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The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
- airstrike 8y agoI'll say it: I miss RSS.
- scarface74 8y agoHow do you “miss it”? It hasn’t gone anywhere.
- vhf 8y agoShameless plug backing up the fact it hasn't gone anywhere: https://draft.li/blog/2016/03/21/rss-usage-on-the-web/ https://draft.li/blog/2016/03/21/rss-usage-on-the-web/
- matkins 8y agoAmount of websites that offer RSS != Amount of users who still use RSS
- scarface74 8y agoAs long as RSS is available and not being abandoned by publishers, why do you care about the number of users?
- therobot24 8y agostill use RSS via newsblur, hope this never goes away
- senectus1 8y agowhat? no one told me! I still use it every day, its a vital part of my controlling what info I see every day process...
- peter_todorov 8y agoStill using it everyday:)
- spc476 8y agoA 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!"
- raphlinus 8y agoI've always said that RSS is Dave Winer's gift to the world.
- chrismorgan 8y agoI 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.)
- CharlesW 8y agoThere's no concept of an "excerpt" in RSS, but if we're talking item descriptions, the RSS 2.0 spec says that HTML is allowed and provides examples. http://www.rssboard.org/rss-encoding-examples http://www.rssboard.org/rss-encoding-examples
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- spc476 8y agoYou could include the whole post or just a portion in the feed, but Dave never clarified how it was to be encoded.
- ttepasse 8y agoThose examples came later than Dave Winer's stewardship. Those were made by the RSS Board which is its own point of weirdness in RSS' history.
- fluxsauce 8y ago> After all, The Onion is a publication that relies on syndication through Facebook and Twitter https://www.theonion.com/rss https://www.theonion.com/rss That didn't take long to find. Why use that as an example?
- cwyers 8y agoI 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.
- scarface74 8y agoFrom 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.
- cwyers 8y agoI 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.
- scarface74 8y agoI 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.”
- carc1n0gen 8y agoI 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
- Complexicate 8y agoThis is what I've been telling my grandmother to do, but for some reason she keeps using Facebook instead.
- carc1n0gen 8y agoI recommend your grandmother try feedly if she finds rolling her own too daunting.
- paulddraper 8y agoConsider working email in there somehow.
- amanzi 8y agoI just read this post via RSS in Feedbin. Still very much alive and kicking. Also... that website proudly displays an RSS feed button on every page.
- orev 8y agoAlso 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.
- EastSmith 8y ago> 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. "WordPress powers 31% of the internet.", according to wordpress.com and Wordpress has RSS built in and ON by default.
- lsh 8y ago> ... it’s invisible to most people. 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.
- orev 8y agoThis 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.
- jgalvez 8y agoJust came in to say I read this in a RSS reader.
- da02 8y agoHow do you read HN via RSS reader?
- grzm 8y agoHere are a couple of options: * https://news.ycombinator.com/rss https://news.ycombinator.com/rss * https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/ https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/
- mi_lk 8y agoHow does hn decide what articles to put on rss?
- ihuman 8y agoThey're in the same order as the front page
- mi_lk 8y agoIf 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.
- ptman 8y agoWell formed feeds have unique id's per item, that stay the same even with title or order or timestamp changing.
- rhizome 8y agoI think it's actually /newest. I don't remember the RSS feed ever rearranging stories up and down the list.
- m-p-3 8y agoInoreader is my main source of gathering news. Social Medias are IMO ill-equiped for this tasks, mainly drowning useful info in a ton of noise.
- dugite-code 8y agoAs a maintainer of the FeedIron plugin for Tiny Tiny RSS I see RSS as quite alive and kicking. https://github.com/feediron/ttrss_plugin-feediron 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
- sbov 8y agoI 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.
- erikb 8y agoAlso 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.
- RandomInteger4 8y agoRSS 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.
- avhon1 8y ago> [RSS would] be even nicer as json. Already a standard! https://jsonfeed.org/ https://jsonfeed.org/
- RandomInteger4 8y agoOh neat! Thank you for the heads up on this!
- nicolaslem 8y agoI 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.
- nreece 8y agoRSS 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 https://feedity.com, a growing startup that helps with custom feeds for unstructured sources like webpages.
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoI'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.)
- kakarot 8y agoI 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.
- fredsir 8y agoI 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.
- CharlesW 8y agoPodcasting is RSS. That means that 26% of Americans (I don't have worldwide stats handy) depend on RSS every month. So, more Americans use RSS every month than use Twitter.
- haywirez 8y agoTangentially, 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).
- yoz-y 8y agoProblem 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.
- haywirez 8y agoThis 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.
- erikb 8y agoThat'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.
- ourcat 8y agoPodcast 'subscriptions' are a perfect RSS use-case. 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'.
- marban 8y agoSince 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17684481
- erikb 8y agoMaybe someone is paying a PR company do push the topic because they plan to release a new product around RSS. Would certainly be interesting.
- justtopost 8y agoAny 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.
- guybedo 8y agoI might be biased here as i've built a news aggregator/RSS reader (https://aktu.io 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...
- jrochkind1 8y agoAs 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.
- themodelplumber 8y agoI 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.
- guybedo 8y agoyep 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.
- gtramont 8y agoWhat a well written piece! Thank you for that!
- RandyRanderson 8y agoWe need to write some software that generates low-quality articles like this and then submits them to hn automatically. Candidates: . $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.
- tomhoward 8y agoOr, just let the system work as it has very well for many years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18003343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18003343
- bopbop 8y agoThis 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.
- RandyRanderson 8y agoThey changed the hn title at least once. It was "rise and demise". Go here [0] and click on past: [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18002503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18002503
- bopbop 8y agoUnderstood - 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.
- nopreserveroot 8y agoI'm subscribing to this blog out of spite.
- jrochkind1 8y agoThis 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".
- Animats 8y agoAs 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.
- ehnto 8y agoStuff 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.
- Hnrobert42 8y agoI 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.
- mi_lk 8y agoYou 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.
- Splines 8y ago> If I could consume Facebook via RSS 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.
- guybedo 8y agoyou 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...
- lkrubner 8y agoBack 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: http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-by-in-fighting-among-those-who-advocate-for-it http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-...
- nsriv 8y agoThis was a great read, thank you!
- ehnto 8y agoI 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.
- wenbin 8y agoYou can find the rss feeds of (almost) all podcasts in the world here: https://www.listennotes.com/ https://www.listennotes.com/ Or use the API: https://www.listennotes.com/api/ https://www.listennotes.com/api/
- ijustwanttovote 8y agoI was planning to build something similar to your app, but you built exactly what I was looking for. How is the audience feedback so far?
- wenbin 8y agoSo far so good :) June, 2018: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/listen-notes-3-0 https://www.producthunt.com/posts/listen-notes-3-0 Dec, 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15825900 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 :)
- ehnto 8y agoAwesome! 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?
- lkuty 8y agoThe title article is missing "and re-rise". I use it regularly and I am happy how it gets the job done : no social stuff, no ads.
- niftich 8y agoThis is a remarkable deep-dive into the history of RSS and the ideas and vision behind it, and how those camps diverged. But despite beginning the article with Kevin Werbach's prediction that syndication was going to become a dominant business model on the web, this never quite came to pass, and RSS took on the role of moving media between aggregators and consumers, rather than between authors and aggregators as originally intended. With the shift in usage to the edge, RSS found itself in the company of adhoc webpages that disseminated the same content but supported scripted adtech to enable just-in-time display advertising -- advertising which, over time, became a significant source of publisher revenue. RSS was often surfaced in a different user-agent and unable to clearly accommodate scripted ads, so first-party RSS feeds were practically giving away the content for free. With time, this greatly contributed to the waning appetite of commercial publishers for RSS, despite it remaining popular in circles were the content was meant to be spread wide at no cost. Although many news organizations still offer RSS feeds, they're not really marketed prominently, and remain a loss leader to make savvy readers happy. Since alternate business models never achieved the same uptake, efforts like Google's AMP (and its offshoots like webpackage [1]) are a practical take on the syndication concept again, where the usage of adtech is assumed from the start, and the surfacer of the content becomes decoupled from its author. [1] https://github.com/WICG/webpackage https://github.com/WICG/webpackage
- toyg 8y ago> syndication was going to become a dominant business model on the web, this never quite came to pass This has happened in at least one media segment: podcasting. Ads are simply inserted in the medium proper, or the feed gets paywalled, or money is generated while producing the content (live shows). It is entirely possible to reproduce this achievement in other media sectors, it just needs to be done wisely: 1. a catchy name ("rss" or "atom" are too geeky, "feeds" or "syndication" are too generic, "newscasting" is another thing). 2. leave clients and formats independent, so the immediate needs of users prevail over broadcasters' ones. Broadcasters are good at telling people what to think, but terrible at telling them how to use or consume anything. It also removes the petty fighting like "we won't rely on a platform built by $competitor". 3. Leave ad-management and general money-making schemes up to publishers. They can license feeds to specific clients only, they can do paywalls, micropayments, embedded ads, whatever. The client should assume nothing, simply move content from A to B on a schedule. All this can easily be implemented on HTTP codes, they are all there already. 4. The real point of feeds is exactly this: move stuff from A to B on a schedule. Metadata is almost irrelevant. Content display is a side-show. What podcasting delivers is control: it gets the content a user wants, as soon as it's available, and makes it ready to be consumed when the user needs it, in the way s/he prefers. This concept is what should move the effort, not dreams of semantic sheeps. 5. Because it optimizes pre-fetching, the format shines where on-demand fetching is time or money-expensive. Niches where it would (or does already) work well, ae things like auto-downloading TV episodes, delivering big images (something for visual artists to cut off Pixiv and friends... ?), delivering big binary updates and so on. With the rise of single-page-applications, one could even devise a format that delivers an entire website, ready to be consumed instantaneously without requiring lots of mobile data usage. Bootstrapping it in "stingy" markets (Southern EMEA etc) could help. 6. Good directories for clients to use. Podcasting really took fire when good directories emerged. (on a sidenote: AMP is evil and publishers are shooting themselves in the foot. It seriosly risks to become an "iTunes" moment, where an entire industry relinquishes control of their market because they don't understand long-term consequences.)
- saran945 8y agoI have been using RSS for 12 years. It has been transformed by big players, Is n't it Facebook a RSS reader with social features? I only unsubscribed my friends rss and connected in facebook, other sources like news, releases etc still I am using RSS.
- lerie82 8y agohow did this story get here? clearly rss isnt dead, 98% or more of my news comes from rss feeds that are parsed into newsbeuter or another reader.
- MikeGale 8y agoI still use RSS and it's, in many ways, better than the web stupidity that surrounds us. The title is misleading. People who captured the feedreader market, killed the competitors then dropped it did a lot of damage. Maybe deliberately. LESSON: Never trust a big company that relies on advertising. RSS is a way to escape the nonsense that has come with those, who have no idea what the web can be, but have flooded in and drowned so much in their ignorance and lack of vision.
- dang 8y agoOK, we've rolled back the claim of the title using a representative phrase from the article. All: let's focus on something other than the title now—it's a pretty interesting piece for anyone who doesn't know the history (as I didn't).
- kovek 8y agoI wonder how much you learn from hacker news submissions. Thank you, dang!
- abtinf 8y agoHaving worked at a giant company, I know there are many competing motivations, teams, and personalities involved - companies are not uniform entities. Still... Google Reader did more to destroy my perception of Google's reputation than everything else evil they've ever done. Conspiracy to suppress wages for tech workers, James Damore, the Snowden revelations - all of those bugged me, but not like Reader. They killed Reader, I suspect to support Plus, just as the walled gardens of the social networks turned into iron curtains, destroying the only viable alternative decentralized content distribution mechanism. And now we get to live in that world.
- epistasis 8y agoIn terms of tech evilness, those aren't really comparable, they're more political. Reader's shutdown, after monopolizing neAly RSS tech and in order to push their own flavor of the year (Plus), was a classic tech evil The other evil that Google is perpetrating is AMP. Reader followed an "embrace and extinguish." AMP is a full on "embrace, extend, and extinguish."
- guybedo 8y agoMight be useful to some: i realized some time ago (yeah it took me a while...) that most websites that don't have a RSS feed do have a Facebook page. So now i just add those Facebook pages as RSS feeds in my reader and i can follow with RSS those websites that don't have a RSS feed. At least Facebook is useful now.... :-)
- schizoidboy 8y agoHow do you do this? I did a bit of research and it looks like FB have deprecated their old RSS feeds based on page `id`.
- guybedo 8y agowell i guess there are other ways but as i built a RSS reader, i've added this feature. But you're right they deprecated the api, so it only works for public pages, and not people's profiles.
- schizoidboy 8y agoOk, so you use their JSON API with an FB app token?
- guybedo 8y agowell you don't need to login to access these pages, they are public, i ended up doing some html parsing :-)
- schizoidboy 8y agoMakes sense
- captn3m0 8y agorss-bridge supports facebook profiles/pages[0]. [0]: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
- lokedhs 8y agoThe irony is that I saw this headline using an RSS reader. That's how I read the Hacker News stories.
- lowry 8y agoI am reading HN through RSS, what demise?
- runningmike 8y agoI use RSS for machine to machine syndication. It still is a real simple and brilliant way to scrap content in an easy way. For me RSS is part of the open web.
- tannhaeuser 8y agoWith the EU parliament's recent voting in favour of requiring consent/royalties for "rich linking" (eg. previewing content without sending the user to the original site), I can see a renaissance for RSS as an accepted and practical means for federated personal news aggregation. But then for me and many others, RSS has never gone away. While we are at it, we should also bring back Usenet/nntp (though obviously I have nothing against news aggregators with discussion boards such as hn). But long term, only a new distributed p2p web will be able to escape the ever-increasing shilling and censorship. You can start this process right now and be prepared for the future by separating content strictly from web apps and avoiding JavaScript-heavy approaches for content.
- clacke2 8y ago> With the EU parliament's recent voting in favour of requiring consent/royalties for "rich linking" (eg. previewing content without sending the user to the original site), I can see a renaissance for RSS as an accepted and practical means for federated personal news aggregation. That's funny, I see the same legislation as the death of all unauthorized RSS aggregation. The "link tax" provision isn't about links, it's about excerpts of content.
- tannhaeuser 8y agoBut with RSS you're receiving content directly from the publisher's site. There's no third-party involved, and the publisher can provide as many text bites as desired. There is no problem there as long as no content aggregation web site is acting as middleman.
- toyg 8y ago> as long as no content aggregation web site is acting as middleman. That would imply people will go back to installing things, hunting for feeds, copypasting urls... As much as I like desktop tech, that boat has likely sailed, at least for the mass-consumer market. You might maybe get away with a mobile app, but you'd still need help from browsers to "subscribe" to feeds - something that was pretty awful the first time it was tried, and has been basically abandoned or removed since.
- forgotpwd16 8y agoI never saw social networks as a replacement to RSS/Atom feeds. Feeds were about checking news/articles directly from a client, whereas social networks are about sharing a link.
- jhabdas 8y agoMissing some important discussion topics such as PubSubHubub and WebSub. As the Web-based ad industry continues to crumble under the ideal of privacy as a basic human right my vision brings Web feeds back into the limelight but not as a metadata description frameworks but as monetized content upgrades.
- walterbell 8y agoWhat's the best iOS RSS reader for iPad (split view support) and iPhone, which manages a local-only database of RSS subscriptions, without requiring iCloud or other cloud-based login and surveillance?
- bstn 8y agoReeder is free since v4 will launch later this year. It works fine on Mac and iOS. You can use local RSS or things like Feedly. I just use local RSS. No syncing between Mac and iOS btw. http://reederapp.com http://reederapp.com edit: There is also the news that NetNewsWire is back to its original developer and will be released later this year: http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/ http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/
- rimliu 8y agoiCloud has surveillance now? Interesting.
- walterbell 8y agohttps://money.cnn.com/2016/02/22/technology/apple-privacy-icloud/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2016/02/22/technology/apple-privacy-ic... > Apple's stance on privacy and security applies only if you don't back up your data to iCloud ... In the first half of 2015, police agencies around the globe asked to explore 4,472 Apple customer accounts, according to the company. Apple disclosed data to police on 1,886 them, of which 1,407 were provided to law enforcement in the United States. In these instances, Apple gave investigators contents of customer iCloud, iTunes and Game Center accounts. Apple didn't always turn over the information. It objected 401 times in all.
- rimliu 8y agoThis is no more surveillance than police coming to your house with a search warrant is though.
- walterbell 8y ago
- bmn__ 8y agoThe article downplays the significance of Atom. Today, nearly all Web feeds are available as Atom. Hackers, learn from this. Specs matter. https://web.archive.org/web/2004/http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-rss https://web.archive.org/web/2004/http://diveintomark.org/arc... Atom exists precisely because RSS is a clusterfuck that could not be salvaged.
- CharlesW 8y agoRegarding the "The myth of RSS compatibility" article, at one point RSS was evolving and changes broke stuff. But the article overstates the case, and the RSS spec has been boringly frozen for almost two decades now. > The article downplays the significance of Atom. Does it? Atom Syndication Format seems like a vestigial feed format, so I'm interested in cases where it's used and RSS isn't also available.
- clacke2 8y ago> Maybe RSS could have been extended somehow so that friends subscribed to the same channel could syndicate their thoughts about an article to each other. @dang Congratulations, you just invented OStatus. :-) OStatus is a combination of Atom+ActivityStreams+Salmon+WebFinger+WebSub for exactly this purpose. It was created in 2009 and was even partially used by Google Buzz. I could post something on identi.ca and see it pop up in my timeline on Google Buzz. But as you indicate regarding RSS, Google didn't know how to monetize it, and they soon killed Google Buzz in favor of the closed Google+, years before they killed Google Reader. When Mastodon arrived in 2016 it used OStatus as its primary protocol until the new ActivityPub was recommended by the W3C as a replacement. OStatus is still supported by Mastodon as a secondary protocol, and part of the Fediverse still runs on pure OStatus. Diaspora was inspired by OStatus, but removes the WebSub part in favor of going full Salmon, and does a few of the details differently.
- xte 8y agoGood "history" post that anyone who do not know should read as personal IT history culture however their conclusion IMVHO are wrong. When RSS concept started we simply do not have always-on tech, ads-tech, aggregator's tech and software itself was a business. Now that we have the above TheBig simply prefer control their consumers better. RSS-web-client like Google reader are simply ancestor of modern aggregator, a way to control users while leaving a bit of freedom, aggregator's suppress this last bit of freedom, that's for me the real reason behind RSS/Atom decline. Sorry for my poor English.
- noirscape 8y agoI miss Apples native RSS readers (Safari and Mail used to have native readers, with Mail being configurable to send you RSS feeds to your inbox). Sadly they dropped them with Lion if I'm not mistaken. RSS is/was nice to be able to stay up-to-date with infrequently updating blogs, and it's honestly a shame that it's no longer used as much as it used to. One thing that could possibly re-ignite the use of RSS feeds is a button in the adress bar (I recall Safari having this option) to indicate that the site has an RSS feed and taking you to it when you click on it. Maybe look in a couple of predetermined places to find this feed (feed.xml and rss.xml are almost universally the common feed names I've seen used on the sites that I frequent, with the exception of reddit, which simply lets you append .rss to any URL).
- occamrazor 8y agoMS Outlook still has a feed reader, although it is pretty limited.
- osterwood 8y agoI see a resurgence happening and a great example of that is Micro.blog -- a social network built on top of RSS, JSON Feed, and other open standards for posting and comments. https://micro.blog/ https://micro.blog/ https://help.micro.blog/2015/why-i-created-this/ https://help.micro.blog/2015/why-i-created-this/
- vshabanov 8y agoAs a developer of a feed reader that supports both RSS/Atom and Twitter/Facebook/Google+/Instagram/VK (https://bazqux.com https://bazqux.com) I say that making client for well defined API hosted by one provider (silo) was much more simple than support RSS/Atom feeds. Here is an incomplete list of various problems you'll have if you want to write a feed reader http://inessential.com/2013/03/18/brians_stupid_feed_tricks http://inessential.com/2013/03/18/brians_stupid_feed_tricks It requires a lot of work to make a feed reader that supports all possible feed generators from all possible sites. And it's more related to multiple buggy producers than to multiple feed formats (for example repeating item IDs, different item IDs for the same items, missing IDs -- no matter what format you use you get same issues). Another complexity is feed updating itself. Silo hosts content and knows what was updated. Feed readers don't. So they need to poll and update a lot of content even if they have just a few users (but with thousand feeds each). There is a PubSubHubbub, but again, lots of providers and implementations could be buggy (for most feeds I just fetch them directly when receiving a push instead of use push data itself since it's more reliable). So the open nature of web syndication itself dampens its usage by making developing and running feed reader a costly task. It's really simpler (and maybe more profitable if you're lucky) to write a silo. And there are more problems that are not related to feed format at all: relative complexity of subscribing, not everybody need syndication (many people prefer occasional visiting of the site instead of reading each article), new forms of "syndication" (related videos, algorithmic feeds), less blogs (maybe it's good -- let people post cat pics in social media), less popularity (not a part of big sites, browsers), less education (social media and messaging apps is the only Internet some people know) and so on. But there are people who want to follow every article from interesting sources in software optimized for this task. And feed readers are the best thing here. For example, some people use my feed reader for Facebook/Twitter feeds only (no RSS feeds at all) just because it's more convenient to read them here. In the end, I think, process of reading subscriptions is more important than underlying format. If RSS will die (quite unlikely) another methods of getting articles will appear.
- amyjess 8y agoSadly, the article glosses over what a mess RSS 2.0 was. There were actually three different, slightly incompatible releases of 2.0. It's not really relevant anymore because so many years have passed, but it used to be that in order to parse an RSS 2.0 feed, you'd have to know when the feed was created and parse it differently depending on the creation time. I read a post about the contentious history of RSS several years ago, similar to this one, and that bit really jumped out at me. I'll see if I can find it again.
- upofadown 8y ago>That little tangerine bubble has become a wistful symbol of defiance against a centralized web increasingly controlled by a handful of corporations, ... Just a quibble about terminology. Those handful of corporations do not control the web; they merely dominate it. It's an important distinction. Actual control is censorship, which is an important issue these days. The fact that a lot of people are using systems associated with a few companies is in the end relatively unimportant. RSS is quite important simply because it is used to discover individual articles from lots of different sources. People who post things with RSS feeds are not raging against the dark but instead are routinely maintaining the light.
- lhball 8y agoAnother tragedy is that RSS dropped in popularity at the same time that appreciation for the "open" web did. The great fake-news scare has greenlit walled gardens of the kind people never envisioned back when RSS started. Content discovery for the everyday internet user consists of either Facebook, Google, or Twitter. And none of them are opaque about their SERPS / timelines.
- jonnytran 8y ago> He pointed out that Twitter was basically a better RSS feed, since it could show you what people thought about an article in addition to the article itself. It allowed you to follow people and not just channels. This is why I absolutely LOVED FriendFeed. Not only could you follow arbitrary RSS feeds and FriendFeed users, but you could group feeds into "imaginary users". This was great because you could follow anyone you wanted, even if they didn't use FriendFeed themselves. So what happened to FriendFeed? Acquired by Facebook and then killed.
- clacke2 8y agoFriendica is still alive and can do this! It's primarily microblogging-oriented, but you can subscribe to any RSS feed too. And users (including RSS feeds) can be grouped, so you could have one group "tech feeds", one group "cat accounts" etc.
- PaulHoule 8y agoLike almost every article about RSS it seems more concerned with people writing than it is with the needs of the readers. That was always the problem with David Weiner and his pals. For instance what the exact format is does not matter. Supporting RSS, Atom and a few similar formats from a reader perspective is just no problem compared to parsing bad HTML, dealing with JS Hell, etc. The real issue is a lack of innovation on the part of feed readers, particularly that we still see the "here is a list of all your feeds" viewed separately and no effort to make a workflow where you can make it so your time is not wasted by articles from Tedium and sensationalistic sites like Fox News and the New York Times, etc. see http://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/ http://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/ http://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/ http://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/ the machine learning technology to do this is ten years old and if the kids out there weren't so interested in word embeddings, functional programming and other fads, they could bring this to the people.
- bitcuration 8y agoFundamentally, RSS is supposed to be a tool to deal with information overflow yet it failed. The demand is how to get the content of what you want and when you want in the quickest and easiest way. Social networks, Tweets, FB, RSS subscriber, flipboard etc. all attempted despite the Ad revenue must be taken care along the way, yet none has really met the demand. Do you get news from your friends, or subscribe people, or visiting sites? To me it is as much as mundane as 20 years ago when internet started. The problem has been resolved except many have made tons of money while tackling it. The fundamental problem remains unresolved and still waiting for answers.