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Slashdot Asks: Do You Still Use RSS?

Posted by msmash on from the changing-habits dept.

Real Site Syndication, or RSS has been around for over a decade but it never really managed to lure regular web users (though maybe it wasn't built to serve everyone). So much so that even Google cited declining usage of Google Reader, at one time the most popular RSS reader service, as one of the two reasons for shutting down the service. With an increasingly number of people looking at Facebook and Twitter for news, we thought it would be a good time to ask the following question: Do you use any RSS reader app? If yes, do you think it is still a good way to keep track of the "new stuff" that your favorite sites publish?

42 of 438 comments (clear)

  1. RTS? by superdave80 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Real Time Syndication, or RSS

    How does Real Time Syndication become RSS? Should be RTS?

    1. Re:RTS? by synaptik · · Score: 5, Informative

      Because it's actually Rich Site Summary, or alternatively "Really Simple Syndication"

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    2. Re:RTS? by dcooper_db9 · · Score: 2

      There are multiple standards sponsored by different stakeholders. I didn't care enough to try to parse out the details but I wouldn't call any of the names wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

      --
      I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
  2. I mean I got this article through RSS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've never understood why people have gone away from it. It's the most effective way to track a ton of websites in entirety. I think of my RSS feed as my morning newspaper. I follow literally hundreds of websites, journals, and blogs using it, and I can churn through it all in maybe twenty minutes at my keyboard each day on inoreader.

    1. Re:I mean I got this article through RSS by hey! · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I think of my RSS feed as my morning newspaper.

      Well, there's your problem. The idea of starting your day with a cup of coffee and a broad sample of current events has gone the way of the dodo.

      --
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    2. Re:I mean I got this article through RSS by rdelsambuco · · Score: 3, Interesting

      bullshit

      --
      I comment occasionally so that I can mod others -1 overrated or -1 offtopic.
    3. Re:I mean I got this article through RSS by rdorn · · Score: 2

      Same, I saw this article through RSS... I use outlook as my RSS reader. Allows me to check on recent events when I catch up on my inbox.

    4. Re:I mean I got this article through RSS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's the same as a newspaper. Skim headlines for pertinent articles. Read the articles that are relevant or interesting.

      I doubt most people that follow the New York Times read every single article they publish every single day. But I feel a lot better seeing the headlines and the first paragraph and deciding whether it pertains to me or not. Either way, I'm aware that those events are happening and being discussed.

    5. Re:I mean I got this article through RSS by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 4, Interesting

      bullshit

      He's actually quite right. Things like Facebook and Twitter and "following", even Google Now's page. It all tracks things you like and molds to an individuals viewpoint.

      Most people ARE getting a very narrow view of the world now. Gone is the broad-spectrum news that people used to get. People tailormake their news to fit their specific world-view these days.

      If news doesn't fit your ideology, you don't read it.

      It has led to increased polarization in the political spectrum.

      --
      "That's the way to do it" - Punch
    6. Re:I mean I got this article through RSS by Gr8Apes · · Score: 4, Funny

      I use outlook as my RSS reader

      You admit that? on /.? Geek card please.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    7. Re:I mean I got this article through RSS by mpol · · Score: 2

      People often complained that RSS was too difficult and only for techies. But with a simple explanation and an "Aha" moment people would enjoy it.

      What I think the real reason is, is that it doesn't make the advertisers money. They want clicks and eyeballs, not RSS refreshes.
      Google Chrome doesn't support RSS feeds anymore, not in the standard build. Google Reader is gone. So you can guess where the advertisers are not wanting to go...
      My local newspaper just recently stopped providing RSS feeds. I quit reading it, but they probably won't care.

      --

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    8. Re:I mean I got this article through RSS by Anubis+IV · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Likewise, I got here via RSS.

      Before I say anything else, I'll shill by tossing in a glowing recommendation for Feedbin. I tested way too many clients after Google Reader went down, and it was far and away my favorite of the bunch. As a nice bonus, it's also open source and can be run on your own servers free of charge, but I've been a paid subscriber ever since Reader shut down. Well worth the $20/year I'm paying.

      Speaking more generally, the problem we all have is with surfacing the content we want to see. The content we want to see is constantly being published all around the web, but we lack the ability to know when and where it's getting published, so we need help finding it.

      As of today, we have a few options. We can rely on curated content (e.g. newspapers, BuzzFeed), which waste our time and attention with copious amounts of content that we have no interest in so that we can find the few nuggets that actually interest us. Alternatively, we can rely on content aggregators (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit), but content aggregation is rarely a money-maker, so each of those serves numerous other purposes (e.g. sharing jokes, posting cat pics, relaying personal messages), all of which add noise that detracts from simply consuming the news. Moreover, each of those sites interferes with the news in some ways (e.g. reordering or hiding content), making them unreliable if we want to have a holistic and accurate view of matters.

      Or, as a third option, we can rely on RSS and not have to make any of those compromises.

      With a newspaper or BuzzFeed, if I feel like I have to sift through too much cruft, I can either take it or leave it. But with RSS, I can effectively make my own newspaper by subscribing to exactly as many sites I want to, each of which narrowly covers a small subset of the topics I'm interested in. As a result, I have exactly as much new content as I want, and nearly each piece of new content is tailored specifically to my interests. Plus, I gain all the fine-grained controls (e.g. mark as unread, applying rules to filter news, being able to look through update statistics) that come with having technology that's dedicated to solving a specific problem, rather than being one part of a much larger, general-purpose platform like those other content aggregators.

      In fact, I've become so averse to sites that waste my time that if a site that posts new content doesn't offer an RSS feed, I simply don't visit it unless someone else links me to it. Nor do I apparently miss them, as I just learned when I went through my feeds and found that about a dozen of them hadn't had any updates in years, only one of which I had noticed was missing.

      And what do I do with all of that time I've saved? Waste it commenting on Slashdot, apparently.

      *sigh*

    9. Re:I mean I got this article through RSS by thegarbz · · Score: 5, Funny

      bullshit

      Yes that is exactly what replaced getting broad and different views on a variety of topics.

    10. Re:I mean I got this article through RSS by akgunkel · · Score: 2

      I also got to this story from my RSS reader. Using an RSS reader is the only realistic way of keeping up with lots of sites. I never load the homepages of the sites I read every day.

    11. Re:I mean I got this article through RSS by extra88 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I also switched to running TinyTinyRSS after Google Reader. I agree that RSS is very helpful for sites that update infrequently and/or at varied times. I also use it for frequently updated sites, it's so much faster to skim headlines and teasers with little to no ads in a feed reader; I tend to be a completist though so I have to fight the urge to skim everything.

      When Twitter dropped their RSS feeds, I added a little code takes a Twitter handle as a parameter and returns their tweets as RSS (I already had the necessary API key).

      Social media is so much worse for keeping track of the output of multiple sites. On one end, you have algorithms trying to decide what you want to see (or making businesses pay to be seen), on the other you have sites that send multiple tweets for the same story using different lines to "grab you."

    12. Re:I mean I got this article through RSS by hey! · · Score: 2

      >back in MY day, hurdy durdy doo

      Back in my day we had the pill and there were no STDs that couldn't be cured with a week or two of antibiotics, with predictable results. So yes, in some ways things were better.

      It doesn't mean everything was better. Python is better than rolling my own control structures with Fortran IV's computed goto.

      When you get older you'll realize "you win some, you lose some" is pretty much what life amounts to.

      --
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    13. Re: I mean I got this article through RSS by phyre917 · · Score: 2

      Following != reading. Don't correct him on a claim he doesn't make, it just makes you look like a troll.

    14. Re: I mean I got this article through RSS by RabidReindeer · · Score: 2

      I don't want to spend the time it takes to trawl a dozen websites multiple times a day.

      A good RSS reader gives me headlines and if they intrigue me, I drill down into them

      I used to use Pulse until it stopped working on my hardware. I used the RSS features built into Firefox, until Firefox started hiding all its controls a la Microsoft. I liked Flipboard, except that apparently someone has to build special feeds for Flipload, and a lot of my favorite sites are ill-served. My latest favorite is Feedly, which has a simple way to mark things if the headlines interest me but I'm busy scanning for good stuff. I can mark the latest news as "seen" and pull the deferred articles out from the "saved" area at leisure.

      RSS is automatically supported in many products these days. Wordpress, for example. It's also a a feature of some things very important to me, like the National Hurricane Center.

    15. Re:I mean I got this article through RSS by E-Rock · · Score: 5, Funny

      Are you sure he doesn't get bonus points for being able to make that work?

  3. Yes, I do. by alexru · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I would not be reading this if there was not RSS. I don't have time to manually check dozens of sites for updates.

    1. Re:Yes, I do. by macxcool · · Score: 2

      Mod this up ;-) I use The Old Reader daily to get updates for software, blogs, comics, news, etc. I couldn't function without RSS/Atom.

  4. Of Course by chrisautrey · · Score: 3, Funny

    How else would I get my Slashdot article headers?

  5. Feedly is a godsend by bigdady92 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    When the Google reader went away I scrambled to find a replacement. Feedly is by far the best replacement of the bunch and I have paid for all their services to support them.

    RSS is far from dead.

    --
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  6. Not since Google Reader folded. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    RIP Google Reader.

    Fuck you, Google.

  7. iGoogle by markus · · Score: 2

    When iGoogle went away, I whipped up a quick little Javascript that does essentially the same thing. My home page is a collection of RSS feeds. And yes, that's pretty much how I find all the news that I read.

    1. Re:iGoogle by Scarred+Intellect · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Same here. I loved iGoogle. Netvibes dashboard is my homepage; I found this article via RSS.

      I also use Postbox for my E-mail and have XKCD and Penny Arcade subscriptions via RSS.

  8. Yes by mseeger · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I still use RSS for about 50 feeds with about 400 articles a day. The problem are the sources.

    The quality is declining. Some feeds only deliver the teaser and a link to the article on the web site.

    Even when I offer money, nearly no newspaper is able to deliver a full RSS stream :-(.

  9. Yes! by dogrio · · Score: 2

    Yes, using https://newsblur.com/. It's a very convenient way to keep up with sites of interest.

  10. Yup. The Old Reader by kwerle · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://theoldreader.com/

  11. Since you asked... by ngc5194 · · Score: 2

    Yes and yes. It fills a need for content aggregation/summary better than any other technology, especially for tracking low volume/high quality sources.

    Apropos of nothing, the recent ad placements on /. really, really suck. They cover so much content and take up so much screen real estate. I don't begrudge any site the need for ads, but seriously, it makes me much less likely to visit the site.

  12. Yes by Burz · · Score: 3, Informative

    I use Liferea to collect feeds. IMO, its a simple but enabling technology... a lot better than cramming everything into centralized locations like Facebook.

  13. Yes by Deth_Master · · Score: 2

    Yep. I've been using TinyTiny RSS (https://tt-rss.org/) since the Original Google Reader went away. Syndicated webcomics is the way to go for those. Hosting my own, and paid for the Android APP. For news, I've not come up with a great solution.

    --
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  14. I used to use RSS by Ramze · · Score: 2

    I used to use RSS back when it was integrated into Firefox. I could hover over the RSS link for Slashdot and several other sites and see the headlines for the newest articles which I could click to read. Somehow, somewhere along the way, that functionality went away, and I haven't used it since.

    I thought it was awesome, and I didn't really care about these "RSS readers" out there b/c I had what I wanted built into my browser.

    Not everyone uses tech the same way, and when this way disappeared, RSS became dead to me at least.

    1. Re:I used to use RSS by slimjim8094 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Er, I'm using RSS in Firefox right now (it's how I found this article). 52.0.2.

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  15. Firefox Live Bookmarks in the Bookmarks Toolbar by m0gely · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is probably the single reason why FF is still my primary browser, though I'm happy with it otherwise. It's the best way to peruse headlines because you never have to visit the site. It's probably saved my eyes from more distraction than any other feature I can think of.

  16. Podcasts by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I think all of my podcasts come in on RSS feeds at this point. I run a video to audio conversion site for one TV program and the RSS feed is the only way anybody gets the audio (they could just play the video file if they were web-constrained).

    Everybody I know who has tried serious podcatching for news has stopped listening to broadcast radio for it.

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  17. Work-related news, Slashdot, Security news, XKCD by mwvdlee · · Score: 2

    Yes. I have an RSS reader in Chrome that tracks about two dozen RSS feeds that I use multiple times each day.
    I don't know anything that comes even close to RSS for uncluttered and highly targeted news delivery.
    I love RSS for all the same reasons marketeers hate it.

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  18. Slashboxes by crow · · Score: 2

    Aren't the Slashboxes you can configure on the right column of Slashdot powered by RSS feeds? I use those daily. (Unfortunately, the "Sci-Fi News" box is stuck with data from over a year ago.)

  19. Yes, I use it, and It IS RSS by CAOgdin · · Score: 5, Informative

    Only a professional cares, but Aaron Swartz named his product RSS, and it's still RSS.

    I live in RSS (Rssowl) every morning. I get all the news I need and can make selective choices about which ones I read (Google News, for instance, posts a lot of Sports crap I couldn't care less about, so I can see the title and know it's not worth my time to click.

    I'm dismayed by the number of sites that no longer provide RSS feeds (I'm looking at you, Daily Kos), and I'm disappointed that RSS aficionados are letting the RSS clients slide by without improvement (Rssowl v2.2.1 was last released at the end of 2013).

    We RSS BELIEVERS need to band together and tell the major sites they need to support RSS clients; the software's free, and they can still inject their ads!

  20. Re:Yes by RyoShin · · Score: 2

    Yeah, a lot of webcomics just use as a notification system... but I'm fine with that. I only find it a very minor annoyance to open a new tab (and no more than opening a new tab for a Slashdot post so I can read the comments!) Better than nothing, and I've stopped reading some webcomics completely because they didn't offer an RSS feed at all and I didn't find it worth my time to make an extra effort to visit them regularly (even when they have a consistent update schedule.)

    Actually, considering what a lot of RSS services seem to be doing, I think I'm in a minority that I'm using it to mostly skim headlines, instead of a summary dashboard like a Facebook or twitter timeline.

  21. Re: Even the correction is wrong! Holy shit! by driblio · · Score: 2

    You're right, it's not a big deal.

    So why is it so hard for the editors to get right?

  22. Re: RSS? by Entrope · · Score: 2

    Why, yes, I do still use Really Sloppy Slashdot. Isn't that obvious?