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Why are people hyped about RSS regaining relevance? (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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According to Google Trends, during the past few years, there has been nothing but a few minor bumps that faded away as quickly as they came. I love RSS because i do not have to scroll through dozens of different news sites all day and i would love it to return.

EDIT: Typical case of people only reading the headline. I was asking why people are hyped over something that did NOT happen.

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[–] 190 points 3 years ago* (6 children)

For me, the value of RSS is bypassing the fucking algorithm.

Just give me the raw feed from the websites I like. No suggestions, no "someone else liked this." Just the raw firehose of content that I asked for.

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  • [–] 19 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    I mean algorithms have their flaws but there is a reason they became popular.

    Subscribe to a dozen RSS feeds and suddenly you have more content then you can read with no easy way to sort through the chuff. Also no easy way to discover content beyond your feeds.

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  • [–] 26 points 3 years ago

    The reason why RSS didn't become popular was because content creators didn't know how to monetize them while still having to pay for hosting fees.

    Social media built walled gardens that could drive traffic to certain content creators if it was in the social media company's best interest. Content creators moved to social media since the carrot was too much to resist.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    Wasn't that how YouTube used to work tho? Still I think it's better discovering new channels, but that makes it harder for the new users I suppose

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    Funny you need YouTube. I have been rediscovering the "Subscriptions" tab recently. It's a chronological view (newest first) of all Channels I am subscribed to, but I actually haven't used it for years.

    I've gotten used to the YouTube algorithm, going to the homepage and just finding whatever seemingly interesting videos YouTube suggests to me. However recently, YouTube made the strange decision to disable the homepage for people who disable Watch History. Now my YouTube homepage is entirely empty.

    Anyway, going to the subscription tab it's just a massive collection of random channels I've subscribed to over the years. It's too messy to keep my interest, and I've actually been using YouTube less.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    Same here, I have removed the home page (using ReVanced) so it automatically loads my subscriptions, as I found those has far better videos than my home feed at all. Homepage has really died, I keep getting the same videos I already watched, some obscure 39 views video keep annoying me and because I use YouTube music I also get recommended music, except they have like 100 views. It's just so terrible.

    I think YouTube has been disabling the homepage, so you are more intrigued to enable it. But it really just makes your and my lives easier. Either way it's the only way to really enjoy the videos nowadays. Hopefully another platform comes along, but that hasn't happened at all in over 20 years

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    That's the thing, I personally liked the YouTube homepage! Even with watch history disabled, I found it gave me decent mix of recommendations based on my region, subscriptions and Liked videos. I know many people dislike the YouTube algorithm but it actually worked well for me.

    Now that YouTube has disabled my homepage (held hostage unless I turn on Watch History), I am far less inclined to go on YouTube and watch random videos. Which is probably a good thing for me, let's be honest. On the other hand I don't know what YouTube wanted to achieve with this move. I find it hilarious that my homepage is empty now by Google's own choice.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    And you know what? The channels today are super sensational when it comes to their titles and thumbnails like it's always about a curiosity gap or some extreme headline that makes you annoyed and I'm honestly over it. It's just so hard to find good channels that are genuinely entertaining and don't employ any of these. Honestly I'd go back to 2013 YouTube, it was far better

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  • [–] 15 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    You can also use it to create your own "algorithm".

    With Reddit I've always subscribed to each subreddit individually, sometimes adding filters like "/hot/?limit=10", which only shows posts that reach the Top 10 posts in /hot. That way I wouldn't miss any post in niche subs while being able to individually scale the amount of posts I get shown from the bigger subs.

    You can do the same here on Lemmy, although I still haven't felt the need to configure it, since staying on top of /new is still doable.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    This is the reason why for me, I actually took it one step further and rebuilt a front end news site with Django and shared the link out with friends who are interested in the same topics, added a discussion feature. Essentially, I have a python script that runs and pulls RSS feed data. If the whole article isn’t included then it uses Asyncio, aiohttp, and Beautifulsoup to pull in the article. Dump all that to a Postgres instance then have Django run on top of it. It’s like deconstructing news to reconstruct it

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Would you mind sharing this? I would be very interested in running my own instance of this and modifying it to fit my needs!

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    There's still an algorithm and "like" system in that scenario: clicks. The news providers generate more content based on what was clicked most.

    Some sites are more objective in what they report on, but there's still going to be biases in what you're fed.

    In that regard, I'm not sure how different subscribing to certain communities is from subscribing to certain news outlets.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    Clickbait is obviously an issue with many media outlets but given that you curate your RSS feeds you can just dump them. Once reddit died I made plenty of changes to my media diet. It left me with way less sources but I'm certain all I lost was low quality reporting and other kinds of outrage bait.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    I do kinda like the idea of some kind of curation, but I'd like the algorithm to be transparent to me, so that I can go in and see what's been filtered out, for instance, and why.

    Some guy on Mastodon a while back was working on a service that'd give him a digest of daily posts he'd missed from his feed. I could see the value in something like that, as long as you control the algorithm yourself.

    I think I'm still stuck on the idea of a daily edition. A finite selection of post or articles and maybe a funny pages section too. Like a newspaper in the olden days.

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