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RSS feeds were just never easy enough for most people to bother. And not just the proverbial grandma, most techies don't use RSS either. Sites will run analytic
by TorKlingberg 11y ago
RSS feeds were just never easy enough for most people to bother. And not just the proverbial grandma, most techies don't use RSS either. Sites will run analytics and see that nobody is clicking the feed button.
RSS certainly solves a real problem, so I think there is an opportunity for reinventing RSS with better UX. Don't ask me how though.
- matt4077 11y agoI don't know how you could improve the UX, considering most sites had an icon that directly linked to google reader. For a while, feed readers where also the app store category where all the innovation happened. I don't want to live in the same internet as people who can't copy & paste an URL.
- xrstf 11y ago> Sites will run analytics and see that nobody is clicking the feed button. I barely ever click on any RSS buttons. Partially because sites nowadays don't even bother putting one in there, partially because TinyTinyRSS extracts the feed from the site's <head> automatically. So running analytics on that button would be very misleading, especially for users like me ;-)
- cowsandmilk 11y ago> RSS feeds were just never easy enough for most people to bother Set up a wordpress site, you have RSS built in. Set up a drupal site, you have RSS built in. Set up on Squarespace and you have RSS built in. Pretty much every off-the-shelf CMS has RSS with zero effort, you have to actively turn it off. It is only the people who put a bunch of work into building a site without a CMS that don't easily have RSS.
- PretzelFisch 11y agoThat was part of the problem the real number of RSS readers were hidden and silly analytics like this led sites to make bad decisions.
- zanny 11y agoHow do you get better UX than clicking an RSS link and it adding itself to your feed reader? It isn't the protocol, it is that there is no profit in an open standard like that. Google killed their Reader because they wanted everyone forced into G+, rather than consuming content from around the Internet. It is the same thing with messaging and VOIP. Nobody wants to use an open standard like XMPP or more recently Matrix because there is no money in using standards when you can lock users in to a walled garden.
- TorKlingberg 11y ago> How do you get better UX than clicking an RSS link and it adding itself to your feed reader? Well, you need to have a feed reader set up.
- zanny 11y agoYou need to signup for Facebook / Twitter as well. And there are browser based feed readers. The only downside is the lack of availability of web-based feed reader support in browsers. That might be partially on the onus of the reader, but it would require you to at least install an extension to add their site as your default feed processor. That can be a UX loss.
- komali2 11y agoBy having your articles directly on your site, linked to via a "feed reader" that everyone already uses - twitter, facebook, reddit, etc. I remember trying to get into RSS feeds a few years back. I passed them by - it was easier to just hit news.google.com or my multireddit or twitterfeed for news I was interested in. Sure, I didn't "get it," and yea fine I'm not the smartest guy ever, but I'm probably a good representation of the average net user - interested in efficient means at getting the news such as RSS, but also tremendously lazy. Why bother? I already have a twitter/reddit/gnews account.
- thescribe 11y agoTwitter is transitory, Facebook isn't chronological, Reddit puts you at the whims of other people.