Let me blow your mind: Betamax was not better quality than VHS. There are many things that can explain why people believed that one was better than the other.
People confused Betamax with Betacam, Sony’s professional grade recording medium, which is absolutely better quality.
People conflated VHS’ ability to slow the tape for even longer play at the expense of quality. That of course made the recording terrible. Betamax did not initially have this capability.
People listened to Sony’s own marketing. When they couldn’t compete on features, they banked on their reputation.
abirch · 59m ago
How do you quantify quality?
"When Betamax was introduced in Japan and the United States in 1975, its Beta I speed of 1.57 inches per second (ips) offered a higher horizontal resolution (approximately 250 lines vs 240 lines horizontal NTSC), lower video noise, and less luma/chroma crosstalk than VHS, and was later marketed as providing pictures superior to VHS's playback. However, the introduction of Beta II speed, 0.79 ips (two-hour mode), to compete with VHS's two-hour Standard Play mode (1.31 ips) reduced Betamax's horizontal resolution to 240 lines.[7]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war#Picture_q...
philistine · 16m ago
In tests done by Technology Connections, the difference was so small as to be inconsequential. It was technically better at its slowest speed, but you could barely perceive the difference and more importantly Sony disabled the feature in the vast majority of machines sold. People wanted more than 60 minutes out of one tape. They wanted 2 hours.
sells VHS decks for $12 and you can get pretty good movies for $2. Contrast that to compact cassette decks which start at twice that and have a good chance of being non-functional. That place has the complete works of Barbara Streisand but if you want music that anybody would want on cassettes the sky is the limit for collectables.
My impression is that the quality of VHS isn't terrible. The video is worse than DVD of course but a lot of DVDs have NERFed soundtracks because they mixed them assuming you're going to play their 5.1 mix on a 2-channel system. Any deck you get now is going to support VHS Hi-Fi and if you have a 5.1 system with some kind of Dolby Pro Logic the soundtrack of a good VHS can be better than the soundtrack of an average DVD. (Blu-Ray often has better sound not because the technology is better but because the 5.1 soundtrack is more likely to really be a 5.1 soundtrack)
chuckadams · 29m ago
Sony charging exorbitant licensing fees to manufacturers of Betamax equipment also didn't help, a lesson it took Sony a few more decades and proprietary formats to finally learn.
theshrike79 · 1h ago
Porn went VHS and later on you could fit a whole movie on one cassette.
RSS has more of a commercial problem. You can’t put ads in it so sites are incentivized to force a site visit. Which in turn forces them to withhold the bulk of the value from the feed itself. Ie just include first sentence or two. Which kills the usefulness of the feed as anything more thank headlines and link. Headlines in turn are all clickbait these days so those don’t have much info density either.
mariusor · 1h ago
> You can’t put ads in it
That's a silly thing to say. Of course you can put ads in it since it allows linking to things. What you mean probably, is that it's not as easy as embedding some google ads markup in your sidebar.
jasonjayr · 37m ago
What you can't do, is add all sorts of invasive tracking to RSS to confirm that the user saw the ad, and that it wasn't filtered out. You have to get more creative with wording that works the ad into the descriptions for the articles, and even then, there's no guarantee.
Advertisers love to burn money, but they draw the line at not being able to verify that the spend did what was promised.
mananaysiempre · 16m ago
You can add an image, can’t you? So the situation is not worse than email, and there’s plenty of tracking there (that good email clients block, but that doesn’t matter in a world where almost everyone uses the Gmail web UI).
ryukoposting · 16m ago
There are also some efficiency-related shortcomings. I'd wager that most feed readers either implement conditional requests incorrectly, or they don't implement conditional requests at all. Polling rates also tend to be stupid, on the order of 1-30 minutes with no regard for how often any given feed actually has new posts. This creates server-side pressure to make your feed as small as possible, which always means excluding content.
Scene_Cast2 · 1h ago
Why can't you put ads on RSS? Either in the story itself (by the site or aggregator) or as a "promoted item" in the feed (by the aggregator). If anything, the Google Discover (or whatever it's called) is not too different, just that you don't control which exact news sources you're subscribed to.
I can imagine an alternate timeline where Google Reader turned into a sort of Twitter (or FB or IG) feed.
danesparza · 21m ago
I'm just here to say that I'm still bitter about Google Reader. :-(
palata · 1h ago
Sounds about right.
Podcasts inject ads into the content: from RSS you get the link and description of the episode, and inside the episode are ads.
I guess that's why RSS is still a thing for podcasts? :-)
nashashmi · 1h ago
Ads are a recent innovation on top of existing web standards. A new generation of changeable scripted ads had emerged and this was not compatible with XML. The old generation of ads was still compatible but not scalable, similar to how podcast sponsor ads work (immutable after publishing), and so did not get much traction.
scarface_74 · 22m ago
Podcasts ads are definitely mutable after publishing. Dynamic ad insertion has been a thing for years. If you download an old Stuff You Should Know podcast, you will get a new ad even based on where you were when you downloaded it.
tonkinai · 19m ago
Man, RSS still brings me so much nostalgia. Anyone still feel the pain when Google discontinued its RSS reader?
em-bee · 1h ago
why not? you can format ads as an entry in the rss feed. in fact it would not even bother me. i could train my rss reader to detect the ad based on keywords and mark it, and even if not, i'd just skip over it manually, mark it as read, and it's gone. as long as the frequency of ads is not to much that is better than an ad on a website that is permanently visible.
scarface_74 · 24m ago
John Gruber has made his entire living by putting a once a week sponsored post in RSS along with the full content of his posts in RSS.
oceanhaiyang · 38m ago
I hate that the self hosting newsletter does this.
factorialboy · 2h ago
> Massive tech companies tried to own syndication. They failed.
Well, RSS won the battle, but lost the war.
piskov · 2h ago
Yet I still use it on all devices and nothing beats it. Moved to Feedly when Google Reader died.
Arguably the best is NetNewsWire, which has been around in various forms for over 20 years and is still developed today https://netnewswire.com
michaelcampbell · 48m ago
https://theoldreader.com has been my go-to since google reader was killed. It's pretty good at sussing out the rss feed of random blogs if one exists, too.
ericd · 1h ago
Sorry for the random question, but I’ve been trying to get more into RSS, and figure it’s worth asking someone who has a lot of experience - is there a reliable way to find an RSS feed for a given site, assuming it has one? Or is it a set of heuristics you try?
Are there good tools to RSSify sites that don’t have one?
With decent RSS apps, you can generally just paste in the URL of any page (or the site's homepage) and they will take care of examining the HTML to find the URL of the actual feed.
Latitude7973 · 1h ago
I use Folo which has Rsshub built in. You simply search for a source you want, or add your own with a known URL for everyone to use. Otherwise you can use Rsshub with a reader of your choice.
AndrewDucker · 1h ago
Check the source code. Looks for "rss". If that returns too many hits then search for "application/rss+xml".
You can link it to your reader so you just click the button and it adds the feed into it.
riedel · 1h ago
I use RSS inside Telegram using a bot (should work with Matrix, Teams, etc as well) Allows syncing read stuff across devices and gives nice previews.
kevincox · 2h ago
Depends how you define lost. I still use it every day.
Is it a popular main stream thing? No. Does every since site offer feeds for every reasonable thing you could want to subscribe to? But does it still work quite well for those that want to use it? Yes.
oDot · 2h ago
This is especially timely, as I'm currently building a service that let's you receive your RSS feed as a physical newspaper.
Many times this sort of meta information reveals much more than expected
jesuslop · 33m ago
That's a damn good of an idea. I'd had uses for my old parents for something that came by snail mail, to notify sports events or what not.
NiloCK · 1h ago
I sort of love this, but immediately wonder about curation.
My feeds are pretty unpredictable - sometimes I have 40 new articles in a day, sometimes just a few. The cheapness of digital consumption and interface makes it viable for me to skim titles and read, defer, or dismiss at my judgement. I don't want the entire feed printed out - not viable.
But if some SaaS is curating my feeds for me, I fear it'll turn into another algorithmized something optimizing for what exactly? At least the first-pass filter is explicitly set by me - feeds I subscribe to.
Curious to hear your thoughts on it, and wishing you luck.
oDot · 34m ago
You got it exactly right, curation and typesetting are the most challenging aspects of it. Experimenting with different solutions...
benoliver999 · 1h ago
Many moons ago I tried out a service [0] that did this with pocket articles (although I used to send to pocket vis RSS). It was pretty good! It didn't last long though.
I suspect maybe it's easier now to nail the layout if ai can read content before it goes to print.
AI is indeed a crucial part in solving the two most difficult challenges -- typesetting and curation, although we'll probably do things that don't scale for a little while before fully automating.
rafterydj · 2h ago
I've had this same idea! Of course, it remains an idea never taken out of the garage. Are you delivering broadsheet, or formatting a printable file for users to print at home?
oDot · 35m ago
Typesetting is a challenge so broadsheet vs tabloid is undetermined, but whatever it will be it will be delivered to the door. The newspaper paper is a crucial part, I believe.
aa-jv · 2h ago
I have had this idea pitched to me many times over the years, with requests to build a simple prototype practically forced into my dev queue .. but I always resist it.
The last time someone tried to convince me this was a good idea was just after the iPhone was announced, and before everyone and their monkey had a super computer in their pocket. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so we almost started - but my advice to the punter then was "lets see what the mobile phone industry looks like next year" .. well that put a pin in it.
Nowadays, I'm not so sure I'd be so willing to do this - again, because it requires the user do the printing - but if you were to, say, make this into a vending machine product, which users can walk up to in the street and walk away with a custom 'zine full of their own interests, you might be onto something.
Here in Europe we have a lot of old telephone booths converted into mini neighborhood free libraries. I've often wondered whether it would make sense to put a public printer in those libraries and let people print things .. seems like this would be a revolutionary new product to make, with printable broadsheets based on a custom RSS, an obvious killer app .. assuming someone can be found to maintain the printers.
(Off to find thermal paper for my ClockworkPi, which I always wanted to turn into a custom RSS printer in the toilet...)
CubsFan1060 · 1h ago
This sounds interesting. Do you have anything to show yet?
oDot · 37m ago
Not yet, but we'll need beta testers. If you're interested and in a large metro area please reach out to ofek [at] nestful [dot] app mentioning said metro.
newsclues · 40m ago
I’ve thought of this (worked in book sales so the espresso printers were around for print on demand books.
Recently I’ve been living in a cottage town and thought of this idea again… rather than be reading on phones or tablets people could read printed books with their favourite articles or blogs. But I think the actual distribution system would be the killer, unless it’s at a big resort the transportation will kill the idea.
PaulRobinson · 2h ago
I still think there is a future for web publishing - from indie to corporate - if people stop feeding the algorithm machine with both sides of the supply and demand market, and move it elsewhere.
People found the web more boring, because it became more boring.
They found the algorithm more interesting, because it allowed them to see what was going on with people they barely knew (from former school mates they'd lost touch with to celebrities without press filtering), and that was compelling.
But there's a next phase available to us, which is to make the web more interesting, entertaining and compelling again.
I love that b3ta.com still exists. I love that metafilter.com is moving on. I think it's great that web comics I love still publish to RSS.
I just think more of us need to provide more demand, and more people will wake up to supply, and the flywheel will start to turn.
RSS beat ICE, and it can beat Meta and X if people want it too, albeit for different reasons.
sexyman48 · 1h ago
Whatever ICE was, I'm sure it wasn't thinking about RSS. RSS remains a
trivial, unhierarchical link dump.
AtNightWeCode · 1h ago
Then Microsoft took out revenge by adding the worst RSS integration ever to Windows/Outlook.
PeterStuer · 2h ago
And then Google and Facebook killed RSS.
latexr · 2h ago
RSS is alive and well. It’s rare that I find an interesting website where RSS makes sense and it doesn’t exist. Even if they don’t advertise it, popping the website’s address into a feed reader tends to be enough to find it. Even Mastodon and Bluesky profiles have RSS feeds.
pndy · 1h ago
Mozilla decided to remove its fantastic live bookmarks feature that seamlessly integrated RSS within bookmarks in 2018 with Firefox 64. Someone then made an extension which was ported to Chromium, and then back again to Firefox because original one was abandoned.
A dedicated extension is needed to have that feature back. Chrome needs one as well, so does Edge; only Vivaldi and Opera come with build-in feed readers. There are of course standalone applications but that seems to be a niche nowadays.
I've found an old rssowl opml file from 2014 last week and I decided to see what's still up. I've found some RSS readers in flathub but sadly, majority of what I was visiting back then died.
zenmac · 2h ago
One can say that, but can you really kill RSS when it is protocol? It is an easier way to keep track of all the updates from different sites.
Bluesky is basically RSS on JSON.
Semiapies · 2h ago
My having to prune my subscriptions says otherwise.
rob · 2h ago
I'm sure there's still some people using a Ford Model T to drive around as well.
charcircuit · 2h ago
>All RSS had to do to weather ICE, Twitter, AI, and whatever comes next
RSS did not weather Twitter. Social media is huge compared to RSS. It turned out that singular recommendation feeds are able to push URLs around better than needing every site to build in feeds themselves and then still requiring someone to turn those feeds into a singular feed for the user.
IgorPartola · 1h ago
I think there are a couple of things here.
First, RSS has a bit more friction. Smashing the follow button on Twitter et al is faster than adding the feed to your RSS reader of choice unless your OS has support for default RSS app.
Second, discoverability. Just like with any distributed system vs monolithic platform, you need to find what to read yourself. For some niches this works well. If you are a software developer/hacker, you are more familiar with blogs in your area of interest. But if you have a wide range of interests you’d need to find the blogs yourself and hope their RSS feed is well formatted.
Third, the algorithm. A monolithic platform can do more to try to mix in new content based on your interests and intelligently mix up the content from sources you follow. This is of course controversial because feed algorithms can also try to cram bullshit into your feed or hide important stuff from you or create an echo chamber. But in the best case scenario they can also expose you to new sources of content you wouldn’t have found otherwise. An RSS reader would mean it is up to you to do this discovery which is more friction.
And ultimately content creators realized that they get more eyeballs on their stuff by using platforms like Facebook, Medium, Instagram, Twitter, than on blogs especially since blogs tend to be then repackaged by blog spam bots, Google’s AMP, and now LLMs.
So IMO RSS is just too manual and requires too much work. And of course since you can’t effectively advertise through it there is less incentive for creators and platforms to support it.
threetonesun · 2h ago
BlueSky and Mastodon both support RSS feeds. The loss from Google Reader dying was huge, more so than Twitter, but it’s probably balanced by the growth in Podcasts.
giveita · 2h ago
RSS feels like a cable. Cables won! Because you need them to power your devices and pipe your home internet. Cables lost! Because of 5G and WiFi. Maybe cables dont care, they just do their job.
ubermonkey · 2h ago
So did Twitter pre-Elon. I moved a number of "public personalities" with high-volume feeds from my follow list to my RSS reader. I liked what Merlin Mann, or Parker Molloy, or John Green had to say, but I wasn't going to interact with them, and their loquaciousness made it hard to keep up with people I followed there that I actually knew and interacted with.
Then I remembered that Twitter was once referred to as "micro blogging," so I put those folks in my blog list on Feedbin, and was happy again.
I do miss the glory days of Twitter, tbh.
charcircuit · 2h ago
Most people consume those services via the app or website and not via the RSS feed.
frou_dh · 50m ago
Back when Twitter was less controversial, I remember tons of techie folks gleefully saying that they didn't bother with RSS any more because Twitter was better.
giancarlostoro · 2h ago
I was going to say, RSS is not as big as I remember it being back in the late 2000s. I remember people having RSS clients, myself included. Now I can't remember the last time I ever used one. Where RSS is most prominent I guess is podcast feeds which were based on RSS to my understanding.
frizlab · 2h ago
I read HN top submissions through RSS \o/ I have a lot of other feeds too in my reader. I don’t think I could function without it, newswise.
vaylian · 2h ago
> which were based on RSS to my understanding.
They still are in most cases.
Vinnl · 1h ago
I don't think that market is zero-sum, so the question is not about who "won", it's whether any player lost. Despite Twitter being big, RSS is still widely used and, perhaps more importantly, widely supported and thus usable. That counts as weather in my book.
(In contrast, ICE did not weather RSS.)
lloydatkinson · 2h ago
Interesting, I’d never heard of that ICE. Seems that it could be considered a very very early idea in line with ActivityPub, which I also don’t really know much about.
I think, as someone that has a RSS feed on my blog, that RSS is a total mess and Atom was probably the better choice.
Maybe even some modern JSON based format would be OK, but maybe that’s what ActivityPub is?
Anyway, after dealing with the mess of images and inline HTML with CDATA in RSS, I have complete fatigue of the whole endeavour.
latexr · 8m ago
> Maybe even some modern JSON based format would be OK
That’s what JSON Feed is. It’s supported by several RSS readers.
People confused Betamax with Betacam, Sony’s professional grade recording medium, which is absolutely better quality.
People conflated VHS’ ability to slow the tape for even longer play at the expense of quality. That of course made the recording terrible. Betamax did not initially have this capability.
People listened to Sony’s own marketing. When they couldn’t compete on features, they banked on their reputation.
"When Betamax was introduced in Japan and the United States in 1975, its Beta I speed of 1.57 inches per second (ips) offered a higher horizontal resolution (approximately 250 lines vs 240 lines horizontal NTSC), lower video noise, and less luma/chroma crosstalk than VHS, and was later marketed as providing pictures superior to VHS's playback. However, the introduction of Beta II speed, 0.79 ips (two-hour mode), to compete with VHS's two-hour Standard Play mode (1.31 ips) reduced Betamax's horizontal resolution to 240 lines.[7]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war#Picture_q...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oJs8-I9WtA
If you want to collect obsolete formats and you have a TV with analog inputs VHS is probably your best thing to get into. This place
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114286077399818803
sells VHS decks for $12 and you can get pretty good movies for $2. Contrast that to compact cassette decks which start at twice that and have a good chance of being non-functional. That place has the complete works of Barbara Streisand but if you want music that anybody would want on cassettes the sky is the limit for collectables.
My impression is that the quality of VHS isn't terrible. The video is worse than DVD of course but a lot of DVDs have NERFed soundtracks because they mixed them assuming you're going to play their 5.1 mix on a 2-channel system. Any deck you get now is going to support VHS Hi-Fi and if you have a 5.1 system with some kind of Dolby Pro Logic the soundtrack of a good VHS can be better than the soundtrack of an average DVD. (Blu-Ray often has better sound not because the technology is better but because the 5.1 soundtrack is more likely to really be a 5.1 soundtrack)
That was it
- Some major platform still provide RSS, which makes me use them (I do not use twitter, because it does not provide RSS
- If not for RSS I would not be using Reddit
- the moment platform drops RSS, I drop the platform
Links:
[0] https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive - my own RSS reader
That's a silly thing to say. Of course you can put ads in it since it allows linking to things. What you mean probably, is that it's not as easy as embedding some google ads markup in your sidebar.
Advertisers love to burn money, but they draw the line at not being able to verify that the spend did what was promised.
I can imagine an alternate timeline where Google Reader turned into a sort of Twitter (or FB or IG) feed.
Podcasts inject ads into the content: from RSS you get the link and description of the episode, and inside the episode are ads.
I guess that's why RSS is still a thing for podcasts? :-)
Well, RSS won the battle, but lost the war.
For apple ecosystem best client is https://reederapp.com/classic/
Are there good tools to RSSify sites that don’t have one?
You can link it to your reader so you just click the button and it adds the feed into it.
Is it a popular main stream thing? No. Does every since site offer feeds for every reasonable thing you could want to subscribe to? But does it still work quite well for those that want to use it? Yes.
Many times this sort of meta information reveals much more than expected
My feeds are pretty unpredictable - sometimes I have 40 new articles in a day, sometimes just a few. The cheapness of digital consumption and interface makes it viable for me to skim titles and read, defer, or dismiss at my judgement. I don't want the entire feed printed out - not viable.
But if some SaaS is curating my feeds for me, I fear it'll turn into another algorithmized something optimizing for what exactly? At least the first-pass filter is explicitly set by me - feeds I subscribe to.
Curious to hear your thoughts on it, and wishing you luck.
I suspect maybe it's easier now to nail the layout if ai can read content before it goes to print.
[0] https://www.bfoliver.com/2014/paperlater
AI is indeed a crucial part in solving the two most difficult challenges -- typesetting and curation, although we'll probably do things that don't scale for a little while before fully automating.
The last time someone tried to convince me this was a good idea was just after the iPhone was announced, and before everyone and their monkey had a super computer in their pocket. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so we almost started - but my advice to the punter then was "lets see what the mobile phone industry looks like next year" .. well that put a pin in it.
Nowadays, I'm not so sure I'd be so willing to do this - again, because it requires the user do the printing - but if you were to, say, make this into a vending machine product, which users can walk up to in the street and walk away with a custom 'zine full of their own interests, you might be onto something.
Here in Europe we have a lot of old telephone booths converted into mini neighborhood free libraries. I've often wondered whether it would make sense to put a public printer in those libraries and let people print things .. seems like this would be a revolutionary new product to make, with printable broadsheets based on a custom RSS, an obvious killer app .. assuming someone can be found to maintain the printers.
(Off to find thermal paper for my ClockworkPi, which I always wanted to turn into a custom RSS printer in the toilet...)
Recently I’ve been living in a cottage town and thought of this idea again… rather than be reading on phones or tablets people could read printed books with their favourite articles or blogs. But I think the actual distribution system would be the killer, unless it’s at a big resort the transportation will kill the idea.
People found the web more boring, because it became more boring.
They found the algorithm more interesting, because it allowed them to see what was going on with people they barely knew (from former school mates they'd lost touch with to celebrities without press filtering), and that was compelling.
But there's a next phase available to us, which is to make the web more interesting, entertaining and compelling again.
I love that b3ta.com still exists. I love that metafilter.com is moving on. I think it's great that web comics I love still publish to RSS.
I just think more of us need to provide more demand, and more people will wake up to supply, and the flywheel will start to turn.
RSS beat ICE, and it can beat Meta and X if people want it too, albeit for different reasons.
A dedicated extension is needed to have that feature back. Chrome needs one as well, so does Edge; only Vivaldi and Opera come with build-in feed readers. There are of course standalone applications but that seems to be a niche nowadays.
I've found an old rssowl opml file from 2014 last week and I decided to see what's still up. I've found some RSS readers in flathub but sadly, majority of what I was visiting back then died.
Bluesky is basically RSS on JSON.
RSS did not weather Twitter. Social media is huge compared to RSS. It turned out that singular recommendation feeds are able to push URLs around better than needing every site to build in feeds themselves and then still requiring someone to turn those feeds into a singular feed for the user.
First, RSS has a bit more friction. Smashing the follow button on Twitter et al is faster than adding the feed to your RSS reader of choice unless your OS has support for default RSS app.
Second, discoverability. Just like with any distributed system vs monolithic platform, you need to find what to read yourself. For some niches this works well. If you are a software developer/hacker, you are more familiar with blogs in your area of interest. But if you have a wide range of interests you’d need to find the blogs yourself and hope their RSS feed is well formatted.
Third, the algorithm. A monolithic platform can do more to try to mix in new content based on your interests and intelligently mix up the content from sources you follow. This is of course controversial because feed algorithms can also try to cram bullshit into your feed or hide important stuff from you or create an echo chamber. But in the best case scenario they can also expose you to new sources of content you wouldn’t have found otherwise. An RSS reader would mean it is up to you to do this discovery which is more friction.
And ultimately content creators realized that they get more eyeballs on their stuff by using platforms like Facebook, Medium, Instagram, Twitter, than on blogs especially since blogs tend to be then repackaged by blog spam bots, Google’s AMP, and now LLMs.
So IMO RSS is just too manual and requires too much work. And of course since you can’t effectively advertise through it there is less incentive for creators and platforms to support it.
Then I remembered that Twitter was once referred to as "micro blogging," so I put those folks in my blog list on Feedbin, and was happy again.
I do miss the glory days of Twitter, tbh.
They still are in most cases.
(In contrast, ICE did not weather RSS.)
I think, as someone that has a RSS feed on my blog, that RSS is a total mess and Atom was probably the better choice.
Maybe even some modern JSON based format would be OK, but maybe that’s what ActivityPub is?
Anyway, after dealing with the mess of images and inline HTML with CDATA in RSS, I have complete fatigue of the whole endeavour.
That’s what JSON Feed is. It’s supported by several RSS readers.
https://www.jsonfeed.org
> but maybe that’s what ActivityPub is?
No, that’s for social networking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub