
RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News - smacktoward
http://fieldguide.gizmodo.com/why-rss-feeds-still-beat-facebook-and-twitter-for-track-1800722740
======
Animats
Most of the sources of hard news have RSS feeds. Reuters. The BBC. The New
York Times. The Hill. National Weather Service. These are all crap-free. No
ads. No "10 ways to waste your time and money". Just news.

I have an Model 14 Teletype tape printer from 1926 in a brass and glass case
hooked up to the Reuters RSS feed. I've had this at steampunk conventions, and
it usually lives in my living room. Push a button and get the news.[1] Or
leave it on, and it starts up whenever Reuters posts something new. Technical
details.[2]

[1]
[https://archive.org/details/Aethericmachine14](https://archive.org/details/Aethericmachine14)
[2] [http://www.aetherltd.com](http://www.aetherltd.com)

~~~
hvvvggg
> hard news

> The BBC

Have you _visited_ the BBC News website recently?

They even have Daily Mail style headlines now, where a random word is
capitalised for emphasis:

"Up to NINE terrible things happened"

I browse with an ad blocker, so those are actual headlines, not
Outbrain/Taboola (ugh) links.

~~~
ikawe
I recall 10 years ago it wasn’t nearly as terrible. Did something happen to
the bbc?

~~~
digi_owl
Best i can tell, there is a new generation of "journalists" coming onboard
that have been trained in the style of "blogs".

And it seems to be far from unique to the BBC, you can notice it with all the
national broadcasters (Though BBC being English and thus have a worldwide
reach in its original form, is more noticeable outside of the UK).

~~~
kuschku
Although I have to be honest, the tagesschau is still immune to this trend.
Let’s hope it never arrives at
[http://www.tagesschau.de/](http://www.tagesschau.de/)

------
johnchristopher
Indeed. But Facebook and Twitter beat RSS for tracking users.

edit:

> Perhaps most importantly, you don’t need to be constantly online and
> constantly refreshing your feeds to make sure you don’t miss anything.

That's misleading. If you are using a desktop client then you might miss items
from a very active feed if it didn't connect to the web recently enough.

That was (to me) the biggest selling point of Google Reader: I could forget
about if for two weeks but Google would happily and regularly download feeds
while I was not connected. Feeddemon and others couldn't do that unless they
connected to proxy-like services.

Of course that has some implications regarding privacy.

~~~
Semaphor
I don't understand your comparison. The advantage of google reader was that it
was a web app? But every other webbased reader had the same advantage, and
since Google Reader's demise, we got an explosion of amazing readers, from
free over self-hosted to paid.

~~~
johnchristopher
`Feeddemon and others` refer to regular applications (see
[http://www.feeddemon.com/](http://www.feeddemon.com/)). Google reader was, to
my knowledge, the dominant feed reader back then even though other services
existed (and filled up the space when GR was discontinued) and had that same
advantage.

> The advantage of google reader was that it was a web app?

Over regular client readers, yes.

------
deepakkarki
Yep, I have to agree. It's decentralised, pub sub, no tracking, can use any
client you want! Somehow the simplicity is just elegant.

The idea of a massive corp controlling what I see (and hence how I think) does
not resonate with me.

------
kome
I am not the developer behind it, but I want to advertise it:
[http://fetchrss.com/](http://fetchrss.com/) is awesome.

I can fetch stuff from public Facebook pages I need (without having a fb
account) and create a RSS feed of them. Then with ifttt.com I send updates to
my mailbox: awesome.

Also, fuck Facebook and long live RSS and the open web.

~~~
xrqvt
Hmm... this looks really interesting. Gonna' try this with a few reddit links
(/r/sub1+sub2...) to see how it handles that. For some reason my current
_reader_ is now having problems.

~~~
PersonalOps
You realize, of course, that Reddit has a native option [0] for RSS right?

[0]:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/pathogendavid/comments/tv8m9/pathog...](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathogendavid/comments/tv8m9/pathogendavids_guide_to_rss_and_reddit/)

------
m-p-3
At least you can sorT RSS feeds in a chronological order. I don't care what
the algorithm believe, I just want to see the news in the order they came out.

~~~
lostmsu
Have to give it to FB, they do have that option.

~~~
_tulpa
An option which resets every time you visit facebook.com

You can bookmark facebook.com/?sk=h_chr which will force chronlogical sorting.

But you really really should not get your news from facebook.

------
rabboRubble
Twitter is where I follow a specific event. Facebook is where I stumble across
bullshit. RSS is where I read news, stories, and technical updates.

RSS is how I come here~

~~~
Jaruzel
> RSS is how I come here~

Likewise.

I use a homegrown RSS reader that I host at
[http://www.weegeeks.com](http://www.weegeeks.com)

It's not great and it's not pretty but it does the job.

------
dankohn1
I highly recommend Inoreader. It works almost exactly like Google Reader, but
with extra enhancements like filtering feeds and following Twitter accounts as
feeds.

~~~
baby
I had to choose a replacement after Google Reader ended, and I chose the one
with the best mobile app because I go back and forth a lot between laptop and
cellphone. Inoreader it was!

BTW my list of crypto/security blogs I follow:
[https://github.com/mimoo/crypto_blogs](https://github.com/mimoo/crypto_blogs)

------
djhworld
I like RSS and use it daily, however the main drawback is a lot of sites tend
to truncate their articles and have a "read more" link.

Not so useful when you're in an offline environment like the London
underground (where I usually catch up with my feeds at the end of the day)

Facebook and Twitter suffer from the same issue though

~~~
superflyguy
Most UK phone networks let you use the free Virgin WiFi in the underground
now.

~~~
djhworld
I'm on GiffGaff which isn't one of those networks supported.

Additionally I think the rigamarole of getting to the station, connecting to
the wifi, swiping back to the article you couldn't read, downloading it etc is
a real pain!

~~~
superflyguy
Giffgaff most certainly is supported (it uses O2's network). Some people
report having to temporarily install the O2 app for a one-off registration.

It's no worse whether you're at the station or not, unless I've missed the
point of what you wrote.

It's better if you can grab the whole article for offline use, though; back
when I used RSS a lot - post Google Reader - I used an Android app which could
get the whole article. But I've stopped just about all internet time-wasting
except to main news headlines and HN, preferring to read books on a kindle.

------
ocdtrekkie
I was okay with social-curated news when my social feeds were chronological,
but now that everyone's doing algorithms, you miss way too much if you aren't
looking at something like RSS.

Personally, I use TinyTinyRSS on Sandstorm.io. There's a fantastic TTRSS
client available for Windows UWP that works on Windows Mobile too.

~~~
CaptSpify
I like TinyTinyRSS, but I wish there was a better web-client for it. The
default one is way to slow and bloated. I'd still recommend using it though.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Definitely not a fan of the web client. In my case, I lucked out, the TTRSS
app I use on my Windows Mobile phone was universal... It's excellent on
desktop too. I never use the web interface.

------
addicted
The idea that you get news from FB and Twitter is fundamentally flawed.

FB/Twitter are known to have algorithms designed to show you things that you
will like (because people stop using Twitter/FB if they see stuff that makes
them unhappy). While newspapers have this to a certain extent (all those
"Drink 2 glasses of wine a day to live longer" articles) since they aren't
targeted based on your individual preferences you still get a very wide
variety of news sticking to only a single newspaper, and pretty much all the
news if you mix in 2 or 3.

~~~
digi_owl
FB sure, as they have made it harder and harder to flip the feed to
chronological.

But Twitter? I know they insert this whole "in case you missed" but most of
the feed is still chronological. A very different problem is with having
overly prolific retweeters in your feed, but that is a problem of your making,
not Twitter's.

~~~
rainbowmverse
Twitter is slowly rolling out an algorithmic feed. It returns to chronological
once you refresh, but sometimes I forget and don't realize until I start
noticing things are out of order.

------
campuscodi
Hallelujah!!! Never gave it up. I felt genuine panic when Google Reader died

------
thescribe
I use feedbin, and I love it. At this point I tend to stop visiting sites that
don't support RSS.

~~~
xrqvt
> I tend to stop visiting sites that don't support RSS

Same here. If the site is interesting enough, I'll try and contact the owner
and explain why RSS matters. Basically.. few people have the time to visit and
sort through individual sites on a daily basis.

~~~
dispo001
I try to visit sites without RSS but most of the time I don't even remember
them.

------
Vinnl
It's a shame that fewer and fewer sites offer feeds. Most of them still do,
luckily, but I've had to dig up [http://feed43.com](http://feed43.com) about
once every two months. Though I wasn't really aware that some feed readers
could perhaps generate feeds automatically, I'll have to try that out
sometime.

~~~
chengiz
I was not aware of feed43. Thanks. But do I have to create my own? Can I not
use feeds people have already created?

~~~
Vinnl
You can, but there's no easy way to discover them as far as I'm aware. As in,
I've always made my own.

------
warrenm
And this is why I run datente.com

And why I use RSS to drive a channel on Telegram

Agree with the item or not, whatever pops up next is next from wherever you've
subscribed

It's great

~~~
newman8r
and you don't need to download 15mb of garbage to read a few kb of news

~~~
kome
That's a very good point!

------
tekni5
One interesting thing is that a specific twitter search sorted by latest,
often produces very decent localized news/reports during some events. One of
the first things I turn to confirm the scale of an event, for example
blackouts, fire, or meteoroid sightings.

Also there are specific feeds on twitter for some cities that report
police/fire scanners. If you ever get a power outage you can track the scale
within minutes, by looking at which addresses/intersections have stuck
elevator reports.

~~~
rainbowmverse
I usually just check the power company's outage map.

~~~
tekni5
Usually takes them sometime to update it, never fast enough.

~~~
rainbowmverse
It must depend on the power company. This one has it almost immediately.

------
erfgh
The problem with RSS is that most feeds treat all items the same so the same
prominence is attached to a nuclear strike on New York as is attached to a
child scraping its knee.

~~~
Gys
To me that is another benefit of rss. I want to do my own 'manual' filtering,
to decide myself what is important to me.

I do not want some algorithm to feed me. Especially not if that algorithm is
commercially biased: its main goal is not to inform me, the goal is to make
money from me.

~~~
JohnBooty
The problem I've found with aggregating multiple feeds into a single
chronological stream is that some feeds totally overwhelm others because they
publish more frequently.

If Feed A publishes 10 articles a day and Feed B publishes 10 articles a year,
the articles from Feed B get totally engulfed and pushed way, way, way down
the list... effectively they become invisible.

~~~
dispo001
My aggregator limits the number of items by feed and by domain. The problem is
less of an issue if you add many more feeds and filter harder. Those rarely
publishing do still get drowned out but it gives you plenty of other things to
read. Thanks to volume, at times, if the slow publisher posts something
awesome (they often do) it is reposted by the more spammy domains.

I do have other ideas to fix that issue but the ink is still wet on those.

------
zby
RSS gives the user maximum control - but it lacks the social features. What we
need is a way to connect our RSS feeds together.

~~~
nl
You mean the lost world of FriendFeed/Google Buzz/PubSubHub.

It seemed like a great idea, but the social features really didn't work.
People dumped their RSS feeds, but the decentralized nature meant that
attempts at flowing comments between sites ended up losing context.

~~~
0x445442
I was the guy that really liked Google Buzz. I think it was it was tightly
integrated with Gmail.

------
pulkitpahwa
I skipped RSS for sometime (actually forgot about their existence, my bad!)
but I've stopped using facebook or similar platforms for a couple of reasons:

1\. No matter how much I try to catch up, I'll still loose something 2\. They
are too distractive, less productive, and addictive.

RSS was a great way, is still a great way to catch on your fav news.

Thanks for bringing to notice :)

------
marban
In case anyone here remembers Popurls fame, I've recently relaunched it under
a new brand: [https://medium.com/hvper/popurls-goes-
hvper-2867b1b6b2bd](https://medium.com/hvper/popurls-goes-hvper-2867b1b6b2bd)

------
linker3000
Absolutely! The RS reader on my Android phone is probably the most-used app.

([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.madsvyat.s...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.madsvyat.simplerssreader))

Sad to note that apparently around the time HN renewed or changed a security
cert configuration about a month or so ago, the app stopped updating this
site's feed. Having removed and re-added it, the feed woke up on my phone, but
my tablet stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the feed, even after reinstalling
the app, manually removing config folders, caches etc., and restoring a backup
of the config files from my phone.

------
criddell
I used to follow around 60 RSS feeds. Then Twitter became the place where
stuff surfaced. A few months ago I got an iPad and started using Apple News
and I've found myself visiting Twitter less. Twitter still surfaces more
stuff, but that's not necessarily a good thing. Apple's news app fits my
desires just about perfectly and it's getting better and better at showing me
stuff I want to read.

------
SimeVidas
I use RSS exclusively for its notification aspect. I still open the posts on
the web (after filtering out the once that I’m not interested in).

------
npguy
Try [http://talll.com](http://talll.com) for tech and
[http://filll.com](http://filll.com) for finance. Solid collection of rss
feeds.

~~~
tinbucket
Really good share -- thank you!

Are there similar sites for other areas of interest, say history or science?

------
goosh453
Miss the days when i filtered my newsfeeds with yahoo pipes. I could follow
around 30 sites with only 10-15 news a day. Reading only the important news.

------
lostmsu
Not arguing with the point of this article. If you have to read FB to keep
track of your friends, Social Fixer for Chrome cuts a lot of crap from it.

------
jiggunjer
I use Google news with a custom filter for stuff about China. Just click on
the bookmark once every morning. Don't get much noise, but sometimes hit
paywalls.

------
Vadim_M
I just use email newsletters from interesting companies and projects. RSS is
not much better than FB and Twitter.

