For example I have a Kobo eReader (Glo HD) and I like to read on it and unfortunately there is no builtin RSS reader app available for it but it does support Pocket natively. My workaround is to either monitor some RSS feeds with specific keywords in IFTTT, and send the URL article to my Pocket account, which in turns get synced to my Kobo every night.
I also want to get notified right away for articles that use a specific keyword, so I have other applets that will send an IFTTT rich notification to my phone with the link to the article.
Or you know, I have some other RSS feed I use with a torrent client to automatically fetch "stuff", and once the download is completed, I configured the torrent client to send an HTTP POST request with the torrent title to IFTTT, which in turn send me a push notification to let me know a download was completed.
I found this via RSS feed to (inoreader). I simply couldn't live without RSS and don't think I'd want to. When I find new sites I always try to find their public (or secret) RSS feed but if none then they usually get ignored.
I just wish Mozilla introduce subscribing to RSS as a first class feature in Firefox. If they can introduce and integrate Pocket, I think an open technology like RSS deserves a fair chance. But they'd need to invest a little bit to make it easy to subscribe—similar to following on Twitter/Instagram or Liking pages on Facebook—to receive site updates. Having to find and enter byzantine URLs is not the way to go although personally, I do not have any trouble doing that as I have been using RSS and feed readers for more than a decade, but that is not the case for everyone.
I just wish some consortium of like minded companies like NYT/WaPo/Guardian/BBCs/Other national dailies, Reddit, Mozilla, and even Microsoft can huddle together and come up with a new name/identity and spread it and popularise it. One can always wish.
As one commentator said in the linked article: protocols are better than platforms.
Edit: The issue here is not about obtaining the feature with add-ons and extensions, which there are many. When the focus of the organisation is on something idealistic (open web), is it too much to expect them to add it to the core of the product?
Would like to see more effort in this area too. There was some work done a few years back at https://www.subtome.com/ to make subscribing to RSS feeds easier.
Totally agree! Subtome was a great project but it lack updates. I talked weeks ago with @julien51, it's creator, and he told me that it didn't have time maintaining it but he would integer contributions.
Can anyone comment on why Mozilla is integrating dodgy services like Pocket and now some ill-conceived screenshot web locker? Is it just hunger for data as revenue?
Conspiracy Theory: Mozilla wanted to acquire the service from the beginning, but before doing so they would integrate it beforehand to stir up some drama, devalue it a little bit and buy it for less.
It was an easy and simple way to get into RSS. I used to use it quite a bit. Just the effort of finding an RSS reader is enough to turn people off the service. Compare to Twitter, which exists on all platforms. I don't think we can underestimate the interface problem for RSS.
I actually used it considerably for my news site bookmarks on my bookmarks bar. It was great for just catching up on the day’s headline. It’s a feature I sorely miss.
> The "rss support" was a folder, filled with links named after the article titles.
You're describing the "live bookmarks" feature, which was only one part of the RSS functionality that was removed from Firefox. I never used live bookmarks, but I used the feed discovery and subscription functionality all the time -- only some of which can now be restored with addons.
They also removed the ability to preview RSS feeds, which is annoying because one of the few certain ways to subscribe to a feed was to preview it and then hit subscribe in whatever addon you were using.
In the past it was even possible to subscribe with whatever addon you prefered from the firefox RSS preview directly, but that was already lost after the jump to WebExtensions.
You are describing the majority of rss readers. Newsboat could be said to be a folder, with a file inside called urls. Sure it's actually more than that, but that's the part you interact with.
There is an add-on called Awesome RSS [1] that brings back the web feed icon to the address bar. It doesn't implement the "live bookmarks" feature though, but you can use some external reader such as Newsboat [2] which will also let you read the content of the articles.
I was looking at this the other day[0] I actually think Brief[1] might even be better than the RSS support that was in Firefox. I haven't tried it yet but I intend to.
I use Thunderbird as well, and that has RSS support but to me that seems counter to my workflow. Typically I'll be on some site and want to subscribe, and then view in my browser. Doesn't really make sense to be in an email client.
Awesome RSS is a great extension, and is compatible again with Firefox 64+ and now adds direct subscription feature to Feedly, Inoreader, NextCloud Reader and even Tiny Tiny RSS (or universal feed display.
https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/
Another great new extension is Want My RSS because it's compatible with 10 RSS readers for direct subscribtion (you can add your own when you have a self-hosted reader for example). Feed detection and feed display is also great!
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/want-my-rss/
Yeah, I didn't know this because I run a customized nightly I forked, so I'll be keen on keeping all the files relating to this feature when I eventually merge with the upstream nightly so I can still have my cake and eat it too.
I discuss it with one dev contributor of Mozilla and they say that they didn't want to loose time maintaining Live Bookmarks. And the Live Bookmarks was underused. RSS is no more a prioritary subject.
The problem is that they don't only suppress Live Bookmarks, they suppress all the ability to manage (I mean detect and display) RSS feeds... and that's terrible!
The decisions that Mozilla comes to when it comes to Firefox sometime puzzles me... but overall, Firefox is still my #1. It was probably more work to remove RSS then to keep it... but either way, it used to be my favorite way to find a page's RSS link (but I disabled Firefox' telemetry and similar reporting tools, so i blame myself a bit too)
Re-introduce, not introduce. Firefox not only used to do a fine job of displaying RSS feeds, it also simply displayed an RSS icon in the URL bar (if the page had the respective link elements HTML header) from which you could subscribe to all the provided feeds. There certainly was room for improvement, but still, they had it, and they canned it. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks
Thunderbird is still a mighty fine RSS reader though.
I've been wondering if the recent addition of AMP to Gmail as precursor to Gmail having RSS integration. I know I'm delusional but it feels good to think there might be a push back to RSS reading in a Google product.
I wish there was pushback against the notion of "hoping" and "wishing" for companies to do the right thing. Companies should be more afraid of the ire of informed customers informing other customers, than of competition, that's the delusion I live in... they should worry about having done too little, too late, instead of us always keeping an ever slimmer hope for ever smaller breadcrumbs alive.
I use the Awesome RSS addon [1] to get the icon in the URL bar back. Also RSSPreview [2] to see whether the feed actually contains what I want to subscribe to. The previous integration where you could add the feed to Thunderbird directly from Firefox with a single click was much better, though.
Thank you for sharing this! I had not encountered an RSS addon with 'subscribe' functionality before. This addon basically restores everything I wish had not been removed from Firefox.
(It's a shame I couldn't have found this on my own. addons.mozilla.org is unbelievably bad for discovering useful addons. It takes a thread like this to turn you on to the good stuff.)
Firefox had a way to display RSS/Atom feeds earlier which they removed, but it did not allow subscribing to them in any meaningful way other than live bookmarks.
Google failed to gain traction in the social network space with G+. If you can't beat them commoditize them!
Why not make interoperable networks based on open standards first class citizens in chrome/chromium? Not just by adding support but also by helping move the RSS standard forward.
There's plenty of really good solutions around :
1. Online: Inoreader, Feedly, Newsblur Newsbin, The Old Reader, Feeder...
2. Browser extension: the great Feedbro
3. Desktop: Liferea (Linux), QuiteRSS (Windows), Caffeinated, Readki, Reeder (MacOS)
For RSSOwl and RSS Bandit (Windows), there's nothing new for years/
The great FeedDemon (Windows) stopped it's dev years ago.
3. Self-hosted: Tiny Tiny RSS, Fever, Leed, Selfoss
RSS is anti-ads. If people don't leave their reader, they don't visit websites, don't load ads, don't ping tracking services. So any alternative to RSS, content creators relying on ads will fight tooth and nail to not make it mainstream ever.
Mails are also ad-free, and they have no problem showing them in gmail. Same would be possible for newsfeeds. Actually, it would be even simpler, as they know the urls and could link this directly with ads shown in web search or on the specific pages. Though, majority of people using RSS are technical competent people, using adblockers, so likely it would be just pointless.
Yes but with mails, you read... mails. That is what you consume. With readers, you consume content that is most probably there because of potential ad revenue. Yes, RSS is generally used by technical people - but you'd be surprised how many technical people don't use adblocks, sometimes because they don't care and sometimes because they don't think it is ethical to do so. And there always is the possibility that it can evolve into something that is more convenient used by masses. So it is a net negative in terms of revenue.
And I'm not only talking about people that produce readers, but also about content creators. I'm making a site and hoping to turn a profit through ads and my interesting content - why would I want to provide a convenient stripped down version of my website for you to consume - something that is a net negative for my revenue (hosting and transferring data costs money)? Sure, I can provide "excerpts" in RSS, but I'd rather prefer you go to my homepage to see what is new - it is thoroughly AB tested to lure you in, spend some time and see some ads - maybe click one.
The first part of your post puts the priority on having more software that can read a reliable formula, which I think is the opposite way to go, since the forumla is already there can't all browsers do this? Yes, but they have refused up until now, why? Because their focuses is web pages ... Make some hybrid RSS web feed with a universal interface and you have Twitter. Approach it from the software side and you have federated, inconsistent implementations of a reliable formula.
Ton on my plate now trying to focus on shipping mobile and a few other features too.
I like the idea of Polar having data sources that are high quality and that the user can just easily subscribe to specific PDFs, research, or high quality content feeds.
We're also going to add social content discovery which is sort of like a Twitter feed but just people who are annotating content on Polar.
I think polar needs a heuristic evaluation, it takes too many clicks to do certain things. Also, I couldn't figure out how to export a card to anki. Exciting project though, I check back every few months.
I’ve used that for over a decade, but eventually gave up and signed up for NewsBlur so reading on my phone and my laptop would be in sync. It is open source and you can run it yourself but I gave up and let Sam host it for me.
The other in-sync option would be setting up an rss/imap gateway, which is not even available as a SaaS afaik, so would cost about as much in hosting (unless you already have a server you can use) and about 20 times in labor.
Happy paying NewsBlur customer - even though the iOS app is a battery hog.
I always found the feed url in a web browser, copied it, and then added it manually to Thunderbird. Granted, it's not the exact same thing as how Firefox used to do it, but it works well enough once you have all the feeds you want set up.
It does, but! I really want Thunderbird to be good, but the web feed experience is infuriating. If you don't care about open source or you just care plenty about UX, you wouldn't use it for feed reading. (I got started on a list, but it's more like the whole concept needs to be rewritten.)
I was not disappointed to see RSS removed from Firefox, because I want my already too-complex browser to have as limited a set of functions as possible. The more first-class features they remove, the more secure and usable their product will be.
The problem, of course, is that for some people, the removal of those features makes the browser no longer meet their needs. Worse, which features are "critical" varies from person to person.
The flexible answer, of course, would be to have a relatively basic core browser and an extension system powerful enough to allow the features to be implemented that way. Like Firefox used to be. Unfortunately, Mozilla decided to neuter the extensions instead.
> As one commentator said in the linked article: protocols are better than platforms.
You're right! For users this is absolutely true.
Yet, almost all the companies that you might think of as potentially interested in RSS are platforms. You cannot sell ads in a protocol.
This is the core of why Twitter has replaced RSS. RSS is better for users, but Twitter is better for publishers and platforms. So users wind up following content.
Is it perhaps possible that in this particular case, the difference you so wisely point to between a format and a protocol is possessed of a great and bountiful opportunity to be relevant? The discussion at hand is between "protocols" and "platforms", which might otherwise be cast as "standards" and "products".
Again, you're completely correct. It might just be worth considering that in some cases, a distinction without difference can be of limited value to a discussion where it is at best tangential.
There are some things I like to follow on twitter, but I wanted them integrated in my RSS feed setup, so a few months ago I wrote a simple app which gates twitter to rss, and which can be deployed as a Google Cloud Function. If anyone is interested:
I use twitrss.me's perl code to do my own thing locally and I've found that twitter throttles me scraping from my home IP very heavily. I can scrape my twitter users/searches about 3 times per day if I space them out correctly. Any more and the pages just stop returning anything at all.
You can usually click the link to the article which opens it in the browser (if the feed reader itself isn't in the browser to begin with), and if you're logged in to that site (or the commenting system or ID provider they use) you can comment right away.
As for displaying comments along with articles, feeds can reference other feeds, and in theory nothing stops an application or website from from making use of that.
I've implemented displaying of blog posts comments in BazQux Reader (https://bazqux.com) years ago. But in general it works well only for niche sites with good communities. Popular sites have too many spam/bullshit in comments.
BTW: it's possible to read Twitter in RSS reader too and make it a "slow web".
Atom has support for commments. Decentralized blog comments work like this: You post a reply to your own blog and set rel=“in-reply-to” then notify the author using Webmention. The authors blog software then adds the comment, which gets included in the feed. See aaronparecki.com for working example and the IndieWeb community in general for an example of a community doing standard decentralized comments on the web.
RSS has <wfw:commentRss> for linking comments feed and <comments> for linking page with comments. Atom has <link rel=replies> or just <link rel=alternate type="application/atom+xml"> for comment feeds.
And I'm visiting blog post pages first to check whether they have Disqus comments (which processed separately via Disqus API) and <blog_post_URL>/feed feeds.
Yup. To add to that, posting a reply to your own blog and setting rel=“in-reply-to” and notifying the author with Webmention provides standard decentralized comments/notifications. See aaronparecki.com and the indieweb community for examples.
I doubt I'd be privy to the discussions happening on Twitter if they were happening any other way (blogs tried to do it with comments and pingbacks, but that isn't as good as Twitter, and not as open to everyone, since you have to run a blog of your own).
This is the secret sauce for me. In fact, if there were a way to only see conversations in Twitter (and ignore all the posts with no responses) that would have a lot of value for me.
RSS is great for reading, but for conversing, it's not a good fit.
I'm excited about ActivityPub integration in blogs. You can give your site its own Mastodon ("Twitter") account, articles show up as posts and replies show up as comment threads.
The one thing I've been frustrated with using ActivityPub for blogs is that it is push based instead of get based like RSS. Basically it means that the responsibility is on the website owner to send out notifications for new content and maintain a database of subscribers instead of just publishing a feed that people can periodically download to check for new stuff.
While I agree that it's inconvenient on a technical level, I think it's the right choice for a model where publishes are more infrequent. Push-based means you only have to publish N times every time you post something (N is subscribers), and it's instant for subscribers, whereas pull-based means you need to poll every so often M times (M is subscriptions) getting nothing back most of the time, and you get posts with a large delay.
AP also handles everything in hubs. So while you do need to know your subscribes, you don't need to send out 100 notifications for 100 subscribes, you probably only need to send out 10 notifications to 10 servers who will handle the delivery to the recipients.
There is also AP relays which could further reduce the overhead if you simply deliver the content to the relay.
I haven't used Google reader. I do use newsblur, but haven't found the conversation features in there useful. The population is so much smaller than that of twitter.
Mastodon has per-user RSS feeds you can subscribe to but they are non-interactive. For interactive communications ActivityPub is the standard at play and the one to promote.
Let RSS be good at one-way consumption and ActivityPub be good at bi-directional communication.
There is a standard <wfw:commentRss> item that exists in almost any Wordpress blog feed. And my feed reader (https://bazqux.com) supports it for years.
But blog post comments is completely another medium from Twitter. It requires you to sign in and, since comment will be there forever, you usually put more effort in it. So comments are more rare and of higher quality. But at the same time you could sign in as anonymous and put your spam link or some ego bullshit -- which frequently happen on popular sites. So it's very dependent from community.
And if you comment on some blog post only readers of this post will see (and they will know the context). When you comment on Twitter -- anybody could see. Together with 280 character limit this leads to completely different kind of discussion.
The classic relation is a link. Atom has the Atom Threading Extensions, to document conversation in feeds.
One problem of course is notifying the thread starter of new decentralized comments. There were Trackback, Pingback, Webmentions for web pages. For feeds there was the Salmon protocol [2], enabling notification of new comments to swim upstream. According to Google's documentation Salmon would have been an API of Google Buzz. But that started with a privacy scandal and shortly thereafter Google decided they needed their own closed social network. Salmon was later used in OStatus 1, I think.
There was a lot of activity in the 2000s transforming the RSS/Atom ecosystem into something of a decentralized social network. Extensions like Activity Stream for richer data, AtomPub, Salmon, OpenID, Webfinger, PubSubHubbub (now WebSub) to turbocharge feeds with a Publish/Subscribe thingy and a lot more, that I'm now forgetting. The rule of thumb is that the problems stay the same, but the syntax and the name changes.
And yes, if you squint the right way stuff like ActivityPub (Mastodon) and the Indiewebcamp Microformats are practically feeds.
Thank you for information. It seems that Salmon is used in Diaspora so it somehow could work.
> But that started with a privacy scandal
What was the privacy scandal?
> The rule of thumb is that the problems stay the same, but the syntax and the name changes.
What problems are? I suspect that there should be problems with spam as anybody could add their comments (although protocols seems to contain some countermeasures) and maybe some kind of DoS of anybody "posting" too many comments. But what other problems are?
RSS is just a way to list the last articles of a website in a generic way.
It is very far from what Twitter offers, on Twitter you can exchange with people, reply and discuss content (yeah this is not the best way to do it, but you can do it), you can alert people or organization (how many time, thanks to RSS we alerted a company about a bad practice or contacted their customer support ?)
Maybe Twitter is not the best at what it does, and maybe we need something that allow to us to exchange but RSS doesn't provide that.
Don't forget the main thing twitter offers: spamming your notification feed with impossible-to-disable garbage in order to prop up whatever the hell engagement metrics they decided on.
I have basically stopped using it ever since they started doing that.
I completely understand and respect the author's sentiments. However, it is unfair to compare RSS to Twitter. Twitter is a place where anyone and everyone can express their opinions while RSS is a technology and a mechanism to get an updated feed from services and blogs we care about. Most of these blobs and services will be well written or perhaps professionally written articles. These are two very different systems that tap into fundamentally different types of information sources.
In short, RSS is a feed of (mostly) professionally written articles while Twitter is full of amateurs expressing half baked thoughts in 140 characters. It is unfair to compare the two.
That feels kind of like a historical circumstance. I could easily imagine something based on RSS where people just express small blurbs like on Twitter. Heck, I've even thought about abandoning Twitter's UIs and creating RSS feeds for all the people I follow. At least then I'd be able to get chronological ordering and read/unread markers on tweets that way
An RSS feed is an XML file that lives under some URL. The RSS reader (or aggregator) polls that URL periodically and picks up new items that have appeared.
It's like a web page, itemized into a very regular syntax.
If you want to "tweet" using RSS, you need a URL somewhere where you can upload updates to XML content; then give people that URL.
Either you have to join some website where content (like blogs) you create are exported as RSS feeds, or else run your own domain.
What part of my comment made it seem like I need to be educated about what RSS is? I think it would have felt nicer for you to inquire rather than just tell me what RSS is.
I’m saying that it’s easily possible to imagine a world where the uses of RSS vary from what they’re used for today — different from the parent commentor.
Your comment didn't educate HN readers sufficiently; I thought it could use a technical backgrounder which could help others imagine the use cases and trade-offs. (I don't understand the Twitter architecture enough to add that for comparison, but perhaps many readers are more familiar with Twitter than RSS due to its popularity.)
That is by the way not alternative history but where RSS started.
Ok, not directly. First it started as a proto semantic web protocol, at Netscape to syndicate links and titles for their portal.
Then Dave Winer used RSS to syndicate his weblog, scripting.com and started the marriage of blogs and feeds. But blogs at that time were more small paragraphs, less big articles. And every paragraph was syndicated. That's still visible in archives of long running blogs:
… which seems a lot twitter like. The focus on longer articles in blogging is something which started later, in 2001 or so, in my recollection.
Btw: Following those blurb-like RSS feeds in a traditional RSS reader with read markers is overwhelming, in my experience. I banned all those feeds into a "High Volume" folder where I more often than not mark all as read just to get ahead.
I always considered twitter to be a modern global IRC, freenode if you will. At that it is amazing.
Complete with all the problems of spam, overwhelm, etc. You gotta find your people, foster a community, and stay there. I owe a lot of my career to twitter I’d say. It’s an amazing place.
280 characters now, though still too short. There are plenty of professional writers on Twitter.
One problem is that there is too much emphasis on short, witty quips in widely shared tweets. It has everyone going for the witty zinger and that makes conversation shallow and obnoxious. Occasionally there are decent tweetstorms, though.
>>> In short, RSS is a feed of (mostly) professionally written articles while Twitter is full of amateurs expressing half baked thoughts in 140 characters. It is unfair to compare the two.
Given that is true, isn't it "funny" that RSS is now non-existent compared to Twitter? ... I despair at the direction of the web.
A lot of people were using RSS. Then Google found RSS feeds were hurting Google ad revenues and so Google killed it. Since Firefox these days trails Google, it too stopped supporting RSS feeds
I was there during the turndown. As I remember, RSS had almost no impact on revenue positive or negative. That is why Reader was shutdown actually. Because not enough people used it to impact the bottom line and make it worth keeping.
Multiple factors go into the decision to kill a product; Google+ had a much larger investment and profile, it would make sense Google would be more skittish about killing it than Reader.
Lots of things changed between when I started to heavily and systematically consume content online (in about 2006), and today. But one thing didn't: RSS is still the crucial cornerstone of my online content consumption.
For me, RSS never was dead or less relevant than in the past. On the contrary: Since I keep adding feeds on a very regular basis, it's still growing in importance.
Fortunately, 95 % of blogs and media sites still provide RSS feeds. As long as this is the case, RSS will remain crucial to me.
Calling RSS dead only sounded like marketing from media sites as they got scared of being consumed outside of their platform but it was never dead from consumers' perspective.
If you get your own free developer API key, you're allowed to call the "statuses/user_timeline" 1500 times per day. So you can follow 1500 users before getting throttled, if you only want an update a max of once per day. Or 62 users if you need hourly updates. etc.
I usually find RSS feeds by looking at the page source code:
- ctrl+u
- ctrl+f rss
- ctrl+f atom (only if “rss” was not found at step 2).
I can't remember of any site providing RSS on which this hasn't worked. Actually, even for sites that advertise their RSS feed, this approach is the fastest for me (because of the lack of consistency of such advertisements).
Same, except I favor the Atom protocol because from previous research (performed a long time ago, to be fair) it was strictly an improvement over RSS in every regard.
There is a highly-rated extension to automate this, but I've grown to distrust extensions that require "Access your data for all websites", and scouring the page source for the relevant <link> tag is not particularly cumbersome.
I don't use RSS much, but fire it up whenever searching on Craigslist for something. Havning multiple CL searches registered as feeds in a feed reader leads to a much more efficient workflow than using the site directly. The presentation of the items is better: you get something very analogous to an e-mail inbox, in which you can easily delete unwanted items, and hide ones you have read. And all of the multiple searches appear like folders and update automatically; you see a count of new items in each one.
I load in RSS feeds on my HN alternative ( handlr.sapico.me ) , one company is using it as a knowledge feed ( accounting niche). So I definitely agree with the title of this topic.
I've tried to use RSS before, but the big hangup for me is most sites don't put the full article in the feed, just a title and summary. To me having to go back and forth just kills the whole thing.
How many times a day do you visually rescan over the same stuff? The minimal time spent going back and forth (alt+tab) is nothing compared to the time saved never having to reconsider the same headline more than once.
If they go to the same url, any decent reader will recognize it as already marked read. But that's not what I meant. Most news sites have much of the same stuff on the front page for hours, sometimes days. How many times do you skim over that looking for new stuff?
> the big hangup for me is most sites don't put the full article in the feed'
If you're using Android, check out gReader Pro. You can have it automatically download and store the full articles for later reading.
I also run my own RSS aggregator, tt-rss (this is how I replaced Google News after Google ruined it). tt-rss has a plugin that will also download and store the full articles for later reading. It provides its own RSS feed as well as a web interface.
Feedbro Reader has built-in partial->full article conversion engine that lets you get full articles within the reader (must be enabled per-feed basis in Properties). Check it out at https://nodetics.com/feedbro/
RSS actually meant, mostly, that you had to have something worthy of RSS'ing ... a blog, an article, something.
Twitter? any old Joe can just post some bullsh!t that marinated in their minds for -0.5 seconds and that just gets added to Twitter and potentially my timeline.
Yes, RSS is far better than Twitter for some uses. Uses that are actually of value.
> RSS actually meant, mostly, that you had to have something worthy of RSS'ing ... a blog, an article, something.
Exactly this! I really miss the time of the internet before social media, when it was more about quality content then clickbait articles. I was a heavy user of Google Reader until it got shut down, but couldn't find any worthy alternative, so I used Twitter as a news feed reader from then on. It's ok, but it's hard to ignore the noise sometimes.
Openness on its own is not a significant competitive advantage. Twitter provides comments, retweets, and already has friends and celebrities.
RSS is still there on the publishing side for major publishers and all popular blog platforms. So why is it not as popular as email? Maybe individually visiting websites is good enough and maybe that itch is scratched by Twitter.
RSS is fine and good, but it's not comparable to Twitter. Maybe if all you do on Twitter is follow newspapers then it's comparable, but that would be a pretty dumb way to use Twitter.
I think part of the issue with RSS is the real pain of dealing with XML. I'm mildly cheering for something like https://jsonfeed.org - which would be a big step towards making a decentralized system more of a reality.
Eh? It's not like teams of elves are tripping over hand-coding this stuff. And even if they were, JSON parsers tend to be way more strict than RSS readers (which are actuakly very liberal interpretations of XML). But again, nobody in their right mind is manually generating or templating this stuff. And if you are, there are a dozen RSS-gen libraries for every single language. Let one of those handle it for you.
Doing this in JSON does not suddenly mean you don't need a convention (aka standard) for fields and types. It's data exchange. The reader needs to know what your data means. You still have pubdates, links, titles, descriptions and you still need to label them in a semi-strict way somehow.
All in all, JSON will save you a few bytes but it would just be another standard on the pile, just with no libraries around to write the RSSJSON format.
I'll be honest —and it'll make me sound like an arrogant dbag— but that doesn't pass my sniff test. "jsonfeed" is lighter than equivalent RSS for several small reasons.
Can I see?
(To be clear to anybody reading this out of context: I'm not claiming that JSON is best —far from it— just that I would expect it to be a few bytes lighter in transit.)
Thank you for sharing that. It took me a little while before I noticed it, but your JSON files have more data.
Each item has a id, date_published and tags field which do not feature in the RSS. Together these account for around 250chars per item or 3750chars per 15 item feed. Cut out those fields and the JSON would be 850chars shorter.
Also, you're preserving tab and newline characters around HTML. This affects JSON more because a newline is valid between RSS tags. In JSON a newline becomes two characters "\n", as a tab becomes "\t". Going "spaceless" on output would save you 1372chars from your JSON feed (and half as much from RSS/ATOM).
I will confess, my sniff test didn't account for using quite as many HTML attributes as you do :) Escaping double-quotes costs you 334 in JSON.
The overall difference is much slighter than I had expected.
XML has worked just fine for RSS. The reason why RSS isn't as mainstream as it used to be around 2004 has nothing to do with XML, but is a consequence of Google capturing, than abandoning the audience, and of walled-garden social media taking off. Inventing a new JSON-based format in this niche is as helpful for adoption as matrix.org is for federated chat - it will only serve to fragment the space.
Working with XML as a simple data-interchange format is not any more difficult than working with JSON, and it is ubiquitous across all major programming language ecosystems.
Beyond that, you can use powerful tools like namespacing, schemas, XSL, etc if you want them, and they are also ubiquitous across most major programming language ecosystems. They add complexity, but so do their JSON analogues.
It seems that people often reinvent aspects of the XML ecosystem using JSON. For example, JSON Schema is like XML schema, OpenAPI is like WSDL, JSONPath is like XPath. That's not to say I don't support these efforts - I think it is great that people are developing powerful tools for JSON. However, I think there is a misconception that the XML ecosystem is less "à la carte" than the JSON ecosystem when it comes to these added complexities. You don't need to deal with them unless you need/want to, and then it is nice to have standardised, battle-tested implementations.
So my blog [1] generates an RSS feed (early 2000s), an Atom feed (2009), a JSON feed (2017) and a Gopher [2] feed (2018). None of these formats were hard to add, and of all four formats, the JSON feed has the least use. Yes, the Gopher feed gets more use than JSON. If I go by "same client picks up feed at least one per day" then the results are:
RSS: ~20 [3]
Atom: ~25 [3]
JSON: 1
gopher: 7
I don't think using JSON is any help towards a decentralized system of blogs. It's just another format to generate.
I personally quite like twitter, although I tend to lurk rather than actively participate (don't feel I have much to say I guess)
In some ways my twitter feed is almost like RSS, and the people I follow tend to be interesting people who post interesting content or links to other content they've found.
Private Account, no followers, only selected accounts I follow to keep my feed clean of clickbait, useless discussions and the usual twitter outrage. It's a great tool, but I think I'm not using it as it's supposed to be ;)
I'm just not interested in participating in useless discussions with trolls and people who try to sell me their product.
Part of the problem that I don't think people talk about needing twitter for work is how they don't separate it as publishing platform and a news platform. I think it is much better to use a kindle that you update before you go to work than using twitter as both.
It really helps to limit it to a finite amount of content for you to consume as well as making it so you don't have the almost non-existent barrier of instantly being able to react to the news.
Good idea. You can also use something like Instapaper to mark articles to read but set aside a few times a week to actually carefully read these ‘curated’ articles. For me a big benefit for doing this that when I do sit down to read what I have ‘curated’, I discard half as being not something I need to spend time reading. Instead on Instapaper, just bookmarking articles, then deleing the bookmarks after reading works well.
rss subscribing to the commits of github repos is a great way to keep up with projects. i’ve been using reederapp ios without an external sync service for a year now, its great.
RSS is like articles without comment sections, completely pointless nowadays. If you can't read corrections, conflicting opinions for something, you might just as well go watch TV. The whole point of Twitter is that it's commentary, not a feed of published articles.
90% of internet comments are low effort garbage that simply isn't worth anyone's time. The other 10% of high quality, high effort posts take more than 280 words, and need 5 to 20 twitter posts to get a full idea of their concepts.
RSS is a different network of users, so it really can't be compared to Twitter. But those mega tweet 10 posts in a row threads would be far better served by a classic blog and RSS feed... Rather than 280 word chunks that have to be tracked and edited separately.
Then comes the blogs out there which pretty much use Twitter as a glorified RSS feed. They just post announcements whenever they post a blog post. This is necessary because of the network effect, but I would argue that RSS is a superior technology for this use case.
> 90% of internet comments are low effort garbage that simply isn't worth anyone's time.
In line with blog articles and TV. At least on Twitter, it's easy to block someone forever.
>The other 10% of high quality, high effort posts take more than 280 words
That's simply not true. You can often deliver important information in 140 characters.
> But those mega tweet 10 posts in a row threads would be far better served by a classic blog and RSS feed... Rather than 280 word chunks that have to be tracked and edited separately.
That's not a huge problem compared to the issue of content quality and it's even less important when you accept that your previous statement is simply not true.
When ever I (rarely) take the time and effort to write a blog, then I drop a link to the new blog article to twitter and FB. Most of the people I follow on twitter do much the same.
I did a feed reader which supports blog comments years ago (https://bazqux.com) and first thing many people asked me is how to turn comments off. There are some good blogs with good communities and interesting discussions in comments but the majority of comments on popular sites are plain junk.
> the majority of comments on popular sites are plain junk.
That's a questionable conclusion from your little project and the feedback of a (non-representative) few users. The counter-argument would be the success of Twitter and FB, where most of the "junk" comments are. Readers want to decide themselves what is junk and what isn't and 1 useful comment easily trumps 20 junk comments. Ask all the newspapers that added comments to their articles despite all the moderation problems that brought with it.
RSS is a feed of subscribable information in a programmably ingestible format.
Imagine formatting your feed however you want, without distracting side content. A use case is using RSS for YouTube subscriptions instead of the horrible subscription page experience.
Many publications do not post full articles, but instead summaries or excerpts.
The HN RSS feed is simply a link to the original article and comments.
258 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 284 ms ] threadRSS is very, very nice. Especially for keeping track of all the journals I have to keep an eye on.
The other halfs are webhooks.
I also want to get notified right away for articles that use a specific keyword, so I have other applets that will send an IFTTT rich notification to my phone with the link to the article.
Or you know, I have some other RSS feed I use with a torrent client to automatically fetch "stuff", and once the download is completed, I configured the torrent client to send an HTTP POST request with the torrent title to IFTTT, which in turn send me a push notification to let me know a download was completed.
I just wish some consortium of like minded companies like NYT/WaPo/Guardian/BBCs/Other national dailies, Reddit, Mozilla, and even Microsoft can huddle together and come up with a new name/identity and spread it and popularise it. One can always wish.
As one commentator said in the linked article: protocols are better than platforms.
Edit: The issue here is not about obtaining the feature with add-ons and extensions, which there are many. When the focus of the organisation is on something idealistic (open web), is it too much to expect them to add it to the core of the product?
It used to be called Poche (French word for pocket) but they had to change it becuase of a legal threat from Pocket.
It was good that it was removed, as it was useless to put it mildly
You're describing the "live bookmarks" feature, which was only one part of the RSS functionality that was removed from Firefox. I never used live bookmarks, but I used the feed discovery and subscription functionality all the time -- only some of which can now be restored with addons.
In the past it was even possible to subscribe with whatever addon you prefered from the firefox RSS preview directly, but that was already lost after the jump to WebExtensions.
So what's your point?
[1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/
[2] - https://newsboat.org/
I use Thunderbird as well, and that has RSS support but to me that seems counter to my workflow. Typically I'll be on some site and want to subscribe, and then view in my browser. Doesn't really make sense to be in an email client.
On my phone I use Flym[2]
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/4757633...
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brief/
[2] https://github.com/FredJul/Flym
1) There also doesn't seem to be a way to sort them by date or alphabetical order or domain.[0][1]
2) It seems like it should be possible to 'group' feeds, but I couldn't figure out how.
3) When Firefox updates certain things break
I think as a result of this I will try out newsboat. I found this tutorial[2] that seems to explain it nicely.
[0]: https://github.com/brief-rss/brief/issues/208
[1]: https://github.com/brief-rss/brief/issues/383
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUFCRqs822w
Another great new extension is Want My RSS because it's compatible with 10 RSS readers for direct subscribtion (you can add your own when you have a self-hosted reader for example). Feed detection and feed display is also great! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/want-my-rss/
Thunderbird is still a mighty fine RSS reader though.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rsspreview/
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feed-preview/
(It's a shame I couldn't have found this on my own. addons.mozilla.org is unbelievably bad for discovering useful addons. It takes a thread like this to turn you on to the good stuff.)
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/livemarks/
That worked for a short time until Firefox removed that API. Now I need to install this addon to be able to do it https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/
It's basically impossible for people to find out how to subscribe to a RSS feed nowadays.
Google failed to gain traction in the social network space with G+. If you can't beat them commoditize them!
Why not make interoperable networks based on open standards first class citizens in chrome/chromium? Not just by adding support but also by helping move the RSS standard forward.
https://theoldreader.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdSense#Feeds
And I'm not only talking about people that produce readers, but also about content creators. I'm making a site and hoping to turn a profit through ads and my interesting content - why would I want to provide a convenient stripped down version of my website for you to consume - something that is a net negative for my revenue (hosting and transferring data costs money)? Sure, I can provide "excerpts" in RSS, but I'd rather prefer you go to my homepage to see what is new - it is thoroughly AB tested to lure you in, spend some time and see some ads - maybe click one.
https://getpolarized.io/
Ton on my plate now trying to focus on shipping mobile and a few other features too.
I like the idea of Polar having data sources that are high quality and that the user can just easily subscribe to specific PDFs, research, or high quality content feeds.
We're also going to add social content discovery which is sort of like a Twitter feed but just people who are annotating content on Polar.
Also, copy-pasting is broken:
Bigtableis a distributedstoragesystemformanagingstructureddatathatisdesignedtoscaletoa verylargesize:petabytesofdataacrossthousandsofcommodityservers.
Also, expected keyboard shortcuts (eg hitting delete to delete a document) don't work.
Fortunately, Thunderbird still has this feature.
http://andregarzia.com/2018/11/reading-blogs-with-thunderbir...
I think a similar setup would be good for many people here who wish to read RSS but doesn't want to add another SaaS to their life.
The other in-sync option would be setting up an rss/imap gateway, which is not even available as a SaaS afaik, so would cost about as much in hosting (unless you already have a server you can use) and about 20 times in labor.
Happy paying NewsBlur customer - even though the iOS app is a battery hog.
Where in Thunderbird do you find feeds to subscribe to?
The flexible answer, of course, would be to have a relatively basic core browser and an extension system powerful enough to allow the features to be implemented that way. Like Firefox used to be. Unfortunately, Mozilla decided to neuter the extensions instead.
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/what-are-rss-feeds-...
That said, I would love if Firefox had an excellent RSS experience, but frankly it was always a confusing afterthought.
You're right! For users this is absolutely true.
Yet, almost all the companies that you might think of as potentially interested in RSS are platforms. You cannot sell ads in a protocol.
This is the core of why Twitter has replaced RSS. RSS is better for users, but Twitter is better for publishers and platforms. So users wind up following content.
Is it perhaps possible that in this particular case, the difference you so wisely point to between a format and a protocol is possessed of a great and bountiful opportunity to be relevant? The discussion at hand is between "protocols" and "platforms", which might otherwise be cast as "standards" and "products".
Again, you're completely correct. It might just be worth considering that in some cases, a distinction without difference can be of limited value to a discussion where it is at best tangential.
https://www.grepular.com/Twitter_to_RSS_with_Google_Cloud_Fu...
As for displaying comments along with articles, feeds can reference other feeds, and in theory nothing stops an application or website from from making use of that.
BTW: it's possible to read Twitter in RSS reader too and make it a "slow web".
The future of the blogosphere remains bright.
And I'm visiting blog post pages first to check whether they have Disqus comments (which processed separately via Disqus API) and <blog_post_URL>/feed feeds.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19532614
Internet 1.5 was pretty nice, in hindsight.
But reading through the post and the comments here, I'm sensing an omission. What Twitter (and social media in general) provides that RSS doesn't is interaction. I don't login to twitter all that often, but when I do, I see things like this: https://twitter.com/mikekarnj/status/1106582308235235330 and this: https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/1106812630985928704
I doubt I'd be privy to the discussions happening on Twitter if they were happening any other way (blogs tried to do it with comments and pingbacks, but that isn't as good as Twitter, and not as open to everyone, since you have to run a blog of your own).
This is the secret sauce for me. In fact, if there were a way to only see conversations in Twitter (and ignore all the posts with no responses) that would have a lot of value for me.
RSS is great for reading, but for conversing, it's not a good fit.
There is also AP relays which could further reduce the overhead if you simply deliver the content to the relay.
(Or is that what Mastodon is trying to do?)
Let RSS be good at one-way consumption and ActivityPub be good at bi-directional communication.
But blog post comments is completely another medium from Twitter. It requires you to sign in and, since comment will be there forever, you usually put more effort in it. So comments are more rare and of higher quality. But at the same time you could sign in as anonymous and put your spam link or some ego bullshit -- which frequently happen on popular sites. So it's very dependent from community.
And if you comment on some blog post only readers of this post will see (and they will know the context). When you comment on Twitter -- anybody could see. Together with 280 character limit this leads to completely different kind of discussion.
One problem of course is notifying the thread starter of new decentralized comments. There were Trackback, Pingback, Webmentions for web pages. For feeds there was the Salmon protocol [2], enabling notification of new comments to swim upstream. According to Google's documentation Salmon would have been an API of Google Buzz. But that started with a privacy scandal and shortly thereafter Google decided they needed their own closed social network. Salmon was later used in OStatus 1, I think.
There was a lot of activity in the 2000s transforming the RSS/Atom ecosystem into something of a decentralized social network. Extensions like Activity Stream for richer data, AtomPub, Salmon, OpenID, Webfinger, PubSubHubbub (now WebSub) to turbocharge feeds with a Publish/Subscribe thingy and a lot more, that I'm now forgetting. The rule of thumb is that the problems stay the same, but the syntax and the name changes.
And yes, if you squint the right way stuff like ActivityPub (Mastodon) and the Indiewebcamp Microformats are practically feeds.
[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4685
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_(protocol)
> But that started with a privacy scandal
What was the privacy scandal?
> The rule of thumb is that the problems stay the same, but the syntax and the name changes.
What problems are? I suspect that there should be problems with spam as anybody could add their comments (although protocols seems to contain some countermeasures) and maybe some kind of DoS of anybody "posting" too many comments. But what other problems are?
It is very far from what Twitter offers, on Twitter you can exchange with people, reply and discuss content (yeah this is not the best way to do it, but you can do it), you can alert people or organization (how many time, thanks to RSS we alerted a company about a bad practice or contacted their customer support ?)
Maybe Twitter is not the best at what it does, and maybe we need something that allow to us to exchange but RSS doesn't provide that.
PS: I'm not saying RSS is bad
I have basically stopped using it ever since they started doing that.
In short, RSS is a feed of (mostly) professionally written articles while Twitter is full of amateurs expressing half baked thoughts in 140 characters. It is unfair to compare the two.
It's like a web page, itemized into a very regular syntax.
If you want to "tweet" using RSS, you need a URL somewhere where you can upload updates to XML content; then give people that URL.
Either you have to join some website where content (like blogs) you create are exported as RSS feeds, or else run your own domain.
I’m saying that it’s easily possible to imagine a world where the uses of RSS vary from what they’re used for today — different from the parent commentor.
Ok, not directly. First it started as a proto semantic web protocol, at Netscape to syndicate links and titles for their portal.
Then Dave Winer used RSS to syndicate his weblog, scripting.com and started the marriage of blogs and feeds. But blogs at that time were more small paragraphs, less big articles. And every paragraph was syndicated. That's still visible in archives of long running blogs:
• http://scripting.com/2001/09/11.html
• https://kottke.org/98/12/
… which seems a lot twitter like. The focus on longer articles in blogging is something which started later, in 2001 or so, in my recollection.
Btw: Following those blurb-like RSS feeds in a traditional RSS reader with read markers is overwhelming, in my experience. I banned all those feeds into a "High Volume" folder where I more often than not mark all as read just to get ahead.
Complete with all the problems of spam, overwhelm, etc. You gotta find your people, foster a community, and stay there. I owe a lot of my career to twitter I’d say. It’s an amazing place.
One problem is that there is too much emphasis on short, witty quips in widely shared tweets. It has everyone going for the witty zinger and that makes conversation shallow and obnoxious. Occasionally there are decent tweetstorms, though.
Given that is true, isn't it "funny" that RSS is now non-existent compared to Twitter? ... I despair at the direction of the web.
By what measure? More people listen to podcasts (powered by RSS) every month than use Twitter.
For me, RSS never was dead or less relevant than in the past. On the contrary: Since I keep adding feeds on a very regular basis, it's still growing in importance.
Fortunately, 95 % of blogs and media sites still provide RSS feeds. As long as this is the case, RSS will remain crucial to me.
Mine too, 100%.
On Mac, I've been using Leaf with no real complaints.
I've found many blogs happily serve rss content, even if a button isn't explicitly advertised. Some of the url's I'll try:
* example.com/rss.xml
* example.com/index.rss
* example.com/?feed=rss
* example.com/feed/
* exmample.com/feed/rss
Try just the domain in Leaf; it might autodetect the feed URL. I use Reeder[1], and that method never failed me.
[1]: http://reederapp.com/
There is a highly-rated extension to automate this, but I've grown to distrust extensions that require "Access your data for all websites", and scouring the page source for the relevant <link> tag is not particularly cumbersome.
WordPress? Add /feed/ For more tips: go to https://wordpress.org/support/article/wordpress-feeds/
Drupal? Try rss.xml ?feed=rss /feed/
Joomla? You can try ?format=feed&type=rss or /itemlist/?format=feed
Blogger? Add /feeds/posts/default
*Spip ? Try /spip.php?page=backend
If you're using Android, check out gReader Pro. You can have it automatically download and store the full articles for later reading.
I also run my own RSS aggregator, tt-rss (this is how I replaced Google News after Google ruined it). tt-rss has a plugin that will also download and store the full articles for later reading. It provides its own RSS feed as well as a web interface.
Twitter? any old Joe can just post some bullsh!t that marinated in their minds for -0.5 seconds and that just gets added to Twitter and potentially my timeline.
Yes, RSS is far better than Twitter for some uses. Uses that are actually of value.
Exactly this! I really miss the time of the internet before social media, when it was more about quality content then clickbait articles. I was a heavy user of Google Reader until it got shut down, but couldn't find any worthy alternative, so I used Twitter as a news feed reader from then on. It's ok, but it's hard to ignore the noise sometimes.
RSS is still there on the publishing side for major publishers and all popular blog platforms. So why is it not as popular as email? Maybe individually visiting websites is good enough and maybe that itch is scratched by Twitter.
1 page of blocked items on my NoScript 23 blocked items on my Adblock Plus
And now I can read the article..
Doing this in JSON does not suddenly mean you don't need a convention (aka standard) for fields and types. It's data exchange. The reader needs to know what your data means. You still have pubdates, links, titles, descriptions and you still need to label them in a semi-strict way somehow.
All in all, JSON will save you a few bytes but it would just be another standard on the pile, just with no libraries around to write the RSSJSON format.
JSON doesn't fix XML.
This does sound painful, unlike parsing ordinary XML.
Can I see?
(To be clear to anybody reading this out of context: I'm not claiming that JSON is best —far from it— just that I would expect it to be a few bytes lighter in transit.)
Each item has a id, date_published and tags field which do not feature in the RSS. Together these account for around 250chars per item or 3750chars per 15 item feed. Cut out those fields and the JSON would be 850chars shorter.
Also, you're preserving tab and newline characters around HTML. This affects JSON more because a newline is valid between RSS tags. In JSON a newline becomes two characters "\n", as a tab becomes "\t". Going "spaceless" on output would save you 1372chars from your JSON feed (and half as much from RSS/ATOM).
I will confess, my sniff test didn't account for using quite as many HTML attributes as you do :) Escaping double-quotes costs you 334 in JSON.
The overall difference is much slighter than I had expected.
Beyond that, you can use powerful tools like namespacing, schemas, XSL, etc if you want them, and they are also ubiquitous across most major programming language ecosystems. They add complexity, but so do their JSON analogues.
It seems that people often reinvent aspects of the XML ecosystem using JSON. For example, JSON Schema is like XML schema, OpenAPI is like WSDL, JSONPath is like XPath. That's not to say I don't support these efforts - I think it is great that people are developing powerful tools for JSON. However, I think there is a misconception that the XML ecosystem is less "à la carte" than the JSON ecosystem when it comes to these added complexities. You don't need to deal with them unless you need/want to, and then it is nice to have standardised, battle-tested implementations.
[1] http://boston.conman.org/
[2] My blog is also available via gopher, gopher://gopher.conman.org/
[3] Unique user agents---probably not the best metric, but for a quick scan, easy enough to check.
Edit: formatting
In some ways my twitter feed is almost like RSS, and the people I follow tend to be interesting people who post interesting content or links to other content they've found.
Private Account, no followers, only selected accounts I follow to keep my feed clean of clickbait, useless discussions and the usual twitter outrage. It's a great tool, but I think I'm not using it as it's supposed to be ;) I'm just not interested in participating in useless discussions with trolls and people who try to sell me their product.
It really helps to limit it to a finite amount of content for you to consume as well as making it so you don't have the almost non-existent barrier of instantly being able to react to the news.
RSS is a different network of users, so it really can't be compared to Twitter. But those mega tweet 10 posts in a row threads would be far better served by a classic blog and RSS feed... Rather than 280 word chunks that have to be tracked and edited separately.
Then comes the blogs out there which pretty much use Twitter as a glorified RSS feed. They just post announcements whenever they post a blog post. This is necessary because of the network effect, but I would argue that RSS is a superior technology for this use case.
In line with blog articles and TV. At least on Twitter, it's easy to block someone forever.
>The other 10% of high quality, high effort posts take more than 280 words
That's simply not true. You can often deliver important information in 140 characters.
> But those mega tweet 10 posts in a row threads would be far better served by a classic blog and RSS feed... Rather than 280 word chunks that have to be tracked and edited separately.
That's not a huge problem compared to the issue of content quality and it's even less important when you accept that your previous statement is simply not true.
That's a questionable conclusion from your little project and the feedback of a (non-representative) few users. The counter-argument would be the success of Twitter and FB, where most of the "junk" comments are. Readers want to decide themselves what is junk and what isn't and 1 useful comment easily trumps 20 junk comments. Ask all the newspapers that added comments to their articles despite all the moderation problems that brought with it.
Imagine formatting your feed however you want, without distracting side content. A use case is using RSS for YouTube subscriptions instead of the horrible subscription page experience.
Many publications do not post full articles, but instead summaries or excerpts.
The HN RSS feed is simply a link to the original article and comments.