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The Rise and Demise of RSS (2018)

32 points by appreciatorBus

by truelson

0 subcomment

RSS is still extremely useful. It may never have been meant for mass adoption like algorithmic feeds, but that is the point: it is the right counterbalance. I want full control of my feeds, and RSS gives me that. With tools like https://docs.rsshub.app almost anything can be made RSS-able.
I know I am not the average user, but for those who care about their information diets, RSS is essential.
One underappreciated aspect: RSS can forward both machine readable and human readable content at the same time. I am experimenting with it for information processing, and I like that you can always peek into the pipes, even mid-stream, to see what is happening.
I will be writing more about this at https://writings.alethia.news (alongside AI, product design, macroeconomic data, and the occasional bit of trivia).

by happytoexplain

4 subcomments

I still use RSS for 100% of my content: A couple news sources, a bunch of YouTube channels, a couple webcomics. It's easy for me, though, because I don't use social media, which I imagine wouldn't really be well served by RSS.

by alberth

4 subcomments

I know many people feel nostalgic about the days when RSS was everywhere (and a more open web) — and I do too.
But my experience must be different than most. I had hundreds of feeds in Google Reader, which quickly became overwhelming. It was hard to tell what was worth reading, and I often just marked everything as “read,” the same way people get email fatigue.
While I support a more open web, I think the real missing piece in the conversation is curation.
Take HN, for example. It’s essentially community-driven curation, and I get far more enjoyment browsing HN today than I ever did sifting endlessly through my RSS feeds trying to find something interesting.

by Apreche

4 subcomments

What is up with the people who keep insisting RSS is dead? It never went anywhere. It’s some kind of twisted comedy sketch where someone insists a person is dead when that person is standing right there next to them.
I have used RSS continuously since near the beginning. When Google Reader died I just changed clients. There are many client options now, basically all of which are better than Google Reader ever was. Pretty much every website out there still has feeds. I can even use it for extremely old fashioned local news sites.

by nop_slide

0 subcomment

I've been using RSS via the Readwise "Reader" app over the last year and it's been awesome. First time using RSS and love that so many developers make sure they have feeds on their blogs.
The lack of the algorithmic "feed" and the fact that I'm "pulling" rather than being "fed" content is such a great change in content consumption.

by dang

0 subcomment

Related:
Rise and Demise of RSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18896168 - Jan 2019 (123 comments)
The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18002503 - Sept 2018 (186 comments)

by smusamashah

1 subcomments

Google didn't just kill feed reader, when Chrome came, other browsers had built in RSS support of some sort (Opera definitely, I think Firefox too, don't remebber about IE).
Chrome always opened RSS links as raw XML file with no hint of what to do with it whatsoever.

by xnx

0 subcomment

The next phase of RSS is having a client ("agent") that can process arbitrary feed-style pages and create sanitized (e.g. ad, tracking, and visual junk free) RSS feeds.
RSS isn't "dead", but it (actively?) neglected when even a "blog" like https://waymo.com/blog/ (to pick one random-ish example) doesn't have an RSS or Atom feed. Content sources see zero (or negative) value in RSS.

by not--felix

6 subcomments

I think the main reason why rss failed is the lack of an algorithmic feed. If you follow just a few news sites you drown in articles. The social media sites are much better in filtering out stuff you do not want to see.

by hombre_fatal

3 subcomments

RSS sucks because it depends on every content source offering the API.
The successor to RSS is where each feed is an arbitrary URL that your client hits to generate a feed. With an LLM this is trivial compared to before.

by ageospatial

0 subcomment

RSS won't be dead. Our AI agents are using RSS as this is still extremely useful for parsing data. Think about the amazing work RSS did for GeoRSS

by WaltPurvis

0 subcomment

This article is seven years old; seems like (2018) should be in the title.

by matteeyah

0 subcomment

Initially, I thought this was about Rainbow Six Siege

by matteeyah

0 subcomment

I thought this was about Rainbow Six Siege

by superkuh

0 subcomment

Feeds in general, and RSS in particular, are far from dead. But one thing that could kill them quite suddenly is the rise in javascript/etc dependent ostensible "anti-bot" or "anti-dos" MITM services/front-ends.
People deploy these solutions across their entire domain without thinking about it and then suddenly all the feed readers cannot access the feeds. I have about 1800 feeds in my feed reader and if the number of bad default cloudflare deployals keeps increasing at the rate I'm seeing by 2026/27 none of my feeds will be acessible at all.

by skeezyboy

5 subcomments

never understood this idea. whats the difference between this and bookmarking the actual site and just manually checking? if people had been using HTML as originally envisioned, this kind of thing would be parsable by a browser and a new protocol need not be introduced

by cowpig

1 subcomments

Are there examples of government policies that successfully encourage the adoption/use of open standards?
I feel like the EU has successfully pushed the world towards USB-C as a standard, which seems like a big success to me (I no longer need, but obviously still have, my giant tub of various connectors and wires in my garage).
Would some kind of policy make sense to encourage an open syndication standard? Would it be a good thing?

by imiric

0 subcomment

RSS isn't dead, though some companies would certainly like that.
The main reason it isn't as popular as it once was is because of advertising. Companies want you on their sites because they can track you and show you ads. They could show ads in RSS feeds as well, but since there's no JavaScript environment, they can't data mine your browser, serve you cookies, profile you, track your behavior, and, ultimately, can't show you valuable microtargetted ads.
This is why even when sites offer RSS feeds, it's often a short blurb with a link to the main site. For these, special solutions like RSS-Bridge or RSSHub are needed, which are often blocked and need constant maintenance. I'd rather not have to use these tools, since they're effectively going against the site's wishes and scraping their content, but I think this is justifiable considering that the content is available publicly, and the user should have ultimate control in how they wish to consume it. I'm not going to be forced to accept a business transaction with a shady middleman where my data is mined, sold, and used to manipulate me into buying something or thinking a certain way.
In any case, I agree with the article's other reasons for the decline of RSS: it's too technical, most people prefer algorithmic feeds, platform centralization, etc. I think all of those are UX and technical challenges that can be addressed by building on top of RSS, but there is little incentive for a company to take them on.

by brycewray

0 subcomment

(2018)

by renewiltord

0 subcomment

RSS is dead. Netcraft confirms.

by hagbard_c

0 subcomment

Rumours of RSS's demise are greatly exaggerated, I use it every day for dozens of sites. If a site does not offer an RSS feed one can be generated using something like rssproxy [1] or another implementation of this idea.
[1] https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy

by vamosg

0 subcomment

[dead]