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> RSS doesn’t allow publishers to track user behavior. This is a feature, not a bug. > Analytics increases revenues from advertising, and that means it is cri

by SllX 9y ago

> RSS doesn’t allow publishers to track user behavior. This is a feature, not a bug. > Analytics increases revenues from advertising, and that means it is critical for companies to have those trackers in place if they want a chance to make it in the competitive media environment. If you can't survive without tracking my behavior, then I guess you will die. Given the quality of writing I can expect from this "competitive media environment", it won't be a great loss. > RSS also offers very few opportunities for branding content effectively. This is a feature, not a bug. > They need to actively guide users to find where the best content is... Let me stop you here. An RSS directory is nothing challenging. You can make one by hosting an old timey "list of cool sites" .html on your own website. Brent Simmons included one when he developed and maintained NetNewsWire before selling to Black Pixel. Modern day Podcast clients often include a directory or access to a 3rd party directory. Anybody can create a directory, stuff it with all the criteria they need to sort by tags or algorithmically push users to the highest bidder and ship it in an RSS client. RSS is a good technology. In terms familiar to a newspaper or press corporation, it is a wire service, except one that goes from newspaper to reader rather than from the Associated Press (or whoever) to newspapers to readers. It does one thing, and it does it well, and doesn't support anything less than it needs to do it. RSS clients range the gamut from inboxes (NetNewsWire) to news rivers (River5) to machine-curated digital newspapers (Apple News), each of them solid form factors and useful for different types of feeds, and the only reason that variance of form factors is even possible is right there in the name: Really Simple Syndication. Dave Winer was right to freeze the spec, it's not perfect, but it is good enough. Letting newer iterations filter through would lead us to a situation like with the web, where the www went from a really great networked document browser to an application container. That's why when I visit a site like say, techcrunch.com in a browser with scripting disabled, almost nothing remains of the actual website, although surprisingly the entire article was fully readable, and perhaps more so than if I had enabled JavaScript to let all that Branding™ shine through. Let me be clear, the only parts of RSS that died are the parts that Google and a few social corporations within 50 miles of each other owned because they all had a stake in getting you into their own walled gardens and keeping you there. The Open Web is great, open standards are great, until you need to convert eyeballs into dollars and the exchange rate isn't looking good because you're too open and didn't introduce enough artificial scarcity into your business model. RSS never died, by and large the feeds that you subscribed to a decade ago in Google Reader are still alive and kicking, ever present and always underappreciated even at the height of Google Reader's popularity before Google decided to rebrand it to death.

pjc50 9y ago
>> RSS also offers very few opportunities for branding content effectively. > This is a feature, not a bug. I know where you're coming from, but .. I'm one of the rare people who, for a while, read a significant number of blogs without RSS because I actually liked having the different distinctive visual styles to remind me who I was reading. It's a pity we can't have a little bit of styling without going bananas.
- gorbachev 9y ago
  The only reason I read articles on my various RSS feeds at their original source is when the article has some sort of meaningful multimedia component to it. By meaningful I mean something that enhances the content in some way that's valuable to me, and not be an auto-play video that was accurately transcribed in text. Most RSS and read-it-later applications do a really poor job of playing embedded videos never mind displaying interactive infographics or other JavaScript applications, so going to the source is really the only alternative at the moment. I hope apps like Pocket would get better at this. Pocket already plays Youtube videos just fine, it's the embedded stuff that doesn't work.
- oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
  I am totally with you on this one. On one hand, I quite like having a uniform experience where text is consistently readable, etc. On the other, I miss the sense of 'place' and identity you get when viewing an article via RSS. I definitely think a compromise would be nice, but tricky. It might be possible to fix on a range of acceptable font styles, and choose the one that best fits each site. Add on a site's logo and colour scheme, and you might be able to come up with a decent approach.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  Every RSS reader I've used had a "click here to go to the original article" button. Does that not do what you want?
- SllX 9y ago
  You know, I think it is how I look at it. More often than not, when I read something, I care about who the other is, and secondary to that, I care about where it is hosted. For more than ten years I've used NetNewsWire, and now I also use Apple News and Overcast. NetNewsWire will show me the author name just fine so long as the feed includes it, and given the left to right style of the client, I can tell at a glance where I am. For most feeds though, it isn't really a problem as I have found that the NetNewsWire-style really only works for feeds that post relatively infrequently, not more than a few times a day if that, and even that would be overwhelming coming from one source if every source I had posted a few times a day to keep up the appearances of their Personal Brand™. I think an optional CSS or rather a subset of CSS component would not be a bad thing. Just enough to style some text and formatting but not enough to screw with the layout too much. The client could completely dismiss the attached CSS and in my case I would almost certainly end up turning off the custom CSS, but I can appreciate good web design and will visit a site if I happen to really like their design. That said, I also fear that even that concession would open the dam to a lot more concessions than I would like, so I can live with the status quo. A good feed reader is going to have a good reading experience already, and I care a lot more about having a good reading experience than I do about the opinion of a web designer and their corporate overlords. RSS, reader mode in Firefox and occasionally lynx -dump or when I can find them, print pages, are how I can even use the web to read anything on it anymore. So HTTP+HTML5 is a mess, I would rather not see HTTP+RSS (or Atom or JSON Feed or whatever) turn into a similar mess so that websites can rebrand their feeds to death in the same way they rebranded their websites to death.

by SllX 9y ago

pjc50 9y ago

>> RSS also offers very few opportunities for branding content effectively. > This is a feature, not a bug. I know where you're coming from, but .. I'm one of the rare people who, for a while, read a significant number of blogs without RSS because I actually liked having the different distinctive visual styles to remind me who I was reading. It's a pity we can't have a little bit of styling without going bananas.

gorbachev 9y ago
The only reason I read articles on my various RSS feeds at their original source is when the article has some sort of meaningful multimedia component to it. By meaningful I mean something that enhances the content in some way that's valuable to me, and not be an auto-play video that was accurately transcribed in text. Most RSS and read-it-later applications do a really poor job of playing embedded videos never mind displaying interactive infographics or other JavaScript applications, so going to the source is really the only alternative at the moment. I hope apps like Pocket would get better at this. Pocket already plays Youtube videos just fine, it's the embedded stuff that doesn't work.
oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
I am totally with you on this one. On one hand, I quite like having a uniform experience where text is consistently readable, etc. On the other, I miss the sense of 'place' and identity you get when viewing an article via RSS. I definitely think a compromise would be nice, but tricky. It might be possible to fix on a range of acceptable font styles, and choose the one that best fits each site. Add on a site's logo and colour scheme, and you might be able to come up with a decent approach.
CaptSpify 9y ago
Every RSS reader I've used had a "click here to go to the original article" button. Does that not do what you want?
SllX 9y ago
You know, I think it is how I look at it. More often than not, when I read something, I care about who the other is, and secondary to that, I care about where it is hosted. For more than ten years I've used NetNewsWire, and now I also use Apple News and Overcast. NetNewsWire will show me the author name just fine so long as the feed includes it, and given the left to right style of the client, I can tell at a glance where I am. For most feeds though, it isn't really a problem as I have found that the NetNewsWire-style really only works for feeds that post relatively infrequently, not more than a few times a day if that, and even that would be overwhelming coming from one source if every source I had posted a few times a day to keep up the appearances of their Personal Brand™. I think an optional CSS or rather a subset of CSS component would not be a bad thing. Just enough to style some text and formatting but not enough to screw with the layout too much. The client could completely dismiss the attached CSS and in my case I would almost certainly end up turning off the custom CSS, but I can appreciate good web design and will visit a site if I happen to really like their design. That said, I also fear that even that concession would open the dam to a lot more concessions than I would like, so I can live with the status quo. A good feed reader is going to have a good reading experience already, and I care a lot more about having a good reading experience than I do about the opinion of a web designer and their corporate overlords. RSS, reader mode in Firefox and occasionally lynx -dump or when I can find them, print pages, are how I can even use the web to read anything on it anymore. So HTTP+HTML5 is a mess, I would rather not see HTTP+RSS (or Atom or JSON Feed or whatever) turn into a similar mess so that websites can rebrand their feeds to death in the same way they rebranded their websites to death.