4 ms·

I bet if someone re-wrote the specification using JSON or YAML, everyone would start using it again.

by account0099099 9y ago

aaronpk 9y ago
http://jsonfeed.org http://jsonfeed.org
- giobox 9y ago
  I really like jsonfeed, but I just can’t envisage it getting anything like the ubiquity RSS enjoyed in the mid 2000s, when even Safari had a pretty reasonable feed reader built in. Back then my main way of following news/blogs was to combine the RSS feeds of my favourite sites, giving me a single view onto all the news I cared about. What killed it for me personally though wasn’t the slow death of widespread RSS, but weirdly Twitter. Twitter can be a great news link replacement for RSS if you used RSS the way I did, as the links the people you follow share have been curated by those people themselves. I started to find a much better “hit rate” for content I wanted to read by seeing what influencers in industries I have an interest in share, rather than the hosepipe of stories that RSS was providing. I found I was still getting all the content I wanted without having to wade through all the noise, at which point I just stopped using RSS altogether. I do however agree it is another sad indicator of a dying open web though.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
s73ver_ 9y ago
RSS was never difficult, and just about every language out there already has RSS libraries.
- MBCook 9y ago
  The biggest problem is the number of people who rolled their own XML generators or use broken templates to generate the XML.
mceoin 9y ago
I suspect you might be right. Personally, I think the main reason RSS failed to get bigger adoption was a UX problem. Clicking on RSS and getting a page of code is just too confronting for most people. Thus it never managed to get the same adoption as other republishing buttons like Pin, Like or Share.
- bob9 9y ago
  If you click on RSS in a browser, you're presented with a HTML rendering of the feed. What browser or messaging application (Thunderbird and friends) doesn't do this?
- giobox 9y ago
  Safari in Mac OS X did a pretty nice job of rendering the feed for a basic feed reader back when it still had the big blue RSS link button in the URL bar, no raw XML to speak of: https://www.askdavetaylor.com/0-blog-pics/safari-rss-view.jpg https://www.askdavetaylor.com/0-blog-pics/safari-rss-view.jp... I used to use this A LOT back in the day, often finding it preferable to many site's native UIs.
- lj3 9y ago
  Hell, just finding the RSS feed on some sites is like going on a scavenger hunt. I really wish the html spec itself had a standardized way of defining the rss file for a site, like they do for favicon.
  - bob9 9y ago
    Don't sites put it in the HTML meta headers anymore? This is then picked up by the browser and displayed under the feed icon/menu.
  - hopesthoughts 9y ago
    I use the RSS feed finder user script. If it really can't find it, I use the feed autodetect bookmarklet. Both work well for me.
  - explainplease 9y ago
ravenstine 9y ago
RSS is difficult to implement? Since when? Sure, it's XML. And had I been the one to design it from the start, I would have gone with JSON. But come on. RSS has been losing ground because, deep down, people love the algorithms. I personally hate how algorithms artificially mangle content that I would have seen anyway if my "timeline" was chronological; it's annoying to me to have stories from hours or days prior to appear near the top of my feed because everyone has already seen the same thing by now and new comments are worthless/unseen after a givens tory is ~1.5 hours old.
- spaceseaman 9y ago
  > RSS is difficult to implement? Since when? He didn't say that - just that people find JSON exciting. There are many things that have been rewritten in JSON just to become popular again, or things people have done long before but are exciting because they're now JSON.
  - ravenstine 9y ago
    I would love to believe that idea would work. What are some examples of concepts written for JSON that became more successful than their predecessor?
- AndrewCHM 9y ago
  Its XML which requires a more difficult tree abstraction instead of a mapping/list abstraction and the XML wraps html-formatted articles, so unless you hate yourself, you'll need to be embedding a browser for rendering, which means bundling a browser too (even on certain browser embed providing platforms like win32, since it still uses IE11 as its browser embed) of course its easy to generate RSS
- AndrewCHM 9y ago
  Its XML which requires a more difficult tree abstraction instead of a mapping/list abstraction and the XML wraps html-formatted articles, so unless you hate yourself, you'll need to be embedding a browser for rendering, which means bundling a browser too (even on certain browser embed providing platforms like win32, since it still uses IE11 as its browser embed) of course its easy to generate RSS. - - - and thats nevermind the whole impossibility of getting all articles without a daemon on a separate server, especially for high-volume feeds
ece 9y ago
Everyone is still using it, they're just getting their feeds differently (or going to the website directly) and Facebook might just be the lone big publisher to stop publishing feeds.
da_chicken 9y ago
No, the problem with RSS is two fold: 1. You have to get users to clickthrough to get your ad revenue, but you also need enough content in the RSS to encourage them to click at all. It feels like you put effort into this thing that prevents users from spot checking your website, which reduces your revenue. And you're hosting the RSS feed, too, so it costs bandwidth! 2. Twitter is easier to use (for you and your audience), is where the audience is, and is "good enough".
- giobox 9y ago
  Twitter is absolutely what eventually killed my RSS usage. Human curated links in my Twitter feed, vs the firehose of articles that often fill up the RSS feeds of many sites.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Could any service not offer this curation? Try Pocket for an example.
    - giobox 9y ago
      I've used countless 'read it later' services like Pocket, Instapaper etc over the years (even some on PalmOS...), but for me at least the combination of Twitter plus the much more reliable cellular data we have now has made them less appealing. Twitter has advantages beyond just the links being shared - the tweets themselves are often interesting to me, and the list of people I follow has been carefully built over time to the point it would be annoying for me to switch again now. I'm sure these are great options for others though, but I don't think I'm alone in using Twitter as a kind of curated RSS replacement.
      - toomuchtodo 9y ago
        Thanks for the reply! I don’t use Twitter, so I’m always interested in getting input from people who still are.
    - 9y ago
jasonkostempski 9y ago
Not sites that are solely driven by ad revenue. Most sites that aren't, still offer an RSS feed, it's just not always visible on the page. Some sites I've subscribed to and contacted for minor RSS related issues, didn't even realize they had it, it was just part of the publishing platform they used and the feed was exposed through a link tag in the markup. I don't think the protocol has anything to do with the choice to provide a feed, in fact, yet-another-protocol would just make it a harder for everyone involved.
vshabanov 9y ago
There is already https://jsonfeed.org https://jsonfeed.org but it's just an example of famous "now there are 15 competing standards" comics (https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/). From RSS reader developer perspective (I'm author of BazQux Reader https://bazqux.com https://bazqux.com) problem with RSS/Atom is that there are many feed generators (and even handwritten feeds) each with its own understanding of standard or without understanding at all. And good feed reader need to handle many quirky issues to support all kinds of feeds. With new feed format there will still be old bugs and problems (duplicating IDs, missing IDs, new IDs for the same posts, duplicated posts, misconfigured web servers, servers down and so on). And new format needs to duplicated efforts like MediaRSS for extended information about podcasts (which JSON Feed is missing). Problem with RSS is not a format (end users won't read XML/JSON anyway) but needs of average user, time to setup, vogue, no profit for big players and so on. People, not tech problem.

I bet if someone re-wrote the specification using JSON or YAML, everyone would start using it again.

aaronpk 9y ago

http://jsonfeed.org http://jsonfeed.org

giobox 9y ago
I really like jsonfeed, but I just can’t envisage it getting anything like the ubiquity RSS enjoyed in the mid 2000s, when even Safari had a pretty reasonable feed reader built in. Back then my main way of following news/blogs was to combine the RSS feeds of my favourite sites, giving me a single view onto all the news I cared about. What killed it for me personally though wasn’t the slow death of widespread RSS, but weirdly Twitter. Twitter can be a great news link replacement for RSS if you used RSS the way I did, as the links the people you follow share have been curated by those people themselves. I started to find a much better “hit rate” for content I wanted to read by seeing what influencers in industries I have an interest in share, rather than the hosepipe of stories that RSS was providing. I found I was still getting all the content I wanted without having to wade through all the noise, at which point I just stopped using RSS altogether. I do however agree it is another sad indicator of a dying open web though.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

s73ver_ 9y ago

RSS was never difficult, and just about every language out there already has RSS libraries.

MBCook 9y ago
The biggest problem is the number of people who rolled their own XML generators or use broken templates to generate the XML.

mceoin 9y ago

I suspect you might be right. Personally, I think the main reason RSS failed to get bigger adoption was a UX problem. Clicking on RSS and getting a page of code is just too confronting for most people. Thus it never managed to get the same adoption as other republishing buttons like Pin, Like or Share.

bob9 9y ago
If you click on RSS in a browser, you're presented with a HTML rendering of the feed. What browser or messaging application (Thunderbird and friends) doesn't do this?
giobox 9y ago
Safari in Mac OS X did a pretty nice job of rendering the feed for a basic feed reader back when it still had the big blue RSS link button in the URL bar, no raw XML to speak of: https://www.askdavetaylor.com/0-blog-pics/safari-rss-view.jpg https://www.askdavetaylor.com/0-blog-pics/safari-rss-view.jp... I used to use this A LOT back in the day, often finding it preferable to many site's native UIs.
lj3 9y ago
Hell, just finding the RSS feed on some sites is like going on a scavenger hunt. I really wish the html spec itself had a standardized way of defining the rss file for a site, like they do for favicon.
- bob9 9y ago
  Don't sites put it in the HTML meta headers anymore? This is then picked up by the browser and displayed under the feed icon/menu.
- hopesthoughts 9y ago
  I use the RSS feed finder user script. If it really can't find it, I use the feed autodetect bookmarklet. Both work well for me.
- explainplease 9y ago

ravenstine 9y ago

RSS is difficult to implement? Since when? Sure, it's XML. And had I been the one to design it from the start, I would have gone with JSON. But come on. RSS has been losing ground because, deep down, people love the algorithms. I personally hate how algorithms artificially mangle content that I would have seen anyway if my "timeline" was chronological; it's annoying to me to have stories from hours or days prior to appear near the top of my feed because everyone has already seen the same thing by now and new comments are worthless/unseen after a givens tory is ~1.5 hours old.

spaceseaman 9y ago
> RSS is difficult to implement? Since when? He didn't say that - just that people find JSON exciting. There are many things that have been rewritten in JSON just to become popular again, or things people have done long before but are exciting because they're now JSON.
- ravenstine 9y ago
  I would love to believe that idea would work. What are some examples of concepts written for JSON that became more successful than their predecessor?
AndrewCHM 9y ago
Its XML which requires a more difficult tree abstraction instead of a mapping/list abstraction and the XML wraps html-formatted articles, so unless you hate yourself, you'll need to be embedding a browser for rendering, which means bundling a browser too (even on certain browser embed providing platforms like win32, since it still uses IE11 as its browser embed) of course its easy to generate RSS
AndrewCHM 9y ago
Its XML which requires a more difficult tree abstraction instead of a mapping/list abstraction and the XML wraps html-formatted articles, so unless you hate yourself, you'll need to be embedding a browser for rendering, which means bundling a browser too (even on certain browser embed providing platforms like win32, since it still uses IE11 as its browser embed) of course its easy to generate RSS. - - - and thats nevermind the whole impossibility of getting all articles without a daemon on a separate server, especially for high-volume feeds

ece 9y ago

Everyone is still using it, they're just getting their feeds differently (or going to the website directly) and Facebook might just be the lone big publisher to stop publishing feeds.

da_chicken 9y ago

No, the problem with RSS is two fold: 1. You have to get users to clickthrough to get your ad revenue, but you also need enough content in the RSS to encourage them to click at all. It feels like you put effort into this thing that prevents users from spot checking your website, which reduces your revenue. And you're hosting the RSS feed, too, so it costs bandwidth! 2. Twitter is easier to use (for you and your audience), is where the audience is, and is "good enough".

giobox 9y ago
Twitter is absolutely what eventually killed my RSS usage. Human curated links in my Twitter feed, vs the firehose of articles that often fill up the RSS feeds of many sites.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Could any service not offer this curation? Try Pocket for an example.
  - giobox 9y ago
    I've used countless 'read it later' services like Pocket, Instapaper etc over the years (even some on PalmOS...), but for me at least the combination of Twitter plus the much more reliable cellular data we have now has made them less appealing. Twitter has advantages beyond just the links being shared - the tweets themselves are often interesting to me, and the list of people I follow has been carefully built over time to the point it would be annoying for me to switch again now. I'm sure these are great options for others though, but I don't think I'm alone in using Twitter as a kind of curated RSS replacement.
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      Thanks for the reply! I don’t use Twitter, so I’m always interested in getting input from people who still are.
  - 9y ago

jasonkostempski 9y ago

Not sites that are solely driven by ad revenue. Most sites that aren't, still offer an RSS feed, it's just not always visible on the page. Some sites I've subscribed to and contacted for minor RSS related issues, didn't even realize they had it, it was just part of the publishing platform they used and the feed was exposed through a link tag in the markup. I don't think the protocol has anything to do with the choice to provide a feed, in fact, yet-another-protocol would just make it a harder for everyone involved.

vshabanov 9y ago

There is already https://jsonfeed.org https://jsonfeed.org but it's just an example of famous "now there are 15 competing standards" comics (https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/). From RSS reader developer perspective (I'm author of BazQux Reader https://bazqux.com https://bazqux.com) problem with RSS/Atom is that there are many feed generators (and even handwritten feeds) each with its own understanding of standard or without understanding at all. And good feed reader need to handle many quirky issues to support all kinds of feeds. With new feed format there will still be old bugs and problems (duplicating IDs, missing IDs, new IDs for the same posts, duplicated posts, misconfigured web servers, servers down and so on). And new format needs to duplicated efforts like MediaRSS for extended information about podcasts (which JSON Feed is missing). Problem with RSS is not a format (end users won't read XML/JSON anyway) but needs of average user, time to setup, vogue, no profit for big players and so on. People, not tech problem.