I just wish Mozilla introduce subscribing to RSS as a first class feature in Firefox. If they can introduce and integrate Pocket, I think an open technology like RSS deserves a fair chance. But they'd need to invest a little bit to make it easy to subscribe—similar to following on Twitter/Instagram or Liking pages on Facebook—to receive site updates. Having to find and enter byzantine URLs is not the way to go although personally, I do not have any trouble doing that as I have been using RSS and feed readers for more than a decade, but that is not the case for everyone.
I just wish some consortium of like minded companies like NYT/WaPo/Guardian/BBCs/Other national dailies, Reddit, Mozilla, and even Microsoft can huddle together and come up with a new name/identity and spread it and popularise it. One can always wish.
As one commentator said in the linked article: protocols are better than platforms.
Edit: The issue here is not about obtaining the feature with add-ons and extensions, which there are many. When the focus of the organisation is on something idealistic (open web), is it too much to expect them to add it to the core of the product?
Ton on my plate now trying to focus on shipping mobile and a few other features too.
I like the idea of Polar having data sources that are high quality and that the user can just easily subscribe to specific PDFs, research, or high quality content feeds.
We're also going to add social content discovery which is sort of like a Twitter feed but just people who are annotating content on Polar.
> As one commentator said in the linked article: protocols are better than platforms.
You're right! For users this is absolutely true.
Yet, almost all the companies that you might think of as potentially interested in RSS are platforms. You cannot sell ads in a protocol.
This is the core of why Twitter has replaced RSS. RSS is better for users, but Twitter is better for publishers and platforms. So users wind up following content.
I was not disappointed to see RSS removed from Firefox, because I want my already too-complex browser to have as limited a set of functions as possible. The more first-class features they remove, the more secure and usable their product will be.
The first part of your post puts the priority on having more software that can read a reliable formula, which I think is the opposite way to go, since the forumla is already there can't all browsers do this? Yes, but they have refused up until now, why? Because their focuses is web pages ... Make some hybrid RSS web feed with a universal interface and you have Twitter. Approach it from the software side and you have federated, inconsistent implementations of a reliable formula.
Would like to see more effort in this area too. There was some work done a few years back at https://www.subtome.com/ to make subscribing to RSS feeds easier.
Can anyone comment on why Mozilla is integrating dodgy services like Pocket and now some ill-conceived screenshot web locker? Is it just hunger for data as revenue?
Re-introduce, not introduce. Firefox not only used to do a fine job of displaying RSS feeds, it also simply displayed an RSS icon in the URL bar (if the page had the respective link elements HTML header) from which you could subscribe to all the provided feeds. There certainly was room for improvement, but still, they had it, and they canned it. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks
Thunderbird is still a mighty fine RSS reader though.
Google failed to gain traction in the social network space with G+. If you can't beat them commoditize them!
Why not make interoperable networks based on open standards first class citizens in chrome/chromium? Not just by adding support but also by helping move the RSS standard forward.
Instead of sending your Twitter followers to a random cloud service (and getting it rate-limited), run your own RSS-Bridge to generate RSS from sites that don't have them, like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. If you use it yourself and some friends, rate limiting is not a problem.
> 2018-10-17: Twitter are rate limiting requests from TwitRSS.me, meaning it is effectively broken until I can think of a way round it. You can still run your own instance
Lots of things changed between when I started to heavily and systematically consume content online (in about 2006), and today. But one thing didn't: RSS is still the crucial cornerstone of my online content consumption.
For me, RSS never was dead or less relevant than in the past. On the contrary: Since I keep adding feeds on a very regular basis, it's still growing in importance.
Fortunately, 95 % of blogs and media sites still provide RSS feeds. As long as this is the case, RSS will remain crucial to me.
Calling RSS dead only sounded like marketing from media sites as they got scared of being consumed outside of their platform but it was never dead from consumers' perspective.
I doubt I'd be privy to the discussions happening on Twitter if they were happening any other way (blogs tried to do it with comments and pingbacks, but that isn't as good as Twitter, and not as open to everyone, since you have to run a blog of your own).
This is the secret sauce for me. In fact, if there were a way to only see conversations in Twitter (and ignore all the posts with no responses) that would have a lot of value for me.
RSS is great for reading, but for conversing, it's not a good fit.
I'm excited about ActivityPub integration in blogs. You can give your site its own Mastodon ("Twitter") account, articles show up as posts and replies show up as comment threads.
Although I am a big fan of RSS, I find this article very disingenuous.
The author complains about the chaos, vulgarity, and hostility of Twitter, but those complaints would apply to almost any social media platform.
Then he suggests replacing it with RSS feeds from curated, professional RSS sources, which is not social media. You could achieve the same things on Twitter if you just followed the same curated, profession Twitter feeds.
This is really just a roundabout argument that can be summarized as "don't read the comments."
The solution to “too much RSS” is the same for Twitter. Unsubscribe/unfollow. Twitter does not require you to follow someone to interact with them. I follow relatively few people directly yet I have themed lists following other accounts. If I want local news I check my local list.
Twitter works quite well in this regard vs. Facebook where you need to be “friends” to interact.
I completely understand and respect the author's sentiments. However, it is unfair to compare RSS to Twitter. Twitter is a place where anyone and everyone can express their opinions while RSS is a technology and a mechanism to get an updated feed from services and blogs we care about. Most of these blobs and services will be well written or perhaps professionally written articles. These are two very different systems that tap into fundamentally different types of information sources.
In short, RSS is a feed of (mostly) professionally written articles while Twitter is full of amateurs expressing half baked thoughts in 140 characters. It is unfair to compare the two.
There are some things I like to follow on twitter, but I wanted them integrated in my RSS feed setup, so a few months ago I wrote a simple app which gates twitter to rss, and which can be deployed as a Google Cloud Function. If anyone is interested:
A lot of people were using RSS. Then Google found RSS feeds were hurting Google ad revenues and so Google killed it. Since Firefox these days trails Google, it too stopped supporting RSS feeds
I was there during the turndown. As I remember, RSS had almost no impact on revenue positive or negative. That is why Reader was shutdown actually. Because not enough people used it to impact the bottom line and make it worth keeping.
Although the title is a little bit provocative, i tend to agree that RSS is a better way to consume news than Twitter or any other social media platform by the way.
Social platforms should be used for social, not for news, but i guess Twitter is a special case in that one of its core values is to deliver news in real time. But do we need realtime?
Twitter being a social platform, it means you can't easily avoid trolls, offensive/aggressive/idiotic comments...
Off the top of my head, some issues i had with RSS and/or with the tools/RSS readers:
- RSS can become en echo chamber if you have a limited number of feeds
- Too many feeds and your feeds are flooded with a lot of noise
- want to check the top stories of the day, or trending content? need to use a different tool than your RSS reader.
- want to follow some social feeds but without the noise of social platforms?
To solve these issues, i'm trying to bring something to the RSS ecosystem, and i built a news platform mixing RSS and traditional news aggregation.
It has features to limit the noise and help avoid echo chambers. You can follow Facebook pages, Twitter users, etc... add your newsletters to declutter your mail box, and much more to come.
"the charming pop-ups that everyone uses because fuck you"
Between the cookie popups, the GRPD "choice" popups, and the sign-up-for-some-email-crap popups, each of which takes 1-2 seconds to appear - sometimes in parallel and sometimes in sequence - the web is a garbage fire.
There definitely needs to be a retraction of sorts in terms of technology and content delivery. I also think we have passed "peak information". On the internet, everyone has a voice. At first that was good, but now the signal to noise ratio is so bad that good, accurate, useful content is just rounding error. The same is also true for television/film as well as the commercial music industry.
That's not to say there are not still great people creating great content, but there are mass numbers of people polluting the mediums and making it increasingly difficult to find the good stuff.
The current rate of decline of value of the internet suggests that there will be some significant disruption this decade. I wish I had the solution (or knew who to bet on!)
I think part of the issue with RSS is the real pain of dealing with XML. I'm mildly cheering for something like https://jsonfeed.org - which would be a big step towards making a decentralized system more of a reality.
Eh? It's not like teams of elves are tripping over hand-coding this stuff. And even if they were, JSON parsers tend to be way more strict than RSS readers (which are actuakly very liberal interpretations of XML). But again, nobody in their right mind is manually generating or templating this stuff. And if you are, there are a dozen RSS-gen libraries for every single language. Let one of those handle it for you.
Doing this in JSON does not suddenly mean you don't need a convention (aka standard) for fields and types. It's data exchange. The reader needs to know what your data means. You still have pubdates, links, titles, descriptions and you still need to label them in a semi-strict way somehow.
All in all, JSON will save you a few bytes but it would just be another standard on the pile, just with no libraries around to write the RSSJSON format.
Twitter is like an internet Rorschach test. It’s a very general platform that offers little guidance, so people use it in fundamentally different ways.
I didn’t get the headline until I saw that apparently the author think Twitter is for getting news. I’m sure some people do, but this is strange to me. I use it to keep up with friends and acquaintances, and with the goings-on at certain local organizations. Other people use it to get better customer service. There are many ways to use it. RSS isn’t even in the same species as most of them.
I don't use RSS much, but fire it up whenever searching on Craigslist for something. Havning multiple CL searches registered as feeds in a feed reader leads to a much more efficient workflow than using the site directly. The presentation of the items is better: you get something very analogous to an e-mail inbox, in which you can easily delete unwanted items, and hide ones you have read. And all of the multiple searches appear like folders and update automatically; you see a count of new items in each one.
Openness on its own is not a significant competitive advantage. Twitter provides comments, retweets, and already has friends and celebrities.
RSS is still there on the publishing side for major publishers and all popular blog platforms. So why is it not as popular as email? Maybe individually visiting websites is good enough and maybe that itch is scratched by Twitter.
Can you carry on a conversation between content creators and subscribers over RSS?
Can you discover new content by following a RSS social graph?
RSS is better than Twitter in only one aspect and that's the one-to-many subscriber model. And that's the least interesting and least profitable thing that Twitter provides.
I think it's a fairly silly comparison overall, but it doesn't help when you judge by technical features rather than what kind of content the ecosystem encourages, which what actually matters.
Twitter is extremely noisy. It tends to overwhelm actual articles that people put some effort into with shallow, witty zingers. If you're not looking for witty zingers, it doesn't really matter what other features it has.
RSS is just a file format, but it enables a larger ecosystem that works better at showcasing good content.
If you look at both Twitter and RSS superficially, you can easily decide one is better than the other. If you've ever tried and failed to create your own "perfect" news reader as I have, you'll realize both suck, and have for over a decade now and they're never going ever improve. The real issue isn't the pros and cons of one platform vs. another from an informational or social perspective, the real issue is much more fundamental: Information overload.
I wrote about this, oh, 9 years ago [1]. And then a few years later as well [2]. I did an analysis of the quantity of news items, posts and tweets coming through my custom feed reader and realized it was - and always will be - impossible to keep up, no matter how I organized, grouped, condensed, summarized and displayed it all.
The basic, undeniable fact is that most RSS sources are filled with repetitive information which are nearly impossible to group or update properly. And if you follow any more than a few dozen accounts on Twitter, you are going to miss most of their posts on a daily basis (regardless of their quality, there's just too many). Most of Twitter, in fact, is simply people talking to themselves. (And Facebook is basically useless in terms of gaining any actual knowledge.)
All news feeds - whether they are from RSS, Twitter, FB, Insta, SnapChat, WeChat, TikTok or anything else - are simply not scalable. So pick which you enjoy most, limit the number of sources to only those most important or useful to you, and get on with your life. Until AI gets to the point where it can sort through all the information out there for you - a la Apple's Knowledge Navigator - the only difference between any stream of data is superficial at best.
[+] [-] knight17|7 years ago|reply
I just wish some consortium of like minded companies like NYT/WaPo/Guardian/BBCs/Other national dailies, Reddit, Mozilla, and even Microsoft can huddle together and come up with a new name/identity and spread it and popularise it. One can always wish.
As one commentator said in the linked article: protocols are better than platforms.
Edit: The issue here is not about obtaining the feature with add-ons and extensions, which there are many. When the focus of the organisation is on something idealistic (open web), is it too much to expect them to add it to the core of the product?
[+] [-] dguo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burtonator|7 years ago|reply
https://getpolarized.io/
Ton on my plate now trying to focus on shipping mobile and a few other features too.
I like the idea of Polar having data sources that are high quality and that the user can just easily subscribe to specific PDFs, research, or high quality content feeds.
We're also going to add social content discovery which is sort of like a Twitter feed but just people who are annotating content on Polar.
[+] [-] u801e|7 years ago|reply
Fortunately, Thunderbird still has this feature.
[+] [-] adolph|7 years ago|reply
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/what-are-rss-feeds-...
[+] [-] Kalium|7 years ago|reply
You're right! For users this is absolutely true.
Yet, almost all the companies that you might think of as potentially interested in RSS are platforms. You cannot sell ads in a protocol.
This is the core of why Twitter has replaced RSS. RSS is better for users, but Twitter is better for publishers and platforms. So users wind up following content.
[+] [-] JasonFruit|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sova|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k1m|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netghost|7 years ago|reply
That said, I would love if Firefox had an excellent RSS experience, but frankly it was always a confusing afterthought.
[+] [-] astazangasta|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] PavlovsCat|7 years ago|reply
Thunderbird is still a mighty fine RSS reader though.
[+] [-] BenoitEssiambre|7 years ago|reply
Google failed to gain traction in the social network space with G+. If you can't beat them commoditize them!
Why not make interoperable networks based on open standards first class citizens in chrome/chromium? Not just by adding support but also by helping move the RSS standard forward.
[+] [-] jayalpha|7 years ago|reply
You can convert Twitter to RSS: http://twitrss.me
Websites that don't have RSS: https://feedity.com/
Email to RSS: https://zapier.com
Hackernews RSS:http://hnrss.org/newest?points=300
You can even use RSS for finding a job: https://www.indeed.ca/jobs?q=millwright&l=Toronto,+ON&sort=d...
[+] [-] k1m|7 years ago|reply
And one which converts partial feeds into full-text feeds: https://fivefilters.org/content-only/
[+] [-] JetSpiegel|7 years ago|reply
https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/
For HN, you can run that very same codebase from https://hnrss.org: https://github.com/edavis/go-hnrss
[+] [-] hirundo|7 years ago|reply
From that link:
> 2018-10-17: Twitter are rate limiting requests from TwitRSS.me, meaning it is effectively broken until I can think of a way round it. You can still run your own instance
[+] [-] fireattack|7 years ago|reply
I used this before, but its delay is just too much for anything that requires timeliness.
The free tier of feed43 is a little bit better I think (still have hours delay sometimes..)
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imartin2k|7 years ago|reply
For me, RSS never was dead or less relevant than in the past. On the contrary: Since I keep adding feeds on a very regular basis, it's still growing in importance.
Fortunately, 95 % of blogs and media sites still provide RSS feeds. As long as this is the case, RSS will remain crucial to me.
[+] [-] h1d|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnFen|7 years ago|reply
Mine too, 100%.
[+] [-] mooreds|7 years ago|reply
But reading through the post and the comments here, I'm sensing an omission. What Twitter (and social media in general) provides that RSS doesn't is interaction. I don't login to twitter all that often, but when I do, I see things like this: https://twitter.com/mikekarnj/status/1106582308235235330 and this: https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/1106812630985928704
I doubt I'd be privy to the discussions happening on Twitter if they were happening any other way (blogs tried to do it with comments and pingbacks, but that isn't as good as Twitter, and not as open to everyone, since you have to run a blog of your own).
This is the secret sauce for me. In fact, if there were a way to only see conversations in Twitter (and ignore all the posts with no responses) that would have a lot of value for me.
RSS is great for reading, but for conversing, it's not a good fit.
[+] [-] taeric|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StavrosK|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Digory|7 years ago|reply
(Or is that what Mastodon is trying to do?)
[+] [-] khendron|7 years ago|reply
The author complains about the chaos, vulgarity, and hostility of Twitter, but those complaints would apply to almost any social media platform.
Then he suggests replacing it with RSS feeds from curated, professional RSS sources, which is not social media. You could achieve the same things on Twitter if you just followed the same curated, profession Twitter feeds.
This is really just a roundabout argument that can be summarized as "don't read the comments."
[+] [-] tamal|7 years ago|reply
Twitter works quite well in this regard vs. Facebook where you need to be “friends” to interact.
[+] [-] hprotagonist|7 years ago|reply
RSS is very, very nice. Especially for keeping track of all the journals I have to keep an eye on.
[+] [-] abhinai|7 years ago|reply
In short, RSS is a feed of (mostly) professionally written articles while Twitter is full of amateurs expressing half baked thoughts in 140 characters. It is unfair to compare the two.
[+] [-] SkyPuncher|7 years ago|reply
On Mac, I've been using Leaf with no real complaints.
I've found many blogs happily serve rss content, even if a button isn't explicitly advertised. Some of the url's I'll try:
* example.com/rss.xml
* example.com/index.rss
* example.com/?feed=rss
* example.com/feed/
* exmample.com/feed/rss
[+] [-] mike-cardwell|7 years ago|reply
https://www.grepular.com/Twitter_to_RSS_with_Google_Cloud_Fu...
[+] [-] agnelvishal|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zaphar|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kgwxd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] guybedo|7 years ago|reply
Off the top of my head, some issues i had with RSS and/or with the tools/RSS readers: - RSS can become en echo chamber if you have a limited number of feeds - Too many feeds and your feeds are flooded with a lot of noise - want to check the top stories of the day, or trending content? need to use a different tool than your RSS reader. - want to follow some social feeds but without the noise of social platforms?
I wrote something about the signal/noise ratio in RSS recently: https://medium.com/@julien.aktu/rss-less-noise-more-informat...
To solve these issues, i'm trying to bring something to the RSS ecosystem, and i built a news platform mixing RSS and traditional news aggregation. It has features to limit the noise and help avoid echo chambers. You can follow Facebook pages, Twitter users, etc... add your newsletters to declutter your mail box, and much more to come.
You can check it out here: https://aktu.io/about
[+] [-] blunte|7 years ago|reply
Between the cookie popups, the GRPD "choice" popups, and the sign-up-for-some-email-crap popups, each of which takes 1-2 seconds to appear - sometimes in parallel and sometimes in sequence - the web is a garbage fire.
There definitely needs to be a retraction of sorts in terms of technology and content delivery. I also think we have passed "peak information". On the internet, everyone has a voice. At first that was good, but now the signal to noise ratio is so bad that good, accurate, useful content is just rounding error. The same is also true for television/film as well as the commercial music industry.
That's not to say there are not still great people creating great content, but there are mass numbers of people polluting the mediums and making it increasingly difficult to find the good stuff.
The current rate of decline of value of the internet suggests that there will be some significant disruption this decade. I wish I had the solution (or knew who to bet on!)
[+] [-] Angostura|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kris-s|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oliwarner|7 years ago|reply
Doing this in JSON does not suddenly mean you don't need a convention (aka standard) for fields and types. It's data exchange. The reader needs to know what your data means. You still have pubdates, links, titles, descriptions and you still need to label them in a semi-strict way somehow.
All in all, JSON will save you a few bytes but it would just be another standard on the pile, just with no libraries around to write the RSSJSON format.
JSON doesn't fix XML.
[+] [-] mikeash|7 years ago|reply
I didn’t get the headline until I saw that apparently the author think Twitter is for getting news. I’m sure some people do, but this is strange to me. I use it to keep up with friends and acquaintances, and with the goings-on at certain local organizations. Other people use it to get better customer service. There are many ways to use it. RSS isn’t even in the same species as most of them.
[+] [-] kazinator|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phasnox|7 years ago|reply
Not really.
Most of the people I know , including me, go there for just one reason: To know the public opinion.
[+] [-] pradn|7 years ago|reply
RSS is still there on the publishing side for major publishers and all popular blog platforms. So why is it not as popular as email? Maybe individually visiting websites is good enough and maybe that itch is scratched by Twitter.
[+] [-] whoopdedo|7 years ago|reply
Can you carry on a conversation between content creators and subscribers over RSS?
Can you discover new content by following a RSS social graph?
RSS is better than Twitter in only one aspect and that's the one-to-many subscriber model. And that's the least interesting and least profitable thing that Twitter provides.
[+] [-] skybrian|7 years ago|reply
Twitter is extremely noisy. It tends to overwhelm actual articles that people put some effort into with shallow, witty zingers. If you're not looking for witty zingers, it doesn't really matter what other features it has.
RSS is just a file format, but it enables a larger ecosystem that works better at showcasing good content.
[+] [-] grenoire|7 years ago|reply
2. No.
3. See 1.
[+] [-] russellbeattie|7 years ago|reply
I wrote about this, oh, 9 years ago [1]. And then a few years later as well [2]. I did an analysis of the quantity of news items, posts and tweets coming through my custom feed reader and realized it was - and always will be - impossible to keep up, no matter how I organized, grouped, condensed, summarized and displayed it all.
The basic, undeniable fact is that most RSS sources are filled with repetitive information which are nearly impossible to group or update properly. And if you follow any more than a few dozen accounts on Twitter, you are going to miss most of their posts on a daily basis (regardless of their quality, there's just too many). Most of Twitter, in fact, is simply people talking to themselves. (And Facebook is basically useless in terms of gaining any actual knowledge.)
All news feeds - whether they are from RSS, Twitter, FB, Insta, SnapChat, WeChat, TikTok or anything else - are simply not scalable. So pick which you enjoy most, limit the number of sources to only those most important or useful to you, and get on with your life. Until AI gets to the point where it can sort through all the information out there for you - a la Apple's Knowledge Navigator - the only difference between any stream of data is superficial at best.
1. https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/drinking-from-the-fireho...
2. https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/but-how-do-you-keep-trac...