It's time to head back to RSS? - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/rss-readers-feedly-inoreader-old-reader/ <comment><USER3> The key thing to know about RSS is that most of the real news sources, those that have actual reporters who go out and find news, have RSS feeds. Reuters, the Associated Press, the New York Times, the BBC...

Here's Reuters Top News.[1] Just the news, no ads, no clickbait. Reuters is useful because their RSS feed contains a readable story summary. Many RSS feeds just have a truncated sentence and a link. Both CNN [2] and Fox News [3] are like that. Voice of America is at the other extreme - the whole story is on RSS.[4]

[1] [http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/topNews](http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/topNews) [2] [http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss](http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss) [3] [http://www.foxnews.com/about/rss/](http://www.foxnews.com/about/rss/) [4] [https://www.voanews.com/rssfeeds](https://www.voanews.com/rssfeeds)

<comment><USER4> Pretty much everything has RSS feeds. Random blogs, webcomics, even major sites like YouTube.

If it puts out content on a regular basis, chances are you can subscribe to it via RSS.

<comment><USER5> I think the OPs point is that there are very valuable first-party sources of information with RSS feeds that you shouldn't ignore.

Basically, there is gold out there.

<comment><USER3> Facebook and Twitter both used to have RSS feeds, and stopped supporting RSS to force people to use their ad-heavy client interfaces. But that's not where the good stuff is. While "social" has dropped RSS, it's still doing great for real news.

<comment><USER6> I wrote a simple Twitter API to RSS script and have been using that to read Twitter (via Feedly) for a few years now. The downside is that you don't get tweets at anything even approaching real time (Feedly seems to hit my RSS once every 6 hours), but I find it just perfect for low volume Twitter feeds (like bands announcing new releases or shows).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Funny, I've set up a RSS reader again just this week.

Prior to that, my main source of information was google feed (when you sweep right on android main screen - for those who don't know it, it's a feed of news curated by google supposed to match our interests). I totally loved it, as it properly detected my interests and shown articles about them even from websites I don't know about.

But lately, I saw more and more posts I wasn't interested in. Well, it always happened, but those made me wondering because they were posts about brands, or very specific products. Was this promoted content? I don't have a clue.

Be it promoted content or not, I realized I was vulnerable: anything could be pushed to me and I would think I see it because I'm interested in it. And I have no way of checking why something appears in my feed.

So I decided to get back to RSS, and realized I could still have the discovery of new sources using... google alerts. I can set a google alerts using the advanced search semantics of google search, and get the result as a RSS feed. This means I discover new sources and I can verify why it appeared (it matches my custom search). Best of both world.

And obviously, I can also subscribe to specific RSS feeds to be sure to not miss something I love.

<comment><USER8> > it's a feed of news curated by google supposed to match our interests

Really? I've always found it to be awful, majority things I am _not_ interested in.

I just checked, and only 2 in 10 were mildly interesting to me. Three of them were about sports, which is way off the mark for me.

Does it optimise based on my interactions with that application in particular, or is it meant to be linked with the rest of my google account?

<comment><USER9> Being pro-active about telling it which topics or sources you don't like helps a lot. My only wish is to say that I don't like a specific article. Often I get an article on a topic from a source I generally like but the specific article is junk.

<comment><USER10> When the last election's campaigns were ramping up, I went into my Google interests sections and made every effort to tell it I was disinterested in politics and the 2 big names. I only started getting MORE political content until it overwhelmed my feed. For a few months I tried swiping it all away whenever I checked, but seemed to get zero response. I then started telling it I'm not interested in any stories from any sources that report anything political. In other words, I blocked the mainstream media. It got significantly better, but it still tries to shoehorn in a few articles on these topics by pulling from obscure local news outlets that are from the other side of the country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been a (paying) user of NewsBlur ([https://newsblur.com/](https://newsblur.com/)) since Google Reader shut down and haven't looked back.

p.s: In HN spirit, it also happens to be one developer's side-project-turned- profitable-business, and the "social" features a totally non-intrusive, but there if you want to know what people are sharing and commenting on.

<comment><USER12> After Google Reader went away I was actively looking for a reader where, by giving the creator money, I was ensuring it would stick around. And also where I was the customer rather than the product. There's a free version you can use to try it out but it's limited in the number of feeds. And $24 a year isn't a high price for what I'm getting.

<comment><USER13> Looks like it's $36/year now.

<comment><USER14> Still easily worth it. I probably get my $2/month value's worth in a single couch session, throwing my saved YouTube feeds onto the Chromecast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> RSS never went away. Podcasting has made careers (e.g. deboarah francis-white, roman mars, andy & helen zaltzman, ollie mann and many others). The technological underpinning of podcasting is entirely RSS. And it ain't going away, or getting embraced and extended any time soon.

<comment><USER16> Podcasting feels like an alternate reality where none of the massive players took over and everything stayed federated.

<comment><USER17> Yep. It's perplexing that a YouTube for podcasts (with centralized ad serving and similar profit sharing) hasn't emerged. The space is endearing - <USER2> that's why it is so vibrant?

<comment><USER18> Well, distribution is fairly centralized [ADDED: in practice through iTunes/Google Play/etc.] and the hosting of the actual podcasts is cheap enough that throwing them on S3 or wherever isn't really a burden for most people. And advertising, when it exists at all, tends to be native advertising.

> The space is endearing - maybe that's why it is so vibrant?

That's true but arguably YouTube at least started out that way as well. I suspect that there are a number of factors; no single one I can think of (except maybe the hosting costs and that seems an unsatisfactory explanation by itself) really captures it.

<comment><USER19> I think it's decentralized partly because itunes doesn't integrate with any other services. So to serve android and IOS many podcasters NEED a single RSS feed that they point iTunes and other services to. Many relatively small services exist to help with hosting, and usually provide a hosted RSS link independent of itunes/whatever.

I really hate that many podcasters are trying to push their own app or their publishers / organizations app (even NPR is doing this). Getting everyone using the same platform is how podcasts will get youtubified.

<comment><USER20> The biggest thing I was surprised about when I started a podcast is that iTunes doesn't host or distribute podcasts. As an end-user, I thought I was getting iTunes content with podcasts. But in reality it's just an aggregator like reddit or HN: it's full of links, but those links are external and pull content from other places.

I was also surprised by how easy (and free) it is to get a podcast on iTunes, especially compared to getting an app on the App Store.

<comment><USER18> I suspect that a lot of it's just historical happenstance. Podcasting as we think of it today started ~2003 and was very intertwined with the development of RSS. The click-wheel iPod (which was really the breakout model) wasn't until the next year. And the current era of podcasting didn't really take off until it became easy to sync with smartphones.

So this was a case where Apple sort of came along for the ride and didn't see podcasting as being a big deal--which they were sort of right about; arguably even today it's somewhat mainstream but I'd bet the majority of people in the US have never listened to a podcast and certainly don't listen regularly.

<comment><USER20> Yeah another thing I'm surprised at, being a relatively new podcaster, is how often I approach people/businesses to interview them and they tell me they either don't listen to podcasts or don't even know what they are.

<comment><USER21> On a recent trip back home, I had some downtime and my device was broken, so I threw a bunch of podcasts on the Apple TV.

A few weeks later my dad calls to tell me he doesn't know how any of this works, but now he gets amazing content while driving, instead of just listening to the mostly ads that came through his antenna.

So.. just lack of awareness? Just fiddly enough to keep people away?

I have a sneaking suspicion that if tomorrow Apple or Google just subscribed everyone to 99% Invisible and waited, FM radio would be dead in a year.

<comment><USER18> Probably all of the above. Plus, for a lot of people, radio is mostly background noise that, in the case of news and talk radio, is always current. And there's always NPR to mostly avoid advertising.

Many people don't want to have to deliberately choose content a lot of the time. I've heard people argue that they don't want to always have to use Netflix because they can't just flip on a channel and/or channel surf.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you haven't tried RSS as your main mode of information consumption in a while, you should give it a shot. I went all-in on RSS recently and it's been great. Way more thoughtful, long form content. Smaller dose information sources (Twitter, etc.) are useful in their own way, but I've found that the amount of time required to create a unit of media is a pretty good reverse indicator of how likely it is to use the baser emotions to acquire and keep my attention.

<comment><USER23> > Way more thoughtful, long form content."

Isn't RSS the same content as on the publishers page or site though? Maybe I am misinterpreting you comment?

<comment><USER22> Yeah, it's the same content. It's just that if you switch to consuming it via RSS, you don't get sucked into all the bite sized media that permeates the web.

<comment><USER23> I see, yes that makes sense. There's nothing that detracts from the reading experience more than an advertisement placed between two adjacent paragraph in s story. Even the moribund print news media doesn't do this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> RSS is awesome. Bring on its resurgence.

But.

It is fundamentally not fit as a Facebook or social media replacement because of it's lack of simple commenting support. It suits some curmudgeonly old farts like me, perhaps. But even I want to feedback sometimes or join in the discussion (hence this comment).

Are there solutions that a content creator can provide, via RSS, without requiring its readers to install particular jiggery pokery? Or is the only option HN / reddit style commenting sites, separate from the content?

<comment><USER25> I think HN might be the only place I read the comments. Missing the hell stew of a comments section is a feature as I see it.

<comment><USER26> Agreed. I was glad when npr.org removed their Disqus comments sections. Disqus comments on news websites tend to be very nasty and stain websites more often than not IMO. Disqus comments on _local_ news sites are an absolute cesspool.

<comment><USER27> Funny because there was a time where Disqus comments actually improved the quality of commentary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I use my own RSS reader since around 8 years now. It has evolved quite a lot. Before I was using aKregator.

I started with a simple CherryPy project and a SQLite database. It is now using Flask, SQLAlchemy and React: [https://www.newspipe.org/](https://www.newspipe.org/)

I have something like 200000 articles in the database. And the oldest article is from February 1995!

<comment><USER29> Just a heads-up: Tried logging in before I got the confirmation e-mail, typo in error message:

> User is desactivated

Should probably be something like

> User account has not been activated yet. Check your e-mail, etc. etc.

<comment><USER28> Thanks, fixed. I used "Account not active", because an account can be deactivated later.

Maybe it will be even better to just say something like 'bad login and/or password'. In order to give the minimum of information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I completely agree. When did RSS go out of style anyway?

The other day I wanted to subscribe to an author's posts on Medium, but I couldn't find a RSS feed anywhere, so I never did. Seems like a loss for the author to me, seeing as gaining influence and credibility is probably the goal of many who write posts. It would also seem as if Medium doesn't want to add RSS as it would take control away in terms of recommending content to people, etc. |

<comment><USER31> > When did RSS go out of style anyway?

It went away when Google killed Reader. Reader had more or less killed off the independent RSS reader market. When it got shuttered, alternatives weren't well developed and people shifted more or less entirely onto Twitter. The Twitter shift had been happening already but the shutdown kind of forced the issue.

<comment><USER32> I think you and HN in general vastly overstates the gravitas of the Google Reader shutdown. I loved it too but the demise of RSS happened probably more because of people switching to Twitter, Facebook and others as their "aggregator" than by killing off one RSS-Reader.

<comment><USER33> If Google had just added comments or other social elements to their reader instead of killing it they might not have missed the boat.

Instead they killed their popular Reader and made Orkut and Google Plus.

<comment><USER34> They did have comments and other social elements [0]. It was possible to follow people and share articles with or without adding your own note to it. They had a bookmarklet that allowed you to share any article, even if it didn't have an RSS feed. Their move to Google+ sharing wasn't exactly an improvement though [1].

I never got why people moved to Twitter, it wasn't, and isn't, as good at consuming or sharing content as Reader was. It's just one more step towards the more centralized web we have today, and hopefully we will move back to a more decentralized experience soon.

[0] [http://googlereader.blogspot.se/2009/03/google-reader-is- you...](http://googlereader.blogspot.se/2009/03/google-reader-is-your-new- watercooler.html) [1] [http://googlereader.blogspot.se/2011/10/new-in-reader- fresh-...](http://googlereader.blogspot.se/2011/10/new-in-reader-fresh-design- and-google.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> To me, RSS and Twitter/FB/etc are very different things. With RSS you are "alone" while reading it. There's no one to discuss things with you. I'm not really qualified to make this statement, but I'd say RSS feeds don't have a social component, leaving your limbic system (responsible for social interaction) widely out of the process. You process the info and that's it.

With Twitter, everything is attached to a social context. If a link is posted by your personal idol, you engage in (pseudo?) social behavior if you read it. You may then feel compelled to discuss it, and you will feel rejected if nobody answers, or very good if you get a lot of likes. So, lots of limbic/social interaction.

Both have their merits.. without Twitter, I would have a content discovery problem, and with (only) Twitter I'll live in a bubble, plus my IRL social interactions might be somewhat crowded out by the interactions on Twitter, plus Twitter can make me feel socially miserable for very petty reasons.

Personally I would love a system that combines my personal RSS feed with recommendations resulting from mining Twitter and applying ML to generate relevant results.

<comment><USER36> Well, one reason Google Reader's closure was such a loss was because it added a social layer to RSS. And it was a completely optional and non-intrusive social layer. I really wish Google had tried to enhance Reader instead of killing it to promote Google+. Allowing the ability to post short messages in your shared feeds would have made it very Twitter like, only nicer.

<comment><USER35> They should kill Google Plus and resurrect the Reader.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Have been using [https://inoreader.com](https://inoreader.com) since the Year Google Reader closed, and imho, it's better than Feedly.

I'm also usually reading HN via my full-text feed. Meaning, I don't have to load a link every time, I focus on the articles first, and I can easily pre- load everything for offline reading on mobile.

I think, in case of RSS such online services are superior to self-hosted solutions - whether server or client - as there is a greater chance someone is already aggregating a feed you might discover only some time in the future.

<comment><USER38> What makes it better than Feedly? I've been using Feedly since Google Reader closed and I think it pretty much nails this simple tool. How is it even possible to be much better?

<comment><USER37> The dev has always been really responsive and closely watching the community, while Feedly focuses on premium support and feels more corporate.

Several features are free: Unlimited sources and feeds, entire search for your own feeds, unlimited tags, sharing via inoreader email

There is also: loading of mobilized content via single click/key, better shortcuts, comprehensive tagging management, more settings, better settings placement, contact management, better feeds stats info, save an entry as pdf or print it, more sharing options, better compact theme, more RSS export settings, export the entire profile which includes the content for favorites and save web pages

Free Feedly boards are limited to 3 and have been only introduced last year, while tags in Inoreader are more powerful, free and part of the service since 2013

<comment><USER38> Now that I'm trying Inoreader, the killer feature for me is being able to open items in background tabs. Too bad that requires a plugin for Firefox.

<comment><USER37> Are you talking about the keyboard shortcut? If so, there is no need for an addon on Firefox.

<comment><USER38> When I tried the keyboard shortcut without the addon, it just triggered a popup saying I needed the addon.

<comment><USER37> Ah, yeah, you're correct. Firefox had changed the permissions for this some time ago.

You can optionally toggle the browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground value in about:config to true, then the v shortcut will open in background.

That said, I find the add-on a must-have. I'm always using it to save web pages. Do not forget to check the HTTPS option in setting, though.

As a reference [1]:

browser.tabs.loadInBackground => when you open a regular link in a new tab using Ctrl+click (or right-click > Open in a New Tab) default = true, do not make the new tab active In the Options dialog/page, this is controlled by the "When I open a link in a new tab, switch to it immediately" setting.

browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground => when you divert a script-generated new window to a new tab using Ctrl+click, or when a page uses the target attribute to launch a link in a new window and you divert it to a new tab default = false, make the new tab active

browser.tabs.loadBookmarksInBackground => when you load a bookmark in a new tab using Ctrl+click (or right-click > Open in a New Tab) default = false, make the new tab active

[1] [https://support.mozilla.org/en- US/questions/1066419](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1066419)

<comment><USER38> Thanks! That actually fixes my biggest problem with Feedly if this Inoreader trial doesn't work out for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I've continued using RSS for years, even when it was a "dying" technology. It certainly never died for me, and is super useful. It's probably the first app I reach for in the morning. I use a few apps not mentioned here. Each is for a Unix/Linux platform: Newsbeuter is a console RSS feeder that's a dream if you prefer keyboard driven software. You can update one feed or all of them, search across all feeds for key words, export to OPML, etc. I also used curn, a java app that can email you your custom feed update whenever you run it with cron. Lastly, rawdog updates feeds and publishes a custom web page. I use it on a VPS running a webserver, and visit it from wherever I like. RSS has been a good way for me to stay in touch with individual bloggers etc who publish sporadically. And I inherently distrust any software that wants to customize a feed for me based on my interests, etc. I always suspect they are more focused on pushing to me what others have paid them to push, than showing me what they think I'll like. How can any paid company ever keep straight those two inherently different things? ("Here, I think you'd like this because I earn money if you do").

<comment><USER40> > RSS has been a good way for me to stay in touch with individual bloggers etc > who publish sporadically.

This!

This has to be the main selling point.

The second would be to NOT use a web service but to run your own desktop feed aggregator. Everyone should stop using walled gardens for things you can easily do yourself:

YOU should be responsible for what you publish - no one else.

YOU should be responsible for what you read - no one else.

It doesn't work any other way. I'm not able to decide what you can and cant write on your blog. I'm also not able to decide what you can and cant read.

If your crap ends up on my webserver in whatever way I will be responsible for it(!)

Someone once said: When you grow up you have to be your own mum. It might sound like a lame joke but if you want lame nothing can beat a formula where one ends up responsible for what other people publish. Any amount of needless centralization will have the usual suspects pressure that entity into censorship.

What is legal in one country will land you in prison in the next.

Employers, government, border and airport security etc cant "ask" you for access to your home desktop computer.

But more importantly: Without RSS you cant read small websites that rarely publish. This also means you don't have to make your own website anymore in 2018 because no one reads it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I've tried Feedly but my goodness, the corporate language is such a turn off. I just want a feed reader, I don't want to "Fuel your team's success," "Enrich articles with unique insights," "Automate your content workflows," "Reinforce your digital brand". These features may be cool and useful, but the way they're sold makes me gag.

I used my ad blocker to remove the "Well done!" that appears when everything is marked as read, it's so patronising.

Now I use rrss ([https://github.com/pmarinov/rrss](https://github.com/pmarinov/rrss)) because it just reads feeds and doesn't constantly promote itself with management garbage.

<comment><USER42> To me inoreader.com is the perfect Google reader like feed reader. I don't get all the fuzz about feedly, there are better alternatives. just my $0.02

<comment><USER43> Tried first The Old Reader but at some point of time switched to Inoreader for a reason I can't remember anymore but Inoreader has been really awesome all the way <3

<comment><USER44> I went the same route, but The Old Reader at one day announced shutting down for all users that came after Google Reader's end.

They reverted this a few days later but by then I was on an alternative already (could have been tt-rss then)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> > THE MODERN WEB contains no shortage of horrors, from ubiquitous ad trackers

This is from a page that connects to (excerpt):

       c.amazon-adsystem.com
       z-na.amazon-adsystem.com
       tag.bounceexchange.com
       graph.facebook.com
       sb.scorecardresearch.com
       cdn.mediavoice.com
       odb.outbrain.com
       cdn.quantummetric.com
       native.sharethrough.com
       s.skimresources.com
       pixel.tapad.com
       d.turn.com
       p.typekit.net
       use.typekit.net
       cdn.yldbt.com
       segment-data.zqtk.net

<comment><USER46> Yeah, but to be fair, the journalist who wrote this has little to no influence over the analytics choices made by the web developers who run wired.com.

<comment><USER45> Sure. Couldn't help to notice the irony though :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> If you miss the clean UI and keyboard shortcuts of Google Reader, I highly recommend BazQux Reader.

The front end tech is also pretty interesting: it's built with Ur/Web. [2]

[1] [http://bazqux.com](http://bazqux.com) [2] [https://github.com/bazqux/bazqux-urweb](https://github.com/bazqux/bazqux- urweb)

<comment><USER48> The Old Reader[1] has been my go-to. Looks similar.

[1] [https://theoldreader.com/](https://theoldreader.com/)

<comment><USER49> I'd been on The Old Reader ever since Google Reader shut down. Tried Bazqux thanks to a post here on HN and switched because it's much faster. Very noticeable with a lot of subscriptions (I have over 100).

Only relative downside is that there's no integration with Firefox's "Subscribe to this page" button, which TOR has. That means you need to use a javascript bookmark to subscribe to new feeds, which feels kludge-ey in comparison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Hot take: we should revive ATOM instead.

RSS and ATOM are both nearly always machine generated and machine read so this may seem trivial to argue, but for those who are interesting in seeing the difference, this is a good article [http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared](http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared)

\</comment><comment>--

When I wrote a forum software a while back, it was trivial to not only add a feed for new threads but also for new comments (per thread and board-wide). Made it very easy to monitor updates on all my devices. Most wikis have RSS/ATOM feeds for recent changes which is a great power feature for admins.

Mastodon is atom-based, I believe. Early twitter supported RSS / ATOM feeds which arguably made it easier to follow hashtags or news accounts.

Another benefit of RSS/ATOM is that you can plug them into chatbots or use them to mirror content. I would love to see syndication come back to the spotlight!

<comment><USER51> I wrote tweets2rss[1] and use it to turn my private lists into RSS feeds. For example, I have a feed in my RSS reader for interesting people (Bill Gates, Elon Musk, etc) and a list for interesting companies.

      [1]: https://github.com/dannysu/tweets2rss

<comment><USER52> Hey, this seems neat; I think I'll check it out. Thanks for contributing this!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> A visitor that comes to your site via social is MUCH more valuable than someone that comes via RSS. The economics of this reality are what removed RSS from the limelight.

Dear publishers, let's fix this. Whenever you publish a blog post, etc. please syndicate it on social and then go back to your site to add "DISCUSS THIS ON TWITTER/whatever AT [https://t.co/aesou02"](https://t.co/aesou02"). Make sure that this also syndicates to RSS.

Dear pubsubbers, let's fix this. In your reader software, please lint these special links and show the discussion below the news. We know you want to get into the content discovery business -- this is the first step.

See the Slashdot RSS feed as a good example, they inline the discussion right in the feed.

<comment><USER54> I am struggling to understand. Why is a social-origin visitor more valuable?

Honest question. I would have expected an RSS-origin to be a more tech-savvy reader and more likely to engage.

<comment><USER20> Engage where? Engage how? Tech savvy may not be what you're looking for, and is not always a good thing.

I think what fulldecent is saying is that people reading on RSS have a barrier to sharing and a barrier to commenting that doesn't exist on social media. On Twitter or Facebook, the "share" action is intrinsically linked to the article in its native format. Not so on RSS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> 100% of my news feed is RSS and have been the past 7 years (It's how I read HN[1]).

I use this Open Source RSS/Atom client:

[https://tt-rss.org/](https://tt-rss.org/)

Activate a couple plugins and it works just like Google Reader!

[1] [http://news.ycombinator.com/rss](http://news.ycombinator.com/rss)

</comment><comment><USER56> I used RSS while Google reader existed, and I stopped using it for a few years after it disappeared.

Now, I'm using a service that sends some RSS feed to my email so so can read them directly from there. I think it's amazing as it has all the features I need (tagging, mark read / unread) and I don't need to open another website / application to read my news.

<comment><USER57> Have you got a link?

<comment><USER58> I do the same. I use [https://blogtrottr.com/](https://blogtrottr.com/) and am very happy wit it.

<comment><USER59> Are you paying for it or do you just put up with the ads? If so, how intrusive are they?

<comment><USER58> I don't pay for it. They're not intrusive at all. Actually I'd forgotten there were ads until you mentioned it :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I agree with those that say RSS never went away, for the last 10 years or so I've noticed my dependence on RSS grow and it's critical to my keeping track of news across a number of blogs and websites. I wrote a shitty little blog post on it last year: [https://smcleod.net/thoughts/2017/09/22/return-of-the- rss.ht...](https://smcleod.net/thoughts/2017/09/22/return-of-the-rss.html)

</comment><comment><USER61> I've been using a hosted copy of TIny Tiny RSS ([https://git.tt- rss.org/fox/tt-rss/wiki](https://git.tt-rss.org/fox/tt-rss/wiki)) for a few years now combined with Fiery Feeds on iOS. It's been rock solid for me, it took a few weeks to dial in my settings for TTRSS but once those were locked in It's pretty empowering to filter out a lot of the noise in the news cycle.

<comment><USER62> Agree that this is an excellent combo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I found RSS feeds to be the best remedy for my accelerated bit-sized dopamine- inducing news consumption.

RSS lets me focus on what I actually want to read, makes me take long-break (instead of short bursts of Twitter updates), and gives me longer and more structured content.

I also use RSS for sharing articles, by giving the URL of your Pocket RSS feed to friends.

I'm glad that, in the age of algorithmically curated timelines, RSS still exist!

</comment><comment><USER64> I'm bummed that no one has mentioned Feedbin, for which I have paid since it launched back in 2013(?). It's fast, not too larded up with unnecessary features, works across the desktop, iOS, and Android, and costs money, so I know that it'll be around for a while, and that I'm the customer and not the product.

[https://feedbin.com](https://feedbin.com)

Edit: it's also OSS: [https://github.com/feedbin](https://github.com/feedbin)

<comment><USER65> Also early supporter here. For the great product/service I even voluntarily increaced my subscription rate, because $2 (what it started with) a month seemed way too cheap to me, especially for a heavy user like me. Still love it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Hey Wired, maybe RSS would be more popular if media outlets like you would put more in your RSS feeds than a title and single sentence for each article.

But I get it. You need ads to make money, and just putting ads in your RSS feed is not enough because they're not "interactive" enough, or something. You need those "engagement" metrics that you generate by making readers press a button to read the full article.

I was trying and fell short of something witty to say. Just, wow, this is a sorry state of affairs. Just give me the damn content and I'll be on my merry way.

<comment><USER67> _I was trying and fell short of something witty to say._

But you're right. I use feedly and have chrome extensions that's give me full articles in a readable fashion.

I would LOVE to visit some of my favorite sites and read articles as the site designers meant for them to be read. But all of the js and ad fuckery makes reading articles online an absolute goddamn chore lately.

So here we are.

RSS revival? Bring it on. I'll play drums.

<comment><USER68> TinyTinyRSS lets you use xpath to specify which element on the linked page is the "real" content. It was a life-saver when dealing with snippet-only feeds.

<comment><USER67> Ohh I didn't know of this, thanks for the recommendation will definitely check it out.

<comment><USER68> BTW, you'll need the feediron plugin for the functionality I was talking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Yes. But please not RSS. At least newer initiatives like JSON Feed have maintainers who respond to requests for improvements.

RSS feels like an abandoned standard. I tried to submit an improvement to the author directly to explicitly allow HTTPS URLs in light of upcoming iTunes changes to enforce HTTPS; they said by email that of course HTTPS resources are valid in their view, but they weren't prepared to actively update the spec to say as much. Until that's done some feed validators continue to mark HTTPS resources as invalid.

<comment><USER70> Does it matter, really? RSS, Atom, JSON, microformats, whatever; there are libraries that can parse any of these. What matters is the idea behind them, the technical implementation is secondary. Please don't revive the format wars.

<comment><USER69> I agree with the spirit of, "better to popularise independent syndication than fight over formats" except:

> the technical implementation is secondary

Until users get a bad experience that can't be solved easily because the spec was set in stone over a decade ago.

Or until people want to extend and improve the spec to create new standards that prevent fractured and disparate extensions to it.

Technical implementation is often secondary, but RSS already failed to achieve mainstream status once. That is not all down to the RSS spec, but recognising that RSS is a candidate for obsoletion and building on something active and progressive might give the idea of indie syndication a healthier second/third/fourth chance.

A non-dead spec that's actively tended, marketed, and used for building great new platforms may garner more interest and prevent the "been there — tried that — it wasn't for me" that RSS seems to induce in non-techies.

<comment><USER70> RSS is good enough for what it was made for and most of the parser libraries and software parse both Atom and RSS (all 0.9, 1.0 and 2.0). Atom vs RSS caused enough trouble already ( [https://indieweb.org/RSS_Atom_wars](https://indieweb.org/RSS_Atom_wars) ) and the solution is definitely not JSONFeed, just to break all previous feed reader implementation.

Let us accept that any parser lib should be able to deal with RSS and Atom, and move on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> One thing I don't understand is people who use all these websites to handle RSS. I've always used Firefox addons in order to handle RSS (before LiveClick which was awesome, now FeedBro or similar).

Why would you give control away for something as decentralized as RSS?

<comment><USER63> I would guess mainly for synchronization between different computers and devices?

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> I built a tiny website back in 2005-ish to aggregate RSS feeds from sites that I was interested in. Just for myself and didn't think too much that it could have been an actual product. That was before Google Reader launching in October 2005. Today it's sad to see Google Reader discontinued.

Somehow I find this article very interesting in that it's kind of a sandwich that the promotion of Feedly is inserted in the middle, which makes me wonder if the article really wants to advocate the revival of RSS, or is just another marketing one. Does anyone have the same feeling here (confusing face)?

Edited: fixed a typo: Google Reader launched in October 2005.

<comment><USER73> Hi Tony, just to be clear, it is not a promotion for us, we've been interviewed as well as all the other readers and only a fraction of what we've been asked was published. We had no control to review how the final article will look like either. -Petr @ Feedly

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> I use TinyTinyRSS. Works pretty well. Fully free unlike services such as Feedly, just like Reader was back in the day.

Works well on any shared hosting or VPS etc. as long as you've got PHP/MySQL/Postgres and the ability to setup a CRON job (CPanel/Plesk give you this) or the daemon.

</comment><comment><USER75> Erm.. I never stopped using RSS. I have never consumed news primarily on social media, I subscribe to hundreds of feeds and that's always where I get my news from.

I use Feedly with the wonderful Nextgen Reader client for Windows. 10/mobile. Beautiful app, service, news experience.

</comment><comment><USER76> Just to plug Newsblur, as others have been posting what they use. I've been using it since Google Reader shut down and am very happy with it.

</comment><comment><USER77> May I suggest FreshRSS, a free and self-hosted RSS reader: [https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS](https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS)

</comment><comment><USER78> For those getting into RSS, I can recommend two resources.

For a SaaS newsreader, I really enjoyed using Newsblur. Great service, excellent functionality, and first-rate support.

For a desktop newsreader, I suggest Emacs with elfeed. That's what I use today, and is the only reason I'm not still happily paying for Newsblur.

<comment><USER79> You lost me at Emacs.

<comment><USER80> Even if you don't use Emacs as an editor, consider using it just for elfeed (or magit). It works on almost every platform in existence and is rock solid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> Emacs has an interesting RSS feed reader: elfeed [ [https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed/blob/master/README.md) ], which even has an Android client [ [https://github.com/areina/elfeed- cljsrn/blob/master/README.m...](https://github.com/areina/elfeed- cljsrn/blob/master/README.md) ].

</comment><comment><USER82> Many of us never left. Yes, it was disappointing for a few days when google changed horses. Their loss. The article failed to mention that RSS feeds are the backbone of Amazon's Alexa Flash Briefings. Seems once again, Bezos and crew know best.

Shameless plug for our Flash Briefing (available on Alexa, iTunes, and our website but only available the days ending in "y"): [http://jmpurl.info/flashbriefing](http://jmpurl.info/flashbriefing)

<comment><USER83> I think the world is moving to a repeatable and reusable style of storing data.

RSS and JSON have become standards that people can use for data on multiple platforms.

<comment><USER82> Agreed. It is an API world. I recall trying make sense of xml then came RSS feeds. Then, why JSON, and now you can have RSS like feeds (and a lot more) via JSON.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> I'm interested in a reader that focuses on efficiency; like probably most people, no matter how much I try to cull them I end up with too many items in my list, more than I have time for.

Let's say it takes an average of 2.5 seconds to read a feed item subject line, decide whether to read it[0], and nothing else - not opening or reading any articles. In half an hour of concentration you could do that with ~700 feed items - again, without reading one article. Let's call 700 feed items a generous maximum; I doubt many will want to devote 30 minutes of their day only to reviewing feed items.

I end up with far more than 700 and I know I'm not the only one. How can I make it faster?

1\. Obviously, the UI must not slow me down in any way.

2\. Deduplication

3\. Grouping of feed items covering the same topic. There may be dozens of items covering the march last weekend: If I don't want to read about it, I can ignore them en masse. If I do want to read about it, I can select the best looking feed item from the group and ignore the rest.

4\. Display summaries instead of articles, at least optionally. If an item interests me, I can read the RSS summary and possibly save reading full articles that don't interest me or for which the summary contains the info I want.

... Is there a reader that does all that? Even if I have to pay for it? And it's still not enough; I doubt I could efficiently process all the items using only above. What else can be done?

[0] Source: I just timed myself doing that with 10 feed items in 26 seconds

<comment><USER85> The major feature here would be deduplication, in my opinion. That would be hard to do though as it would have to parse the feed contents (which vary from links to articles to full blow articles sometimes) and use some kind of percentage to determine whether or not it's a dupe? Curious if there is a smarter solution to that feature possibility.

<comment><USER84> > use some kind of percentage to determine whether or not it's a dupe

That's the problem I intended to solve by 'grouping', as I called it: Don't delete the similar items, but group them together (see my GP comment regarding the functionality).

Also, it might not be as hard as it seems with this data. There would be maybe thousands of records (though you'd want it to scale higher); how many would have the same sets of proper nouns, for example, and not be about the same topic?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> I never stopped using an RSS reader, or writing on my own blog, hosted on my setup, with my domain for that matter.

For its purpose an RSS reader is a much better experience than everything else.

The only thing that comes close is Twitter, but it's too noisy, you can lose really good, but less popular articles, between all the other shit happening on Twitter. It's also addictive and time consuming.

Sure, go back to RSS, but some of us never left it and we've been enjoying it.

</comment><comment><USER87> My phone, an old Nokia, has a built in RSS reader and when I visit a web site that has RSS I get a "follow" button next to favorite. I can even set the RSS reader to show me a notification when there's an update. The same convenience could probably be accomplished with a browser extension or native app.

<comment><USER88> Firefox does this, albeit in a more subtile and hence less discoverable way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> If you already use an email client and have a place to run cron jobs, I highly recommend a feed->email converter. No need for a separate RSS reader, and you get cross-device syncing for free. Options include feed2email[1], feed2imap[2], and my own feedmail[3] (just "released", but I've been using it for years). I prefer clients like the latter two that can upload via IMAP, since that gives better control than sending via SMTP.

[1] [https://github.com/agorf/feed2email](https://github.com/agorf/feed2email)

[2] [https://github.com/feed2imap/feed2imap](https://github.com/feed2imap/feed2imap)

[3] [https://github.com/zsau/feedmail](https://github.com/zsau/feedmail)

<comment><USER90> Thunderbird already supports feeds.

<comment><USER91> And for anyone who still thinks that the T-bird project died long ago, look again ... it's been greatly improved for the past few years and an interface overhaul is in the works.

I don't subscribe to any podcasts that don't support RSS. Most do (altho a few make you use a search-engine to find out where).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> I support this, but I think that RSS services for publishers need to be a part of this conversation, too. I wrote a piece a while back about how FeedBurner has basically been allowed to survive in zombie form at Google—with literally no improvements since at least 2011.

[https://tedium.co/2017/11/14/google-feedburner-rss- history/](https://tedium.co/2017/11/14/google-feedburner-rss-history/)

There are alternatives to FeedBurner that are quite good (I personally use FeedPress) but I think that if RSS is going to get any momentum back, we need more people making these tools again. The emergence of JSON as an alternative to RSS is a real opportunity here.

(Side note: Was a long-term Digg Reader user, so its loss was felt. I found FeedBin a decent alternative for my needs, FWIW.)

<comment><USER93> I'm the CEO of FeedPress, thanks for your support!

BTW we're supporting JSON feeds since the 1.0 release: [https://feed.tedium.co/?format=json](https://feed.tedium.co/?format=json)

Cheers

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> I describe myself as the last "old" using RSS because after Google Reader went away, I found Inoreader. It's a clone, with tons more filtering features and (importantly) the ability to follow Twitter feeds and searches as well.

I recently discovered HN RSS, which is awesome for showing comments: [https://hnrss.org/newcomments?q=kubernetes+OR+k8s](https://hnrss.org/newcomments?q=kubernetes+OR+k8s)

And here's the trick for seeing all new tweets with relevant hashtags but not retweets: [https://twitter.com/search?q=%23kubecon+OR+%23cloudnativecon...](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23kubecon+OR+%23cloudnativecon+exclude%3Aretweets)

<comment><USER95> I don't know why I ever stopped using Inoreader in favor of Feedly. Feedly's Android app is atrocious and I can't open links in Android Chrome using feedly.com, which just made me stop using RSS altogether. It wasn't broken in the first place, I have no idea why I meddled with it.

<comment><USER94> I prefer using Inoreader's mobile website to their iPhone app, since it opens links in my regular browser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER96> RSS has been the backbone of my online information management and news consumption since 2006 and it's still unrivaled. A web without is impossible to imagine. In my eyes, Feedly has done a fairly good job at making the format accessible even to average users.

</comment><comment><USER97> I decided to build my own RSS reader a few months back after getting into the habit of consuming news via RSS, and not really being thrilled with any of the readers out there. The source is open and can be pulled/built locally from GitHub[0] or accessed at the public instance for free[1]. It also made it to the front page of HN through a Shown HN post a while back, so at least a few people here enjoyed it (:

[0] [https://github.com/jtanza/rufus](https://github.com/jtanza/rufus)

[1] [http://rufus.news](http://rufus.news)

</comment><comment><USER98> I role my own aggregator, its 1000 years ahead of the rest. Im only half kidding.

Ill share my most recent idea: sort news items by the amount of time between its pubdate and the previous pubdate in that feed. (Discard items older than x where x is since last time you read the results, a fixed amount of time or more if the number of "winning" results is insufficient.)

The idea is simple. That guy who never says anything. When he opens his mouth it should be interesting to hear what comes out.

He will be delighted to have 1 reader. A much more enjoyable position than listening to some screaming news anchor or other attention whore.

</comment><comment><USER99> IMO, RSS is by far the best tool to get news content. Thanks to the ratio signal/noise.

Problem is, how to convince website editors to promote theirs RSS feeds while there are many social networks out there with built-in ads feature.

</comment><comment><USER100> Comparison of feed aggregators on Wikipedia

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_feed_aggregators](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_feed_aggregators)

</comment><comment><USER101> I'm using a self-hosted instance of CommaFeed and it's awesome. Simple, no distractions, fast and reliable.

<comment><USER102> This. Best reader I've found.

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> Amen.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. But almost nobody is offering RSS at the moment and most publishers who do drop the ball. Feeds are broken or partial.

It might be time to start from scratch though, I'm not sure RSS is simple enough for normal people. Podcast delivery format would be nice, where you subscribe and discover from one aggregated portal and it's finding similar content and making solid recommendations. Maybe inject some type of medium / rank feature so you can track trending content and subscribe to channels of what's popular.

<comment><USER104> Podcasts _are_ RSS feeds aren't they?

<comment><USER105> Podcast feeds often are, though they can really be any web feed format[0].

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed#Confusion_between_web...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed#Confusion_between_web_feed_and_RSS)

<comment><USER106> The RSS feed makes a podcast out of a bunch of audio content imho.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> Also be able to consume activitypub feeds. [http://activitypub.rocks/](http://activitypub.rocks/) supported by Mastodon sites and others.

</comment><comment><USER108> Remember planets - public online news readers? Why not build your own little news feed with pluto [1] (and SQLite) and the universal feedparser library [2] supporting RSS, JSON Feed, Feed.TXT, HTML Microformat Feeds, and many more formats :-). [1] [https://github.com/feedreader](https://github.com/feedreader) [2] [https://github.com/feedparser](https://github.com/feedparser)

</comment><comment><USER109> I spend a lot of time in Slack during the day, so I decided it should become my RSS reader. I created a dedicated team and used an RSS bot to subscribe. It works really well.

</comment><comment><USER110> RSS was not discoverable for non-techy users, in part because browser support was clunky and publishers were reluctant to send readers away from their websites (and ads). But these days publishers rely on Twitter and Facebook as a "worse is better" method to syndicate links to their content. Twitter and Facebook are discoverable and sharable.

I feel like there is some opportunity to create new personalized social software or services using RSS in a post-Facebook world.

</comment><comment><USER111> Maybe MRSS has a chance. I am old enough to remember the first go around at all this. I remember reading an article during the 1990s on O'Reilly about RSS, semantic web, etc. I used to read Dave Winer's blog pretty regularly. I remember being skeptical at the time and it turns out my skepticism was prescient.

Nowadays it seems common to generate MRSS feeds for podcasts and video playlists. Devices like Alexa, Google Home, etc. are taking advantage of this format. Instead of it being used to "free-the-web" it is being used by content aggregators to ease vendor lock-in. This lock-in could not be achieved with textual content (where it is easy to write a competing application) but it can be achieved with hardware devices.

I'm even more cynical now than I was in the 1990's. I do not see content creators providing unfettered access to their content. The whole point of vendor platforms like Facebook and newer devices like Alexa is that the content is marshalled by the platform NOT the user. Content creators will give that ground to another corporation that they can negotiate with but I don't believe they will ever give it to users directly.

</comment><comment><USER112> I always felt RSS/ATOM were underrated,

So in 2015 for the love of RSS and information consumption we set out to build a completely customisable news aggregator app with fast parsing (RSS/ATOM), category selection, reorder categories, notification customisation -(schedule, DND), image toggle, data saving mode, filter, youtube, sharing news with own voice attached called Talk about News - [https://talkabout.co.in/](https://talkabout.co.in/)

Sharing news along with voice was the USP, so that the shared content gets more value. While working on this, we saw that not every site followed RSS/ATOM standards we had to individually handle different sites for the shortcomings. I'm certain that, though Feedly started as RSS aggregator they are now parsing the sites as a whole for content for the same reasons.

By the time we built and released it, we understood Facebook has become the defacto news consumption source and without big marketing budget; our project was dead as soon as it arrived. We tried to salvage the tech and re-brand it as 'build your own app'for bloggers, but it didn't take off.

But we did take the voice sharing feature from TaN to another product called larynx, as we understood the 'News' in the name of Talk about News was one of the main inhibitors for downloads.

larynx (PH) - [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/larynx](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/larynx)

Note: If any of you tried the app and if didn't work as expected; my apologies as the app hasn't been actively developed for years now & the website exists only for historical reasons.

<comment><USER103> They were. It was just too complicated for people. I couldn't get my parents to setup RSS. No way.

</comment></comment><comment> Digital-Citizen The article asks if "anyone weary of black-box algorithms controlling what you see online" and then offers choices which are either hosted web services or proprietary programs, both of which grant someone else the power to control what you see via that reader. So even though standards everyone is free to implement (RSS is certainly in that set) are critically important it's hard to take some of the article seriously.

The real way to avoid the problem of non-freedom and deny the admins/programmers the power to control your reading is to use free software RSS feed readers instead of hosted services you don't host yourself or proprietary programs. Choose RSS readers that respect a user's freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify the program. [https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Category/Internet- application...](https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Category/Internet- application/newsreader) points to some.

</comment><comment><USER113> I miss Sage++ (Higmmers Edition). [1]

Sidebar RSS reader for Firefox. It was perfect for my use case. (Now its dead due to WebExtension)

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/sagepp- higmmers-...](https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/sagepp-higmmers- edition/)

<comment><USER114> So do I, but I've discovered a reasonable replacement: Brief.[0]

0: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- GB/firefox/addon/brief/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- GB/firefox/addon/brief/)

<comment><USER113> I try to get along with Feedbro but its just not the same. [0]

[0] [https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/feedbroreader/](https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/feedbroreader/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've been aggregating my news for my own use recently so I can keep a database of articles and grab articles from more sources than just RSS (some are parsed out of HTML).

The Python code for some of the sources is here: [https://github.com/wybiral/stream-sources](https://github.com/wybiral/stream- sources)

On my network there's a bunch of those stream sources feeding into a Golang server that stores the articles and aggregates the ones I'm interested in for real-time updates/alerts.

The nice thing is that I can attach temporary scrapers with alerts to monitor status pages and other updates that don't use RSS or anything.

IMO WebSocket API's or streaming HTTP make more sense than RSS these days. But RSS can easily be converted into a format like that if you store the recent history and only push new content.

<comment><USER115> Generally speaking, is it legal storing RSS content (if the RSS contains the article)

<comment><USER33> It's for my own use.

Also I don't see why it would be any different than leaving it open in my browser or something.

The articles here are mostly title, link, summary too. So not too unlike what someone would share on social media or something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER116> I just remember the overwhelm: opening up Google Reader and forgetting what I went there to do because there were so many unread things. I don't think this is endemic to a protocol, but the social filter on top of content is how I find most of the things that I find useful and interesting today.

<comment><USER117> I always found RSS/Atom most useful for following sources (usually personal blogs and podcasts) that post infrequently, but where every post is worth reading. Like Oona Räisänen's blog: [http://www.windytan.com/](http://www.windytan.com/)

For sources that post a lot, it's less useful, since I can just visit every couple of days and have stuff to read.

And this means one can easily keep up with the feeds.

<comment><USER118> How do you identify such sites?

<comment><USER117> What do you mean by identify? Find them? Well, every way people find sites, from websearches that hit on a good post, links from other such sites, link aggregators, etc. I believe I got that one from Hackaday.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER119> I've been using the same method for about 16 years thanks to Firefox. RSS toolbar feeds[0] have been supported since Firefox was in beta (Phoenix). I never did use Google Reader, I viewed that as for the kids! Came and went and I never paid any attention to it, didn't need it and I waited out its existence apparently.

RSS toolbar feeds are also the reason I never switched to Chrome, ever. Google never wanted anyone to have ad-free RSS feeds catch on when they could potentially prevent a site visit.

For my iOS solution, I use Feedly by simply subscribing to the same sources as I do in Firefox. Not much else is necessary. Other than picking up Feedly for mobile, same tool all this time.

[0][https://i.imgur.com/6LTAie1.png](https://i.imgur.com/6LTAie1.png)

</comment><comment> huy-nguyen I subscribe to RSS/Atom feeds of more than 100 technical sites using Reeder, hosted by Inoreader for free. Overall it's been a great experience. The only gripe I have is that many sites these days (especially small blogs) don't have an RSS feed or have one that isn't discoverable.

</comment><comment><USER120> True. RSS gives control over what and how we consume information. The curated newsfeed is prone to gaming and misuse. In fact, we should be able to select feeds, curation engines and reader apps. This way it would be less of a "platform" and more of "www".

<comment><USER121> The issue of control with newsfeeds and RSS has been on my mind a lot the last year or so.

RSS and Atom are great as a protocol, but where things break down for me is in discovery, filtering, and selection of content.

There's a few traditional RSS/Atom readers I like, because I have complete control over the feeds I monitor. The problem with this is that then I have complete control over the feeds, and have no way to be alerted to content I might have otherwise missed. I think this is part of the "unread feed overload" problem mentioned by some others, that I just a firehose of feeds at me, with no prioritization of content.

The other end are more curated things, like Feedly. This is great, because I get alerted to things that are popular, but they're very centralized, and it seems like the more you get curation, the less often you're able to customize your feeds. Also, for whatever reason, with the curated systems, it seems like you kind of get the same things over and over again from different systems, like there's a set of feeds they all dip into and don't deviate from.

This is my ideal in an RSS/Atom reader (not saying it's realistic):

1\. Open source

2\. Good UI

3\. Can import and export using OPML or other similar standard open format

4\. Cross-platform, between desktop and mobile

5\. Decentralized feed recommendation

The last part is where things go a little off the beaten path, which is that it would be nice to have some way to get introduced to popular content without it going through some centralized service, like a recommendation system that's decentralized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER122> When did people stop using RSS? After Google Reader was available, I've never looked back.

<comment><USER123> I would say that Reddit and hacker news are direct "competitors" to RSS readers, it's a different kind of syndication flow that certainly replaced my RSS Reader for me.

<comment><USER124> hm, I'm actually reading both HN and reddit through RSS right now, just add .rss after any subreddit url and you are done: [https://www.reddit.com/r/wtf/.rss](https://www.reddit.com/r/wtf/.rss)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER125> I went to Blogtrottr [https://blogtrottr.com/](https://blogtrottr.com/) when Reader shut down. I have been very happy with it and it means one less place to go look, my feeds just come to my inbox.

</comment><comment><USER126> Here's a feed I made with pages that have reached number 1 on Hacker News: [http://enklo.se/hackernews/best-of-hacker- news.xml](http://enklo.se/hackernews/best-of-hacker-news.xml)

</comment><comment><USER127> I've pretty settled on using Feedly and Reeder in iOS, even though I experimented with RSS via IMAP[1] for a fairly long time.

I zip through 1000+ news items a day over breakfast in this way, and my only real gripes are duplicated postings (which are usually best solved by careful handpicking of news sources) and the lack of a decent backlog/archival feature (I settled on Pocket for that).

On and off, I try to build my own "most relevant/trending/hot items" feed via NLTK, but topics of interest vary too quickly in out industry for proper training...

[1]: [https://github.com/rcarmo/rss2imap](https://github.com/rcarmo/rss2imap)

</comment><comment><USER128> I seem to have missed the "abandon all RSS" movement, which doesn't surprise me. I am missing That One Puzzle Piece which enables me to understand why people ditched RSS in the first place. I'd appreciate enlightenment.

<comment><USER129> Google reader was introduced, made it look like it would be there forever and cost nothing, which killed any alternatives. Then Google killed reader in favor of Google+. At that point, there was no good reader, and even with not- as-good alternatives like feedly, a lot of people didn't feel like setting things up again. As a result, the whole ecosystem was knocked out of balance and never recovered.

<comment><USER128> > Google reader was introduced

Ah, a good point. This was a blip on my radar because, oddly, I had RSS and wasn't as plugged into Google at that time as I am now [yet am still 'on' RSS now more than ever].

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER130> I just started using Feedly again, but it looks like adding sub-Reddits is broken - they don't get updated. Anybody know of a way to side-step this? Use IFTTT to shoot new Reddit articles to an RSS feed that Feedly picks up?

</comment><comment><USER131> Version 2 of Winds (open source RSS/Podcast app) is coming out next month: [https://github.com/getstream/winds](https://github.com/getstream/winds)

<comment><USER132> looks good, will try

</comment></comment><comment><USER133> I recently started using RSS again after a long break. Like many of you I decided to build my own reader. Since RSS/Atom is quite easy to work with I didn't take me long to get something usable.

I built a Python library[0] to parse feeds and a Django app using it[1]. It is not ready for prime time yet, but I use it daily and like it.

[0] [https://github.com/NicolasLM/atoma](https://github.com/NicolasLM/atoma)

[1] [https://github.com/NicolasLM/feedsubs](https://github.com/NicolasLM/feedsubs)

</comment><comment><USER134> Multiple sources in one place, no new account, no giving away your email, no re-skimming over read/skipped articles (across sorces if your reader is any good), filters for known garbage (domains with pay/sign-up walls, blog spam, etc.).

My frustration with YouTube subscription mechanics is what resparked my interest in RSS years ago, that's when I found out most channels have a hidden RSS feed. Reddit has them, but the way they're delivered makes them difficult/impossible to filter. Most blogs have them, even if they don't display a link.

<comment><USER135> This sort of thing makes me wonder .. well why are we on this proprietary site here; why isn't the HN community using a decentralised sharing system?

</comment></comment><comment><USER136> Shameless plug: We created [https://contentgems.com](https://contentgems.com) as a feed reader on steroids: You can follow feeds, however you can also filter them based on powerful keyword based search (and other params). You can follow the CG firehose (tens of thousands of feeds we follow and index for you), to discover new feeds. And then you can curate and share the best articles from CG. It's a mashup of Feedly, Google Alerts, Buffer, and IFTTT/Zapier.

</comment><comment><USER137> I've been slowly adding to my RSS feed since 2006. It's migrated from Google Reader to "The Old Reader".

For some sources, it's the only way to keep up. I like that I can keep track of web comics I'm interested in. For thinks like Medium and Wordpress, they already have a feed reading compatible format.

I also add my Github, so I can see when other people commit to repositories in my lab.

Feed reading is great because it allows one to lurk. It gives the consumer more control over when to view material.

</comment><comment><USER138> Not finished ( performance), but my personal bookmarking site ( like HN or Reddit) supports the auto-download of Feeds and implements Tags through it ( RSS based).

[http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/Newest](http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/Newest)

For now, it's usefull for me personally, but it seriously needs a update.

It also supports url customizers ( eg. preventing paywalls from certain sites to redirect through the facebook share url)

<comment><USER139> Seems pretty dead. There's a timeout on the db.

<comment><USER138> Performance, it's probably syncing RSS feeds or too many people ( as mentioned, need to improve it).

Seems to work fine though when i'm watching it: [http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/Newest](http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/Newest) but a db timeout could be indeed.

<comment><USER138> Edit: made it 50% faster by now. Not enough though

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER140> What is the best RSS reader that has a customizable tiled layout, like [http://www.protopage.com/](http://www.protopage.com/)? By this I mean, I have (nearly) the whole screen at my disposal, can choose the number of columns and rows, and the height (number of article titles) for each tile/feed. For my money, no other layout comes close in terms of information ingestion efficiency.

</comment><comment><USER141> I would argue that RSS survived because feeds are offered by default on Wordpress blogs, and Wordpress powers a significant part of online publishing. Luckily, Automattic isn't the kind of company to pull off a Microsoft-style "Embrace, extend, extinguish" [0]

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish)

</comment><comment><USER142> The internet has become so hyper-commercialised that I don't think "innocent" technologies like RSS/Atom are going to make a comeback.

</comment><comment><USER143> As a news publisher, wouldn't encouraging RSS hurt the value of my ad space? What's the incentive? Would readers pay for access to an RSS feed?

<comment><USER144> Premium RSS feeds are one option, as well as putting only a brief summary of the article into the RSS with a link to the full site. The monetization model will probably look similar to Twitter, except without needing to dodge algorithmic uncertainty since RSS is a pure feed.

Plus, Outlook does have an RSS feed function. The incentive can be the same as newsletter publication. It just depends on how you want to reach people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER145> Ive used it a bit, but i havent found any solution that can store about half a million aeticles without choking (even though my computer can handle it)

</comment><comment><USER146> Syndicated feeds (whether RSS or ATOM) are fabulous and are by far the best way to aggregate a wide variety of sources with a minimum of corporate surveillance. There aren't many that don't emit RSS/Atom or can't be coerced in some way (even Twitter with services such as [https://twitrss.me/](https://twitrss.me/))

</comment><comment><USER147> RSS is the prime way I consume my daily news, and has been for several years now.

I even knocked up a rather lame online reader on a spare domain I had: [https://www.weegeeks.com](https://www.weegeeks.com)

That way, regardless what machine I'm on, I can still get my fix. It needs a re-write to bring it up to modern standards, but it still does a sterling job.

</comment><comment><USER148> This strikes a nerve, one still tender and stinging from Google's betrayal of Reader users. Yes, still.

Things like Facebook's non-chronological feed algorithm still annoy me greatly, and a good RSS/Atom aggregator would please me to no end. I switched to Feedly but really need to take better control of my Internet news consumption so I welcome a revival of RSS.

</comment><comment><USER149> Interesting timing. I'm in the process of launching a privacy-first feed reader with tight Pinboard integration. May add support for other services eventually, but I love Pinboard. Lmk what you all think of the idea: [https://www.pinfeed.net/](https://www.pinfeed.net/)

</comment><comment><USER150> This article comes just days after DIGG shut down their RSS reader. Sux, I used it every day. Me and my OPML file are looking for a new home...

[https://digg.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/360000678608](https://digg.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/360000678608)

<comment><USER151> I went from digg to feedly. It's almost the same experience.

<comment><USER150> Per your suggestion I checked out feedly; i like it. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER152> The focus here is on consumption, but IMHO it's also an ideal time to return to decentralized publishing, too [blogs, personal ("vanity") websites, etc.]. Of course the two go hand-in-hand... but maybe instead of trying to replace FB or Medium, it'd be better to take this alternate federated approach.

</comment><comment><USER153> It's sad that no one has mentioned Pushbullet. Is a small app that notifies you when things happen, and you can set it to notify RSS news, it also integrates with IFTTT and has a bunch of other features. You should check it out. Edit: It also has top HN, and it notifies when a story reaches 100 points IIRC.

<comment><USER154> A feed reader allows you to catch up on your feeds at a time that's convenient to you (much like old-fashioned magazines), rather than pestering you every time an article is published.

</comment></comment><comment><USER155> [https://miniflux.net](https://miniflux.net) \- simple and self-hosted

</comment><comment><USER156> that's my ship on these vast oceans for 14 years now. every evening i open (now a beautiful macos reeder app) and depart on sailing as i see fit and where i want to. a treasure, rss feeds collected over the years, from compsc and programming related things, STEM, liberal arts, and several mischiefs.

</comment><comment><USER157> Yes it is. I run some email newsletters and it's kind of a pain to have someone give you their email just to stay up to date without a third party like twitter or Facebook, I like the idea of RSS feeds as a more direct way for people to subscribe to updates without giving up their email

</comment><comment><USER158> RSS feeds rock! They're much less "noisy", and best of all - untouched by algorithmic sorting.

* _Shameless plug_ *: our service at [https://feedity.com](https://feedity.com) helps create custom feeds for any public webpage.

</comment><comment><USER159> I implemented RSS on FWD:Everyone this past week (not deployed yet). It was super easy, didn't take more than a couple hours, and only required two or three extra lines of code for each endpoint.

I have no idea how much use it will get, but seemed like an important thing to.

</comment><comment><USER160> I recently added RSS support to my sideproject blogging platform.

[https://stdlog.net/logs/show/stdlog-net-now-supports-rss- fee...](https://stdlog.net/logs/show/stdlog-net-now-supports-rss-feeds-7693f1)

</comment><comment><USER161> RSS never stopped being a thing for me. When Google Reader shut down, which I still miss, I moved over to Digg Reader, and now that that is shutting down I finally decided to try out Feedly which I like so far. I just like curating my own content.

</comment><comment><USER162> i never thought it was time to give up on rss. Facebook has become a mess, and never was a place to get news from.

After Google Reader was shutdown, i switched to Feedly, but was missing some features, so i decided to build something that would be a cross over between a regular RSS reader and a news aggregator like Google News. So now i can manage my rss feeds, and check out the news in the world that don't show up in my feeds. I also added automatic categorization, entity extraction, and will be adding recommendations, filters, rules, etc...

If you want to give it a try and give me somme feedback, you're welcome :-)

[http://aktu.io](http://aktu.io)

</comment><comment><USER163> I want to use RSS to increment unread content badges on my bookmark icons, to show me so-and-so's website added a new blog post since the last time I visited. Implemented into the standard bookmark browser, no reader necessary.

Is this already a thing anywhere?

</comment><comment><USER164> Yes let Web 2.0s dream of open standards win over this world walled web we have today

</comment><comment><USER165> It always has been. I've been a happy NetNewsWire user for well over a decade. It even supports shell script feeds, so you can write scrapers for sites that don't provide an RSS/ATOM feed themselves.

</comment><comment><USER166> I use my own piece of software as RSS reader - [https://github.com/tjadowski/rsspodder.git](https://github.com/tjadowski/rsspodder.git)

</comment><comment><USER167> I've actually been working on RSS-like feed for newsletters website in my free time. It's still soon to tell if it's useful, but I am slowly starting to replace email subscriptions.

</comment><comment><USER168> No voting, no comments. It's very tough trying to identify what's important, and when you do, you want to talk about it. Should/can RSS be extended to include voting and comments?

<comment><USER117> Yeah, I think ActivityPub support could be nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER169> I've implemented RSS for my blog because its pull mode instead of push mode (like god awful notifications everyone wants you to enable). I don't know if anyone uses it though!

</comment><comment><USER170> Does anyone know of something that could help maintain OPML files? I would like to keep a long list of categorized RSS feeds in a simple YAML file and generate a OPML feed out of that.

</comment><comment><USER171> Days ago I received an email from the makers of Airmail about their upcoming RSS Reader app called Cappuccino and invited me to their beta app. It still early but a promising app.

</comment><comment><USER172> Frustratingly, feeds are gone for such things as reviews on amazon, instagram accounts, youtube, and other sites. It's dying because people don't use it anymore.

</comment><comment><USER173> I'd be bored out of my mind between sets at the gym if I didn't have my Feedly RSS feeds and gReader Pro on my Android.

Facebook and Twitter are much poorer cousins in comparison.

</comment><comment><USER174> I just started with RSS. It's good thing to hav them back.

</comment><comment><USER175> Set up a reader a few months ago, it's been nice.

I started on a python-based HTML scraper to summarize, tag, and prioritize news articles but put it on hold to work on other things.

</comment><comment><USER176> > You've read your last complimentary article this month. > To read the full > article, SUBSCRIBE NOW.

I'm surprised they haven't kicked off over my ad-blocker.

</comment><comment><USER177> I really just want a local app for doing this that doesn't suck. Google Reader really masterfully killed all the momentum behind local RSS clients, I guess.

<comment><USER178> On what OS? And what are your criteria for "doesn't suck"?

<comment><USER177> Windows, and I guess what I mean is that I can generally read the articles without having to open them in my Web browser (which something like Thunderbird isn't really good for). If you have a recommendation I'd be happy to take a look at it.

<comment><USER178> That doesn't seem like too hard of a criterion to fulfill, but well, I'm rather fond of QuiteRSS.

It has all of the options for automatic filtering and tagging, and its UI is rather configurable, too. It's also open-source.

[https://quiterss.org/](https://quiterss.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-- Another one - [https://github.com/truerss/truerss](https://github.com/truerss/truerss)

</comment><comment><USER179> Problem is, Facebook for me is the tool to stay in touch with friends. Events are organized on Facebook and I can't just drop FB because of this.

</comment><comment><USER180> It never went away, my native client has always worked.

<comment><USER181> This so much. Never saw the appeal of web based readers. Been using a desktop based newsfeed for more than a decade.

And since we are using it to have a more focused experience, less clutter, etc. it seems logical to have it away from the browser where distractions are just a click away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER182> bandsintown and bandcamp both ditched RSS only within the last year.

What were they thinking? Under no circumstances am I installing either of their apps on my phone.

</comment><comment><USER183> I recommend blogtrottr for sending rss to your email. If you set a Gmail filter you get pretty much the same experience you had with Google Reader.

</comment><comment><USER184> RSS have been my main source for consuming web content for the last 15 years.

Social feeds? Ads? Trackers? I don't know what you guys are talking about :)

</comment><comment><USER185> I just subscribe to the weekly newsletters of news websites/blogs I'm interested in. Does RSS have any advantages over this?

</comment><comment><USER186> I don't understand. If RSS went away, how did people read webcomics and stuff like that?

<comment><USER117> I assume Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, email subscriptions or simply visiting the site regularly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER187> RSS is the best source of getting information that i've experienced until now.

</comment><comment><USER188> After reading just the title - it was never time to leave RSS in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER189> RSS isn't conducive to advertising. That in itself makes it a non-starter

<comment><USER190> What makes you say that? Text based advertising sure could be a part of RSS.

<comment><USER189> >Text based advertising sure could be a part of RSS.

Nobody cares about text based adverts

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER191> What feeds have you bookmarked? Let's share some good ones shall we!

</comment><comment><USER192> I never stopped using RSS !

</comment><comment><USER193> Most of the information I consume is through RSS. I use Feedly for that.

</comment><comment><USER194> I never stopped using RSS. Currently between theoldreader and feedbin.

</comment><comment><USER195> If wired is saying it's time for a revival it's probably long overdue

</comment><comment><USER196> What is a good open source RSS reader with Android and Linux support?

</comment><comment><USER197> I still read tonnes of RSS feeds, including HN. It never went away.

</comment><comment><USER198> But Google News says "This RSS feed is deprecated"...?

</comment><comment><USER199> If any one who doesn't like RSS like me but wish to get all their news websites in one place, I made an app for that. [https://7web.co](https://7web.co) Hope it helps someone.

</comment><comment><USER200> Do you read HN and Reddit in your RSS readers?

</comment><comment><USER201> Great idea. But why RSS when there is Atom?

</comment><comment><USER202> Is there RSS used as a social platform?

</comment><comment><USER203> Can we get Google Reader back?!?!?!

</comment><comment><USER204> Never left.

</comment><comment><USER205> Yes and irc and usenet.

</comment><comment><USER206> Does anybody read Hacker News outside their RSS-Reader?

</comment><comment><USER207> Yes.

</comment><comment><USER208> Inoreader

</comment><comment><USER209> RSS + AMP. Let's do it.

</comment><comment><USER210> goodnews.click been around a while :)

</comment><comment><USER211> I never left.

</comment><comment><USER212> Agreed!

</comment><comment><USER213> I never stopped using RSS. I follow a few hundred blogs (many of them have only very very few posts. Rule of thumb: The lower the post frequency, the higher the quality). I host my tinyRSS. I consider offering it to the public for free.

Here is a good RSS feed for Hackernews: [http://hnrss.org/newest?points=300](http://hnrss.org/newest?points=300)

Here is a service to convert a twitter feed to RSS (never really understood twitter, sorry) Example [http://twitrss.me/twitter_user_to_rss/?user=Lsigurd](http://twitrss.me/twitter_user_to_rss/?user=Lsigurd)

Here is a service to convert many RSSless websites to an RSS feed. Works soso. [https://feedity.com/](https://feedity.com/)

EDIT: Hackernews RSS feed link was wrong

</comment><comment><USER214> Can anyone clarify to me: why do people use web RSS readers, as opposed to local applications?

<comment><USER32> For me personally it's mainly about synchronisation. I use feedly on my phone, tablet and laptop and never have to see or archive a story twice. Plus i can star/save an interesting story on my laptop and read it on my phone later, say while commuting.

<comment><USER117> Same here, although I use a self-hosted TinyTinyRSS server rather than a third-party service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER215> it's hard for rss to compete with say reddit

<comment><USER216> That's sort of like saying it's hard for a fast food delivery service to compete with a fast food chain.

They're complementary services, not competition. Reddit supports the RSS standard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER217> Hello founder of Panda here, you can use [http://usepanda.com](http://usepanda.com) to read RSS as well. Right now you can add maximum 3 RSS feeds for free. With pro account you can add unlimited feeds. (It's as low as $2.99 per month) We're planning to start a Patreon campaign and our goal is to make all the premium features free for all the users as we reach our goals on the platform. As soon as we reach $2000 we'll make RSS feeds free for everyone. Hope you guys give it a try :)</comment>


Austin Police Department Warns SXSW Attendees Not To Use Uber - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/08/austin-police-sxsw-uber <comment><USER3> Well it would be good if the law was such that the police _could_ encourage it, but since it isn't, why would we expect them to?

If the law says these vehicles are operating illegally, the police are pretty much bound to discommend them. We always knew Uber existed in a highly regulated space, and changing the law or how it's interpreted will always take time.

I'm also pretty sure that if the Ubers and other ride services are not in fact operating under the law, your protections as a citizen and consumer are limited. The police would want people to choose services where they have the most lawful protection.

<comment><USER4> There's a difference though between them just putting a fine on Uber cab someone reported or they ran across by accident, and them actively announcing the disagreement and targeting the business. I'm sure there are many other more interesting things they could spend their time on.

Does the police force care about Uber enough to do this? (on their own) I don't think so. I'd rather ask who cares and has so much influence on them.

<comment><USER5> My guess is that they were being asked by bloggers, journalists, etc who were coming in for SXSW and thought it would be easier to put out an online statement to direct people to.

I don't think this is a high priority for APD.

I don't see the big deal really. I've lived in Austin since 2005 and I've never used a cab service here. They seem pretty useless in this city IMO.

I should also mention that I'm not a fan of Uber. I've been with friends and coworkers using it in San Francisco and always I see 3-4 available yellow cabs go by while we wait for our driver.

I'm in San Fran 1 week a month and when I'm by myself, I just take yellow cabs. They seem to work OK for me.

<comment><USER6> I wonder how much this is the impact of uber/lyft/sidecar etc though. Like many things posted on hn, this is highly anecdotal, but when I first moved to SF almost four years ago it was difficult to find an available cab. I often waited 20 minutes or more on nights when I went out.

Now I have a similar experience to you as open cabs seem more available, but I wonder how much of this is the ridesharing services siphoning off demand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> $55 minimum? This is a great way to increase the amount of drunk drivers on the road. Way to go, Austin!

<comment><USER8> You can still get a cab starting for $2.40/mile. There is a distinct difference between a "vehicle for hire" and a cab.

<comment><USER9> If you can find one. If you aren't on the main drag, good luck. We called twice and waited for cabs which never showed up, and finally called a friend of my sister to pick us up. We would have been much happier taking an uber instead of waking up a friend if we could have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The lack of cabs in Austin is a normal situation; they just don't exist. There are something like 250 licensed taxis in the city. You really can't hail them down like in other cities either; most drivers have scheduled pickups for most of the night.

You really need either a car or a shuttle bus for SXSW. It's just how it is in the US outside the northeast, Chicago or San Francisco.

Also, even though the "minimum price" is $55, Uber's "surge pricing" is requiring a $125 minimum fare.

<comment><USER11> They hang out at the airport and you can order one for a morning pickup. Austin isn't that bad, its just not geared to locals or bar hoppers (but Austin is quite walkable).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For what it's worth, if you didn't already know: Uber doesn't serve Austin, or didn't just a few months ago when I was out there last. It's not like Austin is pulling the rug out from under Uber. It's kind of irritating to me that Uber would pretend to serve Austin during SXSW. If you're going to serve a municipality, put your chips on the table and slug it out for real.

<comment><USER13> It is illegal for Uber to operate in Austin the way they do in other cities. During SXSW, Uber offers free UberX (since it's illegal to charge, but giving free rides is legit) and paid Uber Black, which probably falls under normal limo rules.

Uber isn't doing anything wrong here. Austin's politicians are, because their campaign funds come from the taxi lobby.

<comment><USER12> They don't offer Uber Black outside SXSW either. They seem to be in Austin because they want the attention of tourists, not because they want to go to bat for the people of Austin. Correction welcome.

<comment><USER13> You're right that Uber doesn't operate in Austin outside of SXSW, but it's not because they don't want to. The city shuts down every Uber-like service that tries to operate here. It's bald-faced corruption.

<comment><USER14> That's tptacek's point, though: If Uber wants to have a presence there, they should fight the "shut down" Austin is imposing.

<comment><USER15> right! maybe they should "fight" it by serving people around the absurd rules during a popular tech-related event (a space in which Austin claims to compete) and forcing the local authority figures to put their corruption on full display...

But its cool, I'm sure tptacek has full view of their internal strategies and knows, for sure, that Uber hasn't tried at all to operate within Austin

<comment><USER16> >But its cool, I'm sure tptacek has full view of their internal strategies and knows, for sure, that Uber hasn't tried at all to operate within Austin

Do not say things like this. It is incredibly disrespectful.

<comment><USER15> You're right, it wasn't the best way to put it. I was going to edit it, but apparently I can't anymore.

However...

> If you're going to serve a municipality, put your chips on the table and > slug it out for real.

I found this to be far more presumptuous and disrespectful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> We (me + colleague) are at SxSW now (over from the UK) - this is quite amazing given the utter lack of cabs if you're anywhere resembling out-of-downtown. Thankfully we have through an amazing friend of a friend procured the services of a friendly cab driver who goes out of his way to help us, without which we'd basically have to stay at our residence the whole time and not do SxSW at all.

Yikes.

<comment><USER18> It's always funny how people come in from all over for SXSW and assume Austin will be some bustling metropolis with big-city amenities. Did you not notice "downtown" includes only a few square blocks?

<comment><USER19> The unofficial city bird is the (construction) Crane, define few?

Generally that means 2-3. Is there such a thing as hypobole?

<comment><USER20> Well, there's meiosis[0], but that's not exactly right...

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiosis_(figure_of_speech)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiosis_\(figure_of_speech\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I dunno, I've been on a (authorized) shuttle at SXSW driven by a meth-head whereupon at the end of the trip everyone was sheet-white and couldn't say a word. Could Uber be worse?

<comment><USER22> Did anyone take the driver's information and report him? (Or her?)

This is one of the supposed advantages of the regulated systems - <USER2> report dangerous drivers who then lose their ability to be drivers.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There are actually undercover stings going on too, by the looks of things [http://www.reddit.com/r/SXSW/comments/1zwr26/atx_welcome_to_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/SXSW/comments/1zwr26/atx_welcome_to_intractive_undercover_uber_stings/)

</comment><comment><USER23> You'd think they'd do anything they could to avoid drunk driving. I hope that if anyone gets hurt or killed during SXSW by a drunk driver the victim sues the hell out of the APD for making it more likely there will be drunk drivers on the road.

</comment><comment><USER24> "Permitted transportation services" has kind of a Soviet ring to it.

</comment><comment><USER25> "Someone should tell the folks at the police department before they start fining Uber drivers or scaring attendees away from using the service."

I live in the central belt of Scotland, if a taxi here in Glasgow or Edinburgh cost a minimum of $55 there would be a civil insurrection. I'm frankly amazed that the crux of this story is having a go at the cops and not anyone who thinks $55 minimum for a taxi is OK.

<comment><USER26> $55 isn't the minimum cost for a taxi, it's for pre booked private hire

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Yet another example of society acclimating to disruptive technology.

</comment><comment><USER28> Well, people aren't 6 year olds and the Police isn't their parents. The Police saying something doesn't mean their words shouldn't be let to be gone with the wind, whose direction is, well, south by south west.

In case you're wondering, what I said above is a tactful way to say "Fuck off".

</comment><comment><USER29> I live in Austin. The cab situation here is terrible. There aren't enough cabs when it's busy, drivers often violate the law by refusing credit cards or denying rides. Last night I was downtown (during SXSW) and tried to get a cab for 45 min. The first one that stopped tried scamming me by telling me it would be $20. I told him no way and he drove off. The second one asked where I was going and acted like he didn't know where it was (very common numbered street any idiot would know about) and told me he didn't want to go there. Both violated their licenses.

The whole time I was also trying to get Uber X. Eventually I got an Uber car. It was worth the wait to not have to ride with one of those asshole cabbies. We _really_ need to change the laws here and crack down on these cabs.

</comment><comment><USER30> So, umm, bring a bicycle? Maybe there are some for rent? Austin isn't particularly hilly, is it?

<comment><USER31> Austin is incredibly hilly.

<comment><USER29> No it isn't. SF is incredibly hilly. Austin has a few hills and not many downtown.

<comment><USER31> I'm guessing you state this as a person that has never been to Austin.

Travis County[1]: Highest elevation 1420ft Lowest elevation 425ft

San Francisco: Highest elevation 925 ft (282 m) Lowest elevation 0 ft (0 m)

Thanks for your baseless statement though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> When will APD do something about those slow, dangerous, absurd pedicabs?

</comment><comment><USER33> Gotta love a free market.

</comment><comment><USER34> Actually these are just regs on the driver, as a citizen I can get into any fucking car I want on any fucking terms I want and the police have nothing to say about it.

<comment><USER35> Take that, tax-and-spend liberals!

<comment><USER36> Most of the taxes go for weapons/military, so you could say that you're technically reducing wars by avoiding taxes.

Or better yet, there should be a tax for stupidity in congress, that alone would set the USA economy back on track.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you scrape and mine data from social media? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I mainly use puppetteer.

You can even make it run on a Raspberry Pi and run it all day long.

I wrote a tutorial some time ago.

[https://coding.napolux.com/how-to-scrap-web-page-nodejs- pupp...](https://coding.napolux.com/how-to-scrap-web-page-nodejs-puppeteer/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Before anyone posts advice, what do you plan to use with the data, OP?</comment>