26 ms·

Rise and Demise of RSS

154 points by ForHackernews 8y ago

OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
ain't dead
_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
The title is somewhat contracted by the content itself: "...Today, RSS is not dead. But neither is it anywhere near as popular as it once was...." Though I think that more moderate conclusion is debatable as well. I continue to new sites which offer RSS etc., and it seems to be the exception rather than the rule that (relevant) rites lack RSS.
- SllX 8y ago
  I find the only sites lacking a feed of some RSS-equivalent format are the ones that have commercial interests that are not compatible with RSS or really many other open standards and principles of good web design but might otherwise make good app design, and home made sites that don’t account for the idea that one might want to read a feed instead of visiting the web page, if they even considered that some out there might still use feed readers.
BariumBlue 8y ago
What's a good RSS page / app? On android, Google chrome has a RSS like feed that I rather like, but it feels weird to use - I never intended to have it or use it, and I have no real insight into it.
- aaronbrethorst 8y ago
  http://www.feedbin.com http://www.feedbin.com
- torstenvl 8y ago
  I like Reeder on iOS/Mac. Within the app, you can choose a number of different sync mechanisms - I use Inoreader as mine.
  - mrmondo 8y ago
    Absolutely - Reeder IMO is a very well designed app and it’s great going from my phone / iPad to my home / work desktops and having the syncing work properly. I use Feedly for my subscriptions, filters and other logic processing.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  Newsblur is really nice. Web site, mobile apps, and it's even accessible in Emacs via elfeed-protocol.
- acemarke 8y ago
  On the web, BazQux Reader ( https://bazqux.com https://bazqux.com ). Excellent successor to Google Reader, and totally worth the $20/yr subscription On Android, News+ , which has a BazQux plugin.
- SamWhited 8y ago
  I use https://www.inoreader.com; https://www.inoreader.com; it has a pretty nice Android app too.
- mmusc 8y ago
  I've been using feedly. Free version just works.
- Maledictus 8y ago
  Host your own FreshRSS.
- erikrothoff 8y ago
  I have built https://feeder.co https://feeder.co would love HN’s feedback.
  - gbear605 8y ago
    Big fan, I use it everyday. That said, I do have one small complaint. It is with a change just made in the last few days: the new iOS app update makes it so if you are on the list of all unread articles and you swipe left to mark an article as read, then the article disappears from the list. I’ve repeatedly accidentally marked an article as read and then had to go searching through all my feeds to find it. Instead, it should have the old behavior where it removes the “NEW” icon but otherwise doesn’t change. The app currently still had this behavior when you actually open the article and view it. Even better would be a complete feed sorted by date that shows both read and unread but has unread at the top. This would be similar to how the iOS mail app works.
    - erikrothoff 8y ago
      Thanks for the feedback. Cool to find a user on Hacker News! That's something I hadn't considered. I personally felt it more satisfying to mark as read when the post flies out. But I agree that it can be inconvenient. Do you think an Undo button would help (not sure if you've tried the Outlook iOS app, but it does it really well)? We have better sorting options in the web and browser extensions, adding them to our iOS and Android apps is prio though. I like the idea with unread at the top!
      - gbear605 8y ago
        An undo button would definitely help, especially if it is able to undo multiple times. Thanks for the fast help! I really appreciate it, and it will make me even more likely to keep on using Feeder in the future
- ink_13 8y ago
  I use The Old Reader: https://theoldreader.com/ https://theoldreader.com/ It's 95% like Google Reader used to be.
  - YouKnowBetter 8y ago
    No idea what made people "not like" you mentioning https://theoldreader.com https://theoldreader.com since that is what I use and came by to say. As to the article's headline: if your site does not offer a working RSS feed, you've lost me as a "subscriber". I have nor the time nor the patience to track a 100 sides manually.
- EvanAnderson 8y ago
  I'll throw out a plug for ttrss.
  - ylmm 8y ago
    +1. After some of the initial pain of setting it up (which was educational for me anyway), it's exactly the sort of lightweight thing I was looking for after Google Reader shuttered.
- nicolaslem 8y ago
  I made https://feedsubs.com https://feedsubs.com to read feeds from my phone with a minimalistic interface.
- rakoo 8y ago
  I used to run a bot that sent RSS items to my email, so I could use _any_ UI I wanted to manage those (because rss is just like emails you receive en masse without any reply, so any mail client will work). Bonus: Sync is built-in, no need for some fancy protocol that only works in some applications on some platforms. I don't use it anymore, not because RSS is bad but because I don't need rss
- jhund 8y ago
  Shameless plug for https://contentgems.com https://contentgems.com. It has RSS reader, Feed filtering, and it treats URLs in your twitter home timeline as a feed, too.
craftyguy 8y ago
This seems to be a popular meme, especially on HN. RSS is not 'demised'. It's still used heavily for podcasts, wordpress (and many other blog sites) expose it, and there are countless mobile and desktop apps for fetching RSS and displaying them. RSS is alive and well, even if Google Reader is no longer a thing. Or is considering that RSS did not replace everything on the internet 'proof' that it is dying?
- mario0b1 8y ago
  This. In the past year I have cleaned my mess of (social media) accounts and got rid of everything that is not needed and switched over to RSS (with Liferea). It works perfectly fine. No annoying notifications, no unnecessary mails, just new News when I feel like opening my RSS feed. A wonderful thing.
- marxama 8y ago
  RSS is one of the main ways I consume the web (including HN). Been doing it for years and I'm very happy with it. I don't know anything about how it works, but it seems lightweight in that I can keep using it without any problems even now when I'm in China, going through terrible internet connections which prohibits "normal" web usage (in addition to The Firewall, that is).
- unicornporn 8y ago
  True dat! For me, RSS is by far (still) the best way to access web content. I've tried some self hosted RSS readers over the years but I've stayed with FreshRSS[1] for the last year. It has been a marvelous experience. Zero trouble, zero administrative burden. Self-hosted bliss. Best of all is the fact that it uses a flat file DB so it can easily be backed up, moved around and migrated. Can not recommend it enough. Also, it's PHP, so works on any cheap shared hosting. That's how I use it. One of the best things about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds. Every site and service that I wish to follow has an RSS feed, except for Twitter. I use RSS-Bridge[2] (self hosted too) to follow users. RSS-Bridge[2] will give you feeds for just about every service you can think of. If you don't find a feed for a site, sometimes you just have to dig a little. You learn at which URIs the most commons CMSes presents their Atom/RSS feeds (hello /feed/). [1] https://freshrss.org/ https://freshrss.org/ [2] https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
SamWhited 8y ago
I still don't understand how people who don't use RSS/Atom get by day to day… during development of software projects I subscribe to tags on GitHub for dependencies that I may need to update, same thing for stuff I package in the Arch User Repos and need to update promptly after a release, for services that I host I subscribe to lots of services blogs and status pages so that I get news of security updates or outages quickly, etc. Even for non development stuff I can't imagine going to each blog I read individually or just hoping that I see it on a social network; instead they all come to me and I don't have to do any work to read through all the various blogs I like, news sites, etc.
- code-is-code 8y ago
  I added GreenkeeperBot/renovate to my project so a PR is done whenever a dependency can be updated.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- icebraining 8y ago
  Email notifications and newsletters are much more popular than RSS/Atom, as far as I can tell. People already "get" email, and probably have an account, so it's easier to convert non-techies.
  - SamWhited 8y ago
    That's fair I suppose; I still use a lot of newsletters for things that don't have RSS feeds. My inbox tends to be more cluttered and harder to organize though (filters vs. just dragging a feed into a folder or adding a label) so I avoid it wherever possible. Still, having things come to me that way isn't the end of the world either.
- ovi256 8y ago
  For checking dependencies for updates, my package/dependency manager (pipenv) can check for me, and even do an audit for what dependencies need security updates, through the safety tool (https://github.com/pyupio/safety https://github.com/pyupio/safety). This is for an application though, not a distro like what you seem to be doing.
asdf333 8y ago
demise? I use an rss reader every day and consider it one of my most important news sources.
senectus1 8y ago
pfft RSS has just changed to a power user tool. people who have a clue use it extensively.
joecool1029 8y ago
I've not really used RSS and it's certainly never been a critical part of my Desktop/Laptop workflow. The first time it was exposed to me was through Firefox live bookmarks which I thought was pretty cool. Then I believe they removed the feature or just took out the bundled ones. It wasn't until working on blogs that I became aware that RSS was much used. If we had some javascript get injected into the generated rss files (common with wordpress), users would complain the feeds would stop working. I'd get it fixed, but unless someone was asking for a live feed to be syndicated on another website, I just haven't used it personally. I remember some news apps for phones like Pulse that seemed to run on RSS feeds for a bit. But that's about what I assume the majority of the population experiences of RSS. It runs some things like podcasts 'under the hood' but where does a new user get introduced to it? I run entirely off emails, every email that comes in gets an action (usually delete, respond, or file). People in here talking about relying on RSS, what software do you even use it with? (don't give podcast apps please)
- gbear605 8y ago
  I use a dedicated RSS feeder app to see blog posts from dozens of different blogs that update on frequencies ranging from ten times a day to once a year. It’s also useful for webcomics like xkcd.
  - joecool1029 8y ago
    Mind sharing the app used?
    - gbear605 8y ago
      I like https://feeder.co/ https://feeder.co/ personally, although I haven’t done any exhaustive searching.
- unicornporn 8y ago
  > It runs some things like podcasts 'under the hood' but where does a new user get introduced to it? Nowhere now that even Mozilla has eliminated it from Firefox.
molticrystal 8y ago
If anybody wants to try RSS a great desktop app for Windows,Mac OSX, OS/2, and of course Linux/BSD, I recommend quiterss. The feature that converted me was the ability to have notifications, but adblock is nice as well. I have feeds for when an item appears that I want to purchase in search results at the price I want, I get notification when stories appear on reddit according to my criteria, and when I want to catch a livestream live or just a newly uploaded video, you can use the channel's feed to be notified as Youtube notification is quite often broken. Here is the list of most significant features: https://quiterss.org/en/about https://quiterss.org/en/about I also tried rssowl, thunderbird, and more, but quiterss is one of the few still actively developed. --- Just to give some examples for people who haven't tried it out before, to get the latest JoeRogan podcast for example you can use the following url in your rss reader: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCzQUP1qoWDoEbmsQxvdjxgQ https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCzQUP1q... You can replace channel_id with whoever you want to monitor. Like a blog on blogspot? Then try https://username.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss https://username.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss and get notified for all the latest stories, and on most of them, read them as well without ever leaving your reader. For reddit just add .rss to then end of almost any url, like https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/.rss https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/.rss , many also support .json for the programmer in you. While there are dozens of decent ways to get notified about changes on a project at github, if you just want a quick way to watch things, add ".atom" to the end of urls involving but not limited to commits,tags,and releases, such as https://github.com/HackerNews/API/commits/master.atom https://github.com/HackerNews/API/commits/master.atom and also consider looking at https://bandito.re/ https://bandito.re/ . You can usually check the source code for a page for the words rss/feed/atom if your reader is having trouble and find the url manually. Also try appending /feed or /rss yourself and see what happens. Also try googling, which also still has rss feeds for google news among other places on their site if you look hard enough, it is used internally quite extensively. And of course this place supports it, the feed for here is https://news.ycombinator.com/rss https://news.ycombinator.com/rss , give it a shot.
peterwwillis 8y ago
"But I use RSS every day!" - a Hacker News reader I think this tweet at the end of the article answers that well: "Who is going to tell the normal people that RSS is dead? Wait. Who is going to explain to normal people what RSS was?" The articles aren't claiming the standard is dead, they're claiming that the use by normal users is dead. The RSS standard is still used to make billions of dollars of money (as a backend tech for content licensing & syndication), but users don't touch it. This article from last year has some better examples of why RSS is dead: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/07/rss-is-undead/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/07/rss-is-undead/
- pvorb 8y ago
  But most people never knew what it is. Why would RSS be any more dead than 10 years ago?
  - bryanrasmussen 8y ago
    Because 10 years ago there was quite a bit of hope if not absolute certainty that RSS or some syndication format was going to 'conquer the world'. Now there is a certainty that this will never happen. In our world the certainty of diminishment is equated to death. And really at some point in the future it will diminish enough that Google Chrome will announce a release not supporting RSS in the browser (but you can still get it via plugins!) and then we can have some more RSS is really dead now articles. on edit: assuming Google chrome supports it now which I wouldn't know because I don't use chrome as my primary browser.
    - mcv 8y ago
      Not conquering the world doesn't mean you're dead. I never conquered the world, but I'm very much alive. We need to get rid of this idea that the only way to survive is to dominate. You can survive in a niche. There are still people using IRC, even. New things become popular, but there will always be people who don't go along with the latest fad and either stick with a previous one or jump ahead to the next one. Personally, I've never really used RSS, but I'm seriously thinking of starting, particularly because of the demise of Google+. (Google+ really is dead, or at least dying soon, but that is because Google is actively pulling the plug.) Google+ got me into contact with a number of blogs whose owners posted their blog updates on G+. Now that G+ is dying, I need a new way to keep up to date, and I find myself looking for a new social network that allows me to follow blogs of people who themselves may not be using that network. RSS is the obvious answer here. I believe Hubzilla supports RSS, so that's immediately an interesting candidate to me.
woodman 8y ago
Wow, to base such a lengthy article on a google trend search of "rss"... Queue rekt.webm: https://trends.builtwith.com/feeds/RSS https://trends.builtwith.com/feeds/RSS
- MarsAscendant 8y ago
  Quite a spike in 2011. What happened that year?
  - woodman 8y ago
    The insane spike is for low traffic sites, so I'm guessing a blog platform defaulted RSS.
pvorb 8y ago
It's not dying at all. The death of Google Reader led to a healthier ecosystem with many competitors.
Juliate 8y ago
Wait. Who is going to explain to normal people what HTTP is?
- stevewillows 8y ago
  I was at a party a few weeks ago explaining Usenet to a crowd of confused faces. When I said, 'its sort of like reddit.. but not reddit', that seemed to satisfy them. Just tonight I had to explain what a .exe file extension is for to another friend. Its easy for those of us who are technically minded to 'just get it' when we use a new system, tool, etc -- and its also incredibly easy to forget how little the general public truly understands (or even cares) about the technology they operate on a daily basis. The day I meet a woman who cares about scraping websites to create RSS feeds is the day I consider marriage again.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > The day I meet a woman who cares about scraping websites to create RSS feeds is the day I consider marriage again. My wife is also the first woman I met who knew what IRC is, even though she's non-technical (apparently they covered it on her journalist studies). One of the many little things that impressed me about her :).
  - toyg 8y ago
    We might have to compete for the attentions of such lady. I hope it won’t come to fisticuffs.
edhelas 8y ago
Article reachable using the Motherboard - VICE RSS feed https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/rss https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/rss. Ironic?
hmans 8y ago
I find articles like this obnoxious because 1) they (implicitly or explicitly) claim that RSS was at some point popular (with "normal users") in some way that it is not today, which is wrong. 2) they completely ignore the fact that RSS today is significantly more widespread than it was a decade ago. Yes, Google Reader is gone. Get over it. Flipboard and similar have heaps and heaps of users, and they're all RSS-based.
ivanhoe 8y ago
People use Facebook and Twitter (and Hacker News) as a kind of crowd-sourced RSS, but with the fall of trust in soc. media and the rise of fake news retweets, I wouldn't completely dismiss a big come back of rss in the future.
ccnafr 8y ago
I'm so tired of these headlines. How many of these articles are going to appear every month until people realize they're trash?
campuscodi 8y ago
Remember that time when bots manipulated RSS to push fake news and political agendas? Yeah. I'm so glad Twitter and Facebook replaced RSS. We dodged a bullet there.
- lotu 8y ago
  Why do you assume RSS is immune to bots? The attacks on the election focused on Twitter and Facebook because they where dominate not because they were uniquely vulnerable.
diminish 8y ago
Wasn't the demise of RSS readers a good example of Embrace and Extinguish strategy by the big G? It paved the way to the bloated, paywalled, app-siloed, dumbified media consumption of today.
tushar-r 8y ago
Don't most podcast players use RSS? Isn't this the age of the podcast? :-)
- reshie 8y ago
  yes and other things. its just put to the background. there are others but the concept mostly remains the same. rss is nice as a universal tool to follow things forums/podcasts/news.
- toyg 8y ago
  Like most SGML/XML languages, RSS as a tool for machines is pretty great: server pushes data out, dedicated client (podcast player) retrieves it (often through a directory/aggregator), the user is happy without ever having to know RSS exists. As a document format for chronological, uniform data streams that need to carry human-readable metadata, RSS is just fine. What is unrealistic is the delusion (of which I was complicit, like many) that it could also become the standard way to retrieve most or all information on the planet. There are too many incentives against that.
RickJWagner 8y ago
Social networks are taking the place of RSS? Ugh. RSS allows intelligent selection of what you put in front of yourself every day. I suppose Social media could be used in the same way, but I don't think anybody does it.
burtonator 8y ago
I was one of the inventors of RSS. I was on the RSS 1.0 RSS-DEV Working Group. I'm also the creator of Datastreamer (http://www.datastreamer.io/ http://www.datastreamer.io/) which you could think of as a massive petabyte-scale RSS aggregator. Seeing that I helped invent RSS, and have probably parsed more RSS than anyone (hundreds of petabytes), I'm going to call it and say that RSS is dead. Datastreamer used to index RSS and we've long since deprecated it as a secondary data source. It's really not our primary content source. We prefer to index raw HTML. HTML can do exactly what you want and you don't need RSS thanks to microformats and microdata. Here's the main problem: 1. Publishers don't care about your use case. They WANT you go to back to the site and click their ads. 2. Publishers want to hoard their content and sell it if possible. This is the exact antithesis of RSS content distribution (that the Internet should be open). What's the way forward? 1. HTML microdata parsing RSS but implemented in microdata. Publishers actually WANT their data to be distributed this way as they're hoping their content is distributed over Twitter and Facebook. The only downside here is that full content is often not used. 2. Metadata sharing. SELF metadata sharing where communities of users markup and share their own content. I'm going to be working on some ideas around this in Polar (my project around distributed content sharing). https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ I think you're going to start seeing some of the ideas around the next gen of content syndication in a few months. Right now I'm trying to build a large network of users by building an amazing tool to handle your content. Once the user base is there then I can enable content collaboration where users are sharing content to each other. This will also include some RSS-like features at some point but indexed around microdata.
- panic 8y ago
  Every blog I've tried to follow for years has had an RSS feed. Are microformats really as reliable? Like, picking a blog at random from my feed, I don't see any microdata on the page.
  - burtonator 8y ago
    The biggest challenge with this strategy is discovering which links to index. The microdata is much more data. You can see this metadata when you post to Twitter or Facebook and it shows a preview. We have the internal stats to show that this is MUCH more reliable than RSS but I don't really have it in a format that I can readily share. Discovering the links can be done by just spidering every post on the front page. The biggest challenge is the timestamp. We handle that by just keeping a fingerprint of all the URLs and we only index URLs that have either never been seen before or have timestamps. I honestly with timestamps were required by Facebook and Twitter or at least given special treatment. The special treatment strategy by Google and others has REALLY done a great job at upgrading the quality of the Internet by not breaking it. Basically saying that your site will get some tangible financial benefit if you run X spec. So if you enable IPv6 or HTTPS you get an SEO boost. Companies actually pay attention to this and implement these changes.
chicob 8y ago
I hope RSS keeps being provided for most sites. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I keep track thanks to RSS. Most podcasting platforms behave the same way: they put themselves in between listeners and broadcasters and limit the way people can share the audio, how it is synchronized with some device, and always making sure that our browsing data can me monetized in some way. So podcasters usually have a never-ending list of platforms, which not always overlap, and which I would never subscribe anyway. I find this annoying, and that is why I've always used RSS. For news, it allowed me to skim through the stuff I didn't want to read and also to miss all of the annoying ads. Now, it seems many RSS reader behave the same way: users need a login in order to access a closed environment that monetizes your reading habits. Fortunately, I found QuiteRSS (https://quiterss.org https://quiterss.org), a cross-platform FOSS for RSS with backup, import/export, and adblocking. I like it a lot. I guess the only way it could be improved is by making it fully portable.
- burtonator 8y ago
  Podcasts are amazing. I helped invent that too.. I actually created the mod_link spec for this purpose: http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/modules/link/ http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/modules/link/ interestingly I was attacked for it and people thought it was an anti-RSS feature and that it was "dangerously stupid" ... I didn't expect that reaction but looks like I was right. Podcasts provide for most of the value in RSS right now. Podcasts aren't going anywhere! The main reason podcasting was successful IMO is apple supporting it.
rado 8y ago
I use RSS for news, just need http://cappuccinoapp.com http://cappuccinoapp.com to be stable and to sync via iCloud properly.
forgotAgain 8y ago
RSS did not decline due to technical differences. By the time Google Reader was killed, RSS readers had advanced to the point where wide public usage was possible because the readers dealt with the incompatibility problems outlined in the article. RSS declined because major tech companies convinced large media companies that they had a better future publishing to their walled gardens and not directly to the public. The walled gardens only benefited the garden owners, not independent publishers. Now that that is recognized there is again a chance for independent publishers both big and small.
- lallysingh 8y ago
  RSS declined because nobody wanted to put up content on 3rd party systems that didn't pay them. Large media companies had to actively do work to shut down their RSS feeds, when they could've just done both. They took them down because they weren't making money on keeping them up.
  - aylmao 8y ago
    If the incentives would've been right there's no reason this should've been the case. Large media companies don't make money form being in the Facebook newsfeed, but rather from the traffic redirected from there.
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    > RSS declined because nobody wanted to put up content on 3rd party systems that didn't pay them. Probably 2/3 of the RSS feeds I use come directly from the content producers, not from third party systems.
    - lallysingh 8y ago
      I meant people's RSS readers as the 3rd party, vs the 1st party website hosted by the producer. Not the clearest way to say it, I admit.
      - JohnFen 8y ago
m-p-3 8y ago
The day RSS dies will be a sad one for my email inbox. I don't want to get all those updates by emails, and the RSS reader service I use works perfectly for my need. It's also an easy system to deal with when automating, especially with systems like IFTTT, etc.
altmind 8y ago
i quite happy most websites that i regularily read still provide rss. its a strong word - demise, it just was disabled on some websites that want to wall in their customers.
mapgrep 8y ago
Although it's silly to say RSS is dead given how pervasive the feeds remain and that it's used for podcasting, one of the most vibrant corners of online media, it is interesting to think about why it has fallen out of favor as a way to follow updates and news. For me it just doesn't scale beyond a certain volume of posts. It is great for 10-20 sporadically updated blogs but as you start going beyond that, for example by adding a critical mass of frequent posting writers or professional news sites or aggregators, it becomes stressful to keep up and the signal to noise ratio drops. For all their faults, Twitter and Facebook both do a reasonable job of assisting with moving good stuff to the top of the "river" of news. Personally I've started using tools that sit one level above Twitter and show me things a certain number of my "friends" liked or retweeted over the prior 24 hours or 8 hours or whatever. (Right now that's Nuzzle app, previously it was news.me email newsletter.) I follow nearly 1000 accounts on Twitter, and while this is excessive it is manageable and I see things I'm interested in without much stress. RSS could hypothetically feed into an algorithmic sorting tool but it tends not to be used this way. My theory as to why this is is that, at least in the text news use case, it has a small and opinionated user base and only a subset of that base would want their news sorted for them -- and many RSS users vocally do not want that -- so it never gets built and RSS never gets the chance to grow to a broader audience. Another issue is that there are slightly too many choices. It's not trivial to 1> pick a reader and 2> pick what feeds you want to follow 3> figure out how to follow them. It's not that it's so hard it's just not as easy as say Twitter.
- impostir 8y ago
  Just wanted to say that many rss feeds come with a legal disclaimer that prohibits filtering. It is without teeth, but it could still cause problems for businesses.
bastawhiz 8y ago
I run a podcast hosting service. Every day we push between 20 and 30GB of RSS feeds out into the world. In the same time frame, we push about 150KB of JSONFeed data. RSS is a clunky tool that's difficult to extend. Extensions end up being duplicated by vendors that consume the data in slightly different ways. The ability to embed rich content in a feed is limited and nonstandard. To your average user, the functionality comes off as "this seems broken" instead of "what an amazing ubiquitous standard." If I had a quarter for every support request about why "Podcast App X isn't showing my links" I could cut my prices. RSS is not a good format. On top of that, it has obvious omissions. There is no standard way to do pagination. Podcast feeds need to include _every episode_ with full metadata for the back catalog to be available. For podcasts that publish every day for years, this adds up to megabytes. If you think parse/execution times are bad with JS, imagine the work your phone is doing when it chews on a few meg of XML every half hour for all those shows you're subscribed to that don't publish episodes anymore. RSS is bad and broken. It still works, but it's like IRC (or how IRC used to be): it solves the core needs of many people in the most mediocre way possible and everything else is a hack or just outright doesn't work. I really wish there was enough demand for a better standard.
- xkapastel 8y ago
  Does that amount of RSS data include Atom? If so, what is the ratio, and if not, how much Atom do you serve?
  - bastawhiz 8y ago
    I don't serve Atom, simply because it's not as well supported.
- monksy 8y ago
  JSON won't resolve that issue for podcasts that you've subscribed to that don't publish anymore. That's either a cache issue from a static resource or a service issue that doesn't support the cache response. Also, the issue with the size of the rss feed: It all comes down to how the settings are set. Is it set to full syndication of the article, or is it summaries. Either way, JSON won't solve that issue. JSON isn't going to fix your issue with non-standard attachments to the articles. It's going to make it worse.
JohnFen 8y ago
I use RSS (as a user) every single day. It's one of the core technologies I use. Although I've been hearing that it is dead for years now, it is very much the opposite for me!
- nokya 8y ago
  Same here. To be honest, I was quite surprised to read about the "death" of RSS in Motherboard, I would have hoped they would rather write about how alive it still is despite uncountable attempts by tech and press Goliaths to get rid of it... Being forced to choose to visit each website or to basically surrender to Facebook's or Google's interpretation of "what I should focus my attention to" seems surreal to me. I understand that I'm surrounded by people who enjoy these choices being taken for them, but for me, RSS feeds are still my gateway between the web and my time.
jayalpha 8y ago
RSS is not dead. I could not live without it. Besides the news. 1. I don't like twitter but follow to Twitter accounts. Twitter to RSS: http://twitrss.me/ http://twitrss.me/ 2. A site has no feed? Make one: https://feedity.com/ https://feedity.com/ 3. Looking for a job? Use RSS: https://www.indeed.com/rss?q=telecommute&l=Canoga+Park%2C+CA&radius=100 https://www.indeed.com/rss?q=telecommute&l=Canoga+Park%2C+CA...
parrellel 8y ago
Oh. Another one. It's been a couple months hasn't it. At this point I'm assuming the death of Google Reader has lead to an RSS explosion that's annoying some corporate creature.

154 points by ForHackernews 8y ago

ain't dead

The title is somewhat contracted by the content itself: "...Today, RSS is not dead. But neither is it anywhere near as popular as it once was...." Though I think that more moderate conclusion is debatable as well. I continue to new sites which offer RSS etc., and it seems to be the exception rather than the rule that (relevant) rites lack RSS.

SllX 8y ago
I find the only sites lacking a feed of some RSS-equivalent format are the ones that have commercial interests that are not compatible with RSS or really many other open standards and principles of good web design but might otherwise make good app design, and home made sites that don’t account for the idea that one might want to read a feed instead of visiting the web page, if they even considered that some out there might still use feed readers.

BariumBlue 8y ago

What's a good RSS page / app? On android, Google chrome has a RSS like feed that I rather like, but it feels weird to use - I never intended to have it or use it, and I have no real insight into it.

aaronbrethorst 8y ago
http://www.feedbin.com http://www.feedbin.com
torstenvl 8y ago
I like Reeder on iOS/Mac. Within the app, you can choose a number of different sync mechanisms - I use Inoreader as mine.
- mrmondo 8y ago
  Absolutely - Reeder IMO is a very well designed app and it’s great going from my phone / iPad to my home / work desktops and having the syncing work properly. I use Feedly for my subscriptions, filters and other logic processing.
_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
Newsblur is really nice. Web site, mobile apps, and it's even accessible in Emacs via elfeed-protocol.
acemarke 8y ago
On the web, BazQux Reader ( https://bazqux.com https://bazqux.com ). Excellent successor to Google Reader, and totally worth the $20/yr subscription On Android, News+ , which has a BazQux plugin.
SamWhited 8y ago
I use https://www.inoreader.com; https://www.inoreader.com; it has a pretty nice Android app too.
mmusc 8y ago
I've been using feedly. Free version just works.
Maledictus 8y ago
Host your own FreshRSS.
erikrothoff 8y ago
I have built https://feeder.co https://feeder.co would love HN’s feedback.
- gbear605 8y ago
  Big fan, I use it everyday. That said, I do have one small complaint. It is with a change just made in the last few days: the new iOS app update makes it so if you are on the list of all unread articles and you swipe left to mark an article as read, then the article disappears from the list. I’ve repeatedly accidentally marked an article as read and then had to go searching through all my feeds to find it. Instead, it should have the old behavior where it removes the “NEW” icon but otherwise doesn’t change. The app currently still had this behavior when you actually open the article and view it. Even better would be a complete feed sorted by date that shows both read and unread but has unread at the top. This would be similar to how the iOS mail app works.
  - erikrothoff 8y ago
    Thanks for the feedback. Cool to find a user on Hacker News! That's something I hadn't considered. I personally felt it more satisfying to mark as read when the post flies out. But I agree that it can be inconvenient. Do you think an Undo button would help (not sure if you've tried the Outlook iOS app, but it does it really well)? We have better sorting options in the web and browser extensions, adding them to our iOS and Android apps is prio though. I like the idea with unread at the top!
    - gbear605 8y ago
      An undo button would definitely help, especially if it is able to undo multiple times. Thanks for the fast help! I really appreciate it, and it will make me even more likely to keep on using Feeder in the future
ink_13 8y ago
I use The Old Reader: https://theoldreader.com/ https://theoldreader.com/ It's 95% like Google Reader used to be.
- YouKnowBetter 8y ago
  No idea what made people "not like" you mentioning https://theoldreader.com https://theoldreader.com since that is what I use and came by to say. As to the article's headline: if your site does not offer a working RSS feed, you've lost me as a "subscriber". I have nor the time nor the patience to track a 100 sides manually.
EvanAnderson 8y ago
I'll throw out a plug for ttrss.
- ylmm 8y ago
  +1. After some of the initial pain of setting it up (which was educational for me anyway), it's exactly the sort of lightweight thing I was looking for after Google Reader shuttered.
nicolaslem 8y ago
I made https://feedsubs.com https://feedsubs.com to read feeds from my phone with a minimalistic interface.
rakoo 8y ago
I used to run a bot that sent RSS items to my email, so I could use _any_ UI I wanted to manage those (because rss is just like emails you receive en masse without any reply, so any mail client will work). Bonus: Sync is built-in, no need for some fancy protocol that only works in some applications on some platforms. I don't use it anymore, not because RSS is bad but because I don't need rss
jhund 8y ago
Shameless plug for https://contentgems.com https://contentgems.com. It has RSS reader, Feed filtering, and it treats URLs in your twitter home timeline as a feed, too.

craftyguy 8y ago

This seems to be a popular meme, especially on HN. RSS is not 'demised'. It's still used heavily for podcasts, wordpress (and many other blog sites) expose it, and there are countless mobile and desktop apps for fetching RSS and displaying them. RSS is alive and well, even if Google Reader is no longer a thing. Or is considering that RSS did not replace everything on the internet 'proof' that it is dying?

mario0b1 8y ago
This. In the past year I have cleaned my mess of (social media) accounts and got rid of everything that is not needed and switched over to RSS (with Liferea). It works perfectly fine. No annoying notifications, no unnecessary mails, just new News when I feel like opening my RSS feed. A wonderful thing.
marxama 8y ago
RSS is one of the main ways I consume the web (including HN). Been doing it for years and I'm very happy with it. I don't know anything about how it works, but it seems lightweight in that I can keep using it without any problems even now when I'm in China, going through terrible internet connections which prohibits "normal" web usage (in addition to The Firewall, that is).
unicornporn 8y ago
True dat! For me, RSS is by far (still) the best way to access web content. I've tried some self hosted RSS readers over the years but I've stayed with FreshRSS[1] for the last year. It has been a marvelous experience. Zero trouble, zero administrative burden. Self-hosted bliss. Best of all is the fact that it uses a flat file DB so it can easily be backed up, moved around and migrated. Can not recommend it enough. Also, it's PHP, so works on any cheap shared hosting. That's how I use it. One of the best things about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds. Every site and service that I wish to follow has an RSS feed, except for Twitter. I use RSS-Bridge[2] (self hosted too) to follow users. RSS-Bridge[2] will give you feeds for just about every service you can think of. If you don't find a feed for a site, sometimes you just have to dig a little. You learn at which URIs the most commons CMSes presents their Atom/RSS feeds (hello /feed/). [1] https://freshrss.org/ https://freshrss.org/ [2] https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge

SamWhited 8y ago

I still don't understand how people who don't use RSS/Atom get by day to day… during development of software projects I subscribe to tags on GitHub for dependencies that I may need to update, same thing for stuff I package in the Arch User Repos and need to update promptly after a release, for services that I host I subscribe to lots of services blogs and status pages so that I get news of security updates or outages quickly, etc. Even for non development stuff I can't imagine going to each blog I read individually or just hoping that I see it on a social network; instead they all come to me and I don't have to do any work to read through all the various blogs I like, news sites, etc.

code-is-code 8y ago
I added GreenkeeperBot/renovate to my project so a PR is done whenever a dependency can be updated.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
icebraining 8y ago
Email notifications and newsletters are much more popular than RSS/Atom, as far as I can tell. People already "get" email, and probably have an account, so it's easier to convert non-techies.
- SamWhited 8y ago
  That's fair I suppose; I still use a lot of newsletters for things that don't have RSS feeds. My inbox tends to be more cluttered and harder to organize though (filters vs. just dragging a feed into a folder or adding a label) so I avoid it wherever possible. Still, having things come to me that way isn't the end of the world either.
ovi256 8y ago
For checking dependencies for updates, my package/dependency manager (pipenv) can check for me, and even do an audit for what dependencies need security updates, through the safety tool (https://github.com/pyupio/safety https://github.com/pyupio/safety). This is for an application though, not a distro like what you seem to be doing.

asdf333 8y ago

demise? I use an rss reader every day and consider it one of my most important news sources.

senectus1 8y ago

pfft RSS has just changed to a power user tool. people who have a clue use it extensively.

joecool1029 8y ago

I've not really used RSS and it's certainly never been a critical part of my Desktop/Laptop workflow. The first time it was exposed to me was through Firefox live bookmarks which I thought was pretty cool. Then I believe they removed the feature or just took out the bundled ones. It wasn't until working on blogs that I became aware that RSS was much used. If we had some javascript get injected into the generated rss files (common with wordpress), users would complain the feeds would stop working. I'd get it fixed, but unless someone was asking for a live feed to be syndicated on another website, I just haven't used it personally. I remember some news apps for phones like Pulse that seemed to run on RSS feeds for a bit. But that's about what I assume the majority of the population experiences of RSS. It runs some things like podcasts 'under the hood' but where does a new user get introduced to it? I run entirely off emails, every email that comes in gets an action (usually delete, respond, or file). People in here talking about relying on RSS, what software do you even use it with? (don't give podcast apps please)

gbear605 8y ago
I use a dedicated RSS feeder app to see blog posts from dozens of different blogs that update on frequencies ranging from ten times a day to once a year. It’s also useful for webcomics like xkcd.
- joecool1029 8y ago
  Mind sharing the app used?
  - gbear605 8y ago
    I like https://feeder.co/ https://feeder.co/ personally, although I haven’t done any exhaustive searching.
unicornporn 8y ago
> It runs some things like podcasts 'under the hood' but where does a new user get introduced to it? Nowhere now that even Mozilla has eliminated it from Firefox.

molticrystal 8y ago

If anybody wants to try RSS a great desktop app for Windows,Mac OSX, OS/2, and of course Linux/BSD, I recommend quiterss. The feature that converted me was the ability to have notifications, but adblock is nice as well. I have feeds for when an item appears that I want to purchase in search results at the price I want, I get notification when stories appear on reddit according to my criteria, and when I want to catch a livestream live or just a newly uploaded video, you can use the channel's feed to be notified as Youtube notification is quite often broken. Here is the list of most significant features: https://quiterss.org/en/about https://quiterss.org/en/about I also tried rssowl, thunderbird, and more, but quiterss is one of the few still actively developed. --- Just to give some examples for people who haven't tried it out before, to get the latest JoeRogan podcast for example you can use the following url in your rss reader: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCzQUP1qoWDoEbmsQxvdjxgQ https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCzQUP1q... You can replace channel_id with whoever you want to monitor. Like a blog on blogspot? Then try https://username.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss https://username.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss and get notified for all the latest stories, and on most of them, read them as well without ever leaving your reader. For reddit just add .rss to then end of almost any url, like https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/.rss https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/.rss , many also support .json for the programmer in you. While there are dozens of decent ways to get notified about changes on a project at github, if you just want a quick way to watch things, add ".atom" to the end of urls involving but not limited to commits,tags,and releases, such as https://github.com/HackerNews/API/commits/master.atom https://github.com/HackerNews/API/commits/master.atom and also consider looking at https://bandito.re/ https://bandito.re/ . You can usually check the source code for a page for the words rss/feed/atom if your reader is having trouble and find the url manually. Also try appending /feed or /rss yourself and see what happens. Also try googling, which also still has rss feeds for google news among other places on their site if you look hard enough, it is used internally quite extensively. And of course this place supports it, the feed for here is https://news.ycombinator.com/rss https://news.ycombinator.com/rss , give it a shot.

peterwwillis 8y ago

"But I use RSS every day!" - a Hacker News reader I think this tweet at the end of the article answers that well: "Who is going to tell the normal people that RSS is dead? Wait. Who is going to explain to normal people what RSS was?" The articles aren't claiming the standard is dead, they're claiming that the use by normal users is dead. The RSS standard is still used to make billions of dollars of money (as a backend tech for content licensing & syndication), but users don't touch it. This article from last year has some better examples of why RSS is dead: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/07/rss-is-undead/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/07/rss-is-undead/

pvorb 8y ago
But most people never knew what it is. Why would RSS be any more dead than 10 years ago?
- bryanrasmussen 8y ago
  Because 10 years ago there was quite a bit of hope if not absolute certainty that RSS or some syndication format was going to 'conquer the world'. Now there is a certainty that this will never happen. In our world the certainty of diminishment is equated to death. And really at some point in the future it will diminish enough that Google Chrome will announce a release not supporting RSS in the browser (but you can still get it via plugins!) and then we can have some more RSS is really dead now articles. on edit: assuming Google chrome supports it now which I wouldn't know because I don't use chrome as my primary browser.
  - mcv 8y ago
    Not conquering the world doesn't mean you're dead. I never conquered the world, but I'm very much alive. We need to get rid of this idea that the only way to survive is to dominate. You can survive in a niche. There are still people using IRC, even. New things become popular, but there will always be people who don't go along with the latest fad and either stick with a previous one or jump ahead to the next one. Personally, I've never really used RSS, but I'm seriously thinking of starting, particularly because of the demise of Google+. (Google+ really is dead, or at least dying soon, but that is because Google is actively pulling the plug.) Google+ got me into contact with a number of blogs whose owners posted their blog updates on G+. Now that G+ is dying, I need a new way to keep up to date, and I find myself looking for a new social network that allows me to follow blogs of people who themselves may not be using that network. RSS is the obvious answer here. I believe Hubzilla supports RSS, so that's immediately an interesting candidate to me.

woodman 8y ago

Wow, to base such a lengthy article on a google trend search of "rss"... Queue rekt.webm: https://trends.builtwith.com/feeds/RSS https://trends.builtwith.com/feeds/RSS

MarsAscendant 8y ago
Quite a spike in 2011. What happened that year?
- woodman 8y ago
  The insane spike is for low traffic sites, so I'm guessing a blog platform defaulted RSS.

pvorb 8y ago

It's not dying at all. The death of Google Reader led to a healthier ecosystem with many competitors.

Juliate 8y ago

Wait. Who is going to explain to normal people what HTTP is?

stevewillows 8y ago
I was at a party a few weeks ago explaining Usenet to a crowd of confused faces. When I said, 'its sort of like reddit.. but not reddit', that seemed to satisfy them. Just tonight I had to explain what a .exe file extension is for to another friend. Its easy for those of us who are technically minded to 'just get it' when we use a new system, tool, etc -- and its also incredibly easy to forget how little the general public truly understands (or even cares) about the technology they operate on a daily basis. The day I meet a woman who cares about scraping websites to create RSS feeds is the day I consider marriage again.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > The day I meet a woman who cares about scraping websites to create RSS feeds is the day I consider marriage again. My wife is also the first woman I met who knew what IRC is, even though she's non-technical (apparently they covered it on her journalist studies). One of the many little things that impressed me about her :).
- toyg 8y ago
  We might have to compete for the attentions of such lady. I hope it won’t come to fisticuffs.

edhelas 8y ago

Article reachable using the Motherboard - VICE RSS feed https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/rss https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/rss. Ironic?

hmans 8y ago

I find articles like this obnoxious because 1) they (implicitly or explicitly) claim that RSS was at some point popular (with "normal users") in some way that it is not today, which is wrong. 2) they completely ignore the fact that RSS today is significantly more widespread than it was a decade ago. Yes, Google Reader is gone. Get over it. Flipboard and similar have heaps and heaps of users, and they're all RSS-based.

ivanhoe 8y ago

People use Facebook and Twitter (and Hacker News) as a kind of crowd-sourced RSS, but with the fall of trust in soc. media and the rise of fake news retweets, I wouldn't completely dismiss a big come back of rss in the future.

ccnafr 8y ago

I'm so tired of these headlines. How many of these articles are going to appear every month until people realize they're trash?

campuscodi 8y ago

Remember that time when bots manipulated RSS to push fake news and political agendas? Yeah. I'm so glad Twitter and Facebook replaced RSS. We dodged a bullet there.

lotu 8y ago
Why do you assume RSS is immune to bots? The attacks on the election focused on Twitter and Facebook because they where dominate not because they were uniquely vulnerable.

diminish 8y ago

Wasn't the demise of RSS readers a good example of Embrace and Extinguish strategy by the big G? It paved the way to the bloated, paywalled, app-siloed, dumbified media consumption of today.

tushar-r 8y ago

Don't most podcast players use RSS? Isn't this the age of the podcast? :-)

reshie 8y ago
yes and other things. its just put to the background. there are others but the concept mostly remains the same. rss is nice as a universal tool to follow things forums/podcasts/news.
toyg 8y ago
Like most SGML/XML languages, RSS as a tool for machines is pretty great: server pushes data out, dedicated client (podcast player) retrieves it (often through a directory/aggregator), the user is happy without ever having to know RSS exists. As a document format for chronological, uniform data streams that need to carry human-readable metadata, RSS is just fine. What is unrealistic is the delusion (of which I was complicit, like many) that it could also become the standard way to retrieve most or all information on the planet. There are too many incentives against that.

RickJWagner 8y ago

Social networks are taking the place of RSS? Ugh. RSS allows intelligent selection of what you put in front of yourself every day. I suppose Social media could be used in the same way, but I don't think anybody does it.

burtonator 8y ago

I was one of the inventors of RSS. I was on the RSS 1.0 RSS-DEV Working Group. I'm also the creator of Datastreamer (http://www.datastreamer.io/ http://www.datastreamer.io/) which you could think of as a massive petabyte-scale RSS aggregator. Seeing that I helped invent RSS, and have probably parsed more RSS than anyone (hundreds of petabytes), I'm going to call it and say that RSS is dead. Datastreamer used to index RSS and we've long since deprecated it as a secondary data source. It's really not our primary content source. We prefer to index raw HTML. HTML can do exactly what you want and you don't need RSS thanks to microformats and microdata. Here's the main problem: 1. Publishers don't care about your use case. They WANT you go to back to the site and click their ads. 2. Publishers want to hoard their content and sell it if possible. This is the exact antithesis of RSS content distribution (that the Internet should be open). What's the way forward? 1. HTML microdata parsing RSS but implemented in microdata. Publishers actually WANT their data to be distributed this way as they're hoping their content is distributed over Twitter and Facebook. The only downside here is that full content is often not used. 2. Metadata sharing. SELF metadata sharing where communities of users markup and share their own content. I'm going to be working on some ideas around this in Polar (my project around distributed content sharing). https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ I think you're going to start seeing some of the ideas around the next gen of content syndication in a few months. Right now I'm trying to build a large network of users by building an amazing tool to handle your content. Once the user base is there then I can enable content collaboration where users are sharing content to each other. This will also include some RSS-like features at some point but indexed around microdata.

panic 8y ago
Every blog I've tried to follow for years has had an RSS feed. Are microformats really as reliable? Like, picking a blog at random from my feed, I don't see any microdata on the page.
- burtonator 8y ago
  The biggest challenge with this strategy is discovering which links to index. The microdata is much more data. You can see this metadata when you post to Twitter or Facebook and it shows a preview. We have the internal stats to show that this is MUCH more reliable than RSS but I don't really have it in a format that I can readily share. Discovering the links can be done by just spidering every post on the front page. The biggest challenge is the timestamp. We handle that by just keeping a fingerprint of all the URLs and we only index URLs that have either never been seen before or have timestamps. I honestly with timestamps were required by Facebook and Twitter or at least given special treatment. The special treatment strategy by Google and others has REALLY done a great job at upgrading the quality of the Internet by not breaking it. Basically saying that your site will get some tangible financial benefit if you run X spec. So if you enable IPv6 or HTTPS you get an SEO boost. Companies actually pay attention to this and implement these changes.

chicob 8y ago

I hope RSS keeps being provided for most sites. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I keep track thanks to RSS. Most podcasting platforms behave the same way: they put themselves in between listeners and broadcasters and limit the way people can share the audio, how it is synchronized with some device, and always making sure that our browsing data can me monetized in some way. So podcasters usually have a never-ending list of platforms, which not always overlap, and which I would never subscribe anyway. I find this annoying, and that is why I've always used RSS. For news, it allowed me to skim through the stuff I didn't want to read and also to miss all of the annoying ads. Now, it seems many RSS reader behave the same way: users need a login in order to access a closed environment that monetizes your reading habits. Fortunately, I found QuiteRSS (https://quiterss.org https://quiterss.org), a cross-platform FOSS for RSS with backup, import/export, and adblocking. I like it a lot. I guess the only way it could be improved is by making it fully portable.

burtonator 8y ago
Podcasts are amazing. I helped invent that too.. I actually created the mod_link spec for this purpose: http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/modules/link/ http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/modules/link/ interestingly I was attacked for it and people thought it was an anti-RSS feature and that it was "dangerously stupid" ... I didn't expect that reaction but looks like I was right. Podcasts provide for most of the value in RSS right now. Podcasts aren't going anywhere! The main reason podcasting was successful IMO is apple supporting it.

rado 8y ago

I use RSS for news, just need http://cappuccinoapp.com http://cappuccinoapp.com to be stable and to sync via iCloud properly.

forgotAgain 8y ago

RSS did not decline due to technical differences. By the time Google Reader was killed, RSS readers had advanced to the point where wide public usage was possible because the readers dealt with the incompatibility problems outlined in the article. RSS declined because major tech companies convinced large media companies that they had a better future publishing to their walled gardens and not directly to the public. The walled gardens only benefited the garden owners, not independent publishers. Now that that is recognized there is again a chance for independent publishers both big and small.

lallysingh 8y ago
RSS declined because nobody wanted to put up content on 3rd party systems that didn't pay them. Large media companies had to actively do work to shut down their RSS feeds, when they could've just done both. They took them down because they weren't making money on keeping them up.
- aylmao 8y ago
  If the incentives would've been right there's no reason this should've been the case. Large media companies don't make money form being in the Facebook newsfeed, but rather from the traffic redirected from there.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  > RSS declined because nobody wanted to put up content on 3rd party systems that didn't pay them. Probably 2/3 of the RSS feeds I use come directly from the content producers, not from third party systems.
  - lallysingh 8y ago
    I meant people's RSS readers as the 3rd party, vs the 1st party website hosted by the producer. Not the clearest way to say it, I admit.
    - JohnFen 8y ago

m-p-3 8y ago

The day RSS dies will be a sad one for my email inbox. I don't want to get all those updates by emails, and the RSS reader service I use works perfectly for my need. It's also an easy system to deal with when automating, especially with systems like IFTTT, etc.

altmind 8y ago

i quite happy most websites that i regularily read still provide rss. its a strong word - demise, it just was disabled on some websites that want to wall in their customers.

mapgrep 8y ago

Although it's silly to say RSS is dead given how pervasive the feeds remain and that it's used for podcasting, one of the most vibrant corners of online media, it is interesting to think about why it has fallen out of favor as a way to follow updates and news. For me it just doesn't scale beyond a certain volume of posts. It is great for 10-20 sporadically updated blogs but as you start going beyond that, for example by adding a critical mass of frequent posting writers or professional news sites or aggregators, it becomes stressful to keep up and the signal to noise ratio drops. For all their faults, Twitter and Facebook both do a reasonable job of assisting with moving good stuff to the top of the "river" of news. Personally I've started using tools that sit one level above Twitter and show me things a certain number of my "friends" liked or retweeted over the prior 24 hours or 8 hours or whatever. (Right now that's Nuzzle app, previously it was news.me email newsletter.) I follow nearly 1000 accounts on Twitter, and while this is excessive it is manageable and I see things I'm interested in without much stress. RSS could hypothetically feed into an algorithmic sorting tool but it tends not to be used this way. My theory as to why this is is that, at least in the text news use case, it has a small and opinionated user base and only a subset of that base would want their news sorted for them -- and many RSS users vocally do not want that -- so it never gets built and RSS never gets the chance to grow to a broader audience. Another issue is that there are slightly too many choices. It's not trivial to 1> pick a reader and 2> pick what feeds you want to follow 3> figure out how to follow them. It's not that it's so hard it's just not as easy as say Twitter.

impostir 8y ago
Just wanted to say that many rss feeds come with a legal disclaimer that prohibits filtering. It is without teeth, but it could still cause problems for businesses.

bastawhiz 8y ago

I run a podcast hosting service. Every day we push between 20 and 30GB of RSS feeds out into the world. In the same time frame, we push about 150KB of JSONFeed data. RSS is a clunky tool that's difficult to extend. Extensions end up being duplicated by vendors that consume the data in slightly different ways. The ability to embed rich content in a feed is limited and nonstandard. To your average user, the functionality comes off as "this seems broken" instead of "what an amazing ubiquitous standard." If I had a quarter for every support request about why "Podcast App X isn't showing my links" I could cut my prices. RSS is not a good format. On top of that, it has obvious omissions. There is no standard way to do pagination. Podcast feeds need to include _every episode_ with full metadata for the back catalog to be available. For podcasts that publish every day for years, this adds up to megabytes. If you think parse/execution times are bad with JS, imagine the work your phone is doing when it chews on a few meg of XML every half hour for all those shows you're subscribed to that don't publish episodes anymore. RSS is bad and broken. It still works, but it's like IRC (or how IRC used to be): it solves the core needs of many people in the most mediocre way possible and everything else is a hack or just outright doesn't work. I really wish there was enough demand for a better standard.

xkapastel 8y ago
Does that amount of RSS data include Atom? If so, what is the ratio, and if not, how much Atom do you serve?
- bastawhiz 8y ago
  I don't serve Atom, simply because it's not as well supported.
monksy 8y ago
JSON won't resolve that issue for podcasts that you've subscribed to that don't publish anymore. That's either a cache issue from a static resource or a service issue that doesn't support the cache response. Also, the issue with the size of the rss feed: It all comes down to how the settings are set. Is it set to full syndication of the article, or is it summaries. Either way, JSON won't solve that issue. JSON isn't going to fix your issue with non-standard attachments to the articles. It's going to make it worse.

JohnFen 8y ago

I use RSS (as a user) every single day. It's one of the core technologies I use. Although I've been hearing that it is dead for years now, it is very much the opposite for me!

nokya 8y ago
Same here. To be honest, I was quite surprised to read about the "death" of RSS in Motherboard, I would have hoped they would rather write about how alive it still is despite uncountable attempts by tech and press Goliaths to get rid of it... Being forced to choose to visit each website or to basically surrender to Facebook's or Google's interpretation of "what I should focus my attention to" seems surreal to me. I understand that I'm surrounded by people who enjoy these choices being taken for them, but for me, RSS feeds are still my gateway between the web and my time.

jayalpha 8y ago

RSS is not dead. I could not live without it. Besides the news. 1. I don't like twitter but follow to Twitter accounts. Twitter to RSS: http://twitrss.me/ http://twitrss.me/ 2. A site has no feed? Make one: https://feedity.com/ https://feedity.com/ 3. Looking for a job? Use RSS: https://www.indeed.com/rss?q=telecommute&l=Canoga+Park%2C+CA&radius=100 https://www.indeed.com/rss?q=telecommute&l=Canoga+Park%2C+CA...

parrellel 8y ago

Oh. Another one. It's been a couple months hasn't it. At this point I'm assuming the death of Google Reader has lead to an RSS explosion that's annoying some corporate creature.