![]() ![]() Each morning, I get about 50-75 articles in my feed. a few blogs of related interests that I don't often visit wikipedia featured articles (once a day) bbc global news (my daily snapshot of world happenings) Social media feeds aren't going to work, because that's always going to be a firehose. I also use RSS to keep track of things that don't post very often- but I'm going to forget to visit their site on a "regular" basis (think once a month, once every 2 weeks). In order for this to work, you need to be very aggressive with what goes in your RSS feed list. If I find a few articles that are really good, I star them (save) for reading later. Then I skim the headlines for things I want to read, read them, and then put my "newspaper" away. I only put stuff on there that I would actually look at each morning (not always read, but actually look). I know I'm not always going to get the best articles. I treat RSS like I would treat buying a newspaper. The first mistake is expecting to fill your feed with content a la social media (reddit, whatever). If discovery isn’t seamless, only the people determined to use RSS will stick with it after their friends pester them to try it out. Half the value proposition of sites like Substack is making it dead simple for readers to understand how they can subscribe.Īs someone who had never used RSS before and didn’t know how to expect RSS to work, it was the problem that grated me the most. ![]() We can say “discovery is not a problem” but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask for it to be better. ![]() NetNewsWire would always pick the first link in the page, disregarding all others, and not telling me that the page had multiple. Some sites I found had multiple feed links (one per kind of post: long post, short fragments, photo posts). I tried a few more times before realizing, “oh, there’s just no feed.” I went looking for my feeds later and they were missing. Using the iOS Safari share button to “Open in NetNewsWire” would silently fail if the blog didn’t have a feed. Of course the downside of RSS not being mainstream anymore is that smaller/independent publishers that don't make money on clicks either don't know it exists, or don't think the effort is worthwhile. And with people visiting their home page, they're more incentivized to keep the crap headlines to a tolerable level. There's a disincentive to publishing an RSS feed, as the content creators would much rather you visit their home page so they can serve you some ads. I kinda view the result of the "social aggregators" as an RSS feed with the content ranked. and others followed, and RSS feeds became much and much less popular. Aggregators existed before, like, but were curated by editors. I think what really put an end to RSS was sites like (not sure if they were the first, but they're the first I remember), where people would submit stories and users would vote on whether they were good or not. And publishers were all too happy to put crap in their feeds in the hope that it might get a click. The problem with it, as you found out, was there's a lot of stuff in those feeds you're not interested in. It used to be very popular, with everyone promoting their feeds, lots of clients, and lots of interested users. In order for RSS to be useful, I think it needs to stay an "underground" tech. The overall experience is better than any of the other modern RSS apps I've tried, and better than Reader was way back when. I've paid for two versions of Reeder now (about $15 total, I believe) and I pay Feedbin $50/year to act as my backend + web interface. Also, like most things, it's better if you pay for it. I'm sure that's part of what limited the appeal even in the fabled golden age of Google Reader. On some level, "I want to/am able to wade through the firehose" is a pre-req for RSS. It's solveable, but it does require either a very specific approach (I quickly scan my unreads in Feedbin/Reeder, save whatever I want to read in depth, and then browse saved items later), or a reasonably large suite of rules applied to your feed (takes a long time to build, takes even longer to refine, and you will find yourself perpetually tuning them), or something like Feedly's AI assistant (but then you're still outsourcing your feed to someone else's algorithm, and avoiding that is supposed to be the point of RSS). The firehose issue is definitely a problem with RSS, especially if all you've ever experienced is algorithmic social media feeds. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |