12 ms·

RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried

278 points by sant0sk1 16y ago

geoffw8 16y ago
RSS is the pipe, its not a solution. Your average joe doesn't "know" what TCP/IP is and frankly its the same for RSS. Something needs to sit at either end and actually make use of the RSS "pipe".
lwhi 16y ago
RSS is not dying! One of the traditional applications for RSS (a browser-based RSS feed-reader) is becoming obsoleted because most browsers aren't particularly good at managing feeds. I can understand why the benefits of RSS aren't more widely understood by the general public; the technology makes use of an abbreviation (an abbreviation that isn't actually much more comprehensible when its spelt out). RSS is a service, used by applications to make content portable. It's not a final solution, it's a tool that can be integrated into a number of different applications. It's quite likely that many of the applications it could be used for haven't been created yet. A slightly ridiculous article.
peterbotond 16y ago
many users use webkit and write a program that evaluates, stores the content effectively building a personal rss. moreover.com has many precompiled rss feeds for various subjects.
tlianza 16y ago
Curious why none of the comments, nor the original article, mentions Internet Explorer. They've continued to add new features in this area ever since IE7. The icon is hidden now in IE9 (as are most of the icons... less browser chrome is fashionable) but I believe they still consider this a first-class feature. They are still the world's most popular browser... and presumably their users are less technical, so presumably it's usage is less than what Mozilla reports, but it remains.
- Groxx 16y ago
  >They are still the world's most popular browser Because of their history. Because users aren't technical. Because IE is bundled with Windows. And look how quickly they've been falling in use. Methinks they won't be the most popular for much longer, which is an incredible mark against their design decisions because of how fast and how far they've fallen from such complete domination.
  - tlianza 16y ago
    The story is about RSS dying, and the author is upset that Mozilla is removing RSS features and Chrome never had any. Are you also arguing that IE is failing because they still have those features (possibly a bad design decision)? In which case, what is it we're complaining about? Browsers that have RSS readers are bad and browsers that don't have RSS readers are bad?
    - Groxx 16y ago
      Not at all. I'm arguing that taking your design decisions from IE based on IE's popularity is illogical when looked at in context.
k33n 16y ago
> Mozilla outright refuse to listen (33 bloody votes!) Wow, 33 votes. They're really ignoring the masses on that one.
- bzbarsky 16y ago
  For a bug in Mozilla's Bugzilla installation, that's high. Of course all the high-vote bugs are special-interest-advocacy stuff like "bring back MNG support" and "bring back gopher support" and "bring back the RSS button"... So high vote count is actually a reliable indicator that the bug should be wontfixed, more often than not.
emef 16y ago
If there was really enough demand for RSS, it wouldn't die.
- kroc 16y ago
  How can there be demand if nobody is making it easy to use?
  - emef 16y ago
    It seems like the incentive is missing. Browser developers have to prioritize what users use and what they know how to use. The author made the point that very few people even know what RSS is, and I think it's the content deliverers' responsibility to make users aware of that feature; there's only so much a browser can do to help with that.
- codeup 16y ago
  It wouldn't die if enough people were convinced like the author that it shouldn't die.
u48998 16y ago
If Mozilla is getting rid of it and if Chrome doesn't have it, than that's just proof enough that big companies are conspiring against RSS. My fingers crossed for the Adblocker.
macco 16y ago
RSS is dying only if Bloggers don't support it anymore. But I can't see that.
ryanwaggoner 16y ago
The replacement for RSS isn't Facebook and Twitter...it's email. People don't understand RSS but they understand: "Enter your email address to subscribe to updates." Hence the reason that CPM rates for email are so much higher...
Groxx 16y ago
>IF RSS DIES, WE LOSE THE ABILITY TO READ IN PRIVATE Based on what causal chain? At best, it's an incredible stretch of a slippery slope fallacy.
- codeup 16y ago
  Disagree. The author clearly refers to corporations like Facebook and Twitter tracking your reading behavior.
  - Groxx 16y ago
    So run NoScript. Run in private mode. Block their cookies. Block their address in your hosts file. You can use wget, curl, or any other cookieless downloading tools, none of which will expose you reading The Times to Facebook. RSS doesn't even prevent against this; it can be behind a login, it can require cookies or not serve up info, and it can send info to Facebook denoting you viewed article X. All of which is determined by the server it's running on, not the format of data it serves up. Browsers are unnecessary for RSS or tracking, and it's a very poor match for browsing behaviors anyway.
    - codeup 16y ago
      Why should I have to do all that if RSS already exists? There's no reason to accept letting this working technology die. I agree that browsers are unnecessary for RSS though.
      - Groxx 16y ago
        Because if you're that worried about Facebook tracking your browsing habits, accessing information via RSS will only prevent some tracking. The Like button is damn near everywhere, not just on news sites. The only way to prevent it is to prevent your browsing tools from communicating with Facebook at all, and hope the servers you're accessing aren't doing it behind the scenes. And/or anonymize your connection (TOR), so even that doesn't give them anything. The point is that paranoia (valid or not) is not a reason to keep a technology alive when that technology does not solve the problem, especially when solutions do exist. If you want a solution, use a solution, not a crippled, bundled-in-your-browser partial solution that only works under certain circumstances / assumptions.
kinnth0 16y ago
Can't we just use Google reader and be done with it?
shaver 16y ago
What would an RSS reader good enough for Kroc's grandmother and 419,999,999 other Firefox users look like? I would be genuinely interested in his designs for one. Of the many different RSS reader add-ons I've tried for Firefox, for example, there haven't been any that made me say "we've gotta put this in Firefox, let's delay $otherwork instead". If we had an energetic contributor like Kroc, though, it's quite possible that we could end up in a great place. I'm not trying to say "patches talk, chump", though of course they do speak quite compellingly. I'm trying to indicate that via open projects like Mozilla technical people can have agency beyond voting in bugzilla (!) or a letter-writing campaign. It'll be interesting to test Kroc's thesis, though: if he's right that RSS will be harmed a lot by Firefox removing the RSS icon, then hits to the RSS stream from Firefox UAs should change trend-line between 3.6.x and 4. I look forward to such a follow-up, it would be interesting data!
- dlsspy 16y ago
  I think it'd look like it looks for many of us. I go to a web site and see a little orange button that I can click and it will add this web site flipbook. Yay, now I can read the web site like a magazine with consistent and readable formatting and not have to remember what that site was I wanted to go back and look at the next time they posted something.
bl4k 16y ago
Users shouldn't need to know what RSS is to use it just as they don't need to know what HTTP is to read a website or what SMTP is to send email. The interface to using RSS has always been flawed, that is where the problem is.
stan_d 16y ago
I'd be interested to know the number of people using Google Reader as their primary tool to read stuff from the web. I'm sure the numbers would skew heavily towards the tech/geek crowd. But I have no idea how popular it is.
GBKS 16y ago
From the user flow, RSS doesn't make much sense. Clicking an RSS button shows you the same thing you just looked at, except without the site design and only partial content (Safari). Currently, in Chrome, I just see a dense block of text. RSS is an amazing tool, but maybe we just haven't found the right UI for it yet. Exposing it in the browser doesn't work very well and treating RSS as an Inbox (like Google Reader) where every item needs to be marked as read is too overwhelming. Personally, I think a social approach to RSS that puts content and personal preferences at the fore-front would solve a lot of this.
- sharednothing 16y ago
  "RSS is an amazing tool, but maybe we just haven't found the right UI for it yet. Exposing it in the browser doesn't work very well and treating RSS as an Inbox (like Google Reader) where every item needs to be marked as read is too overwhelming." I think we're looking at half a 'system' here. Userland software also putout a publishing system called "Radio" to go along with the "Syndication" mechanism. So I think the community solution here is to finish that loop and start thinking of forward layer 'radios' that provide 'channels' that filter/aggregate RSS feeds.
zandorg 16y ago
I think Dave Winer, basically inventor of RSS, would disagree.
- markg 16y ago
  Dave Winer did not invent RSS. You might want to know your history before spouting such nonsense.
bretpiatt 16y ago
It is pretty clear why Google doesn't like RSS, it stops you from browsing the web and that is how they get paid. As a user though I also don't like it anymore and I'll share why... This isn't 1970 anymore where I want to read "What's New" from a small list of new sources. I prefer to go each day to a list of curated aggregators like HN or what the people I follow on Twitter or saying. This is vastly superior to RSS and this is why at least one technical user no longer uses it.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- aaronkaplan 16y ago
  I prefer to go each day to a list of curated aggregators like HN or what the people I follow on Twitter or saying But aggregators can publish RSS streams too. How is following someone on Twitter different from subscribing to his RSS feed? I would agree that a site like HN isn't very attractive to read via RSS. When the ranking is dynamically determined by readers' interest, you lose something by freezing the list in the form of an RSS stream. But for a curated site like Slashdot, what difference does it make if the link stream comes in the form of RSS or as tweets? Incidentally, I wouldn't call HN a curated site. Slashdot has editors/curators; HN doesn't.
- stanleydrew 16y ago
  "It is pretty clear why Google doesn't like RSS, it stops you from browsing the web and that is how they get paid." But they built and are actively maintaining Google reader. I don't think Google dislikes RSS, rather they are hesitant to build a browser feature for something that should really be a separate application.
  - TomOfTTB 16y ago
    They also employ 2 of the 3 creators of PubSubHubBub a technology specifically created to enhance feed syndication. It's also a project that was developed on company time (albeit 20% time) and is hosted on their GoogleCode website. AND Google Alerts was one of the first (if not THE first) to implement the technology.
pamelafox 16y ago
RSS readers may be dying (I admit that I once was a Google Reader fanatic and now only log in time to time), but RSS/ATOM as a format for communicating between websites is still pretty decent. I often setup an ATOM feed for the data on whatever webapp I'm building, and usually end up using that feed to integrate with other webapps. (And as a bonus, I can hand it out to techie users). I don't know, do you think that RSS readers dying will mean websites will stop producing RSS feeds? The output seems to be built in to many systems these days already.
bendauphinee 16y ago
RSS is not dying. It's just not based in the browser, and I'm fine with that. I use an RSS aggregation program, and if I really wanted to, there is open source software available to build and host my own RSS portal.
petervandijck 16y ago
RSS isn't dying, it's become so pervasive that it's now invisible infrastructure.
smcl 16y ago
"It gives less of a shite than a French man smoking a cigarette in public" Um...what?
- stanleydrew 16y ago
  Really HN? We're upvoting this? No offense to the commenter, but we can do better.
  - mechanical_fish 16y ago
    I don't think so, actually. I'd be hard put to make that comment's point any more elegantly. In person, the right response to the original sentence would be a polite cough, followed by a brief but significant silence, followed by a slight but detectable face-saving change of subject. We can't do those things on the web, but in this case "um... what?" is an artful alternative.
    - stanleydrew 16y ago
      I question the comment's usefulness to this discussion, not the elegance with which it was made (although I think I disagree on that as well). The comment, to me, is a distraction. Not purposeful I'm sure, but it's had that effect. The fact that the community would vote it up to the point where it might be the first comment someone reads when seeing this thread is disappointing.
      - smcl 16y ago
        > The comment, to me, is a distraction Perhaps a little reflection is in order, you were originally unhappy that the comment I made might have distracted from, or derailed, any possible discussion. Then, rather than turning the other cheek, you opted to kick off a discussion which has ironically created a genuine distraction. update: This reply was a little bit cheeky and I subsequently sent stanleydrew an email to apologise.
        16y ago
zoul 16y ago
RSS is dying because browser vendors do not want to implement or maintain integrated RSS readers? That does not sound very convincing.
- kroc 16y ago
  RSS aggregators are used by the elite few. When websites start deciding to use Twitter and Facebook instead of RSS because it’s faster and gives them better features, and regular users understand it better, then there will be complaints.
gurraman 16y ago
I have -- without giving it much thought -- stopped using RSS. Many friends have done the same. Now browsers seem to be dropping support. Maybe this is proof that RSS/Atom wasn't the panacea we thought it was. Maybe it is actually time for RSS to die?
ghurlman 16y ago
It's hard to take the author's concern seriously, when I can't even find the RSS link on his/her page.
- kroc 16y ago
  because the browser is supposed to provide the button. Why do you think I’m worried? I don’t want to have to clutter my site with a button to an XML feed that nobody understands. I want the browser auto-discovery to do the right thing and present the right interface to make RSS worthwhile. Turning the key in a car shouldn’t present you a diagram on how to connect the battery. Browsers shouldn’t sit there dumbfounded when presented a piece of RSS.
  - stanleydrew 16y ago
    Your analogy doesn't work for me. A car is built to run when you turn it on. That is basic functionality. The reverse analogy to a browser would be "making an HTTP request shouldn't present you a diagram on how to do DNS resolution," and the browser doesn't.
  - DougBTX 16y ago
    Why do you think I’m worried? Because auto-discovery isn't working on his site either? (At least in Safari)
    - ugh 16y ago
      It is working. Safari changed the way it displays RSS feeds. You have to click and hold on the “Reader” button to display any RSS feeds.
  - mithaler 16y ago
    If I copy the URL of your site/blog into my RSS reader's Add Subscription dialog, I don't know of any RSS readers that wouldn't scrape your site for the link tags I assume you put in and discover the feed for me.
- codeup 16y ago
jonnii 16y ago
I'm glad my browser doesn't support RSS natively when other apps offer a far greater experience. Have you tried the safari rss reader? It's awful. As a chrome user I'm happy that it does one thing well and that's displaying web pages. Now I'm free to use any online RSS reader I want and be able to access my RSS feeds from anywhere.
antidaily 16y ago
Most of what I need to read shows up on HN or Reddit or Twitter. I know that sounds incredibly lazy, but I don't have time to mark 233 Lifehacker posts as read every week.
corin_ 16y ago
I can't imagine that browser button pursuading anyone who doesn't already understand and appreciate RSS to start using it. Anyone tech-savvy enough to see it, and start googling to find out how to use it properly has certainly already heard of RSS. And on the other side, anyone who does use RSS, and anyone in the future who learns to use it, won't be put off using it by the loss of that button. The worse statement in this article (other than the french man smoking) is: Mozilla’s mistake here is to associate low usage with user dis-interest. Ummm... they're correct. He claims that, just because only 3-7% use it, it must be kept in because "what regular user wouldn’t want this feature!?" Clearly the answer to that question is "93-97% of regular users". Touché?
- gergles 16y ago
  The argument is that more people would use the feature if the UI were better, and that hiding the feature because "nobody uses it (because it sucks)" is not the same statement as "nobody uses it (because nobody wants it)".
- ianl 16y ago
  3%-7% that use the button are most likely power users. It would be unwise to disenfranchise them as they are the ones who normally advocate your software to their friends (regular users).
  - corin_ 16y ago
    Sure, you could make an argument that 3%-7% is enough people to justify keeping the feature. Or you could make the argument that while it isn't enough, because they are the online non-shopping version of Alpha Consumers, it's worth keeping it to help get the browser promoted. However you cannot argue that it has to be kept because every regular user wants this feature - statistics don't lie, clearly the majority of users don't care.
  - lftl 16y ago
    In chrome at least you can install a plugin to add an RSS icon to the URL bar. Easy enough for power users.
stanleydrew 16y ago
RSS isn't dying because browsers are deciding not to build native readers into their UIs. It's dying because it's not terribly easy to understand for most users. The article readily points this out. And even for technical users like me, it isn't solving the main problem I have which is discovering new and interesting content. Sure, once I've found some new source of content it's nice to put its RSS feed into a reader. But really, bookmarking is pretty good too. Yes there are clear benefits to RSS over naked bookmarks, but the discoverability problem is still paramount. Anyway this is kind of inconsequential to the point of whether native RSS functionality should be included in a browser. Mozilla is right to kill this "feature." RSS is an application-level protocol on top of HTTP, itself an application-level protocol. Browsers are built to perform HTTP requests. In my opinion they shouldn't do much else. A feature that displays and helps you manage RSS content falls into the category of bloat.
- sudont 16y ago
  > Sure, once I've found some new source of content it's nice to put its RSS feed into a reader This is why most linkblogs are now twitter feeds. Even Andy Baio’s is still a subset of what he twitters. My problem in RSS feeds is importance, some sort of metric of popularity would be good. A lot of times I’ll remove a feed for curatorial purposes to have that site drop some major project that goes viral, and I then find out several weeks later. The entire concept of RSS is somewhat flawed for what happens in the real world. It would be a lot better to create some XML encapsulation of what the front page of the NYT does in terms of curatorial importance.
  - macrael 16y ago
    I know the rss reader fever (by Shaun Inman) tries to do something like this.
    - xenomachina 16y ago
      As does Google Reader's "Sort by magic" (under "View settings").
  - 16y ago
corywilkerson 16y ago
This. "Every website should not look like a NASCAR advert for every sharing service in existence."
- thwarted 16y ago
  That's one reason I've always thought bookmarklets were better for sharing, not the least of which is because you don't need to wait/hope the website operator adds support for the sharing site you are using.
hsmyers 16y ago
I only indirectly depend on browser based RSS feeds as I use Google Reader. Which does precisely what I want it to and is available without regard to browser.
Lagged2Death 16y ago
The implementation of RSS in Firefox was always an "ultra-lite" version that I doubt will be missed by any serious RSS enthusiasts. A full-featured RSS reader feels a lot like a mailing list, so I think it's appropriate to keep RSS in Thunderbird rather than Firefox. In some respects, a web-app RSS reader (like Bloglines or Google Reader) is better. You can access your feeds from any computer, the read/unread status is kept synchronized between PCs, and the centralized web-app arrangement makes more efficient use of network resources. Better to have Google Reader poll a site every 30 minutes than to have 10,000 Firefox installs each polling it every few hours. The only browsers I know of that ever had good in-browser RSS readers were Opera and Seamonkey. But even in those cases, RSS was included as part of the mail client, not shoehorned into the browsing paradigm.
- rhymeswithcycle 16y ago
  I've always used the browser RSS button precisely in order to add feeds to Google Reader -- I feel like that's the button's main use case. It's an immediate, standard way to see whether a page offers a feed, and to quickly save the feed in your reader. I've found it incredibly useful.
  - Lagged2Death 16y ago
    It's been a while since I used Firefox's RSS button. I see it offers more options than I remember (like subscribing with a web-based reader). And it looks like the plan is to eliminate any standard in-browser indication of the presence of an RSS feed, something I didn't really catch from the blog post's talk about a "button on the toolbar." That does seem pretty inconvenient. Many of the posts at bugzilla argue that the most important feature of the button is the fact that it indicates, in a standard way, that feeds were detected. And I agree. On the other hand, since it's Firefox, there will probably be several feed-finder extensions available before 4.0 is final.
- nakkiel 16y ago
  Agreed. I once wrote a Python script that would parse RSS feeds and write emails in a maildir (or whatever is supported by Python); one was then able to read news from an MUA which was comfortable (Mutt by then). I lost that script when I did a 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda' before quitting my last job and realizing 2 minutes later that I forgot to backup many useful scripts I wrote over the course of my year and half in that NGO. Being a smoking Frenchman, I'm tempted to be gratuitously insulting to the author but there's one interesting problem that could come from RSS' disappearance from browsers: the lack of visibility may very well "destroy" the format in the long term. Also, as the web is increasingly publicized, the incentive to remove a format that generates traffic but may hardly generate revenue might be high.
doorty 16y ago
I frankly never got into RSS until I started using RockMelt about a month ago. Now I use it all the time to tell me when there are new Hacker News post, etc. But unfortunately the only clickable link for the Hacker News RSS takes me to the story, which is often an external link. If I want to see the "discuss" of the story I have to manually go the website and find the post and click the discuss link. Perhaps RSS needs a more robust protocol that wouldn't require others to make their own API. Then I think browsers like Rock Melt might bring this new kind of RSS to the masses.
- phirephly 16y ago
  Google Reader displays a comment link, which I always click and then click through to the article if the link is still alive from there. That's a problem with a bad RSS reader, not RSS, or HN, who would actually be at fault here.
- gnosis 16y ago
  The reader I use, newsbeuter, always shows two links: the article link, and the discussions link. http://www.newsbeuter.org http://www.newsbeuter.org You might also be interested in trying these alternate HN feeds: http://andrewtrusty.appspot.com/readability/feed?url=http://news.ycombinator.com/rss http://feeds.feedburner.com/HackerNewsFullFeed http://feeds.feedburner.com/HackerNewsFullFeed
yycom 16y ago
Why should this particular <link> incantation receive special treatment over others?
- nakkiel 16y ago
  How are other <link> elements not specially treated? <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://ycombinator.com/news.css"> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/favicon.ico"> Also, this will make a good reading: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#h-12.3 http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#h-12.3 "Although LINK has no content, it conveys relationship information that may be rendered by user agents in a variety of ways (e.g., a tool-bar with a drop-down menu of links)."
  - kroc 16y ago
    Well put; what I believe in is that user agents should do their absolute best to make the most sense of what information is available to it in the context of the UI paradigm of the user agent. i.e. there is not enough screen space on phones for every website to fit an RSS icon; the browser should do the best thing that befits its UI and help minimise the efforts of the user to get the information they want. RSS can massively help with that. Imagine for example that on the Chrome home page, where sites you visit often appear, Chrome also was following the RSS of these sites in the background, and listing new news items for those sites on the home page, all without you having to do anything. There is infinite possibility here for browser vendors to make browsing quicker, easier and more intelligent and RSS is a key part of that. The browser vendors are not interested in exploring this avenue and as such everybody is stuck doing the same stupid routine every single day. This is dumb! Our computers should be smarter than this!
    - nakkiel 16y ago
      Imagine for example that on the Chrome home page, where sites you visit often appear, Chrome also was following the RSS of these sites in the background, and listing new news items for those sites on the home page, all without you having to do anything. That's a hell of a good idea actually. Having a count of items that popped on a website since your last visit would be a really useful information.
angrycoder 16y ago
I have used RSS for years now. I check google reader about as often as I check hacker news. I start my morning off with a cup of coffee while I read my feeds using Reeder on the iphone or ipad. Not once have I used any of the RSS features of a browser. I really don't see the point. I guess google doesn't either.
- thirdsun 16y ago
  i couldn't agree more. Breakfast, Coffee and Reeder is my morning routine. And a browser's RSS features are indeed too limited - third-party web- and mobile apps are much more sophisticated when it comes to RSS. What I'm more worried about is the trend to only show an excerpt or introduction of an increasing number of articles. Given the fact that most of those sites rely on ads, it's fair to do that though.
  - DrJokepu 16y ago
    Excerpts only in RSS annoy the hell out of me and here's why: I usually read my RSS feed in Reeder on my iPhone during my morning commute. There's still no mobile reception on the London Underground (I'll resist the temptation for now and save that rant for another time) meaning that all I can read is what have been cached by Reeder before I left home. Which means that I'm unable to read posts that only have excerpts in RSS. They should figure out some other way to monetize their RSS feeds; I particularly like Daring Fireball's approach of having sponsored RSS-only posts every now and then (that are actually interesting to read).
    - jonknee 16y ago
      Full text RSS makes it really easy for your content to show up on spam blogs, which is why I think it's not used all the time.
    - dools 16y ago
      You might be interested this in this article: http://www.steverubel.com/instapaper-20-turns-every-rss-feed-full-text http://www.steverubel.com/instapaper-20-turns-every-rss-feed...
TomOfTTB 16y ago
RSS is not dying. There are very few individual users of it but there are literally millions of web sites that use it. Almost everyone on the Internet uses a portal site of some kind and the only way to be included on one of those sites is RSS/Atom feeds. So as long as people want to use RSS for a personal reader it will be there to do it. And there will always be RSS readers because every programming environment I can think of has a pre-built library for feed reading meaning a programmer could whip a reader up in under an hour. As far as the button disappearing from browsers that just makes UI sense. Chrome Browser taught the rest of the industry that most people hate clutter in their browser. So buttons that 93% of the users don't use are being taken out. But they can be added back with a simple browser extension/plug-in/whatever. So even here the people who want to use an RSS reader aren't losing anything (and even without an extension/plug-in/whatever any user savvy enough to be using a reader will know how to cut and paste a url)
gregory80 16y ago
just b/c rss is dying, thank god too, doesn't mean syndication is dying. already ideas like pubsubhubbub have provided realtime syndication in a more compact format. The web is just moving to realtime and ingesting a big long text file and determining deltas sucked. For that matter, XML as a data transport vehicle should end in favor of more compact and type friendly solutions like JSON. Don't be so alarmist that a crappy tech is being phased out. Now, where's my Tandy 1000.
axod 16y ago
RSS never really caught on beyond a geek crowd. I've never used it.
- dlsspy 16y ago
  I had a lot of TiVo conversations like this ten or eleven years ago. Lots of people who never used the technology would tell me why it didn't make sense to them.
  - axod 16y ago
    Is TiVo still big in the US? (It doesn't exist in the UK). We have various hard disk based recorders, and sky plus etc
    - dlsspy 16y ago
      TiVo itself isn't huge, but pretty much everyone has a DVR these days. I just use that as an example because 10-11 years ago nobody knew what it was, but they knew they didn't need it... until they tried it.
      - axod 16y ago
        But RSS is like 10-15 years old. How long until it takes off?
draebek 16y ago
Lack of a browser button doesn't put me off using RSS, as many have pointed out. There are browser extensions and GreaseMonkey scripts for me to add feeds to Google Reader. I'd be more concerned that RSS is dying because many content providers--from big media to bloggers--seem to prefer to only show me a short excerpt, or even a title in their RSS feeds. I don't want to leave Google Reader to read your articles! When I have to open every single RSS item's link (in a new tab) from Reader, that either discourages me from visiting your site... or discourages me from using RSS, as it adds little to no value, and indeed just introduces frustration. The other reason I avoid RSS is for sites like HN and Reddit, where the order of links, their scores, and their ages are important. Maybe RSS should be updatable (which may be what PubSubHubbub is designed for?).
patio11 16y ago
RSS saves me from having to load up 100 different sites several times a day just to check what’s ‘new’. Everything wrong with RSS in a nutshell: this is a problem real people don't have.
- frou_dh 16y ago
  Well hopefully real people might one day branch out from the Yahoo! homepage and make it a problem.
- HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago
  Ha! Summed up exactly what I was thinking. Difficulty reading "100 sites several times a day" isn't a technology problem; it's a focus problem.
  - xenomachina 16y ago
    Feed readers and sites like Hacker News are two solutions to the same problem: content aggregation. Is it dumb for Hacker News to collect stories from hundreds of different sites? If no, then why is it dumb for a feed reader to do the same? If yes, then why are you here?
  - derefr 16y ago
    I am subscribed to around 400 niche blogs, for various topics (game design, linguistics, sci-fi writing, etc.)—but most of them update very rarely (once every few months.) This means that, on average, I'll see 13 new articles on a given day—but I would have had to check all 400 sites to find those 13. The alternative is to only check them once at the same average rate they update at—but that means that I'll get a big wodge of material, go through it all the first time I have a few hours free, and then get nothing for months.
- erikpukinskis 16y ago
  I fully appreciate the sentiment, I hate when people build stuff people don't need. But I want to dig a little at this. I think the fact that most people only have access to CNN or Time or Fox News or Cosmopolitan or Maxim or whatever... that there is not an easy way for people to get news aggregated from 100's of their peers and thought leaders in their affinity groups.... I think that IS a problem people have. It may not be a problem they are aware of, but I think the social cost of consolidated media is very high. I think RSS, and technologies like it (Twitter, Facebook) are an important part of the solution to that problem. RSS is obviously not very user friendly, and I'm not sure if it will have a place at the table 10 years from now. But the problem it solves (a standard interchange format for syndication) is absolutely real, and it's not going away.
mmphosis 16y ago
Okay, I haven't really used RSS before. I'm diving in. In Safari Version 5.0.3 (6533.19.4), I view all of the RSS Feeds by choosing the following (buried) menu item: Bookmarks > Bookmarks Bar > View All RSS Articles I can't find a "View All RSS Articles" button. By default, I hide the "Bookmarks Bar" toolbar (because I want as much vertical screen real estate as I can get.) The "View All RSS Articles" item does not appear in the "Bookmarks Bar" toolbar when I make this toolbar visible. I am looking into the NetNewsWire app for Mac. http://netnewswireapp.com/mac/ http://netnewswireapp.com/mac/ No RSS feed for Wikipedia portal:Current events? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events Hacker News RSS is broken? http://news.ycombinator.com/rss http://news.ycombinator.com/rss
- jschuur 16y ago
  Try this improved full text HN feed: http://preona.net/2010/12/hackernews-full-feed-for-your-reading-pleasure/ http://preona.net/2010/12/hackernews-full-feed-for-your-read...
- mmphosis 16y ago
  Wow! Hacker News RSS seems to be working now.
EGreg 16y ago
This is ridiculous. First of all what about the ATOM format? I don't think it's dying. Anyway, why not simply have an RSS plugin / extension as some have suggested? You can do this in all the browsers.
tel 16y ago
Recently Flipboard added a Google Reader section. I've started using this and never turned back. It solves perfectly pretty much every problem with RSS via attractive presentation, quick access to full content, social connectivity, and getting rid of the "inbox feel". Like a few others here, I look at RSS in the morning. As it turns out, what I really wanted was a sort of newspaper/magazine format. Flipboard delivers that perfectly.
bsg75 16y ago
RSS is a tool for technologists. The average user will not find it attractive enough, so RSS will always be used by the minority. This does not necessarily make it a dying technology however.
Kilimanjaro 16y ago
Change the RSS button for a 'Follow' button.
agavin 16y ago
RSS brings me 90% of my outside information. And by doing it with programs like Reeder that use Google Reader to sync the feeds and what's been read allow me to do it on 3 computers, an iphone, and an ipad without ever seeing the same junk twice But, it does require some computer savvy to setup and operate. You need programs, you need to sometimes figure out your feed URL's. Good reader has a really weird and lousy interface. As a computer guy I don't care, but I rarely recommend it to even medium tech savvy friends because I don't see them dealing.
dennyferra 16y ago
I want to read my RSS feeds like a newspaper. I think formatting is really the issue. I don't necessarily want a list of links.
zzzeek 16y ago
RSS is primarily used by aggregation widgets and sites as a server-to-server protocol for retrieving lists of links from blogs and news sites, and I see no evidence offered that anything is changing in that regard. As far as people actually using their "RSS" buttons to read websites, I've actually never heard of anyone doing that. The author appears to misunderstand the primary rationale of modern RSS.
beej71 16y ago
RSS is really cheap to set up compared to the cost of an entire site, and for news sites, it makes economic sense to add a feed on the off-chance that you might get 0.1% more readers. The technology that is the RSS reader is not the driver of RSS. The feed is what drives it. NYT is putting up a feed even if is has zero browser support, I'll bet. Until it's not worth the practically-zero cost of setting up a feed, there will be piles of feeds out there. Publishers will use anything they can to get more eyeballs, and feeds like RSS fit perfectly into that strategy. I use RSS all the time. That's how I got to this article. And I'm not worried about it one bit.
bambax 16y ago
An interesting point of this post is that Twitter is effectively about to replace RSS, and that in order to use Twitter one has to have an account with it and "follow" such and such. But is this really true? Wouldn't it be possible to build an (authorized) interface to Twitter that would serve search results according to topics/keywords without actually creating an account with Twitter? Something along the lines of twitfeed.com/topics?q=topic1+topic2+topic3 I'm sure this already exists somehow?
- rjvir 16y ago
  Kind of: http://twitter.com/search?q=node.js%20OR%20from:reddit%20OR%20from:hackernewsbot http://twitter.com/search?q=node.js%20OR%20from:reddit%20OR%... This searches all posts that contain "node.js", are from reddit, or are from hackernewsbot. You can even get an RSS feed for it, at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=node.js%20OR%20from:reddit%20OR%20from:hackernewsbot&format=rss http://search.twitter.com/search?q=node.js%20OR%20from:reddi...
nycticorax 16y ago
I use Google Reader, because I want to know when there's new stuff on certain sites without visiting them all, but I don't like it that much. I prefer to read the stories on the web site, with its "native" formatting and whatnot. Is there a tool in any of the common browsers that will highlight a bookmark (or something like that) when there's new content on the site? I think I'd greatly prefer that to the whole business of using a feed reader. Am I the only one?
omaranto 16y ago
I won't miss the RSS browser button: I hardly ever use it! While I read many RSS feeds I almost never subscribe to them (which is what I've used the button for). The average number of times I've subscribed to a feed I read is extremely close to 1, and the average number of times I've subscribed to each existing feed in the world is extremely close to 0.
stretchwithme 16y ago
Cobol's been dying too and I'm not concerned about that either.
mcnemesis 16y ago
am probably contributing late, but i have recently worked on something that might solve this "rss hunger" or at least provide a better alternative eventually. am calling my creation "razor" and it runs right in the brwser, is totally free, doesn't sacrifice privacy to corporations, is customizable by the user (only knowledge of regular expressions required - in case one wants to craft their own feeds) i've developed my solution as a firefox addon, and you can download it from here -- http://fixx.yolasite.com/razor http://fixx.yolasite.com/razor i'd never used rss feeds before (probably wouldn't have invented razor then?), but razor is different and to me is more powerful! i use razor to check newest stuff from hacker_news using the following saved razor-expression: http://news.ycombinator.com/newest)))<a http://news.ycombinator.com/newest)))<a href=".+">.</a>%%%>[^<]<%%%[^>].[^<]((([0-9]+.ago---[0-9]+.point---\sby\s---^[0-9]\.$---^\s$.$\s$---^[0-9]+[ ]comment.\s$---^\w$---^\s[\|\[]\s$---^Feature Requests$---^Y Combinator$---^Hacker News$---^(News\s)$ It might look "geeky" and intimidating, but check the above razor link (it has docs too) and you'll see why this solution is promising. nice feeds hacking!
- jerf 16y ago
  Thank you for demonstrating so clearly why we need RSS. If you don't get it yet, check back in two years. You'll be able to tell us all about why that doesn't scale and can't work and RSS is a lot better. You may not believe me yet, but I can wait.
  - mcnemesis 16y ago
    well help by clarifying why. as i said, this might not be the best, but probably the difference between this and RSS is that razor isn't solely meant to create information feeds, it is a quicker and more succinct way of scraping the web for arbitrary information. it solves the problem of having to build a new scraper tool every time you have some site you want to programatically pick something from. maybe i didn't clarify its purpose well, or i gave the wrong examples? imagine using it to track malformed tags in web pages of your choice in real-time, this is another way it could be used.
ThePinion 16y ago
I just want you to know years ago I vowed to use RSS in all of my websites for the rest of my life. I would hate an Internet without RSS feeds (and Google Reader!)
asadotzler 16y ago
The only problem with Kroc's rant is that RSS auto discovery and UI wasn't removed from Firefox. It was moved from the addressbar to the Bookmarks menu.
Create 16y ago
I think it is plain and simply facebook and twitter which are killing RSS. Most normal people have heard about twitter and facebook and have no clue about the cryptic acronym RSS. Which, by-the-way requires a technical degree to understand, and to use (should it rather be v1 v2 or atom? does my pc support the best option?). Is it really a bookmark? Or an inbox? Or a notification? Now one should go through hidden features and install new apps. No sane person would set this up as opposed to a single click in a browser to a twitter feed or the push of a like button. Like webmail displaced most "normal" people's imap/smtp (with all the firewall misery). Google groups/forums displaced NNTP. I also feel sad, because RSS was free, while twitter and facebook are careless computing. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/dec/14/chrome-os-richard-stallman-warning?INTCMP=SRCH http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/dec/14/chrome...
eitan 16y ago
I find myself more & more use blekko to replace my RSS feeds, maybe this is the future of feeds. But then again maybe blekko doesn't have a future....

278 points by sant0sk1 16y ago

RSS is the pipe, its not a solution. Your average joe doesn't "know" what TCP/IP is and frankly its the same for RSS. Something needs to sit at either end and actually make use of the RSS "pipe".

lwhi 16y ago

RSS is not dying! One of the traditional applications for RSS (a browser-based RSS feed-reader) is becoming obsoleted because most browsers aren't particularly good at managing feeds. I can understand why the benefits of RSS aren't more widely understood by the general public; the technology makes use of an abbreviation (an abbreviation that isn't actually much more comprehensible when its spelt out). RSS is a service, used by applications to make content portable. It's not a final solution, it's a tool that can be integrated into a number of different applications. It's quite likely that many of the applications it could be used for haven't been created yet. A slightly ridiculous article.

peterbotond 16y ago

many users use webkit and write a program that evaluates, stores the content effectively building a personal rss. moreover.com has many precompiled rss feeds for various subjects.

tlianza 16y ago

Curious why none of the comments, nor the original article, mentions Internet Explorer. They've continued to add new features in this area ever since IE7. The icon is hidden now in IE9 (as are most of the icons... less browser chrome is fashionable) but I believe they still consider this a first-class feature. They are still the world's most popular browser... and presumably their users are less technical, so presumably it's usage is less than what Mozilla reports, but it remains.

Groxx 16y ago
>They are still the world's most popular browser Because of their history. Because users aren't technical. Because IE is bundled with Windows. And look how quickly they've been falling in use. Methinks they won't be the most popular for much longer, which is an incredible mark against their design decisions because of how fast and how far they've fallen from such complete domination.
- tlianza 16y ago
  The story is about RSS dying, and the author is upset that Mozilla is removing RSS features and Chrome never had any. Are you also arguing that IE is failing because they still have those features (possibly a bad design decision)? In which case, what is it we're complaining about? Browsers that have RSS readers are bad and browsers that don't have RSS readers are bad?
  - Groxx 16y ago
    Not at all. I'm arguing that taking your design decisions from IE based on IE's popularity is illogical when looked at in context.

k33n 16y ago

> Mozilla outright refuse to listen (33 bloody votes!) Wow, 33 votes. They're really ignoring the masses on that one.

bzbarsky 16y ago
For a bug in Mozilla's Bugzilla installation, that's high. Of course all the high-vote bugs are special-interest-advocacy stuff like "bring back MNG support" and "bring back gopher support" and "bring back the RSS button"... So high vote count is actually a reliable indicator that the bug should be wontfixed, more often than not.

emef 16y ago

If there was really enough demand for RSS, it wouldn't die.

kroc 16y ago
How can there be demand if nobody is making it easy to use?
- emef 16y ago
  It seems like the incentive is missing. Browser developers have to prioritize what users use and what they know how to use. The author made the point that very few people even know what RSS is, and I think it's the content deliverers' responsibility to make users aware of that feature; there's only so much a browser can do to help with that.
codeup 16y ago
It wouldn't die if enough people were convinced like the author that it shouldn't die.

u48998 16y ago

If Mozilla is getting rid of it and if Chrome doesn't have it, than that's just proof enough that big companies are conspiring against RSS. My fingers crossed for the Adblocker.

macco 16y ago

RSS is dying only if Bloggers don't support it anymore. But I can't see that.

ryanwaggoner 16y ago

The replacement for RSS isn't Facebook and Twitter...it's email. People don't understand RSS but they understand: "Enter your email address to subscribe to updates." Hence the reason that CPM rates for email are so much higher...

Groxx 16y ago

>IF RSS DIES, WE LOSE THE ABILITY TO READ IN PRIVATE Based on what causal chain? At best, it's an incredible stretch of a slippery slope fallacy.

codeup 16y ago
Disagree. The author clearly refers to corporations like Facebook and Twitter tracking your reading behavior.
- Groxx 16y ago
  So run NoScript. Run in private mode. Block their cookies. Block their address in your hosts file. You can use wget, curl, or any other cookieless downloading tools, none of which will expose you reading The Times to Facebook. RSS doesn't even prevent against this; it can be behind a login, it can require cookies or not serve up info, and it can send info to Facebook denoting you viewed article X. All of which is determined by the server it's running on, not the format of data it serves up. Browsers are unnecessary for RSS or tracking, and it's a very poor match for browsing behaviors anyway.
  - codeup 16y ago
    Why should I have to do all that if RSS already exists? There's no reason to accept letting this working technology die. I agree that browsers are unnecessary for RSS though.
    - Groxx 16y ago
      Because if you're that worried about Facebook tracking your browsing habits, accessing information via RSS will only prevent some tracking. The Like button is damn near everywhere, not just on news sites. The only way to prevent it is to prevent your browsing tools from communicating with Facebook at all, and hope the servers you're accessing aren't doing it behind the scenes. And/or anonymize your connection (TOR), so even that doesn't give them anything. The point is that paranoia (valid or not) is not a reason to keep a technology alive when that technology does not solve the problem, especially when solutions do exist. If you want a solution, use a solution, not a crippled, bundled-in-your-browser partial solution that only works under certain circumstances / assumptions.

kinnth0 16y ago

Can't we just use Google reader and be done with it?

shaver 16y ago

What would an RSS reader good enough for Kroc's grandmother and 419,999,999 other Firefox users look like? I would be genuinely interested in his designs for one. Of the many different RSS reader add-ons I've tried for Firefox, for example, there haven't been any that made me say "we've gotta put this in Firefox, let's delay $otherwork instead". If we had an energetic contributor like Kroc, though, it's quite possible that we could end up in a great place. I'm not trying to say "patches talk, chump", though of course they do speak quite compellingly. I'm trying to indicate that via open projects like Mozilla technical people can have agency beyond voting in bugzilla (!) or a letter-writing campaign. It'll be interesting to test Kroc's thesis, though: if he's right that RSS will be harmed a lot by Firefox removing the RSS icon, then hits to the RSS stream from Firefox UAs should change trend-line between 3.6.x and 4. I look forward to such a follow-up, it would be interesting data!

dlsspy 16y ago
I think it'd look like it looks for many of us. I go to a web site and see a little orange button that I can click and it will add this web site flipbook. Yay, now I can read the web site like a magazine with consistent and readable formatting and not have to remember what that site was I wanted to go back and look at the next time they posted something.

bl4k 16y ago

Users shouldn't need to know what RSS is to use it just as they don't need to know what HTTP is to read a website or what SMTP is to send email. The interface to using RSS has always been flawed, that is where the problem is.

stan_d 16y ago

I'd be interested to know the number of people using Google Reader as their primary tool to read stuff from the web. I'm sure the numbers would skew heavily towards the tech/geek crowd. But I have no idea how popular it is.

GBKS 16y ago

From the user flow, RSS doesn't make much sense. Clicking an RSS button shows you the same thing you just looked at, except without the site design and only partial content (Safari). Currently, in Chrome, I just see a dense block of text. RSS is an amazing tool, but maybe we just haven't found the right UI for it yet. Exposing it in the browser doesn't work very well and treating RSS as an Inbox (like Google Reader) where every item needs to be marked as read is too overwhelming. Personally, I think a social approach to RSS that puts content and personal preferences at the fore-front would solve a lot of this.

sharednothing 16y ago
"RSS is an amazing tool, but maybe we just haven't found the right UI for it yet. Exposing it in the browser doesn't work very well and treating RSS as an Inbox (like Google Reader) where every item needs to be marked as read is too overwhelming." I think we're looking at half a 'system' here. Userland software also putout a publishing system called "Radio" to go along with the "Syndication" mechanism. So I think the community solution here is to finish that loop and start thinking of forward layer 'radios' that provide 'channels' that filter/aggregate RSS feeds.

zandorg 16y ago

I think Dave Winer, basically inventor of RSS, would disagree.

markg 16y ago
Dave Winer did not invent RSS. You might want to know your history before spouting such nonsense.

bretpiatt 16y ago

It is pretty clear why Google doesn't like RSS, it stops you from browsing the web and that is how they get paid. As a user though I also don't like it anymore and I'll share why... This isn't 1970 anymore where I want to read "What's New" from a small list of new sources. I prefer to go each day to a list of curated aggregators like HN or what the people I follow on Twitter or saying. This is vastly superior to RSS and this is why at least one technical user no longer uses it.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
aaronkaplan 16y ago
I prefer to go each day to a list of curated aggregators like HN or what the people I follow on Twitter or saying But aggregators can publish RSS streams too. How is following someone on Twitter different from subscribing to his RSS feed? I would agree that a site like HN isn't very attractive to read via RSS. When the ranking is dynamically determined by readers' interest, you lose something by freezing the list in the form of an RSS stream. But for a curated site like Slashdot, what difference does it make if the link stream comes in the form of RSS or as tweets? Incidentally, I wouldn't call HN a curated site. Slashdot has editors/curators; HN doesn't.
stanleydrew 16y ago
"It is pretty clear why Google doesn't like RSS, it stops you from browsing the web and that is how they get paid." But they built and are actively maintaining Google reader. I don't think Google dislikes RSS, rather they are hesitant to build a browser feature for something that should really be a separate application.
- TomOfTTB 16y ago
  They also employ 2 of the 3 creators of PubSubHubBub a technology specifically created to enhance feed syndication. It's also a project that was developed on company time (albeit 20% time) and is hosted on their GoogleCode website. AND Google Alerts was one of the first (if not THE first) to implement the technology.

pamelafox 16y ago

RSS readers may be dying (I admit that I once was a Google Reader fanatic and now only log in time to time), but RSS/ATOM as a format for communicating between websites is still pretty decent. I often setup an ATOM feed for the data on whatever webapp I'm building, and usually end up using that feed to integrate with other webapps. (And as a bonus, I can hand it out to techie users). I don't know, do you think that RSS readers dying will mean websites will stop producing RSS feeds? The output seems to be built in to many systems these days already.

bendauphinee 16y ago

RSS is not dying. It's just not based in the browser, and I'm fine with that. I use an RSS aggregation program, and if I really wanted to, there is open source software available to build and host my own RSS portal.

petervandijck 16y ago

RSS isn't dying, it's become so pervasive that it's now invisible infrastructure.

smcl 16y ago

"It gives less of a shite than a French man smoking a cigarette in public" Um...what?

stanleydrew 16y ago
Really HN? We're upvoting this? No offense to the commenter, but we can do better.
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  I don't think so, actually. I'd be hard put to make that comment's point any more elegantly. In person, the right response to the original sentence would be a polite cough, followed by a brief but significant silence, followed by a slight but detectable face-saving change of subject. We can't do those things on the web, but in this case "um... what?" is an artful alternative.
  - stanleydrew 16y ago
    I question the comment's usefulness to this discussion, not the elegance with which it was made (although I think I disagree on that as well). The comment, to me, is a distraction. Not purposeful I'm sure, but it's had that effect. The fact that the community would vote it up to the point where it might be the first comment someone reads when seeing this thread is disappointing.
    - smcl 16y ago
      > The comment, to me, is a distraction Perhaps a little reflection is in order, you were originally unhappy that the comment I made might have distracted from, or derailed, any possible discussion. Then, rather than turning the other cheek, you opted to kick off a discussion which has ironically created a genuine distraction. update: This reply was a little bit cheeky and I subsequently sent stanleydrew an email to apologise.
      - 16y ago

zoul 16y ago

RSS is dying because browser vendors do not want to implement or maintain integrated RSS readers? That does not sound very convincing.

kroc 16y ago
RSS aggregators are used by the elite few. When websites start deciding to use Twitter and Facebook instead of RSS because it’s faster and gives them better features, and regular users understand it better, then there will be complaints.

gurraman 16y ago

I have -- without giving it much thought -- stopped using RSS. Many friends have done the same. Now browsers seem to be dropping support. Maybe this is proof that RSS/Atom wasn't the panacea we thought it was. Maybe it is actually time for RSS to die?

ghurlman 16y ago

It's hard to take the author's concern seriously, when I can't even find the RSS link on his/her page.

kroc 16y ago
because the browser is supposed to provide the button. Why do you think I’m worried? I don’t want to have to clutter my site with a button to an XML feed that nobody understands. I want the browser auto-discovery to do the right thing and present the right interface to make RSS worthwhile. Turning the key in a car shouldn’t present you a diagram on how to connect the battery. Browsers shouldn’t sit there dumbfounded when presented a piece of RSS.
- stanleydrew 16y ago
  Your analogy doesn't work for me. A car is built to run when you turn it on. That is basic functionality. The reverse analogy to a browser would be "making an HTTP request shouldn't present you a diagram on how to do DNS resolution," and the browser doesn't.
- DougBTX 16y ago
  Why do you think I’m worried? Because auto-discovery isn't working on his site either? (At least in Safari)
  - ugh 16y ago
    It is working. Safari changed the way it displays RSS feeds. You have to click and hold on the “Reader” button to display any RSS feeds.
- mithaler 16y ago
  If I copy the URL of your site/blog into my RSS reader's Add Subscription dialog, I don't know of any RSS readers that wouldn't scrape your site for the link tags I assume you put in and discover the feed for me.
codeup 16y ago

jonnii 16y ago

I'm glad my browser doesn't support RSS natively when other apps offer a far greater experience. Have you tried the safari rss reader? It's awful. As a chrome user I'm happy that it does one thing well and that's displaying web pages. Now I'm free to use any online RSS reader I want and be able to access my RSS feeds from anywhere.

antidaily 16y ago

Most of what I need to read shows up on HN or Reddit or Twitter. I know that sounds incredibly lazy, but I don't have time to mark 233 Lifehacker posts as read every week.

corin_ 16y ago

I can't imagine that browser button pursuading anyone who doesn't already understand and appreciate RSS to start using it. Anyone tech-savvy enough to see it, and start googling to find out how to use it properly has certainly already heard of RSS. And on the other side, anyone who does use RSS, and anyone in the future who learns to use it, won't be put off using it by the loss of that button. The worse statement in this article (other than the french man smoking) is: Mozilla’s mistake here is to associate low usage with user dis-interest. Ummm... they're correct. He claims that, just because only 3-7% use it, it must be kept in because "what regular user wouldn’t want this feature!?" Clearly the answer to that question is "93-97% of regular users". Touché?

gergles 16y ago
The argument is that more people would use the feature if the UI were better, and that hiding the feature because "nobody uses it (because it sucks)" is not the same statement as "nobody uses it (because nobody wants it)".
ianl 16y ago
3%-7% that use the button are most likely power users. It would be unwise to disenfranchise them as they are the ones who normally advocate your software to their friends (regular users).
- corin_ 16y ago
  Sure, you could make an argument that 3%-7% is enough people to justify keeping the feature. Or you could make the argument that while it isn't enough, because they are the online non-shopping version of Alpha Consumers, it's worth keeping it to help get the browser promoted. However you cannot argue that it has to be kept because every regular user wants this feature - statistics don't lie, clearly the majority of users don't care.
- lftl 16y ago
  In chrome at least you can install a plugin to add an RSS icon to the URL bar. Easy enough for power users.

stanleydrew 16y ago

RSS isn't dying because browsers are deciding not to build native readers into their UIs. It's dying because it's not terribly easy to understand for most users. The article readily points this out. And even for technical users like me, it isn't solving the main problem I have which is discovering new and interesting content. Sure, once I've found some new source of content it's nice to put its RSS feed into a reader. But really, bookmarking is pretty good too. Yes there are clear benefits to RSS over naked bookmarks, but the discoverability problem is still paramount. Anyway this is kind of inconsequential to the point of whether native RSS functionality should be included in a browser. Mozilla is right to kill this "feature." RSS is an application-level protocol on top of HTTP, itself an application-level protocol. Browsers are built to perform HTTP requests. In my opinion they shouldn't do much else. A feature that displays and helps you manage RSS content falls into the category of bloat.

sudont 16y ago
> Sure, once I've found some new source of content it's nice to put its RSS feed into a reader This is why most linkblogs are now twitter feeds. Even Andy Baio’s is still a subset of what he twitters. My problem in RSS feeds is importance, some sort of metric of popularity would be good. A lot of times I’ll remove a feed for curatorial purposes to have that site drop some major project that goes viral, and I then find out several weeks later. The entire concept of RSS is somewhat flawed for what happens in the real world. It would be a lot better to create some XML encapsulation of what the front page of the NYT does in terms of curatorial importance.
- macrael 16y ago
  I know the rss reader fever (by Shaun Inman) tries to do something like this.
  - xenomachina 16y ago
    As does Google Reader's "Sort by magic" (under "View settings").
- 16y ago

corywilkerson 16y ago

This. "Every website should not look like a NASCAR advert for every sharing service in existence."

thwarted 16y ago
That's one reason I've always thought bookmarklets were better for sharing, not the least of which is because you don't need to wait/hope the website operator adds support for the sharing site you are using.

hsmyers 16y ago

I only indirectly depend on browser based RSS feeds as I use Google Reader. Which does precisely what I want it to and is available without regard to browser.

Lagged2Death 16y ago

The implementation of RSS in Firefox was always an "ultra-lite" version that I doubt will be missed by any serious RSS enthusiasts. A full-featured RSS reader feels a lot like a mailing list, so I think it's appropriate to keep RSS in Thunderbird rather than Firefox. In some respects, a web-app RSS reader (like Bloglines or Google Reader) is better. You can access your feeds from any computer, the read/unread status is kept synchronized between PCs, and the centralized web-app arrangement makes more efficient use of network resources. Better to have Google Reader poll a site every 30 minutes than to have 10,000 Firefox installs each polling it every few hours. The only browsers I know of that ever had good in-browser RSS readers were Opera and Seamonkey. But even in those cases, RSS was included as part of the mail client, not shoehorned into the browsing paradigm.

rhymeswithcycle 16y ago
I've always used the browser RSS button precisely in order to add feeds to Google Reader -- I feel like that's the button's main use case. It's an immediate, standard way to see whether a page offers a feed, and to quickly save the feed in your reader. I've found it incredibly useful.
- Lagged2Death 16y ago
  It's been a while since I used Firefox's RSS button. I see it offers more options than I remember (like subscribing with a web-based reader). And it looks like the plan is to eliminate any standard in-browser indication of the presence of an RSS feed, something I didn't really catch from the blog post's talk about a "button on the toolbar." That does seem pretty inconvenient. Many of the posts at bugzilla argue that the most important feature of the button is the fact that it indicates, in a standard way, that feeds were detected. And I agree. On the other hand, since it's Firefox, there will probably be several feed-finder extensions available before 4.0 is final.
nakkiel 16y ago
Agreed. I once wrote a Python script that would parse RSS feeds and write emails in a maildir (or whatever is supported by Python); one was then able to read news from an MUA which was comfortable (Mutt by then). I lost that script when I did a 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda' before quitting my last job and realizing 2 minutes later that I forgot to backup many useful scripts I wrote over the course of my year and half in that NGO. Being a smoking Frenchman, I'm tempted to be gratuitously insulting to the author but there's one interesting problem that could come from RSS' disappearance from browsers: the lack of visibility may very well "destroy" the format in the long term. Also, as the web is increasingly publicized, the incentive to remove a format that generates traffic but may hardly generate revenue might be high.

doorty 16y ago

I frankly never got into RSS until I started using RockMelt about a month ago. Now I use it all the time to tell me when there are new Hacker News post, etc. But unfortunately the only clickable link for the Hacker News RSS takes me to the story, which is often an external link. If I want to see the "discuss" of the story I have to manually go the website and find the post and click the discuss link. Perhaps RSS needs a more robust protocol that wouldn't require others to make their own API. Then I think browsers like Rock Melt might bring this new kind of RSS to the masses.

phirephly 16y ago
Google Reader displays a comment link, which I always click and then click through to the article if the link is still alive from there. That's a problem with a bad RSS reader, not RSS, or HN, who would actually be at fault here.
gnosis 16y ago
The reader I use, newsbeuter, always shows two links: the article link, and the discussions link. http://www.newsbeuter.org http://www.newsbeuter.org You might also be interested in trying these alternate HN feeds: http://andrewtrusty.appspot.com/readability/feed?url=http://news.ycombinator.com/rss http://feeds.feedburner.com/HackerNewsFullFeed http://feeds.feedburner.com/HackerNewsFullFeed

yycom 16y ago

Why should this particular <link> incantation receive special treatment over others?

nakkiel 16y ago
How are other <link> elements not specially treated? <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://ycombinator.com/news.css"> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/favicon.ico"> Also, this will make a good reading: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#h-12.3 http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#h-12.3 "Although LINK has no content, it conveys relationship information that may be rendered by user agents in a variety of ways (e.g., a tool-bar with a drop-down menu of links)."
- kroc 16y ago
  Well put; what I believe in is that user agents should do their absolute best to make the most sense of what information is available to it in the context of the UI paradigm of the user agent. i.e. there is not enough screen space on phones for every website to fit an RSS icon; the browser should do the best thing that befits its UI and help minimise the efforts of the user to get the information they want. RSS can massively help with that. Imagine for example that on the Chrome home page, where sites you visit often appear, Chrome also was following the RSS of these sites in the background, and listing new news items for those sites on the home page, all without you having to do anything. There is infinite possibility here for browser vendors to make browsing quicker, easier and more intelligent and RSS is a key part of that. The browser vendors are not interested in exploring this avenue and as such everybody is stuck doing the same stupid routine every single day. This is dumb! Our computers should be smarter than this!
  - nakkiel 16y ago
    Imagine for example that on the Chrome home page, where sites you visit often appear, Chrome also was following the RSS of these sites in the background, and listing new news items for those sites on the home page, all without you having to do anything. That's a hell of a good idea actually. Having a count of items that popped on a website since your last visit would be a really useful information.

angrycoder 16y ago

I have used RSS for years now. I check google reader about as often as I check hacker news. I start my morning off with a cup of coffee while I read my feeds using Reeder on the iphone or ipad. Not once have I used any of the RSS features of a browser. I really don't see the point. I guess google doesn't either.

thirdsun 16y ago
i couldn't agree more. Breakfast, Coffee and Reeder is my morning routine. And a browser's RSS features are indeed too limited - third-party web- and mobile apps are much more sophisticated when it comes to RSS. What I'm more worried about is the trend to only show an excerpt or introduction of an increasing number of articles. Given the fact that most of those sites rely on ads, it's fair to do that though.
- DrJokepu 16y ago
  Excerpts only in RSS annoy the hell out of me and here's why: I usually read my RSS feed in Reeder on my iPhone during my morning commute. There's still no mobile reception on the London Underground (I'll resist the temptation for now and save that rant for another time) meaning that all I can read is what have been cached by Reeder before I left home. Which means that I'm unable to read posts that only have excerpts in RSS. They should figure out some other way to monetize their RSS feeds; I particularly like Daring Fireball's approach of having sponsored RSS-only posts every now and then (that are actually interesting to read).
  - jonknee 16y ago
    Full text RSS makes it really easy for your content to show up on spam blogs, which is why I think it's not used all the time.
  - dools 16y ago
    You might be interested this in this article: http://www.steverubel.com/instapaper-20-turns-every-rss-feed-full-text http://www.steverubel.com/instapaper-20-turns-every-rss-feed...

TomOfTTB 16y ago

RSS is not dying. There are very few individual users of it but there are literally millions of web sites that use it. Almost everyone on the Internet uses a portal site of some kind and the only way to be included on one of those sites is RSS/Atom feeds. So as long as people want to use RSS for a personal reader it will be there to do it. And there will always be RSS readers because every programming environment I can think of has a pre-built library for feed reading meaning a programmer could whip a reader up in under an hour. As far as the button disappearing from browsers that just makes UI sense. Chrome Browser taught the rest of the industry that most people hate clutter in their browser. So buttons that 93% of the users don't use are being taken out. But they can be added back with a simple browser extension/plug-in/whatever. So even here the people who want to use an RSS reader aren't losing anything (and even without an extension/plug-in/whatever any user savvy enough to be using a reader will know how to cut and paste a url)

gregory80 16y ago

just b/c rss is dying, thank god too, doesn't mean syndication is dying. already ideas like pubsubhubbub have provided realtime syndication in a more compact format. The web is just moving to realtime and ingesting a big long text file and determining deltas sucked. For that matter, XML as a data transport vehicle should end in favor of more compact and type friendly solutions like JSON. Don't be so alarmist that a crappy tech is being phased out. Now, where's my Tandy 1000.

axod 16y ago

RSS never really caught on beyond a geek crowd. I've never used it.

dlsspy 16y ago
I had a lot of TiVo conversations like this ten or eleven years ago. Lots of people who never used the technology would tell me why it didn't make sense to them.
- axod 16y ago
  Is TiVo still big in the US? (It doesn't exist in the UK). We have various hard disk based recorders, and sky plus etc
  - dlsspy 16y ago
    TiVo itself isn't huge, but pretty much everyone has a DVR these days. I just use that as an example because 10-11 years ago nobody knew what it was, but they knew they didn't need it... until they tried it.
    - axod 16y ago
      But RSS is like 10-15 years old. How long until it takes off?

draebek 16y ago

Lack of a browser button doesn't put me off using RSS, as many have pointed out. There are browser extensions and GreaseMonkey scripts for me to add feeds to Google Reader. I'd be more concerned that RSS is dying because many content providers--from big media to bloggers--seem to prefer to only show me a short excerpt, or even a title in their RSS feeds. I don't want to leave Google Reader to read your articles! When I have to open every single RSS item's link (in a new tab) from Reader, that either discourages me from visiting your site... or discourages me from using RSS, as it adds little to no value, and indeed just introduces frustration. The other reason I avoid RSS is for sites like HN and Reddit, where the order of links, their scores, and their ages are important. Maybe RSS should be updatable (which may be what PubSubHubbub is designed for?).

patio11 16y ago

RSS saves me from having to load up 100 different sites several times a day just to check what’s ‘new’. Everything wrong with RSS in a nutshell: this is a problem real people don't have.

frou_dh 16y ago
Well hopefully real people might one day branch out from the Yahoo! homepage and make it a problem.
HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago
Ha! Summed up exactly what I was thinking. Difficulty reading "100 sites several times a day" isn't a technology problem; it's a focus problem.
- xenomachina 16y ago
  Feed readers and sites like Hacker News are two solutions to the same problem: content aggregation. Is it dumb for Hacker News to collect stories from hundreds of different sites? If no, then why is it dumb for a feed reader to do the same? If yes, then why are you here?
- derefr 16y ago
  I am subscribed to around 400 niche blogs, for various topics (game design, linguistics, sci-fi writing, etc.)—but most of them update very rarely (once every few months.) This means that, on average, I'll see 13 new articles on a given day—but I would have had to check all 400 sites to find those 13. The alternative is to only check them once at the same average rate they update at—but that means that I'll get a big wodge of material, go through it all the first time I have a few hours free, and then get nothing for months.
erikpukinskis 16y ago
I fully appreciate the sentiment, I hate when people build stuff people don't need. But I want to dig a little at this. I think the fact that most people only have access to CNN or Time or Fox News or Cosmopolitan or Maxim or whatever... that there is not an easy way for people to get news aggregated from 100's of their peers and thought leaders in their affinity groups.... I think that IS a problem people have. It may not be a problem they are aware of, but I think the social cost of consolidated media is very high. I think RSS, and technologies like it (Twitter, Facebook) are an important part of the solution to that problem. RSS is obviously not very user friendly, and I'm not sure if it will have a place at the table 10 years from now. But the problem it solves (a standard interchange format for syndication) is absolutely real, and it's not going away.

mmphosis 16y ago

Okay, I haven't really used RSS before. I'm diving in. In Safari Version 5.0.3 (6533.19.4), I view all of the RSS Feeds by choosing the following (buried) menu item: Bookmarks > Bookmarks Bar > View All RSS Articles I can't find a "View All RSS Articles" button. By default, I hide the "Bookmarks Bar" toolbar (because I want as much vertical screen real estate as I can get.) The "View All RSS Articles" item does not appear in the "Bookmarks Bar" toolbar when I make this toolbar visible. I am looking into the NetNewsWire app for Mac. http://netnewswireapp.com/mac/ http://netnewswireapp.com/mac/ No RSS feed for Wikipedia portal:Current events? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events Hacker News RSS is broken? http://news.ycombinator.com/rss http://news.ycombinator.com/rss

jschuur 16y ago
Try this improved full text HN feed: http://preona.net/2010/12/hackernews-full-feed-for-your-reading-pleasure/ http://preona.net/2010/12/hackernews-full-feed-for-your-read...
mmphosis 16y ago
Wow! Hacker News RSS seems to be working now.

EGreg 16y ago

This is ridiculous. First of all what about the ATOM format? I don't think it's dying. Anyway, why not simply have an RSS plugin / extension as some have suggested? You can do this in all the browsers.

tel 16y ago

Recently Flipboard added a Google Reader section. I've started using this and never turned back. It solves perfectly pretty much every problem with RSS via attractive presentation, quick access to full content, social connectivity, and getting rid of the "inbox feel". Like a few others here, I look at RSS in the morning. As it turns out, what I really wanted was a sort of newspaper/magazine format. Flipboard delivers that perfectly.

bsg75 16y ago

RSS is a tool for technologists. The average user will not find it attractive enough, so RSS will always be used by the minority. This does not necessarily make it a dying technology however.

Kilimanjaro 16y ago

Change the RSS button for a 'Follow' button.

agavin 16y ago

RSS brings me 90% of my outside information. And by doing it with programs like Reeder that use Google Reader to sync the feeds and what's been read allow me to do it on 3 computers, an iphone, and an ipad without ever seeing the same junk twice But, it does require some computer savvy to setup and operate. You need programs, you need to sometimes figure out your feed URL's. Good reader has a really weird and lousy interface. As a computer guy I don't care, but I rarely recommend it to even medium tech savvy friends because I don't see them dealing.

dennyferra 16y ago

I want to read my RSS feeds like a newspaper. I think formatting is really the issue. I don't necessarily want a list of links.

zzzeek 16y ago

RSS is primarily used by aggregation widgets and sites as a server-to-server protocol for retrieving lists of links from blogs and news sites, and I see no evidence offered that anything is changing in that regard. As far as people actually using their "RSS" buttons to read websites, I've actually never heard of anyone doing that. The author appears to misunderstand the primary rationale of modern RSS.

beej71 16y ago

RSS is really cheap to set up compared to the cost of an entire site, and for news sites, it makes economic sense to add a feed on the off-chance that you might get 0.1% more readers. The technology that is the RSS reader is not the driver of RSS. The feed is what drives it. NYT is putting up a feed even if is has zero browser support, I'll bet. Until it's not worth the practically-zero cost of setting up a feed, there will be piles of feeds out there. Publishers will use anything they can to get more eyeballs, and feeds like RSS fit perfectly into that strategy. I use RSS all the time. That's how I got to this article. And I'm not worried about it one bit.

bambax 16y ago

An interesting point of this post is that Twitter is effectively about to replace RSS, and that in order to use Twitter one has to have an account with it and "follow" such and such. But is this really true? Wouldn't it be possible to build an (authorized) interface to Twitter that would serve search results according to topics/keywords without actually creating an account with Twitter? Something along the lines of twitfeed.com/topics?q=topic1+topic2+topic3 I'm sure this already exists somehow?

rjvir 16y ago
Kind of: http://twitter.com/search?q=node.js%20OR%20from:reddit%20OR%20from:hackernewsbot http://twitter.com/search?q=node.js%20OR%20from:reddit%20OR%... This searches all posts that contain "node.js", are from reddit, or are from hackernewsbot. You can even get an RSS feed for it, at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=node.js%20OR%20from:reddit%20OR%20from:hackernewsbot&format=rss http://search.twitter.com/search?q=node.js%20OR%20from:reddi...

nycticorax 16y ago

I use Google Reader, because I want to know when there's new stuff on certain sites without visiting them all, but I don't like it that much. I prefer to read the stories on the web site, with its "native" formatting and whatnot. Is there a tool in any of the common browsers that will highlight a bookmark (or something like that) when there's new content on the site? I think I'd greatly prefer that to the whole business of using a feed reader. Am I the only one?

omaranto 16y ago

I won't miss the RSS browser button: I hardly ever use it! While I read many RSS feeds I almost never subscribe to them (which is what I've used the button for). The average number of times I've subscribed to a feed I read is extremely close to 1, and the average number of times I've subscribed to each existing feed in the world is extremely close to 0.

stretchwithme 16y ago

Cobol's been dying too and I'm not concerned about that either.

mcnemesis 16y ago

am probably contributing late, but i have recently worked on something that might solve this "rss hunger" or at least provide a better alternative eventually. am calling my creation "razor" and it runs right in the brwser, is totally free, doesn't sacrifice privacy to corporations, is customizable by the user (only knowledge of regular expressions required - in case one wants to craft their own feeds) i've developed my solution as a firefox addon, and you can download it from here -- http://fixx.yolasite.com/razor http://fixx.yolasite.com/razor i'd never used rss feeds before (probably wouldn't have invented razor then?), but razor is different and to me is more powerful! i use razor to check newest stuff from hacker_news using the following saved razor-expression: http://news.ycombinator.com/newest)))<a http://news.ycombinator.com/newest)))<a href=".+">.</a>%%%>[^<]<%%%[^>].[^<]((([0-9]+.ago---[0-9]+.point---\sby\s---^[0-9]\.$---^\s$.$\s$---^[0-9]+[ ]comment.\s$---^\w$---^\s[\|\[]\s$---^Feature Requests$---^Y Combinator$---^Hacker News$---^(News\s)$ It might look "geeky" and intimidating, but check the above razor link (it has docs too) and you'll see why this solution is promising. nice feeds hacking!

jerf 16y ago
Thank you for demonstrating so clearly why we need RSS. If you don't get it yet, check back in two years. You'll be able to tell us all about why that doesn't scale and can't work and RSS is a lot better. You may not believe me yet, but I can wait.
- mcnemesis 16y ago
  well help by clarifying why. as i said, this might not be the best, but probably the difference between this and RSS is that razor isn't solely meant to create information feeds, it is a quicker and more succinct way of scraping the web for arbitrary information. it solves the problem of having to build a new scraper tool every time you have some site you want to programatically pick something from. maybe i didn't clarify its purpose well, or i gave the wrong examples? imagine using it to track malformed tags in web pages of your choice in real-time, this is another way it could be used.

ThePinion 16y ago

I just want you to know years ago I vowed to use RSS in all of my websites for the rest of my life. I would hate an Internet without RSS feeds (and Google Reader!)

asadotzler 16y ago

The only problem with Kroc's rant is that RSS auto discovery and UI wasn't removed from Firefox. It was moved from the addressbar to the Bookmarks menu.

Create 16y ago

I think it is plain and simply facebook and twitter which are killing RSS. Most normal people have heard about twitter and facebook and have no clue about the cryptic acronym RSS. Which, by-the-way requires a technical degree to understand, and to use (should it rather be v1 v2 or atom? does my pc support the best option?). Is it really a bookmark? Or an inbox? Or a notification? Now one should go through hidden features and install new apps. No sane person would set this up as opposed to a single click in a browser to a twitter feed or the push of a like button. Like webmail displaced most "normal" people's imap/smtp (with all the firewall misery). Google groups/forums displaced NNTP. I also feel sad, because RSS was free, while twitter and facebook are careless computing. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/dec/14/chrome-os-richard-stallman-warning?INTCMP=SRCH http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/dec/14/chrome...

eitan 16y ago

I find myself more & more use blekko to replace my RSS feeds, maybe this is the future of feeds. But then again maybe blekko doesn't have a future....