
The power of the RSS reader - mh_
http://www.marco.org/2013/03/26/power-of-rss
======
BenoitEssiambre
Exactly! Also the fact that rss enables this kind high quality, narrow domain,
low volumes posting makes the web way better.

I don't want to read professional writers who have to write their quota
whether there is good material to write about or not on that day. They too
often focus on gossip and sensationalism. Although I might be entertained
briefly, in the end I will not have gained much from reading this type of
articles and it's a waste of my time.

I want to read the authors who mostly spends their time doing things in their
domain of expertise and get out of their lab/office/cave once in a while to
write a post on something they feel is interesting and worth sharing. Because
they are not frequent writers the prose might be dryer but the facts, ideas
and insights are usually much better than what you get from those who's main
job is writing.

I love insights that comes directly from an expert's keyboard. They are pearls
of wisdom and it would be sad to lose them because of a decline in support for
RSS.

~~~
BenoitEssiambre
Writing this made me realize that the closing of G Reader might be a huge
opportunity for Tumblr.

Tumblr already has RSS features on the publishing side which means they don't
lock in their users content in their platform. Imagine if facebook would allow
their users's public posts to be viewable in g+. That's what Tumblr does.

Having RSS publishing is a good first step for an open and interoperable
social platform. Add to that the ability to see all unread posts from a group
of subscriptions and the ability to subscribe to outside rss feeds within
Tumblr and you got yourself a very good social network/feed reader/blogging
platform.

Maybe the kids are on to something.

I wonder if there is a business model for a social network that keeps posts in
the open and encourages consumptions from outside platforms through rss.

~~~
johnchristopher
> Imagine if facebook would allow their users's public posts to be viewable in
> g+. That's what Tumblr does.

I may have missed something but I haven't seen some tumblr post posted on G+
via RSS (yet).

> Having RSS publishing is a good first step for an open and interoperable
> social platform. Add to that the ability to see all unread posts from a
> group of subscriptions and the ability to subscribe to outside rss feeds
> within Tumblr and you got yourself a very good social network/feed
> reader/blogging platform.

A good first step but they (facebook, twitter) all ended up removing it.

> Maybe the kids are on to something.

More like the parents (read: youngsters from the 2000) were on to something. I
had high hopes for RSS and even higher for ATOM (I ended up writing my own
flat-file blog system that only used ATOM documents as storage, I really liked
it with the full xslt mumbo jumbo but in the end it's xml and that was it).

>I wonder if there is a business model for a social network that keeps posts
in the open and encourages consumptions from outside platforms through rss.

Some tried to monetize RSS by adding ads in the feeds but that didn't take
off. Reading a site's content only in the rss feed cuts off its authors from
any kind of revenues (worse if the online reader displays its own add along
the feeds).

I presented a project when I was a student. It consisted of a website that
offered any registered user to transform the RSS/ATOM feeds they would have
supplied into a mini updated WAP-enabled website for browsing the feeds on
those old nokia of the 2000s. It was nice and all but when one of my advisors
asked me "how would you turn it into something profitable or how would you
bring it to the market?" all I could say was "this would never work because
nobody with profits on his mind is promoting webfeeds".

I though the news-publishing industry would use RSS as a kind of copy-pasta
medium but it doesn't look like things are going this way (at least not on the
public side of things).

RSS (and ATOM because "i want to believe") isn't dead but I am not convinced
it's going to make a come-back on any for-profit social network.

------
jcurbo
This exactly matches my use case for RSS. High volume daily websites - like HN
- I read directly. I went through a phase where I tried to read HN via RSS (in
Google Reader) and for me it wasn't better than just hitting HN directly.

But for the kind of sites Marco mentions (which I read most of, actually) that
update on a semi-daily or weekly basis, RSS readers are perfect because I
don't want to go and visit those pages individually just to see they don't
have any updates. Typically those sites are narrowly-focused
personal/organizational blogs in areas I am interested in.

~~~
jrkelly
Could not agree more, this is the exact use case for the 'power users' of RSS.
And he is right that without RSS I don't know how these low-posting-frequency
sites would keep their readership. If I had to give up one, I'd give up
twitter or hackernews long before that low-frequency RSS feed. Those posts are
gold and for niche subjects (I'm into bio) there is no where else they are
aggregated.

~~~
epsylon
Tech, video games, etc.. journalists have a very different use case for RSS,
which is exactly using it to monitor dozens of other information sources
(including their competitors). I think they match the definition of power
users, perhaps more than you and I, because that's the primary tool for their
job : they will routinely have hundreds of RSS feeds and will skim quickly
through thousands of items a day to look for the information that they haven't
treated yet. RSS is perfect for that matter and it is precisely the opposite
of what marco and you claim is a poor usage of RSS.

------
joebadmo
Personally, I have different labels. I have a high volume label that I nuke
with impunity, then another label with low volume feeds that I treat more like
Marco describes in tfa.

This lets me keep up with all of those low volume feeds, but also skim the
daily news when I have time.

I also prune my feeds pretty aggressively.

This is probably a much fiddlier setup than most people will want, but really
so is any RSS reader.

~~~
TillE
That's how I used to use Reader. One "Important" folder for stuff that I was
very likely to read, and another for skimming.

It's a common complaint about Twitter that once you start following a few
people who produce high volumes of crap, it becomes useless. The usual advice
is to be quick to unfollow, but I've always missed a "must read" feature for
Twitter, to specially mark those few people where you really do want to see
every single tweet.

~~~
runjake
This is what Twitter's Lists functionality is for. I have separate lists of
people for topics I am interested in, such as running, android, infosec, etc.
The downside is that people on your lists don't enjoy the same capabilities as
the people you follow, so they can't DM and they might be insulted that you
show as not following them.

------
charlieok
The feature I want on RSS readers: Volume sliders.

A volume slider per feed, and perhaps also a global one.

If a feed is posting too much stuff, but I still like some of the stuff on it,
I'd prefer not to unsubscribe if I had a better option.

If I notice a feed getting a bit noisy, I'd like to open a view for that feed,
with titles and timestamps. Then I'd just move a slider and watch stuff drop
out, until I've turned it down to a volume I can handle.

Hopefully, the lower-signal items will drop out of view first and the higher-
signal items last. The more data available for making these rankings, the
better. Comment counts or scores from the hosting site should help. So should
links/shares/likes/comments across the major social networks.

~~~
tristan_juricek
Right, the problem is just that "unread counts" aren't _that_ nice of a
feature for RSS feeds, because not all posts are created equal. (Hell, it's
not even that nice of a feature on email, unless you do a lot of filtering.)

I like the volume slider ideal; I that you could leverage social media outlets
as a scoring system. (I'd include HN in that - the more points, the higher the
score.) That could give you a nice way to "bump up" the things past some
"volume" you haven't seen in priority.

I don't like the idea of "just don't subscribe"; why can't the tool figure
this out for me?

Edit: "aren't nice" -> "aren't that nice". I do think counts are useful, just
far, far from perfect. What I find myself dong is finding a feed with unread
items, skimming, then marking all as read. (Well, when I use Reader, sigh.)

~~~
charlieok
I personally don't mind unread counts. That aspect really depends on the way
you use it.

I used to have a ton of unread items sitting in the feed reader; now
everything is either immediately discarded or immediately shunted into Pocket.
(A good phone interface for me might be: swipe left = discard, swipe right =
send to view-later service of choice and discard. Fast!)

Of course, that means I now have a ton of unread stuff sitting in Pocket. So I
think services in that category could benefit from this kind of scoring too. I
can see my Pocket stuff in reverse chronological order. I'd love a really
intelligent, adaptive “sort by magic” for that big bucket.

You suggested using HN as a source. That's absolutely along the lines I'm
thinking. It's like this: every site can be a source of stories, but every
site should also be a potential source of scoring signals for stories --
either its own or elsewhere.

------
gnosis
I've read HN over RSS for years. It's perfect for that.

Firefox isn't very well suited for keeping up with blogs and news sites like
HN because it's so damn bloated and slow, and you can't really save any
articles for later reading without upvoting, opening them in a new tab, or
bookmarking them. Bookmarks in Firefox are a total pain in the ass, so I try
to avoid them as much as possible. I already have more than enough tabs open,
and don't want to waste more keeping some possibly interesting article waiting
for me.

In my RSS reader (Newsbeuter[1]), all I have to do to save an article for
later reading is not delete it. It will remain marked as new and I can read it
later, at my leisure.

If I go for some days (or weeks) without reading HN at all, I can come back
whenever I have time and still have all the articles waiting for me, instead
of using HN's shitty time-limited "more.." prompt to painfully page through
old articles.

Some years back, there were even a couple of "HN Full Feed" RSS feeds that
would show the entire linked article in each RSS item, so I could read it in
my RSS reader instead of having to click through to some crappily designed
website and get pissed off at how long Firefox took to load it.

RSS is really one of the very best ways to read virtually any blog or news
site, whether there are a ton of new items per day (like HN), or whether it's
some little blog that's updated once every few years, or anywhere in between.

[1] - <http://www.newsbeuter.org/index.html>

~~~
pseut
Newsbeuter is awesome for text heavy feeds, but less so for (say) photoblogs.
I'd really like to see more development of different types of specialized rss
readers and get away from the OP's argument that there's a "right way" to use
rss.

------
gtCameron
Ironically, I use IFTTT to read the RSS and push sites like what he is
describing into Instapaper. You lose the by-site organization of it, but if
you don't overdo it you end up with a nice small selection of things to read
every day when you fire up Instapaper.

------
Spellman
I personally started using an RSS Reader to keep track of webcomics.
Especially ones that update infrequently. Now they're all in one handy place
and I never miss a panel.

------
roc
The creator of Instapaper doesn't see the value-add of using an RSS reader to
skim the postings of a high-volume site, for readability/usability reasons?

That's a curious blind-spot.

~~~
itafroma
He didn't say anything to that effect at all. The only things that come close
to that characterization are:

1\. "If a site posts many items each day _and you barely read any of them_ ,
delete that feed." (emphasis mine) If you're skimming all the items in a feed
and deriving value from it, this piece of advice doesn't apply.

2\. "RSS works best when following a large number of infrequently updated
sites." Works best, not _only_ works.

3\. "It’s not enough to interleave their posts into a “river” or “stream”
paradigm [...] because many of them would get buried in the noise of higher-
volume feeds and people’s tweets." It's _not enough_ , not that it's
categorically not valuable.

The whole article dovetails nicely with Instapaper's purpose, which is to
ensure you don't miss reading articles you find important. Relying solely on a
river of news that's filled with high volume sources leads to a high chance of
missing stuff you otherwise want to keep close tabs on. Pretty uncontroversial
stuff.

~~~
roc
> _"You shouldn’t come back to hundreds or thousands of unread articles."_ ...
> _"you shouldn’t subscribe to feeds that would generate that kind of unread
> volume."_ ... _"you’re using it in a way that’s not good for you."_

These sorts of prescriptive statements don't read as "I see the value others
may derive from other use cases." They explicitly read as "I don't see the
value" and "I've looked and I don't think it exists."

Further, using an RSS reader to skim a frequently-updated site, of which I
read only a few articles, _is precisely the point_.

High quantities of postings exacerbates the flaws of their designs. But with
RSS, it's easy to skim pages of headlines. After a long weekend I can deal
with hundreds of unread articles precisely _because_ I'm interested in so
little.

If there were aggregating services that delivered what I was looking for, I'd
certainly _prefer_ that. But I haven't found them.

------
bsimpson
I never got into RSS readers, but I use Hacker News and Reddit for the
purposes Marco is describing. I have Pulse on my phone set up to follow a
handful of RSS feeds (Hacker News, The Verge, Daring Fireball, Ars Technica,
etc.) so I have an easy way to see what's happening if I have a couple minutes
to kill throughout my day.

~~~
ldh
I think you're missing what he says. Hacker News and Reddit are completely
perpendicular use cases to RSS.

From the article: _The true power of the RSS inbox is keeping you informed of
new posts that you probably won’t see linked elsewhere._

I feel like I've been shouting this into the void over the last few days of
RSS-related submissions, but RSS is _not_ best suited as a news-discovery
paradigm. Aggregators like HN or Reddit serve that purpose. RSS's sweet spot
is tracking deeper content on niche sites or topics that don't get swept up in
hype mills, and if you're interested in more than two or three blogs or sites
like that, RSS is essentially _the_ way to track that content. Being able to
share that and discuss with a select group of people was icing on the cake
that Google Reader added.

Without seeming overly defensive about it, I feel like everyone who dismisses
RSS lately with "that's what HN is for" has never used RSS in the way that
many of us find indispensable.

~~~
bsimpson
But if there's an interesting article on marco.org, someone who reads that
will post it to /r/programming, and I'll get to read it without having to find
and follow the author.

~~~
ldh
Ok, so imagine the site in question is a little-known blog. I follow a link on
reddit, enjoy the article, then click around to see what else the author
writes. I find it really interesting and want to follow this author more
closely. Do I then cross my fingers and hope reddit shares my taste in his
other content and also hope I happen to catch it on reddit if that blog's
content comes up again? No, I track the RSS and can peruse updates at my
leisure without missing anything.

I think it's a different model of consumption. HN/Reddit is browsing, "let's
see what the chatter by the watercooler is today". RSS is "I am more than
casually interested in particular content and want to be notified of updates".

------
notaddicted
Something else that Marco didn't dwell on is the diversity of stuff that you
can basically just plug into your rss reader if you want notification. A
website may choose to use it to publish anything they wish. Misc. examples:

1\. Following a user on reddit via rss:

<http://www.reddit.com/user/PresidentObama/.rss>

2\. Following a search term on reddit via rss:

<http://www.reddit.com/search/.rss?q=manbearpig>

3\. Checking a mailinator throwaway email via rss:

<http://www.mailinator.com/rss.jsp?email=webmaster>

4\. Google Alerts (RIP.)

~~~
gurkendoktor
5\. Blog comments, especially for threads that go like this: "I also have this
problem" (2010), "Me too" (2011), "Me too" (2012), "Ah, here's the solution
(2013)

~~~
chronomex
"Please send me the codes? sandeep_31285@yahoo.co.in" (2012 a, b, c, d)

------
curtin
I use to mess with rss and agree with Marco on the purpose of them. Then I
found a better solution, just subscribe to some of the awesome curated
newsletters out there that do all this for you. HN has one -
<http://hackernewsletter.com> and Peter Cooper's tech focused ones
(<https://cooperpress.com/>) keep you in the loop in a particular stack, plus
a lot of others that I've seen.

Now I don't have to check anything these days, except my email, which of
course I check everyday anyhow!

~~~
ruswick
That may be fine for some, but newsletters are inherently limited by the
amount of space they are willing to provide to links, and by their domain,
because most letters are topic-specific. While newsletters can support maybe
20 links per week, RSS is adept at handling hundreds if not thousands.

Moreover, one of the great benefits of RSS is that it is customizable and
one's reading experience pertains specifically and only to them. With
newsletters, one is throwing their reading experience to the mercy of the
newsletter editor. This is not to say that newsletters aren't valuable. Their
spontaneity and conciseness provides a great reading experience. (Although, I
think Twitter is superior at this type of thing anyway.)

But, given the idiosyncrasies of newsletters, I just don't believe that they
are tenable alternatives to RSS. Those who want to read a _lot_ of content
from an eclectic array of specific sources still need something like RSS.

~~~
petercooper
If you want to specifically choose your sources, I think you're right. If
you're happy with a 'best of' on a topic by topic basis, newsletters can/do
work.

 _With newsletters, one is throwing their reading experience to the mercy of
the newsletter editor._

This is part of the appeal for many non-power readers. The majority are not
particularly interested in curating or even controlling their sources and are
happy to outsource it to either trusted editors (see almost the entire print
media or something like Techmeme) or the "cloud" (e.g. Reddit or Hacker News).

------
saraid216
I wonder how much of a challenge it would be to create an RSS client that
provides a direct payment system to content creators. I'm sort of shocked that
I can't remember _hearing_ about something like that; the issue was always
about getting page views and having a donation link or whatever. They never
seemed to consider direct payment of any kind, even though PayPal was
definitely around back then.

Take a slice en route and you have a business model.

...I feel like I should append this to the top comment so that it gets seen,
heh. I'm not interested in doing this. Someone else do it.

------
mcculley
I think advising people to delete feeds misses a possible feature that I wish
was available in the feed readers I've tried: I would like to mark each
feed/URL to tell the feed reader if it is a feed in which I care about seeing
every new item. The "number unread" cue/badge should only count the important
feeds and not ones where I just want to see the latest content if I have free
time.

------
webwanderings
The rss2email script apparently works like a charm but it isn't suitable for
large number of feed subscription. This is where Google Reader came in handy
because I didn't have to care how long it takes to grab however many feeds I
have under my account. Ultimately, all RSS feed readers (old and new) are
going to be suffering from this issue of retrieving large number of feeds.

------
pauljonas
Everybody thinks everyone uses or should use the internet the same way they
do.

I couldn't disagree with this post more. I subscribe to a lot of sites that
accumulate thousands of _unread_ items. In fact, I could care less about
read/unread toggle. My RSS is indeed a river, but it's a river that sometimes
I plunge wholeheartedly into and devour large chunks, other times I merely
skim for items of interest. Then there are spots in which most is completely
ignored. But it's still there and given the magic of _SEARCH_ , I can pull up
all the articles for a topic of interest, confining my query to _just_ those
sites I have pre-declared an interest in.

So I like the mailbox metaphor for being able to quickly traverse items and
skim item summaries, so the real payoff for me is not just the increased
efficiency in reviewing so much more than could be done by visiting each site
(or even in a magazine/mosaic format) but also a repository ready to serve up
information for any topic that I wish to browse upon in a future moment.

------
Too
Just disable read status in your rss-client and the problem is solved. For low
frequency sites that you care about you most likely remember their latest
headlines anyway. For high frequency sites just watch the headlines roll by,
if you happen to be interested in one then click it, otherwise just ignore.

------
Mithaldu
So he advocates never subscribing to high frequency feeds because most clients
show the contents of all feeds in one big list.

I find that is the wrong way to adress the problem. A more useful solution
seems to be a different way to structure an rss reader. Opera for example
incorporates one that works alongside its email client. It fixes the issue by
treating individual feeds as email folders which can be structured inside more
folders and highlighting folders with unread contents as well as displaying
their content counts.

This screenshow should demonstrate usefully how easy this makes it to notice
new updates on low-frequency feeds while still allowing skimming of high-
frequency ones without one interrupting the other:

<https://dl.dropbox.com/u/10190786/feeds.png>

------
erikpukinskis
The "tyranny of the loudest" is a problem I wish more reader software
addressed. If someone tweets 100 times a day, just show me the one that was
retweeted 10 times. If someone tweets once a month I want to see every one.

Maybe give the option to accordion out a "100 tweets hidden" link.

------
edavis
Both high and low volume feeds have their use. You just have to know how to
manage them.

I use River2 for my high volume feeds while I stick my rarely updated and
"must read" feeds into NetNewsWire. Has been working pretty well for me so
far.

When using NetNewsWire, I'm in "slow down mode" where just about every item
(in theory) is important to me. But when I'm using River2, I'm in "scan and
click mode" and just trying to see what the latest news is.

Using separate applications like this helps keep me "in the zone."

If I were to put high volume feeds in NetNewsWire the temptation to read all
the posted items would be too great. In River2, items older than three hours
just drop off the page. There's no "unread count" or "read older items" button
to tempt you.

------
jasonjayr
This is not a new problem -- newsgroups had this problem back in the day. I
think the solution now is the same as it was back then -- better
scoring/sorting/killfile tools that the end user can control.

The death of newsgroups, was also the death of an structured, parseable
discussion forum, where the end user had the final say on how they'd see the
discussion. Nowadays, we need moderators and the forum software on the server
to re-implement these things that newsreaders had worked out.

I've setup my own ttrss instance, and it has some basic scoring abilities.
Unfortunatly not all rss feeds provide the text of the article (or even the
lede) in the feed directly, so the scoring ends up crippled.

------
josephkern
Marco, you might also think of RSS readers like an archived narrow band search
for high volume traffic. For example: I am a security researcher, so I
susbscribe (via RSS) to everything security related that I can find: mailing
lists, bleeding edge snort ruls, CVE, blogs, SANS, etc, etc.

Now when I want to see the current state of affairs in Ineternet Explorer
security issues, I can simply search for "Internet Explorer" in my RSS reader.
I am then presented with the traffic on the latest issues, their possible
resolutions, and even possibly the person who discovered the issue.

The beauty of RSS is that it lets me decide what it will be, and when I want
it to be that way.

------
Spittie
I partially agree - I do use RSS to check for sites that publish daily updates
(yes, even Hacker News). But even with those, you don't need to overload
yourself. Right now I get about ~100 news every day, which is perfectly fine
with me. I went away last week, and I was greeted by ~500 news. I was able to
skim through those in maybe one hour, so it was fine.

Everytime I feel that my feed reader is overloaded, I write down every site
that I follow, and decide about which sites I really care, and which sites i
can easily unsubscribe without problems. I also try to remove sites that post
the same thing (this happen a lot with news sites).

------
gz5
Like many of the points but not following the conclusions because Google
Reader doesn't aid long tail discovery...was just best place to subscribe
post-discovery.

If the need for RSS reader remains, then others will simply fill the GR niche?

------
caycep
Also, it occurs to me, I use Instapaper to deal with this issue in
RSS...hmm...

------
laurent123456
> If a site posts many items each day and you barely read any of them, delete
> that feed. If you find yourself hitting “Mark all as read” more than a
> couple of times for any feed, delete that feed. You won’t miss anything
> important.

Actually, this could be an interesting feature of an RSS client. If the user
keeps marking items of a feed as read, either put the feed in silent mode (no
longer shows up in inbox) or lower the relevance of its items so that they go
down the list (if the items are sorted by relevance).

------
wcgortel
This is a very interesting use case, particularly in investment analysis, my
area of specialty.

The problem of obscure, rarely updated blogs with fantastic information (but
no reader base) is plainly evident here. I can think of a blogger who is a
fixture on "who's who" lists, but publishes a blog so ill-trafficked you can
hear the crickets chirping. There are hundreds of these guys.

I'm at work on a finance-specific version of this. Hopefully we can announce
something before the readerpocalypse.

------
prathibhanu
We have been working on developing RSS reader since last 8 months. We felt
google reader is not for everyone and we wanted our rss reader to be used by
anyone... who may not understand RSS. While implementing the RSS reader, we
have learnt a lot and one of them being the power of RSS. I hope what we are
building helps a lot of people. Check out <http://multiplx.com>

------
Schwolop
Surely there's a sorting metric that could solve this? Something like score =
k_1/age_of_post * k_2/frequency_of_posts with appropriate k-weights.

Personally, my Google Reader has a folder for 'rarely updated', which I
usually check first. Then I have the 'All Items' sorted by magic and skim the
first few pages or so for things that strike me as interesting. Then I mark
all as read.

------
stevewilhelm
I think RSS is being replaced by Twitter. Many of the RSS feeds I currently
consume already cross post to a dedicated Twitter account. If publishers
aren't doing this, they should start before Google Reader is shuttered.

As a consumer, set up a Twitter account dedicated to reading "long tail" low
volume twitter feeds or use a fancy Twitter client like Tweetbot that manages
lists.

~~~
taligent
With RSS I often get the entire content or at minimum a decent sized summary
with lots of photos.

Twitter has none of that.

------
monsur
This is precisely why I like Fever as an RSS reader. Fever lets you separate
feeds into low-volume kindling and high-volume sparks. Kindling are the feeds
you want to keep up with regularly, while items that are mentioned across
Sparks bubble up to the top (Its like having your own personal Hacker News).

~~~
icebraining
Well, I'd say any reader with some kind of categorization support (tags,
folders, etc) lets you do that.

I have folders in Tiny Tiny RSS that never accumulate more than a couple of
unread items, and I have a folder with 22000 unread items, it works just fine.

------
davebindy
I tend to add feeds only when the site doesn't generate either a significant
number of comments or comments that are actually worth reading. Sites like HN
I'm often as (or more) interested in the comments as in the actual article, so
I'll just visit the site for that reason instead of using RSS.

------
Sami_Lehtinen
You don't need RSS for monitoring sites for infrequent updates.
<http://www.changedetection.com/> Free and well working solution. I use that
to monitor all low traffic sites, which do not provide RSS.

------
caycep
sorta wish this was the start of the "negative killfile" in the William Gibson
Idoru trilogy. Because, you know, 3D cyberspace Walled City and stuff.

------
mh-
I was very confused to see that I posted this article.

~~~
dasil003
Hacking might be difficult if you confuse dashes with underscores.

------
eridius
mathOne, all your comments seem to be [dead].

------
lakofsth
For the same reason that I have 14000 messages in my inbox (half unread), this
is bunk. Who cares if you can't read everything? OCD much.

