
RSS Is Better Than Twitter - k1m
https://gizmodo.com/rss-is-better-than-twitter-1833624929
======
knight17
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?

~~~
burtonator
I'm considering integrating RSS with Polar:

[https://getpolarized.io/](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.

~~~
gloflo
I am starting to get annoyed seeing you promoting it in _every_ thread of a
vaguely relatable topic. Could you please tone it down a bit? :)

------
jayalpha
I love RSS feeds.

You can convert Twitter to RSS: [http://twitrss.me](http://twitrss.me)

Websites that don't have RSS: [https://feedity.com/](https://feedity.com/)

Email to RSS: [https://zapier.com](https://zapier.com)

Hackernews
RSS:[http://hnrss.org/newest?points=300](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...](https://www.indeed.ca/jobs?q=millwright&l=Toronto,+ON&sort=date)

~~~
toomuchtodo
Are you aware of an open source/non-commercial email to RSS solution?

~~~
jayalpha
No. But Zapier is free for limited applications.

But yes, wish TinyTinyRSS would offer all this functionality. Other RSS
readers might be better, but I always return to TinyTinyRSS.

~~~
toomuchtodo
An open, distributed web demands open source tooling. I can appreciate
benevolent corporations (Zapier goes above and beyond for their users, and is
generous with their free plan), but nothing lasts forever; open source code
once public can always be maintained and built upon further.

------
imartin2k
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.

~~~
h1d
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.

~~~
sbmassey
A lot of journalist types seem to have switched to Twitter in the aftermath of
Google Reader. But yeah, RSS never died in the real world.

------
mooreds
I love RSS, and have for years. My first blog post ever was about RSS:
[http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/4](http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/4)
. I recently wrote that new developers should use RSS:
[https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2019/03/25/use-an-rss-
rea...](https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2019/03/25/use-an-rss-reader/)

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](https://twitter.com/mikekarnj/status/1106582308235235330)
and this:
[https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/1106812630985928704](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.

~~~
Digory
Has anyone tried to build conversation into RSS? An RSS item that is related
or responsive to another RSS item?

(Or is that what Mastodon is trying to do?)

~~~
ttepasse
The classic relation is a link. Atom has the Atom Threading Extensions, to
document conversation in feeds.

One problem of course is notifying the thread starter of new decentralized
comments. There were Trackback, Pingback, Webmentions for web pages. For feeds
there was the Salmon protocol [2], enabling notification of new comments to
swim upstream. According to Google's documentation Salmon would have been an
API of Google Buzz. But that started with a privacy scandal and shortly
thereafter Google decided they needed their own closed social network. Salmon
was later used in OStatus 1, I think.

There was a lot of activity in the 2000s transforming the RSS/Atom ecosystem
into something of a decentralized social network. Extensions like Activity
Stream for richer data, AtomPub, Salmon, OpenID, Webfinger, PubSubHubbub (now
WebSub) to turbocharge feeds with a Publish/Subscribe thingy and a lot more,
that I'm now forgetting. The rule of thumb is that the problems stay the same,
but the syntax and the name changes.

And yes, if you squint the right way stuff like ActivityPub (Mastodon) and the
Indiewebcamp Microformats are practically feeds.

[1] [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4685](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4685)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_(protocol)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_\(protocol\))

~~~
vshabanov
Thank you for information. It seems that Salmon is used in Diaspora so it
somehow could work.

> But that started with a privacy scandal

What was the privacy scandal?

> The rule of thumb is that the problems stay the same, but the syntax and the
> name changes.

What problems are? I suspect that there should be problems with spam as
anybody could add their comments (although protocols seems to contain some
countermeasures) and maybe some kind of DoS of anybody "posting" too many
comments. But what other problems are?

------
khendron
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."

~~~
tamal
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.

~~~
cannonedhamster
As a counterpoint you're unlikely to be doxxed, lose your job, or any of the
other social "features" using RSS. While one could simply say nothing and hope
to avoid this, it's still up to the Twitter algorithms to display relevant
content, which could change at any moment. Effectively it's about control,
with Twitter you're hoping for benevolence as you're the product, with RSS
you're the customer.

~~~
ihuman
> it's still up to the Twitter algorithms to display relevant content

What do you mean? I just see a chronological list of tweets, not a randomly-
ordered list like facebook

~~~
rrix2
I find myself having to swap off Twitter's algorithmic feed once or twice a
day on mobile.

~~~
ihuman
Huh, I didn't know there even was an algorithmic feed. I haven't used the
official Facebook app since it stopped being Tweetie, so I wasn't following
the changes.

------
hprotagonist
Considering how i read HN and thus how i’m reading this — and that i don’t
have a twitter account — i guess i have to agree!

RSS is very, very nice. Especially for keeping track of all the journals I
have to keep an eye on.

~~~
m-p-3
And it's super easy to use these feeds to automate stuff. Half of my IFTTT are
about monitoring RSS feeds and taking an action upon them.

The other halfs are webhooks.

~~~
Bolderman
Interesting. Do you mind to explain this a bit more?

~~~
m-p-3
For example I have a Kobo eReader (Glo HD) and I like to read on it and
unfortunately there is no builtin RSS reader app available for it but it does
support Pocket natively. My workaround is to either monitor some RSS feeds
with specific keywords in IFTTT, and send the URL article to my Pocket
account, which in turns get synced to my Kobo every night.

I also want to get notified right away for articles that use a specific
keyword, so I have other applets that will send an IFTTT rich notification to
my phone with the link to the article.

Or you know, I have some other RSS feed I use with a torrent client to
automatically fetch "stuff", and once the download is completed, I configured
the torrent client to send an HTTP POST request with the torrent title to
IFTTT, which in turn send me a push notification to let me know a download was
completed.

------
abhinai
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._

~~~
Glench
That feels kind of like a historical circumstance. I could easily imagine
something based on RSS where people just express small blurbs like on Twitter.
Heck, I've even thought about abandoning Twitter's UIs and creating RSS feeds
for all the people I follow. At least then I'd be able to get chronological
ordering and read/unread markers on tweets that way

~~~
kazinator
An RSS feed is an XML file that lives under some URL. The RSS reader (or
aggregator) _polls_ that URL periodically and picks up new items that have
appeared.

It's like a web page, itemized into a very regular syntax.

If you want to "tweet" using RSS, you need a URL somewhere where you can
upload updates to XML content; then give people that URL.

Either you have to join some website where content (like blogs) you create are
exported as RSS feeds, or else run your own domain.

~~~
Glench
What part of my comment made it seem like I need to be educated about what RSS
is? I think it would have felt nicer for you to inquire rather than just tell
me what RSS is.

I’m saying that it’s easily possible to imagine a world where the uses of RSS
vary from what they’re used for today — different from the parent commentor.

~~~
kazinator
Your comment didn't educate HN readers sufficiently; I thought it could use a
technical backgrounder which could help others imagine the use cases and
trade-offs. (I don't understand the Twitter architecture enough to add that
for comparison, but perhaps many readers are more familiar with Twitter than
RSS due to its popularity.)

~~~
Glench
Okay, that makes more sense. Maybe if you had included some of that context it
would have been helpful in properly interpreting your comment.

------
SkyPuncher
Lately, I've been getting back into RSS to stay up to date with industry news.
I've noticed a lot of industry blogs still support RSS.

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

~~~
Arkanosis
I usually find RSS feeds by looking at the page source code:

    
    
      - ctrl+u
      - ctrl+f rss
      - ctrl+f atom (only if “rss” was not found at step 2).
    

I can't remember of any site providing RSS on which this hasn't worked.
Actually, even for sites that advertise their RSS feed, this approach is the
fastest for me (because of the lack of consistency of such advertisements).

~~~
dmit
Same, except I favor the Atom protocol because from previous research
(performed a long time ago, to be fair) it was strictly an improvement over
RSS in every regard.

There is a highly-rated extension to automate this, but I've grown to distrust
extensions that require "Access your data for all websites", and scouring the
page source for the relevant <link> tag is not particularly cumbersome.

------
mike-cardwell
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:

[https://www.grepular.com/Twitter_to_RSS_with_Google_Cloud_Fu...](https://www.grepular.com/Twitter_to_RSS_with_Google_Cloud_Function)

~~~
DJHenk
There is also [https://www.twitrss.me/](https://www.twitrss.me/)

~~~
superkuh
I use twitrss.me's perl code to do my own thing locally and I've found that
twitter throttles me scraping from my home IP _very_ heavily. I can scrape my
twitter users/searches about 3 times per day if I space them out correctly.
Any more and the pages just stop returning anything at all.

------
agnelvishal
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

~~~
zaphar
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.

~~~
moogly
I don't buy it, because then they would've killed Google+ way earlier.

~~~
Andrex
Multiple factors go into the decision to kill a product; Google+ had a much
larger investment and profile, it would make sense Google would be more
skittish about killing it than Reader.

------
guybedo
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?

I wrote something about the signal/noise ratio in RSS recently:
[https://medium.com/@julien.aktu/rss-less-noise-more-
informat...](https://medium.com/@julien.aktu/rss-less-noise-more-
information-983ea20cb05e)

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](https://aktu.io/about)

------
blunte
"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!)

~~~
BuckRogers
_> 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!)_

Books.

That's what I've retreated to as the internet has been ruined. It's all about
low barrier to entry that ruins anything with the shiftless/idle masses
becoming involved. No one wants to pickup a book and read, they want to offer
smart ass one-liners or harass people on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.
That's most people's entire life, same behavior in the workplace, then they
die. That's why I'm a developer, the barrier to entry is high enough that I
enjoy and appreciate most people that I work with. Same concept as with media.

Books are proof-read, edited and vetted for reasonably accurate sources in
most cases. In general, publishing them is hard enough that as a consumer I
can rely on them being one of the better mediums.

------
mastrsushi
I did use RSS through Google Reader briefly back in 2009. Then I found out
about Twitter, and immediately thought of it as a modern response. Unifying
the web's news feeds into one technology was such an obvious solution, its
emergence was unavoidable, no matter what way it came. Web platforms always
had some form of portal, blog publishing service, general discussion board, or
better yet a single tap service where everything anyone wants to know, or at
least thinks they do is encapsulated.

What these older services failed to capture that made Twitter and other
"social" media sites so popular is the "social" aspect. The automated
synchronized posting structure that RSS provides may be more efficient than
user-driven Twitter. But with Twitters' intuition, popularity, and ability to
communicate within that vast user space is enough to outweigh any of RSS's
technological advancements. RSS always seemed like a technology for techies,
Twitter brought the feed to laymen.

~~~
Yhippa
Peak Internet for me was using Google Reader, sharing articles, and having
discussions about them with my Google Buzz friends.

------
Angostura
Remember when Twitter offered RSS feeds? It made the service actually useful.

~~~
alexmingoia
There’s a number of bridges from Twitter to RSS. I read Twitter in Feeder. See
[https://feeder.co/knowledge-base/rss-feed-
creation/twitter-r...](https://feeder.co/knowledge-base/rss-feed-
creation/twitter-rss-feeds/)

~~~
superkuh
But nothing you can do yourself without getting throttled by twitter.

~~~
mike-cardwell
If you get your own free developer API key, you're allowed to call the
"statuses/user_timeline" 1500 times per day. So you can follow 1500 users
before getting throttled, if you only want an update a max of once per day. Or
62 users if you need hourly updates. etc.

------
kris-s
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](https://jsonfeed.org) \- which would be a big step
towards making a decentralized system more of a reality.

~~~
oliwarner
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.

JSON doesn't fix XML.

~~~
spc476
Of the three formats I support, RSS, Atom, and JSON, the RSS feed is the
smallest.

    
    
        RSS: 33,228
        Atom: 43,433
        JSON: 36,137

~~~
oliwarner
I'll be honest —and it'll make me sound like an arrogant dbag— but that
doesn't pass my sniff test. "jsonfeed" is lighter than equivalent RSS for
several small reasons.

Can I see?

(To be clear to anybody reading this out of context: I'm not claiming that
JSON is best —far from it— just that I would expect it to be a few bytes
lighter in transit.)

~~~
spc476
Sure.

    
    
        http://boston.conman.org/index.atom
        http://boston.conman.org/index.json
        http://boston.conman.org/bostondiaries.rss
    

Each one contains the full text of the past 15 entries.

~~~
oliwarner
Thank you for sharing that. It took me a little while before I noticed it, but
your JSON files have more _data_.

Each item has a id, date_published and tags field which do not feature in the
RSS. Together these account for around 250chars per item or 3750chars per 15
item feed. Cut out those fields and the JSON would be 850chars shorter.

Also, you're preserving tab and newline characters _around_ HTML. This affects
JSON more because a newline is valid between RSS tags. In JSON a newline
becomes two characters "\n", as a tab becomes "\t". Going "spaceless" on
output would save you 1372chars from your JSON feed (and half as much from
RSS/ATOM).

I will confess, my sniff test didn't account for using quite as many HTML
attributes as you do :) Escaping double-quotes costs you 334 in JSON.

The overall difference is much slighter than I had expected.

------
mikeash
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.

------
kazinator
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.

------
phasnox
> On the surface, Twitter’s main value proposition is that it delivers up-to-
> the-second news.

Not really.

Most of the people I know , including me, go there for just one reason: To
know the public opinion.

~~~
rwz
Twitter is actually very bad at this. It's designed to amplify the most
fringe, outrageous, and reaction-provoking hot takes, and trending stuff. A
lot of sensible people either don't comment on twitter, or their voices get
drowned in a sea of outrage and more engageable reactions.

------
pradn
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.

------
whoopdedo
Can you track trending topics with RSS?

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
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.

------
russellbeattie
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.

1\. [https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/drinking-from-the-
fireho...](https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/drinking-from-the-firehose)

2\. [https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/but-how-do-you-keep-
trac...](https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/but-how-do-you-keep-track-of-
everything)

~~~
andersonnnunes
I have 50K regexs on a black-list to filter feeds on my reader. AI would help
with some, but this brute force method goes a long way too.

~~~
russellbeattie
That's... amazing! I admire your dedication (addiction?). :-)

------
mchmarny
Every couple of months I search for a better news reader… cycle through
Flipper, Feedly, NewsBlur, & 4-8 others… once more acknowledge how good Google
Reader really was, and go back to scrolling through Twitter/Reddit

I’d probably pay large amount of money now for a news reader w/ these 4
features * Extract stories from my feed/lists on Twitter & Reddit and
aggregate comments on these from people I follow * Learn from my ‘more/less
like this’ on individual stories * Allow me to tag sources and create auto-
tagging filters * Clean/intuitive Web UI & mobile client

~~~
casualmr
Have you tried [https://bazqux.com](https://bazqux.com) ? It was built right
after Google shut down Reader and very much resembles and improved upon it in
multiple ways. Super fast too.

------
oliwarner
They're very different.

RSS only let you listen. And it only works if you already know who you want to
listen to.

Twitter et al expose you to other content you're not already "following" by
letting the people you do follow quickly push things in your eyeline.

But RSS is just a format for sharing data. There's no built-in client for
having a conversation, for tracking conversations. You ultimately still need a
point of centralisation (like HN) to talkk shit about the stuff you're
reading.

All in, article is silly nonsense. Apples are way better than oranges.

~~~
gnomewascool
> Twitter et al expose you to other content you're not already "following" by
> letting the people you do follow quickly push things in your eyeline.

How is that different from the people whom you do "follow" with RSS
recommending other feeds or individual articles, or quoting these articles,
with their own comments?

(Mostly agreed about the point regarding third-party pushed conversations.)

~~~
oliwarner
> How is that different

We *could( each publish feeds of what we liked, or re-feed them with
annotations. And we could follow other individuals (ie friends, acquaintances)
and they us, and we could control access to levels of feed with
authentication. We could have feeds of our friends (and their URLs). As well
as feeds of our own throwaway commentary on life. Yeah, you could quite easily
build something like Facebook and Twitter (without comments) with RSS.

The "how is that different" is that we don't. There's both a technical
networking obstacle as well as an interface. You and I likely know how to host
this stuff but our grandmas don't. There's also nothing —there could be— to
tie this together in an interface.

Twitter et al do this crap for us, for "free".

~~~
gnomewascool
> Yeah, you could quite easily build something like Facebook and Twitter
> (without comments) with RSS.

People already have!

I'm going to use the example of Wordpress, as I know for sure that it does
offer RSS out-of-the-box, but there are alternatives.

If your grandma, say, has a wordpress blog, then RSS comes for free. If she
knows what a hyperlink is (even if she doesn't know what it's called) then she
can paste links to individual articles or blogs or news-sites. The reader can
read whatever is recommended in their web browser and if it was (part of) an
RSS feed, they can subscribe. In principle, you could even have an RSS feed
reader that checks all links for whether they are associated with RSS feeds,
to avoid the "web browser" step.

I don't think that a non-self-hosted wordpress blog is significantly more
difficult to use than Twitter. There _will_ probably be people who can use the
latter, but not the former; however, I think that it'll be a tiny minority.

With Wordpress you could even have an RSS feed of comments and pingbacks,
partially (but not globally) solving the third-party comments problem.

------
polote
RSS is just a way to list the last articles of a website in a generic way.

It is very far from what Twitter offers, on Twitter you can exchange with
people, reply and discuss content (yeah this is not the best way to do it, but
you can do it), you can alert people or organization (how many time, thanks to
RSS we alerted a company about a bad practice or contacted their customer
support ?)

Maybe Twitter is not the best at what it does, and maybe we need something
that allow to us to exchange but RSS doesn't provide that.

PS: I'm not saying RSS is bad

~~~
kuzehanka
Don't forget the main thing twitter offers: spamming your notification feed
with impossible-to-disable garbage in order to prop up whatever the hell
engagement metrics they decided on.

I have basically stopped using it ever since they started doing that.

------
atomi
Surprised No one has mentioned Miniflux
[https://github.com/miniflux/miniflux](https://github.com/miniflux/miniflux)

------
addicted
But RSS doesn’t replace Twitter.

As much as the Twitterati May argue they need to be on Twitter to be informed,
the reality is that the need Twitter fills is the need to broadcast your own
views all over the world.

A blog post, which requires a lot more effort, since it’s expected to be a
little more substantial, may get 0 views, while a silly comment in response to
a controversial topic on Twitter could easily get a few hundred likes, which
makes people feel important.

And RSS does not replace that aspect of Twitter.

~~~
mark_l_watson
Yup, I agree with you for some twitter accounts. I find myself often pruning
who I follow on Twitter so much so that I then find I am mostly getting tech
announcements of papers and conferences, release announcements, etc.

Periodically, I start following more people, then the pruning cycle repeats.

I feel sometimes that I spend too much time on twitter and HN, and so I go on
cycles for time spent per week there also. Really good to use a monitoring
tool to let you know cumulatively how much time you spend a week on different
media.

------
zarriak
Part of the problem that I don't think people talk about needing twitter for
work is how they don't separate it as publishing platform and a news platform.
I think it is much better to use a kindle that you update before you go to
work than using twitter as both.

It really helps to limit it to a finite amount of content for you to consume
as well as making it so you don't have the almost non-existent barrier of
instantly being able to react to the news.

~~~
mark_l_watson
Good idea. You can also use something like Instapaper to mark articles to read
but set aside a few times a week to actually carefully read these ‘curated’
articles. For me a big benefit for doing this that when I do sit down to read
what I have ‘curated’, I discard half as being not something I need to spend
time reading. Instead on Instapaper, just bookmarking articles, then deleing
the bookmarks after reading works well.

------
lkrubner
If anyone is interested in the soap opera that shaped the early days of RSS,
read "RSS has been damaged by infighting among those who advocate for it".
This is from 2006, and captures the chaos of the times:

[http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-
damaged-...](http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-by-
in-fighting-among-those-who-advocate-for-it)

------
godzillabrennus
I miss using Newsfire before it stopped getting updates.

[http://newsfirerss.com/](http://newsfirerss.com/)

~~~
O_H_E
Well...if it is working for you, you can keep using it

------
djhworld
I personally quite like twitter, although I tend to lurk rather than actively
participate (don't feel I have much to say I guess)

In some ways my twitter feed is almost like RSS, and the people I follow tend
to be interesting people who post interesting content or links to other
content they've found.

~~~
j7k6
That's similar to how I use Twitter.

Private Account, no followers, only selected accounts I follow to keep my feed
clean of clickbait, useless discussions and the usual twitter outrage. It's a
great tool, but I think I'm not using it as it's supposed to be ;) I'm just
not interested in participating in useless discussions with trolls and people
who try to sell me their product.

------
triplee
Once Google Reader died, I found The Old Reader (theoldreader.com) and just
ran with that.

I never stopped using RSS, and trying to get syndication from Twitter would
cause my head (and my Twitter feed for things I actually care about) to
explode.

I'm sad that we still have to remind people of these things.

------
captn3m0
If you are interested in RSS, I did a twitter-thread [3] recently on
interesting projects in the space. Reproducing here: If you are interested in
helping revive #RSS, a thread on some good FOSS projects around RSS:

1\. RSS-Bridge[0] - RSS Feeds for websites that don't give you one. Supports
instagram/facebook/Google Search and many more (150+) websites. Very easy to
contribute, and there are open requests for lots of providers. (I added a
Amazon Price Tracker Bridge in <150 loc). Yes, I get a RSS notification when
there is a price change on something I follow[1].

2\. MiniFlux - Golang+Postgres based self-hosted RSS feed reader.
Minimal/responsive design with keyboard shortcuts
[https://miniflux.app](https://miniflux.app)

3\. 3. tt-rss - A highly configurable PHP based RSS feed reader. Supports
plugins and has tons of options. UI is similar to Google Reader. [https://tt-
rss.org](https://tt-rss.org)

4\. Winds - A Beautiful Open Source RSS & Podcast App powered by
@getstream_io. I haven't tried self-hosting it yet, but it looks really great.
Also, under very active development.
[https://github.com/GetStream/Winds](https://github.com/GetStream/Winds)

5\. FreshRSS - Lightweight PHP/SQlite self-hosted feed reader. Looks great as
well. [https://freshrss.org](https://freshrss.org)

6\. Kill the Newsletter - Subscribe to a newsletter with a one-time generated
email address, it generates a RSS feed for you. Your inbox stays clean.
[https://www.kill-the-newsletter.com](https://www.kill-the-newsletter.com)

7\. OPML Generator - Generates OPML Files using subscriptions on other sites.
Supports GitHub stars (generates a file you can import to follow releases from
all your starred repos on GitHub)
[https://opml.bb8.fun/](https://opml.bb8.fun/) (Personal project, so count
this as a shameless self plug)

8\. RSS never really died, so revival is a misnomer in that sense. All major
news publications still support RSS. The entire Podcast ecosytem works on RSS.
You should also look at WebSub and ActivityPub (both W3C recommendations) if
you're interested in this.

9\. And finally a cool new idea - build a Telegram Channel to RSS Feed
generator. Will open up so much hidden content to the open web.

10\. Bonus: [https://www.youneedfeeds.com/](https://www.youneedfeeds.com/)
Info site that you should share with your friends to help them get started
with RSS.

[0]: [https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge](https://github.com/RSS-
Bridge/rss-bridge)

[1]: [https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-
bridge/pull/741](https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/pull/741)

[3]:
[https://twitter.com/captn3m0/status/1018850458675408902](https://twitter.com/captn3m0/status/1018850458675408902)

~~~
jhund
I'd like to mention [https://contentgems.com](https://contentgems.com) \- a
free web service that follows any RSS feed you want. It then gives you
powerful filters to include/exclude content you're not interested. You can
also connect your twitter home timeline to extract all articles linked to from
a tweet. And finally, there are workflows that you can use to re-mix RSS feeds
and produce new ones. Paid plans give you more resources, however the free
plan is super valuable for individual users. Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-
founders.

------
packet_nerd
I've tried to use RSS before, but the big hangup for me is most sites don't
put the full article in the feed, just a title and summary. To me having to go
back and forth just kills the whole thing.

~~~
kgwxd
How many times a day do you visually rescan over the same stuff? The minimal
time spent going back and forth (alt+tab) is nothing compared to the time
saved never having to reconsider the same headline more than once.

~~~
O_H_E
I don't get your point. If two sources post an article about the same event, I
am going to get the "similar" title twice.

~~~
kgwxd
If they go to the same url, any decent reader will recognize it as already
marked read. But that's not what I meant. Most news sites have much of the
same stuff on the front page for hours, sometimes days. How many times do you
skim over that looking for new stuff?

~~~
O_H_E
Oh. That is actually quite annoying. Have been wanting to get my rss setup of
quite sometime, but couldn't get the motivation.

------
OrgNet
RSS is great and I use RSS to read some parts of Twitter but you can't really
compare the two (at least not in its current form) but it could be extended to
allow feedback, etc...

------
NicoJuicy
I load in RSS feeds on my HN alternative ( handlr.sapico.me ) , one company is
using it as a knowledge feed ( accounting niche). So I definitely agree with
the title of this topic.

------
Imagenuity
WordPress now powers 30% of websites. Get an RSS feed from a WordPress site by
adding /feed/ to the URL. You can also get RSS feeds from WordPress categories
and tags.

------
notadoc
Twitter is basically Outrage as a Service, it is not a good information
platform.

I still miss Google Reader, I think it was a serious mistake to kill it off,
and doing so largely killed RSS too.

------
Mauricio_
I'll take this chance to recommend Blogtrottr as a perfect alternative to
Google Reader, if used along with Gmail Reader.

------
hellllllllooo
They're different things with different purposes. Both are useful. This is
clickbate.

------
HenryBemis
Gizmodo:

1 page of blocked items on my NoScript 23 blocked items on my Adblock Plus

And now I can read the article..

------
lazyjones
RSS is like articles without comment sections, completely pointless nowadays.
If you can't read corrections, conflicting opinions for something, you might
just as well go watch TV. The whole point of Twitter is that it's commentary,
not a feed of published articles.

~~~
dragontamer
90% of internet comments are low effort garbage that simply isn't worth
anyone's time. The other 10% of high quality, high effort posts take more than
280 words, and need 5 to 20 twitter posts to get a full idea of their
concepts.

RSS is a different network of users, so it really can't be compared to
Twitter. But those mega tweet 10 posts in a row threads would be far better
served by a classic blog and RSS feed... Rather than 280 word chunks that have
to be tracked and edited separately.

Then comes the blogs out there which pretty much use Twitter as a glorified
RSS feed. They just post announcements whenever they post a blog post. This is
necessary because of the network effect, but I would argue that RSS is a
superior technology for this use case.

~~~
lazyjones
> _90% of internet comments are low effort garbage that simply isn 't worth
> anyone's time._

In line with blog articles and TV. At least on Twitter, it's easy to block
someone forever.

> _The other 10% of high quality, high effort posts take more than 280 words_

That's simply not true. You can often deliver important information in 140
characters.

> _But those mega tweet 10 posts in a row threads would be far better served
> by a classic blog and RSS feed... Rather than 280 word chunks that have to
> be tracked and edited separately._

That's not a huge problem compared to the issue of content quality and it's
even less important when you accept that your previous statement is simply not
true.

------
nathants
rss subscribing to the commits of github repos is a great way to keep up with
projects. i’ve been using reederapp ios without an external sync service for a
year now, its great.

------
allenleein
Would like to see `RSS + customizable AI` as a protocol.

------
noelsusman
RSS is fine and good, but it's not comparable to Twitter. Maybe if all you do
on Twitter is follow newspapers then it's comparable, but that would be a
pretty dumb way to use Twitter.

------
Tunyalit
I'm the one who still likes RSS.

------
WhatTheHomePod
They should make commenting and karma like this and Reddit a standard in RSS.
Let people comment on RSS.

------
binoyxj
For once, I thought this was something related to the political scene in
India. Now that it's election season and the right-wing (BJP/RSS) actually
protested against Twitter on roads alleging them to be left aligned or
supporting the opposition.

------
TheTruth1234
RSS actually meant, mostly, that you had to have something worthy of RSS'ing
... a blog, an article, something.

Twitter? any old Joe can just post some bullsh!t that marinated in their minds
for -0.5 seconds and that just gets added to Twitter and potentially my
timeline.

Yes, RSS is far better than Twitter for some uses. Uses that are actually of
value.

~~~
j7k6
> RSS actually meant, mostly, that you had to have something worthy of RSS'ing
> ... a blog, an article, something.

Exactly this! I really miss the time of the internet before social media, when
it was more about quality content then clickbait articles. I was a heavy user
of Google Reader until it got shut down, but couldn't find any worthy
alternative, so I used Twitter as a news feed reader from then on. It's ok,
but it's hard to ignore the noise sometimes.

------
adamnemecek
Add responses and maybe.

~~~
hprotagonist
You mean “add rss to your own blog and set a link back on your blog roll”?

Internet 1.5 was pretty nice, in hindsight.

~~~
alexmingoia
Yup. To add to that, posting a reply to your own blog and setting rel=“in-
reply-to” and notifying the author with Webmention provides standard
decentralized comments/notifications. See aaronparecki.com and the indieweb
community for examples.

