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Thing is, RSS didn’t “die”. It only ever filled a couple of niches, and arguably it is more popular than it ever was because not only are people still continuin

by SllX 6y ago

Thing is, RSS didn’t “die”. It only ever filled a couple of niches, and arguably it is more popular than it ever was because not only are people still continuing to use RSS readers, podcasts are arguably more popular than they’ve ever been (this period of time with the coronavirus possibly excepted). I get that when people think of “RSS”, they’re thinking of tech that downloads text and maybe some images into a reader, but it’s just another means of syndicating media. The same places that disseminate the full text continue to do so because they’re not invested in making money directly off the writing, and the same places that have an investment in you going directly to the site continue to operate their feeds in that manner. If you have a browser extension that can discover it, or are willing to do a bit of guesswork, it’s amazing how many new sites launched in the last year that might not expose it on the website (because the webmaster didn’t think it was important to expose even when the CMS has it) actually have a feed you can pass off to a reader. I don’t think RSS is ever going be competitive with a service like Instagram or Reddit for what they do, but the full value of these services doesn’t lie entirely within a feed and wouldn’t be neatly exposed within the constraints of the RSS or Atom specs to begin with. It’s different, and therefore have other, albeit less popular than social media, uses. If someone prefers a stream of photographs to a stream of blogs and news sites, and that’s a lot of people, then RSS isn’t going to be competitive for their attention. If somebody prefers the discussions on Reddit and the semi-randomness of sources, RSS isn’t going to be competitive for their attention either. If you don’t care about an image stream (with comments, reactions, stories and whatever else Instagram has), and you can do without the Reddit commentary, well, you may very well have a use for RSS. Or maybe not. If it hasn’t gone away yet (and it really hasn’t), I have a hard time believing it is going anywhere in the near future.

tlavoie 6y ago
While RSS doesn't replace a site like Reddit, it's great that Reddit has RSS support built-in. Much of my browsing of the site at least starts off in a feed reader, to make it quick to find what I'm interested in. From there, I'll open links to the site proper, with all the comments and such that make the experience what it is.
- SllX 6y ago
  Actually forgot about this! That said I do remember trying it some years ago; Reddit RSS just ended up providing too little signal for too much noise. I came to the same conclusion with Twitter RSS and certain types of Tumblogs.
  - hopesthoughts 6y ago
    Twitter RSS works fine if you want to follow certain users and/or searches, which is what I use it for.
    - SllX 6y ago
      No, I understand that basic premise, it's what I did too, it's just, well this is an old outstanding complaint I've had about Twitter and not so much Twitter RSS, and really the main reason I don't consistently use it anymore. Every now and then I re-install Tweetbot on my phone, create a new account, carefully curate a list of Accounts to follow based off whatever I'm thinking Twitter might be useful for this time. I personally think it's really cool that I can follow people I respect and see a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, but inevitably some stupid controversy erupts and all of them have to get their opinion in on the subject. The other problem I have is that generally, people tweet too much. It is too easy to compose a tweet and fire it off into the void and and while they're at it, about five or six retweets. RSS didn't improve this for me, I look for ways to make Twitter work for me, and it's just unworkable. The one time the list of accounts I came up with was political (that is to say rather than being constantly exposed to the abhorrent politics of people I otherwise respect for other reasons, I picked people who I respected in the field of politics), it was still an irredeemable crapshoot. If Twitter works for you, I have no doubt Twitter RSS can also work for you, but Twitter doesn't work for me. Too much noise, not enough signal. Same with any kind of firehose feed, I think I even followed an HN firehose feed at one point six or seven years ago which just overwhelmed my reader within a week. I mean if you tried following Tumblogs as I did at one point in my youth, I tried to treat them like blogs, but what I didn't realize was that nobody was really interested in using Tumblr like a blogging platform. Your typical user that posted at all, was generally going through their feed and reblogging whatever they liked, and they'd do this 30 or 40 or 50 reblogs at a time. It was asinine, I gave it the old college try because a few of my friends really seemed to like it and I wanted to see what they saw, and it was just asinine. Anyway it sounds like you're still using Twitter RSS, and, I mean this sincerely, kudos to Twitter that they're apparently still maintaining RSS feeds. I really thought that would have been killed off by now. More choices are generally better, so I'm glad that's still a thing.
gspr 6y ago
> podcasts are arguably more popular than they’ve ever been (this period of time with the coronavirus possibly excepted). There's been a worrying trend of some podcasts shifting to a "get our app" mode of delivery. I've been boycotting each one, and been encouraging the podcasts I donate to to explicitly keep the RSS delivery.
- SllX 6y ago
  This is news to me, and I’ll keep it in mind. Personally I’m not so sure I would boycott for the sake of effecting a policy change as I simply wouldn’t continue listening because the only thing that makes podcasts tolerable is that I’m filtering them through Overcast’s smart speed. Can’t stand talk shows at the pace of a normal conversation.
  - gspr 6y ago
    > This is news to me, and I’ll keep it in mind. Granted, I only have two immediate examples: * Season 2 of The Onion's hilarious true crime parody (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Fatal_Murder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Fatal_Murder) is exclusively on a platform called Luminary. I can't even figure out exactly what Luminary is, because they serve me with a special can of "Luminary is not yet available in your location" crap. Not that I care anyway. The first season is on regular old RSS and is fantastic (if you like the true crime genre and The Onion-style silliness). * Wind of Change (https://crooked.com/podcast-series/wind-of-change/ https://crooked.com/podcast-series/wind-of-change/) investigates the (serious!) conspiracy theory that the CIA created the hit "Wind of Change" by The Scorpions. Now, this is borderline, but the podcast is available over RSS – however they're clearly trying to push people onto Spotify by releasing all episodes there at once and only dripping out an episode a week over RSS. I'll allow it.
    - SllX 6y ago
      I woke up today, checked Hacker News and saw Joe Rogan setup an exclusive deal with Spotify or more specifically, Spotify setup an exclusive deal with Joe Rogan. I was thinking about this thread all day. I've never listened to any of his podcasts because there's so many podcasts out there that I'm more interested in I just haven't gotten around to trying the Joe Rogan Experience. I like the idea of someone that just gets someone into a room and let's them speak from the heart or shoot from the hip about whatever their pet issue, policy, thing they are known for is, but I also have plenty of other discussion format podcasts I'm subscribed to and working through the backlog of. Luminary by the way is one of those "we're going to do podcasting but it's not really podcasting because we're going to lock things up behind our paywall." kinds of "podcasting" apps. Think of it as Spotify but without the music or (I believe) without the free tier. Mind I've never signed up, but I remember there were a big story last year, or maybe it was the year before? Either way, they aspire to be the Spotify of Podcasts and Spotify is also trying to be the Spotify of Podcasts. I think Spotify is probably winning that exchange. The strange thing is, a lot of these podcasts could probably get away with charging more directly if they wanted to. Joe Rogan has literally millions of fans, and charging for episodes isn't exactly incompatible with RSS. It just means you need to authenticate for access to the feed which is fine. I do that with TechMeme Ride Home subscribing to their ad-free feed. I think I'm paying $5 a month for that at the moment. I also pay for podcasts that don't have a premium feed per se and can be found in every podcast directory, but are products of news and political commentary organizations to which I pay a monthly or annual sum to support, primarily because I enjoy their podcasts (and newsletters) so much. I get access to their websites and dead tree print editions, but really it's the podcasts I find I like the most out of the deal and am happy to pay for just those. And Joe Rogan is bigger than almost all of those, so selling out to Spotify to try to be the next Howard Stern feels a bit like he's selling himself short. Welp, we live in a free society with free markets and he's free to do that if he wants to. I get that he's a controversial figure for some, but so are Howard Stern and PewDiePie and last I checked, they're doing fine.
hopesthoughts 6y ago
I use userscripts to try and find those hidden feeds, but sometimes they still can't be found. Sites like that are the bane of my existence!!!!!!
- SllX 6y ago
  I mean if browsers hadn't gone out of their way to remove RSS discovery, it wouldn't be necessary. I don't remember if I mentioned this in my above post and I don't want to re-read every word I wrote, but I've got the NetNewsWire Safari extension which finds feeds for me. Pretty sure I also have some extension in my current Firefox install, but I haven't opened that in a while. Sometimes the feed really doesn't exist anymore, which is unfortunate.
  - hopesthoughts 6y ago
    I use a service to create feeds from pages if they really don't exist. It's a paid service, but worth it!

by SllX 6y ago

tlavoie 6y ago

While RSS doesn't replace a site like Reddit, it's great that Reddit has RSS support built-in. Much of my browsing of the site at least starts off in a feed reader, to make it quick to find what I'm interested in. From there, I'll open links to the site proper, with all the comments and such that make the experience what it is.

SllX 6y ago
Actually forgot about this! That said I do remember trying it some years ago; Reddit RSS just ended up providing too little signal for too much noise. I came to the same conclusion with Twitter RSS and certain types of Tumblogs.
- hopesthoughts 6y ago
  Twitter RSS works fine if you want to follow certain users and/or searches, which is what I use it for.
  - SllX 6y ago
    No, I understand that basic premise, it's what I did too, it's just, well this is an old outstanding complaint I've had about Twitter and not so much Twitter RSS, and really the main reason I don't consistently use it anymore. Every now and then I re-install Tweetbot on my phone, create a new account, carefully curate a list of Accounts to follow based off whatever I'm thinking Twitter might be useful for this time. I personally think it's really cool that I can follow people I respect and see a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, but inevitably some stupid controversy erupts and all of them have to get their opinion in on the subject. The other problem I have is that generally, people tweet too much. It is too easy to compose a tweet and fire it off into the void and and while they're at it, about five or six retweets. RSS didn't improve this for me, I look for ways to make Twitter work for me, and it's just unworkable. The one time the list of accounts I came up with was political (that is to say rather than being constantly exposed to the abhorrent politics of people I otherwise respect for other reasons, I picked people who I respected in the field of politics), it was still an irredeemable crapshoot. If Twitter works for you, I have no doubt Twitter RSS can also work for you, but Twitter doesn't work for me. Too much noise, not enough signal. Same with any kind of firehose feed, I think I even followed an HN firehose feed at one point six or seven years ago which just overwhelmed my reader within a week. I mean if you tried following Tumblogs as I did at one point in my youth, I tried to treat them like blogs, but what I didn't realize was that nobody was really interested in using Tumblr like a blogging platform. Your typical user that posted at all, was generally going through their feed and reblogging whatever they liked, and they'd do this 30 or 40 or 50 reblogs at a time. It was asinine, I gave it the old college try because a few of my friends really seemed to like it and I wanted to see what they saw, and it was just asinine. Anyway it sounds like you're still using Twitter RSS, and, I mean this sincerely, kudos to Twitter that they're apparently still maintaining RSS feeds. I really thought that would have been killed off by now. More choices are generally better, so I'm glad that's still a thing.

gspr 6y ago

> podcasts are arguably more popular than they’ve ever been (this period of time with the coronavirus possibly excepted). There's been a worrying trend of some podcasts shifting to a "get our app" mode of delivery. I've been boycotting each one, and been encouraging the podcasts I donate to to explicitly keep the RSS delivery.

SllX 6y ago
This is news to me, and I’ll keep it in mind. Personally I’m not so sure I would boycott for the sake of effecting a policy change as I simply wouldn’t continue listening because the only thing that makes podcasts tolerable is that I’m filtering them through Overcast’s smart speed. Can’t stand talk shows at the pace of a normal conversation.
- gspr 6y ago
  > This is news to me, and I’ll keep it in mind. Granted, I only have two immediate examples: * Season 2 of The Onion's hilarious true crime parody (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Fatal_Murder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Fatal_Murder) is exclusively on a platform called Luminary. I can't even figure out exactly what Luminary is, because they serve me with a special can of "Luminary is not yet available in your location" crap. Not that I care anyway. The first season is on regular old RSS and is fantastic (if you like the true crime genre and The Onion-style silliness). * Wind of Change (https://crooked.com/podcast-series/wind-of-change/ https://crooked.com/podcast-series/wind-of-change/) investigates the (serious!) conspiracy theory that the CIA created the hit "Wind of Change" by The Scorpions. Now, this is borderline, but the podcast is available over RSS – however they're clearly trying to push people onto Spotify by releasing all episodes there at once and only dripping out an episode a week over RSS. I'll allow it.
  - SllX 6y ago
    I woke up today, checked Hacker News and saw Joe Rogan setup an exclusive deal with Spotify or more specifically, Spotify setup an exclusive deal with Joe Rogan. I was thinking about this thread all day. I've never listened to any of his podcasts because there's so many podcasts out there that I'm more interested in I just haven't gotten around to trying the Joe Rogan Experience. I like the idea of someone that just gets someone into a room and let's them speak from the heart or shoot from the hip about whatever their pet issue, policy, thing they are known for is, but I also have plenty of other discussion format podcasts I'm subscribed to and working through the backlog of. Luminary by the way is one of those "we're going to do podcasting but it's not really podcasting because we're going to lock things up behind our paywall." kinds of "podcasting" apps. Think of it as Spotify but without the music or (I believe) without the free tier. Mind I've never signed up, but I remember there were a big story last year, or maybe it was the year before? Either way, they aspire to be the Spotify of Podcasts and Spotify is also trying to be the Spotify of Podcasts. I think Spotify is probably winning that exchange. The strange thing is, a lot of these podcasts could probably get away with charging more directly if they wanted to. Joe Rogan has literally millions of fans, and charging for episodes isn't exactly incompatible with RSS. It just means you need to authenticate for access to the feed which is fine. I do that with TechMeme Ride Home subscribing to their ad-free feed. I think I'm paying $5 a month for that at the moment. I also pay for podcasts that don't have a premium feed per se and can be found in every podcast directory, but are products of news and political commentary organizations to which I pay a monthly or annual sum to support, primarily because I enjoy their podcasts (and newsletters) so much. I get access to their websites and dead tree print editions, but really it's the podcasts I find I like the most out of the deal and am happy to pay for just those. And Joe Rogan is bigger than almost all of those, so selling out to Spotify to try to be the next Howard Stern feels a bit like he's selling himself short. Welp, we live in a free society with free markets and he's free to do that if he wants to. I get that he's a controversial figure for some, but so are Howard Stern and PewDiePie and last I checked, they're doing fine.

hopesthoughts 6y ago

I use userscripts to try and find those hidden feeds, but sometimes they still can't be found. Sites like that are the bane of my existence!!!!!!

SllX 6y ago
I mean if browsers hadn't gone out of their way to remove RSS discovery, it wouldn't be necessary. I don't remember if I mentioned this in my above post and I don't want to re-read every word I wrote, but I've got the NetNewsWire Safari extension which finds feeds for me. Pretty sure I also have some extension in my current Firefox install, but I haven't opened that in a while. Sometimes the feed really doesn't exist anymore, which is unfortunate.
- hopesthoughts 6y ago
  I use a service to create feeds from pages if they really don't exist. It's a paid service, but worth it!