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How entry id’s serve as an alternative to pubDates? Also by entry id, do you mean RSS item? Most of my concern comes from seeing NewsBlur, Feedly, and The Old

How entry id’s serve as an alternative to pubDates? Also by entry id, do you mean RSS item? Most of my concern comes from seeing NewsBlur, Feedly, and The Old Reader resort to premium services. Throttling users unless they pay, now that’s not a game I want to be apart of.

kevincox 4y ago
My only guess for how pubDate would affect the cost was using it to identify previously seen entries/items. If you can rely on pubDates being stable and monotonically increasing for new entries you can just remember the last one instead of a number of IDs. But that is likely an incredibly small cost. How else do you expect to make money other than premium services? Even if cheap hosting is not free. And likely the cost of staff is by far the biggest expense of these companies. Premium literally means something that costs. The only other major business model I am aware of than charging your chstomers is to sell their data or attention. Personally I prefer the freemium or paid model. If you are going for freemium than faster update rate sounds like an incredibly fair compromise if that is increasing the cost of serving a user. Much better than many artificial limitations.
- pipeline_peak 4y ago
  > How else do you expect to make money other than premium services? I don’t, I want something that can host for users as cheaply as possible. I’d make it open source and be fully transparent about the fat client design and whatever else. I pretty much want this site, but every user has an RSS feed, can see each other’s, and a front page with rankings.
  - kevincox 4y ago
    Even this site is funded, it is effectively an add for Y-Combinator and it also hosts job listings for YC companies. I guess "make money" is poor wording but privately funded often fails in the long-term especially if a site becomes popular.

kevincox 4y ago

My only guess for how pubDate would affect the cost was using it to identify previously seen entries/items. If you can rely on pubDates being stable and monotonically increasing for new entries you can just remember the last one instead of a number of IDs. But that is likely an incredibly small cost. How else do you expect to make money other than premium services? Even if cheap hosting is not free. And likely the cost of staff is by far the biggest expense of these companies. Premium literally means something that costs. The only other major business model I am aware of than charging your chstomers is to sell their data or attention. Personally I prefer the freemium or paid model. If you are going for freemium than faster update rate sounds like an incredibly fair compromise if that is increasing the cost of serving a user. Much better than many artificial limitations.

pipeline_peak 4y ago
> How else do you expect to make money other than premium services? I don’t, I want something that can host for users as cheaply as possible. I’d make it open source and be fully transparent about the fat client design and whatever else. I pretty much want this site, but every user has an RSS feed, can see each other’s, and a front page with rankings.
- kevincox 4y ago
  Even this site is funded, it is effectively an add for Y-Combinator and it also hosts job listings for YC companies. I guess "make money" is poor wording but privately funded often fails in the long-term especially if a site becomes popular.