6 ms·

I don’t know about the “year of…” but RSS readers are definitely the best option to consume information in a manner that leaves the individual with control, whi

I don’t know about the “year of…” but RSS readers are definitely the best option to consume information in a manner that leaves the individual with control, while being exposed to a broad range of thinking. And consuming content from a broad range of media. I do hope 2023 becomes the year of the comeback of RSS.

kgwxd 4y ago
For me the biggest selling point of RSS is never having to rescan over feed items I've already read, or decided to skip, to find the new stuff. Another big one is that there's an end to the list. Neither of those are a huge deal for low-volume feeds but for HN and Reddit, they're priceless to me.
deltarholamda 4y ago
>consume information in a manner that leaves the individual with control This is both the main feature, and the biggest obstacle. The people with the money do no want the individual to have control. Thus it has always been and shall always be. Folks are banging on Elon because they feel he's using Twitter to manipulate, but it's not like Twitter was different pre-Elon. Elon simply gave The Man a face, voice and smell. Back in the blogosphere (I hate that word) days, a lot of RSS was floating around. It wasn't very good, as RSS implementations varied a lot. But when it was working well, it was so good. If I have a complaint about returning to RSS it would be that we will return to the days of clickbaity headlines.
- ascagnel_ 4y ago
  > we will return to the days of clickbaity headlines We entered those days and have yet to leave. If anything, the rise of social media (at RSS's expense) turbo-charged clickbait headlines, since now it's easy to measure engagement around those stories, both in terms of views and in terms of comments/likes/shares/etc.
  - tracker1 4y ago
    Gated through fewer sources providing much more analytics definitely changes the game there.
- _xivi 4y ago
  > If I have a complaint about returning to RSS it would be that we will return to the days of clickbaity headlines Wait, what do you mean? Clickbaiting (and borderline misinformation) has been getting only worse ever since
  - deltarholamda 4y ago
    Fair enough, "return" is not the correct word here. Maybe "we will solidify the importance of clickbaity headlines"? I first noticed the up-tick of clickbait headlines in the salad days of RSS. Due to this, I tend to ignore headlines these days, because I was trained to assume the headline was complete nonsense. So my internal metrics are a bit wonky.
jfengel 4y ago
I don't understand the love of RSS readers. The basic concept is trivial; you could write one in five minutes. It doesn't seem radically different from any of thousands of news aggregator type web sites, including HN. I read upthread that Google Reader had a social mechanism for recommending feeds to friends. That's great for discovery, but it still hardly seems earth-shaking. It feels an awful lot like a rose-colored-glasses situation, where something existed that wasn't horrible but doesn't reappear because it wasn't all that great, either. What is it I'm missing?
- reaperducer 4y ago
  It doesn't seem radically different from any of thousands of news aggregator type web sites, including HN. It allows you to tailor your aggregation, and create you own aggregation of topics if there isn't another aggregator out there. Are you into kumquats, ancient Mesopotamia, and The Buzzcocks? You're not going to find a web aggregator for that. But you can put together several RSS feeds into your own aggregation.
  - jfengel 4y ago
    Couldn't I just subscribe to kumquats, ancient Mesopotamia, and The Buzzcocks groups on Facebook? Yeah, I know "the algorithm" means that I'd miss some things and have other things injected into my feed, but it doesn't sound like the total content is radically different. I understand the idea of wanting to feel more control by seeing precisely and exactly the groups you asked for, but I feel like it's not really a radical change in terms of content.
    - vanilla_nut 4y ago
      Facebook shoves content I don't care about in my face, and frequently hides content from pages and people that I do care about (who don'y pay Zuck's troll toll or play visibility optimization games like emphasizing useless Story content). My RSS reader (FreshRSS, self-hosted, and NetNewsWire on macOS/iOS) shows me all posts from all feeds I've chosen to subscribe to. Nothing more, nothing less. No ads, no murky VC cloud funding -- I self host on my own raspberry pi -- and no privacy concerns. Social media is kind of like a flaky RSS feed with comments from people I don't know or care about that sometimes doesn't show me content I DO want to see but also constantly shows me ads, tries to manipulate me into spending more time browsing, and hoovers up as much data as humanly possible. Oh, and it changes the UI every 6-8 months in seemingly random UX a/b tests in the name of "optimization." And it radicalizes my older relatives politically. That seems like a pretty shitty RSS feed to me.

kgwxd 4y ago

For me the biggest selling point of RSS is never having to rescan over feed items I've already read, or decided to skip, to find the new stuff. Another big one is that there's an end to the list. Neither of those are a huge deal for low-volume feeds but for HN and Reddit, they're priceless to me.

deltarholamda 4y ago

>consume information in a manner that leaves the individual with control This is both the main feature, and the biggest obstacle. The people with the money do no want the individual to have control. Thus it has always been and shall always be. Folks are banging on Elon because they feel he's using Twitter to manipulate, but it's not like Twitter was different pre-Elon. Elon simply gave The Man a face, voice and smell. Back in the blogosphere (I hate that word) days, a lot of RSS was floating around. It wasn't very good, as RSS implementations varied a lot. But when it was working well, it was so good. If I have a complaint about returning to RSS it would be that we will return to the days of clickbaity headlines.

ascagnel_ 4y ago
> we will return to the days of clickbaity headlines We entered those days and have yet to leave. If anything, the rise of social media (at RSS's expense) turbo-charged clickbait headlines, since now it's easy to measure engagement around those stories, both in terms of views and in terms of comments/likes/shares/etc.
- tracker1 4y ago
  Gated through fewer sources providing much more analytics definitely changes the game there.
_xivi 4y ago
> If I have a complaint about returning to RSS it would be that we will return to the days of clickbaity headlines Wait, what do you mean? Clickbaiting (and borderline misinformation) has been getting only worse ever since
- deltarholamda 4y ago
  Fair enough, "return" is not the correct word here. Maybe "we will solidify the importance of clickbaity headlines"? I first noticed the up-tick of clickbait headlines in the salad days of RSS. Due to this, I tend to ignore headlines these days, because I was trained to assume the headline was complete nonsense. So my internal metrics are a bit wonky.

jfengel 4y ago

I don't understand the love of RSS readers. The basic concept is trivial; you could write one in five minutes. It doesn't seem radically different from any of thousands of news aggregator type web sites, including HN. I read upthread that Google Reader had a social mechanism for recommending feeds to friends. That's great for discovery, but it still hardly seems earth-shaking. It feels an awful lot like a rose-colored-glasses situation, where something existed that wasn't horrible but doesn't reappear because it wasn't all that great, either. What is it I'm missing?

reaperducer 4y ago
It doesn't seem radically different from any of thousands of news aggregator type web sites, including HN. It allows you to tailor your aggregation, and create you own aggregation of topics if there isn't another aggregator out there. Are you into kumquats, ancient Mesopotamia, and The Buzzcocks? You're not going to find a web aggregator for that. But you can put together several RSS feeds into your own aggregation.
- jfengel 4y ago
  Couldn't I just subscribe to kumquats, ancient Mesopotamia, and The Buzzcocks groups on Facebook? Yeah, I know "the algorithm" means that I'd miss some things and have other things injected into my feed, but it doesn't sound like the total content is radically different. I understand the idea of wanting to feel more control by seeing precisely and exactly the groups you asked for, but I feel like it's not really a radical change in terms of content.
  - vanilla_nut 4y ago
    Facebook shoves content I don't care about in my face, and frequently hides content from pages and people that I do care about (who don'y pay Zuck's troll toll or play visibility optimization games like emphasizing useless Story content). My RSS reader (FreshRSS, self-hosted, and NetNewsWire on macOS/iOS) shows me all posts from all feeds I've chosen to subscribe to. Nothing more, nothing less. No ads, no murky VC cloud funding -- I self host on my own raspberry pi -- and no privacy concerns. Social media is kind of like a flaky RSS feed with comments from people I don't know or care about that sometimes doesn't show me content I DO want to see but also constantly shows me ads, tries to manipulate me into spending more time browsing, and hoovers up as much data as humanly possible. Oh, and it changes the UI every 6-8 months in seemingly random UX a/b tests in the name of "optimization." And it radicalizes my older relatives politically. That seems like a pretty shitty RSS feed to me.