Show HN: You Need Feeds – Introduce friends/family/workmates to RSS and webfeeds

Hey, this is a great contribution. Thank you for making it.

I run one of the more popular readers and I have to ask why wasn't NewsBlur included in your list. It's the oldest on that list for one. It's also got its own native client on all of the platforms. Plus, I'm a HNer and NewsBlur launched on HN as well.

As somebody who has been introducing people, in person, to the concept of RSS for exactly a decade now, I'll mention that for those who really haven't heard of it, which is 10% of folks in tech and 90% of everybody else, my strategy has been to compare it to an inbox for websites with filtering and sharing. Really hits home on the idea that every story shows up unlike the dominant competitor to RSS which is FB/twitter.

95% of the people who leave RSS, and I ask everybody who cancels why they're canceling, leave it because they get their news from social media. Social filtering provides a higher signal than the manual process. I don't blame them.

Personally I built in that serendipity into my reader because I think it belongs in a news reader, but as its own feed among many.

One problem with feeds is many sites don't have feeds and people blame RSS rather than the site not implementing it. Another problem is noise: most sites just offer a single all-or-nothing feed, while they categorize/tag posts on their site. If they offered a comprehensive set of microfeeds that would help adoption I think (or include the category metadata).

Another problem is truncated feeds, requiring users to click links and navigate to the original site to read each item. While some premium readers claim to offer complete news items, this is probably against the wishes of the site and may be circumvented similar to the add-blocker arms-race. In my opinion if a site model requires users to visit it, then they shouldn't offer feeds at all.

Lastly some feeds are behind logins (e.g. forums), not all readers support these feeds.

If you want to take it a step further, add some links feed readers that run as browser plugins. Unlike hosted services, they're not as likely to disappear, and they have a low barrier to entry since they don't require any sign up.

I've been working on one that runs in Firefox[1], but there are many others that look promising for Chrome as well.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-re...

Non-social user here (no fb, twitter, other feeds except hn and few forums).

I cannot remember why exactly rss stopped fitting my needs. I was using a standalone reader before iphone was a thing, then google reader, and then began to simply check my 3-5 sites at non-busy times. I think that for HN I miss at least 1/2 of all topics since it is “a fast board”, among others. I don’t really want to be overwhelmed by all these events and knowing only things that are top-20 right now is actually okay for me. Rss is instant and has no “top/discussed” conception.

I’m not your auditory though probably.

I recall I stopped using RSS feeds when Google pulled the plug on the reader. I couldn't find anything that was as convenient and I don't really want to pay for yet another subscription as I have too many of those as it is.

This is a great initiative. Feeds need to be promoted with the wider public, or they will gradually and silently disappear.

Really like your starter packs.

> Are you sick of big websites trying to decide what you should see, despite what you’ve subscribed to? Sick of "the algorithm" shuffling what order you get told of things, if at all?

Most people nowadays consume news from social media (Facebook), and are not truly aware of the issues that arise from this (filter bubble, echo chamber, targeting, etc.). This could be explained better on the front page, or even have a sub-page with more detail and examples. Increase the incentive to use feeds.

Lastly, you present yourself as a not-for-profit initiative. But your About and whole site does not mention who you are. Be transparent.

If non-profit, you could be open-source as well. Have a crowdsourced place where people submit and improve starter packs.

(If I have overlooked something, then I stand corrected)

Edit: I just shared your link, on LI, and you seem to lack an open graph image (og:image) to be added to the link preview.

This is great, a lot of people don’t know RSS exists but would be technical enough to use them if pointed in the right direction.

Somewhat related, I built a small tool to scrape sites with no feeds and generate one: https://feedbridge.notmyhostna.me/

It's a great initiative, but I'm pessimist about this. I tried to introduce colleagues to RSS and the reaction I got was "why would I want this, it's inferior to twitter, non interactive etc etc". So it went over the head of those whimsical people, it's possible that I could have explained it better although at that point when they accused me of pushing "obsolete technology" I did not bother anymore. Even to the point where I said that RSS feed on the marketing website needs some improvements the reaction was that it would harm the "social media presence".

My reaction was: "So we are cutting the branch we're sitting on, keep calm and carry on".

Right now to subscribe to over 250 rss feeds (that update in realtime) there are services offering this for typically around $250/ month.

Suppose this was decentralised. I think the cost would greatly reduce and RSS could power a whole new web

I think most people don't see the value in RSS feeds because they are used to the business of forums and social networks - where you don't need (or have the capability to) process _all_ the information.

RSS feeds are perfectly suitable for stuff like blogs, podcasts, webcomics, etc.pp. - not for platforms where a new item pops up every few seconds.

For podcasts people use a separate app like PodcastAddict or iTunes - for webcomics and blogs the author(s) usually also have twitter to announce a new item or an entirely separate platform like DeviantArt or WebToons.

So RSS is indeed not required to keep track of new submissions. I actually have a colleague who isn't using RSS feeds and instead keeps bookmarks and checks each page individually (given he only keeps track of maybe ~30 pages).

In conclusion - I think they don't see a value in RSS feeds because the existing options they're using already fulfill their needs.

Loved this a lot :)

Thanks a lot for making this. A couple of small suggestions (do proceed ahead with them if they make sense):

Add Android feed readers in the navigation menu.

Also allow folks to suggest good sites (Add my site or even a simple trello board will do) that have good content and also RSS support.

All you have to do now is to curate the site submitted and make more of really usable starter packs.

This is a great idea. I don't recall finding a simple source of clear information about feeds when I started. That could be why so little people know about them.

And I love the design of the website by the way. Simple and elegant.

Would be awesome to show generation of feeds.

It is possible to generate RSS feeds for any site.

love the starter packs

I had a little project I was working on. every6hours.com, it's a river style feed reader broken down into various silos. Two things that might be unique, I can't keep up with all the reader features anymore. First is that it only updates, as the domain says, every 6 hours because it helps me stay away from constantly reading my feeds, 12 and 6 am/pm EST. Second is that I pull in content from twitter, reddit and hackernews as well as your standard rss feeds. There was a bug 2 weeks ago and I haven't had the time to fix it and get it up and running again.

I'm in the middle of rebuilding my own online feed reader (converting it from old asp to php) and as such I've been doing a fair bit of online reading about the current state of RSS.

There are many sites out there promoting RSS, but they are all islands of their own content. If this initiative of getting RSS more visibility is to succeed then either someone needs to link to all the sites (like a webring or index of sorts), or they all need to get together to cross promote themselves.

I use RSS feeds quite extensively, but as others have mentioned, its noisy and not every site lets you filter on categories and search terms. So I have my own little python script which fetches, regex filters and pushes to my phone. https://torvald.no/rss-regex-reader

One problem with feeds is many sites don't have feeds and people blame RSS rather than the site not implementing it. Another problem is noise: most sites just offer a single all-or-nothing feed, while they categorize/tag posts on their site. If they offered a comprehensive set of microfeeds that would help adoption I think (or include the category metadata). Another problem is truncated feeds, requiring users to click links and navigate to the original site to read each item. While some premium readers claim to offer complete news items, this is probably against the wishes of the site and may be circumvented similar to the add-blocker arms-race. In my opinion if a site model requires users to visit it, then they shouldn't offer feeds at all.

Lastly some feeds are behind logins (e.g. forums), not all readers support these feeds.

I like the concept.

Here's a repo I put together with an OPML list of the 22 top US newspapers

https://github.com/newman8r/us-newspapers-opml if anyone would find that useful

feel free to add the list to your site

Been Experimenting with generation of RSS feeds for over 10k sources for crypto related stuff, based on google news sources found over the last 2 years. Currently working on automation of the generation of these feeds in python.

Thank you so much for doing this! RSS FTW

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