I am not sure you can. Metadata is quite inconsistent and many websites that I have the RSS feed for block crawlers and scrapers. Advantages of RSS are common standard and design to be consumed by a bot. What we've got instead are curated fb and twitter feeds that people get hooked on and never look back. Openness is the aspect of RSS that I'll miss the most.

That said, if Firefox hadn't hidden live bookmarks away several years ago they might see more use. The small subset of users who bothered to look for them and bring them back to the toolbar might even overlike the set of users who disable telemetry, too.

Part of the solution is this sort of A.I.

http://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/

but trained by you and not some other person who is training it to control your behavior.

It goes into some detail about the various RSS incompatibilities and is well worth the read, because RSS never really got any better even afterwards.

I think that's the kind of thing that burtonator was referring to.

I think that's the hard part. Some content providers put out content way quicker than a human could ever keep up with. I wrote a web crawler once to download high resolution pictures of cars from a Russian website at a quick but modest pace and I got IP banned within a couple hours.

For a business (which what I'm thinking in terms of), $500/mo for 100 IP addresses which you can trivially cycle by destroying and creating new virts is well within cost. For an individual, I assume you wouldn't be crawling 24/7, so bring up as many as needed for short bursts. At $0.007/hr, you could bring up 100 from a snapshot/template, use them for a few hours to crawl whatever you need, and it will cost you just over $2.[1] For longer term but smaller needs, just spin up 5-10 for $25-$50/mo cost.

1: 100 * $0.007/hr * 3 hours = $2.10

DO data is cheaper, but not free, and I'm not sure if they charge for changing IP addresses a lot.

Not to mention that in many cases, admins start blocking while up ranges. And due to scraping, lots of sites block popular ip ranges like that of AWS. There are actually forums where people keep updated ranges for the different cloud platforms.

This was a long time ago, and I don't remember what it cost, and there was a limit. It was certainly cheaper than having multiple EC2s just for their IPs though.

Filters (never see topics or even entire sites, you don't want to); mark-as-read (never rescan, HUGE time saver); single place to monitor multiple sources; standard. All these things make RSS far superior to any subscribe/follow systems I've seen anywhere else. I know RSS was supposed to be about the content too, but just as a notification system, it's crushes anything else out there. Some sites still include the content, but obviously you can't get that from aggregate and multimedia sites. RSS still provides a better way to consume the general web, even if most people don't realize it. Thank you for your work.

The sad truth is that RSS is a product designed for an internet that doesn't really exist anymore (blogosphere on top of the open web). The reason everyone is dropping support for RSS is because not enough people are using it.

Besides the consumers not using it anymore you also see producers moving behind paywalls or pushing people to their website so they can click ads (media), and everyone else uses a few closed platforms (twitter, facebook).

EDIT: I personally would choose an RSS feed over Facebook's newsfeed any day of the week. Including having to go through the hassle of keeping my subscriptions up to date and going out of my way to find new sources. Unfortunately the reality is that mass consumers don't agree and FB has over 2 billion users whereas RSS readers are dropping left and right because no one is using them.

Every site I've cared to "subscribe" to has an RSS feed somewhere, so that end of things is still alive and well. I don't see any reason for them to stop either, I still end up at their site (assuming they only publish links) and that's all they can hope for.

This is the most effective way to consume content. It's not dead and won't be until more effective one.

Is it shrinking? My podcast apps use RSS feeds to locate episodes. Debian uses sourceforge's RSS feeds to locate updated sources. A published, chronological list of events or things is not an uncommon thing to want, and as the parent said unless something better comes along RSS/Atom is it.

Shout-out to one of those niche sources, for example:

https://www.newsdeeply.com/water

Open to other great niche sources.

I currently use it mostly for the "post to hn" function and as rss reader ofc :p

It just needs some curation and the example I'm showing is more for testing with "more than average data" -> http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/Newest

Ps. Rss is good enough, just like SQL is good enough untill you hit the limits

Actually today I thought about transforming schema org data to rss depending on the configuration ( eg. price changes), which seems to be what you are doing ( sort of)

Keep circling!

sounds like your saying a site has to use Facebook and Twitter if they want to achieve the same thing as an rss feed.

how is having two for profit companies who record ever click be the gateway to a feed the right solution?

I'm the last person to want to begrudge making a profit, but the move away from RSS is a blatant, deliberate move away from openness/user control and toward walled gardens. And ever since Twitter dropped RSS, I realized I'd rather do without the sites entirely than do without their feeds.

Meanwhile, huge swathes of the internet still use RSS and Atom or even the age-old approach of mailing lists. (And readers like Feedbin gives you an address to provide to mailing lists so you can follow those just like any other feed.) Every time I see someone say RSS is dead, I go and look at my unread article count.

Worse: a site has to scrape FB and TWTR to achieve the same thing.

I'm baffled how anybody who even knows what page-scraping is could think of it as an improvement over RSS.

That is to say, what Firefox and Datastreamer are deciding about RSS appears to be unrelated. However, as a cocreator of RSS, you probably know that HTML -- which is the source of "metadata" for you -- is hard to parse correctly. Much harder and error-prone than parsing XML for RSS. Your solution serves only to push complexity downstream.

Providing RSS feeds is practically free everywhere. I wouldn't be surprised if many more resources are spent deciding to turn it off than feeds would consume for all eternity.

Boom, spot on. Being able to create Anki flashcards while you are reading new content is pretty cool, and much more useful than the whole 'non-linear reading progress' (most documents are meant to be read linearly, and my PDF reader opens a file at the position I closed it).

Now I will check it out ;-)

Very few end users can parse the metadata on an HTML page, and of those who can do it, few have time to do it for every page they'd like to 'subscribe to'.

Also, what is your pricing like? I understand you can’t give details, but are we talking a few hundred a month? A few thousand?

Thanks!

To come full circle figuratively means to be back where you started. What you meant to say is that you've done a 180 (a U-turn) on the idea.

I think it is a curious thing that even though all major browsers are written and built by geeks their corporate entities have ditched a tech that geeks are very vocal about liking.

Google famously killed Google Reader, a much loved product. That decision made me for the first time look at Google in a different light (when Reader was around I practically lived in Reader – this is perhaps what Google didn't like, I know it's a paranoid/conspiratorial viewpoint but …) [0]

Microsoft killed RSS support when moving from IE to Edge. [1]

Apple removed RSS support from Safari in Mountain Lion only to add it back in half-heartedly in Yosemite but I don't know enough about the MacOS/iOS platform to say for certain where its support is at. [2]

And today – champion of the open web, Mozilla – kills support a short while after acquiring Pocket, a non-open feature of their browser that for most people sits uselessly on the toolbar taking up valuable screen real estate and also bloats the code-base.

That's all of them then. So what's up? Why is it that browser creators don't want us to consume content in an open, uniform and standard way using RSS when it works fine and clearly geek like consuming content that way? What's so awful about: “I like that site (or sub-site), please subscribe to it and notify me about new content.”? Anybody who has any inside info on this topic please let us know.

I think it mirrors why large tech companies have failed to deliver open and federated social media. From now on, given that Chromium is also open source, I know longer consider Mozilla to be the champion of the open web. Not if they kill useful open standards and don't champion other ones even if it's not popular. Freedom has never been about popularity. Firefox should have been the first browser ages ago to ship with a built in ad-blocking and anti-tracking tech but they never did. Why? I thought Persona was pretty cool tech, but nope, they had to shut it down. And Firefox Hello? D.O.A. In certain optics it looks like Mozilla only exist to enrich themselves and not rock the ecosystem too much.

[0] “ Google Reader shutting down

1926 points knurdle 6 years ago 704 comments (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cl...) “

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5371725 (I have rarely seen such a uniform outcry on HN)

[1] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/forum/insider_in...

[2] https://thesweetsetup.com/apps/best-rss-reader-os-x/

I think his use of the expression is accurate—coming full circle to HTML—not to RSS. There would have been no need for the commenter to co-create RSS if HTML had been adequate for what they were trying to achieve at that time.

In other words, HTML's poor fit for content syndication as the web was growing paved way for the creation of RSS. Now, people merely use HTML meta elements to achieve most of what RSS was designed for.

I know this much, if RSS was easier to monetize. Firefox wouldn't have any problems maintaining it on their browser.

>if RSS was easier to monetize

There's no problems with monetizing RSS feeds. It's just a notification system.