22 ms·

Ask HN: Is RSS dead?

• diablo1 7y ago
  It's only dead insofar as most blogs don't have a decent RSS feed to begin with. I've scoured the web looking for high quality RSS feeds that are updated regularly, and have even shared an OPML file with close friends who happen to really like RSS too. The amount of effort was astonishing gathering those RSS feeds, but it was worth it.
  • totaldude87 7y ago
    care to list a few?!
    • diablo1 7y ago
      No, but if you look around Hackernews there are plenty of blogs that have a high quality RSS feed. I'm not sharing my own personal preferences on here with others for privacy reasons. By high quality, I mean the content is exceptional and not blogspam and the content is updated regularly. Bonus points if the RSS feed is not a list of 'summaries' and includes the full content of each post. Even more bonus points if the feed doesn't have ADs and 'share this on Facebook' links :)
      • totaldude87 7y ago
        understood :)
      • smabie 7y ago
        Privacy reasons? You created your account 3 days ago and have a couple posts. Moreover, I don’t understand how mentioning blogs hurts your privacy.
        • diablo1 7y ago
          Yes. Privacy reasons. Sometimes privacy is about consent, and I do not consent to sharing the blogs that I follow.
    • sogen 7y ago
      NetNewsWire has some good defaults: https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/ https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/ (Kottke, DF, etc)
    • sizzzzlerz 7y ago
      The USGS offers a feed of earthquake activity, if you're in to that sort of thing. It can be quite chatty if you set the threshold too low but I'm only interested in 5+ and there are far fewer of those.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • scarface74 7y ago
    I can’t think of a single blog that doesn’t have an RSS feed or major site for that matter.
  • timbit42 7y ago
    WordPress supports RSS and 35% of websites are WordPress. Just add /feed/ to the domain name to access it.
    • diablo1 7y ago
      Yes but not many of those are not updated regularly, and the content is sometimes very thin and not written well and doesn't have sources for various claims.
• mkchoi212 7y ago
  Absolutely not! I use Reeder on the Mac to keep up with my favorite blogs, and most of them (I’d say 90%) support RSS.
• wenbin 7y ago
  No. Podcast is booming. And podcasts are distributed via rss. Every podcast player is basically a rss client.
  • Causality1 7y ago
    The industry's seeming loss of interest in RSS as a technology does have me wondering, is there a replacement for podcasts? Are podcasts migrating away from RSS as their primary distribution concern? If there is a replacement, is it platform-independent like RSS or does it hinge on a single company like Apple?
    • chrisrhoden 7y ago
      I think podcasters generally only care about RSS because it's how to get into the Apple Podcasts app. There are many hosting companies that will create friction and pain if a consumption platform attempts to vertically integrate and eliminate the idea that you can publish a podcast on any web server, but we're already in a world where some of the consumption platforms have distinct flavors of RSS published especially for them. Not hard to imagine one of them offering better support if you use a more custom integration, which it's not impossible to imagine major hosting providers building.
  • scarface74 7y ago
    Unless you are using a not-podcast player like Spotify or whatever Google has that hosts podcasts themselves instead of just using RSS and letting the player download from the content providers server.
• zikani_03 7y ago
  No way! I use The Old Reader and it's a great way to kinda deal with FOMO; having feeds in one place from various outlets. It's only annoying when some news sites don't have RSS/Atom feeds.. meh
• ctas 7y ago
  RSS/Atom still has its place and for many is still the favorite way to subscribe to content on the internet. I built my own feed reader just a few months ago. On top of it I added a simple recommendation algorithm based on statistics of my reading behavior and article topics. I prefer the simplicity and accessibility of RSS. The standard itself plays more or less a secondary role nowadays. The various feed readers building on top it are still innovating and still attract new users.
• thinkingkong 7y ago
  RSS the protocol, or RSS the experience? The Protocol is alive and kicking, as far as being available, but it's been more or less killed by publishers not promoting it out of the box. AFAIK ad revenue is basically the reason. The replacement set of broadcast tools is still Facebook, Twitter, Direct, and Newsletters. Newsletters are really the new feed.
  • pavel_lishin 7y ago
    > Newsletters are really the new feed. I've noticed this as well, and it boggles my mind. If ever there was a use case for RSS, this would be it.
    • nickthegreek 7y ago
      Inoreader just rolled out a new feature that allows you to subscribe to newsletters directly in their reader and have them available with the rest of your feeds.
      • panzerboy 7y ago
        Feedbin does it as well.
    • Animats 7y ago
      With RSS, the user is in control. Unsubscribe, and it's gone. "Newsletters", which are mostly ads, are much harder to stop. Hence the demand for MailChump, Constant Spammer, and SpamBlast.
  • worble 7y ago
    >Newsletters are really the new feed Nearly every newsletter I follow also provides an RSS feed though.
  • scarface74 7y ago
    I have yet to find a website that I feel should have an RSS feed that doesn’t have one.
• adeltoso 7y ago
  RSS is still alive but maybe not as a direct data source, still it can be super useful. Less than 24 hours ago it let me give access to a daily report to anyone via email (registration at the bottom here https://nichecommerce.net/reports/daily_ecommerce_pulse/2020/03/05/#emailsub https://nichecommerce.net/reports/daily_ecommerce_pulse/2020... RSS: https://nichecommerce.net/latest/feed/ https://nichecommerce.net/latest/feed/ - MailService: mailerlite.com)
• JohnFen 7y ago
  I hope not! I use it rather heavily, every day.
• jasonboyd 7y ago
  If RSS is dead then I am reading this from the great beyond.
• tacone 7y ago
  Also, we miss you Aaron. <3
• hprotagonist 7y ago
  No, i use RSS every day to read HN, among 163 other things.
  • taborj 7y ago
    Same here. Found this HN item via RSS. Recently switched to FreshRSS (from tt-rss), running on my own system. I very much prefer sites that provide an RSS feed, or that can be made to have one with something like RSS-Bridge.
  • Jaruzel 7y ago
    Every morning at 6am a script wakes up on my PC gets HN's RSS feed (plus a few others), bundles them all up as a nice html list and sends it as a single email to my inbox. So for me, RSS is very much alive.
• tryonlinux 7y ago
  Literally used rss to see this question lol
  • ashwinaj 7y ago
    Lol, same here
  • towb 7y ago
    Me 3
• jasode 7y ago
  By asking the question using the word "dead"[0] which has such offensive connotations, it will spur some to say "it's not dead" -- which isn't really going to be productive for what I think you're really asking. First, in one sense (but doesn't really answer your question) ... the old protocols like RSS (feeds), NNTP (news), IRC (chat), etc are never going to be "dead" because somebody somewhere will always be providing it and somebody somewhere will always be consuming it. Just like horse & buggies are not truly "dead" because a few are being run for tourists and the Amish communities, there are some old dialup BBS's serving callers with old modems even though the internet+web has supplanted it. I think the longer form of your question for productive discussion is this: Is RSS usage decline possible to reverse with new clients on the web & mobile? The answer is no. RSS/NNTP/IRC don't have the incentives (both economic and social) that allow them to experience a renaissance. E.g. StackOverflow may someday be supplanted by another Q&A site but it won't be supplanted by NNTP news forums. Same with RSS. Typical mass consumers use Facebook as their "rss" reader. It won't matter what kind of new RSS reader you develop, the typical web surfers don't want to manage RSS feeds. [0] to the replies below about why "dead" often triggers unproductive arguments: In observing decades of debates on USENET,BBSs,web, etc... the word "dead" has 2 very different meanings which needlessly causes participants to talk right past each other. meaning #1: "dead" is harmless synonym for "decline", "losing popularity", "no longer supported", "no longer in mainstream use", etc. meaning #2: "dead" is provocative synonym for "no longer worth learning", "useless", "stopped working forever", "nobody intelligent is using it", etc. The amazing phenomenon that happens with asking "Is X Dead?" is that the question asker is almost always innocently using meaning #1 but the most enthusiastic answerers are using meaning #2. This is why "dead" triggers unproductive threads because both sides are talking past each other with different semantics of "dead".
  • lucb1e 7y ago
    While I agree with everything you wrote, I think it is fair to add that an eventual demise does not mean it is quite dead yet, especially among the HN audience. I use RSS to follow a number of blogs and I know that a lot of other nerds follow some of my stuff using the RSS feed. It works just fine and until it gets replaced, a new client might receive a warm welcome by this large-in-absolute-numbers audience.
• geraldbauer 7y ago
  See http://isrssdead.com http://isrssdead.com For my part I'm currently building and updating a feedreader / feedparser kit that lets you build a newsfeed in minutes [1] or use a ready-made client such as rubynews [2] [1]: https://github.com/feedreader/news.rb https://github.com/feedreader/news.rb [2]: https://github.com/planetruby/planet/tree/master/rubynews https://github.com/planetruby/planet/tree/master/rubynews PS: The stats on Planet Ruby for RSS vs ATOM are: Q: What feed formats are in use? Formats (n=51) atom (52%) | ******************************* 27 rss 2.0 (47%) | **************************** 24
• AlchemistCamp 7y ago
  > Is RSS Dead Have you heard of podcasts? They're booming and they rely on RSS. The way they're subscribed to and the way they're submitted to large platforms is via their RSS feeds.
  • rodgerd 7y ago
    Spotify are trying to "fix" that.
    • drdeadringer 7y ago
      Honest Questions: * Is Spotify trying to "fix" that now like iTunes tried to "fix" that 20 years ago? * Why should I "enjoy" Spotify as much as I "enjoyed" iTunes? [I didn't, not even a little bit]
      • cultus 7y ago
        They're funding podcasts on the condition they are Spotify-exclusive. It's not about if you enjoy it or not, but just that you need to use Spotify to listen to a particular podcaast.
        • Phillipharryt 7y ago
          I'm in the strong belief if your podcast doesn't have a public feed (even if it's paywalled) and it's only on spotify then it's not a podcast, it's a very long unmelodic song. The feed is essential.
      • jtvjan 7y ago
        iTunes hasn't tried to "fix" it. iTunes runs a podcast directory for discovering podcasts, but it still uses the podcaster's feeds to actually deliver episodes. The API for the directory is public, so any podcatcher can use it for their search functionality.
  • slg 7y ago
    The podcast industry might be booming, but the days of nearly every podcast being freely available with an RSS feed is certainly over. Granted this is mostly a business decision rather than a technical decision. Companies like Spotify want you to listen to their podcasts on their platform. This allows them to better track ad statistics and push other revenue streams compared to podcasts served over traditional RSS feeds.
• elFarto 7y ago
  I still use it for all of my Youtube subscriptions. I have about 50 channels in there.
  • emsign 7y ago
    yep me too. yt's subscription page becomes really cluttered once your channel count is that high. so I prefer to check them in a rss reader
• muppetman 7y ago
  I'd say it's on the decline, yes. I have quite a few websites in my RSS Reader (I love TinyTinyRSS) and over the last 2-3 years I've seen probably ~10 sites get "makeovers" and every time, the RSS feed I was using for those sites has gone away/broken. Each time I've emailed them to ask "Oh hey are you going to bring back RSS" and of the ~4 that replied, 1 bought it back ~3 months later, the other 3 said "Nope, no one uses it" and the others didn't even reply. So yes, it's on a steep decline I'd say. I love the "But Podcasts use it" argument! There's what, ~100 major podcast sites people use? Yes, RSS is the backend workhorse that makes it work, but the podcast(content) producers aren't using RSS, they'll be uploading their content to a website. RSS is just the backend magic that makes the podcast clients work. RSS at most sites seems to suffer bitrot. Sometimes the RSS URL is still http when the site has moved to https etc etc. It's sad to see the decline of it, because an RSS Reader really is a beautiful thing. But yes, RSS as a way to exposing content to people is dying and used by only a very few hardcore "oldschool" people these days I'd suggest.
• gramakri 7y ago
  I use TinyTinyRSS every day and it's my primary way to access the internet. I can say that in my bubble it's not dead.
  • ThinkingGuy 7y ago
    I literally just discovered and installed tt-rss last week, and it's revolutionized my daily online reading (and listening)
• hs86 7y ago
  I am currently using Feedly with their recent "Leo" feature and it is really interesting how well it works. It requires some setup and imho is a bit expensive (Pro+ plan required) but this announcement should give a good overview of its capabilities: https://blog.feedly.com/leo/ https://blog.feedly.com/leo/ Innovation in the RSS space is still happening and therefore I wouldn't call it 'dead'.
• webwanderings 7y ago
  I use this, works perfectly fine on daily/frequent basis (not dead): https://feedreader.com/online https://feedreader.com/online
• Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
  I came to comment on this post after receiving notification in my RSS reader. So I say this: Pretty lively dead standard!
• sam_lowry_ 7y ago
  Nope, I read HN through RSS.
• robobro 7y ago
  It takes like 20 seconds to add an Rss feed to whatever feed generator software you've been writing. For the love of God please take those 20 seconds to help people like us！
• Thorentis 7y ago
  To the average consumer: yes. Why? Almost all news sites, blogs, journalists, etc. use Facebook pages and other social media as "RSS feeds" for their own websites. When people "like" a Facebook page or "follow" a Twitter account, they are basically adding that outlet to their RSS feed. And when they scroll through Facebook or Twitter, they are consuming that feed. Social media has replaced RSS feeds for the vast majority of people. They tailor their feed by choosing who to follow and which pages to like, and the writers / media producers ensure that new content is automatically cross posted to their social media accounts so that it appears in people's feeds. For tech people / people that read more niche sites, RSS is useful, but RSS will never become mainstream or widely adopted given the already widespread adoption of other Internet feeds such as social media platforms.
• xorzarle 7y ago
  Well, I used RSS to find this comment....
• jdofaz 7y ago
  My feed reader app is my go to app when I'm bored. I will say its becoming less prominent. Half the time I want to add a site I have to guess where rss feed is generated since its less common to link to it. Apple makes the experience worse on iOS since rss link open in the News app but it doesn't support rss. Some new sites don't have it at all, when https://www.thefarside.com/ https://www.thefarside.com/ came to life I didn't have a way to follow it until someone made feed based on scraping. Most sites seem to have a sitemap for search, I wish my reader app could fall back to that.
• knorker 7y ago
  I hope not, or I'll never read a single web comic, photo journal, or blog ever again, including corporate blogs.
• sys_64738 7y ago
  No
• erikrothoff 7y ago
  We’re working full time on https://feeder.co https://feeder.co and growing MRR every month. Does the average consumer know what RSS is? No. Will it become the next Twitter anytime soon? Probably not. Is there a need for managing news outside of your e-mail inbox, our usage data definitely shows yes. Is the market ultra saturated? You betcha! That said we’re eager to help grow the space. Would love to know if HN has any ideas or feedback on this.
• allard 7y ago
  it's not dead, it just smells funny
• zenlot 7y ago
  Opened this post using RSS in Inoreader. All my news comes via RSS. I use it for news sites, I use it for Medium and I also use it for Reddit. The nice thing about it, is that everything stays in one place, categorized and I can see unread counts. Especially useful while checking reddit feeds. There's no infinite scroll and I can clearly see/mark what's been read and what's not. I can come back later and continue from where I left or review my favorites. If the site does not have RSS, or I can't make it appear in Inoreader - most likely I won't be visiting it again, or at least not scrolling daily. RSS gives you freedom and saves you a lot of time.
  • timbit42 7y ago
    I use it for eBay and Kijiji. Great for sniping.
    • vroomik 7y ago
      I use Inoreader too, care to explain how do you use it for ebay? I've tried to add sub from ebay url to no avail..
  • jamie-vesoft 7y ago
    Totally agree that the nice thing is everything stays in one place. I use it for Stack Overflow as well. :) And will definitely add Reddit to my list.
  • _hao 7y ago
    Same thing. Inoreader is such a good product!
  • sys_64738 7y ago
    Familiarity. Centralization. Time saving. No ads. These are the major strengths of RSS. If it’s dead or not, just leave it be for us.
  • mdoar 7y ago
    Me too. RSS is the way to absorb lots of information
• hkt 7y ago
  No, I use it every day. There isn't an alternative to subscribe to lots of feeds of specialist things. It's a great tool for anybody who needs to supplement regular journalistic output with As to new clients, it's hard to say. Gnome RSS just became a thing (relatively recently, emphasis on relatively) and I love it. AntennaPod is great for podcast subscriptions and I find Feeder is perfectly adequate on mobile. It is a specialist tool though. That's the thing. It means it is as likely to get a new set of shiny clients as say, IRC. Which is to say, probably not.
• IronWolve 7y ago
  I love RSS, using IFTTT tools, I can automate and share different feeds to other different sites, populating and share information from static portals. I can even make RSS feeds from sites that dont offer native RSS. Many different sites offer RSS feeds, many people dont even know they exist unless they are webmasters or advanced users. Podcasts are based around RSS feeds, even youtube offers RSS feeds. This really is a powerful tool that is all over that you can use to build core infrastructure for social media and knowledge bases. You would be surprised how many backends of websites uses RSS to spread links around the Internet.
• nreece 7y ago
  RSS feeds aren't dead. On the contrary, their usage for content aggregation, media monitoring and podcasts has increased in the past few years, specially by power users (inforvores) and in the business world. Speaking from my own experience running Feedity - https://feedity.com https://feedity.com, a growing service that helps with custom feeds for unstructured sources like webpages.
  • dahx4Eev 7y ago
    Does feedity allow me to generate an RSS feed for sites that do not provide it?
    • nreece 7y ago
      Yes, for almost any public webpage.
• arwhatever 7y ago
  RSS had better not die! It's my escape plan for keeping up with the software industry once Twitter becomes too obnoxious to bear any longer.
• johnmarcus 7y ago
  In my experience, the rss feed of so many blog sights is often so broken that it makes it challenging to use, and Soni abondon it every time I try to use it meaningfully.
• davepeck 7y ago
  I wrote an thing a couple years back. https://davepeck.org/2018/08/16/revisiting-rss/ https://davepeck.org/2018/08/16/revisiting-rss/ -- for me, anyway, RSS is still a key part of my daily work and leisure.
• tree3 7y ago
  I don't think RSS will ever die because it takes little to no effort for a content producer to provide it. It's as simple and straight forward as it gets.
• Multicomp 7y ago
  I used Live Bookmarks (powered by RSS) to get to this post. I hope not! I have a pet pipe dream that once symmetric upload/download is a thing vs. ADSL (whether FTTH or 5G effects this, I dare not speculate) in 10-20 years, mesh networks and fediverse style stuff will have their greatest opportunity in years to leverage open protocols like RSS, Delta.Chat's chatting over autocrypt-encrypted emails, chat-over-Wifi-SSID and more to split open the walled gardens that people are in mainly because of their network effects and lack of a convenient alternative.
• timw4mail 7y ago
  Every site that removes RSS is dead to me.
• reportingsjr 7y ago
  Nope! I use newsblur and it is absolutely fantastic on web/mobile/whatever.
• birdyrooster 7y ago
  NZB and Torrent indexers often publish RSS and works great. Definitely not dead.
• gorbachev 7y ago
  No.
• wooque 7y ago
  Nope, I'm still using it. I currently using it through my own web app that's aggregating RSS, Reddit, HN, Twitter and Youtube. Planning for a long time to launch it as a product but never got around it.
• dade_ 7y ago
  Newsblur is my Internet's start page. We use MS Teams at work and I have noticed that coworkers have setup RSS subscription channels to follow businesses, etc. I use hidden RSS feeds on many websites (/feed on Wordpress for example), it is a shame they are not visible.
  • Yhippa 7y ago
    Thanks for mentioning this. I dug up my old NewsBlur account and it's pretty slick. I had a lot of issues with Feedly and other aggregators. I was pleasantly surprised to find that a lot of the sites I visit have RSS feeds still.
• woodruffw 7y ago
  According to my httpd logs, between 50 and 100 people[1] are fetching my (not particularly popular) blog via RSS daily. That's enough people for it to be (personally) worth ensuring that RSS continues to function. Whether that meets the standard of being "alive" is probably a community judgement. [1]: The exact number is hard to get, since a lot of feed hits are for RSS services and not all of them announce their subscriber count in their user agent.
• moltar 7y ago
  I got this post on HN via RSS via Reeder app. Conclusion: not dead.
  • smabie 7y ago
    “I read this post on Mac OS 9. Conclusion: not dead” Unless you’re using a pedantic and useless definition of dead (a bad faith interpretation, I would argue), your statement doesn’t make much sense.
• pipework 7y ago
  RSS is not dead, but it's not cool to ship RSS clients in new projects. It's consumed far and wide, both directly and indirectly from readers, leechers, and listeners; it's used inside products and projects ranging from enterprise to mom-and-pop shops. Do I need a list? Nah. If I did, it'd be more telling about me than RSS anyways.
• jbj 7y ago
  still use it for podcasts, butgetting increasingly more troublesome to track down for new podcasts
• tschellenbach 7y ago
  I still read my news in my Winds RSS reader, put in quite a few commits to it as well: https://github.com/GetStream/winds https://github.com/GetStream/winds
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• smkellat 7y ago
  RSS powers podcasts. 110+ feeds in my feed reader come from extremely diverse sources. It isn’t dead yet. Spotify, iHeartRadio, and others want to wall off podcasts but their selection is still too limited. Frankly their apps frustrate me greatly. Trying to play things back on Xubuntu while writing is too much of a challenge compared to pairing gPodder & VLC. I have a blog and a newsletter that doesn’t duplicate the blog. Using TinyLetter forces me to shoot for long form pieces and to get them in good shape. I also end up approaching things in the newsletter that I don’t on my blog. I can’t remember if the bot on Telegram is fed by RSS but that’s how I spotted this anyhow...
• reaperducer 7y ago
  I think a lot of people think RSS is dead because they never see it promoted anywhere. Pretty much every web site has a row of social media icons, but hardly ever is there an RSS icon in the row, even if the web site supports it. Frankly, I don't think most people who run web sites even know that the framework/CMS/rolfburger they're using automatically publishes RSS feeds for them. Yesterday I stumbled across an app called Fraidy Cat, which is supposed to be a privacy-focused news ingester. I haven't done much with it yet, but I was surprised when I pasted in the URLs of several newspapers that I read, the program showed RSS feeds for all of them. None of the paper web sites have any mention of RSS at all. Edit: Even the New York Times has RSS: Latest: https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml New York: https://www.nytimes.com/section/nyregion https://www.nytimes.com/section/nyregion Technology: https://www.nytimes.com/section/technology https://www.nytimes.com/section/technology Science: https://www.nytimes.com/svc/collections/v1/publish/https://www.nytimes.com/section/science/rss.xml https://www.nytimes.com/svc/collections/v1/publish/https://w...
  • newman8r 7y ago
    I put together a list of popular US newspapers with RSS feeds in OPML format a few years ago. I haven't checked to see if any of them have gone dead yet though. https://github.com/newman8r/us-newspapers-opml https://github.com/newman8r/us-newspapers-opml might be useful for people trying to start a collection of feeds
  • Semiapies 7y ago
    The NYT and other news sites have many RSS feeds, in fact.
  • cjmb 7y ago
    Yup, exactly this. I had a few emails recently asking if my site had an RSS feed. I have never used RSS and had no idea. Went into Squarespace settings, messed around for 2 mins, it gave me a button and set it all up for me. Honestly I thought it was already dead until I had those emails come in...
    • 7y ago
• altmind 7y ago
  no this feels like almost "is rss dead" spam
• o_p 7y ago
  Deprecated.
• INTPenis 7y ago
  I think I sort of take my internet access for granted. Because I never use RSS since at any time I can open a browser or an app and get the news. Imo there are two uses for RSS. 1) People who still scroll through a digest of news at certain times in their day. I envy these people for their disciplined habits. 2) And having a service that syncs news to your device via RSS for when you're not online.
  • smabie 7y ago
    Or 3) People who have realized that clicking around on different sites for news is a massive waste of time compared to having the news come to you.
• PaulHoule 7y ago
  If the European countries want to see competition in social media they ought to require that platforms support open protocols such as RSS, XMPP, SIP, etc. It drives me nuts that Facebook Messenger does exactly what Skype does, which does exactly what AIM did, which did exactly what ICQ did, etc. None of these platforms get better, in fact, each one rots over time, driving people to whatever the next platform is -- people keep moving to escape the rot but they never get ahead.
• senectus1 7y ago
  oh its that time of the year again? already? No. RSS isnt dead. I got this link FROM RSS.
• dazsnow 7y ago
  Came here from my rss feed. So I sure hope not...
• craze3 7y ago
  Do we really need a new thread about this thread every month? :)
• AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
  No, but I certainly don't find it as useful as it used to be. Used to be able to add newsfeeds to an RSS feeder and actually be able to read the news. Now the ticker is just the headline or one-to-two sentences, with a URL to the full article. Why bother with a bloody RSS feed if I'm gonna have to open my browser anyway?
  • listenallyall 7y ago
    For most sites, BazQux Reader (in my opinion, the absolute best RSS reader), can pull in the entire article even if the RSS feed only provides a headline or abbreviated version.
• ioseph 7y ago
  At my work we considered removing the RSS functionality, a quick analysis showed it fed a whole bunch of apps both internal and external. It's definitely alive and heavily used just not as much by humans
• xs 7y ago
  No. My entire business is based on RSS. And it's doing great. I'm a podcaster. All podcasts are RSS feeds.
• ksec 7y ago
  Google Reader literally killed all Web and Clients side RSS development. It make sense it lives on the web rather than an App. And it was one of the best RSS Reader. I am not sure what RSS Reader people are using these days, but I have been using Feedly since Reader discontinued. And as long as they keep their free tier I dont see myself stop using them. I think most people who use RSS are nerds or geeks anyway. So in terms of usage it is very small in the world where we have 4 billion Smartphone users. And I dont even look for RSS icon in website. I just search it inside Feedly to see if they have it listed. And most of the time they do. The problem with RSS is no one has figure out a sustainable business model or UX for the majority of the market. Is Something "Dead" in tech often means something entirely different to its literal sense. What the precise word you are / may be looking for is declining.
  • edoceo 7y ago
    The model is to use RSS feed of intelligent stuff to drive folks to my revenue machine. Exactly what blogs do. You don't monitize the feed, it feeds the machine. Like how, just recently, Tailwind leveraged is feed followers (but not on rss, on other streams) to $$$. RSS, and other streams (your insta, Twitter, etc) monitize the same way.
  • jamesgeck0 7y ago
    > I am not sure what RSS Reader people are using these days Reeder is the best RSS application I've seen. I sync it with Feedly on macOS and iOS. Vienna RSS is another solid (open source!) option on mac, although the UI isn't as nice as Reeder. Linux users have FeedReader, which seems pretty great. I haven't found a client I love on Windows. There's a lot of abandoned applications that look and feel a few decades old.
  • detaro 7y ago
    A bunch of the Google Reader competitors of the day are still around and developed. How did Google Reader kill their development?
• foxfired 7y ago
  The reason RSS is not dead is because it is relatively free. The people who don't want it on their website remove the RSS button from their list of share-buttons. They have no clue that their website still supports it. Example: Vice wrote an article titled "The rise and demise of RSS" (you can google it). Now go to their homepage, look at the page source, and there you go: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="vice" href="http..redacted..."/>
• kickscondor 7y ago
  I've recently released a new type of reader: https://fraidyc.at/ https://fraidyc.at/ It's a bit much to try to explain in the comments here - but I am glad to answer questions and hear from others who are trying this kind of thing. RSS isn't dead at all - in fact, I'm introducing some extensions for it next week.
  • Jaruzel 7y ago
    Thats very confident colour scheme you've got going on there. :)
• kmstout 7y ago
  I've used RSS in some form for several years. I've lately gotten quite a bit of use from rss2email, some .forward rules, and mutt.
• Arkanosis 7y ago
  Using it daily… reading 300+ titles and around 50 full articles every day of the year… Definitely not dead for me. I can't even imagine how I'd read as much /interesting/ content in as little time without RSS.
  • drpixie 7y ago
    Similar, so RSS is not dead, despite google's best efforts $#%%###!!
• Scottn1 7y ago
  I have used RSS daily for longer than I can accurately say. Since at least when Opera had a built in RSS client. When Google Reader died I switched to https://g2reader.com https://g2reader.com and have been using that daily since. I don't know how younger people do it but I can't see any other way to get my preferred news in one organized headline only in an outline-like place. Maybe I am just old school but I really like RSS as I am able to get through headlines from tech, finance, etc on daily basis and go through them quickly. Anything that pikes my interest I click on the headline and it takes me to the site to read whole article. One of my favorite things to do while winding down in bed. RSS though is like a foreign language to the under 35 crowd when I have brought it up or they have seen me using it. So it is already dead in that sense. They just prefer to get their news through Instagram/Facebook feeds or just visiting their few preferred websites directly.
  • hkt 7y ago
    I'm 30 and know 20 year olds using it. It is invaluable to them and to me. Not everyone is a social media junkie.
• jinushaun 7y ago
  No. I saw this post via RSS
• derefr 7y ago
  Keep in mind, the goal of RSS is and always was to serve as a sort of shim between the simplest, most static of websites (the ones that live an entirely-static life, which don't run code during the rendering lifecycle, and therefore which can't call out to tell anyone about their new content) and users (who want to receive a notification or message somehow anyway.) RSS was largely supposed to be a hidden bit of infrastructure, allowing some intermediary (like an RSS-to-email-digest gateway, or a news aggregator service) to scrape the RSS feed and convert that into useful notifications/events/messages in some form. The idea was that you, as an author, would pick one of these services, set up an account with it, and point it at your RSS feed URL; and then you'd put a link to that service on your page, which your users could then subscribe to, in place of subscribing to your site itself. Just like a regular email-notification service, but with the webhook part "turned around" so that it's the service poking your server, rather than your server poking the service. "RSS Readers" were never meant to happen; RSS was never meant to be used as a direct link between authors and users. If you think about it, such a direct M:N link is exactly the opposite of what an author with a simple static resource-constrained blog wants—their whole user-base would now constantly be polling their (or their ISP's) dinky little server! (But it's fine in practice, since we eventually got Cloudflare and PuSH.) If you're a content author with a full-on web-app, you can call out (with webhooks, or messages in a message queue, or even API calls to a service like Sendgrid or Twilio), and so, for you, RSS is unnecessary. As we've seen higher-level PaaS-style personal web hosts like Netlify, Squarespace, and WordPress.com supplant the old-school Apache public_html/-style hosting, fewer and fewer authors have needed RSS, because they've had access to other methods to deliver notifications directly. As well, microblogging (mostly in the form of posting links to your new blog posts on either a Twitter account, Facebook page, or subreddit dedicated to your blog) also take the place of notifications of new content on the blog, as well as providing the bonus feature of moving the "comments section" of your posts outside the blog itself, such that you no longer need to host or moderate it. Many people today combine a static-site-generator blog on S3/Github Pages/etc. (having no real "front page", only at most an "all posts" archive for web spiders) with an external, mostly-ephemeral social-network-microblog "index" of their blog. RSS still exists for those authors who it serves, of course; but it's always been an author-side feature, and so, if you're seeing it less, it's because fewer authors need it. (And, if this annoys you as a consumer-of-feeds, know that RSS is probably not the universal-notifications-infrastructure you want. Please don't write gateways that scrape pages and spit out RSS. If anything, emit emails. Mail readers are a strict superset of RSS readers, and usually do everything RSS readers do better than RSS readers do those things; but that's a topic for another post.)
• timw4mail 7y ago
  Part of the problem with RSS feeds is that they have to be found more often than not. This is one of the few reasons I still use 'View Source' functionality in browsers. Even with this downside, it is still way better than some website-specific account thing you have to sign up for (Hello, SmackJeeves)
• ptrott2017 7y ago
  Firstly - call out to Dave Winer - his work on outliners and RSS have both proven incredible useful, influential and long lasting. Is RSS dead? No not by a long shot. Is it as visible as it was in bloggings early days nearly 20 years ago when the spec had been written (2002) and the orange logo was displayed on websites - certainly not. I think the question needs context - Are you aiming to use it to syndicate content and expect an audience boost because your using RSS- then unlikely - but thats more to do with the state of blogging and syndication in general versus alternative publishing platforms such as facebook and medium. Are you looking to use it for a syndication standard to base an implementation on for an app or tooling? If the later then you will find RSS has proven itself a rather nice spec that is utterly boring and stable - which is exactly what you want. It is not sexy, nor is it fashionable but it can be foundational - you can build on it and it does what the spec says. No one is likely to applaud your choice - its an old format but a goodie and if you coose to build on it for what its designed for then your likely to get the job done. If you dont like XML and prefer JSON - Manton Reece and Brent Simmons' JSONFeed also does a great job.
• zelon88 7y ago
  RSS is one of the primary ways I read HN.
• caseyf7 7y ago
  I just got back into it in February thanks to the Reeder iPad app. It helps you grab the RSS feeds even if the site doesn’t post a link.
• strzibny 7y ago
  Someone asked me for my RSS feed last week. I have it, but did not promote it at all. I guess RSS is not dead yet.
• Zebfross 7y ago
  I personally use RSS on my website as a way to automatically publish to various social media sites. It works great, and I don’t know what I would replace it with.
• mc3 7y ago
  I'd really prefer RSS instead of marketing emails I choose to opt in to. An email feels like a todo, a stressor! An RSS feed feels like a "to read at lesiure" stream.
• NicoJuicy 7y ago
  Almost everyone probably already has a rss client at work. It's called Outlook.
• nergal 7y ago
  I wrote a rss/atom reader just a few months ago. I use it every day. Fully open sourced and written in Golang. https://github.com/Lallassu/gorss https://github.com/Lallassu/gorss
• gnuarch 7y ago
  Feed reader support for JSONFeed (Brent Simmons and Manton Reece, jsonfeed.org) is quite unclear at the moment; maybe only iOS Reeder apart from NetNewsWire? It's a pity, as Web feeds in JSON can be produced in a more ad-hoc fashion – an even more simple format with one entry per JSON feed line (admittedly with redundancy across lines) would have been great, too.
• mikorym 7y ago
  This is like when someone asked on Reddit whether Ubuntu Studio is dead. No, it's not dead. Use it if you want to. Here be no adverts.
• jlelse 7y ago
  This seems to be a question regularly popping up. My answer: it's not dead. I, and I think many other people, still use RSS. My reply to a similar question on HN: https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2019/12/do-you-still-use-rss/ https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2019/12/do-you-still-use-rss/
  • hitchhiker999 7y ago
    I got to this article via RSS. Using Start.me to organize a lovely page full of feeds.
    • jpkeisala 7y ago
      Thanks for start.me. I just registered. I forgot these kind of portals still exist. I used to have netvibes.com but for some reason I stopped using it. I will give another try with Start.me.
• kwood 7y ago
  I'm currently writing a new client for RSS, which is dead. Framework of choice is Rails - which is also dead. This thread inspires me to pull in some jQuery and change the project name to Graveyard.
  • Jaruzel 7y ago
    +1 for the name Graveyard. :)
• void_nill 7y ago
  I've given up RSS. Until the end of the year 2019 I still had a RSS.xml file which I updated by hand, but eventually I got too much work. The main reason was not that RSS is "dead" but the old and cumbersome syntax. I cannot get used to XML. Another reason is that browsers have started not to support RSS anymore. I have never used a reader, but rather read RSS in the browser than some kind of minimalist blog. It is difficult to say if RSS is dead, but I have the "subjective" feeling that less and less people implement RSS in their projects. In my opinion, RSS should be completely revised, not only in concept but also in syntax.
• jillesvangurp 7y ago
  It still exists but awareness that it exists is at an all time low with both users, web developers, and SEO specialists. Valid reasons for continuing to invest in having this feature on your websites include better discoverability of your content by various content aggregators that still depend on this. In short, if you are running any kind of blog or news site, it probably helps you to have some RSS feeds but not not a lot. But lets be real, a lot of RSS out there is just a side effect of many companies having used the same CMS for more than a decade. It's just something the CMS does by default. I stopped using feed readers some time after Google reader shut down. I used feedly and inoreader for a while but found myself opening that less and less over the years. I still have the bookmark but haven't looked at it in over a year and have not added any new feed in probably close to five years. These days I depend on HN, twitter, and a few other social media accounts to discover content. I use but am increasingly unhappy with Google News; or rather what's left of it after Google's AI hipsters got their hands on it and turned into a clickbait aggregator to drive their ad revenue. Trump trump trump, more trump, did you know trump farted? etc. It's hopelessly biased to crap I definitely don't care about. All my attempts to nudge it away to more interesting stuff seem to be not working. I hope he loses the election; mainly it because it might clean up my news feed. By chance I'm actually working on a project currently where I'm dealing with RSS feeds. A lot of feeds out there are actually shockingly bad in terms of content, usage of fields, etc. You get stupid things like brain-dead marketeers putting their company name in every title and description; people forgetting to add a timestamp. Or categories. Or an image. These things kind of matter if you want to aggregate and present content from multiple sources. Looking bad is never a good thing for any company whose primary business model is content distribution (i.e. major news papers and magazines).
• Groxx 7y ago
  Every interesting blog I run across hosts an RSS feed of some kind too, with only 1 or 2 exceptions in... almost 5 years? Not dead. Absurdly useful. Quite possibly niche, but is it a niche of valuable users? Maybe.
• rcarmo 7y ago
  No. I read HN through RSS, as well as around 200 other sites. I would never be bothered to check them all manually, and this affords me a much higher signal to noise ratio over a much shorter period of time. There simply is no substitute.
• k1m 7y ago
  If anyone comes across a site witout an RSS feed, try Feed Creator - http://createfeed.fivefilters.org http://createfeed.fivefilters.org - It'll let you target a set of links or other HTML elements to be turned into a feed. (I developed this.)
• undefined-1 7y ago
  I think there is hope. Ask sites for RSS feeds (especially podcasts, which often forget to link to the RSS feeds). Build interesting new things with it that inspire other people to build things with it. Convince browsers to make RSS friendlier. Mozilla should have Firefox at least tell people what do with RSS when they click the button instead of downloading a raw XML file: "you clicked an RSS feed -- would you like to download this extension to read it?"
• bert2002 7y ago
  Still using RSS and Feedly! Perfect to get passive information.
• tgiba 7y ago
  Nobody saw anything wrong in RSS until Google Reader came along, then everyone started using the reader, then content creators realized that GR is stealing thunder and started dropping RSS, and then GR died and we ended up with no Reader and no RSS. It's certainly not dead, but it's not as popular as it used to be.
• jpswade 7y ago
  What purpose do RSS feeds have in a world of news feeds?
• ninedays 7y ago
  > then content creators realized that GR is stealing thunder and started dropping RSS, and then GR died and we ended up with no Reader and no RSS. Funny how anyone can define History.
• dzsekijo 7y ago
  I do use Facebook to get at news but that's a feed someone else (well, an AI) curated for me. Which is often useful but mostly I'd like to be the one who decides about the sources to check out. Then I turn to a feed reader. I would be driven insane if this technology were not at hand, aggregating a plethora of resources into a single comprehensive UI. I use the excellent Bazqux Reader for this (which in my opinion continues the legacy of Google Reader in the best way).
• boastful_inaba 7y ago
  Hey, I'm trying to revive it somewhat! You Need Feeds is my attempt to create an explainer and RSS promo page. (I admit the copy and design needs a refresh, and I still haven't done a proper Android page...) https://www.youneedfeeds.com/ https://www.youneedfeeds.com/ Suggestions welcome...
• toyg 7y ago
  Rss / Atom is not dead, but it has become part of B2B stacks rather than being a standalone B2C format. Considering it’s XML, it was somewhat naive (in retrospect) to hope for anything different. Btw, Podcasting is an interesting window on what an XML-powered web might have been: a multitude of different specialised clients and semantic aggregators, consuming content in agnostic formats, with no dependency on a handful of big browsers. Like a 1955 illustration of “Tomorrow World”, it still looks like a nice future, even though we know it will probably never happen.
• artembugara 7y ago
  2 weeks ago, I released a Python package (700+ stars on GitHub) that "automagically scrapes" the last news from more than 3k news sources. You just have to provide the base form of URL. Behind the package is just a list of websites and their RSS URLs. For example, the input is "nytimes.com" and the output is all the latest news. So, it's quite alive. GitHub: https://github.com/kotartemiy/newscatcher https://github.com/kotartemiy/newscatcher
• BillFranklin 7y ago
  I wrote a fast feed aggregator a couple months ago. I’ve found I’ve read HN less because of it, and have read more of what I’m interested in. RSS feeds are fantastic, could still be improved though (eg pagination of feeds). https://www.bilbof.com/following https://www.bilbof.com/following It’s open source if you want to run your own: https://github.com/bilbof/feed https://github.com/bilbof/feed
• einpoklum 7y ago
  RSS is what got me to this post, so not quite dead yet I guess.
• slightwinder 7y ago
  No, it's just unpopular with mainstream-users, and kinda dying for newssources. As a format there seems to be not much improvment done in the last decade, as an ecosystem there are always new clients and libs, but no innovation is done IMHO, it's always the same set of features being implemented. As a longtime user of at least 15+ years now I've seen some strong dying of feeds in the last years, To the point that I'm thinking now aboubt alternative ways to scrap data from my sources. I think most existing feeds are more a case of legacy code in popular frameworks. Also, there are many new sources growing which are build without RSS for commercial reasons. So having alternative source-scrapers is a neccessary anyway.
• johnfisher57 7y ago
  probably
• maxhedrome 7y ago
  No /thread
• hfdh434535 7y ago
  RSS was never really alive to begin with.
• nikki-9696 7y ago
  I hope not. It's how I get most of my news and follow sites. Feedly is my friend.
• jsilence 7y ago
  No.
• copperfitting1 7y ago
  I use Feedly myself which pulls in articles via RSS. I even got into this thread with an RSS link. Frankly, it's a great resource to keep up with different blogs and sites without having them all live in your bookmarks bar.