One thing that's been corrosive to rss the past couple years have been podcast platforms. I find more podcasts (free ones) that can only be accessed through platforms like Google podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or Anchor, with no rss feed link to use in a platform agnostic podcatcher app.
Unfortunately, to Spotify's great delight, the word "podcast" has been successfully embraced, extended, and extinguished. Us technical types have been complicit in it by allowing the word "podcast" to mean audio shows on proprietary platforms that require proprietary players.
> Us technical types have been complicit in it by allowing the word "podcast" to mean [...]
Those types have done a lot of the same damage to the word "wiki". It blows my mind that Sourcehut of all places is a willing participant in debasing the term.
The same thing GitHub is doing: throwing a bunch of source files into a repo—i.e. the sort of thing that came before wikis (and the reason why wikis were invented in the first place—to displace those kinds of systems)—but then calling that a wiki. It qualifies certainly as what GNU calls a "Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Site". But to call it a "wiki" is wildly inappropriate—like saying "integral" when you're talking about derivatives:[1]
> Imagine you're a mathematician, and fellow mathematicians start calling derivatives integrals instead; that's basically how badly the term[] is being misused: it's being used to describe systems that are almost the _exact opposite_ of the concept.
Whats missing from GitHub/SourceHut "wikis" that would make them actual wikis? At least with GitHub wikis you can edit them from the web like the wikis that came before GitHub.
Because it was broadcast to your iPod. Where iPod means a non-networked personal media player which in the 00s overwhelmingly meant an iPod.
The distribution model was a client subscribes to the RSS feed on their computer, downloads new episodes (from the publisher's website), and then syncs them when the "iPod" is synced to the computer. Many PMPs but the iPod especially defaulted to syncing your computer library when plugged in (to charge). So the iPod just received no episodes of podcasts when people plugged them in to charge at the end of the day.
When iTunes added explicit podcast support it became even easier to subscribe and sync podcasts. This was and remains a good distribution model but Spotify et al have done their damnedest to co-opt the term to mean content exclusive to their platform.
The history was that "podcasting" was an open medium, "open" being the point. A "podcast" was a show (e.g. "Smartless"). "Episodes" were audio or video files combined with metadata that lived in the podcast's RSS. Anybody could play in that ecosystem.
Now "podcasting" means anything/nothing. "Podcasts" are shows. "Podcasts" are episodes. "Podcasts" are things that increasingly need a proprietary app to play.
Of course it's okay for languages to evolve, but here's how you're missing the point:
Imagine that shortly after the turn of the century, Adobe created a proprietary platform for delivering internet content and called it the "web". Viewers must use Adobe Web Reader to use Adobe "web pages", which are DRM-protected PDF files delivered using proprietary protocols. Adobe has done deals with several hundred popular sites to turn off their standards-based websites and deliver Adobe websites exclusively.
This is what Spotify and others are doing, and nobody cares. Apple is effectively the last media giant left holding the flag for standards-based podcasting, but how long do we think that will last?
What I just love is when people use this excuse to justify "borrowing" a clearly defined technical term, using it incorrectly, and then insisting that their incorrect usage of that term is entirely valid because "language and meaning change over time."
(Not saying you're one of those people at all but that is one of the most frequent uses of that phrase that I tend to experience from other people.)
This doesn't seem particularly closely related to the discussion. The meaning of "podcast" hasn't changed. Instead, the question is "why bother distinguishing podcasts from other mp3 files that you also download off the internet?". If someone records an album and puts it up for sale online, how is that not a "podcast"?
Note that the Google Podcasts mobile app differs greatly from the site at podcasts.google.com. When accessing Google Podcasts through the latter, the feed URL is encoded in a base-64 variant that you have to resort to extracting from Google's show page URL and descrambling. If you want to export your feed list, this can be tedious. (Made worse by how top-heavy the Google Podcasts site is just to load a page.)
Nope. One of the few use cases where I actually looked towards Google Takeout as an escape hatch for my data, instead of a mere novelty ("a ZIP of all my YouTube interactions—that's neat, I guess"), but Google Podcasts is not there. I've filed several complaints about this and several other shortcomings in response to the Google Podcasts app's spammy notifications requesting feedback.
I ended up writing a short set of procedures to follow (an SOP—written like a software manual, really) that walks you through how to select page elements that are shown on screen while logged in, and then drag and drop them from the podcasts.google.com tab into the "export tool". The punchline is that the export tool is just the SOP document itself. It's meant to be read in your browser, and it takes advantage of the fact that the browser also happens to be a universal runtime...
The exporter will descramble the links and output your subscriptions in text/uri-list format.
Thanks. Wow, did not notice that you have to click not the globe button or share button, but the three dot 'hamburger' button at the top right in order to see this.
Disagree on 'blaming the creator' argument. Not everyone is aware of these technical philosophies and are focused on getting a good story out there. Feel the same way about social media.
I have only noticed that on spotify, but, without a spotify subscription, I hate it. I have had several podcasts I used to listen to move to spotify-only.
(I actually still listen to them on an Apple iPod nano....)
I could believe it being true of some of other platforms, trying to have "our-platform-only" content but I haven't seen it and am not finding confirmation. I don't think it's true of Google Podcasts, that they have any of their own content.
Yea, but the flipside (patreon) is really, really, really nice and a huge step up from the ad-ridden public ones and work with whatever podcast player you like. Nearly all my favorite podcasts on the platform release half their content for free. I just wish they allowed mixed media in the feed.
It's not dead, but many things I wish supported RSS don't.
Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. These would be incredibly useful things to have native RSS feeds for, but instead I have to dig around and either use some tool someone built for the purpose - a tool at the mercy of the walled garden whose wall they're peeking over - or build my own nightmare factory.
None of those will because they rely on engagement to make money. They need people logging into their servers so that they can see what they are looking at. That's not how RSS works, so of course they won't support it.
And I think this is the main reason Google Killed Google Reader.
It was controversial (or illegal or ugly) to put ads over the third party content.
And it was way better to have Adsense on the websites directly.
Such "spring cleaning" was an alibi, not the reason. It was abandoned after some attempts to build a kind of social network inside, and probably they preferred people to create content on +1 instead of on blogs.
But Blogger still exists, and there's a strong contradiction why to kill the reader for the blogs except one: Ads. Google Reader was bad for Ad business.
And that's a big business in Google.
And terribly sad.
Some places that do offer rss only offer truncated feeds so you actually have to open the website and be monetized and fingerprinted. there are of course workarounds but its an arms race with only a few maintainers.
> instead I have to dig around and either use some tool someone built for the purpose - a tool at the mercy of the walled garden whose wall they're peeking over
My dream is being able to get only the events off my Facebook feed. Invitations, events my "friends" are going to that show up on my feed, events people post on their timeline that would show up on my feed, whatever.
If Facebook had any kind of API I could probably build this, and stop using facebook otherwise. Which is probably why they don't?
RSS is still the default distribution system for podcasts. It's probably the thin thread that is keeping Spotify from building a walled garden for audio.
> […] The company spent a good portion of its presentation specifically focused on podcasts, which it said had been “largely unchanged” for years before its entry into the market, due to the limitations of RSS.
> Spotify cited how unbundling podcasts from RSS technology has paved the way for Spotify to generate revenue through these popular audio programs — a sentiment that’s not universally beloved by those who support an open podcast ecosystem. Spotify has disrupted that market by bringing some podcasts in-house, where they can only be heard on its service, and competitors have followed. This has fractured the ecosystem and left consumers at a disadvantage as some shows are no longer broadly available.
> “We’ve been able to replace RSS for on-platform distribution, which means that podcasts created on our platform are no longer held back by this outdated technology,” Maya Prohovnik, Spotify’s head of Talk, told investors.
The entire framing of this (esp. re "unbundling") is pretty gross. Unbundling is associated with disintermediation. What Spotify is doing is the opposite. What organizational dysfunction led to the circumstances here—where the writers and editors of the linked article uncritically publish and more or less legitimize this kind of shameless corporate spin?
The whole article is pretty much just re-wording Spotify's press release.
There seem to be no sources in it except for Spotify's press release.
So, a very old form of organizational disfunction in journalism: The cheapest and quickest way to write an article is to use someone's press release as the only source, as it doesn't actually require, well, any journalism.
Spotify has never used RSS, other than for Roach Motel-style ingest.
The plan was to embrace, extend, and extinguish the podcasting medium, and the hard part of that is done. "Podcasting" was a standards-based, open medium. Now it's any audio show, and we've lost the unique name for the open medium. As Spotify incentivizes more and more creators to not publish an RSS feed, standards-based podcasting will become a fond memory.
I also boycott them for a more practical reason: I can’t listen to them in my normal podcatchers! I’d have to switch all my podcast listening to Spotify to change that, and that’s a pain.
Spotify has started and rapidly escalated a program to pay podcast producers for spotify-only podcasts. (with no rss feeds). Several podcasts I used to listen to and enjoy have become spotify-only.
When I recently asked friends for podcast suggestions... several were spotify-only, i don't think the suggestors even realized it, cause they just listened on spotify anyway regardless.
So I think Spotify agrees with you and is working on it...
+1 for Feedly, although I use Feedly Classic on IOS for a more concise, no-frills UI. I really appreciate the header + summary without thumbnails format for quickly going through large-volume sources (like HN).
I dropped Feedly because I found that 90%+ of my feeds would only put the article title and the first sentence into the feed, then require I click the URL to pull up the full article.
It wasn't very fun constantly having to switch between my RSS app and my browser, so I just stopped using it.
This is an issue with the site's RSS feed, not Feedly. Feedly has an option to open any individual feeds posts in an in-app browser directly (and if you're on iOS, even enable Reader mode!) to combat this, so you don't need to switch apps!
I use Reeder for iOS + Feedly. What the OP describes started happening to me with all sites at the same time 2 days ago. Interestingly, it does not happen on the main Feedly site. So I do think that Feedly is making the experience worse with third party readers. I would speculate that this is done because third party readers don’t show ads.
We let publishers decide whether to showcase their content via a full feed (ie. full text and multimedia content can be read through a reader app) or a partial feed (ie. only showing limited text, inviting readers to browse full-content directly on their website). The choice is entirely in their hands.
Some publishers offer full RSS feeds as one of the benefits of their subscriptions. It might be something to explore for your favorite must-read sources.
I use inoreader and had the same problem. But solved it by installing a plugin to Firefox, that closes current tab with back-button if you are at the start of history.
Inoreader also has a button to show full content. But it's not working for all feeds.
Yeah this really sucks. I think some do this for paywall reasons, but there are definitely models out there to allow in-reader paywall access. Stratechery has an interesting approach - when you subscribe you get a unique feed that can be cancelled when you stop paying.
Same. After Google Reader I went with Feedly for a while, then self-hosted TTRSS, and currently self-hosted Miniflux. Miniflutt is my preferred Android client and ReadKit on Mac. The Miniflux web app is nice and simple but I prefer clients that mark as read on scroll.
I occasionally venture onto Reddit or HN to see if I've missed anything big but rarely do.