And that’s the answer about RSS renaissance. If you have to explain it, there is zero chance of massive adoption.

This enters a failure mode very soon, especially because most people using RSS-like technologies would typically subscribe to more sources than they can typically read through. Like it or not, _the algorithm_ does serve the purpose in prioritizing and discovery. The trouble, IMO, is with the objectives for these recommendation and ranking algorithms.

A middleman/aggregator who is paid by subscribers would be incentivized for the users, a marketplace-like aggregator would always have trade-offs.

There are plenty of RSS reader apps, but there are very few with good cross-device sync - let alone self-hosted cross-device sync.

To really read what you want, there is only one way: to create your own parsers for each source, on top of which there will be various filters, both based on simple words/phrases and contextual. For example, I do this either in the form of plugins or scripts for ViolentMonkey, including here on HN, where the design has been completely changed to tabular. Many topics, domains, and authors are not even displayed. Comments that contain 1-2-3 mentions of a certain word/phrase are also hidden.

For example, I have completely blocked everything related to “AI”: famous people, companies, programs, products. As well as various hot topics: the US military, ICE, age verification (because there are two stupid camps for and against, without an objective approach and assessment). And many other topics (discussions/comments): political, military, or mentions of specific countries or peoples whose bots are numerous here: israel, russia, china, iran, india. And the corresponding users are blocked.

Why do I block so much? Because on these topics, either stupid people or bots write the same thing year after year. Why should I see this spam? For politics and economics, I go to other resources, and there are other filters there.

I digress a little. Overall, RSS won't help here. Someone will mention tagging, and we've all been through that too, when whole paragraphs of tags start to form, where blocking one tag that could have been left out hides a good article. Then someone will say that such filters could be configured in RSS... well, yes, if you take it again and make your own client/wrapper, because all clients are limited in their own way, just like website designs.

RSS appears good now only because it’s not popular enough for LLMs to meddle with. I don’t use RSS, so I don’t really mind, but those who use RSS are making disservice to its _purity_ by trying to popularize it.

I have miniflux set up so it integrates with instapaper so I get interesting articles on my kindle. And saving an article will send it to karakeep automatically for permanent storage! (image, video, screen shots and text storage).

Pretty pretty pretty good.

In a world where every site with a feed is algorithm-driven makes sense that RSS would eventually come back around.

Didn’t/doesnt have to be RSS, I’m no devotee to it. But some standard that lets you import things into your own “feed”

It’s my primary hn reader now.

it kills SEO advertising. someone writing an article for the purpose of ranking high and making money off of clicks doesnt get clicks anymore because of AI summaries.

direct content-to-ad-revenue is dead. Either you're a hobbyist and write for the heck of it - so your writing will be honest and better quality. Or, you're a product vendor and your writing is documentation meant to be found by AI summaries, again - that's honest.

Once profit is gone, love is all left.

It's similar to the viewership of coding tutorials having sunk incredibly low these, creators, especially the ones creating high quality content, can't finance such work / content anymore.

Doesn't fix the problem of discovering sources that aren't "AI" slop.

Also wondering if the article is "AI" slop or not. Seems a bit too verbose for me.

The problem with RSS today: you have to already know what you want to follow. There's no equivalent of "people like you are reading this." Until someone solves discovery for RSS, it'll stay a power-user tool.

The irony is that LLMs could actually solve this — a model that knows your reading history and surfaces relevant feeds you haven't found yet. That's the product that could bring RSS back to the mainstream.

https://lurkkit.com/

I believe human validation protocols might help, think captcha enabled ping backs, but RSS I believe may have very little impact on its own

Interesting thing is, much of what AI is now regurgitating is human output, accumulated over the years. Model training dataset. Stuff like Reddit posts, even posts here?

If, say, AI output becomes THE 99% over the next few years, we will enter the era of incestuous inbreeding within AI -when it simply regurgitates its own output.

Wonder what will be the result at that point!

I do agree that AI is killing tons of things right now. This monster must be stopped; it is worse than Skynet in that it really, really sucks. Things started to decay before AI took over, though - for instance, Google search has been garbage since years. It was useful before that.

I used to compare the decay of google search with how youtube search works. You search for, say, "ninja cats". You get some results about cats. Perhaps also ninjas. After like 10 or 20 results, you suddenly get other videos that are totally unrelated, but you may click on it. That's addictive design. People click on it suddenly when it is interesting to them - but this also takes them away from their original search. Something similar happened to google search. The UI is total crap, it shows semi-related videos (I don't want to watch videos when I search for a specific term), some ads for companies (Google is milking it here) and then also useless entries such as "other people searched for sick grannies instead, do you want to search for this as well" and similar UI-ruining components. Without ublock origin I'd be quite lost already - lo and behold, Google killed ublock origin because it threatened their business model (another reason to use ublock origin; we really need to get rid of Google. It is no longer a useful corporation - just greedy).

No one wants to make a bet like that, so they don’t. That’s why RSS doesn’t get pushed or used more often.

These evangelists want to make it sound like all we need to do is get everyone on board with RSS and we’ll all just hold hands and share the web.

People don’t browse the web, there’s like 10 websites, that’s the whole internet.

Everything else is just asteroids and abandoned space stations.