Slashdot Asks: Do You Still Use RSS?

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?

Comments

RTS?

[superdave80]

Real Time Syndication, or RSS

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

Re:RTS?

[synaptik]

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

I mean I got this article through RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[rdelsambuco]

bullshit

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Oswald McWeany]

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.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Gr8Apes]

I use outlook as my RSS reader

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

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Anubis IV]

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*

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[thegarbz]

bullshit

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

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[E-Rock]

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

Yes, I do.

[alexru]

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

Of Course

[chrisautrey]

How else would I get my Slashdot article headers?

Feedly is a godsend

[bigdady92]

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.

Not since Google Reader folded.

[Anonymous Coward]

RIP Google Reader.

Fuck you, Google.

Yes

[mseeger]

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 :-(.

Yup. The Old Reader

[kwerle]

http://theoldreader.com/

Yes

[Burz]

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

Firefox Live Bookmarks in the Bookmarks Toolbar

[m0gely]

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.

Podcasts

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

Re:iGoogle

[Scarred Intellect]

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.

Yes, I use it, and It IS RSS

[CAOgdin]

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!

Re:I used to use RSS

[slimjim8094]

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