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Why RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: One of the main reasons RSS is so beloved of news gatherers is that it catches everything a site publishes -- not just the articles that have proved popular with other users, not just the articles from today, not just the articles that happened to be tweeted out while you were actually staring at Twitter. Everything. In our age of information overload that might seem like a bad idea, but RSS also cuts out everything you don't want to hear about. You're in full control of what's in your feed and what isn't, so you don't get friends and colleagues throwing links into your feeds that you've got no interest in reading. Perhaps most importantly, you don't need to be constantly online and constantly refreshing your feeds to make sure you don't miss anything. It's like putting a recording schedule in place for the shows you know you definitely want to catch rather than flicking through the channels hoping you land on something interesting. There's no rush with RSS -- you don't miss out on a day's worth of news, or TV recaps, or game reviews if you're offline for 24 hours. It's all waiting for you when you get back. And if you're on holiday and the unread article count starts to get scarily high, just hit the mark all as read button and you're back to a clean slate.
When Google News changed their web site format (and rendered it much, much less useful to me), I switched to using RSS feeds.
I had forgotten how awesome getting news this way is, and wonder why I ever stopped.
I use Feedly to monitor around 100 RSS feeds. Every morning I peruse the headlines and read any stories of interest, the way people used to read the morning newspaper. There isn't really any reasonable alternative. Visiting all those individual sites and dealing with different layouts, scrolling, paging, etc. would be a nightmare.
Could someone recommend to me a newsreader that will integrate several news feeds into a single one? I do not want to use a web site that I have to log into. I just want an app or browser plugin. Thanks.
Most sites implement their RSS feed as a "most recent X items" and if there were more than X in however long you were offline - oops, they're just gone. You missed them.
There are many solutions to this issue. The one I prefer is to use Tiny Tiny RSS that runs on my home server. It constantly gathers stories from the feeds I've defined, organizes them into topics that I've defined, and keeps those stories available for as long as I define (even forever, if I wish).
Then it provides RSS feeds of its own (as well as a web interface). I use the RSS feeds from it instead of going straight to the source. I don't miss any stories.
That's my solution, but it's one of many.
What's the practical benefit of "tracking news" supposed to be? News makes for poor entertainment. "Breaking" news tends to be inaccurate and the corrections usually don't rate headlines. It's also full of nonsense, like "someone said XYZ thing on twitter", or 50 different kinds of clickbait, or the latest dramatic semi-truthful story to troll the news consumers.
Conversations about the latest news are tedious. People just repeat the shit the newscasters and writers say, and most of them are repeating shit from other news. They all think very highly of themselves.
Unless you're tracking news for professional reasons, you're better off just reading it the next day on some web site. Or not reading it.
Not sure if anyone else has pointed out that RSS is decentralized (like the good old web 1.0 sites that serve it up), and therefore not subject to the whims of an editor like Facebook or Twitter.
Sure, RSS is great for keeping up with your latest sites. Especially those low-volume sites that might publish an article every few months, and you forgot that it existed. But the real joy of reading by RSS is the lack of formatting. No more "read more" buttons, no more in-your-face javascript popup, no more loading 24 trackers. Just the article with photos.
In fact, I'm surprised that RSS hasn't been removed by the hipster designer crowd for being obsolete (because it's old, not because it's useless) and failing to track engagement or whatever. Frankly, I think they've forgotten that it's on their sites.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!