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Did anyone else notice how corporations like Twitter and Facebook quietly tried to kill RSS in the past 10 years? RSS is a wonderful technology with embodies t

Did anyone else notice how corporations like Twitter and Facebook quietly tried to kill RSS in the past 10 years? RSS is a wonderful technology with embodies the spirit of the Internet. Facebook and Twitter are, by comparison, cancer. I often recommend WordPress to folks as an alternative for blogging, because it is free and has RSS functional out of the box.

LoSboccacc 8y ago
RSS has no analytics. that's the big weakness. RSS has been stripped of content even in most other blogs, substituting it for links back to the main sites, which is a workable compromise for webmaster but not one that helps readers. yahoo pipes where a stopgap for a while, until yahoo pulled the plug. I think what's needed is an intrusive format that delivers metrics and tracking. sure it'd be another tool for control and manipulation, but we'd at least have back the ability to read our news centralized.
- dewiz 8y ago
  Readers don’t need/want analytics though, so this is a friction between content accessibility and businesses tracking usage
- gerbilly 8y ago
  > RSS has no analytics. Great! Another selling point.
  - LoSboccacc 8y ago
    I agree, but realistically speaking that is why it’s being fought by content providers whether we the techies like it or not
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - gkya 8y ago
      Let it be fought by them all the time. Useful websites will have an RSS feed. It's a nice filter, IMO.
      - LoSboccacc 8y ago
        that's kind of an ivory tower argument. "let's people don't have nice thing, we know what's best for them." meanwhile, most normal use don't gives a damn if the site track their behavior and post relevant ads, as long as they get quality content and ads aren't abusive they believe it's a fair bargain.
        acct1771 8y ago
        "ads aren't abusive" "believe"
        zbentley 8y ago
        Believe it or not, some people make high-quality content on the internet with the expectation of compensation. The current state of advertising is ethically and technically questionable in many ways. But the idea of advertising as a revenue model is not.
        Spivak 8y ago
        Ethical advertising is pretty much a unicorn. I don't deny that it's possible but I would struggle to find even a single example of it in the wild.
        gkya 8y ago
        I guess Deck Network was an example of that. Most of the 5-6 ads I intentionally clicked ever was theirs. There were also similar networks like Carbon.
        gkya 8y ago
        No, more like "instead of trying to tame bad actors making compromises, we refrain from them and tell others to do so too".
- firasd 8y ago
  Embedded images? I don't think the big weakness is lack of tracking, really, I think the big weakness is consumer adoption. The average person (outside of the journalist/influencer-types that continue to bemoan the loss of Google Reader) doesn't care to use feeds. Podcasts (based on feeds) are still held back by the idea that you have to figure out how to subscribe to a show.
- eric_the_read 8y ago
  RSS doesn't need analytics. If you want analytics, put them on the links in the feed. If you want to know that people are reading the link at all, either put in an invisible pixel, or just include a paragraph with a [more...] link.
  - ge0rg 8y ago
    RSS feeds that provide a paragraph (or less) and a "more..." link make me unsubscribe immediately. I'm most often reading my feeds when offline or on the go, and not having the full article makes it worthless.
- Naga 8y ago
  As a frequent RSS user, I don't mind when feeds use links back to the main site. I personally use RSS to notify me when a new article is posted.
  - jeena 8y ago
    As a frequent RSS user, I want to read the content in my preferred environment with my preferred contrast, colors and font. Many years ago I decided to not follow people who only put a crippeled version of their content into my RSS reader. If they don't want to be read, that's ok, they're pleanty others with better content anyway which I gladly read instead.
    - qume 8y ago
      Any chance you know of a good list of full uncrippled rss feeds?
      - jeena 8y ago
        I'm not quite sure what you mean, aren't list of things to read very personal and dependent on the taste and interests of the person? My website has full feed: https://jeena.net/all.atom https://jeena.net/all.atom and so have blogs like Kottke http://feeds.kottke.org/main http://feeds.kottke.org/main Marco Arment https://marco.org/rss https://marco.org/rss Scott Hanslemann http://feeds.hanselman.com/ScottHanselman http://feeds.hanselman.com/ScottHanselman and most of the personal blogs you can find out there. But as I said, I most probably didn't quite get the question.
        jeena 8y ago
        But otherwise there are plugins like https://tt-rss.org/oldforum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=1539 https://tt-rss.org/oldforum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=1539 to replace the short content in a RSS feed with the full content from the Website.
- jsjohnst 8y ago
  As there were quite a few analytics companies for RSS when it was more popular, your comment couldn’t be further from the truth. The founder of one of the most popular RSS analytics firms (FeedBurner) later went on to be the CEO of twitter in fact.
- p2t2p 8y ago
  How come it doesn't? I'm a paying subscriber of Ars Technica so I have unique personified URLs to access various of their feeds. You also can include images from the web into the feed and most of the clients will gladly render it. There are myriads of tricks you can use to collect data.
  - kabanossen 8y ago
    RSS is a protocol, not a service. Email doesn't have analytics, nor does html or http or any other protocol. Analytics is functionality you connect to services or tools, generating logs of how you use something. It's not on the same level of abstraction as a protocol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS
- ino 8y ago
  That's what feedburner was for and looking back it's so obvious why google bought them.
- kabanossen 8y ago
  RSS is a protocol, not a service. Email doesn't have analytics, nor does html or http or any other protocol. Analytics is functionality you connect to services or tools, generating logs of how you use something. It's not on the same level of abstraction as a protocol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS
  - LoSboccacc 8y ago
    duh, this is only a technicality, but since you need to be anal about it, I'll have the detail obsessive version so you can follow the discussion too: "RSS doesn't define support active content, which is what's used on other channel to build in depth analytical tool that go beyond page view. without active content, analytic is in control of the reading software, a big step back from other content delivery protocol. even email could be used to track engagement using unique links for each recipient, but most reader software has an incentive to cache reads and not to forward unique links, letting content provider with the only option of syndicating link and summaries, causing a natural bias for clickbaiting titles, because driving user to the producer is the only way to get back analytical data. this has caused a steep decline in the availability of rss content and viability of rss for consumers."
dfee 8y ago
Nothing is free. WordPress is also a blogging platform first and foremost.
- michaelbuckbee 8y ago
  I think you're being downvoted as there is both wordpress.com (which you correctly state is a blogging platform) and then wordpress.org (the open source PHP application anyone can freely install on anything from shared hosting on up). At even a cursory glance, independent Wordpress installs vastly outnumber the number of domains hosted on wordpress.com
  - originalsimba 8y ago
    Well you can get a VPS for $2.50/mo these days with half a gig of ram, more than enough to handle 5-15 simultaneous visitors on your average WordPress blog. The WordPress software IS free. The WordPress.com service is not, as you pay for it by attaching their domain name to yours thereby providing them free advertising. Also, there's nothing to stop you from hosting your personal blog on your personal internet connection. Even if you don't have a static IP there's ways to solve that.
    - bkdonline 8y ago
      How do you solve around a non static ip?
      - KayEss 8y ago
        Dynamic updates. So long as you're not behind carrier NAT you can find your IP number and update a DNS record. Many DNS providers have a specific service for this, e.g. https://dyn.com/dynamic-dns/ https://dyn.com/dynamic-dns/ (no affiliation, just used them many years ago for this service). Many ISPs are switching to carrier NAT though and then you can't host as you don't have a routable IP number.
        8y ago
weberc2 8y ago
> Facebook and Twitter are, by comparison, cancer. How are FB and Twitter comparable to RSS? And how are they trying to kill it? Like they're not supporting it on their platform? If so, why should I care? Or do you mean "they're conspiring to kill it across the Internet", in which case please elaborate. EDIT: I'm getting downvoted; I can only assume people are interpreting my comment as vouching for FB/Twitter, which couldn't be further from the truth. I can be (and am) confused by his wording without supporting big social media companies. :)
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  They are a way to subscribe to notifications of updates from your favorite content providers. But they don't use a standards-conformant protocol when consuming those notifications. By becoming popular, they reduce content providers' incentive to support RSS. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
- originalsimba 8y ago
  Both Facebook and Twitter DID support RSS, both, for years. Each corporation decided to eliminate RSS from their platform around 3 to 5 years ago, because they wanted complete control over the distribution of "their" content (OUR social lives). It's difficult to discuss this subject without running into this gigantic elephant in the room which is that the behavior of corporate "social media" giants is exploitative, bordering on criminal, and absolutely contradicts the best interest of the public, our nation, the internet, and intelligent life. This has really served to spotlight some of the problems with free market capitalism.
whorleater 8y ago
>I often recommend WordPress to folks as an alternative for blogging Didn't blogging start on wordpress/blogger/livejournal?
- tnorthcutt 8y ago
  Movable Type preceded WordPress by a couple of years or so, FWIW.
  - adventured 8y ago
    LiveJournal predated Movable Type by two years.
    - jmspring 8y ago
      Static websites with blogs/regular entries predated even livejournal
      - originalsimba 8y ago
        This. Blogging predates all blogging services, platforms, and software. Blogging was invented by early web pioneers. The corporations followed in the Gold Rush of the 1990s dot-com bubble, and they've been trying to monetize our social lives ever since. Nowadays, thanks to marketing machines and television talking heads, nobody has "websites" anymore, we have "blogs".
        infectoid 8y ago
        I think I first blogged in the early 2000's with Blog Spot (which became Blogger). It was great.
    - bmelton 8y ago
      Finger's got them all beat by a few decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol
fny 8y ago
Did Twitter[0] kill RSS or is that mode of expression not conducive for it? Evan Williams (Blogger Founder, RSS -> Twitter co-founder, No-RSS -> Medium founder, RSS[1]) has explored many of these modalities. He probably decided Twitter didn't need RSS. Maybe we're all learning about the health of certain forms of discourse? https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214874118-RSS-feeds https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214874118-RSS-feed... [0]: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214874118-RSS-feeds https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214874118-RSS-feed... [1]: I lack faith in Facebook given Zuckerberg's historic lack of an ethical compass.
- kripy 8y ago
  The original REST API had a quasi-RSS feed[0]. [0]: https://twittercommunity.com/t/can-you-get-your-twitter-feed-in-an-rss-feed/10178 https://twittercommunity.com/t/can-you-get-your-twitter-feed...
  - Semiapies 8y ago
    I certainly subscribed to Twitter RSS feeds until Twitter eliminated the feeds.
AznHisoka 8y ago
.. and also how they force people to adopt it when it is convenient? ie Facebook making you privately specify RSS feeds for Instant Articles through their system (but not public ones that other people can use)
- awat 8y ago
  I think you hit it head on with this. It seems to be a control thing first and foremost. The worst nightmare is that you will grab their content in a text only format with no ads.
  - 0x445442 8y ago
    Yep, capital has viewed the interwebs main purpose as a massive direct marketing platform.
  - Jaruzel 8y ago
    It's a very blinkered view. There's plenty of RSS feeds with text based adverts at the bottom of each article, and as most RSS reader apps show the article content in HTML, normal image based ads can work as well. So it's totally do-able to include advertising in RSS. A layperson wouldn't know how to strip the advert out either.
    - zbentley 8y ago
      Yes, but advertisers (you know, Google's actual customers) don't like it, because they get less control over the appearance of their ads, and way fewer metrics/information about click rates etc. It might also just be less effective than in-page advertising. Google and its peers probably know the truth of that, but I don't know if there are any reliable comparative studies in that area that don't fall into the "we tried to cram exactly the same strategy/campaign/content we would put in a banner ad into an RSS feed and got no uptick in sales" trap, but I'd love to read up on that area. Regardless, the bandwagon effect of "traditional" online advertising is such that RSS is at best an (at present) tiny new frontier that would require advertisers to re-learn or change a lot of their content strategy, and at worst an actively advertiser-hostile platform. Those are just observations; not statements of should/should-not.
8bitsrule 8y ago
Not just them. After last week's discussion, I noticed this week that, while Rick Steves does podcasts, I had to hunt for the RSS feeds page hosted on his own website. WTF? My usual policy for podcasts is, RSS subscription or else. Ain't got time to visit the damn website. Science Friday tried that for a while and soon went back.
- JoshMnem 8y ago
  Most podcasts that I've encountered lately don't have RSS feeds listed. You have to view source to find the URLs. The Internet needs to revive that open technology culture. Instead of Facebook/Twitter/G+/etc. subscribe to RSS feeds. Instead of Medium, use WordPress/Hugo/Metalsmith/etc. on Netlify/Surge/Github etc. Instead of Mac, use GNU/Linux. Etc.
  - anonymouz 8y ago
    > You have to view source to find the URLs. In Firefox, do Right Click->View Page Info. The "Feeds" tabs lists the links. There are also extensions (e.g. "Awesome RSS") that will put a symbol in your URL bar.
    - JoshMnem 8y ago
      Thanks, I didn't know that. Mozilla should make that more prominent so that users who don't know what RSS/ATOM is could "subscribe to this website" with just a click.
      - groby_b 8y ago
        That was funny. Mozilla used to make that more prominent. Most users didn't care, because they still didn't know what that weird icon meant. That was ultimately the downfall of RSS - the web tech scene never managed to communicate to the average user what RSS was good for, what it did, and how to use it. The issue isn't "not knowing about RSS/ATOM". You don't need to. The same way e.g. you don't need to know what the octane numbers for gasoline mean. What you do need to know is what it does for you, and that answer has always been "not enough to satisfy the hassle". (A good chunk of the blame here goes to all the larger, traffic-hungry web sites that only published excerpts via RSS, with a click-through link. It transformed a useful feed into a rather useless list of self-updating bookmarks)
amygdyl 8y ago
I used to wish I could publish my email correspondence as a RSS feed, to which the "recipients" could more selectively subscribe. So they're always engaged in seeking the information they need, which is so duplicated between correspondence and emails, I could even avoid copy and paste. This was when I didn't get funny looks for suggesting that I send a email. Did anyone else notice how regular people seem to have been killing off email and all forms of communication that require any configuration, lately? Edit: configuration, not confirmation
- voltagex_ 8y ago
  Haven't you just described a blog though?
  - Nadya 8y ago
    Sounds more like a newsletter to me. Let people subscribe to the newsletter, send out an email blast once a day/week/month.
    - dnzm 8y ago
      But then by RSS, which makes it a web thing, which sure sounds like a blog.
      - amygdyl 8y ago
        I have in mind a very much more newsreader interface than anything web, but my idea was to publish styles once for each of my feeds, which would be very opt in only. I went so far as to develop a mark-up "header" that would have any problematic style niggles indicated by offsets, to avoid any inline tags. I very badly want my working output to be genuinely easily archived, searched and, internally discoverable.
askvictor 8y ago
Don't forget Google. In fact, it's not just RSS; it's other open standards (e.g. XMPP) that they embraced initially, then dropped.
- wmeredith 8y ago
  Google’s Reader fiasco did more to kill RSS than any other actor in the community before or since. Cornering the market damaging their AdWords business with a free product subsidized by that very business and then shutting it down was really gross.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  Embrace, extend, and extinguish is alive and well. This time it's not MS though.
- xelxebar 8y ago
  FWIW, YouTube still has RSS available: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNELID https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=USERNAME https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=YOUR_YOUTUBE_PLAYLIST_NUMBER You used to be able to go into your subscription manager and download an OPML file with the RSS feeds for your subscriptions. I'm unable to find that buton anymore though.
  - vengefulduck 8y ago
    You can still download the OPML file you just click export to RSS reader at the bottom of this page: https://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager https://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager
  - ino 8y ago
    Youtube used to have an rss feed for a search term, it was very useful. Now we have to web scrape the results page because their api requires authentication and who wants to use that for results that are public anyways. I sure don't. Rss worked great and they removed it. Boo.
- criddell 8y ago
remram 8y ago
Twitter used to have RSS versions of every profile, accessible through api.twitter.com without credentials. It was awesome. They retired it years ago... I took the time to make a proxy (Twitter API to RSS), and though I did write a few more, a lot more services still provide feeds (such as YouTube, Reddit, Steam, GitHub) than I thought they would. RSS is still going strong.
- dijit 8y ago
  Would you be willing to release the code for this? I'd like to run one myself.
  - Semaphor 8y ago
    Can't remember the name, but there is at least one open source self hosted tool that allows you to subscribe to tweets via RSS. I used it to follow an author who had neither mailing list nor website.
    - XzetaU8 8y ago
      https://twitrss.me/ https://twitrss.me/
    - m-localhost 8y ago
      https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge creates rss for many popular services.
- Raphael 8y ago
  RSS is a(n) (open) secret club these days.
- mcovey 8y ago
  YouTube killed it's new subscription videos feed a few years ago, it's no longer possible to get a single combined feed of new videos from all channels you're subscribed to. The only alternative is to export the entire subscription list in OPML format (youtube at least provides this) and import them into a feed reader. I stopped subscribing to channels on YouTube after this and only subscribe in my RSS reader, because it was too difficult to manage synchronizing subscriptions between the two.
royalharsh95 8y ago
WordPress still doesn't support postgres.
- dnzm 8y ago
  Which, to the general public, doesn't matter one iota. Luckily, there's other platforms that, apart from giving you more options wrt your database backend, embrace newer PHP practices and versions a whole lot quicker.
Shank 8y ago
I'm a big fan of Feedbin, because it lets you subscribe to any Twitter user's profile as a normal feed and browse it too. It means I can subscribe to 10 or so people I really don't want to miss and get their updates exactly like I would a normal feed. https://feedbin.com/ https://feedbin.com/
- masivemunkey 8y ago
  Love feedbin. I've been using it since Google Reader died and it's been rock solid. Also nice that they have vim-like commands built in.
chenster 8y ago
If you are old enough, you should remember Web Services, a RSS fork by Microsoft, then came REST as a lightweight WS that just works for 99% of the Internet. So RSS never actually died but just evolved into many different forms.
raldu 8y ago
Exactly! The social media platforms have effectively "devoured" and "engulfed" the very idea behind RSS in order to exploit the political economy of content publication, for monopoly. When Google Reader has been shut down in 2013, it had left millions of loyal fans behind who had loved and used the platform over the years. There had been a strong disappointment, especially in communities like Reddit, HN and Slashdot. Reader platform still seems to have been missed even today [2]. Judging by the range of Google products that had got shut down along with the Reader [2] that time, it seems that it had been a strategic move to preserve their interests in rising social media and mobile market. Google had failed to "build products that people love," by betraying what people loved. With Google killing the Reader, Twitter shutting down support for RSS, AI having had started deciding what is most relevant for you, and feeds having buried behind giant walls of API interfaces, Legacy of Aaron Swartz had been turned into "social media," the new television! 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/897hr1/i_made_mockups_of_how_google_reader_could_look_if/dwpi69h https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/897hr1/i_made_mocku... 2: https://googleblog.blogspot.com.tr/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com.tr/2013/03/a-second-spring-o...
- bhnmmhmd 8y ago
  Excuse me, but I need to put it out there: how exactly is RSS useful if the sources themselves (websites) are more and more biased? I believe nowadays, people are interested in "content", not in "source". As long as the content is valid and trustworthy, I don't care if it's on social media or an RSS feed. As a matter of fact, my problem with RSS is that I can't be sure the websites I'm receiving their notifs are going to keep up the good work and are not "deviated" or "biased" after a while. RSS is solid, but it's also rigid, meaning that it relies on websites to deliver you content. Other alternatives (such as news aggregators) do the reverse: they bring you content based on your own interests and regardless of where that news was published in. I think this is way better than "blindly" trusting our favorite websites to tell us the truth.
  - naravara 8y ago
    A website has an editorial perspective and voice of its own. Their biases are known and can be accounted for when you read them. News aggregators are having editorial decisions made by the vagaries of some opaque voting algorithm and get gamed by motivated actors and bots. If manipulative bias is your concern, aggregators are way worse.
PeterStuer 8y ago
I was Google with their most popular Reader client that in practice 'killed' RSS, to get users on their shiny new G+.

LoSboccacc 8y ago

RSS has no analytics. that's the big weakness. RSS has been stripped of content even in most other blogs, substituting it for links back to the main sites, which is a workable compromise for webmaster but not one that helps readers. yahoo pipes where a stopgap for a while, until yahoo pulled the plug. I think what's needed is an intrusive format that delivers metrics and tracking. sure it'd be another tool for control and manipulation, but we'd at least have back the ability to read our news centralized.

dewiz 8y ago
Readers don’t need/want analytics though, so this is a friction between content accessibility and businesses tracking usage
gerbilly 8y ago
> RSS has no analytics. Great! Another selling point.
- LoSboccacc 8y ago
  I agree, but realistically speaking that is why it’s being fought by content providers whether we the techies like it or not
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - gkya 8y ago
    Let it be fought by them all the time. Useful websites will have an RSS feed. It's a nice filter, IMO.
    - LoSboccacc 8y ago
      that's kind of an ivory tower argument. "let's people don't have nice thing, we know what's best for them." meanwhile, most normal use don't gives a damn if the site track their behavior and post relevant ads, as long as they get quality content and ads aren't abusive they believe it's a fair bargain.
      - acct1771 8y ago
        "ads aren't abusive" "believe"
        zbentley 8y ago
        Believe it or not, some people make high-quality content on the internet with the expectation of compensation. The current state of advertising is ethically and technically questionable in many ways. But the idea of advertising as a revenue model is not.
        Spivak 8y ago
        Ethical advertising is pretty much a unicorn. I don't deny that it's possible but I would struggle to find even a single example of it in the wild.
        gkya 8y ago
        I guess Deck Network was an example of that. Most of the 5-6 ads I intentionally clicked ever was theirs. There were also similar networks like Carbon.
      - gkya 8y ago
        No, more like "instead of trying to tame bad actors making compromises, we refrain from them and tell others to do so too".
firasd 8y ago
Embedded images? I don't think the big weakness is lack of tracking, really, I think the big weakness is consumer adoption. The average person (outside of the journalist/influencer-types that continue to bemoan the loss of Google Reader) doesn't care to use feeds. Podcasts (based on feeds) are still held back by the idea that you have to figure out how to subscribe to a show.
eric_the_read 8y ago
RSS doesn't need analytics. If you want analytics, put them on the links in the feed. If you want to know that people are reading the link at all, either put in an invisible pixel, or just include a paragraph with a [more...] link.
- ge0rg 8y ago
  RSS feeds that provide a paragraph (or less) and a "more..." link make me unsubscribe immediately. I'm most often reading my feeds when offline or on the go, and not having the full article makes it worthless.
Naga 8y ago
As a frequent RSS user, I don't mind when feeds use links back to the main site. I personally use RSS to notify me when a new article is posted.
- jeena 8y ago
  As a frequent RSS user, I want to read the content in my preferred environment with my preferred contrast, colors and font. Many years ago I decided to not follow people who only put a crippeled version of their content into my RSS reader. If they don't want to be read, that's ok, they're pleanty others with better content anyway which I gladly read instead.
  - qume 8y ago
    Any chance you know of a good list of full uncrippled rss feeds?
    - jeena 8y ago
      I'm not quite sure what you mean, aren't list of things to read very personal and dependent on the taste and interests of the person? My website has full feed: https://jeena.net/all.atom https://jeena.net/all.atom and so have blogs like Kottke http://feeds.kottke.org/main http://feeds.kottke.org/main Marco Arment https://marco.org/rss https://marco.org/rss Scott Hanslemann http://feeds.hanselman.com/ScottHanselman http://feeds.hanselman.com/ScottHanselman and most of the personal blogs you can find out there. But as I said, I most probably didn't quite get the question.
      - jeena 8y ago
        But otherwise there are plugins like https://tt-rss.org/oldforum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=1539 https://tt-rss.org/oldforum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=1539 to replace the short content in a RSS feed with the full content from the Website.
jsjohnst 8y ago
As there were quite a few analytics companies for RSS when it was more popular, your comment couldn’t be further from the truth. The founder of one of the most popular RSS analytics firms (FeedBurner) later went on to be the CEO of twitter in fact.
p2t2p 8y ago
How come it doesn't? I'm a paying subscriber of Ars Technica so I have unique personified URLs to access various of their feeds. You also can include images from the web into the feed and most of the clients will gladly render it. There are myriads of tricks you can use to collect data.
- kabanossen 8y ago
  RSS is a protocol, not a service. Email doesn't have analytics, nor does html or http or any other protocol. Analytics is functionality you connect to services or tools, generating logs of how you use something. It's not on the same level of abstraction as a protocol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS
ino 8y ago
That's what feedburner was for and looking back it's so obvious why google bought them.
kabanossen 8y ago
RSS is a protocol, not a service. Email doesn't have analytics, nor does html or http or any other protocol. Analytics is functionality you connect to services or tools, generating logs of how you use something. It's not on the same level of abstraction as a protocol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS
- LoSboccacc 8y ago
  duh, this is only a technicality, but since you need to be anal about it, I'll have the detail obsessive version so you can follow the discussion too: "RSS doesn't define support active content, which is what's used on other channel to build in depth analytical tool that go beyond page view. without active content, analytic is in control of the reading software, a big step back from other content delivery protocol. even email could be used to track engagement using unique links for each recipient, but most reader software has an incentive to cache reads and not to forward unique links, letting content provider with the only option of syndicating link and summaries, causing a natural bias for clickbaiting titles, because driving user to the producer is the only way to get back analytical data. this has caused a steep decline in the availability of rss content and viability of rss for consumers."

dfee 8y ago

Nothing is free. WordPress is also a blogging platform first and foremost.

michaelbuckbee 8y ago
I think you're being downvoted as there is both wordpress.com (which you correctly state is a blogging platform) and then wordpress.org (the open source PHP application anyone can freely install on anything from shared hosting on up). At even a cursory glance, independent Wordpress installs vastly outnumber the number of domains hosted on wordpress.com
- originalsimba 8y ago
  Well you can get a VPS for $2.50/mo these days with half a gig of ram, more than enough to handle 5-15 simultaneous visitors on your average WordPress blog. The WordPress software IS free. The WordPress.com service is not, as you pay for it by attaching their domain name to yours thereby providing them free advertising. Also, there's nothing to stop you from hosting your personal blog on your personal internet connection. Even if you don't have a static IP there's ways to solve that.
  - bkdonline 8y ago
    How do you solve around a non static ip?
    - KayEss 8y ago
      Dynamic updates. So long as you're not behind carrier NAT you can find your IP number and update a DNS record. Many DNS providers have a specific service for this, e.g. https://dyn.com/dynamic-dns/ https://dyn.com/dynamic-dns/ (no affiliation, just used them many years ago for this service). Many ISPs are switching to carrier NAT though and then you can't host as you don't have a routable IP number.
      - 8y ago

weberc2 8y ago

> Facebook and Twitter are, by comparison, cancer. How are FB and Twitter comparable to RSS? And how are they trying to kill it? Like they're not supporting it on their platform? If so, why should I care? Or do you mean "they're conspiring to kill it across the Internet", in which case please elaborate. EDIT: I'm getting downvoted; I can only assume people are interpreting my comment as vouching for FB/Twitter, which couldn't be further from the truth. I can be (and am) confused by his wording without supporting big social media companies. :)

fjsolwmv 8y ago
They are a way to subscribe to notifications of updates from your favorite content providers. But they don't use a standards-conformant protocol when consuming those notifications. By becoming popular, they reduce content providers' incentive to support RSS. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
originalsimba 8y ago
Both Facebook and Twitter DID support RSS, both, for years. Each corporation decided to eliminate RSS from their platform around 3 to 5 years ago, because they wanted complete control over the distribution of "their" content (OUR social lives). It's difficult to discuss this subject without running into this gigantic elephant in the room which is that the behavior of corporate "social media" giants is exploitative, bordering on criminal, and absolutely contradicts the best interest of the public, our nation, the internet, and intelligent life. This has really served to spotlight some of the problems with free market capitalism.

whorleater 8y ago

>I often recommend WordPress to folks as an alternative for blogging Didn't blogging start on wordpress/blogger/livejournal?

tnorthcutt 8y ago
Movable Type preceded WordPress by a couple of years or so, FWIW.
- adventured 8y ago
  LiveJournal predated Movable Type by two years.
  - jmspring 8y ago
    Static websites with blogs/regular entries predated even livejournal
    - originalsimba 8y ago
      This. Blogging predates all blogging services, platforms, and software. Blogging was invented by early web pioneers. The corporations followed in the Gold Rush of the 1990s dot-com bubble, and they've been trying to monetize our social lives ever since. Nowadays, thanks to marketing machines and television talking heads, nobody has "websites" anymore, we have "blogs".
      - infectoid 8y ago
        I think I first blogged in the early 2000's with Blog Spot (which became Blogger). It was great.
  - bmelton 8y ago
    Finger's got them all beat by a few decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol

fny 8y ago

Did Twitter[0] kill RSS or is that mode of expression not conducive for it? Evan Williams (Blogger Founder, RSS -> Twitter co-founder, No-RSS -> Medium founder, RSS[1]) has explored many of these modalities. He probably decided Twitter didn't need RSS. Maybe we're all learning about the health of certain forms of discourse? https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214874118-RSS-feeds https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214874118-RSS-feed... [0]: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214874118-RSS-feeds https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214874118-RSS-feed... [1]: I lack faith in Facebook given Zuckerberg's historic lack of an ethical compass.

kripy 8y ago
The original REST API had a quasi-RSS feed[0]. [0]: https://twittercommunity.com/t/can-you-get-your-twitter-feed-in-an-rss-feed/10178 https://twittercommunity.com/t/can-you-get-your-twitter-feed...
- Semiapies 8y ago
  I certainly subscribed to Twitter RSS feeds until Twitter eliminated the feeds.

AznHisoka 8y ago

.. and also how they force people to adopt it when it is convenient? ie Facebook making you privately specify RSS feeds for Instant Articles through their system (but not public ones that other people can use)

awat 8y ago
I think you hit it head on with this. It seems to be a control thing first and foremost. The worst nightmare is that you will grab their content in a text only format with no ads.
- 0x445442 8y ago
  Yep, capital has viewed the interwebs main purpose as a massive direct marketing platform.
- Jaruzel 8y ago
  It's a very blinkered view. There's plenty of RSS feeds with text based adverts at the bottom of each article, and as most RSS reader apps show the article content in HTML, normal image based ads can work as well. So it's totally do-able to include advertising in RSS. A layperson wouldn't know how to strip the advert out either.
  - zbentley 8y ago
    Yes, but advertisers (you know, Google's actual customers) don't like it, because they get less control over the appearance of their ads, and way fewer metrics/information about click rates etc. It might also just be less effective than in-page advertising. Google and its peers probably know the truth of that, but I don't know if there are any reliable comparative studies in that area that don't fall into the "we tried to cram exactly the same strategy/campaign/content we would put in a banner ad into an RSS feed and got no uptick in sales" trap, but I'd love to read up on that area. Regardless, the bandwagon effect of "traditional" online advertising is such that RSS is at best an (at present) tiny new frontier that would require advertisers to re-learn or change a lot of their content strategy, and at worst an actively advertiser-hostile platform. Those are just observations; not statements of should/should-not.

8bitsrule 8y ago

Not just them. After last week's discussion, I noticed this week that, while Rick Steves does podcasts, I had to hunt for the RSS feeds page hosted on his own website. WTF? My usual policy for podcasts is, RSS subscription or else. Ain't got time to visit the damn website. Science Friday tried that for a while and soon went back.

JoshMnem 8y ago
Most podcasts that I've encountered lately don't have RSS feeds listed. You have to view source to find the URLs. The Internet needs to revive that open technology culture. Instead of Facebook/Twitter/G+/etc. subscribe to RSS feeds. Instead of Medium, use WordPress/Hugo/Metalsmith/etc. on Netlify/Surge/Github etc. Instead of Mac, use GNU/Linux. Etc.
- anonymouz 8y ago
  > You have to view source to find the URLs. In Firefox, do Right Click->View Page Info. The "Feeds" tabs lists the links. There are also extensions (e.g. "Awesome RSS") that will put a symbol in your URL bar.
  - JoshMnem 8y ago
    Thanks, I didn't know that. Mozilla should make that more prominent so that users who don't know what RSS/ATOM is could "subscribe to this website" with just a click.
    - groby_b 8y ago
      That was funny. Mozilla used to make that more prominent. Most users didn't care, because they still didn't know what that weird icon meant. That was ultimately the downfall of RSS - the web tech scene never managed to communicate to the average user what RSS was good for, what it did, and how to use it. The issue isn't "not knowing about RSS/ATOM". You don't need to. The same way e.g. you don't need to know what the octane numbers for gasoline mean. What you do need to know is what it does for you, and that answer has always been "not enough to satisfy the hassle". (A good chunk of the blame here goes to all the larger, traffic-hungry web sites that only published excerpts via RSS, with a click-through link. It transformed a useful feed into a rather useless list of self-updating bookmarks)

amygdyl 8y ago

I used to wish I could publish my email correspondence as a RSS feed, to which the "recipients" could more selectively subscribe. So they're always engaged in seeking the information they need, which is so duplicated between correspondence and emails, I could even avoid copy and paste. This was when I didn't get funny looks for suggesting that I send a email. Did anyone else notice how regular people seem to have been killing off email and all forms of communication that require any configuration, lately? Edit: configuration, not confirmation

voltagex_ 8y ago
Haven't you just described a blog though?
- Nadya 8y ago
  Sounds more like a newsletter to me. Let people subscribe to the newsletter, send out an email blast once a day/week/month.
  - dnzm 8y ago
    But then by RSS, which makes it a web thing, which sure sounds like a blog.
    - amygdyl 8y ago
      I have in mind a very much more newsreader interface than anything web, but my idea was to publish styles once for each of my feeds, which would be very opt in only. I went so far as to develop a mark-up "header" that would have any problematic style niggles indicated by offsets, to avoid any inline tags. I very badly want my working output to be genuinely easily archived, searched and, internally discoverable.

askvictor 8y ago

Don't forget Google. In fact, it's not just RSS; it's other open standards (e.g. XMPP) that they embraced initially, then dropped.

wmeredith 8y ago
Google’s Reader fiasco did more to kill RSS than any other actor in the community before or since. Cornering the market damaging their AdWords business with a free product subsidized by that very business and then shutting it down was really gross.
maxxxxx 8y ago
Embrace, extend, and extinguish is alive and well. This time it's not MS though.
xelxebar 8y ago
FWIW, YouTube still has RSS available: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNELID https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=USERNAME https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=YOUR_YOUTUBE_PLAYLIST_NUMBER You used to be able to go into your subscription manager and download an OPML file with the RSS feeds for your subscriptions. I'm unable to find that buton anymore though.
- vengefulduck 8y ago
  You can still download the OPML file you just click export to RSS reader at the bottom of this page: https://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager https://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager
- ino 8y ago
  Youtube used to have an rss feed for a search term, it was very useful. Now we have to web scrape the results page because their api requires authentication and who wants to use that for results that are public anyways. I sure don't. Rss worked great and they removed it. Boo.
criddell 8y ago

remram 8y ago

Twitter used to have RSS versions of every profile, accessible through api.twitter.com without credentials. It was awesome. They retired it years ago... I took the time to make a proxy (Twitter API to RSS), and though I did write a few more, a lot more services still provide feeds (such as YouTube, Reddit, Steam, GitHub) than I thought they would. RSS is still going strong.

dijit 8y ago
Would you be willing to release the code for this? I'd like to run one myself.
- Semaphor 8y ago
  Can't remember the name, but there is at least one open source self hosted tool that allows you to subscribe to tweets via RSS. I used it to follow an author who had neither mailing list nor website.
  - XzetaU8 8y ago
    https://twitrss.me/ https://twitrss.me/
  - m-localhost 8y ago
    https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge creates rss for many popular services.
Raphael 8y ago
RSS is a(n) (open) secret club these days.
mcovey 8y ago
YouTube killed it's new subscription videos feed a few years ago, it's no longer possible to get a single combined feed of new videos from all channels you're subscribed to. The only alternative is to export the entire subscription list in OPML format (youtube at least provides this) and import them into a feed reader. I stopped subscribing to channels on YouTube after this and only subscribe in my RSS reader, because it was too difficult to manage synchronizing subscriptions between the two.

royalharsh95 8y ago

WordPress still doesn't support postgres.

dnzm 8y ago
Which, to the general public, doesn't matter one iota. Luckily, there's other platforms that, apart from giving you more options wrt your database backend, embrace newer PHP practices and versions a whole lot quicker.

Shank 8y ago

I'm a big fan of Feedbin, because it lets you subscribe to any Twitter user's profile as a normal feed and browse it too. It means I can subscribe to 10 or so people I really don't want to miss and get their updates exactly like I would a normal feed. https://feedbin.com/ https://feedbin.com/

masivemunkey 8y ago
Love feedbin. I've been using it since Google Reader died and it's been rock solid. Also nice that they have vim-like commands built in.

chenster 8y ago

If you are old enough, you should remember Web Services, a RSS fork by Microsoft, then came REST as a lightweight WS that just works for 99% of the Internet. So RSS never actually died but just evolved into many different forms.

raldu 8y ago

Exactly! The social media platforms have effectively "devoured" and "engulfed" the very idea behind RSS in order to exploit the political economy of content publication, for monopoly. When Google Reader has been shut down in 2013, it had left millions of loyal fans behind who had loved and used the platform over the years. There had been a strong disappointment, especially in communities like Reddit, HN and Slashdot. Reader platform still seems to have been missed even today [2]. Judging by the range of Google products that had got shut down along with the Reader [2] that time, it seems that it had been a strategic move to preserve their interests in rising social media and mobile market. Google had failed to "build products that people love," by betraying what people loved. With Google killing the Reader, Twitter shutting down support for RSS, AI having had started deciding what is most relevant for you, and feeds having buried behind giant walls of API interfaces, Legacy of Aaron Swartz had been turned into "social media," the new television! 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/897hr1/i_made_mockups_of_how_google_reader_could_look_if/dwpi69h https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/897hr1/i_made_mocku... 2: https://googleblog.blogspot.com.tr/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com.tr/2013/03/a-second-spring-o...

bhnmmhmd 8y ago
Excuse me, but I need to put it out there: how exactly is RSS useful if the sources themselves (websites) are more and more biased? I believe nowadays, people are interested in "content", not in "source". As long as the content is valid and trustworthy, I don't care if it's on social media or an RSS feed. As a matter of fact, my problem with RSS is that I can't be sure the websites I'm receiving their notifs are going to keep up the good work and are not "deviated" or "biased" after a while. RSS is solid, but it's also rigid, meaning that it relies on websites to deliver you content. Other alternatives (such as news aggregators) do the reverse: they bring you content based on your own interests and regardless of where that news was published in. I think this is way better than "blindly" trusting our favorite websites to tell us the truth.
- naravara 8y ago
  A website has an editorial perspective and voice of its own. Their biases are known and can be accounted for when you read them. News aggregators are having editorial decisions made by the vagaries of some opaque voting algorithm and get gamed by motivated actors and bots. If manipulative bias is your concern, aggregators are way worse.

PeterStuer 8y ago

I was Google with their most popular Reader client that in practice 'killed' RSS, to get users on their shiny new G+.