Case in point: I saw someone had unsubscribed from one of my email newsletters, and when I went to go read the "reason why" field, they'd filled out: "subscribed to the RSS feed instead."
That's right, my email newsletter has an RSS feed (thanks Buttondown!), and they prefer to receive the newsletter that way rather than via email. And can I blame them? Absolutely not! I love RSS. Is it better for my vanity to have their email address in my database instead, rather than some nebulous XML file going out to who-knows? Of course. But again, this format keeps on winning year after year because it's one of the best consumer-first features of the open web.
I thought the comment says "it was an absolute dream for consumers" but actually it says "it's". Sorry to burst your bubble, if you ask any normal person who does not spend 10 hours on HN per week, chances are that they have never heard of the term RSS in their life.
I still use RSS but I am completely with you on this. Most people, even those who work in tech related fields very rarely know what RSS is and when you explain it to them, they mostly don't care.
I have had a very nice example where I explained what RSS/Feedly was to an interested graphic artist/designer (pretty competent with computers, spends all day on it). Once she got it, she told ME it was basically the same as email newsletter or subscribing to a Facebook page, Twitter feed or things like that. Which of course it is.
So, she couldn't be bothered to try the thing and set it up. I completly get it. For those who are used to it, it makes sense. If you already have your subscription stuff managed elsewhere, it's just more work for little benefits for most people.
What's more RSS actually inverse the responsibility in the relation, and you become the one who has to manage long term changes. Some feeds change URLs and I don't even notice it and you need a specific software to read them, which might be paid and might change overtime. And unlike emails, you can't even archive it easily, you need another software or a reader that has the functionality.
It's just a hassle and the reason most people don't care is because they can get the same benefits without paying for anything or having to manage/learn new stuff.
RSS is just a technology that matches an idealism about the world, very prevalent in the optimist technophile sphere. But the reality is that people don't want to make that much effort for some dubious "advantage" and they are right.
- Some major platform still provide RSS, which makes me use them (I do not use twitter, because it does not provide RSS
- If not for RSS I would not be using Reddit
- the moment platform drops RSS, I drop the platform
Links:
[0] https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive - my own RSS reader
Viewing the source of a subreddit on old.reddit.com shows an RSS link; viewing it on the new domain does not.
But I also have a child & a job, so in general my available time to goof around online is less.
That's a silly thing to say. Of course you can put ads in it since it allows linking to things. What you mean probably, is that it's not as easy as embedding some google ads markup in your sidebar.
Advertisers love to burn money, but they draw the line at not being able to verify that the spend did what was promised.
Let's not. Please.
With email, you normally use unique image and link URLs for each recipient, so you generally know who's opened the email and what they've clicked and can map that to their email address and whatever other information you have about them.
With RSS, you generally don't have any information about who's accessing the feed other than an IP address. It is possible to require users to log in and receive a unique RSS URL, which is what podcasts often do to give paid subscribers access to paywalled episodes, but that's not common for web RSS.
Even the injected ads idea was tried with companies like FeedBurner, later acquired by google.
If you're generating feeds on the fly with tracking metadata based on the requester, you can identify aggregators, and treat them equivalently to social media platforms where users circulate normal web links. You still get click-throughs to the underlying content from the end users, and you'll know the aggregator was the referrer.
Many podcasts use direct ad injection using metadata from the request to the enclosure link -- that seems to work well enough, and seems like the sort of thing that could be used for other content than just audio and video.
If RSS has been more common, I imagine the bigger RSS readers (bearing in mind one of them was from Google!) would also have standardised on other ways of tracking clicks and ad views and all the rest. There just weren't enough people interested in RSS to make any of that worthwhile.
I say this as a user of RSS and someone who publishes a (very sporadic) RSS feed. It's a niche, because most people don't want to curate their own feeds.
Paying for content is a conscious action, it has a higher activation threshold than just clicking mindlessly on something that looks fun.
Then, transactions are expensive; micropayments are not a thing.
Subscriptions alleviate that a bit. Large middlemen alleviate that even more: Apple and Google can make micropayments like $0.50 viable within their ecosystems, so apps or in-app purchases can be tiny, and allow to remove ads for paying users. Attempts to do something similar for websites never took off, sadly.
Polling rate also has nothing to do with frequency of updates if you care to receive those updates in a timely manner. I haven't seen a reader default to 30 minutes or less.
Probably in both cases you just notice the bad implementations more because they make more requests.
And Atom supports pagination so you can limit the main feed url to be just one entry while still allowing for clients to retrieve older ones.
https://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-site-technicals-99.html#202...
I'm a small enough deal that I can call out specific readers at the top of a new post. A couple weeks ago I put up a post that started with the aside "hey one of you has a Turkish IP and you're pulling the whole feed every 10 minutes, please stop doing that."
(The podcast where I capture primarily audio material such as voice or sonfification that might as well also be presented in this alternative channel form...)
I'd be interested to listen to your podcast if you were to ping me its URL via one of the contact methods in my bio...
I can imagine an alternate timeline where Google Reader turned into a sort of Twitter (or FB or IG) feed.
Podcasts inject ads into the content: from RSS you get the link and description of the episode, and inside the episode are ads.
I guess that's why RSS is still a thing for podcasts? :-)
Readers don't know how to reply to the author in a standard way (like an email)
I host freshRSS and it's been amazing for me.
Yes, but mostly because of a lost opportunity.
I was working on my own web based reader when Google made a significant upgrade to their reader. It was similar to what I had made, so I thought it would be foolish to compete with Google and stopped working on it.
I wonder where RSS would be now if Google had not discouraged potential competitors.
Well, RSS won the battle, but lost the war.
For apple ecosystem best client is https://reederapp.com/classic/
Are there good tools to RSSify sites that don’t have one?
Any half-decent feed reader app will do it for you after just pasting the website’s address.
> Are there good tools to RSSify sites that don’t have one?
https://createfeed.fivefilters.org
And for newsletters:
For the first question, I should clarify that I'm hoping to just ingest these RSS feeds myself in various scripts. But yeah, makes sense that most of the good feed readers mostly take care of that.
Browsers used to detect this and show an RSS icon near the address bar if the website you were viewing had a feed - and you could click the icon to see more details and subscribe.
I use this Firefox addon which replicates that functionality: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/feed-preview/
FreshRSS is a good self-hosted RSS feed reader, and you can configure it to scrape non-RSS webpages for updates too: https://danq.me/2022/09/27/freshrss-xpath/
You can link it to your reader so you just click the button and it adds the feed into it.
Is it a popular main stream thing? No. Does every since site offer feeds for every reasonable thing you could want to subscribe to? But does it still work quite well for those that want to use it? Yes.
Discord, WhatsApp, and iMessage are all messaging applications that aren't directly related to the use case for RSS.
That leaves Twitter and Instagram as the two major sites for which RSS would be applicable, but which don't natively offer RSS feeds. And a cursory web search reveals the large number of solutions people have come up with for subscribing to content from Twitter and Instagram via RSS, indicating that there's significant demand for it.
It's also worth noting that with Twitter in decline, the main competitors gaining traction, BlueSky and Mastodon, do both natively offer RSS feeds.
On top of that, the entire podcasting ecosystem is fundamentally based on RSS, and it's still the primary mechanism for syndicating blog content.
So RSS is not just alive and well, it's thriving.
Many times this sort of meta information reveals much more than expected
I suspect maybe it's easier now to nail the layout if ai can read content before it goes to print.
AI is indeed a crucial part in solving the two most difficult challenges -- typesetting and curation, although we'll probably do things that don't scale for a little while before fully automating.
My feeds are pretty unpredictable - sometimes I have 40 new articles in a day, sometimes just a few. The cheapness of digital consumption and interface makes it viable for me to skim titles and read, defer, or dismiss at my judgement. I don't want the entire feed printed out - not viable.
But if some SaaS is curating my feeds for me, I fear it'll turn into another algorithmized something optimizing for what exactly? At least the first-pass filter is explicitly set by me - feeds I subscribe to.
Curious to hear your thoughts on it, and wishing you luck.
I am sure people use RSS in many different ways though, it just doesn't seem useful to me.
The last time someone tried to convince me this was a good idea was just after the iPhone was announced, and before everyone and their monkey had a super computer in their pocket. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so we almost started - but my advice to the punter then was "lets see what the mobile phone industry looks like next year" .. well that put a pin in it.
Nowadays, I'm not so sure I'd be so willing to do this - again, because it requires the user do the printing - but if you were to, say, make this into a vending machine product, which users can walk up to in the street and walk away with a custom 'zine full of their own interests, you might be onto something.
Here in Europe we have a lot of old telephone booths converted into mini neighborhood free libraries. I've often wondered whether it would make sense to put a public printer in those libraries and let people print things .. seems like this would be a revolutionary new product to make, with printable broadsheets based on a custom RSS, an obvious killer app .. assuming someone can be found to maintain the printers.
(Off to find thermal paper for my ClockworkPi, which I always wanted to turn into a custom RSS printer in the toilet...)
Recently I’ve been living in a cottage town and thought of this idea again… rather than be reading on phones or tablets people could read printed books with their favourite articles or blogs. But I think the actual distribution system would be the killer, unless it’s at a big resort the transportation will kill the idea.
People confused Betamax with Betacam, Sony’s professional grade recording medium, which is absolutely better quality.
People conflated VHS’ ability to slow the tape for even longer play at the expense of quality. That of course made the recording terrible. Betamax did not initially have this capability.
People listened to Sony’s own marketing. When they couldn’t compete on features, they banked on their reputation.
"When Betamax was introduced in Japan and the United States in 1975, its Beta I speed of 1.57 inches per second (ips) offered a higher horizontal resolution (approximately 250 lines vs 240 lines horizontal NTSC), lower video noise, and less luma/chroma crosstalk than VHS, and was later marketed as providing pictures superior to VHS's playback. However, the introduction of Beta II speed, 0.79 ips (two-hour mode), to compete with VHS's two-hour Standard Play mode (1.31 ips) reduced Betamax's horizontal resolution to 240 lines.[7]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war#Picture_q...
If you want to collect obsolete formats and you have a TV with analog inputs VHS is probably your best thing to get into. This place
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114286077399818803
sells VHS decks for $12 and you can get pretty good movies for $2. Contrast that to compact cassette decks which start at twice that and have a good chance of being non-functional. That place has the complete works of Barbara Streisand but if you want music that anybody would want on cassettes the sky is the limit for collectables.
My impression is that the quality of VHS isn't terrible. The video is worse than DVD of course but a lot of DVDs have NERFed soundtracks because they mixed them assuming you're going to play their 5.1 mix on a 2-channel system. Any deck you get now is going to support VHS Hi-Fi and if you have a 5.1 system with some kind of Dolby Pro Logic the soundtrack of a good VHS can be better than the soundtrack of an average DVD. (Blu-Ray often has better sound not because the technology is better but because the 5.1 soundtrack is more likely to really be a 5.1 soundtrack)
Beyond this, is when they bake a 16:9 movie into the 4:3 format losing significant fidelity. Batman Begins was nearly unwatchable.
This of course doesn't get into the sound quality/mixing issues you mention... I wish they had something closer to h.265 at that time, as I don't mind a blurry background nearly as much as blotchy/blocky artifacts for similar sizes or smaller. A 2gb h.265 movie from blueray looks dramatically better than a 4+gb DVD movie.
> Any deck you get now is going to support VHS Hi-Fi
When you say "VHS deck", do you mean something other than a VCR?
That was it
It's (a part of) what killed MiniDisc too. It was _the_ coolest format ever invented, but Sony gatekeeped it so hard nobody used it.
Nothing more Cyberdeck-y than using a MD to transfer data :)
As far as I can tell, it's become the "de-facto" for Anthropic related RSS feeds.
You'd think RSS was dead, but I release this earlier this year and it's at 100 start.
2 – It feels like RSS is one of those topics where the same old observations and opinions are raised, but nothing new is ever tread for or against it.
I’m not sure whether these works address my interest for the former, but I think they’re cool.