20 ms·

RSS Is Better Than Twitter

580 points by k1m 8y ago

hprotagonist 8y ago
Considering how i read HN and thus how i’m reading this — and that i don’t have a twitter account — i guess i have to agree! RSS is very, very nice. Especially for keeping track of all the journals I have to keep an eye on.
- m-p-3 8y ago
  And it's super easy to use these feeds to automate stuff. Half of my IFTTT are about monitoring RSS feeds and taking an action upon them. The other halfs are webhooks.
  - Bolderman 8y ago
    Interesting. Do you mind to explain this a bit more?
    - m-p-3 8y ago
      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.
- sys_64738 8y ago
  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.
knight17 8y ago
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?
- k1m 8y ago
  Would like to see more effort in this area too. There was some work done a few years back at https://www.subtome.com/ https://www.subtome.com/ to make subscribing to RSS feeds easier.
  - rsscircus 8y ago
    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.
- astazangasta 8y ago
  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?
  - seba_dos1 8y ago
    "Cloud" features have been recently removed from the screenshot tool, FYI.
mike-cardwell 8y ago
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: https://www.grepular.com/Twitter_to_RSS_with_Google_Cloud_Function https://www.grepular.com/Twitter_to_RSS_with_Google_Cloud_Fu...
- zikzak 8y ago
  I think Feedbin let's you subscribe to Twitter as well (RSS reading service).
- DJHenk 8y ago
  There is also https://www.twitrss.me/ https://www.twitrss.me/
  - superkuh 8y ago
    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.
  - mike-cardwell 8y ago
    Yes. That service is mentioned in the second paragraph of my link. Along with reasoning as to why you might use the tool I wrote instead.
adamnemecek 8y ago
Add responses and maybe.
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  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.
  - vshabanov 8y ago
    I've implemented displaying of blog posts comments in BazQux Reader (https://bazqux.com 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".
    - avian 8y ago
      How are you fetching the comments? RSS has no support for that as far as I know.
      - alexmingoia 8y ago
        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. The future of the blogosphere remains bright.
      - vshabanov 8y ago
        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.
mooreds 8y ago
I love RSS, and have for years. My first blog post ever was about RSS: http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/4 http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/4 . I recently wrote that new developers should use RSS: https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2019/03/25/use-an-rss-reader/ https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2019/03/25/use-an-rss-rea... 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 https://twitter.com/mikekarnj/status/1106582308235235330 and this: https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/1106812630985928704 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.
- StavrosK 8y ago
  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.
  - thekyle 8y ago
    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.
    - StavrosK 8y ago
      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.
polote 8y ago
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. PS: I'm not saying RSS is bad
- kuzehanka 8y ago
  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.
abhinai 8y ago
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.
- Glench 8y ago
  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
  - kazinator 8y ago
    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.
    - Glench 8y ago
      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.
agnelvishal 8y ago
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
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- zaphar 8y ago
  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.
  - moogly 8y ago
    I don't buy it, because then they would've killed Google+ way earlier.
    - Andrex 8y ago
      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.
  - layoutIfNeeded 8y ago
    Still had more impact than Google+
- kgwxd 8y ago
  RSS can't be killed by anyone, thats what makes it good.
imartin2k 8y ago
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.
- h1d 8y ago
  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.
  - sbmassey 8y ago
    A lot of journalist types seem to have switched to Twitter in the aftermath of Google Reader. But yeah, RSS never died in the real world.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  > RSS is still the crucial cornerstone of my online content consumption. Mine too, 100%.
Angostura 8y ago
Remember when Twitter offered RSS feeds? It made the service actually useful.
- alexmingoia 8y ago
  There’s a number of bridges from Twitter to RSS. I read Twitter in Feeder. See https://feeder.co/knowledge-base/rss-feed-creation/twitter-rss-feeds/ https://feeder.co/knowledge-base/rss-feed-creation/twitter-r...
  - superkuh 8y ago
    But nothing you can do yourself without getting throttled by twitter.
    - mike-cardwell 8y ago
      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.
  - erikrothoff 8y ago
    Erik from Feeder here. Let me know if there's anything we can do to make the experience better! :D
  - Angostura 8y ago
    They are mainly (all?) dead because of rate limiting.
ez7r6i 8y ago
Wow, sexism and bigotry ;( ;( ;( Close down Twitter now!
SkyPuncher 8y ago
Lately, I've been getting back into RSS to stay up to date with industry news. I've noticed a lot of industry blogs still support RSS. 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
- jamiek88 8y ago
  There’s a couple safari extensions on the store that will do that for you. I use rssfind.
- latexr 8y ago
  > Some of the url's I'll try 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/ http://reederapp.com/
- mike-cardwell 8y ago
  I tend to just "View Source" and then search for "rss/feed/atom". There's usually a <link/> header in there pointing to one or more feeds.
- Arkanosis 8y ago
  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).
  - captn3m0 8y ago
    This used to be easy with RSS support in Firefox. Not anymore
  - dmit 8y ago
    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.
atomi 8y ago
Surprised No one has mentioned Miniflux https://github.com/miniflux/miniflux https://github.com/miniflux/miniflux
kazinator 8y ago
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.
NicoJuicy 8y ago
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.
packet_nerd 8y ago
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.
- kgwxd 8y ago
  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.
  - O_H_E 8y ago
    I don't get your point. If two sources post an article about the same event, I am going to get the "similar" title twice.
    - kgwxd 8y ago
      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?
      - O_H_E 8y ago
        Oh. That is actually quite annoying. Have been wanting to get my rss setup of quite sometime, but couldn't get the motivation.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  > 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.
TheTruth1234 8y ago
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.
- j7k6 8y ago
  > 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.
pradn 8y ago
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.
HenryBemis 8y ago
Gizmodo: 1 page of blocked items on my NoScript 23 blocked items on my Adblock Plus And now I can read the article..
noelsusman 8y ago
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.
kris-s 8y ago
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 https://jsonfeed.org - which would be a big step towards making a decentralized system more of a reality.
- oliwarner 8y ago
  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. JSON doesn't fix XML.
  - anoncake 8y ago
    > which are actuakly very liberal interpretations of XML This does sound painful, unlike parsing ordinary XML.
  - spc476 8y ago
    Of the three formats I support, RSS, Atom, and JSON, the RSS feed is the smallest. RSS: 33,228 Atom: 43,433 JSON: 36,137
    - oliwarner 8y ago
      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.)
djhworld 8y ago
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.
- j7k6 8y ago
  That's similar to how I use Twitter. 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.
zarriak 8y ago
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.
- mark_l_watson 8y ago
  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.
nathants 8y ago
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.
lazyjones 8y ago
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.
- dragontamer 8y ago
  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.
  - lazyjones 8y ago
    > 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.
  - mark_l_watson 8y ago
    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.
- 8y ago
oliwarner 8y ago
They're very different. RSS only let you listen. And it only works if you already know who you want to listen to. Twitter et al expose you to other content you're not already "following" by letting the people you do follow quickly push things in your eyeline. But RSS is just a format for sharing data. There's no built-in client for having a conversation, for tracking conversations. You ultimately still need a point of centralisation (like HN) to talkk shit about the stuff you're reading. All in, article is silly nonsense. Apples are way better than oranges.
- gnomewascool 8y ago
  > Twitter et al expose you to other content you're not already "following" by letting the people you do follow quickly push things in your eyeline. How is that different from the people whom you do "follow" with RSS recommending other feeds or individual articles, or quoting these articles, with their own comments? (Mostly agreed about the point regarding third-party pushed conversations.)
  - oliwarner 8y ago
    > How is that different We *could( each publish feeds of what we liked, or re-feed them with annotations. And we could follow other individuals (ie friends, acquaintances) and they us, and we could control access to levels of feed with authentication. We could have feeds of our friends (and their URLs). As well as feeds of our own throwaway commentary on life. Yeah, you could quite easily build something like Facebook and Twitter (without comments) with RSS. The "how is that different" is that we don't. There's both a technical networking obstacle as well as an interface. You and I likely know how to host this stuff but our grandmas don't. There's also nothing —there could be— to tie this together in an interface. Twitter et al do this crap for us, for "free".
    - gnomewascool 8y ago
      > Yeah, you could quite easily build something like Facebook and Twitter (without comments) with RSS. People already have! I'm going to use the example of Wordpress, as I know for sure that it does offer RSS out-of-the-box, but there are alternatives. If your grandma, say, has a wordpress blog, then RSS comes for free. If she knows what a hyperlink is (even if she doesn't know what it's called) then she can paste links to individual articles or blogs or news-sites. The reader can read whatever is recommended in their web browser and if it was (part of) an RSS feed, they can subscribe. In principle, you could even have an RSS feed reader that checks all links for whether they are associated with RSS feeds, to avoid the "web browser" step. I don't think that a non-self-hosted wordpress blog is significantly more difficult to use than Twitter. There will probably be people who can use the latter, but not the former; however, I think that it'll be a tiny minority. With Wordpress you could even have an RSS feed of comments and pingbacks, partially (but not globally) solving the third-party comments problem.
jayalpha 8y ago
I love RSS feeds. You can convert Twitter to RSS: http://twitrss.me http://twitrss.me Websites that don't have RSS: https://feedity.com/ https://feedity.com/ Email to RSS: https://zapier.com https://zapier.com Hackernews RSS:http://hnrss.org/newest?points=300 http://hnrss.org/newest?points=300 You can even use RSS for finding a job: https://www.indeed.ca/jobs?q=millwright&l=Toronto,+ON&sort=date https://www.indeed.ca/jobs?q=millwright&l=Toronto,+ON&sort=d...
- k1m 8y ago
  I work on a project which creates RSS feeds for sites which don't offer their own: Feed Creator - http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/ http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/ And one which converts partial feeds into full-text feeds: https://fivefilters.org/content-only/ https://fivefilters.org/content-only/
  - dewey 8y ago
    Cool project, I was searching for something like this a while ago and then tried to build something similar. It's not as cool and full featured as yours though; you have to write your own plugins for each site. It was still fun to build though. https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge
    - k1m 8y ago
      I came across your project a while ago. I was actually trying to search for it today to post a link to it in reply to another comment. I only remembered the 'bridge' part and assumed it was in PHP, so my search didn't bring it up. :)
  - sonar_un 8y ago
    I use a modified Scrape ‘N Feed to scrape the sites I need without RSS. With this I can go another level deeper and scrape the entire article and return that back to the feed instead of just getting the snippet. https://www.crummy.com/software/ScrapeNFeed/ https://www.crummy.com/software/ScrapeNFeed/
- 8y ago
godzillabrennus 8y ago
I miss using Newsfire before it stopped getting updates. http://newsfirerss.com/ http://newsfirerss.com/
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- O_H_E 8y ago
  Well...if it is working for you, you can keep using it
khendron 8y ago
Although I am a big fan of RSS, I find this article very disingenuous. The author complains about the chaos, vulgarity, and hostility of Twitter, but those complaints would apply to almost any social media platform. Then he suggests replacing it with RSS feeds from curated, professional RSS sources, which is not social media. You could achieve the same things on Twitter if you just followed the same curated, profession Twitter feeds. This is really just a roundabout argument that can be summarized as "don't read the comments."
- tamal 8y ago
  The solution to “too much RSS” is the same for Twitter. Unsubscribe/unfollow. Twitter does not require you to follow someone to interact with them. I follow relatively few people directly yet I have themed lists following other accounts. If I want local news I check my local list. Twitter works quite well in this regard vs. Facebook where you need to be “friends” to interact.
  - hannasanarion 8y ago
    No, that doesn't work, because Twitter shows tweets to you if their algorithm thinks you will like them, whether you have a follower relationship to it or not. Twitter's newsfeed is nothing at all like an RSS feed. You can turn twitter into an RSS feed with various other apps (I like Feedbin), and it greatly improves the experience.
    - tamal 8y ago
      I do not use Twitter.com not the Twitter app. I use third-party clients exclusively.
  - cannonedhamster 8y ago
    As a counterpoint you're unlikely to be doxxed, lose your job, or any of the other social "features" using RSS. While one could simply say nothing and hope to avoid this, it's still up to the Twitter algorithms to display relevant content, which could change at any moment. Effectively it's about control, with Twitter you're hoping for benevolence as you're the product, with RSS you're the customer.
addicted 8y ago
But RSS doesn’t replace Twitter. As much as the Twitterati May argue they need to be on Twitter to be informed, the reality is that the need Twitter fills is the need to broadcast your own views all over the world. A blog post, which requires a lot more effort, since it’s expected to be a little more substantial, may get 0 views, while a silly comment in response to a controversial topic on Twitter could easily get a few hundred likes, which makes people feel important. And RSS does not replace that aspect of Twitter.
- mark_l_watson 8y ago
  Yup, I agree with you for some twitter accounts. I find myself often pruning who I follow on Twitter so much so that I then find I am mostly getting tech announcements of papers and conferences, release announcements, etc. Periodically, I start following more people, then the pruning cycle repeats. I feel sometimes that I spend too much time on twitter and HN, and so I go on cycles for time spent per week there also. Really good to use a monitoring tool to let you know cumulatively how much time you spend a week on different media.
phasnox 8y ago
> On the surface, Twitter’s main value proposition is that it delivers up-to-the-second news. Not really. Most of the people I know , including me, go there for just one reason: To know the public opinion.
- rwz 8y ago
  Twitter is actually very bad at this. It's designed to amplify the most fringe, outrageous, and reaction-provoking hot takes, and trending stuff. A lot of sensible people either don't comment on twitter, or their voices get drowned in a sea of outrage and more engageable reactions.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  > To know the public opinion But always remember that you're only getting to know the opinion of the twitterverse. That may or may not track public opinion overall.
blunte 8y ago
"the charming pop-ups that everyone uses because fuck you" Between the cookie popups, the GRPD "choice" popups, and the sign-up-for-some-email-crap popups, each of which takes 1-2 seconds to appear - sometimes in parallel and sometimes in sequence - the web is a garbage fire. There definitely needs to be a retraction of sorts in terms of technology and content delivery. I also think we have passed "peak information". On the internet, everyone has a voice. At first that was good, but now the signal to noise ratio is so bad that good, accurate, useful content is just rounding error. The same is also true for television/film as well as the commercial music industry. That's not to say there are not still great people creating great content, but there are mass numbers of people polluting the mediums and making it increasingly difficult to find the good stuff. The current rate of decline of value of the internet suggests that there will be some significant disruption this decade. I wish I had the solution (or knew who to bet on!)
- lazyjones 8y ago
  > There definitely needs to be a retraction of sorts in terms of technology and content delivery. Indeed. The easiest (low-friction) way to implement this would be as browser options/addons. We need to get back control over how content is displayed on our screens, but browser makers' priority is to turn the browser into a TV set.
- BuckRogers 8y ago
  >The current rate of decline of value of the internet suggests that there will be some significant disruption this decade. I wish I had the solution (or knew who to bet on!) Books. That's what I've retreated to as the internet has been ruined. It's all about low barrier to entry that ruins anything with the shiftless/idle masses becoming involved. No one wants to pickup a book and read, they want to offer smart ass one-liners or harass people on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. That's most people's entire life, same behavior in the workplace, then they die. That's why I'm a developer, the barrier to entry is high enough that I enjoy and appreciate most people that I work with. Same concept as with media. Books are proof-read, edited and vetted for reasonably accurate sources in most cases. In general, publishing them is hard enough that as a consumer I can rely on them being one of the better mediums.
captn3m0 8y ago
If you are interested in RSS, I did a twitter-thread [3] recently on interesting projects in the space. Reproducing here: If you are interested in helping revive #RSS, a thread on some good FOSS projects around RSS: 1. RSS-Bridge[0] - RSS Feeds for websites that don't give you one. Supports instagram/facebook/Google Search and many more (150+) websites. Very easy to contribute, and there are open requests for lots of providers. (I added a Amazon Price Tracker Bridge in <150 loc). Yes, I get a RSS notification when there is a price change on something I follow[1]. 2. MiniFlux - Golang+Postgres based self-hosted RSS feed reader. Minimal/responsive design with keyboard shortcuts https://miniflux.app https://miniflux.app 3. 3. tt-rss - A highly configurable PHP based RSS feed reader. Supports plugins and has tons of options. UI is similar to Google Reader. https://tt-rss.org https://tt-rss.org 4. Winds - A Beautiful Open Source RSS & Podcast App powered by @getstream_io. I haven't tried self-hosting it yet, but it looks really great. Also, under very active development. https://github.com/GetStream/Winds https://github.com/GetStream/Winds 5. FreshRSS - Lightweight PHP/SQlite self-hosted feed reader. Looks great as well. https://freshrss.org https://freshrss.org 6. Kill the Newsletter - Subscribe to a newsletter with a one-time generated email address, it generates a RSS feed for you. Your inbox stays clean. https://www.kill-the-newsletter.com https://www.kill-the-newsletter.com 7. OPML Generator - Generates OPML Files using subscriptions on other sites. Supports GitHub stars (generates a file you can import to follow releases from all your starred repos on GitHub) https://opml.bb8.fun/ https://opml.bb8.fun/ (Personal project, so count this as a shameless self plug) 8. RSS never really died, so revival is a misnomer in that sense. All major news publications still support RSS. The entire Podcast ecosytem works on RSS. You should also look at WebSub and ActivityPub (both W3C recommendations) if you're interested in this. 9. And finally a cool new idea - build a Telegram Channel to RSS Feed generator. Will open up so much hidden content to the open web. 10. Bonus: https://www.youneedfeeds.com/ https://www.youneedfeeds.com/ Info site that you should share with your friends to help them get started with RSS. [0]: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge [1]: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/pull/741 https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/pull/741 [3]: https://twitter.com/captn3m0/status/1018850458675408902 https://twitter.com/captn3m0/status/1018850458675408902
- jhund 8y ago
  I'd like to mention https://contentgems.com https://contentgems.com - a free web service that follows any RSS feed you want. It then gives you powerful filters to include/exclude content you're not interested. You can also connect your twitter home timeline to extract all articles linked to from a tweet. And finally, there are workflows that you can use to re-mix RSS feeds and produce new ones. Paid plans give you more resources, however the free plan is super valuable for individual users. Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders.
whoopdedo 8y ago
Can you track trending topics with RSS? Can you carry on a conversation between content creators and subscribers over RSS? Can you discover new content by following a RSS social graph? RSS is better than Twitter in only one aspect and that's the one-to-many subscriber model. And that's the least interesting and least profitable thing that Twitter provides.
- grenoire 8y ago
  1. No, do you need to? Trending for whom? People could create curated feeds for this purpose. 2. No. 3. See 1.
- skybrian 8y ago
  I think it's a fairly silly comparison overall, but it doesn't help when you judge by technical features rather than what kind of content the ecosystem encourages, which what actually matters. Twitter is extremely noisy. It tends to overwhelm actual articles that people put some effort into with shallow, witty zingers. If you're not looking for witty zingers, it doesn't really matter what other features it has. RSS is just a file format, but it enables a larger ecosystem that works better at showcasing good content.
notadoc 8y ago
Twitter is basically Outrage as a Service, it is not a good information platform. I still miss Google Reader, I think it was a serious mistake to kill it off, and doing so largely killed RSS too.
Tunyalit 8y ago
I'm the one who still likes RSS.
guybedo 8y ago
Although the title is a little bit provocative, i tend to agree that RSS is a better way to consume news than Twitter or any other social media platform by the way. Social platforms should be used for social, not for news, but i guess Twitter is a special case in that one of its core values is to deliver news in real time. But do we need realtime? Twitter being a social platform, it means you can't easily avoid trolls, offensive/aggressive/idiotic comments... Off the top of my head, some issues i had with RSS and/or with the tools/RSS readers: - RSS can become en echo chamber if you have a limited number of feeds - Too many feeds and your feeds are flooded with a lot of noise - want to check the top stories of the day, or trending content? need to use a different tool than your RSS reader. - want to follow some social feeds but without the noise of social platforms? I wrote something about the signal/noise ratio in RSS recently: https://medium.com/@julien.aktu/rss-less-noise-more-information-983ea20cb05e https://medium.com/@julien.aktu/rss-less-noise-more-informat... To solve these issues, i'm trying to bring something to the RSS ecosystem, and i built a news platform mixing RSS and traditional news aggregation. It has features to limit the noise and help avoid echo chambers. You can follow Facebook pages, Twitter users, etc... add your newsletters to declutter your mail box, and much more to come. You can check it out here: https://aktu.io/about https://aktu.io/about
allenleein 8y ago
Would like to see `RSS + customizable AI` as a protocol.
lkrubner 8y ago
If anyone is interested in the soap opera that shaped the early days of RSS, read "RSS has been damaged by infighting among those who advocate for it". This is from 2006, and captures the chaos of the times: 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-...
mastrsushi 8y ago
I did use RSS through Google Reader briefly back in 2009. Then I found out about Twitter, and immediately thought of it as a modern response. Unifying the web's news feeds into one technology was such an obvious solution, its emergence was unavoidable, no matter what way it came. Web platforms always had some form of portal, blog publishing service, general discussion board, or better yet a single tap service where everything anyone wants to know, or at least thinks they do is encapsulated. What these older services failed to capture that made Twitter and other "social" media sites so popular is the "social" aspect. The automated synchronized posting structure that RSS provides may be more efficient than user-driven Twitter. But with Twitters' intuition, popularity, and ability to communicate within that vast user space is enough to outweigh any of RSS's technological advancements. RSS always seemed like a technology for techies, Twitter brought the feed to laymen.
- Yhippa 8y ago
  Peak Internet for me was using Google Reader, sharing articles, and having discussions about them with my Google Buzz friends.
OrgNet 8y ago
RSS is great and I use RSS to read some parts of Twitter but you can't really compare the two (at least not in its current form) but it could be extended to allow feedback, etc...
hellllllllooo 8y ago
They're different things with different purposes. Both are useful. This is clickbate.
WhatTheHomePod 8y ago
They should make commenting and karma like this and Reddit a standard in RSS. Let people comment on RSS.
mchmarny 8y ago
Every couple of months I search for a better news reader… cycle through Flipper, Feedly, NewsBlur, & 4-8 others… once more acknowledge how good Google Reader really was, and go back to scrolling through Twitter/Reddit I’d probably pay large amount of money now for a news reader w/ these 4 features * Extract stories from my feed/lists on Twitter & Reddit and aggregate comments on these from people I follow * Learn from my ‘more/less like this’ on individual stories * Allow me to tag sources and create auto-tagging filters * Clean/intuitive Web UI & mobile client
- WCityMike 8y ago
  While there are definitely areas where it sorely can be improved, check out Inoreader.
- guybedo 8y ago
  Hey i'm working on a News Aggregation platform / RSS reader, aktu.io. It doesn't have the features you need but if you'd like to give it a try anyway, would love your feedback. You can check out the main features here: - https://aktu.io/about https://aktu.io/about - and here https://medium.com/@julien.aktu/rss-less-noise-more-information-983ea20cb05e https://medium.com/@julien.aktu/rss-less-noise-more-informat...
- casualmr 8y ago
  Have you tried https://bazqux.com https://bazqux.com ? It was built right after Google shut down Reader and very much resembles and improved upon it in multiple ways. Super fast too.
russellbeattie 8y ago
If you look at both Twitter and RSS superficially, you can easily decide one is better than the other. If you've ever tried and failed to create your own "perfect" news reader as I have, you'll realize both suck, and have for over a decade now and they're never going ever improve. The real issue isn't the pros and cons of one platform vs. another from an informational or social perspective, the real issue is much more fundamental: Information overload. I wrote about this, oh, 9 years ago [1]. And then a few years later as well [2]. I did an analysis of the quantity of news items, posts and tweets coming through my custom feed reader and realized it was - and always will be - impossible to keep up, no matter how I organized, grouped, condensed, summarized and displayed it all. The basic, undeniable fact is that most RSS sources are filled with repetitive information which are nearly impossible to group or update properly. And if you follow any more than a few dozen accounts on Twitter, you are going to miss most of their posts on a daily basis (regardless of their quality, there's just too many). Most of Twitter, in fact, is simply people talking to themselves. (And Facebook is basically useless in terms of gaining any actual knowledge.) All news feeds - whether they are from RSS, Twitter, FB, Insta, SnapChat, WeChat, TikTok or anything else - are simply not scalable. So pick which you enjoy most, limit the number of sources to only those most important or useful to you, and get on with your life. Until AI gets to the point where it can sort through all the information out there for you - a la Apple's Knowledge Navigator - the only difference between any stream of data is superficial at best. 1. https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/drinking-from-the-firehose https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/drinking-from-the-fireho... 2. https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/but-how-do-you-keep-track-of-everything https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/but-how-do-you-keep-trac...
- andersonnnunes 8y ago
  I have 50K regexs on a black-list to filter feeds on my reader. AI would help with some, but this brute force method goes a long way too.
  - russellbeattie 8y ago
    That's... amazing! I admire your dedication (addiction?). :-)
mikeash 8y ago
Twitter is like an internet Rorschach test. It’s a very general platform that offers little guidance, so people use it in fundamentally different ways. I didn’t get the headline until I saw that apparently the author think Twitter is for getting news. I’m sure some people do, but this is strange to me. I use it to keep up with friends and acquaintances, and with the goings-on at certain local organizations. Other people use it to get better customer service. There are many ways to use it. RSS isn’t even in the same species as most of them.
binoyxj 8y ago
For once, I thought this was something related to the political scene in India. Now that it's election season and the right-wing (BJP/RSS) actually protested against Twitter on roads alleging them to be left aligned or supporting the opposition.
hnsukas 8y ago
Less shadow banning features definitely :-))
Imagenuity 8y ago
WordPress now powers 30% of websites. Get an RSS feed from a WordPress site by adding /feed/ to the URL. You can also get RSS feeds from WordPress categories and tags.
triplee 8y ago
Once Google Reader died, I found The Old Reader (theoldreader.com) and just ran with that. I never stopped using RSS, and trying to get syndication from Twitter would cause my head (and my Twitter feed for things I actually care about) to explode. I'm sad that we still have to remind people of these things.
Mauricio_ 8y ago
I'll take this chance to recommend Blogtrottr as a perfect alternative to Google Reader, if used along with Gmail Reader.

580 points by k1m 8y ago

Considering how i read HN and thus how i’m reading this — and that i don’t have a twitter account — i guess i have to agree! RSS is very, very nice. Especially for keeping track of all the journals I have to keep an eye on.

m-p-3 8y ago
And it's super easy to use these feeds to automate stuff. Half of my IFTTT are about monitoring RSS feeds and taking an action upon them. The other halfs are webhooks.
- Bolderman 8y ago
  Interesting. Do you mind to explain this a bit more?
  - m-p-3 8y ago
    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.
sys_64738 8y ago
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.

knight17 8y ago

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?

k1m 8y ago
Would like to see more effort in this area too. There was some work done a few years back at https://www.subtome.com/ https://www.subtome.com/ to make subscribing to RSS feeds easier.
- rsscircus 8y ago
  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.
astazangasta 8y ago
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?
- seba_dos1 8y ago
  "Cloud" features have been recently removed from the screenshot tool, FYI.

mike-cardwell 8y ago

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: https://www.grepular.com/Twitter_to_RSS_with_Google_Cloud_Function https://www.grepular.com/Twitter_to_RSS_with_Google_Cloud_Fu...

zikzak 8y ago
I think Feedbin let's you subscribe to Twitter as well (RSS reading service).
DJHenk 8y ago
There is also https://www.twitrss.me/ https://www.twitrss.me/
- superkuh 8y ago
  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.
- mike-cardwell 8y ago
  Yes. That service is mentioned in the second paragraph of my link. Along with reasoning as to why you might use the tool I wrote instead.

adamnemecek 8y ago

Add responses and maybe.

PavlovsCat 8y ago
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.
- vshabanov 8y ago
  I've implemented displaying of blog posts comments in BazQux Reader (https://bazqux.com 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".
  - avian 8y ago
    How are you fetching the comments? RSS has no support for that as far as I know.
    - alexmingoia 8y ago
      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. The future of the blogosphere remains bright.
    - vshabanov 8y ago
      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.

mooreds 8y ago

I love RSS, and have for years. My first blog post ever was about RSS: http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/4 http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/4 . I recently wrote that new developers should use RSS: https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2019/03/25/use-an-rss-reader/ https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2019/03/25/use-an-rss-rea... 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 https://twitter.com/mikekarnj/status/1106582308235235330 and this: https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/1106812630985928704 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.

StavrosK 8y ago
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.
- thekyle 8y ago
  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.
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    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.

polote 8y ago

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. PS: I'm not saying RSS is bad

kuzehanka 8y ago
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.

abhinai 8y ago

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.

Glench 8y ago
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
- kazinator 8y ago
  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.
  - Glench 8y ago
    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.

agnelvishal 8y ago

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

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
zaphar 8y ago
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.
- moogly 8y ago
  I don't buy it, because then they would've killed Google+ way earlier.
  - Andrex 8y ago
    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.
- layoutIfNeeded 8y ago
  Still had more impact than Google+
kgwxd 8y ago
RSS can't be killed by anyone, thats what makes it good.

imartin2k 8y ago

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.

h1d 8y ago
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.
- sbmassey 8y ago
  A lot of journalist types seem to have switched to Twitter in the aftermath of Google Reader. But yeah, RSS never died in the real world.
JohnFen 8y ago
> RSS is still the crucial cornerstone of my online content consumption. Mine too, 100%.

Angostura 8y ago

Remember when Twitter offered RSS feeds? It made the service actually useful.

alexmingoia 8y ago
There’s a number of bridges from Twitter to RSS. I read Twitter in Feeder. See https://feeder.co/knowledge-base/rss-feed-creation/twitter-rss-feeds/ https://feeder.co/knowledge-base/rss-feed-creation/twitter-r...
- superkuh 8y ago
  But nothing you can do yourself without getting throttled by twitter.
  - mike-cardwell 8y ago
    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.
- erikrothoff 8y ago
  Erik from Feeder here. Let me know if there's anything we can do to make the experience better! :D
- Angostura 8y ago
  They are mainly (all?) dead because of rate limiting.

ez7r6i 8y ago

Wow, sexism and bigotry ;( ;( ;( Close down Twitter now!

SkyPuncher 8y ago

Lately, I've been getting back into RSS to stay up to date with industry news. I've noticed a lot of industry blogs still support RSS. 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

jamiek88 8y ago
There’s a couple safari extensions on the store that will do that for you. I use rssfind.
latexr 8y ago
> Some of the url's I'll try 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/ http://reederapp.com/
mike-cardwell 8y ago
I tend to just "View Source" and then search for "rss/feed/atom". There's usually a <link/> header in there pointing to one or more feeds.
Arkanosis 8y ago
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).
- captn3m0 8y ago
  This used to be easy with RSS support in Firefox. Not anymore
- dmit 8y ago
  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.

atomi 8y ago

Surprised No one has mentioned Miniflux https://github.com/miniflux/miniflux https://github.com/miniflux/miniflux

kazinator 8y ago

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.

NicoJuicy 8y ago

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.

packet_nerd 8y ago

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.

kgwxd 8y ago
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.
- O_H_E 8y ago
  I don't get your point. If two sources post an article about the same event, I am going to get the "similar" title twice.
  - kgwxd 8y ago
    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?
    - O_H_E 8y ago
      Oh. That is actually quite annoying. Have been wanting to get my rss setup of quite sometime, but couldn't get the motivation.
JohnFen 8y ago
> 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.

TheTruth1234 8y ago

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.

j7k6 8y ago
> 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.

pradn 8y ago

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.

HenryBemis 8y ago

Gizmodo: 1 page of blocked items on my NoScript 23 blocked items on my Adblock Plus And now I can read the article..

noelsusman 8y ago

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.

kris-s 8y ago

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 https://jsonfeed.org - which would be a big step towards making a decentralized system more of a reality.

oliwarner 8y ago
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. JSON doesn't fix XML.
- anoncake 8y ago
  > which are actuakly very liberal interpretations of XML This does sound painful, unlike parsing ordinary XML.
- spc476 8y ago
  Of the three formats I support, RSS, Atom, and JSON, the RSS feed is the smallest. RSS: 33,228 Atom: 43,433 JSON: 36,137
  - oliwarner 8y ago
    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.)

djhworld 8y ago

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.

j7k6 8y ago
That's similar to how I use Twitter. 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.

zarriak 8y ago

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.

mark_l_watson 8y ago
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.

nathants 8y ago

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.

lazyjones 8y ago

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.

dragontamer 8y ago
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.
- lazyjones 8y ago
  > 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.
- mark_l_watson 8y ago
  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.
8y ago

oliwarner 8y ago

They're very different. RSS only let you listen. And it only works if you already know who you want to listen to. Twitter et al expose you to other content you're not already "following" by letting the people you do follow quickly push things in your eyeline. But RSS is just a format for sharing data. There's no built-in client for having a conversation, for tracking conversations. You ultimately still need a point of centralisation (like HN) to talkk shit about the stuff you're reading. All in, article is silly nonsense. Apples are way better than oranges.

gnomewascool 8y ago
> Twitter et al expose you to other content you're not already "following" by letting the people you do follow quickly push things in your eyeline. How is that different from the people whom you do "follow" with RSS recommending other feeds or individual articles, or quoting these articles, with their own comments? (Mostly agreed about the point regarding third-party pushed conversations.)
- oliwarner 8y ago
  > How is that different We *could( each publish feeds of what we liked, or re-feed them with annotations. And we could follow other individuals (ie friends, acquaintances) and they us, and we could control access to levels of feed with authentication. We could have feeds of our friends (and their URLs). As well as feeds of our own throwaway commentary on life. Yeah, you could quite easily build something like Facebook and Twitter (without comments) with RSS. The "how is that different" is that we don't. There's both a technical networking obstacle as well as an interface. You and I likely know how to host this stuff but our grandmas don't. There's also nothing —there could be— to tie this together in an interface. Twitter et al do this crap for us, for "free".
  - gnomewascool 8y ago
    > Yeah, you could quite easily build something like Facebook and Twitter (without comments) with RSS. People already have! I'm going to use the example of Wordpress, as I know for sure that it does offer RSS out-of-the-box, but there are alternatives. If your grandma, say, has a wordpress blog, then RSS comes for free. If she knows what a hyperlink is (even if she doesn't know what it's called) then she can paste links to individual articles or blogs or news-sites. The reader can read whatever is recommended in their web browser and if it was (part of) an RSS feed, they can subscribe. In principle, you could even have an RSS feed reader that checks all links for whether they are associated with RSS feeds, to avoid the "web browser" step. I don't think that a non-self-hosted wordpress blog is significantly more difficult to use than Twitter. There will probably be people who can use the latter, but not the former; however, I think that it'll be a tiny minority. With Wordpress you could even have an RSS feed of comments and pingbacks, partially (but not globally) solving the third-party comments problem.

jayalpha 8y ago

I love RSS feeds. You can convert Twitter to RSS: http://twitrss.me http://twitrss.me Websites that don't have RSS: https://feedity.com/ https://feedity.com/ Email to RSS: https://zapier.com https://zapier.com Hackernews RSS:http://hnrss.org/newest?points=300 http://hnrss.org/newest?points=300 You can even use RSS for finding a job: https://www.indeed.ca/jobs?q=millwright&l=Toronto,+ON&sort=date https://www.indeed.ca/jobs?q=millwright&l=Toronto,+ON&sort=d...

k1m 8y ago
I work on a project which creates RSS feeds for sites which don't offer their own: Feed Creator - http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/ http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/ And one which converts partial feeds into full-text feeds: https://fivefilters.org/content-only/ https://fivefilters.org/content-only/
- dewey 8y ago
  Cool project, I was searching for something like this a while ago and then tried to build something similar. It's not as cool and full featured as yours though; you have to write your own plugins for each site. It was still fun to build though. https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge
  - k1m 8y ago
    I came across your project a while ago. I was actually trying to search for it today to post a link to it in reply to another comment. I only remembered the 'bridge' part and assumed it was in PHP, so my search didn't bring it up. :)
- sonar_un 8y ago
  I use a modified Scrape ‘N Feed to scrape the sites I need without RSS. With this I can go another level deeper and scrape the entire article and return that back to the feed instead of just getting the snippet. https://www.crummy.com/software/ScrapeNFeed/ https://www.crummy.com/software/ScrapeNFeed/
8y ago

godzillabrennus 8y ago

I miss using Newsfire before it stopped getting updates. http://newsfirerss.com/ http://newsfirerss.com/

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
O_H_E 8y ago
Well...if it is working for you, you can keep using it

khendron 8y ago

Although I am a big fan of RSS, I find this article very disingenuous. The author complains about the chaos, vulgarity, and hostility of Twitter, but those complaints would apply to almost any social media platform. Then he suggests replacing it with RSS feeds from curated, professional RSS sources, which is not social media. You could achieve the same things on Twitter if you just followed the same curated, profession Twitter feeds. This is really just a roundabout argument that can be summarized as "don't read the comments."

tamal 8y ago
The solution to “too much RSS” is the same for Twitter. Unsubscribe/unfollow. Twitter does not require you to follow someone to interact with them. I follow relatively few people directly yet I have themed lists following other accounts. If I want local news I check my local list. Twitter works quite well in this regard vs. Facebook where you need to be “friends” to interact.
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  No, that doesn't work, because Twitter shows tweets to you if their algorithm thinks you will like them, whether you have a follower relationship to it or not. Twitter's newsfeed is nothing at all like an RSS feed. You can turn twitter into an RSS feed with various other apps (I like Feedbin), and it greatly improves the experience.
  - tamal 8y ago
    I do not use Twitter.com not the Twitter app. I use third-party clients exclusively.
- cannonedhamster 8y ago
  As a counterpoint you're unlikely to be doxxed, lose your job, or any of the other social "features" using RSS. While one could simply say nothing and hope to avoid this, it's still up to the Twitter algorithms to display relevant content, which could change at any moment. Effectively it's about control, with Twitter you're hoping for benevolence as you're the product, with RSS you're the customer.

addicted 8y ago

But RSS doesn’t replace Twitter. As much as the Twitterati May argue they need to be on Twitter to be informed, the reality is that the need Twitter fills is the need to broadcast your own views all over the world. A blog post, which requires a lot more effort, since it’s expected to be a little more substantial, may get 0 views, while a silly comment in response to a controversial topic on Twitter could easily get a few hundred likes, which makes people feel important. And RSS does not replace that aspect of Twitter.

mark_l_watson 8y ago
Yup, I agree with you for some twitter accounts. I find myself often pruning who I follow on Twitter so much so that I then find I am mostly getting tech announcements of papers and conferences, release announcements, etc. Periodically, I start following more people, then the pruning cycle repeats. I feel sometimes that I spend too much time on twitter and HN, and so I go on cycles for time spent per week there also. Really good to use a monitoring tool to let you know cumulatively how much time you spend a week on different media.

phasnox 8y ago

> On the surface, Twitter’s main value proposition is that it delivers up-to-the-second news. Not really. Most of the people I know , including me, go there for just one reason: To know the public opinion.

rwz 8y ago
Twitter is actually very bad at this. It's designed to amplify the most fringe, outrageous, and reaction-provoking hot takes, and trending stuff. A lot of sensible people either don't comment on twitter, or their voices get drowned in a sea of outrage and more engageable reactions.
JohnFen 8y ago
> To know the public opinion But always remember that you're only getting to know the opinion of the twitterverse. That may or may not track public opinion overall.

blunte 8y ago

"the charming pop-ups that everyone uses because fuck you" Between the cookie popups, the GRPD "choice" popups, and the sign-up-for-some-email-crap popups, each of which takes 1-2 seconds to appear - sometimes in parallel and sometimes in sequence - the web is a garbage fire. There definitely needs to be a retraction of sorts in terms of technology and content delivery. I also think we have passed "peak information". On the internet, everyone has a voice. At first that was good, but now the signal to noise ratio is so bad that good, accurate, useful content is just rounding error. The same is also true for television/film as well as the commercial music industry. That's not to say there are not still great people creating great content, but there are mass numbers of people polluting the mediums and making it increasingly difficult to find the good stuff. The current rate of decline of value of the internet suggests that there will be some significant disruption this decade. I wish I had the solution (or knew who to bet on!)

lazyjones 8y ago
> There definitely needs to be a retraction of sorts in terms of technology and content delivery. Indeed. The easiest (low-friction) way to implement this would be as browser options/addons. We need to get back control over how content is displayed on our screens, but browser makers' priority is to turn the browser into a TV set.
BuckRogers 8y ago
>The current rate of decline of value of the internet suggests that there will be some significant disruption this decade. I wish I had the solution (or knew who to bet on!) Books. That's what I've retreated to as the internet has been ruined. It's all about low barrier to entry that ruins anything with the shiftless/idle masses becoming involved. No one wants to pickup a book and read, they want to offer smart ass one-liners or harass people on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. That's most people's entire life, same behavior in the workplace, then they die. That's why I'm a developer, the barrier to entry is high enough that I enjoy and appreciate most people that I work with. Same concept as with media. Books are proof-read, edited and vetted for reasonably accurate sources in most cases. In general, publishing them is hard enough that as a consumer I can rely on them being one of the better mediums.

captn3m0 8y ago

If you are interested in RSS, I did a twitter-thread [3] recently on interesting projects in the space. Reproducing here: If you are interested in helping revive #RSS, a thread on some good FOSS projects around RSS: 1. RSS-Bridge[0] - RSS Feeds for websites that don't give you one. Supports instagram/facebook/Google Search and many more (150+) websites. Very easy to contribute, and there are open requests for lots of providers. (I added a Amazon Price Tracker Bridge in <150 loc). Yes, I get a RSS notification when there is a price change on something I follow[1]. 2. MiniFlux - Golang+Postgres based self-hosted RSS feed reader. Minimal/responsive design with keyboard shortcuts https://miniflux.app https://miniflux.app 3. 3. tt-rss - A highly configurable PHP based RSS feed reader. Supports plugins and has tons of options. UI is similar to Google Reader. https://tt-rss.org https://tt-rss.org 4. Winds - A Beautiful Open Source RSS & Podcast App powered by @getstream_io. I haven't tried self-hosting it yet, but it looks really great. Also, under very active development. https://github.com/GetStream/Winds https://github.com/GetStream/Winds 5. FreshRSS - Lightweight PHP/SQlite self-hosted feed reader. Looks great as well. https://freshrss.org https://freshrss.org 6. Kill the Newsletter - Subscribe to a newsletter with a one-time generated email address, it generates a RSS feed for you. Your inbox stays clean. https://www.kill-the-newsletter.com https://www.kill-the-newsletter.com 7. OPML Generator - Generates OPML Files using subscriptions on other sites. Supports GitHub stars (generates a file you can import to follow releases from all your starred repos on GitHub) https://opml.bb8.fun/ https://opml.bb8.fun/ (Personal project, so count this as a shameless self plug) 8. RSS never really died, so revival is a misnomer in that sense. All major news publications still support RSS. The entire Podcast ecosytem works on RSS. You should also look at WebSub and ActivityPub (both W3C recommendations) if you're interested in this. 9. And finally a cool new idea - build a Telegram Channel to RSS Feed generator. Will open up so much hidden content to the open web. 10. Bonus: https://www.youneedfeeds.com/ https://www.youneedfeeds.com/ Info site that you should share with your friends to help them get started with RSS. [0]: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge [1]: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/pull/741 https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/pull/741 [3]: https://twitter.com/captn3m0/status/1018850458675408902 https://twitter.com/captn3m0/status/1018850458675408902

jhund 8y ago
I'd like to mention https://contentgems.com https://contentgems.com - a free web service that follows any RSS feed you want. It then gives you powerful filters to include/exclude content you're not interested. You can also connect your twitter home timeline to extract all articles linked to from a tweet. And finally, there are workflows that you can use to re-mix RSS feeds and produce new ones. Paid plans give you more resources, however the free plan is super valuable for individual users. Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders.

whoopdedo 8y ago

Can you track trending topics with RSS? Can you carry on a conversation between content creators and subscribers over RSS? Can you discover new content by following a RSS social graph? RSS is better than Twitter in only one aspect and that's the one-to-many subscriber model. And that's the least interesting and least profitable thing that Twitter provides.

grenoire 8y ago
1. No, do you need to? Trending for whom? People could create curated feeds for this purpose. 2. No. 3. See 1.
skybrian 8y ago
I think it's a fairly silly comparison overall, but it doesn't help when you judge by technical features rather than what kind of content the ecosystem encourages, which what actually matters. Twitter is extremely noisy. It tends to overwhelm actual articles that people put some effort into with shallow, witty zingers. If you're not looking for witty zingers, it doesn't really matter what other features it has. RSS is just a file format, but it enables a larger ecosystem that works better at showcasing good content.

notadoc 8y ago

Twitter is basically Outrage as a Service, it is not a good information platform. I still miss Google Reader, I think it was a serious mistake to kill it off, and doing so largely killed RSS too.

Tunyalit 8y ago

I'm the one who still likes RSS.

guybedo 8y ago

Although the title is a little bit provocative, i tend to agree that RSS is a better way to consume news than Twitter or any other social media platform by the way. Social platforms should be used for social, not for news, but i guess Twitter is a special case in that one of its core values is to deliver news in real time. But do we need realtime? Twitter being a social platform, it means you can't easily avoid trolls, offensive/aggressive/idiotic comments... Off the top of my head, some issues i had with RSS and/or with the tools/RSS readers: - RSS can become en echo chamber if you have a limited number of feeds - Too many feeds and your feeds are flooded with a lot of noise - want to check the top stories of the day, or trending content? need to use a different tool than your RSS reader. - want to follow some social feeds but without the noise of social platforms? I wrote something about the signal/noise ratio in RSS recently: https://medium.com/@julien.aktu/rss-less-noise-more-information-983ea20cb05e https://medium.com/@julien.aktu/rss-less-noise-more-informat... To solve these issues, i'm trying to bring something to the RSS ecosystem, and i built a news platform mixing RSS and traditional news aggregation. It has features to limit the noise and help avoid echo chambers. You can follow Facebook pages, Twitter users, etc... add your newsletters to declutter your mail box, and much more to come. You can check it out here: https://aktu.io/about https://aktu.io/about

allenleein 8y ago

Would like to see `RSS + customizable AI` as a protocol.

lkrubner 8y ago

If anyone is interested in the soap opera that shaped the early days of RSS, read "RSS has been damaged by infighting among those who advocate for it". This is from 2006, and captures the chaos of the times: 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-...

mastrsushi 8y ago

I did use RSS through Google Reader briefly back in 2009. Then I found out about Twitter, and immediately thought of it as a modern response. Unifying the web's news feeds into one technology was such an obvious solution, its emergence was unavoidable, no matter what way it came. Web platforms always had some form of portal, blog publishing service, general discussion board, or better yet a single tap service where everything anyone wants to know, or at least thinks they do is encapsulated. What these older services failed to capture that made Twitter and other "social" media sites so popular is the "social" aspect. The automated synchronized posting structure that RSS provides may be more efficient than user-driven Twitter. But with Twitters' intuition, popularity, and ability to communicate within that vast user space is enough to outweigh any of RSS's technological advancements. RSS always seemed like a technology for techies, Twitter brought the feed to laymen.

Yhippa 8y ago
Peak Internet for me was using Google Reader, sharing articles, and having discussions about them with my Google Buzz friends.

OrgNet 8y ago

RSS is great and I use RSS to read some parts of Twitter but you can't really compare the two (at least not in its current form) but it could be extended to allow feedback, etc...

hellllllllooo 8y ago

They're different things with different purposes. Both are useful. This is clickbate.

WhatTheHomePod 8y ago

They should make commenting and karma like this and Reddit a standard in RSS. Let people comment on RSS.

mchmarny 8y ago

Every couple of months I search for a better news reader… cycle through Flipper, Feedly, NewsBlur, & 4-8 others… once more acknowledge how good Google Reader really was, and go back to scrolling through Twitter/Reddit I’d probably pay large amount of money now for a news reader w/ these 4 features * Extract stories from my feed/lists on Twitter & Reddit and aggregate comments on these from people I follow * Learn from my ‘more/less like this’ on individual stories * Allow me to tag sources and create auto-tagging filters * Clean/intuitive Web UI & mobile client

WCityMike 8y ago
While there are definitely areas where it sorely can be improved, check out Inoreader.
guybedo 8y ago
Hey i'm working on a News Aggregation platform / RSS reader, aktu.io. It doesn't have the features you need but if you'd like to give it a try anyway, would love your feedback. You can check out the main features here: - https://aktu.io/about https://aktu.io/about - and here https://medium.com/@julien.aktu/rss-less-noise-more-information-983ea20cb05e https://medium.com/@julien.aktu/rss-less-noise-more-informat...
casualmr 8y ago
Have you tried https://bazqux.com https://bazqux.com ? It was built right after Google shut down Reader and very much resembles and improved upon it in multiple ways. Super fast too.

russellbeattie 8y ago

If you look at both Twitter and RSS superficially, you can easily decide one is better than the other. If you've ever tried and failed to create your own "perfect" news reader as I have, you'll realize both suck, and have for over a decade now and they're never going ever improve. The real issue isn't the pros and cons of one platform vs. another from an informational or social perspective, the real issue is much more fundamental: Information overload. I wrote about this, oh, 9 years ago [1]. And then a few years later as well [2]. I did an analysis of the quantity of news items, posts and tweets coming through my custom feed reader and realized it was - and always will be - impossible to keep up, no matter how I organized, grouped, condensed, summarized and displayed it all. The basic, undeniable fact is that most RSS sources are filled with repetitive information which are nearly impossible to group or update properly. And if you follow any more than a few dozen accounts on Twitter, you are going to miss most of their posts on a daily basis (regardless of their quality, there's just too many). Most of Twitter, in fact, is simply people talking to themselves. (And Facebook is basically useless in terms of gaining any actual knowledge.) All news feeds - whether they are from RSS, Twitter, FB, Insta, SnapChat, WeChat, TikTok or anything else - are simply not scalable. So pick which you enjoy most, limit the number of sources to only those most important or useful to you, and get on with your life. Until AI gets to the point where it can sort through all the information out there for you - a la Apple's Knowledge Navigator - the only difference between any stream of data is superficial at best. 1. https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/drinking-from-the-firehose https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/drinking-from-the-fireho... 2. https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/but-how-do-you-keep-track-of-everything https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/but-how-do-you-keep-trac...

andersonnnunes 8y ago
I have 50K regexs on a black-list to filter feeds on my reader. AI would help with some, but this brute force method goes a long way too.
- russellbeattie 8y ago
  That's... amazing! I admire your dedication (addiction?). :-)

mikeash 8y ago

Twitter is like an internet Rorschach test. It’s a very general platform that offers little guidance, so people use it in fundamentally different ways. I didn’t get the headline until I saw that apparently the author think Twitter is for getting news. I’m sure some people do, but this is strange to me. I use it to keep up with friends and acquaintances, and with the goings-on at certain local organizations. Other people use it to get better customer service. There are many ways to use it. RSS isn’t even in the same species as most of them.

binoyxj 8y ago

For once, I thought this was something related to the political scene in India. Now that it's election season and the right-wing (BJP/RSS) actually protested against Twitter on roads alleging them to be left aligned or supporting the opposition.

hnsukas 8y ago

Less shadow banning features definitely :-))

Imagenuity 8y ago

WordPress now powers 30% of websites. Get an RSS feed from a WordPress site by adding /feed/ to the URL. You can also get RSS feeds from WordPress categories and tags.

triplee 8y ago

Once Google Reader died, I found The Old Reader (theoldreader.com) and just ran with that. I never stopped using RSS, and trying to get syndication from Twitter would cause my head (and my Twitter feed for things I actually care about) to explode. I'm sad that we still have to remind people of these things.

Mauricio_ 8y ago

I'll take this chance to recommend Blogtrottr as a perfect alternative to Google Reader, if used along with Gmail Reader.