7 ms·

I wrote about this recently[1]. The "problem" with RSS, that essentially lead to it falling out of favour, is that it is pure consumption, not interaction. You

by leejo 9y ago

I wrote about this recently[1]. The "problem" with RSS, that essentially lead to it falling out of favour, is that it is pure consumption, not interaction. You can't "like" an update that comes to you via RSS, nor comment, nor easily share. It's difficult for sites to monetise it, or track, or promote their own agenda. It's not "social" and since every other site these days needs to be social, whether through aforementioned ways, or adding some sort of messaging process, it's not a way that sites can keep users hooked on the site to boost ad impressions. RSS is pure content, curated only by the consumer and presented in chronological order not algorithmically messed with, which is why there's nothing better. [1] https://leejo.github.io/2017/09/27/social_media_zero/ https://leejo.github.io/2017/09/27/social_media_zero/

Arnt 9y ago
What you try to say is (I think): RSS is better because it's totally foreign to clickbait. The goals sites try to reach using clickbait are goals not helped by RSS. Right? RSS is badly suited as a vector for virally driven waves of outrage. "Let's call it an accidental feature" as lwall once wrote.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  He's partially right, the web 2.0 trend was all about interaction, "we" all believed it would be heavens on earth while we now know it's far from that and now I (we?) would love to go back to light and simple aggregation.
- barkingtoad 9y ago
  To be more exact, RSS is headline-oriented, so it's about clickbait. It is not about sharebait.
- hopesthoughts 9y ago
  Well you can still have clickbait-like headlines with RSS, but it does take the viral element away,.
matchagaucho 9y ago
Even before it's demise, a lot of content publishers were only publishing headlines and abstracts via RSS, with the intent to drive clicks to hosted articles. The inability to publish ads inline RSS ultimately killed it. If and when the news bundling model re-emerges, something like RSS will gain favor again.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >The inability to publish ads inline RSS ultimately killed it. Huh? There's no such inability.
  - OJFord 9y ago
    GP probably meant targeted ads, beyond just 'well if you like this feed,'...
    - oliwarner 9y ago
      You could have a identifiable feed URL. Static, personalised ads that most feed readers wouldn't block. And in terms of technology, there's nothing stopping you sticking an iframe or script block in your feed. It comes back to what the reader will allow. Origin really doesn't matter too much.
      - JD557 9y ago
        If you use a web reader, I think you don't even need an unique url if your ads are static images. Just request an image from your server and use the user cookie for recommendations
- jojoo 9y ago
  > Even before it's demise, a lot of content publishers > were only publishing headlines and abstracts via RSS, > with the intent to drive clicks to hosted articles. yes, but that can be helpful as well: spiegel online (biggest german news site) has feeds for every subtopic; for an example for every sport an own feed. i subscribe to ~20 of this subtopics and i'm sure i will never miss an article about one of that topics.
cJ0th 9y ago
This (probably correctly) assumes that the average user stays 'dumb' forever. The 'intelligent' user would understand the benefits of rss, demand them from their news outlets and be willing to pay, if necessary, an appropriate amount of money for it. This will probably never happen but I maintain the view that if you want the web to become a better place you have to find ways to educate the (average) user.
- b0rsuk 9y ago
  Not necessarily. My brother, 6 years older, insists that RSS is dead, nobody uses it, and he's happy to follow the trend. He will happily chase whatever tech is fashionable to increase his perceived workforce market value. He is intelligent, but also cynical. His rationale in this and many other cases is "you shouldn't use it because people don't use it."
chiefalchemist 9y ago
Yup. RSS is exactly what it say it is. Nothing more. Nothing less. And in that simplicity is a tool that just works. No wresting with authenication. No "oh shit they updated the API." None of that. Sure RSS has it's limits. But there are plenty of times that's a positive. It's disheartening to see RSS not get the respect and value it deserves.
- aiNohY6g 9y ago
  Couldn't agree more. RSS is just about content. It's up to the feed reader to provide interactions, e.g. w/plugins allowing to ping back authors/original URLs in order to create a kind social network. I don't think such a business logic would have to be implemented in RSS for it to be successful. Separation of concerns rules.
- moocowtruck 9y ago
  DILLY DILLY!
  - sctb 9y ago
    Not here, please.
criddell 9y ago
I use a blend of things. For a story that's breaking right now, I go to Twitter. For blogs and websites that consistently have things I want to read, I use RSS + Feedly (I follow around 40 feeds). For actual news, I use Apple News. I probably spend the least time on Twitter and the most in the Apple News app. Apple News does a remarkably good job of showing me things I want to read. I assume it's based on how long I spend reading articles because I don't use the like button a lot.
- nawtacawp 9y ago
  I tried Apple News for a few months. I felt like it started to filter what it was showing me based on what I was reading. One of the reasons I prefer an RSS feed is I don’t get the impression that the news source may be tailoring the news feed.
tzahola 9y ago
It has the same limitations as HTML. For HTML, these limitations were circumvented by burying the platform under an ever increasing heap of javascript crap.
- JoshMnem 9y ago
  What limitations are those? HTML is great for what it's supposed to do (allow anyone to publish and distribute content online). RSS/Atom is great for what it does too.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
    I like html but a lighter format along the lines of TeX or something s-expression/indentation based would have been nicer
    - JoshMnem 9y ago
      If you haven't seen them, you might be interested in Pug or Elm. - https://pugjs.org/api/getting-started.html https://pugjs.org/api/getting-started.html - https://www.dailydrip.com/blog/creating-html-elements-and-using-libraries-in-elm.html https://www.dailydrip.com/blog/creating-html-elements-and-us...
JoshMnem 9y ago
The thing that caused RSS to fall out of favor is that most people were using Google Reader to consume it, and Google killed off Google Reader.
- ece 9y ago
  No one has replicated Google Reader's scale definitely. Some combination of email/twitter/reddit/facebook has somewhat taken it's place, but they're not real substitutes if you were using Google Reader.
acgIssues 9y ago
This is fine for most people; the "interaction" nowadays (likes, retweets, ...) doesn't really represent support but a lack of communication skill from the consumer. When someone likes something without anything to say it's just a metric, doesn't bring value to a discussion.
- ghthor 9y ago
  This isn't true, it can be a crowd source quality control. Not as good as a direct share from one of my trusted colleague's, but it does work as a quality control given the right community makeup, the right web of users.
  - acgIssues 9y ago
    Which is difficult to control over a social network unless it's a closed community and still, it's used as a metric.
b0rsuk 9y ago
This is a problem I can live with! So not all solutions to the centralized, monopolized social/tracking web lie in the future. We should also learn from the past, and it's encouraging to see some tools we need are already there, ready to use!
dleslie 9y ago
And this is why Google Reader was amazing. There we were, my friends and I, reading RSS feeds and liking/sharing/commenting amongst ourselves. pours one out
- lostmsu 9y ago
  Here we are now, in a line with BSS and Usenix users.
- aylmao 9y ago
  I see this promise in Mastodon. Under the hood it's just Atom + extensions. If current blogging solutions had a mastodon extension; say if a Wordpress blog also automatically set up a Mastodon instance for you even if it's just a single identity one, you'd have liking/sharing/commenting by default. Note: fairy new to Mastodon, not sure exactly if / how this would work, but I've been thinking about this lately.
  - ece 9y ago
    There seems to be a few plugins like this: https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/mastodon/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/mastodon/, but it's not RSS, and ultimately different. It could all potentially work together nicely, and I wish federated services like Mastodon were more widely used. They could definitely lower the burden to publishing/consuming RSS. I don't think social news delivery/publishing is an easily monetize-able business. Out of twitter/reddit, reddit seems to have found a model that works for them. Twitter hasn't found what works yet.
    - aylmao 9y ago
      I think that if each site funded it's own social delivery, there would be no single "social publishing platform" to monetize. It would be a matter of just the publishers monetizing themselves, and the social platform would be the web. And that's the promise of Mastodon. It is free because each instance pays the cost of keeping it alive in the form of hosting their instance. Like, right now, the NYTimes acts like a "database" with all the pages, and reddit or twitter like the content distribution feed, and both need funding. But if the NYTimes had its own Mastodon instance and published there, the rest of the Mastodon network would be its content distribution feed, each federation funding itself. As a sidetone, it even solves the problem of verification I think, because if I have the Mastodon account aylmao@nytimes.com for example, I don't need a central system to confirm that I'm working for the nytimes, like for example twitter would. And moreover, since Mastodon is just Atom, if people want to just see feed updates they can do that, or they can get a client that supports the full social features too. I think it's pretty cool.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
I find it surprising that someone would say it's not easily shared, since you can just copy the entry's permalink and send it to someone. I don't think it could be any easier! Heck, I don't think I ever use a site's sharing button. The only exceptions are probably "retweet" on Twitter and "share now" on Facebook, which reposts content on your timeline in a way that can't be replicated by posting the URL. On Chrome for Android there's the Web Share API [0], which they claim makes it easier to share content, although I'm unconvinced it's needed or really even desirable. [0] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/09/navigator-share https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/09/navigator-...
losteric 9y ago
RSS is a protocol, applications could implement Twitter/tumblr's retweeting functionality on top of it... FB conversations would also work. From the end-user's perspective, I don't think anyone is asking for features that are fundamentally at odds with using RSS to distribute messages. The resulting network would be much more distributed and harder to "monetize" (imo, good for users)
senorsmile 9y ago
This is an interesting point of view. I personally never understood why someone would need to "like" an update. Thus, I've never understood the appeal of things like facebook. All I need is RSS.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  When I've tried RSS in the past, I've ended up with a deluge of content to sift through. That may be partially my own fault for subscribing to actively updated sites, but I would've welcomed ways to filter out posts based on the user feedback of peers. That's part of the reason sites like HN are helpful in finding interesting content.
  - kthejoker2 9y ago
    Newsblur offers personalization of your feed content through simple up down feedback. Surprisingly effective. That being said I prefer the firehose to a crafted cocktail.
rabboRubble 9y ago
Welllllllll back in the day Google Reader did have a social element. You could share articles / feeds with friends. I think The Old Reader tried to keep some of that social element but I do know how successful they were. Due to reasons that I now can’t recall, I preferred Digg Reader over TOReader. Even Digg, for whatever reason has tried to make their RSS offering more social with their Digg platform. I avoid social as much as humanly possible so again not sure how effective they are.
- leejo 9y ago
  My experience with RSS predates Google Reader by a couple of years, i think i started using it around 2003, ish? I didn't start using Google Reader until (IIRC) 2009 so my interest in the social element was absolutely zero. RSS was designed to be a consumption means only, which is my point. I'm fine with aggregators adding a social element, as it's not the aim and can easily ignored (Feedly even has this i think). I'm even fine with sources having only the title and the first paragraph as i can choose to ignore the content if it doesn't interest me. My point is more that, if there's going to be curation of content i want to do that myself because there isn't an algorithm that exists that can do it well for me[1]. And if your content is posted exclusively to the various social networks that try and fail to curate content for me (i.e. you don't have your own site outside of the walled gardens) then i probably have little interest in it. [1] This is part of a wider problem in that people want to follow hundreds (thousands?) of sources, and that quickly becomes a deluge. In the same vein, people favourite just about every image they see on Instagram - to paraphrase, "if you favourite everything, then nothing is your favourite". Self restraint is the best form of curation against a world in which everyone is screaming to be heard over everyone else.
WhyDoPeople 9y ago
This is essentially what killed off RSS from every day use. This is also what killed off Gopher when the Web came around.
tripzilch 9y ago
Fair. But what if users also had they own RSS feed(s)? They'd select the items/articles they want to share and they get broadcast into (one of) those feed(s). Their friends can subscribe, and why not, comments would easily fit into such a feed as well. Only problem I see is that these users would need a URL for the feed for their friends to subscribe to. So you'd need an external service (like Google Reader was). How about one of these new(ish) open/decentralized social network thingies? I forget their names, there was one that was sort-of-twitter and another sort-of-facebook. They probably already have RSS built-in with various RSS API endpoints for different filters on the stream. Maybe such an idea could ride along with that? Also, I want to echo the other comments, how it is nice that RSS just does one thing. Just means it's a building block.
- kinos 9y ago
  You're literally talking about decentralized social media such as what ActivityPub suggests and is attempting to implement.

by leejo 9y ago

Arnt 9y ago

What you try to say is (I think): RSS is better because it's totally foreign to clickbait. The goals sites try to reach using clickbait are goals not helped by RSS. Right? RSS is badly suited as a vector for virally driven waves of outrage. "Let's call it an accidental feature" as lwall once wrote.

agumonkey 9y ago
He's partially right, the web 2.0 trend was all about interaction, "we" all believed it would be heavens on earth while we now know it's far from that and now I (we?) would love to go back to light and simple aggregation.
barkingtoad 9y ago
To be more exact, RSS is headline-oriented, so it's about clickbait. It is not about sharebait.
hopesthoughts 9y ago
Well you can still have clickbait-like headlines with RSS, but it does take the viral element away,.

matchagaucho 9y ago

Even before it's demise, a lot of content publishers were only publishing headlines and abstracts via RSS, with the intent to drive clicks to hosted articles. The inability to publish ads inline RSS ultimately killed it. If and when the news bundling model re-emerges, something like RSS will gain favor again.

coldtea 9y ago
>The inability to publish ads inline RSS ultimately killed it. Huh? There's no such inability.
- OJFord 9y ago
  GP probably meant targeted ads, beyond just 'well if you like this feed,'...
  - oliwarner 9y ago
    You could have a identifiable feed URL. Static, personalised ads that most feed readers wouldn't block. And in terms of technology, there's nothing stopping you sticking an iframe or script block in your feed. It comes back to what the reader will allow. Origin really doesn't matter too much.
    - JD557 9y ago
      If you use a web reader, I think you don't even need an unique url if your ads are static images. Just request an image from your server and use the user cookie for recommendations
jojoo 9y ago
> Even before it's demise, a lot of content publishers > were only publishing headlines and abstracts via RSS, > with the intent to drive clicks to hosted articles. yes, but that can be helpful as well: spiegel online (biggest german news site) has feeds for every subtopic; for an example for every sport an own feed. i subscribe to ~20 of this subtopics and i'm sure i will never miss an article about one of that topics.

cJ0th 9y ago

This (probably correctly) assumes that the average user stays 'dumb' forever. The 'intelligent' user would understand the benefits of rss, demand them from their news outlets and be willing to pay, if necessary, an appropriate amount of money for it. This will probably never happen but I maintain the view that if you want the web to become a better place you have to find ways to educate the (average) user.

b0rsuk 9y ago
Not necessarily. My brother, 6 years older, insists that RSS is dead, nobody uses it, and he's happy to follow the trend. He will happily chase whatever tech is fashionable to increase his perceived workforce market value. He is intelligent, but also cynical. His rationale in this and many other cases is "you shouldn't use it because people don't use it."

chiefalchemist 9y ago

Yup. RSS is exactly what it say it is. Nothing more. Nothing less. And in that simplicity is a tool that just works. No wresting with authenication. No "oh shit they updated the API." None of that. Sure RSS has it's limits. But there are plenty of times that's a positive. It's disheartening to see RSS not get the respect and value it deserves.

aiNohY6g 9y ago
Couldn't agree more. RSS is just about content. It's up to the feed reader to provide interactions, e.g. w/plugins allowing to ping back authors/original URLs in order to create a kind social network. I don't think such a business logic would have to be implemented in RSS for it to be successful. Separation of concerns rules.
moocowtruck 9y ago
DILLY DILLY!
- sctb 9y ago
  Not here, please.

criddell 9y ago

I use a blend of things. For a story that's breaking right now, I go to Twitter. For blogs and websites that consistently have things I want to read, I use RSS + Feedly (I follow around 40 feeds). For actual news, I use Apple News. I probably spend the least time on Twitter and the most in the Apple News app. Apple News does a remarkably good job of showing me things I want to read. I assume it's based on how long I spend reading articles because I don't use the like button a lot.

nawtacawp 9y ago
I tried Apple News for a few months. I felt like it started to filter what it was showing me based on what I was reading. One of the reasons I prefer an RSS feed is I don’t get the impression that the news source may be tailoring the news feed.

tzahola 9y ago

It has the same limitations as HTML. For HTML, these limitations were circumvented by burying the platform under an ever increasing heap of javascript crap.

JoshMnem 9y ago
What limitations are those? HTML is great for what it's supposed to do (allow anyone to publish and distribute content online). RSS/Atom is great for what it does too.
- fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
  I like html but a lighter format along the lines of TeX or something s-expression/indentation based would have been nicer
  - JoshMnem 9y ago
    If you haven't seen them, you might be interested in Pug or Elm. - https://pugjs.org/api/getting-started.html https://pugjs.org/api/getting-started.html - https://www.dailydrip.com/blog/creating-html-elements-and-using-libraries-in-elm.html https://www.dailydrip.com/blog/creating-html-elements-and-us...

JoshMnem 9y ago

The thing that caused RSS to fall out of favor is that most people were using Google Reader to consume it, and Google killed off Google Reader.

ece 9y ago
No one has replicated Google Reader's scale definitely. Some combination of email/twitter/reddit/facebook has somewhat taken it's place, but they're not real substitutes if you were using Google Reader.

acgIssues 9y ago

This is fine for most people; the "interaction" nowadays (likes, retweets, ...) doesn't really represent support but a lack of communication skill from the consumer. When someone likes something without anything to say it's just a metric, doesn't bring value to a discussion.

ghthor 9y ago
This isn't true, it can be a crowd source quality control. Not as good as a direct share from one of my trusted colleague's, but it does work as a quality control given the right community makeup, the right web of users.
- acgIssues 9y ago
  Which is difficult to control over a social network unless it's a closed community and still, it's used as a metric.

b0rsuk 9y ago

This is a problem I can live with! So not all solutions to the centralized, monopolized social/tracking web lie in the future. We should also learn from the past, and it's encouraging to see some tools we need are already there, ready to use!

dleslie 9y ago

And this is why Google Reader was amazing. There we were, my friends and I, reading RSS feeds and liking/sharing/commenting amongst ourselves. pours one out

lostmsu 9y ago
Here we are now, in a line with BSS and Usenix users.
aylmao 9y ago
I see this promise in Mastodon. Under the hood it's just Atom + extensions. If current blogging solutions had a mastodon extension; say if a Wordpress blog also automatically set up a Mastodon instance for you even if it's just a single identity one, you'd have liking/sharing/commenting by default. Note: fairy new to Mastodon, not sure exactly if / how this would work, but I've been thinking about this lately.
- ece 9y ago
  There seems to be a few plugins like this: https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/mastodon/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/mastodon/, but it's not RSS, and ultimately different. It could all potentially work together nicely, and I wish federated services like Mastodon were more widely used. They could definitely lower the burden to publishing/consuming RSS. I don't think social news delivery/publishing is an easily monetize-able business. Out of twitter/reddit, reddit seems to have found a model that works for them. Twitter hasn't found what works yet.
  - aylmao 9y ago
    I think that if each site funded it's own social delivery, there would be no single "social publishing platform" to monetize. It would be a matter of just the publishers monetizing themselves, and the social platform would be the web. And that's the promise of Mastodon. It is free because each instance pays the cost of keeping it alive in the form of hosting their instance. Like, right now, the NYTimes acts like a "database" with all the pages, and reddit or twitter like the content distribution feed, and both need funding. But if the NYTimes had its own Mastodon instance and published there, the rest of the Mastodon network would be its content distribution feed, each federation funding itself. As a sidetone, it even solves the problem of verification I think, because if I have the Mastodon account aylmao@nytimes.com for example, I don't need a central system to confirm that I'm working for the nytimes, like for example twitter would. And moreover, since Mastodon is just Atom, if people want to just see feed updates they can do that, or they can get a client that supports the full social features too. I think it's pretty cool.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

TheAceOfHearts 9y ago

I find it surprising that someone would say it's not easily shared, since you can just copy the entry's permalink and send it to someone. I don't think it could be any easier! Heck, I don't think I ever use a site's sharing button. The only exceptions are probably "retweet" on Twitter and "share now" on Facebook, which reposts content on your timeline in a way that can't be replicated by posting the URL. On Chrome for Android there's the Web Share API [0], which they claim makes it easier to share content, although I'm unconvinced it's needed or really even desirable. [0] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/09/navigator-share https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/09/navigator-...

losteric 9y ago

RSS is a protocol, applications could implement Twitter/tumblr's retweeting functionality on top of it... FB conversations would also work. From the end-user's perspective, I don't think anyone is asking for features that are fundamentally at odds with using RSS to distribute messages. The resulting network would be much more distributed and harder to "monetize" (imo, good for users)

senorsmile 9y ago

This is an interesting point of view. I personally never understood why someone would need to "like" an update. Thus, I've never understood the appeal of things like facebook. All I need is RSS.

ZenoArrow 9y ago
When I've tried RSS in the past, I've ended up with a deluge of content to sift through. That may be partially my own fault for subscribing to actively updated sites, but I would've welcomed ways to filter out posts based on the user feedback of peers. That's part of the reason sites like HN are helpful in finding interesting content.
- kthejoker2 9y ago
  Newsblur offers personalization of your feed content through simple up down feedback. Surprisingly effective. That being said I prefer the firehose to a crafted cocktail.

rabboRubble 9y ago

Welllllllll back in the day Google Reader did have a social element. You could share articles / feeds with friends. I think The Old Reader tried to keep some of that social element but I do know how successful they were. Due to reasons that I now can’t recall, I preferred Digg Reader over TOReader. Even Digg, for whatever reason has tried to make their RSS offering more social with their Digg platform. I avoid social as much as humanly possible so again not sure how effective they are.

leejo 9y ago
My experience with RSS predates Google Reader by a couple of years, i think i started using it around 2003, ish? I didn't start using Google Reader until (IIRC) 2009 so my interest in the social element was absolutely zero. RSS was designed to be a consumption means only, which is my point. I'm fine with aggregators adding a social element, as it's not the aim and can easily ignored (Feedly even has this i think). I'm even fine with sources having only the title and the first paragraph as i can choose to ignore the content if it doesn't interest me. My point is more that, if there's going to be curation of content i want to do that myself because there isn't an algorithm that exists that can do it well for me[1]. And if your content is posted exclusively to the various social networks that try and fail to curate content for me (i.e. you don't have your own site outside of the walled gardens) then i probably have little interest in it. [1] This is part of a wider problem in that people want to follow hundreds (thousands?) of sources, and that quickly becomes a deluge. In the same vein, people favourite just about every image they see on Instagram - to paraphrase, "if you favourite everything, then nothing is your favourite". Self restraint is the best form of curation against a world in which everyone is screaming to be heard over everyone else.

WhyDoPeople 9y ago

This is essentially what killed off RSS from every day use. This is also what killed off Gopher when the Web came around.

tripzilch 9y ago

Fair. But what if users also had they own RSS feed(s)? They'd select the items/articles they want to share and they get broadcast into (one of) those feed(s). Their friends can subscribe, and why not, comments would easily fit into such a feed as well. Only problem I see is that these users would need a URL for the feed for their friends to subscribe to. So you'd need an external service (like Google Reader was). How about one of these new(ish) open/decentralized social network thingies? I forget their names, there was one that was sort-of-twitter and another sort-of-facebook. They probably already have RSS built-in with various RSS API endpoints for different filters on the stream. Maybe such an idea could ride along with that? Also, I want to echo the other comments, how it is nice that RSS just does one thing. Just means it's a building block.

kinos 9y ago
You're literally talking about decentralized social media such as what ActivityPub suggests and is attempting to implement.