interactive infographics or other JavaScript applications, so going to the source is really the only alternative at the moment.
I hope apps like Pocket would get better at this. Pocket already plays Youtube videos just fine, it's the embedded stuff that doesn't work.
I am totally with you on this one. On one hand, I quite like having a uniform experience where text is consistently readable, etc. On the other, I miss the sense of 'place' and identity you get when viewing an article via RSS. I definitely think a compromise would be nice, but tricky. It might be possible to fix on a range of acceptable font styles, and choose the one that best fits each site. Add on a site's logo and colour scheme, and you might be able to come up with a decent approach.
More often than not, when I read something, I care about who the other is, and secondary to that, I care about where it is hosted. For more than ten years I've used NetNewsWire, and now I also use Apple News and Overcast. NetNewsWire will show me the author name just fine so long as the feed includes it, and given the left to right style of the client, I can tell at a glance where I am. For most feeds though, it isn't really a problem as I have found that the NetNewsWire-style really only works for feeds that post relatively infrequently, not more than a few times a day if that, and even that would be overwhelming coming from one source if every source I had posted a few times a day to keep up the appearances of their Personal Brand™.
I think an optional CSS or rather a subset of CSS component would not be a bad thing. Just enough to style some text and formatting but not enough to screw with the layout too much. The client could completely dismiss the attached CSS and in my case I would almost certainly end up turning off the custom CSS, but I can appreciate good web design and will visit a site if I happen to really like their design. That said, I also fear that even that concession would open the dam to a lot more concessions than I would like, so I can live with the status quo.
A good feed reader is going to have a good reading experience already, and I care a lot more about having a good reading experience than I do about the opinion of a web designer and their corporate overlords. RSS, reader mode in Firefox and occasionally lynx -dump or when I can find them, print pages, are how I can even use the web to read anything on it anymore.
So HTTP+HTML5 is a mess, I would rather not see HTTP+RSS (or Atom or JSON Feed or whatever) turn into a similar mess so that websites can rebrand their feeds to death in the same way they rebranded their websites to death.
I used to use the self install feedafever app which had a somewhat clever algorithm that would scrape all my subscribed feeds and provide me with a breakdown of whats hot over the past 30 days while also giving me the ability to view a chronological feed.
Unfortunately it became unmaintained and is now abandoned by its author. It's been on my todo list for a while to write similar so I can have the same experience again.
Does 'RSS' also mean Atom feeds? The terms seem to be used interchangeably. I had thought Atom was supposed to be a better alternative to RSS but it doesn't seem to have landed. Is it necessary to always offer both? Most sites seem to.
Many sites offer both because common libraries and tools support both so it's easy. I don't think I've seen a reader that only supports one of the formats. IIRC from way back when, atom has a few more features but also some problems, but in the end, it doesn't really matter.
My conclusion (quite a while ago now!) was to use Atom as it is a more consistent and reliable format, but to call it RSS in any user interface as that is what users know it as.
Usually RSS stands for "feed", so both RSS and Atom. I personally prefer RSS format for the feeds I make because Atom feels like premature optimisation, and I do not really comprehend UUIDs, and do not understand why I have to bother with them given a URL is a unique identifier anyways (i.e. https://example.com/a/b/c points to one thing and one thing only at any given time).
RSS will never die, as long as podcasts are using it (and podcasting IS booming around the world right now). Many thought it dead even in the podcasting world, yet there is no viable alternative and there won't be in the next few years. A bit of a Javascript-y situation.
Please stop claiming that RSS died, it didn't. Most of the new sites and blogs i come across usually have an RSS feed buried somewhere, so a more apt metaphor would be that it was buried alive, it didn't die. And please stop trying to feature creep RSS, it doesn't need any more "features". I already wrote about this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15675823
"Died" means "no one is talking about it". But that could just as well be a consequence of it doing its job without fault, silently being a good boy in the background, rather than any depletion of use.
It's hiding very well, thanks to browser manufacturers, unfortunately. Back in the day, my browser (from memory, any of the major browsers) alerted me, via an icon, when a site provided an RSS feed and clicking on that icon subscribed me to the feed. That was a much nicer situation than the 'View Source, CTRL-F "rss", Copy' dance I have to do nowadays.
In Firerox you can add the Subscribe button back to the toolbar using the personalization UI. They shouldn't hide this feature as much in my opinion, but it is still much better than manually looking for a feed URI in the source.
Yep, in 2013 Google Reader was axed. Feedly alone went up 500k users in 48 hours, 3 million within a few weeks and 12 million by the end of the year. Given that this definitely represents active consumers and probably only represents a proportion of the total number of consumers, the numbers aren't trivial. They aren't facebook level (or even twitter level) but there's enough to say that RSS isn't dead.
Intense RSS user as I am, I don’t think the recent hype of RSS practical and scalable for daily users.
Algorithm-generated feeds are mostly critisized for buidling filter bubbles and leading to dependency, but either can be avoided by simply switching to RSS. It is you who choose what to subscribe to in RSS, and it’s hard to imagine many people would offense themselves by subscribing to sources contrasting their own ideologies. And any experienced RSS user will understand the stress of out-of-control unread counts, which easily leads to the crumbling of your RSS-based reading system.
You may be like, “well, I’m nimble at selecting non-biased sources and spend a health time on my RSS feed.” Congrats, but one as rational and restrained as you is also unlikely to be solicited or tricked by News Feed. On the other way, you can’t expect one inclined to be biased and addicted to crappy stories to become less so just by using RSS instead.
And that’s without mentioning the high technical barrier of RSS that filters ordinary users away. For many popular content providers, there’s no full text output, even no conspicuous feed address. Shall I suggest my mom switching to RSS and subscribing to her favorite WeChat official accounts by setting up an Linux server running web crawler? I haven’t be nerdy enough to do that.
I do love the simplicity and transparency of RSS but don’t really think something invented in the 1990s can solve the problem of 2010s and decades to come. When the density of information available reaches a certain bar, you have to turn to something like algorithm. Being arbitrary and black-boxed is not inherently a problem. Haven’t we been happy with the works of DJs, curators, and food writers? What can be more arbitrary and black-boxed than we human? What needs be changed the most is not the tool people use to get information, but the mindset with which people live with the torrent of information in such a post-scarcity era of contents.
> And any experienced RSS user will understand the stress of out-of-control unread counts, which easily leads to the crumbling of your RSS-based reading system.
Do not follow newspapers through RSS. That's the golden advice. Most often they have daily or weekly digest newsletters (NY Times and Guardian has excellent ones), use them instead. More generically, use periodical digests for high-volume news sources, and RSS for following websites that post anything less frequent than a couple or so times a day.
I was really wondering if I should chip in Feedpresso here (that I've been developing) to avoid shameless promo but your writing struck a chord with me.
All of the things you mentioned there, is basically a reason why I started Feedpresso. After GReader was shut down, and after I got pissed with unread counts from a local newspaper on Feedly, I've put some basic probabilistic machine learning together to "avoid a mess" (what a strange thing to do - to avoid a mess, you start an even bigger one :-D).
One thing led to another, and I have to say Feedpresso is a pretty decent reader that is easy to use (my dad uses it without knowing what's RSS) compared to the most of the RSS readers available.
My feeling is that this problem about content and updates boils down to a mix of a few things:
- following local and international news
- following writers that produce high-quality industry-specific content
- how do I get that conveniently in one place?
- how should I not lose sanity and hours of time doing that?
And you are right about the amount of the content. It extremely magnifies the mess.
Also, let's not forget the whole hell with ad-incentives that make publishers produce lots of low-quality content (with ad-bloat) just to get a few extra page views (impressions). I would even argue that "free content" and ad-incentives is what ruined the regular news, and it is what drives most of the stupid viral content on FB.
Anyway, give Feedpresso a go - maybe it will stick. PM me for a discount at tadas@feedpresso.com .
>And that’s without mentioning the high technical barrier of RSS that filters ordinary users away. For many popular content providers, there’s no full text output, even no conspicuous feed address. Shall I suggest my mom switching to RSS and subscribing to her favorite WeChat official accounts by setting up an Linux server running web crawler? I haven’t be nerdy enough to do that.
Well it's a protocol. Just as we have better e-mail clients than we used to, we can have better ways of dealing with feeds. Part of the push to re-establish RSS is the hope of more services exposing more and better RSS feeds to be consumed.
Since google reader died, I've been self-hosting a TTRSS instance. I agree with the author that newspapers often have a waterfall of articles that's impossible to read.
One of the solutions I saw on a local traffic alert site was that you could create a personalized feed URL which would only send you a notification when e.g. here is an accident on that specific road.
This might be useful to solve the prioritization problem if you could create a custom feed based on your interests.
Secondly this also provides the newspaper with some sort of analytics to incorporate "relevant ads" in the feed (I know I'm playing the devil's advocate here)
275 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 249 ms ] threadI currently use it for personal bookmarking and posting stories to HN.
It's based on tags, eg. http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/ByTag?Name=artificial-intellige...
Ps. Performance is slow on the main page for sorting calculated columns ( eg. The Algorithm ), that's why I linked to the newest page
If anyone knows how to performantly sort on non deterministic computed columns ( eg. the ranking algorithm for votes of posts + comments) in MS SQL server -> https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/203331/slow-calculat... i'd be very happy :p, it's killing my "trending topic" performance...
Edit: added non deterministic
Even then?
Check out how reddit does it: https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algo...
The concept is that the time-based part of the score is immutable, fixed at post creation time.
That way you only have to recalculate when a score-modifying event occurs, not every time the page is refreshed.
No problem. Most had just moved URL slightly or changed format so finding them on the http site was easy enough. And while finding the new RSS URLs I often checked out the entire blogroll/webring/etc too and found new feeds to subscribe to.
For me RSS is wasn't ever dead. But it may have been left to itself in the nursing home for a few years.
Maybe it's a failure of my imagination, but I'm having trouble coming up with anything at the protocol level that wouldn't make RSS worse as a general protocol, though it might improve at specific cases.
Leave the protocol simple, let innovation happen at the client level, and then if necessary enhance the protocol to support generally effective solutions.
"4. Adding value to the Internet lowers its value.
5. All the Internet's value grows on its edges."
http://www.worldofends.com/
All the articles published on the network are actually Atom elements (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(Web_standard)), it's then super easy to import and export Atom/RSS feeds in XMPP (for example https://nl.movim.eu/?feed/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim).
On top of that Pubsub brings you a fully real-time solution (no need to pull hundreds of feeds each 15min, the articles comes to you) with roles, subscriptions, comments (also relying on Atom, see https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html) and many other things :)
You can still access Movim using any other browsers (Chrome, Firefox) on your phone and bookmark it on your launcher with a similar result :) The Android app is basically a wrapper around a WebView.
But Movim looks really great, I should give it a go, thanks for the links!
The best thing about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds.
Every and service that I use has an RSS feed, except for Twitter. I use https://twitrss.me/ to follow users. If you don't find a feed, sometimes you just have to dig a little. You learn at which URIs the most commons CMSes presents their Atom/RSS feeds (hello /feed/).
[1] https://freshrss.org/
Bingo. Plenty of my RSS feeds have ads, they just publish them as articles and say "This RSS feed is sponsored by. . ."
It's the same ad model as podcasts basically.
Other ones just give you an abstract or short blurb on your feed with a link to go back to the main site, which works just as well.
I've migrated from Google Reader to TTRSS when I was forced to make a change.
Then a few months ago TTRSS started to act up and started making bold claims like "your database doesn't respond" so I moved over to FreshRSS which was a much bigger improvement than I thought that it would be to begin with.
Runs fine using Postgres as a database.
Oh, exactly what happened to me. All kinds of strange errors, especially after upgrades. I eventually gave up and found FreshRSS. Been running (and updating) it over a year, without a single problem.
Honestly, I don't think algorithmically curated feeds are a problem. The main problem is the goal of the given algorithm which is often trying to maximize someone else's profit rather than minimize your time reading the feed...
That being said, I am always amazed at the ability of my brain to go through my feed and filter the interesting out quickly.
True that. Sadly, that is the business model for the larger part of the internet. My use of RSS is partly a way of trying to escape that.
Twitter is just a firehose, but my aggregated feeds are categorized and hand picked so I am far more likely to catch content I'm interested in on there and therefore be much more engaged with it.
(I am curious though, I may just try using feeds myself.)
This article really overstates RSS's problems, and underestimates "users," who it seems to view as epsilon semi-morons attached to credit cards. On the reader side, it's simply not that hard to control the rate of things you receive, and to quickly scan them for things you want to read. On the publisher side, it's trivial to keep track of the number of people subscribed to your feed(s). And if you want to know how long each of them spent on each article, and where their mouse cursor and eyeballs pointed that whole time, then too bad -- you are part of what's wrong with today's media ecosystem.
I'm speaking from my own experience running a growing & profitable startup, Feedity - https://feedity.com, that helps with custom feeds for unstructured sources like webpages.
Our upcoming API and content explorer (a different kind of 'feed reader') have received thumbs-up from some customers who opted for early-testing.
Qutebrowser is a very interesting browser. It's easily scriptable using a config file in python, but not only. It has a nice Emacs Customize like UI, and then it has a system reminiscent of CGI for running external scripts against web pages or on events. A definite improvement for me over whatever is available. I maintain a handful of websites with js enabled (HN, reddit, youtube, a couple more), and for the web apps I'm forced to use, I just start up Chromium temporarily. It's been lovely so far.
[0] https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki
Also, we've never stopped growing and are approaching profitability on one full time employee so don't believe the RSS-is-dead hype.
> I would gladly pay money for an Amazon Prime-like subscription where I can get unlimited text-only feeds from a bunch of a major news sources at a reasonable price. It would also allow me to get my privacy back to boot.
Facebook had a scandal over selling private data, so move to RSS for the privacy! RSS doesn't allow tracking (from Amazon), let's turn it into HTML.
RSS is not a business model. Selling things people actually want is a business model.
If you can't persuade someone to pay for your content (perhaps via willingly watching adverts), then it's not economically viable content. If you care enough to continue publishing it, great, but it's out of your own pocket.
"useless content". FTFY.
If you want a read count, then add pingback urls and make the protocol support it so various feed aggregators can report true numbers.
Curation should happen at the client, not the protocol. Tagging various feeds works well for me.
Maybe the opposite of why users are pushing for RSS, but without analytics content producers have reasonable justification for being hostile instead.
I'd say it absolutely is harder--on the one hand, you have an opportunity for more money. On the other hand, you have the mass of users that have proven that they don't care enough to react against irresponsible use in any meaningful way.
Simple decision in a business context.
Not all reaction is direct. It's a bit like other polluting industries; you can keep doing it right up to the point where public opinion turns on the industry as a whole, and onerous regulations get imposed. I think GDPR is a taste of this.
But yeah, more GDPR-like moves would be fantastic.
I just try to avoid screens and spend time with books in my free time. I still succumb to the infinite scroll thing with the reddit mobile app -- until just this weekend I didn't actually have the adequate lighting fixtures in every place in my home where I lay back to relax.
(Books. Not "ebooks".)
Facebook and RSS will both die before books do.
I assume that 80-90% of blogs already have RSS, just due to default configurations. Seems to me the context here is about pushing adoption and design significantly beyond that, both in terms of consumers and producers.
I can't say for certain that a pingback URL system would be acceptable, but I strongly suspect a dramatic comeback requires drastic measures.
Of course anything Google shuts down gets an immediate scream of pain from some people, but most everything else they've shut down has died out since then.
(The other one I still hear about is Wave. Though that one seems to have a lot of people lamenting what could have been, rather than what actually was. For Reader, the complaints are about what actually was.)
I always find these articles about RSS being dead to be pretty funny, considering I'm usually reading them via RSS.
https://tt-rss.org/ seems to be gone/down.
When Google Reader went away I looked at a few of the hosted alternatives but found tt-rss early on and never looked back.
There are clients that kind of did, but one of the cool things about Google Reader that a lot of people miss is the social feed. You could share articles you found interesting and your shares would show up on the feeds of anyone who followed you as just another RSS source. It's just an extra folder of articles from your GChat friends that you can read at your leisure.
And it's people selecting articles from their normal reading rotation, so it was refreshingly clear of clickbait. People usually shared stuff because they thought their friends would find it interesting rather than distributing content designed to "go viral."
Once the ecosystem fragmented nobody has the critical mass to replicate the social features. It was nicer than what Twitter or Facebook do because it wasn't in your face.
It happened back when "Social" was a big thing and Google was trying to push everyone onto its erstwhile Facebook competitor Google+ and it's erstwhile Twitter competitor Google Buzz.
First they killed the social feed and made the button auto-post to your Google Buzz account, but Buzz being a version of Twitter, had a lot more noise to signal so nobody used it that way.
They probably eventually killed it because they preferred having their development resources put towards more exotic social media efforts than maintaining a thing that didn't really make any money.
This long article has more of the sordid details if you're interested: https://www.buzzfeed.com/robf4/googles-lost-social-network?u...
All thanks to an ex-MS "cookie licker" (the term was used by Google people after he left the company).
Although nowadays they hide the feature in the interface, it is possible to subscribe to a feed by just pasting it in input text box when you are looking for new content.
I have quit reading about a dozen news sites / webcomics just because I used to check them through the feeds and now I can't be bothered.
As someone who relied on RSS for years, and did not use Google Reader, this equivalency between RSS and Google Reader annoys me greatly. Google didn't kill RSS. RSS is alive and well - almost all sites have a feed.
I used to have an RSS reader set up on my own server. For people who do not want to do that, just use an RSS software on your machine and update once a day.
Incidentally, at the time, the laws were such that if my house had been located 200 feet closer to a school than it was, I would most likely still be in prison. I got lucky there, the laws were "within 1000 feet of a school" and my house was somewhere between 1100-1200, and even though I absolutely NEVER sold anything out of my house it would not have mattered. The prosecutor went so far as to send surveyors to my property and dig up the blueprints of my house from City Hall and measure out the property lines and distances. I think I saw steam shoot out of that lady's ears when my lawyer read the surveyor's report in court. She was pissed.
Assaulted no. Did I have to fight? You bet. Inside, if you don't protect yourself and/or stand up for what's rightfully yours then you're not going to have a good time at all. At some point someone who is bigger, stronger, tougher, whatever than you _IS_ going to attempt to take all your shit. It's more of a test than anything else, to see what you will let people get away with. If you don't stand up for yourself, well, prison is full of predators especially if you're in a medium or higher security facility. This does not apply if your charges are for anything to do with hurting children or extreme violence against women -- in that case they're never going to stop coming... ever.
Word from the older guys who had been in there for a long time is that prison isn't what it once was in the 70's and 80's. Bad inmate on inmate assaults is almost always gang related, forcible rape doesn't really happen [at least in the facilities I was in and passed thru along the way] because they don't really have to do that -- there are plenty of willing participants (with exceptions for internal gang retaliation, but it would have to be something major). Another big change that reduced a lot of violence was they started giving people additional criminal charges, "outside cases" to use prison parlance, for crimes they commit inside such as stabbings, murders, serious contraband, etc. instead of just doing internal institutional discipline. This also cut way down on inmate vs. corrections officer violence -- stabbing a guard now became attempted murder of a law enforcement official -- an A felony, 20 more years to your sentence minimum.
That's not to say it's fun or peaceful or anything, it's still prison, still a city within walls segregated intensely by race and where you grew up, and there are some truly messed up people in there. It's 90% boredom 5% loneliness, and 5% small bouts of intense violence. But if you carry yourself with dignity, don't do anything stupid, and don't back down when challenged (particularly over something petty) you'll be allright.
Somebody did, The Old Reader (theoldreader.com natch) was setup to be as close to Google Reader as possible. I've been a paying user since it launched shortly after the Google Reader shut down, very happy with the service.
I've been using the oldreader (what a blessing) since Google Reader died (what a shame).
Love the google auth integration (as soon as I log in to my gmail, all my subscribtions are available, no matter what machine I am on ATM), but I never ever thought about paying for the service since it is more then complete for me as it is.
Maybe I should since I truly appreciate it and have found 0 alternatives over the years (and no, I am not going to roll my own, nor host anything, nor install apps across all my devices).
Shutting down Reader had zero effect on my RSS reading habits.
That's why I'm happy to rediscover the old reader. It is not only not a native app, it doesn't try to act like one.
Webviews are unwelcome.
I think that's what makes @dril so funny. He's incredibly skilled at walking the classification boundary of that mechanism.
I hate some new media who provides App only. App can increase DAU and maybe better for their KPI, but will lose serious reader.
This is a feature, not a bug.
> Analytics increases revenues from advertising, and that means it is critical for companies to have those trackers in place if they want a chance to make it in the competitive media environment.
If you can't survive without tracking my behavior, then I guess you will die. Given the quality of writing I can expect from this "competitive media environment", it won't be a great loss.
> RSS also offers very few opportunities for branding content effectively.
This is a feature, not a bug.
> They need to actively guide users to find where the best content is...
Let me stop you here. An RSS directory is nothing challenging. You can make one by hosting an old timey "list of cool sites" .html on your own website. Brent Simmons included one when he developed and maintained NetNewsWire before selling to Black Pixel. Modern day Podcast clients often include a directory or access to a 3rd party directory. Anybody can create a directory, stuff it with all the criteria they need to sort by tags or algorithmically push users to the highest bidder and ship it in an RSS client.
RSS is a good technology. In terms familiar to a newspaper or press corporation, it is a wire service, except one that goes from newspaper to reader rather than from the Associated Press (or whoever) to newspapers to readers. It does one thing, and it does it well, and doesn't support anything less than it needs to do it.
RSS clients range the gamut from inboxes (NetNewsWire) to news rivers (River5) to machine-curated digital newspapers (Apple News), each of them solid form factors and useful for different types of feeds, and the only reason that variance of form factors is even possible is right there in the name: Really Simple Syndication.
Dave Winer was right to freeze the spec, it's not perfect, but it is good enough. Letting newer iterations filter through would lead us to a situation like with the web, where the www went from a really great networked document browser to an application container. That's why when I visit a site like say, techcrunch.com in a browser with scripting disabled, almost nothing remains of the actual website, although surprisingly the entire article was fully readable, and perhaps more so than if I had enabled JavaScript to let all that Branding™ shine through.
Let me be clear, the only parts of RSS that died are the parts that Google and a few social corporations within 50 miles of each other owned because they all had a stake in getting you into their own walled gardens and keeping you there. The Open Web is great, open standards are great, until you need to convert eyeballs into dollars and the exchange rate isn't looking good because you're too open and didn't introduce enough artificial scarcity into your business model.
RSS never died, by and large the feeds that you subscribed to a decade ago in Google Reader are still alive and kicking, ever present and always underappreciated even at the height of Google Reader's popularity before Google decided to rebrand it to death.
> This is a feature, not a bug.
I know where you're coming from, but .. I'm one of the rare people who, for a while, read a significant number of blogs without RSS because I actually liked having the different distinctive visual styles to remind me who I was reading. It's a pity we can't have a little bit of styling without going bananas.
Most RSS and read-it-later applications do a really poor job of playing embedded videos never mind displaying interactive infographics or other JavaScript applications, so going to the source is really the only alternative at the moment.
I hope apps like Pocket would get better at this. Pocket already plays Youtube videos just fine, it's the embedded stuff that doesn't work.
More often than not, when I read something, I care about who the other is, and secondary to that, I care about where it is hosted. For more than ten years I've used NetNewsWire, and now I also use Apple News and Overcast. NetNewsWire will show me the author name just fine so long as the feed includes it, and given the left to right style of the client, I can tell at a glance where I am. For most feeds though, it isn't really a problem as I have found that the NetNewsWire-style really only works for feeds that post relatively infrequently, not more than a few times a day if that, and even that would be overwhelming coming from one source if every source I had posted a few times a day to keep up the appearances of their Personal Brand™.
I think an optional CSS or rather a subset of CSS component would not be a bad thing. Just enough to style some text and formatting but not enough to screw with the layout too much. The client could completely dismiss the attached CSS and in my case I would almost certainly end up turning off the custom CSS, but I can appreciate good web design and will visit a site if I happen to really like their design. That said, I also fear that even that concession would open the dam to a lot more concessions than I would like, so I can live with the status quo.
A good feed reader is going to have a good reading experience already, and I care a lot more about having a good reading experience than I do about the opinion of a web designer and their corporate overlords. RSS, reader mode in Firefox and occasionally lynx -dump or when I can find them, print pages, are how I can even use the web to read anything on it anymore.
So HTTP+HTML5 is a mess, I would rather not see HTTP+RSS (or Atom or JSON Feed or whatever) turn into a similar mess so that websites can rebrand their feeds to death in the same way they rebranded their websites to death.
Unfortunately it became unmaintained and is now abandoned by its author. It's been on my todo list for a while to write similar so I can have the same experience again.
RSS is the javascript of text.
A agree that it never really died, it's just hiding.
Algorithm-generated feeds are mostly critisized for buidling filter bubbles and leading to dependency, but either can be avoided by simply switching to RSS. It is you who choose what to subscribe to in RSS, and it’s hard to imagine many people would offense themselves by subscribing to sources contrasting their own ideologies. And any experienced RSS user will understand the stress of out-of-control unread counts, which easily leads to the crumbling of your RSS-based reading system.
You may be like, “well, I’m nimble at selecting non-biased sources and spend a health time on my RSS feed.” Congrats, but one as rational and restrained as you is also unlikely to be solicited or tricked by News Feed. On the other way, you can’t expect one inclined to be biased and addicted to crappy stories to become less so just by using RSS instead.
And that’s without mentioning the high technical barrier of RSS that filters ordinary users away. For many popular content providers, there’s no full text output, even no conspicuous feed address. Shall I suggest my mom switching to RSS and subscribing to her favorite WeChat official accounts by setting up an Linux server running web crawler? I haven’t be nerdy enough to do that.
I do love the simplicity and transparency of RSS but don’t really think something invented in the 1990s can solve the problem of 2010s and decades to come. When the density of information available reaches a certain bar, you have to turn to something like algorithm. Being arbitrary and black-boxed is not inherently a problem. Haven’t we been happy with the works of DJs, curators, and food writers? What can be more arbitrary and black-boxed than we human? What needs be changed the most is not the tool people use to get information, but the mindset with which people live with the torrent of information in such a post-scarcity era of contents.
Do not follow newspapers through RSS. That's the golden advice. Most often they have daily or weekly digest newsletters (NY Times and Guardian has excellent ones), use them instead. More generically, use periodical digests for high-volume news sources, and RSS for following websites that post anything less frequent than a couple or so times a day.
All of the things you mentioned there, is basically a reason why I started Feedpresso. After GReader was shut down, and after I got pissed with unread counts from a local newspaper on Feedly, I've put some basic probabilistic machine learning together to "avoid a mess" (what a strange thing to do - to avoid a mess, you start an even bigger one :-D).
One thing led to another, and I have to say Feedpresso is a pretty decent reader that is easy to use (my dad uses it without knowing what's RSS) compared to the most of the RSS readers available.
My feeling is that this problem about content and updates boils down to a mix of a few things: - following local and international news - following writers that produce high-quality industry-specific content - how do I get that conveniently in one place? - how should I not lose sanity and hours of time doing that?
And you are right about the amount of the content. It extremely magnifies the mess.
Also, let's not forget the whole hell with ad-incentives that make publishers produce lots of low-quality content (with ad-bloat) just to get a few extra page views (impressions). I would even argue that "free content" and ad-incentives is what ruined the regular news, and it is what drives most of the stupid viral content on FB.
Anyway, give Feedpresso a go - maybe it will stick. PM me for a discount at tadas@feedpresso.com .
Well it's a protocol. Just as we have better e-mail clients than we used to, we can have better ways of dealing with feeds. Part of the push to re-establish RSS is the hope of more services exposing more and better RSS feeds to be consumed.
One of the solutions I saw on a local traffic alert site was that you could create a personalized feed URL which would only send you a notification when e.g. here is an accident on that specific road.
This might be useful to solve the prioritization problem if you could create a custom feed based on your interests. Secondly this also provides the newspaper with some sort of analytics to incorporate "relevant ads" in the feed (I know I'm playing the devil's advocate here)
Three steps:
1. Make sure your browser has the feed detector enabled. It used to be standard, now you need to go into settings and configure it.
2. Surf normally.
3. When you see interesting content and the Feed icon goes active, click on it. Now you've added a feed.
Eventually you should categorize and prune your feeds, but this is a good start.