A point not mentioned was Dave Winer's refusal to clarify if excerpts in his version of RSS feed needed to be plain text or contain HTML (either as HTML tags or entity encoded). He just kept saying "Keep it simple, people!"
I type prose naturally with curly quotes (I love my Compose key!), and the fact that they aren’t as commonly mangled as straight quotes has been a nice bonus. (OK, so occasionally it’ll become mojibake, but I find that to be rarer than improper HTML entity encoding, for the last few years.)
I think you misunderstood the point there. Facebook and Twitter is what drives traffic for The Onion. They can and do syndicate via RSS. But it doesn't help them reach most of their readers.
From a user’s standpoint, who cares? Just because most people don’t use RSS, doesn’t really matter. Every continuously updated news site and blogging site still supports it - as well as HN.
Once I start finding sites that don’t support RSS, then I worry.
I mean, care about whatever you want to. I find it odd that someone who doesn't care posts in an RSS-related thread, but maybe you post about things you don't care about all of the time.
But if you care about what content is available, if you care about how people who create work you enjoy are able to make a living about it, if you care about things like who's the president of the US. Then it might behoove you to care about the fact that between them, Google, Twitter and Facebook control the majority of the referral traffic for the most popular 100 websites. A future where RSS prevailed over social media as a way of curating content for most people is a different world than the one we live in, and if you care about the world you live in, you might care about why RSS didn't prevail, even if it's still usable for the minority who prefer it.
I mean, care about whatever you want to. I find it odd that someone who doesn't care posts in an RSS-related thread, but maybe you post about things you don't care about all of the time.
Reread my post. There is a difference between caring about whether the majority of users are using RSS and caring about whether publishers are creating RSS feeds.
I specifically said “Once I start finding sites that don’t support RSS then I worry.”
I still use it every day. I run a python script through Cron that parses a list of feeds and caches new items in a sqlite database. Then it pulls the most recent 100 items out of the database and generates a static html page in which I read them
Also use it every day, but there is something to be said about the issues with it, mainly that it’s invisible to most people. It’s very much a techie thing and I think the only reason it’s still around is because it’s default in a lot of site software. It’d be interesting to see what kind of engagement larger news organizations get from RSS links.
that's a really general statement but I'm going to bite. Tech need not be up front and in everybody's face. I think HTTP is the same. It seems reasonable that most people don't know or care what http is or what it's doing at the beginning of urls. Or why it sometimes has an 's' on the end. And I'm even more confident saying that 'most people' don't know about how amazing TCP over IP is.
I'd like RSS/feeds of strongly typed content to be more invisible and prevalent. We're living in the HTML dark ages here.
This is a very odd comparison and I think a straw man, unless you just misunderstand. Everything you mention is internal plumbing, so of course people don’t need to care about it, by design. HTTP however does have a very “in your face” interface, which are the hypertext links themselves. People know the system exists because it is actually right there in their face. In RSS, maybe the xml is the plumbing, but there’s no clear and obvious way to access it, so much so that most people wouldn’t even know it exists. It’s hard to build and justify a system if a majority of people have no idea about it.
If the /rss query always return the current front page order articles, then I wonder how RSS subscription services work to mark some of them read and some not.
Should probably need to know how RSS actually works.
Did you read it or get a link to it? That's a subtle but important difference. I love RSS and it seems to be available every where I want it to be, even if it's a bit hidden, but it's almost always just links, maybe a snippet. The only exception in my current list is Planet GNU.
By-passes most soft paywalls. No Javascript. No Tracking. No 'social' media buttons. No modal dialogs. Just text you can read in a terminal based rss reader like canto.
On occasion I have needed to use a site parser like rss-bridge but honestly it's so rare that a site doesn't have rss (albeit often hidden from view). Just a hint for people searching for rss feeds the most common I find are:
I tried using twitter to get news before. But the news magazines I subscribed to on twitter tweeted out the same article more than once. It was rather frustrating.
Also nowadays they manipulate what you see. From one source you like you might only get 1 out of 100 posts into your stream, and another source you don't care so much about you get 10.
RSS is a nice format, but it'd be even nicer as json.
Recently had a client that needed me to read their RSS feed into email templates and update their template after they switched their email service. First time working with RSS. 10/10, would do so again.
I recently added support for JSON feed in my feed reader and blog. After playing with it for a while, I doubt it will be a wildly supported standard.
- It is really just RSS/Atom wrapped in JSON. Sure it changes a few names, makes some elements mandatory and other elements optional but overall it does not attempt to fix core problems (consistent item IDs to avoid reruns, embedding messy HTML with relative links...).
- Besides a dozen of JSON feeds mentioned in the documentation or in the Github repo, there are very few feeds published in the wild.
- Its authors seem to have kind of given up already, a lot of open issues and PRs but not much happening.
Don't get me wrong, I'd like a successor to come and fix the issues that RSS and Atom have but this successor would need much more traction than what JSON feed has.
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 Feedity - https://feedity.com, a growing startup that helps with custom feeds for unstructured sources like webpages.
I've been wondering why Feedly, which I use exclusively to follow webcomics, has been hammering me with ad copy about "the news you need to stay on the cutting edge" lately.
(RSS is, like, objectively the best way to follow multiple webcomics. I don't understand why it's not more popular.)
I use RSS for webcomics as well as visiting the actual websites, but a few things:
1. You miss out on the aesthetics each comic's website brings to the table
2. Sometimes you miss things like "hidden panels" or blog posts you're interested in.
3. No advertisement money going towards the artists (Not a big deal if you support them by buying merch and the comics don't need a lot of bandwidth)
I would really love to develop a reader that focused on webcomics, having both a dynamically curated section as well as all of your subscribed comics. Newspaper-like layout. Customized borders around each comic to add back some of the flair each comic's website offers. Quick links to the artist's blog/website/comic permalink. Text/image-only advertisements interleaved between comics, with 100% revenue going back to artists. Even merch advertisements which occasionally appear under an artist's comic, offering links to their storefronts.
Basically an open source Funny Papers for the web, which would offer content discovery for artists through its curated/related sections, as well as revenue from advertisements. It would update daily and could be used to follow both new and old comics serially.
I just need someone to help me build it because I'm juggling too many things to devote all of my attention to it.
I don't think 1., 2., and 3. is applicable to at least how I use my RSS reader. Also, I don't understand why that is not the norm...
The way I use my RSS reader is that I scroll through the list of posts, and if it's something I wish to check back on later, I press the shortcut to send it to instapaper, and if it's something I wish to check now, I press the shortcut to open it in a new tab, and then I go on. When I'm done, all posts have been marked as read, and then I have a few tabs open that I immediately check out, and a few links in instapaper that I check out later. I never actually read an article or a comic or a video in my reader. It's terrible interface, I find. I much rather check out the actual website. I do the exact same for instapaper; open in a new tab and archive the link.
It sounds like you are using RSS as a way to generalize your access to each provider, but only as a delivery mechanism. The viewing is still done in the browser.
With the exception of web apps / extensions, it's my understanding that RSS feeds were originally meant to be consumed by a program specifically optimized for handling feeds, instead of a bloated, slow, unsafe web browser.
In the end, your RSS flow could mostly be replaced by a set of live bookmarks in your bookmark toolbar, then you wouldn't even have to leave the browser. Plus you would get easy multi-platform synchronization of your feeds. A hell of a lot easier than running an RSS reader on a private server like a lot of us.
Well, that might be the intention, but I have never experienced an "RSS Reader" that have left me with the want to actually consume the content inside it. I much prefer opening say an article in a browser and reading it with "reader mode" if it has bad text-layout.
Also, my RSS reader is just a web app, not a native application, so when I get through my list of new posts in my feeds, I'm already in the browser.
> (RSS is, like, objectively the best way to follow multiple webcomics. I don't understand why it's not more popular.)
The core feature of RSS is that it takes content and moves it from a site the publisher controls and into one the reader controls. This is immensely valuable to readers! It's perhaps less valuable to publishers, however.
Many publishers invest significantly in adding value to and gaining value from their websites. Advertisements, links to other sites, merchandise sales, etc. Almost all of those vanish when you feed only the core content to readers through RSS.
With all that in mind, publishers have ample reason to not invest in RSS. The economics of it are not kind to them.
If the "economic" publishers all agree to be monetized and harvested by Facebook and Google, this could be a self-correcting dynamic.
The only people left using RSS will be the classic web of independent readers and writers, who are still free to donate directly to each other with only a payment processor as middleparty.
At the same time, it's worth considering that those publishers are often much worse off when they escape the cat's malicious paws. More than one newspaper has learned this to their considerable sorrow.
Tangentially, this is also a great argument in music business discussions against the finality of Spotify, Youtube and other centralized streaming platforms. People are doing just fine consuming podcast RSS feeds using players when the UX is smooth; there's no reason why that couldn't be the case for music or other verticals in general (direct artist-to-fan).
Problem with video is still bandwidth and the fact that it is more difficult to distribute.
For podcasts you need one mp3, usually quite compressed. For video you usually need more than one source, adaptable stream quality and good seeking (because most people do not watch videos end to end but only view parts of it).
This is probably not insurmountable but I guess we need better tools for creators to abstract all of this.
This is already solved by HLS - all you'd need is a .m3u8 file in the feed. Industry insistence on DRM issues is what's preventing it from taking off, but "indies" could do it.
That's quite interesting. Do you have more stuff to read about it? I never really used podcasts so I always wondered how people listen to it and assumed people use spotify or something like that.
Since the discussion about RSS is popping up every month now, I'll just repeat myself that RSS is still doing great in terms of publisher support. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17684481
Any casual HN browser has seen the scores of "Google is evil... and they killed Reader!" comments endemic to the discussions of any produt release or shuttering by the former tech darling. It was just a matter of time before some smart reader figured out how to leverage the sentiment with code and vc funding. Thats what we do.
I might be biased here as i've built a news aggregator/RSS reader (https://aktu.io) but imho RSS was and still is the best way to get news from sources you like.
This is so obvious when you compare RSS to social platforms... I mean Facebook was great to share stuff with your friends and get updates but now it's become a huge mess where you get a little bit of everything, you're not even sure you'll ever see all the publications from sources you like/follow thanks to obscure algorithms, and to make things worse, priority is given to images and videos...
As long as those sources have an RSS feed (that is usable, looking at you Medium), sure. But, most sources that _most_ people (not geeks) like... don't.
The comment above where someone said "RSS isn't dead, I have a business scraping pages to make RSS feeds when they didn't have one already"... yeah, exactly.
I recently built a new OPML set of feeds from scratch, in different areas like Linux, ham radio, science, general news, and shopping/deals. Easily 95% of these sites offered RSS or Atom feeds. The main offenders were national news sites, for which there were plenty of alternatives.
Only a couple are available yet annoying, like the forum at eham.net, which offers a feed that essentially gets you unsorted forum replies mixed in with new topics. So every day's updates are full of "Re:" entries. Anyway that's been the only speed bump so far. I was surprised.
Also, since I monitor niche subreddits on Reddit, their generalized feed availability means I can automatically get amazingly wide access to a variety of niche topics (e.g. shorthand writing).
Part of my experiment was aimed at figuring out whether RSS is useful to me. It really is, though careful culling of unwanted or unneeded feeds is important. It's kind of like maintaining a plain-HTML links page. Still valuable in its simplicity, but also requiring ongoing refinements to continue to be useful.
yep RSS sure isn't the most user friendly solution, and i guess it's always been the problem #1 with RSS.
But it's getting better, or at least not worse?, there's now many good web-based RSS readers that do a great job at helping people find and subscribe to sources but it's still not facebook-easy.
by the way, i'm trying with Aktu to improve the RSS experience, well at least mine :-)
I've always missed a few things that i tried to add to the platform. I mostly wanted to reduce the noise in my feeds and i also wanted to have a way to be exposed to news outside my feeds.
So i built Aktu in a way that same-story articles are automatically grouped together, which helps reduce the noise: instead of having 10 articles about Apple's new hardware event showing up in my feeds, i now have just one big story with references to all the articles... So at the same time, if i want, i can now easily check tens of arictles about that story, articles from my own feeds but also from sources i don't follow.
There's a lot of features that i plan on adding but i'm open to suggestions and would love to hear from longtime RSS users what cool features would be great to add!
Hey, just looked at Aktu and I was very impressed with the great job you've done! How long have you been working on it? What's the tech stack you're using? Would love to hear the details.
Not sure HN qualifies as a social platform, and i got there through RSS anyway :-)
Used to love Slashdot, now spending more time on HN too i guess and following some reddits through RSS. I even follow some Facebook pages through RSS so i minimize the time and energy spent on FB.
These both serve different purposes. RSS is for sources you like and want to see everything from. Social aggregators are for getting exposed to things from sites you're not already aware of or aren't usually interested in.
I want to read every XKCD comic, so I subscribe to its RSS feed. I like to read a little tech news when I'm bored, so I go to Hacker News.
Almost all stories I comment on have at some point appeared in the HN RSS Feed, which contains basically stories that appear on the frontpage. Since I poll every 5 minute I also catch a lot of stories that only briefly are frontpage.
RSS reader is used mostly as a updater of the source/site who I care about. When I read, I most of time would still go to the site but RSS allows me to quickly get a summary if I'm interested to go to the page. This is to me the best use of RSS reader, is to keep in touch with the sources. Not much a reader per se.
This article is quite a poor example of the issue you are referring to - it's quite a detailed look at the technical history of RSS - but I love your regex spam queries.
Ask HN: $question_where_the_answer_is_my_own_business is my personal favourite.
Understood - that's also the name of the actual article, although on reflection this article is a bit weirder then your average click bait.
Normally a rise and fall, etc, is only a title looking for eyeballs - what's most odd about this otherwise well researched article is that the last two paragraphs actually proclaim RSS's death, when this is clearly not the case. It's not as prominent without a flagship corporate app like google reader, as noted by the author, but it's nearly everywhere and there are a large number of very usable readers on mobile.
It is a good argument against corporate walled gardens, however.
This is really good, this story of RSS ends up being a representative illustrative example (synecdoche?) of a couple interesting themes in "what's happened with the internet".
As I point out occasionally, most hard news sources have RSS feeds. The New York Times, Reuters, the BBC, CNN, and Fox News all have RSS feeds. The Hill, Roll Call, and Politico have RSS feeds. The Congressional leadership has an RSS feed. NASA and the ESA have RSS feeds. The National Weather Service has RSS feeds. New York City and the LAPD have RSS feeds.
If it matters, it's probably in an RSS feed. It's social media blithering that's left out. And ads.
Stuff that the creator/producer wants syndicated will probably have an RSS feed still. As social media platforms benefit from content lock in as opposed to syndication, the publisher (the platform) has no incentive to offer RSS.
I am not particularly bothered by the lack of RSS on social platforms.
I dont know if that’s true. If I could consume Facebook via RSS, I might follow it a bot more. When I wanted to respond or like, I would have to switch to the app.
You just answer your own question? With RSS you'd only use app when you feel like to involve, but social media platforms generally want you to stay in the app, hence no incentives.
You used to be able to do that. The problem (from fb's point of view) as the sibling comment points out is that you'd never visit facebook.com unless you wanted to actually wanted to interact with the content.
you still can follow public FB pages with RSS. It needs some HTML parsing but it's doable.
To make it easier i've added the feature to aktu.io and i'm following a few FB pages of websites that don't have RSS...
FB couldn't collect data on your usage from an RSS feed, which is what they use to drive their advertising platform, which you are also not participating in. So having you read outside of FBs site or app is not in their best interests.
Twitter used to have RSS feeds for every user. I still follow a few accounts using code that converts them to RSS but I probably would not have bothered if I didn't already have a Twitter API key.
No, they don't have an official list of RSS feeds for all categories, like Reuters[1] and others do. There's no way to follow bloomberg.com/markets via RSS, for instance.
I agree, I don't know where this idea that RSS died is coming from. RSS seems to be doing just fine. I use Feedly to subscribe to dozens of feeds. Before that I used Google Reader. I subscribe to more feeds now than I did then.
Back in 2006 I wrote an extremely detailed history of some of the infighting that shaped the history of RSS. It was a popular article at the time. For anyone interested in this bit of history, written at a formative moment, the article is here:
I still use RSS to power my little podcast syndication platform.
While I was building it I did notice it had become harder to find a poscasts RSS feed but they definitely all still used it. I suspect it is used more as a business to business/platform to platform transport these days.
Certainly beats building thirty API integrations for people who want to roll their own syndication for their podcast.
But one comment that I heard again and again is: It's meaningless to build a podcast search engine, because Google and Apple can easily build something similar :)
Awesome! It looks like you are the creator, I have some questions regarding licensing and copyright I have had trouble finding the answer to.
As the episodes are syndicated it seems reasonable to "rebroadcast" the episode on your site, but the terms and conditions for many podcasts (example 99 Percent Invisible) seem to suggest that is breaching their usage rights.
Have you looked into this at all and did you find similar issues?
191 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 265 ms ] threadI still use it every day, its a vital part of my controlling what info I see every day process...
http://www.rssboard.org/rss-encoding-examples
https://www.theonion.com/rss
That didn't take long to find. Why use that as an example?
Once I start finding sites that don’t support RSS, then I worry.
But if you care about what content is available, if you care about how people who create work you enjoy are able to make a living about it, if you care about things like who's the president of the US. Then it might behoove you to care about the fact that between them, Google, Twitter and Facebook control the majority of the referral traffic for the most popular 100 websites. A future where RSS prevailed over social media as a way of curating content for most people is a different world than the one we live in, and if you care about the world you live in, you might care about why RSS didn't prevail, even if it's still usable for the minority who prefer it.
Reread my post. There is a difference between caring about whether the majority of users are using RSS and caring about whether publishers are creating RSS feeds.
I specifically said “Once I start finding sites that don’t support RSS then I worry.”
And probably also: Are you aware that the request to work in email somehow is a joke with about 90% certainty?
Also... that website proudly displays an RSS feed button on every page.
"WordPress powers 31% of the internet.", according to wordpress.com and Wordpress has RSS built in and ON by default.
that's a really general statement but I'm going to bite. Tech need not be up front and in everybody's face. I think HTTP is the same. It seems reasonable that most people don't know or care what http is or what it's doing at the beginning of urls. Or why it sometimes has an 's' on the end. And I'm even more confident saying that 'most people' don't know about how amazing TCP over IP is.
I'd like RSS/feeds of strongly typed content to be more invisible and prevalent. We're living in the HTML dark ages here.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
* https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/
Should probably need to know how RSS actually works.
https://github.com/damng/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content
This generates an RSS feed with the contents of the articles inlined and available at https://damng.github.io/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content/...
By-passes most soft paywalls. No Javascript. No Tracking. No 'social' media buttons. No modal dialogs. Just text you can read in a terminal based rss reader like canto.
https://github.com/feediron/ttrss_plugin-feediron
On occasion I have needed to use a site parser like rss-bridge but honestly it's so rare that a site doesn't have rss (albeit often hidden from view). Just a hint for people searching for rss feeds the most common I find are:
/rss
/rss.xml
/feed
/feed.xml
/index.php/feed
/index?format=xml
Recently had a client that needed me to read their RSS feed into email templates and update their template after they switched their email service. First time working with RSS. 10/10, would do so again.
Already a standard! https://jsonfeed.org/
- It is really just RSS/Atom wrapped in JSON. Sure it changes a few names, makes some elements mandatory and other elements optional but overall it does not attempt to fix core problems (consistent item IDs to avoid reruns, embedding messy HTML with relative links...).
- Besides a dozen of JSON feeds mentioned in the documentation or in the Github repo, there are very few feeds published in the wild.
- Its authors seem to have kind of given up already, a lot of open issues and PRs but not much happening.
Don't get me wrong, I'd like a successor to come and fix the issues that RSS and Atom have but this successor would need much more traction than what JSON feed has.
I'm speaking from my own experience running Feedity - https://feedity.com, a growing startup that helps with custom feeds for unstructured sources like webpages.
(RSS is, like, objectively the best way to follow multiple webcomics. I don't understand why it's not more popular.)
1. You miss out on the aesthetics each comic's website brings to the table
2. Sometimes you miss things like "hidden panels" or blog posts you're interested in.
3. No advertisement money going towards the artists (Not a big deal if you support them by buying merch and the comics don't need a lot of bandwidth)
I would really love to develop a reader that focused on webcomics, having both a dynamically curated section as well as all of your subscribed comics. Newspaper-like layout. Customized borders around each comic to add back some of the flair each comic's website offers. Quick links to the artist's blog/website/comic permalink. Text/image-only advertisements interleaved between comics, with 100% revenue going back to artists. Even merch advertisements which occasionally appear under an artist's comic, offering links to their storefronts.
Basically an open source Funny Papers for the web, which would offer content discovery for artists through its curated/related sections, as well as revenue from advertisements. It would update daily and could be used to follow both new and old comics serially.
I just need someone to help me build it because I'm juggling too many things to devote all of my attention to it.
The way I use my RSS reader is that I scroll through the list of posts, and if it's something I wish to check back on later, I press the shortcut to send it to instapaper, and if it's something I wish to check now, I press the shortcut to open it in a new tab, and then I go on. When I'm done, all posts have been marked as read, and then I have a few tabs open that I immediately check out, and a few links in instapaper that I check out later. I never actually read an article or a comic or a video in my reader. It's terrible interface, I find. I much rather check out the actual website. I do the exact same for instapaper; open in a new tab and archive the link.
With the exception of web apps / extensions, it's my understanding that RSS feeds were originally meant to be consumed by a program specifically optimized for handling feeds, instead of a bloated, slow, unsafe web browser.
In the end, your RSS flow could mostly be replaced by a set of live bookmarks in your bookmark toolbar, then you wouldn't even have to leave the browser. Plus you would get easy multi-platform synchronization of your feeds. A hell of a lot easier than running an RSS reader on a private server like a lot of us.
Also, my RSS reader is just a web app, not a native application, so when I get through my list of new posts in my feeds, I'm already in the browser.
The core feature of RSS is that it takes content and moves it from a site the publisher controls and into one the reader controls. This is immensely valuable to readers! It's perhaps less valuable to publishers, however.
Many publishers invest significantly in adding value to and gaining value from their websites. Advertisements, links to other sites, merchandise sales, etc. Almost all of those vanish when you feed only the core content to readers through RSS.
With all that in mind, publishers have ample reason to not invest in RSS. The economics of it are not kind to them.
The only people left using RSS will be the classic web of independent readers and writers, who are still free to donate directly to each other with only a payment processor as middleparty.
At the same time, it's worth considering that those publishers are often much worse off when they escape the cat's malicious paws. More than one newspaper has learned this to their considerable sorrow.
So, more Americans use RSS every month than use Twitter.
For podcasts you need one mp3, usually quite compressed. For video you usually need more than one source, adaptable stream quality and good seeking (because most people do not watch videos end to end but only view parts of it).
This is probably not insurmountable but I guess we need better tools for creators to abstract all of this.
A 'podcatcher' (ie whatever app downloads it) is downloading the 'enclosure' url (which can point to any type of media) of the latest RSS 'item'.
Yes! Check out the deck and video from Edison Research's "The Podcast Consumer 2018" at http://www.edisonresearch.com/podcast-consumer-2018/.
The comment above where someone said "RSS isn't dead, I have a business scraping pages to make RSS feeds when they didn't have one already"... yeah, exactly.
Only a couple are available yet annoying, like the forum at eham.net, which offers a feed that essentially gets you unsorted forum replies mixed in with new topics. So every day's updates are full of "Re:" entries. Anyway that's been the only speed bump so far. I was surprised.
Also, since I monitor niche subreddits on Reddit, their generalized feed availability means I can automatically get amazingly wide access to a variety of niche topics (e.g. shorthand writing).
Part of my experiment was aimed at figuring out whether RSS is useful to me. It really is, though careful culling of unwanted or unneeded feeds is important. It's kind of like maintaining a plain-HTML links page. Still valuable in its simplicity, but also requiring ongoing refinements to continue to be useful.
I honestly have never used a feed aggregator, I used Slashdot, then Reddit, and now a mix of Reddit and HN.
Having a filter of some sort is really useful.
I want to read every XKCD comic, so I subscribe to its RSS feed. I like to read a little tech news when I'm bored, so I go to Hacker News.
I 'consume' other people's thoughts and opinions via HN, after 'consuming' the story via my feed.
Different purposes.
. $x is dead
. the rise and fall of $x
. new battery breakthrough claims to $x
. Ask HN: $question_where_the_answer_is_my_own_business
. <Google|Apple> <unveils|retires> create_rand_product_name($technology)
. Study reveals random_food() <increases|decreases> risk of random_quality()
. <any string of english words that contains "Machine Learning" or "AI">
. A random_quality() RayTracer in random_tech()
. ??? suggestions welcome
This would then force hn to have some sort of filtering/moderation.
Randy's law 247: The easiest way to fix a non-trivial system is to abuse it.
Ask HN: $question_where_the_answer_is_my_own_business is my personal favourite.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18002503
Normally a rise and fall, etc, is only a title looking for eyeballs - what's most odd about this otherwise well researched article is that the last two paragraphs actually proclaim RSS's death, when this is clearly not the case. It's not as prominent without a flagship corporate app like google reader, as noted by the author, but it's nearly everywhere and there are a large number of very usable readers on mobile.
It is a good argument against corporate walled gardens, however.
If it matters, it's probably in an RSS feed. It's social media blithering that's left out. And ads.
I am not particularly bothered by the lack of RSS on social platforms.
You used to be able to do that. The problem (from fb's point of view) as the sibling comment points out is that you'd never visit facebook.com unless you wanted to actually wanted to interact with the content.
Apparently Mastodon generates an Atom RSS feed for every user, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16755553
Link: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/rss/contributors/matt-levine....
Oh, and there's also this https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/feeds/site.xml
http://www.newslookup.com/rss/business/bloomberg.rss
[1] https://www.reuters.com/tools/rss
http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-...
While I was building it I did notice it had become harder to find a poscasts RSS feed but they definitely all still used it. I suspect it is used more as a business to business/platform to platform transport these days.
Certainly beats building thirty API integrations for people who want to roll their own syndication for their podcast.
Or use the API: https://www.listennotes.com/api/
How is the audience feedback so far?
June, 2018: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/listen-notes-3-0
Dec, 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15825900
But one comment that I heard again and again is: It's meaningless to build a podcast search engine, because Google and Apple can easily build something similar :)
As the episodes are syndicated it seems reasonable to "rebroadcast" the episode on your site, but the terms and conditions for many podcasts (example 99 Percent Invisible) seem to suggest that is breaching their usage rights.
Have you looked into this at all and did you find similar issues?