4 ms·

> It was intentional. RSS is a way to sidestep advertising. I would argue that's only a part of the story. After all RSS quickly morphed into Link with a short

> It was intentional. RSS is a way to sidestep advertising. I would argue that's only a part of the story. After all RSS quickly morphed into Link with a short blurb and image just like any modern link aggregation site rather than a full page of content. The big issue was RSS was it prevents site lock-in like Facebook ect. Even Reddit pushes people to the comments to try keep you on the site as much as possible in order to have you see the link aggregator's Advertisements and more recently, to provide more robust data collection for later sale.

rambambram 3y ago
I'm willing to advocate in favor of the short blurbs. I follow a lot of 'dev blogs' by RSS and my homegrown feed reader also only shows the short blurbs. I do this because all these people crafted their (personal) sites, made it beautiful and personal, and I'm wanting to visit their site to pay hommage and look at what they made (whether that's a cool logo, a nice color scheme, etc.) exactly in the way they made it. My ad blocker already blocks the ads I don't want to see (if there are any externally loaded ads). It also has the benefit of the site owners now being able to see somebody is subscribed to the feed. I'm visiting their website and they might see my traffic in their visitor statistics. To make this even more clear to the site owner, I add an URL parameter called /?rss_ref=heyhomepage.com
- manuelmoreale 3y ago
  I advocated for the exact opposite[0] There’s no point in serving only excerpts. By serving full content the people like you who like to consume on the original site can still do that. Serving blurbs forces everyone to do that and that’s wrong imo. [0] https://manuelmoreale.com/rss-excerpts https://manuelmoreale.com/rss-excerpts
  - rambambram 3y ago
    Yeah, there's definitely something to say for giving people a choice, so I'm going to keep this in the back of my head. For my system it feels weird to show the full content. I don't trim the feed description (yet) and sometimes these are very very long, looks awful with the rest of the UI. What I also do is filter out all the markup and even links, I only show some sentences of text basically. It sits wrong with me to make my reader a sort of browser window and display all the markup. Beautifully simple site you have, by the way. And I found I'm already subscribed to your feed. "RSS is not a notification system. It's a distribution system." you say on your site. Was that the purpose of the inventors? I guess I take the freedom to use it slightly different then, we're on Hacker News after all. ;) We can agree to disagree.
    - dugite-code 3y ago
      > there's definitely something to say for giving people a choice This is why I took over the maintaince of the Feediron plugin for the TT-RSS feedreader, I really like having the flexibility to define what content I feel is relevant on a feed by feed basis
    - manuelmoreale 3y ago
      In not sure if it was intended to be a distribution system but it sure is today. Especially because the web and the browser do have built in notification tools we can leverage if what we want to do is send notifications. But I can see why not all situations allow for sending full content via rss. I still believe that IF you can send the full content you should do so.

rambambram 3y ago

I'm willing to advocate in favor of the short blurbs. I follow a lot of 'dev blogs' by RSS and my homegrown feed reader also only shows the short blurbs. I do this because all these people crafted their (personal) sites, made it beautiful and personal, and I'm wanting to visit their site to pay hommage and look at what they made (whether that's a cool logo, a nice color scheme, etc.) exactly in the way they made it. My ad blocker already blocks the ads I don't want to see (if there are any externally loaded ads). It also has the benefit of the site owners now being able to see somebody is subscribed to the feed. I'm visiting their website and they might see my traffic in their visitor statistics. To make this even more clear to the site owner, I add an URL parameter called /?rss_ref=heyhomepage.com

manuelmoreale 3y ago
I advocated for the exact opposite[0] There’s no point in serving only excerpts. By serving full content the people like you who like to consume on the original site can still do that. Serving blurbs forces everyone to do that and that’s wrong imo. [0] https://manuelmoreale.com/rss-excerpts https://manuelmoreale.com/rss-excerpts
- rambambram 3y ago
  Yeah, there's definitely something to say for giving people a choice, so I'm going to keep this in the back of my head. For my system it feels weird to show the full content. I don't trim the feed description (yet) and sometimes these are very very long, looks awful with the rest of the UI. What I also do is filter out all the markup and even links, I only show some sentences of text basically. It sits wrong with me to make my reader a sort of browser window and display all the markup. Beautifully simple site you have, by the way. And I found I'm already subscribed to your feed. "RSS is not a notification system. It's a distribution system." you say on your site. Was that the purpose of the inventors? I guess I take the freedom to use it slightly different then, we're on Hacker News after all. ;) We can agree to disagree.
  - dugite-code 3y ago
    > there's definitely something to say for giving people a choice This is why I took over the maintaince of the Feediron plugin for the TT-RSS feedreader, I really like having the flexibility to define what content I feel is relevant on a feed by feed basis
  - manuelmoreale 3y ago
    In not sure if it was intended to be a distribution system but it sure is today. Especially because the web and the browser do have built in notification tools we can leverage if what we want to do is send notifications. But I can see why not all situations allow for sending full content via rss. I still believe that IF you can send the full content you should do so.