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Businesses Software

Digg Reader To Shut Down This Month -- Latest RSS Service To Bite the Dust (betanews.com) 109

Posted by msmash from the tough-business-model dept.
Digg announced this week that it's shutting down Digg Reader, an app which allows users to follow RSS feeds from sites. From a report: Following the closure of Google Reader, RSS fans flocked to the likes of Feedly, The Old Reader, Digg Reader and Inoreader. Now Digg Reader has announced that it is to close, and users are being advised to export their feeds so they can be imported into an alternative service. Users do not have a great deal of time to grab their data and take it elsewhere. The RSS reader is due to close on March 26, meaning there's less than two weeks to go. No reason has been given for the closure, but presumably the venture either didn't prove as popular as expected, or it was rather more costly to run than anticipated.
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Digg Reader To Shut Down This Month -- Latest RSS Service To Bite the Dust More

Digg Reader To Shut Down This Month -- Latest RSS Service To Bite the Dust

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  • I'll just stay on AIM and ICQ, while listening to my 8-track tapes.

  • RSS for the masses? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by sqorbit ( 3387991 )
    Can someone who really uses RSS feeds shed some light on it's benefits for a mass market? Is there any? I find RSS doesn't really fit into any internet habits I currently have. I've never really used RSS other than trying it out a few times and I never found it to be helpful in anyway. I'm sure there are lots of people who love RSS. Not being one of them I'd like to hear the positives from someone who actually uses it regularly.

    • Re:RSS for the masses? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15, 2018 @11:17AM (#56264741)

      I mostly use it to view a collection of articles from various sources, and comics from various sources. Instead of having to visit each and every site and keeping track of which articles I have read and not read an RSS reader does that for me.
      Visiting one link I can view all the slashdot tech articles, lifehacker, dilbert comics, commitstrip, etc. There may be other ways to emulate this on social media platforms but the fact I can pick and choose exactly what I want to read makes it so much easier to keep track of exactly what I want.

      • Re:RSS for the masses? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Thursday March 15, 2018 @11:22AM (#56264777)

        The problem: Where is the ad revenue in that?

        • It's a good point.

          For example, I tend to use RSS with comics. It's nice because I get notified when there's a new comic. Of course, what I want is to actually see the new comic. But, like you said, where's the money in that?

          So, yeah, it's not the best. But it certainly beats going to the website to see if there's a new comic.

          • I just have bookmark folders grouped by roughly how often they update - daily, MWF, weekly/Sunday. In Firefox I just Ctrl-click on the bookmark folder and all bookmarks within it are opened in new tabs.

            Can be a handy way to provide a big load to test a network connection as well, just by doing that Ctrl-click one level higher.

            • That's another way to attack the problem, but you can see in itself the advantage for an RSS reader - it doesn't have to load a whole ton of pages and their formats, it's easier on limited dataplans and on the browser itself. :D

        • Simple - if I didn't use an RSS reader, I would rarely visit any of the sites I'm keeping track of.

          Clicking through to the site when a story interests me and/or I want to comment on it, they are getting more traffic out of me using an RSS reader than if I didn't.

        • Imagine that the people who wanted to use this RSS service were routed to an ongoing-cost project to support the service. If enough of the people who want to use it agree to pay the costs, perhaps $10 each, then the service would continue.

          My take is that the problem is bad financial models, and if you [Opportunist] actually earned that insightful moderation it is only for a light touch on the root of the problem. I think advertising is fundamentally lies, and it is crazy even to try to fund truth (in journa

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Trogre ( 513942 )

          The same as every other service - injected into the feed as an article or inline with another article.

          Oh, you mean using analytics to spy on whether I actually read an article or not? Yeah RSS isn't so good for that.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by pots ( 5047349 )
          For a lot of things like comic strips, it's a bad deal if they publish the strips to the RSS feed. But it works out fine if they only publish a notice and a link, "New strip available, click here to read it."

          From my perspective, this is really all that I want anyway. RSS is a great way to stay notified.

          • Unfortunately it's way more interesting for them (and reaches a lot more people, too) to ask for your mail address to keep you informed...

        • RSS can be monetized in two ways. One - publish only snippets in the RSS so that users will see the ads when they visit the site for the entire article. Two - publish ads directly in the RSS. Most RSS readers use a web browser component which can display ads in addition to images and videos.
    • I have yet to find another means of keeping up to date with news from various sources without visiting them all one after another. This is especially useful for sites that don't update very often. My feedreader will just present me with new articles as soon as they are available. I don't know how I could do this without RSS.

    • Re:RSS for the masses? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by schklerg ( 1130369 ) on Thursday March 15, 2018 @11:25AM (#56264801)
      I heavily use RSS. It's what brought this article to my attention. I currently use TT-RSS with about 60 or so RSS feeds subscribed. I like it because it gives me one spot to see all of the articles that have been published on sites that I frequent without having to go there. I can quickly scan the title and the summary (when provided) to see if I want to read it. Using TT-RSS I can quickly "star" articles to read later when I get a chance or just ignore ones that aren't interesting. I even use it to follow some Twitter feeds with my RSS reader so I don't have to use that service. I just think it's easier to have something aggregate the news for me. Push emails from sites end up being interpreted as SPAM to my brain, and manually going to 60 sites to see whats new is just arduous.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jon3k ( 691256 )
        I'm a TT-RSS user as well, immediately after the closure of Google Reader. Although I don't have anything near 60 sources. Being able to go to a single site and see a stream of events which I can easily and quickly navigate (with vim keyboard shortcuts even) which shows me in a nice linear form only the items that have been published since the last time I looked is the most efficient way I've found to consume news and other published resources on the web.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • This. I use TT-RSS installed on an rPi2 at home that doubles as my proxy from work. You'd be surprised how much compelling content is still out there on RSS - Slashdot included. I have images turned off and it just appears as text.

    • Tried it, hated it. What I wanted was a RSS reader that was smart enough to use regular expressions / follow the damn links to the content, but instead got something which was half-email / half-webbrowser.

      For instance, there are, perhaps, several dozen webcomics that use RSS; Dilbert might publish the actual image inside the RSS feed, while Slightly Damned might include a link to their latest webcomic; in either case, it's annoying -> I want to be able to tell the RSS reader to grab ONLY the images (from

      • Tried it, hated it. What I wanted was a RSS reader that was smart enough to use regular expressions / follow the damn links to the content, but instead got something which was half-email / half-webbrowser.

        For instance, there are, perhaps, several dozen webcomics that use RSS; Dilbert might publish the actual image inside the RSS feed, while Slightly Damned might include a link to their latest webcomic; in either case, it's annoying -> I want to be able to tell the RSS reader to grab ONLY the images (from wherever), and to display it all like on the cartoon pages of a newspaper (back when we had those; use a grid layout or something).

        Same things with major stories: I want paragraphs...the reader I was using would give it to you in a line, like email -> I want the headline + a customizable amount of text following that, ala a newspaper.

        Instead it just became unnecessary work. Reuter's homepage had things more properly organized than I could make them in the reader. As for the comics, I hate having to read a post, to find a link, that says that you have the latest up on your website (so take me there)...it's an unnecessary amount of clicking.

        If you know regular expressions, you can probably just write your own reader in your language of choice that has easy XML parsing. Unfortunately--and I'm not sure which--either RSS is a super loose standard, or very few content providers adhere to the standard.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          You just can write input parser. For some feeds i replace thumbnail pictures with actual large pictures, so i don't have to open them in new tab. Liferea supports that

      • for me I have a tt-rss server going, and there's actually a lot of plugins that help with the issues in particular you mention. Like say making sure comics actually go into the feed for the particular comic etc... It does take a bit of time, finding the addons for that site (or writing them if you are inclined). But it also is a one time task that gets things going quickly for as long as you want to keep using it.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I don't go to sites to check "is there something new, no, let me come back 5 minutes later to see if there's something new" for multiple sources that would be unmanageable, I follow in Inoreader, the RSS reader that I use, a lot of sources and I can see when new things pop up without having to check different sites, it's very efficient and I can mark items as read or unread so it's easy to manage what I want to read.

    • I have a Logitech gaming keyboard that has a little display that uses RSS to populate some news stories. It is a nice gimmick but not really something I've tried to make more useful, and I don't see a way for it to be monetized, so I don't imagine the remaining services will survive long.

    • Re:RSS for the masses? (Score:5, Informative)

      by apoc.famine ( 621563 ) <apoc DOT famine AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday March 15, 2018 @12:34PM (#56265327) Journal

      Something like 90% of my browsing gets done through RSS. I'm happily subscribed to INOreader, in the hopes that it will stay alive for a long time. Here is how I use RSS. On one page, I get the following notifications, bundled into the appropriate folders:

      * All of my mainstream news from a half dozen different websites, with a headline and 1-2 sentence intro. This allows me to decide which ones are worth reading, and which ones to skip. It is super quick to get through a lot of news this way, and I avoid going to all of the different websites, their shitastic auto-playing videos, poorly laid out pages, etc.
      * All of my web comics. About 2/3 display right in the reader, the other 1/3 I have to go to. But all in one folder, so no bookmarking, opening in tabs, etc.
      * The limited social media feeds I follow, both Twitter and Facebook. Just the posts from the creators, none of the reposts, retweets, replies, or any of that shit. It's a minimal way to keep up with asshats who insist on using social media. (Hello local brewery, which only posts their taplist and hours on facebook...)
      * Stupid shit that I keep around for when I need some lowbrow entertainment. Cat memes and failure gifs.
      * STEM websites posting content I may or may not be interested in. The posts build up in that folder until I'm feeling sciency, then I can browse through a bunch of different fields and some of the new stuff coming out.

      Having all of that in one place limits the mental energy it takes to track down all those disparate things. When I want to read my comics, pop open the comic folder, and I can read a couple of weeks of comics. When I want science, I can do that with science. I don't have to bookmark a thousand pages and open them in different tabs, and try to figure out how long it's been since I've been there.

      Most places do a crappy job with archives. RSS lets me save and favorite things for later. And unread things are all in date order, so when I get around to it, I have an idea how old it is.

      Trying to take in most modern websites is brain-fuzzing. Graphics and moving shit, boxes of articles, teasers and the like, infinite scrolling, etc. Every one is different, and they all suck. RSS gives me every website in the same format. Small image, title, couple of sentences.

      Scrolling past a headline and it's marked as read. Unless I unmark it. And if I go to long and have 500 unread articles, I can just mark ones older than X days, weeks, months as read. It really simplifies how one interacts with content on the web. It's just so easy and organized. I really can't be bothered to do the web without RSS.

      Oh, and INOreader has a great mobile app too, so I have the same thing on my browser as on my phone.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jahta ( 1141213 )

      Can someone who really uses RSS feeds shed some light on it's benefits for a mass market? Is there any? I find RSS doesn't really fit into any internet habits I currently have. I've never really used RSS other than trying it out a few times and I never found it to be helpful in anyway. I'm sure there are lots of people who love RSS. Not being one of them I'd like to hear the positives from someone who actually uses it regularly.

      I use QuiteRSS [quiterss.org]; it's how I got to this article.

      Why do I use it? It allows me to aggregate new posts from a bunch of different sites and home in on stuff I'm particularly interested in; e.g. QuiteRSS can tag articles about development languages and tools I use (using keywords or regular expressions that I specify) making it easy to quickly see new articles about, say, python. There's a lot of new content published every day and a good RSS reader makes that "fire hose" more manageable.

    • I think if you mainly only visit a handful of sites regularly then RSS doesn't have much value. If you're one of those people that bounces between Slashdot, Reddit, Hackaday and CNN (or whatever news you prefer). Then RSS is not worth setting up.

      If you're like me and you track 40 blogs that are only periodically updated, then RSS is a real time saver. (the blogs are related to my hobbies, not anything news worthy).

      As for how someone monetizes it? I don't care. I'm from the era when nearly everything on the

    • RSS is my primary source of new, analyses, and opinions. I find blogs and websites that consistently publish well-written, reliable, well-researched content that I'm interested in and find their RSS feed URL. I then add it to my personal list of feeds in my email client (Mozilla Thunderbird) so I can check up on new articles when I've finished doing my emails. The only other places I look for news are /. and Twitter, where I only follow people who consistently find and/or write "good" articles.

      Keeping up to

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cdecoro ( 882384 )

      The reason I saw this article is because of RSS (I use Feedly). In fact, the only way I see *any* /. articles is through my RSS reader. I really don't have the time or the Interest to randomly click around to every site that I subscribe to in order to see if there are new articles. There are about 25 sites that I subscribe to. Perhaps if they went away, I'd "Like" or "Follow" them on Facebook, but scrolling through the Facebook newsfeed would be a lot less efficient than just seeing the headlines in Fee

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      I want to read news from my favourite news sites. I just click open bookmarks, mouseover my favourite site and scan the headlines.

      Welcome to firefox RSS bookmarks integration.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kris_J ( 10111 )
      I use TinyTinyRRS on an old laptop I leave running at home and have a variety of ways to connect to it from outside the house. It's my main source of news, and in fact the way I was alerted to this Slashdot article. It consolidates feeds from the following sources, allowing me to quicly keep up with a ton of news and other stuff that interests me in one place:

    • I dunno about mass market, but the RSS reader advantages from early days remain true, and there isn't a proper replacement for it to this day. I might miss some stuff here, but I think they are:

      1. Speed and efficiency - the ability to read through multiple news sources updates fast, in a non-polluted platform. My reader is setup like webmail/Gmail. Most readers offer keyboard shortcuts that once you learn and start using makes going through the list even faster. So it's a really good tool for people who rea

    • I used iGoogle and now I use NetVibes. They are RSS aggregator "personal homepage" pages. They allow for there to be a single page of all of my favorite RSS feeds (Slashdot, soylent, gmail). There is then another page for entertainment (reddit /r/jokes, /r/firstworldproblems, zenhabits, Art of Manliness, etc.). There is then another page for work stuff (AI news, tech pushes, etc.).

      RSS is the internet plumbing that enables me to see the content from 10+ pages in headline format (click to know more) witho

  • https://newsblur.com/ [newsblur.com] Yes is costs a small amount of money but it works well. I have no other relation than being an early and still happy customer.

    • https://newsblur.com/ [newsblur.com] Yes is costs a small amount of money but it works well. I have no other relation than being an early and still happy customer.

      Bonus, because it costs money instead of selling ads, you're the actual customer and not a product being sold to someone else.

      Also a customer, with 165 feeds, including Slashdot.

  • Irony (for me at least) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Snard ( 61584 ) <mike.shawaluk@gmNETBSDail.com minus bsd> on Thursday March 15, 2018 @11:35AM (#56264887) Homepage
    I've been using Feedly for quite a while now. I originally was a Google Reader user, but that was shuttered a long time ago. Anyway, I have been mostly happy with the free version of Feedly, except that recently they've started injecting "fake" articles in my various feeds, presumably as a source of ad revenue. So, a couple weeks ago I finally got fed up and decided to see what other free readers there were out there. Digg Reader seems to be the best of the bunch, so I exported/imported my feeds and gave it a whirl. The user interface was not quite as nice, but at least there weren't fake articles to skip over. Then, yesterday I got the message about it going away on the 26th. Sigh

    I suppose I could try the pay version of Feedly and ditch the ads, but for some reason, an RSS reader isn't worth 1/2 of the monthly price of Netflix to me (that's just an example). I suppose it's only "pennies a day" but a penny saved is a penny earned, as they say.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Fusen ( 841730 )

      I use Feedly (free, I don't pay anything) and have yet to see any 'fake article' type injected entries.

      Do you use an AdBlocker? I always will have either uBlock or AdBlock Plus depending on which device which may explain it. Although I also use the Feedly Android app and haven't seen anything there either.

      What were these injected ads like?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Snard ( 61584 )
        The ads show up as an article within a particular feed. There are certain ones that show up over and over. One example is "You've got this. Wow your presentation audience with Prezi." Of course now that I'm looking for other examples, I can't find one. Maybe it's because I accidentally clicked on it so now they are suppressing more ads for X hours.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by trawg ( 308495 )

          Are you sure they're not ads in the RSS content you're reading? I've seen nothing like the behaviour you're describing.

  • I'm an avid user of RSS feeds. When Google Reader bit the dust I moved to TinyTiny RSS along with many others. It's based on the look and feel of the old Google Reader. I login to TinyTiny every morning to catch up on everything from software updates to the latest news. In one app I have access to: The latest news from various sources News from all the open source projects I follow Updates on topics I'm interested in. For example, I have an RSS feed based on Google News keywords such as SIP or VoIP. That
  • I'm a heavy user of RSS feeds, after google pulled the plug I installed TT-RSS on one of my servers. I have 487 Feeds, collected over the yrs. I have found RSS feeds for job hunting to be a MASSIVE asset . It saves hours and hours of going from job hunting site to site. Build a RSS feed from a keyword on say for example indeed and put into a RSS reader and it saves me from going to indeed and searching for each keyword for new job postings.

  • I need to understand why RSS is not working in the real world.

    It is because people just don't read any more? Or because publishers don't care about less-engaged RSS visitors versus high-engaged direct website visits and facebook referrals? Or because the hub is too expensive to run versus the advertising revenue (which Digg didn't have)?

    ---

    Originally RSS was thought to be a many-to-many protocol. Apply quickly taught the world that many-to-one-to-many is a superior model and it is how you get push notificat

    • Twitter has taken up the role RSS use to have. I use to have Google Reader page setup with blogs and tech sites that were infrequent but published good material. At that point I dropped it and went to just a news sites.
      Recently tried to duplicate that capability to track some authors and had to get a twitter account because notifications of new articles was sent through that.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by glomph ( 2644 )

        Totally - just create a Twitter list of sources (or multiple topical lists) and group your interests there (Sports / Tech / General News / Sleaze). Virtually all info sources (real and clickbait) publish regularly there with links to content. For most users at least as good as RSS readers.

  • RSS died the moment Dilbert strips were not shown in Dilbert RSS.

  • Tiny Tiny RSS, then MiniFlux (Score:3)

    by kbahey ( 102895 ) on Thursday March 15, 2018 @01:38PM (#56265687) Homepage

    I was dependent on Google Reader for the daily news (including Slashdot).

    When it shutdown, I did not want to go to yet another online service that can shutdown, so I opted for a self hosted solution.

    First, I used Tiny Tiny RSS [wikipedia.org] for a few years. It worked well. I ran it on my home server. Written in PHP and using MySQL made it easy to host.

    One day, it was choking on feeds from a certain site, and stopped updating.

    So I switched to the original MiniFlux [github.com] reader. Again, it is written in PHP, so easy to host. It can use either SQLite, MySQL, and other databases.

    The same developer has gone in a different direction, with MiniFlux 2 [github.com], which uses Go, and PostgreSQL (only!). The developer describes it as 'opinionated!'

    Using Go is an odd choice here, since this is not an application that has to be super fast. The slowest parts will be retrieving feeds (limited by the speed of the network and servers that host the feeds), or reading the database. Moreover, being a single executable, it does not integrate with your existing Apache or Nginx (if you already have them and want to use existing SSL certificates, ...etc.) and therefore has to run on a different port. PostgreSQL only is higher maintenance than MySQL, and if I don't not run PostgreSQL already, then I will not install, configure and maintain PostgreSQL just for the this one application.

    So for now, the original MiniFlux does the job adequately, running behind SSL and password protected, so not much chance for a vulnerability getting exploited. Tiny Tiny RSS had a better user interface, but you get used to MiniFlux quickly. It even uses short cut keys that are like vim (j, k, ...)

  • I tried a couple readers after Google Reader shutdown, most were flashy, i wanted something i could read quickly, not flashy graphics. I settled on G2reader. Very minimalist, good support from developer. I did like the Old reader, but they seemed concerned about social groups. If g2reader shutdown, i'd head back to the old reader.

  • The problem with the RSS model is how companies can't find a good way of profitting out of it, which is unfortunate.
    I've been using RSS readers before Google Reader even existed (I remember using Foxmail and some other types of RSS readers in the past), currently on Feedly, but already have TinyTiny RSS reader as a backup strategy and I'm trying to also see if I can make my Synology NAS work with Selfoss... no success so far.

    For those wondering what's good about it, once you are used to the format it's kind

  • The main advantage of RSS is the anonymity it provides. I used to use Opera as feed reader on my PC. It stores the article snippets offline on the computer. Even if the site goes out, I still have article links, which I can use on the Internet Archive's cache. For Android, I did not like these apps that store my data online. So I wrote my own offline feed reader and added it to my app - Subhash Browser. With Opera, I just need to copy the .opera folder if I move to a new PC. I like RSS so much that when Twi

  • Newblur.com

    Switched to it when Google Reader died. Haven't regretted it. RSS is a HUGE part of my daily internet. Allows me to keep on top of thousands of sites.

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