Suddenly the RSS feed is providing only snippet view (with a “read more” link) instead of full posts. The first post that I saw this with was maybe the Pretenders post from last night, though I didn’t view it in my reader until this morning. Now that I’ve refreshed my reader, all posts are coming through in snippet view. Was there some sort of update overnight?
Please keep RSS alive, BoingBoing. Snippet view is for haters.
EDIT: Snippet view has only propagated as far back as the cranky 100 year old hotdogs story. So looks like everything within the past 24 hours or so?
So now we are stuck with just the title and a photo? I really don’t get why there can’t be a few sentences of text. Wouldn’t this draw the reader in more? PLEASE bring back https://boingboing.net/category/post to the way it was.
Yeah, I remember when the BoingBoing admins vowed to always have full post RSS feeds. Such is the new Internet we live in, I suppose.
I’m probably going to stop reading now because of this, especially since you don’t even have a good Snippets system that puts full paragraphs in the feed.
Closest I’ve been able to find so far is this old post from @beschizza which notes 1) that full RSS feeds have a short term negative impact on viewership but that this effect eventually reverses, and 2) remarks that BB has had a full feed “since the dawn of time”.
[edit: yes, not old by BoingBoing standards, but old by internet standards]
Maybe this isn’t the place for it, but I’d STILL be happy to throw $5-$10 a month at BoingBoing on some kind of funding site to avoid dealing with the cesspit of third-party-served advertising and whatever the Shop is without cutting y’all off from the revenue stream. (I have no idea if that’s comparable to an average reader’s revenue stream is over the course of the month, but since I currently use BBS view, you’re not making all that much money from me anyway.)
Sure, but BB has been a champion for RSS for as long as there’s been RSS, on both moral and practical grounds. To give up on RSS (and yes, snippet RSS feeds are giving up) feels like a capitulation.
BoingBoing has been wearing its morals on its sleeve – even at potential legal and monetary risk – for longer than there’s been a world wide web. It seems shortsighted to give up on something that’s represented y’all’s beliefs for 50 cents per click.
I assure you, we wish we existed in the decade-ago times when revenue was plentiful and we were spoiled for choice in ad partners. 2020 is not that time. There’s not much more that can be said here other than please support government and societal initiatives working to protect independent publishers from huge megacorps and conglomerates who control all the eyeballs, and by extension, revenue.
We appreciate that, but as we’ve said before, the most successful patreon website campaign ever would not be enough to fund Boing Boing. We hear you and are always looking for better options!
If you are willing/able to offer time to develop a membership system for Boing Boing that would work with our existing infrastructure but offer ad-free, tracker-free pages for members, I’d love to hear your proposal! Otherwise, the answer is still the same - we are looking for options, but doing this is not “free” or “simple” for us.
