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Ask HN: Rss vs. Direct Hit
I have been using RSS and twitter for a while to keep up to date and informed. Since RSS became popular we've seen points about rss dying, twitter replacing rss, etc.
I'm wondering, with the recent "UI/UX explosion" in web and mobile, does this provide more of a reason for people to hit websites directly and read them for favorite blogs/news sites? What do you think?
Would you rather hit a page directly if the blog has great content and an enjoyable UI or would you still prefer reading it through Google Reader?
- thedjinn 16y agoI have all the blogs I read in my RSS reader. However, most of these blogs deal with source code and thus far I haven't seen any RSS reader which does syntax highlighting and proper formatting on source snippets. Therefore I usually read most of the interesting posts on the site itself. But I never visit a blog directly, always through the reader.
- clammer 16y agoOne thing I never fully understood about RSS is that only geeks know what RSS is, hence it will never be ubiquitous. If you have a geek audience, then it's useful, otherwise, forget it.
- triviatise 16y agoThe issue is if you want to read 50-60 news sources you have to aggregate them using a reader. I use google reader which works fine and sort of works on my android phone. Sometimes I click through but it depends more on the article. Twitter doesnt come close to replace RSS at the moment.
- riskish 16y agoperhaps a good differentiator would be a blog/site with content and/or ui design that people enjoy so much they visit it directly? meaning it breaks through the rss feed, and they goto it directly. thoughts?