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One problem with feeds is many sites don't have feeds and people blame RSS rather than the site not implementing it. Another problem is noise: most sites just o

One problem with feeds is many sites don't have feeds and people blame RSS rather than the site not implementing it. Another problem is noise: most sites just offer a single all-or-nothing feed, while they categorize/tag posts on their site. If they offered a comprehensive set of microfeeds that would help adoption I think (or include the category metadata). Another problem is truncated feeds, requiring users to click links and navigate to the original site to read each item. While some premium readers claim to offer complete news items, this is probably against the wishes of the site and may be circumvented similar to the add-blocker arms-race. In my opinion if a site model requires users to visit it, then they shouldn't offer feeds at all. Lastly some feeds are behind logins (e.g. forums), not all readers support these feeds.

mwgkgk 8y ago
Often projects that don't provide RSS do twitter, which can be converted to RSS via online services. Also sometimes you have to look harder than usual, because the presence of an RSS icon only loosely correlates with having actual feeds. Sometimes things like domain.com/feed, domain.com/rss, domain.com/atom yield success, I suspect provided by the website engine itself. Not to take away from your argument
- mercer 8y ago
  It's as simple as: https://twitrss.me/twitter_user_to_rss/?user=<username> https://twitrss.me/twitter_user_to_rss/?user=<username>
- jefurii 8y ago
  Or just View Source and search for "rss" or "atom".
guybedo 8y ago
i've tried to solve some of these issues with the feed reader i built https://aktu.io https://aktu.io : - sites without feed: These sites usually have a Facebook page so i added a feature to subscribe to a Facebook page. The page posts now appear in your RSS feeds as regular RSS items. - noise: The content is automatically categorized, with names of people, places, etc... extracted so you can easily filter your feeds. Articles in your feeds are automatically grouped together if they're about the same story, that helps reduce the number of items and at the same time provide different angles on stories. - truncated content: There's not much to be done for this one i guess, unless you go against the publisher's wishes

mwgkgk 8y ago

Often projects that don't provide RSS do twitter, which can be converted to RSS via online services. Also sometimes you have to look harder than usual, because the presence of an RSS icon only loosely correlates with having actual feeds. Sometimes things like domain.com/feed, domain.com/rss, domain.com/atom yield success, I suspect provided by the website engine itself. Not to take away from your argument

mercer 8y ago
It's as simple as: https://twitrss.me/twitter_user_to_rss/?user=<username> https://twitrss.me/twitter_user_to_rss/?user=<username>
jefurii 8y ago
Or just View Source and search for "rss" or "atom".

guybedo 8y ago

i've tried to solve some of these issues with the feed reader i built https://aktu.io https://aktu.io : - sites without feed: These sites usually have a Facebook page so i added a feature to subscribe to a Facebook page. The page posts now appear in your RSS feeds as regular RSS items. - noise: The content is automatically categorized, with names of people, places, etc... extracted so you can easily filter your feeds. Articles in your feeds are automatically grouped together if they're about the same story, that helps reduce the number of items and at the same time provide different angles on stories. - truncated content: There's not much to be done for this one i guess, unless you go against the publisher's wishes