
RSS is undead - jpamata
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/07/rss-is-undead/
======
tompccs
I'm a PhD student, and one of the things you quickly become aware of is the
fire-hose of new science that is published daily. The discovery/prioritisation
problem is being "solved" by publishers recommending other articles (published
by them) on their website, or sites like ResearchGate (basically Facebook for
academics and researchers) doing the same with similarly obscure algorithms.

I started a side project that pulls in RSS feeds from various academic
publishers and uses a simple regression analysis based on tiles and abstracts
to recommend you papers. I've become busy with my PhD but if anyone is
interested, it's on github:

[https://github.com/tompccs/scoopy](https://github.com/tompccs/scoopy)

~~~
Matumio
For machine learning there is the Arxiv Sanity Preserver, which can recommend
new papers based on your library.

[http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/](http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/)

It didn't really preserve my sanity, though. I'm reading those papers in my
spare time, and it got me to read many more papers than I ever did before.

~~~
tompccs
Not seen that before (my field isn't comp sci or ML), but it looks great!
Obviously web interface is the way to go for a serious project, but I actually
found it fun learning how to implement an interactive command line app. It's
incredibly responsive and has a four-key interface, so if you are good at skim
reading you can train it with a _lot_ of papers in very little time.

~~~
jarvist
A bespoke solution (learns by your 'up votes') for any area of the ArXiv has
been developed by Anton Lukyanenko:
[http://arxivist.com/](http://arxivist.com/)

------
tw1010
This whole "RSS died" narrative illustrates a basic problem with how we
understand the internet. Since there's no unified unbiased sort of "index",
like GDP, to tell us just what proportion of users on the internet uses RSS
anymore, we're stuck having to rely on socially propogated ideas about the
state. This leads to all the typical problems with socially defined truth,
such as drift as a consequence of incentives (or just random mutations due to
statistically insignificant data, amplified by mimetics). Just remember that
fact-space is only correlated, but not bijective, to common-sense-space.

~~~
jeremyjh
Surely Google Reader had numbers that influenced the decision to shut it down?

~~~
stryk
I see Google Reader mentioned a _lot_ when virtually anything RSS-related
comes up. I missed out on the whole RSS craze (prison will do that to you).
But I have always wondered -- so many people lament the fact that Google
killed it -- why hasn't anyone forked/cloned it's UI and feature-set? You
don't want to just straight up copy it and wake the Google lawyers from their
nests obviously, but why not make something that works the same way? Seems
like that would be a popular project among the open source crowd.

~~~
organsnyder
When Reader was killed, I switched to Feedly and haven't looked back. It took
Reader's feature-set (at least, the features I care about) and has continued
to provide a robust application for consuming news. I never used the social
bits of Reader, though.

~~~
xtracto
I second that. I am an avid Feedly user and a paying customer. It really
filled up the huge void in Google Reader. I use Feedly it to consume RSS
feeds.

Although nowadays they hide the feature in the interface, it is possible to
subscribe to a feed by just pasting it in input text box when you are looking
for new content.

------
unicornporn
RSS never (un)died for me. I run FreshRSS[1]. It works well on shared hosting
and it runs on SQLite (no migration troubles!).

The best thing about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds.

Every and service that I use has an RSS feed, except for Twitter. I use
[https://twitrss.me/](https://twitrss.me/) to follow users. If you don't find
a feed, _sometimes_ you just have to dig a little. You learn at which URIs the
most commons CMSes presents their Atom/RSS feeds (hello /feed/).

[1] [https://freshrss.org/](https://freshrss.org/)

~~~
3pt14159
When I created my personal website I thought: “Eh, if anyone asks for RSS I’ll
make it then.” To my surprise I started getting asked after the second
article! It didn’t take long to code up (relative paths to full urls was the
biggest hurdle—but not exactly hard) and it’s kinda nice knowing that people
can just follow the content without having to be lucky enough to see an
article go by on Twitter.

~~~
c12
I am guilty of emailing or otherwise attempting to contact authors for a feed
link for their blog. It's often because I have become really engaged with one
of their articles, read a few more and developed a hunger to see their fresh
work.

Twitter is just a firehose, but my aggregated feeds are categorized and hand
picked so I am far more likely to catch content I'm interested in on there and
therefore be much more engaged with it.

------
jsmeaton
This seems like a weird article. People are advocating for RSS to avoid “the
algorithm” and to increase privacy. Yet the author recommends adding analytics
(tracking) and a way for publishers to indicate priorities. No. That’s the
opposite of why people are again pushing RSS.

If you want a read count, then add pingback urls and make the protocol support
it so various feed aggregators can report true numbers.

Curation should happen at the client, not the protocol. Tagging various feeds
works well for me.

~~~
catach
> _No. That’s the opposite of why people are again pushing RSS._

Maybe the opposite of why users are pushing for RSS, but without analytics
content producers have reasonable justification for being hostile instead.

~~~
pjc50
Analytics are a hell of a drug. Analytics gave us A/B tested clickbait and
listicles. I appreciate it's hard to go cold turkey, but maybe it's _even
harder_ to have an analytics system and use it responsibly?

~~~
catach
> but maybe it's _even harder_ to have an analytics system and use it
> responsibly?

I'd say it absolutely is harder--on the one hand, you have an opportunity for
more money. On the other hand, you have the mass of users that have proven
that they don't care enough to react against irresponsible use in any
meaningful way.

Simple decision in a business context.

~~~
pjc50
> react against irresponsible use in any meaningful way.

Not all reaction is direct. It's a bit like other polluting industries; you
can keep doing it right up to the point where public opinion turns on the
_industry as a whole_ , and onerous regulations get imposed. I think GDPR is a
taste of this.

~~~
catach
I think that under-simplifies the dynamic: public opinion is changed slowly
and painfully through consistent advocacy efforts that publicize abuses, while
the abusing industries fight back and regain ground at least some of the time.

But yeah, more GDPR-like moves would be fantastic.

------
nreece
RSS never died. On the contrary, its usage for content aggregation &
monitoring has been increasing over the years, specially in the business world
and niche markets.

I'm speaking from my own experience running a growing & profitable startup,
Feedity - [https://feedity.com](https://feedity.com), that helps with custom
feeds for unstructured sources like webpages.

Our upcoming API and content explorer (a different kind of 'feed reader') have
received thumbs-up from some customers who opted for early-testing.

~~~
plugger
+1. I start each morning in the office by firing up my RSS aggregator. Have
been since the early days of Google Reader. I can skim through my feeds in
minimal time, especially when compared to any other alternative.

------
sametmax
Most of the problems the author mentions are, to me, the actual reasons I love
RSS.

No filtering. No comments. No proposal. No central way to find them.

It's not the absence of curation.

It's my curation.

It's easy: I like a site, I want news, I get the RSS. I delete it when it's
not to my taste anymore.

The basic, deterministic, manual aspect of it is what's right with it. Not
what's wrong.

Another weird idea is that RSS should be for everybody. No. It speaks to a
certain kind of people, and that's fine.

~~~
ryangittins
> No filtering.

Shameless(-ish) plug for my project, siftrss:
[https://siftrss.com/](https://siftrss.com/)

You add a source feed, include/exclude items by keyword or regex match, and
get a new filtered feed to subscribe to. Because it produces a normal RSS feed
like any other, it works with all RSS readers.

It's totally free. No ads, no account, no email capture, nothing but totally
disposable RSS feed filters.

~~~
Vinnl
Hmm, you might want to know (or already do) that Feedly just added keyword
filtering - brings in some competition :)

~~~
ryangittins
I did see that a while back—I'm actually a Feedly user myself!

I haven't looked at their implementation much, but I imagine it only works on
Feedly itself whereas siftrss is meant to be totally agnostic to what reader
you use. The tool also supports regex, so you can do some slightly richer
matching with siftrss.

~~~
pinkano
It actually works everywhere, you just have to create the Mute Filters in
Feedly. Petr from Feedly

------
_bxg1
The important things is to keep the limiting/filtering features client-side.
That keeps the user in control and the power dynamic in balance. The protocol
should provide as much information as possible (priority level, tags, maybe
even attributes for brand name or a logo image link), and it should be up to
the client to provide the best possible experience given that information.
That also allows for different clients for different types of users.

One thing that could also be interesting is standardizing
subscription/donation information as part of the protocol itself. So that
users can easily do those things across all their sources at once (via their
client), rather than going to separate websites and walking through their
unique subscription forms.

------
Aissen
No one has mentioned NewsBlur yet. It's fantastic as an RSS reader, and
provides intelligence training (filtering) for only subjects you might be
interested in, allowing you to tame high-rate RSS feeds quite easily:
[http://newsblur.com/](http://newsblur.com/)

~~~
creatonez
Can this be self-hosted?

~~~
_up
It is not really meant for self hosting. Newsblur is build to scale and
basicly needs 3 servers/envirements (app, db, task) and also Sentry, Redis,
Celery, RabbitMQ, Postresql, MongoDB and Elasticsearch running.

------
edhelas
The Movim ([https://movim.eu/](https://movim.eu/)) social network is relying
heavily on the XMPP Pubsub standard.

All the articles published on the network are actually Atom elements
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(Web_standard)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_\(Web_standard\))),
it's then super easy to import and export Atom/RSS feeds in XMPP (for example
[https://nl.movim.eu/?feed/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim](https://nl.movim.eu/?feed/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim)).

On top of that Pubsub brings you a fully real-time solution (no need to pull
hundreds of feeds each 15min, the articles comes to you) with roles,
subscriptions, comments (also relying on Atom, see
[https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html](https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html))
and many other things :)

~~~
severine
Only Android 5.0 and up :(

~~~
edhelas
It's actually because older versions of Android doens't have a browser up to
date enough to support Movim (see
[https://github.com/movim/movim_android/issues/1](https://github.com/movim/movim_android/issues/1)).
Sorry about that.

You can still access Movim using any other browsers (Chrome, Firefox) on your
phone and bookmark it on your launcher with a similar result :) The Android
app is basically a wrapper around a WebView.

~~~
severine
Cool, yeah, I'm "stuck" with my old, tiny smartphone but I'm quite reluctant
to change it (I even refuse to call it an upgrade [shakes fist]). But it's
really insecure and slow also... I have a similar problem with Firefox, no
updates since 55.0.2.

But Movim looks really great, I should give it a go, thanks for the links!

------
kmfrk
I don't know if this is as much of a comeback for RSS as a comeback for self-
hosted services.

I needed RSS enough to self-host Fever (on A Small Orange which is a POS that
I need to migrate from, if anyone can recommend me a simple and user-friendly
alternative).

Similarly, I've been waiting for Pinry to release version 2, but this seems to
have eluded the team for a few years unfortunately.

It physically hurts when I see people purge their tweet history, because I
can't imagine giving up all that history, especially when you can at least
export your stuff first - which doesn't include your likes and DMs.

I don't think the latest Instagram/Facebook/Twitter brouhaha has been a
vindication for RSS per se, but definitely one for self-hosting, especially as
services die or get acquired left and right.

You might be cute and argue that for RSS being such a big deal, there sure
aren't any overnight successes 15+ years in the making to migrate to at this
point. I know Maciej Ceglowski of Pinboard fame was working on an RSS reader,
but that seems to have stalled. And Digg just shut down theirs, which was
really good. Fever is also shut down, but that doesn't matter much when it's
self-hosted - except for the crazy fees ASO is charging people like me.

~~~
cannonedhamster
Personally I've really enjoy The Old Reader for my RSS feeds. Not really a fan
of the social aspects of it and it's not self hosted, which if it's a
requirement for you this doesn't fill.

I've used SelfOSS which was fine, but didn't like some of the feeds I tried to
import. It's pretty lightweight though and based on your like of Fever this
seems like it might be a little too light.

I'm sure I'm going over stuff you've head of with Tiny Tiny RSS, so I won't go
into that too much.

A really small shared hosting reseller with decent support I've used for years
is Hole In The Wall Hosting. It isn't a big operation but it just works and
does what you need it to do, SSH is extra but the plans are relatively
inexpensive.

------
wwweston
> I think the solution is a set of improvements. RSS as a protocol needs to be
> expanded so that it can offer more data around prioritization as well as
> other signals critical to making the technology more effective at the reader
> layer.

Maybe it's a failure of my imagination, but I'm having trouble coming up with
anything at the protocol level that wouldn't make RSS worse as a general
protocol, though it might improve at specific cases.

Leave the protocol simple, let innovation happen at the client level, and then
if necessary enhance the protocol to support generally effective solutions.

"4\. Adding value to the Internet lowers its value.

5\. All the Internet's value grows on its edges."

[http://www.worldofends.com/](http://www.worldofends.com/)

------
dankohn1
If you're considering giving RSS a try, here are a few of my favorite
services:

Inoreader, a fantastic Google Reader clone that supports advanced filtering
and following Twitter feed.
[https://www.inoreader.com/](https://www.inoreader.com/)

HNRSS, for seeing all comments with some words.
[https://hnrss.org/](https://hnrss.org/)

Nice paid service for visually scraping pages into RSS feeds
[https://feedity.com/](https://feedity.com/)

Convert summary feeds into full text feeds [http://fivefilters.org/content-
only/](http://fivefilters.org/content-only/)

~~~
AndrewStephens
I just tried out that fivefilters full text service on my own blog (which
shamefully only provides summaries in the feeds) and it worked seamlessly. I
shall be using it in the future.

------
nathan_long
> ...many of these challenges are ultimately problems with the underlying
> protocol itself...

> ...It’s an exhausting experience wading through articles from the style and
> food sections just to run into the latest update on troop movements in the
> Middle East.

> Some sites try to get around this by offering an array of RSS feeds built
> around keywords. Yet, stories are almost always assigned more than one
> keyword, and keyword selection can vary tremendously in quality across
> sites. Now, I see duplicate stories and still manage to miss other stories I
> wanted to see.

None of this is a problem with the _protocol_. The protocol just publishes a
list of stories.

If people want a feed of the "most important" stories, you can build that. You
can let people build their own personal feeds based on tags, popularity, or
any set of rules imaginable, and you can de-dupe the items in that feed.

I used to subscribe to a podcast feed on The Conversations Network (no longer
operating) which they let me personalize to include a mix of episodes from a
variety of their podcasts. That was RSS.

RSS has nothing to do with how you determine which stories to publish on which
feed.

------
daveFNbuck
The complaint that prioritization is needed is bullshit. You can already
achieve that through multiple RSS feeds once your feed has become too big for
users to follow. You can even do categorization, which is what is really
wanted/needed here.

More importantly, this is already solved by RSS readers. All the online RSS
services I've tried have algorithmic feed ordering options for those who want
it. This means that users who want algorithmic sorting/filtering can not only
get it but also have their choice of providers.

More importantly, people like me who prefer to manually prune their sources
and only subscribe to things they're actually interested in seeing can still
do so. You can get a quick overview of what's trending and I can do a deep
dive into what I like. Everyone wins.

------
discreditable
> losing your logo, colors, and fonts on an article is an effective way to
> kill enterprise value

Dropping the garbage styles is one of my favorite things about RSS. Using my
TT-RSS via phone app is a lot speedier than the "enterprise value" provided by
the native site.

This article loads 3.97MB with an adblocker. In TT-RSS, I can load the
homepage and a full-page RSS article from Ars Technica for only 600kb.

~~~
mAEStro-paNDa
Exactly. In fact, this is a tremendous advantage that RSS has. The assertion
that it needs some "sort of commerce layer" is not an issue of the technology,
but a question of the industry of advertising and the structure of the
economy. The problem of keywords as the author mentions is a cultural one,
based on the way our society exchanges and prioritizes the information we
receive.

~~~
discreditable
I think the author's wording is perfect. It's not "user value" they're
concerned about, it's "enterprise value".

------
AndrewStephens
Don't call it a comeback - RSS never went away.

I find the "pull" model of RSS much nicer to deal with than the "push" model
of twitter and facebook. You simply cannot keep up with your twitter feed if
you add 20 or 30 publishers that tweet every day. But those same 20 or 30
publishes in an RSS reader are easy to deal with.

Of course, the publishers dislike RSS because it messes with their metrics,
discourages stickiness, and makes advertising difficult. 3 things that aren't
my problem.

------
NicoJuicy
RSS is the core of my Reddit alternative. Still improving performance though
[http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/Newest](http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/Newest)

I currently use it for personal bookmarking and posting stories to HN.

It's based on tags, eg. [http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/ByTag?Name=artificial-
intellige...](http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/ByTag?Name=artificial-intelligence)

Ps. Performance is slow on the main page for sorting calculated columns ( eg.
The Algorithm ), that's why I linked to the newest page

~~~
dc_gregory
I think we killed it :)

~~~
NicoJuicy
Back alive atm ( disabled RSS sync :p )

If anyone knows how to performantly sort on non deterministic computed columns
( eg. the ranking algorithm for votes of posts + comments) in MS SQL server ->
[https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/203331/slow-
calculat...](https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/203331/slow-calculated-
sort-in-ms-sql-server) i'd be very happy :p, it's killing my "trending topic"
performance...

Edit: added non deterministic

~~~
pbalau
You don't do the calculation on the fly, you do it at data mutation time (if
the column should be the same for every client) or in a separate "thread" (eg,
a script). Basically, you pre calculate the column and simply add it to your
table, indexed.

~~~
NicoJuicy
It's non deterministic because it has a time variation ( newer posts get
ranked higher).

Even then?

~~~
erpellan
Don't modify the scores of old posts, start newer ones with a higher score.

Check out how reddit does it: [https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-
reddit-ranking-algo...](https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-
ranking-algorithms-work-ef111e33d0d9)

The concept is that the time-based part of the score is immutable, fixed at
post creation time.

That way you only have to recalculate when a score-modifying event occurs, not
every time the page is refreshed.

~~~
NicoJuicy
Good advice, thx!

------
kinlan
I still love RSS like many people in this thread. I've been using them to
aggregate and publicise a lot of the content that the developers we work with
create [https://web.gdedeck.com/](https://web.gdedeck.com/) (I created an
aggregation client for myself) and likewise our team is starting to publish
more activities
[https://devwebfeed.appspot.com](https://devwebfeed.appspot.com) \- RSS is a
great fit for consumption and sharing...

However there are still a lot of issues that I see.

* discovery is still an issue - more and more people are removing link rel alternate from their content so it's becoming harder to find the feeds.

* ATOM vs RSS is still a thing even though all the feeds that I parse are actually mostly ATOM namespaced RSS feeds.

* syndication and push - Pubsubhubbub is still hard and not widely supported.

* Cross-Origin and HTTPS - for my needs I'd love to be able to fetch content directly from a web client and not have to proxy the content, however the web's sandbox model means that I need the pages to be on https and have the correct CORS headers - there's no clear incentive though for publishers to support this though.

------
santhoshr
I would love to see the resurgence of RSS and other public protocol enabled
start-ups and solutions. This is the time.

RSS is also a prolific engine for curation, given how flexible and extendable
the protocol is. The emergence of expert-run email digest frenzy should be
built on foundation of RSS, where individuals can parse hundreds of sources
and quickly construct a digest for easy circulation.

~~~
mkirklions
I can definitely see RSS taking off in the future more than ever.

We finally are getting to standard formats in the digital age. JSON obviously
is the leader in storing object data. RSS would be great for making multi-
platform content.

As a programmer and content creator, writing something 1 time and it working
everywhere is the future.

------
mwexler
As a guy who uses Feedly every day, I am glad to pay for it, and I hope to
keep RSS in some state of life support for as long as I can.

I still don't quite understand the fascination with video content: It's
completely synchronous; a 10 minute video takes up 10 min of my time, with
limited ability to consume more efficiently. Textual information puts the
control back in my hands, with the ability to aggregate content and quickly
consume. RSS has been the best way to do so while avoiding the dross that
every social network has devolved into.

~~~
pinkano
Thank you so much for supporting us! Petr from Feedly

------
outsidetheparty
> RSS as a protocol needs to be expanded so that it can offer more data around
> prioritization as well as other signals critical to making the technology
> more effective at the reader layer.

"We have to ruin RSS in order to save it."

No thank you. The "features" he wants to add to RSS are the very features that
users are trying to get away from by switching to RSS.

------
jillesvangurp
The reason RSS is still here, is that things like feedly, inoreader, and
others that filled the google reader gap continue to have millions of loyal
users and just about every blog and news publisher still publishes rss feeds
because it is easy to do and you lose potential clicks if you don't. Google
killed Google reader to make buzz work (failed) and the several other thingies
they have been pushing since (also failing).

FB, twitter, and the "more of the same old shit" algorithms that they try to
pass as machine learning are currently failing in the market. FB is losing
users because it has nothing interesting to show to them and because they have
been taken hostage by paying customers that depend on idiots clicking on click
bait. Twitter is desperately trying to get rid of real time because they
believe it is more "interesting" to keep week old tweets on top that are
somehow "more relevant".

The branding thing is a bit disingenuous; this is really about ads and
tracking. Good luck with that, blocking all of it like most serious users
these days and also GDPR is not going to help your cause.

RSS as a publishing mechanism is fine. The firehose needs work though. It
needs reliable filtering, curation, and aggregation. That's the gap filled by
hacker news and other aggregators. And having access to the firehose is nice
sometimes.

~~~
icc97
Google Buzz died first in December 2011. Google Reader died in July 2013.

~~~
xenomachina
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/03/25/why-is-
google-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/03/25/why-is-google-
killing-google-reader/#5d7621a16022)

------
jeffreyrogers
You don't use RSS to follow news sites. You use RSS to follow infrequently
updated sites so you don't have to keep checking them to see if there's any
new content. It still works for this purpose and most sites that fit this
format still have RSS or Atom feeds.

~~~
ASalazarMX
Seeing how faster it is for me (compared to the web interface) to keep up to
date with HackerNews after the weekend, I disagree. RSS is excellent to sift
and pick many articles.

~~~
chmaynard
RSS feeds for Hacker News? Please elaborate.

~~~
KyleGalvin
Not OP but I use feedly which has hackerNews as a source. Minimal digging and
I found this third party HN feed provider:

[https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/](https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/)

------
leejo
Please stop claiming that RSS died, it didn't. Most of the new sites and blogs
i come across usually have an RSS feed buried somewhere, so a more apt
metaphor would be that it was buried alive, it didn't die. And please stop
trying to feature creep RSS, it doesn't need any more "features". I already
wrote about this recently:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15675823](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15675823)

~~~
tw1010
"Died" means "no one is talking about it". But that could just as well be a
consequence of it doing its job without fault, silently being a good boy in
the background, rather than any depletion of use.

~~~
vanderZwan
It also flies in the face of the walled garden approach that has slowly
infected the internet

------
randomsearch
> Instead, users want personalization and prioritization

All news sources I can think of implement prioritisation.

Do users really want personalisation? Do you remember your Dad saying pre-web
"oh, I just want a newspaper personalised to me, so I don't read outside of my
core interests" or did he just sometimes read, sometimes skip less
immediately-relevant articles? I'm not sure anyone really wants to live in a
bubble, just some tech companies decided they should.

~~~
adbachman
Lots of personalization bubbles are fantastically useful.

I prefer local news from my neighborhood over news from a neighborhood in
another city in another state. I prefer technically detailed articles about
software development over technically detailed articles about dog grooming. I
choose feeds and sources that filter in my favor.

Your dad always had the option of subscribing to the Wall Street Journal or
People if their local paper didn’t cover business or celebrity gossip
extensively enough.

Maybe not bubbles all the way down, but it’s close.

~~~
bo1024
Good point. Maybe the issue is user-controlled, opt-in style personalization
versus opaque, algorithmic, A-B-tested-on-other-people personalization.

I'm definitely in favor of personally choosing what to subscribe to, but
algorithms are very far from where I would trust them to make those choices
for me.

------
Zhyl
Here are some things that would be useful for me, but that I don't currently
know how to access easily.

* A feed for all updates to a news story for a given news source

* A feed for all updates and developments for a news story across all news sources.

* A feed for all updates for a given area for a given news source. More specific than 'news category', more general than one specific thread of events.

* Feed for all updates for a given area (as above) across all news sources.

* [Client] Functionality to subscribe to related or more specific feeds from a given feed.

* Functionality to see related commentary for a given item from given forums (for each story I'm interested in I will normally look at HN or reddit comments).

I'm sure all these exist, but I haven't dug deep enough to find them yet.

~~~
namibj
For 2) you might want to look at GDELT. It is a big feed, so you might not
want it on your phone, but a 5$ VM should do the job. It lacks 1), from what I
remember, but that's about it.

------
geraldbauer
FYI: Find another undead feed parser library (in ruby) @
[https://github.com/feedparser](https://github.com/feedparser) Build the next
facebook! The future of online news is... news feeds. See my humble talk notes
from a tech meetup last year -
[https://github.com/geraldb/talks/blob/master/webfeeds2.md](https://github.com/geraldb/talks/blob/master/webfeeds2.md)

------
iagooar
RSS will never die, as long as podcasts are using it (and podcasting IS
booming around the world right now). Many thought it dead even in the
podcasting world, yet there is no viable alternative and there won't be in the
next few years. A bit of a Javascript-y situation.

~~~
mkirklions
Standard formats are working great in 2018.

RSS is the javascript of text.

------
c12
I used to use the self install feedafever app which had a somewhat clever
algorithm that would scrape all my subscribed feeds and provide me with a
breakdown of whats hot over the past 30 days while also giving me the ability
to view a chronological feed.

Unfortunately it became unmaintained and is now abandoned by its author. It's
been on my todo list for a while to write similar so I can have the same
experience again.

------
firexcy
Intense RSS user as I am, I don’t think the recent hype of RSS practical and
scalable for daily users.

Algorithm-generated feeds are mostly critisized for buidling filter bubbles
and leading to dependency, but either can be avoided by simply switching to
RSS. It is _you_ who choose what to subscribe to in RSS, and it’s hard to
imagine many people would offense themselves by subscribing to sources
contrasting their own ideologies. And any experienced RSS user will understand
the stress of out-of-control unread counts, which easily leads to the
crumbling of your RSS-based reading system.

You may be like, “well, I’m nimble at selecting non-biased sources and spend a
health time on my RSS feed.” Congrats, but one as rational and restrained as
you is also unlikely to be solicited or tricked by News Feed. On the other
way, you can’t expect one inclined to be biased and addicted to crappy stories
to become less so just by using RSS instead.

And that’s without mentioning the high technical barrier of RSS that filters
ordinary users away. For many popular content providers, there’s no full text
output, even no conspicuous feed address. Shall I suggest my mom switching to
RSS and subscribing to her favorite WeChat official accounts _by setting up an
Linux server running web crawler_? I haven’t be nerdy enough to do that.

I do love the simplicity and transparency of RSS but don’t really think
something invented in the 1990s can solve the problem of 2010s and decades to
come. When the density of information available reaches a certain bar, you
have to turn to something like algorithm. Being arbitrary and black-boxed is
not inherently a problem. Haven’t we been happy with the works of DJs,
curators, and food writers? What can be more arbitrary and black-boxed than we
human? What needs be changed the most is not the tool people use to get
information, but the mindset with which people live with the torrent of
information in such a post-scarcity era of contents.

~~~
gkya
> And any experienced RSS user will understand the stress of out-of-control
> unread counts, which easily leads to the crumbling of your RSS-based reading
> system.

Do not follow newspapers through RSS. That's the golden advice. Most often
they have daily or weekly digest newsletters (NY Times and Guardian has
excellent ones), use them instead. More generically, use periodical digests
for high-volume news sources, and RSS for following websites that post
anything less frequent than a couple or so times a day.

------
SllX
> RSS doesn’t allow publishers to track user behavior.

This is a feature, not a bug.

> Analytics increases revenues from advertising, and that means it is critical
> for companies to have those trackers in place if they want a chance to make
> it in the competitive media environment.

If you can't survive without tracking my behavior, then I guess you will die.
Given the quality of writing I can expect from this "competitive media
environment", it won't be a great loss.

> RSS also offers very few opportunities for branding content effectively.

This is a feature, not a bug.

> They need to actively guide users to find where the best content is...

Let me stop you here. An RSS directory is nothing challenging. You can make
one by hosting an old timey "list of cool sites" .html on your own website.
Brent Simmons included one when he developed and maintained NetNewsWire before
selling to Black Pixel. Modern day Podcast clients often include a directory
or access to a 3rd party directory. Anybody can create a directory, stuff it
with all the criteria they need to sort by tags or algorithmically push users
to the highest bidder and ship it in an RSS client.

RSS is a good technology. In terms familiar to a newspaper or press
corporation, it is a wire service, except one that goes from newspaper to
reader rather than from the Associated Press (or whoever) to newspapers to
readers. It does one thing, and it does it well, and doesn't support anything
less than it needs to do it.

RSS clients range the gamut from inboxes (NetNewsWire) to news rivers (River5)
to machine-curated digital newspapers (Apple News), each of them solid form
factors and useful for different types of feeds, and the only reason that
variance of form factors is even possible is right there in the name: Really
Simple Syndication.

Dave Winer was right to freeze the spec, it's not perfect, but it is good
enough. Letting newer iterations filter through would lead us to a situation
like with the web, where the www went from a really great networked document
browser to an application container. That's why when I visit a site like say,
techcrunch.com in a browser with scripting disabled, almost nothing remains of
the actual website, although surprisingly the entire article was fully
readable, and perhaps more so than if I had enabled JavaScript to let all that
Branding™ shine through.

Let me be clear, the only parts of RSS that died are the parts that Google and
a few social corporations within 50 miles of each other owned because they all
had a stake in getting you into their own walled gardens and keeping you
there. The Open Web is great, open standards are great, until you need to
convert eyeballs into dollars and the exchange rate isn't looking good because
you're too open and didn't introduce enough artificial scarcity into your
business model.

RSS never died, by and large the feeds that you subscribed to a decade ago in
Google Reader are still alive and kicking, ever present and always
underappreciated even at the height of Google Reader's popularity before
Google decided to rebrand it to death.

~~~
pjc50
>> RSS also offers very few opportunities for branding content effectively.

> This is a feature, not a bug.

I know where you're coming from, but .. I'm one of the rare people who, for a
while, read a significant number of blogs _without_ RSS because I actually
liked having the different distinctive visual styles to remind me who I was
reading. It's a pity we can't have a little bit of styling without going
bananas.

~~~
SllX
You know, I think it is how I look at it.

More often than not, when I read something, I care about _who_ the other is,
and secondary to that, I care about _where_ it is hosted. For more than ten
years I've used NetNewsWire, and now I also use Apple News and Overcast.
NetNewsWire will show me the author name just fine so long as the feed
includes it, and given the left to right style of the client, I can tell at a
glance where I am. For most feeds though, it isn't really a problem as I have
found that the NetNewsWire-style really only works for feeds that post
relatively infrequently, not more than a few times a day if that, and even
that would be overwhelming coming from one source if every source I had posted
a few times a day to keep up the appearances of their Personal Brand™.

I think an optional CSS or rather a subset of CSS component would not be a bad
thing. Just enough to style some text and formatting but not enough to screw
with the layout too much. The client could completely dismiss the attached CSS
and in my case I would almost certainly end up turning off the custom CSS, but
I can appreciate good web design and will visit a site if I happen to really
like their design. That said, I also fear that even that concession would open
the dam to a lot more concessions than I would like, so I can live with the
status quo.

A good feed reader is going to have a good reading experience already, and I
care a lot more about having a good reading experience than I do about the
opinion of a web designer and their corporate overlords. RSS, reader mode in
Firefox and occasionally lynx -dump or when I can find them, print pages, are
how I can even use the web to read anything on it anymore.

So HTTP+HTML5 is a mess, I would rather not see HTTP+RSS (or Atom or JSON Feed
or whatever) turn into a similar mess so that websites can rebrand their feeds
to death in the same way they rebranded their websites to death.

------
gkya
> RSS died. Whether you blame Feedburner, or Google Reader, or Digg Reader
> last month, or any number of other product failures over the years, the
> humble protocol has managed to keep on trudging along despite all evidence
> that it is dead, dead, dead.

What a stupid thing to say... All this indicates is that RSS users didn't like
those apps. I use elfeed, which has upwards of 500 stars on Github, and it's
an _Emacs_ feed reader. Many other feedreaders exist that you can run on your
computer. Furthermore, Feedly and NewsBlur, along with other services, seem to
be quite lively. My rather unknown blog gets some requests referred from the
Flipboard app regularly.

But a fact is that lots of incompetent site makers do not add RSS feeds to the
websites they build. My uni's RSS feeds are going offline one by one as they
redesign the web pages, and I have to maintain a scraper script to follow the
updates. Many institutions' feeds are badly curated, e.g. a museum I follow, I
figured out today that I wasn't getting any news because their RSS feed had a
<!doctype html> and some conditional comments before the actual feed. Some
feeds include javascript and XML readers fail on them. And then there's the
Wix or Squarespace or whatnot websites, and they are a total failure
(especially because they can't do this RSS thing whereas even Tumblr does it
easily).

I really believe we should somehow certificate programmers and some certain
specialisations. That means ensuring that a "web developer" does know about
the base specifications on which the web is built, and the most common best
practices. If a web dev fails at making an RSS feed, that's a _big_ problem.

~~~
corobo
Anecdata- When Google Reader was killed off I stopped using RSS feeds entirely
with the exception of podcasts

Since the recent post saying we should to back to using RSS I've given
NewsBlur a go (I'd tried Feedly when GReader died, didn't like the way it
scrolls). Honestly though I looked at a few articles on the day I signed up
but I've not checked back once yet. I'm like the person that pays for the gym
then never goes when it comes to RSS now apparently.

I don't think I've ever had a problem with a site not having RSS feeds though,
any site with regular articles that I want to follow has had one

~~~
gkya
I have made checking my RSS my equivalent of reading a newspaper in the
morning. And it's really easy for me: Emacs is always open anyways, so I type
M-x elfeed RET G, and I have a list of updates. I have configured Elfeed such
that it has some stored searches [1] which I navigate using j and k, and such
that it scores articles in a crude but useful way [2]. So it takes me about
5-10 minutes to process the entire thing, make note of the links to read
later, and check the important, immediate stuff. And once I transformed it to
a rather joyful thing to do from a chore, it was incredibly easy and
automatical to make it into a habit.

[1]
[https://github.com/cadadr/configuration/blob/master/emacs.d/...](https://github.com/cadadr/configuration/blob/master/emacs.d/gk.org#search-
ring)

[2]
[https://github.com/cadadr/configuration/blob/master/emacs.d/...](https://github.com/cadadr/configuration/blob/master/emacs.d/gk.org#scoring)

------
zafiro17
A bit more obscure for some, but hugely useful to others: if you're a
newsreader (Usenet) kind of person, there's Gwene, by the same folks who did
Gmane. While Gmane took mailing lists and made them available as news
articles, gwene takes RSS feeds and makes them available as news articles. You
need a newsreader (Thunderbird will do, or emacs/gnus, knode, pan, slrn,
alpine etc.). Start here: [http://gwene.org](http://gwene.org) or just point
your newsreader at news.gwene.org. There are millions of RSS feeds, each
submitted by someone. (Or you can submit your own). It's managed by Lars Magne
Ingebrigtsen, the guy who wrote gnus. I find it hugely useful.

------
DarkIye
Thanks to Wordpress publishing an RSS feed endpoint by default (/feed) and
Feedly's aptitude at finding feeds, RSS is not dead, or undead, or anything of
the sort and I have been using it on a daily basis for over a decade now.

~~~
pinkano
Happy to hear this, thank you for using Feedly! Petr from Feedly

------
jackninja1
Pretty funny to see an article like this! For a course that I followed I
needed to create a paper about the Internet. I chose the topic of RSS and what
has let to its so called "death". What I found is that people used RSS but
where not aware of it. Then Facebook became big and that became a hugh source
of news for many. Now with the exodus happening at Facebook it makes sense
that RSS is becoming popular again. Still, this is only the case for tech-savy
users and I don't expect that movement to progress into the mainstream.

~~~
mkirklions
>What I found is that people used RSS but where not aware of it.

Yep, I had no idea I was using it until I started a website years ago and saw
RSS was everywhere.

------
FussyZeus
> It’s wonderfully idealistic, but the reality of RSS is that it lacks the
> features required by nearly every actor in the modern content ecosystem, and
> I would strongly suspect that its return is not forthcoming.

Maybe every actor thinks RSS is a problem, but I as a consumer of content love
it for all the reasons they find it problematic.

It seems like the author is conflating what's bad for their industry and their
marketing dept. and what's bad for the consumer. Consumers don't want
intrusive advertising, we don't want analytics, we don't want social
interaction. We want content. Full stop.

There's a healthy and lively debate to be had about what needs to happen to
allow news to work for both the people who make it and those who consume it,
but currently, every discussion along those lines that I read like this are
always written solely from the point of the publisher. No one is asking the
important questions, like:

1) Did anyone ask the consumer why the "pivot to video" strategy failed? I can
tell you in one sentence: No one on the consumer end wanted it.

2) Were consumers ever asked if we wanted our data shared with all manner of
companies and possible bad actors? We answered anyway by ramping up adblock
usage and noscript usage.

All of these articles read so impressively tone-deaf to the wants and desires
of the people they allege to be serving, and then they wonder in thinkpieces
why news as an industry is dying.

------
stunt
RSS (currently via Feedly) is how I use Internet. And some of the drawbacks
mentioned in this articles are exactly why I use it.

~~~
pinkano
Happy to hear this! Thank you :) Petr from Feedly

------
JelteF
We're currently working on an Open Source and good looking RSS + podcast app
that has personalization built in. If that sounds interesting to you be sure
sign up here to be notified when the beta is released:
[https://getstream.io/winds/](https://getstream.io/winds/)

------
Nition
Does anyone have a good RSS feed reader for Firefox? I don't need to be able
to read the actual feed in the reader, I just want a list that'll notify me
when a blog I've subscribed to has a new post.

"Feeder"[1] looks like exactly what I want, but the requested permissions list
is insane. Are there any that don't request to "Access [my] data on all
websites"? I've tried a bunch and they all seem to - I guess so they can
detect RSS links in web pages?

I know Firefox has the built-in Live Bookmarks thing, but it doesn't give a
notification when there's a new post to read.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/feeder](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/feeder)

~~~
contravariant
There were a couple that used firefox's native live-bookmarks system to
register new feeds but I think that was killed off along with the old
extension system.

Now they can't handle RSS feeds natively so they need to access webpages to be
able to register RSS links. Guess it shows how sacrificing usability for
security doesn't necessarily lead to more security.

I'm currently using Brief, and have been using it for quite some time. Still
haven't found an alternative I liked. And I guess with the live-bookmarks dead
it's harder than ever to switch. I might give Feeder a try.

~~~
severine
That's the 2nd reference to some trouble with Firefox and RSS or live-
bookmarks. I use both a reader extension (Feedbro) and the native live-
bookmarks, in Nightly (60.0b10-32bits) and haven't noticed anything. Anyone
can clarify?

------
erpellan
Does 'RSS' also mean Atom feeds? The terms seem to be used interchangeably. I
had thought Atom was supposed to be a better alternative to RSS but it doesn't
seem to have landed. Is it necessary to always offer both? Most sites seem to.

~~~
Semaphor
Many sites offer both because common libraries and tools support both so it's
easy. I don't think I've seen a reader that only supports one of the formats.
IIRC from way back when, atom has a few more features but also some problems,
but in the end, it doesn't really matter.

------
baud147258
I'm using RSS with a browser extension, which will check the feeds. Then I'd
read the content on the site. Since it's a handfull of blogs and webcomics,
I've got no problems with curation or finding the content I want to read.

------
rubenbe
Since google reader died, I've been self-hosting a TTRSS instance. I agree
with the author that newspapers often have a waterfall of articles that's
impossible to read.

One of the solutions I saw on a local traffic alert site was that you could
create a personalized feed URL which would only send you a notification when
e.g. here is an accident on that specific road.

This might be useful to solve the prioritization problem if you could create a
custom feed based on your interests. Secondly this also provides the newspaper
with some sort of analytics to incorporate "relevant ads" in the feed (I know
I'm playing the devil's advocate here)

------
andrethegiant
I loved using Fever back in the day for RSS! It was self-hosted and bubbled up
stories of the same article from different sources.
[https://feedafever.com](https://feedafever.com)

------
erikrothoff
At [https://feeder.co](https://feeder.co) onboarding is one of our largest
hurdles to solve. For a lot of reasons we're lucky to get a lot of users who
are completely new to RSS. This means we have a huge job in educating what RSS
and what it's not. We've seen that a lot of large sites have stopped
advertising their RSS feeds on their homepages, making it harder to detect via
the standard means.

Also, we've never stopped growing and are approaching profitability on one
full time employee so don't believe the RSS-is-dead hype.

~~~
c12
I used to use the feedafever agrigator (until upgrading my servers PHP version
stopped it working) I could give it a website url and it would attempt to
identify the feed from it; probably first by looking for relevant meta tags
and then resulting in checking obvious url paths.

------
JetSpiegel
> solving RSS as business model. There needs to be some sort of a commerce
> layer around feeds

> I would gladly pay money for an Amazon Prime-like subscription where I can
> get unlimited text-only feeds from a bunch of a major news sources at a
> reasonable price. It would also allow me to get my privacy back to boot.

Facebook had a scandal over selling private data, so move to RSS for the
privacy! RSS doesn't allow tracking (from Amazon), let's turn it into HTML.

~~~
gregknicholson
> solving RSS as business model. There needs to be some sort of a commerce
> layer around feeds

RSS is not a business model. Selling things people actually want is a business
model.

If you can't persuade _someone_ to pay for your content (perhaps via willingly
watching adverts), then it's not economically viable content. If you care
enough to continue publishing it, great, but it's out of your own pocket.

~~~
gkya
> If you can't persuade someone to pay for your content (perhaps via willingly
> watching adverts), then it's not economically viable content.

"useless content". FTFY.

~~~
gregknicholson
No, there's a difference between “economically viable” and “useful”. A labour
of love may be very valuable to its author and its audience; it's just not a
way to make money.

~~~
gkya
Certainly. What I meant was the content that was meant to make money but not
inherently economically viable, i.e. all that clickbait ad-ridden stuff out
there.

~~~
gregknicholson
Ah, yeah. That _is_ useless, by its own measure. Good riddance.

------
weichsel
I am also still using RSS - Preferably consumed via well-made, native apps on
macOS and iOS. Since Google Reader went down, I am using the self-hosted
Coldsweat:
[https://github.com/passiomatic/coldsweat](https://github.com/passiomatic/coldsweat).
It provides a web based aggregator but also can be used to sync native
clients.

------
dalbasal
Dead & undead are not really interesting categories.

Who is using RSS? How are they using it? What depends on or is enabled by RSS?
What are the feedback loops, and what are the trends?

There is difference between podcasts, news sites publishing a headline-only,
twitter-like feed and a blog publishing full text essays. The protocol itself
is a protocol. The interaction between consumer, publisher and protocol is
what's interesting. That's a very wide field of possibilities.

Fwiw, in the context of a FB alternative, id be looking out for trends that
blur the lines between consumer and publisher. Its certainly not sufficient,
but I imagine that any open (or not) alternative to social networks will have
this quality.

------
shurcooL
Does anyone know how well JSON Feed [0] is doing?

[0] [https://jsonfeed.org/](https://jsonfeed.org/)

~~~
vaillancourtmax
Not that this should be any indicator of health, but it's worth pointing out
that a few RSS readers (e.g. FeedPress [0], Cast [1], FeedBin [2]) have
implemented JSON feed support a few weeks after the initial announcement.
What's more, my own basic JSON Feed Viewer [3] is getting multiple hits every
day.

[0] [https://feed.press/blog/2017/05/31/feedpress-adds-
automatic-...](https://feed.press/blog/2017/05/31/feedpress-adds-automatic-
json-feed-support/)

[1] [https://blog.tryca.st/cast-update-experimental-json-feed-
sup...](https://blog.tryca.st/cast-update-experimental-json-feed-
support-e983a14171ac)

[2] [https://feedbin.com/blog/2017/05/22/feedbin-supports-json-
fe...](https://feedbin.com/blog/2017/05/22/feedbin-supports-json-feed/)

[3] [http://json-feed-viewer.herokuapp.com/](http://json-feed-
viewer.herokuapp.com/)

------
dsr_
"How exactly do you find good RSS feeds?" the article asks.

Three steps:

1\. Make sure your browser has the feed detector enabled. It used to be
standard, now you need to go into settings and configure it.

2\. Surf normally.

3\. When you see interesting content and the Feed icon goes active, click on
it. Now you've added a feed.

Eventually you should categorize and prune your feeds, but this is a good
start.

~~~
gkya
An alternate route is: view-source, search: "alternate".

------
Tomte
Is there a real RSS reader for the desktop anymore, besides Thunderbird?

And one for iOS and Android?

I can only find frontends to online services like Feedly.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
What do you need beyond e.g. the feedly webapp?

~~~
Tomte
I need something local. Not "cloud".

------
rmc
Surely the issues with prioritization or filtering could be solved client
side, ie with your RSS reader? Configure your software to hide things with tag
X or word Y. You could even have up/down votes to train your RSS reader what
is good and what is stuff you never want to see, and it could operate like a
local spam filter.

------
PaulAJ
The article talks about analytics, but under GDPR you will have to have a
sign-up wall before you can do any analytics. If someone comes on to your site
without signing up then you are not allowed to track their IP address or any
other identifying information, and without that you can't do much in the way
of analytics.

~~~
criddell
I think analytics often makes things less interesting. I wish more publishers
would trust their own judgement and taste and quit trying to optimize for the
lowest common denominator.

------
digi_owl
The one big thing for me with RSS is that it provides me a way to see what
exactly is new, when it is new.

------
justanton
I’ve been using Unread app on my iPhone to read all my RSS feeds. I really
don’t get all these “RSS is dead” arguments — for me it’s always been such a
pleasant experience. People don’t talk about it much, but that doesn’t
necessarily mean that it’s “dead”.

------
badosu
I wonder if it would make sense to have a bidirectional mapping between RSS
and ActivityPub...

------
fxj
I wish we could go back to the old protocols like RSS, email and SMS. They
were open and you could use any client you like and they never had problems
with walled gardens. Sometime you have to lose your freedom to really value it
like RMS said.

~~~
creatonez
While I mostly agree, I'm not sure going back to SMS is going to help solve a
whole lot of problems-of-the-2010s. I'd rather break free from mass
surveillance than embrace it, and standardizing new federated encrypted
messaging protocols will do this.

Unfortunately, as EFF points out in their recent series about encrypted
texting, a one-size-fits-all solution is difficult.

~~~
fxj
I totally agree. However, SMS is a protocol that _just works_ on ANY mobile
phone.

------
krychu
A self-plug, I built a simple RSS reader after Google shut down theirs, which
I was using on regular basis. Perhaps someone will find it useful:
[https://readdu.com](https://readdu.com)

------
artichokeheart
RSS will never die as long as someone can scrape a website and make their own
feed.

------
barrkel
If you're a news publisher, sure it looks like RSS is dead, because all you
see is its use for news publishing, and it seems unfit for purpose.

I subscribe to hundreds of feeds, and none of them are news publishers. Still
works for me.

------
sbaha88
Sligthly off-topic, but I've been working on a rss-like feed for newsletters:
newsletterhunt.com. I may be wrong but I have a feeling that rss moved to
newsletters

------
jjallen
RSS is crucial for me to get custom keyword alerts from various SEC filings
feeds from companies I watch.

InoReader makes a great assistant in this way. I'm not affiliated at all.

------
franzwong
I am still using RSS for automatic downloading torrent files.

------
Tree1993
Thunderbird is my default rss reader and it works very well.

------
erpellan
I don't see anything in RSS itself that would preclude using it for an
algorithmically curated feed, any more than HTML does. It's just a protocol.

------
guybedo
If you want to try a new RSS reader / news aggregator, you can check out
[http://aktu.io](http://aktu.io)

------
singingfish
I guess RSS is dead in the same sense that perl is dead.

------
laktak
I really like [http://goodnews.click/](http://goodnews.click/) as a news
reader

------
itakedrugs
I never stopped using RSS but Firefox has made it a bit more difficult to find
out if a site offers RSS...

~~~
JulienRbrt
I personally still have the "Subscribe" icon (Firefox 59). I had to move it
from "Customize" to my toolbar but it is definitely there.

~~~
itakedrugs
it used to be in plain view all the time (maybe 10 versions ago, I don't
remember exactly)

~~~
itakedrugs
it was in the address bar, too:
[http://screenshots.oldapps.com/3/large_87_Firefox%201.5.0.12...](http://screenshots.oldapps.com/3/large_87_Firefox%201.5.0.12-about.png)

------
whisk
People who concerns their information source are keeping using RSS all the
time. RSS can confirm you receives all the news you subscribed everyday and
decide read which article by yourself.

I hate some new media who provides App only. App can increase DAU and maybe
better for their KPI, but will lose serious reader.

------
luxpir
Quick newsbeuter mention. Still going strong here as a fast CLI option.

------
ourcat
Anyone who listens to podcasts uses RSS.

RSS hasn't gone or been anywhere.

~~~
m-localhost
Unfortunately "Podcast" is becoming synonym with non-music content on Spotify
& Co.

------
dreamfactored
It's been a while but ISTR Atom is extendable unlike RSS

------
ASipos
I check Feedly daily.

------
smarx007
Thank you, TechChunch, for resuscitating RSS! /s

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croisillon
OT: what has become of TechCrunch? I'm on a wide screen (1920 pixels), don't
expect me to read paragraphs with 16px font! So I scroll down without really
reading and I see "view comments", I scroll down a bit further and I see there
is more stuff so maybe they buried the comments and I don't even need to
click? I scroll further and... lose the whole article to land automatically on
the homepage. Such a layout is plain horrible and I won't return to TC for a
few more years.

~~~
gkya
The page almost looks perfect with JS disabled. If the major browsers were
better at giving the user a way to use and maintain a whitelist of which web
sites are allowed to run JS, maybe the websites become less JS-heavy. NoScript
or UBlock don't even come close wrt UX to what xombrero was, and what
qutebrowser is ATM (I've switched to it from Firefox, just awesome).

~~~
vanderZwan
I assume you've given uMatrix a shot?

~~~
gkya
Nope. I was using uBlock origin on Firefox with dynamic blocking and quite a
bit of the provided blacklists enabled. I just gave quick uMatrix a look, and
it does not seem fundamentally different to me. I like that I can easily add
some globs and use version control on the blocklist without having to import-
export my settings.

Qutebrowser is a very interesting browser. It's easily scriptable using a
config file in python, but not only. It has a nice Emacs Customize like UI,
and then it has a system reminiscent of CGI for running external scripts
against web pages or on events. A definite improvement for me over whatever is
available. I maintain a handful of websites with js enabled (HN, reddit,
youtube, a couple more), and for the web apps I'm forced to use, I just start
up Chromium temporarily. It's been lovely so far.

~~~
vanderZwan
uMatrix works quite differently than uBlock, and the interface is _much_
easier IMO. It also lets you manually edit rules by text if the GUI doesn't
work out. For example, the following lines blocks any third-party loading of
anything from Facebook or Twitter, but allows Google Fonts and Gstatic to load
except for cookies

    
    
        * facebook.com * block
        * fonts.googleapis.com * allow
        * fonts.googleapis.com cookie block
        * fonts.googleapis.com frame allow
        * gstatic.com cookie block
        * gstatic.com frame allow
        * gstatic.com media allow
        * gstatic.com other allow
        * gstatic.com script allow
        * gstatic.com xhr allow
        * twitter.com * block
    

Cutebrowser is interesting, thanks for pointing that out to me!

[0]
[https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki](https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki)

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amarant
what is dead may never die

