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How can we reverse the trend that a wonderful piece of tech such as RSS is obliterated without any regard to implications? If you have been using RSS readers yo

How can we reverse the trend that a wonderful piece of tech such as RSS is obliterated without any regard to implications? If you have been using RSS readers you'll have noticed that over time even quality sites (not ironic) slowly remove their RSS feeds and leave only the usual social media links. This means that they are providing their audience with no option but to have a social media account (where their interests can be tracked and cross-referenced, data mined etc), not to mention that they endorse and promote particular for-profit private companies (which is in general not done lightly, unless there is a partnership or other disclosed interest) New open source tools like this engine, especially if they integrate more with this other wonderful piece of tech, the email client could create a more healthy information retrieval environment. The time to think anew about how to evolve a positive digital life is now and the pieces of the puzzle are all around us.

ferdowsi 5y ago
I don't think the trend can be reversed. I don't blame social media, I think RSS is incapable on the supply side as well. Quality content producers are not going to use RSS because - HTML/CSS/JS allow for much more sophisticated, expressive presentations than simple markup, using video/images/canvases and whatnot. - News is much more frequently updated now than in 2005. With RSS, the update cycle is not in control of the content creator. - RSS is largely incompatible with paywalled subscriptions.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  > - RSS is largely incompatible with paywalled subscriptions. But it doesn't have to be. It really comes down to the clients having so many different ways to authenticate and therefore a complex UI. Consumers and producers also struggle with how to manage so many subscriptions. Full disclosure: just started working for a company trying to streamline paid podcasts.
  - mawise 5y ago
    RSS works great with HTTP Basic Auth. This is the approach I'm using with Haven[1] to expose private personal blog content via RSS. In this manner, each user gets a dedicated RSS link of the form: https://name:token@example.com/rss.xml https://name:token@example.com/rss.xml You can even use the same tools to prevent login sharing such as checking how many IPs the URL is fetched from etc. [1]: https://havenweb.org https://havenweb.org
    - Crespyl 5y ago
      I've also seen some private/paid RSS feeds just using tokens in query parameters (I think Patreon and Ars Technica do this), eg 'https://www.patreon.com/rss/foo?auth= https://www.patreon.com/rss/foo?auth=...' I'm not entirely sure what the benefit of one over the other is, unless some RSS readers/podcast apps have issues with Basic Auth or maybe it's just easier to fit into existing code server-side.
- streamofdigits 5y ago
  On the first point, you only need to include a summary of the resource for notification purposes. The idea is that the user still visits the site to consume the actual content I am not sure what you mean with the second point, the timing of updates is under the full control of the content creator no? The third point is quite relevant. Some sites ask that you subscribe to get updates (via email). Obviously they want to have better visibility of their audience rather than have a large set of passive (lurkers). That is a legitimate choice.
- D13Fd 5y ago
  You’re missing two big ones: 1. RSS readership can’t be effectively tracked, and regular readers may transition to RSS, so RSS content becomes a black hole of readership. 2. RSS can’t easily be monetized via ads or a paywall (although some sites have managed it, like Ars Technica). It sucks, but most sites have to make money somehow, and RSS just isn’t very conducive to that.
ajvs 5y ago
FOSS front ends like Nitter provide a RSS feed for Twitter feeds. Invidious for YouTube and Teddit for Reddit also work, though the original sites in this case still provide their own RSS feeds.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  Newpipe for Android is also good and available in the f-droid market.
- imglorp 5y ago
  How long until momma bird locks out whatever api nitter is using?
  - RNCTX 5y ago
    https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge Not possible as long as the pages are not walled behind a login.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    The point of Nitter is that it uses the API their official web client (which is a JS SPA) is using. They can't lock out Nitter without also locking their own frontend out.
    - chriswarbo 5y ago
      Twitter can alter that API at any point, since they can update their front-end at the same time.
  - perelin 5y ago
    They seem to be pretty stable when it comes to their APIs. Over 5 years ago I built a small service to provide your personal Twitter main timeline as an RSS feed. Never touched it since. Still works. https://twissr.herokuapp.com https://twissr.herokuapp.com
hazelnut 5y ago
Social media sites offer a simple way to share links with their circle which drives back more traffic than just one user consuming the content through RSS. Driving more traffic means more money. It’s a self-made problem by the content creators.
- streamofdigits 5y ago
  thats a very good point, the ease of "propagating" the news of an RSS update surely plays a role in decisions publishers make but its more a client-side issue, the degree to which the social graph of a person (e.g their list of email or phone contacts) is easily accessible / allows forwarding with comments etc. maybe the problem is that client app functionality has remained stagnant over decades? also consider that a lot of that easy social media virality is actually part of the problem
johnchristopher 5y ago
Easy peasy. Make RSS provides as much data as publisher/provider/broker want, enforce a common set of metadata when (re)sharing content so stats can made and funnels be monetized and add a mandatory opt-in et voilà. What ?
- cabalamat 5y ago
  > mandatory opt-in What does this mean? To me, "mandatory" implies compulsory, while "opt-in" implies optional, i.e. not compulsory.
  - johnchristopher 5y ago
    Mea culpa. I meant mandatory as in "there MUST be an opt-in mechanism for users to agree to sharing their metadata". So the privacy conscious crowd can still read RSS items and share them without automatically sharing metadata. Without a way for authors/producers/adnetwork to extract values from the RSS format there's no incentives for them to use it. So give them what they want if we want. Big words for what is just UTM added to the specs. I am saying this tongue in cheek because I doubt people would opt-in if there's nothing for them in it. They opt-in for facebook and google because they get gmail/googlesearch/facebookfeed but with RSS they already have everything they want. RSS is hard to monetize without putting it behind a paywall.
smusamashah 5y ago
I always blame chrome for demise of RSS. When chrome came, all other browser (firefox, opera, even internet explorer) had native RSS view support. To this date, chrome opens RSS as XML garbage e.g. open this in Chrome https://quakkels.com/index.xml https://quakkels.com/index.xml Chrome came, all other browsers lost, then finally Google killed Google Reader and we had nowhere to go. That's how I believe it happened. What's still worse is that Chrome DOES NOT SUPPORT RSS natively.
- cabalamat 5y ago
  Chrome doesn't care because either Google doesn't care, or because Google is actively hostile to open web technologies.
  - thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
    Google killed their very nice (at the time) RSS product, Google Reader, so they could push people to Google+, their solution to compete with Facebook.
    - pphysch 5y ago
      I can see the rationale behind Google's (mis)judgment. Social media was steamrolling RSS in popular adoption, and seemed like the future. Sometimes, new technology does replace old technology. But there were a lot of issues with planning and execution.
      - thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
        >> But there were a lot of issues with planning and execution. That's a very generous understatement: https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/10/18134541/google-plus-privacy-api-data-leak-developers https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/10/18134541/google-plus-pri... https://www.zdnet.com/article/thanks-for-nothing-jerkface/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/thanks-for-nothing-jerkface/ https://mashable.com/archive/google-plus-history https://mashable.com/archive/google-plus-history
- 5y ago
beckman466 5y ago
> How can we reverse the trend that a wonderful piece of tech such as RSS is obliterated without any regard to implications? RSS being killed is a part of the commodification/privatization of knowledge. RSS simply gives users too much freedom. "What if we thought of some of the most lucrative tech companies as essentially tax collectors, but privately-run (and thus not democratically accountable)? Economists call this rent-seeking, and what we’re seeing with a lot of tech companies is that their telos is little more than “rent-seeking as a service”. It’s basically baked in to their business model. Once you’ve fully developed the technology underpinning your service - be it coordinating food delivery, or processing payments, or displaying intrusive ads to people who just want to read a goddamn page on the Internet without being entreated to buy stuff - then your whole schtick then becomes collecting taxes on a whole ecosystem of economic activity." https://dellsystem.me/posts/fragments-86 https://dellsystem.me/posts/fragments-86
- the_snooze 5y ago
  You're seeing this in the podcast space, where content is normally distributed via RSS. You have big players like Spotify buying up podcast productions and making them exclusive behind their app. Luckily, right now open RSS distribution is still the norm for the overwhelming majority of podcasts, but who knows how long that'll last. That quote is absolutely right with the MO of a lot of tech companies these days. They don't actually innovate on tech itself---that's too risky and expensive. Instead, they innovate on business models to make themselves toll operators on everyday life.
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    "They don't actually innovate on tech itself---that's too risky and expensive. Instead, they innovate on business models " So true. When you look at most of the unicorns most of their tech could have been done 10 or 20 years ago. Considering their size the innovation output of giants like MS, Google or Apple is really low.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    >Luckily, right now open RSS distribution is still the norm for the overwhelming majority of podcasts, but who knows how long that'll last. Presumably it will probably last so long as advertising pays the bills for those for whom podcasts are a directly commercial endeavor. At which point they'll go behind paywalls and/or die.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cabalamat 5y ago
> How can we reverse the trend that a wonderful piece of tech such as RSS is obliterated without any regard to implications? I'm not sure this is doable without government regulations. I'm not sure it is doable with government regulations, as to do it properly would require politicians who're both clueful, and not captured by vested interests.
- streamofdigits 5y ago
  well governments (and the massive number of associated government funded sites) could start by always having RSS and not sending their citizens towards the social media platforms with gratuitous links and endorsements. that doesn't need much regulation, just an elementary ethical / moral code but you are right about the limited role of governments in resolving this. this is not a complex / high risk / long term project where you need them. actually just the people in this thread could probably solve this from a technical perspective. the elephant in the room is the publishing industry. one could excuse an initial decade of them being dazed and confused, but its 2021 and they should wake up and smell the coffee.
  - cabalamat 5y ago
    > well governments could start by always having RSS [...] that doesn't need much regulation But it does require them to be clueful. Does anyone think that Joe Biden or Boris Johnson could give a coherent explanation of RSS (or any other piece of computing technology)?
    - streamofdigits 5y ago
      you are giving the massive number of people below the figureheads at the very top an easy pass... government IT is a major, major, segment and technology, protocol etc choices they make can have huge influence.
      - cabalamat 5y ago
        No-one knows everything, and every national leader has to employ experts on different subject areas. Do you think that Joe Biden or Boris Johnson know enough about computer technology -- or any technology -- to employ staff who're competent? Do you think they can tell the difference between people who really know what they're talking about, and plausible-sounding bullshitters? Particularly when the plausible-sounding bullshitters are executives from Big Tech companies who're trying to persuade a government to do something which is in the interests of Big Tech but not in the interest of the general public? I don't, and I think many world leaders could easily be bamboozled by bullshit. Their thought processes would be something like: "This person is from Google/Microsoft/Facebook/Intel/etc, and that company provably knows a lot about technology. They know what they're talking about, and if I say they're wrong, I risk looking stupid (as I fully admit I don't understand the technology). So my best bet is to go along with them."
grumbel 5y ago
The biggest issue with RSS in my eyes is that it tries to replace the Web instead of just being a better way of viewing the Web. The info RSS provides should be extracted out of the HTML itself by your Web browser, not a separate document provided by the content creator. It should be like a cross between Bookmarks and ReaderView on steroids. Leaving it up to the content creator just makes adoption much harder than it needs to be and is a large part of the reason why the semantic web never really went anywhere. But as long as browser manufacturers don't really care, I don't see much chance of anything changing. Bookmarks haven't changed one bit in 25 years, despite offering so much potential for improvement. And it's not just Google's fault either, even Firefox removed that little bit of RSS integration that they had some years ago, when they really should have done the opposite and made it more useful and flexible.
- RNCTX 5y ago
  I agree about the "replacing the web" observation, however I think the nostalgia is warranted in that it's people splitting hairs between the lesser of two evils. While RSS replaced web sites (particularly aesthetically), they are less nefarious than social media companies and search companies whose only goal is to use the content of others to sell ads and their own products.
- freosam 5y ago
  One of the indieweb approaches to feeds is to just structure the HTML sufficiently, and not have separate feed files. This works pretty well, and some feed readers work with it. Some info is at https://indieweb.org/h-entry https://indieweb.org/h-entry
rpastuszak 5y ago
The one-word answer to “why this keeps happening?” would be “advertising”. RSS makes it much harder to control ad inventory. Obviously the bigger problem here is how content creators/publishers are paid for their work. Both Google and FB are often blamed for the current state of things, but the ways in which they impact open standards such as RSS differs.
ako 5y ago
Problem is that RSS is not in the interest of the publishers, but mostly serves the interest of readers: * Hard to keep users on your site - in an RSS reader you just open the next interesting article, most likely from another site. So it reduces page views. * Harder to serve ads - RSS readers show the text of the articles, not all the other stuff on the page of the publisher * Easier to steal content - other sites have an easy way to take your content and republish it on another website. * Harder to track your users - most rss readers just show the content, not all the javascript nonsense required to track the user. * Harder to monetize - for profit sites like to keep their readers behind a paywall, but how likely is it that you'll pay for a new site, if your RSS feed shows content from 20+ news sites? You can't pay for all of them, so you'll most likely pay for none. If you want RSS to succeed, it needs to bring value to the publishers.
- clairity 5y ago
  > “If you want RSS to succeed, it needs to bring value to the publishers.” rss does bring value to publishers: viewers/listeners. that publishers want more than that is a separate issue.
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    RSS is definitely a problem for publishers that depend on ad revenue and "engagement". In RSS it's difficult to develop dark patterns to attract more attention.
  - cortesoft 5y ago
    Viewers/listeners are not valuable by themselves. They are only valuable if the publisher gets paid for them, and they get paid via advertising (or a subscription fee). RSS does not provide advertising revenue for publishers. It could work with a subscription model, I suppose, but I am not sure there is the demand to sustain it.
    - clairity 5y ago
      you're looking at the situation too narrowly. publishers & content creators also want esteem and influence, which they can bank to get paid later (perhaps through a related but separate effort, like product 'reviews').
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

ferdowsi 5y ago

I don't think the trend can be reversed. I don't blame social media, I think RSS is incapable on the supply side as well. Quality content producers are not going to use RSS because - HTML/CSS/JS allow for much more sophisticated, expressive presentations than simple markup, using video/images/canvases and whatnot. - News is much more frequently updated now than in 2005. With RSS, the update cycle is not in control of the content creator. - RSS is largely incompatible with paywalled subscriptions.

paulryanrogers 5y ago
> - RSS is largely incompatible with paywalled subscriptions. But it doesn't have to be. It really comes down to the clients having so many different ways to authenticate and therefore a complex UI. Consumers and producers also struggle with how to manage so many subscriptions. Full disclosure: just started working for a company trying to streamline paid podcasts.
- mawise 5y ago
  RSS works great with HTTP Basic Auth. This is the approach I'm using with Haven[1] to expose private personal blog content via RSS. In this manner, each user gets a dedicated RSS link of the form: https://name:token@example.com/rss.xml https://name:token@example.com/rss.xml You can even use the same tools to prevent login sharing such as checking how many IPs the URL is fetched from etc. [1]: https://havenweb.org https://havenweb.org
  - Crespyl 5y ago
    I've also seen some private/paid RSS feeds just using tokens in query parameters (I think Patreon and Ars Technica do this), eg 'https://www.patreon.com/rss/foo?auth= https://www.patreon.com/rss/foo?auth=...' I'm not entirely sure what the benefit of one over the other is, unless some RSS readers/podcast apps have issues with Basic Auth or maybe it's just easier to fit into existing code server-side.
streamofdigits 5y ago
On the first point, you only need to include a summary of the resource for notification purposes. The idea is that the user still visits the site to consume the actual content I am not sure what you mean with the second point, the timing of updates is under the full control of the content creator no? The third point is quite relevant. Some sites ask that you subscribe to get updates (via email). Obviously they want to have better visibility of their audience rather than have a large set of passive (lurkers). That is a legitimate choice.
D13Fd 5y ago
You’re missing two big ones: 1. RSS readership can’t be effectively tracked, and regular readers may transition to RSS, so RSS content becomes a black hole of readership. 2. RSS can’t easily be monetized via ads or a paywall (although some sites have managed it, like Ars Technica). It sucks, but most sites have to make money somehow, and RSS just isn’t very conducive to that.

ajvs 5y ago

FOSS front ends like Nitter provide a RSS feed for Twitter feeds. Invidious for YouTube and Teddit for Reddit also work, though the original sites in this case still provide their own RSS feeds.

fartcannon 5y ago
Newpipe for Android is also good and available in the f-droid market.
imglorp 5y ago
How long until momma bird locks out whatever api nitter is using?
- RNCTX 5y ago
  https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge Not possible as long as the pages are not walled behind a login.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  The point of Nitter is that it uses the API their official web client (which is a JS SPA) is using. They can't lock out Nitter without also locking their own frontend out.
  - chriswarbo 5y ago
    Twitter can alter that API at any point, since they can update their front-end at the same time.
- perelin 5y ago
  They seem to be pretty stable when it comes to their APIs. Over 5 years ago I built a small service to provide your personal Twitter main timeline as an RSS feed. Never touched it since. Still works. https://twissr.herokuapp.com https://twissr.herokuapp.com

hazelnut 5y ago

Social media sites offer a simple way to share links with their circle which drives back more traffic than just one user consuming the content through RSS. Driving more traffic means more money. It’s a self-made problem by the content creators.

streamofdigits 5y ago
thats a very good point, the ease of "propagating" the news of an RSS update surely plays a role in decisions publishers make but its more a client-side issue, the degree to which the social graph of a person (e.g their list of email or phone contacts) is easily accessible / allows forwarding with comments etc. maybe the problem is that client app functionality has remained stagnant over decades? also consider that a lot of that easy social media virality is actually part of the problem

johnchristopher 5y ago

Easy peasy. Make RSS provides as much data as publisher/provider/broker want, enforce a common set of metadata when (re)sharing content so stats can made and funnels be monetized and add a mandatory opt-in et voilà. What ?

cabalamat 5y ago
> mandatory opt-in What does this mean? To me, "mandatory" implies compulsory, while "opt-in" implies optional, i.e. not compulsory.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  Mea culpa. I meant mandatory as in "there MUST be an opt-in mechanism for users to agree to sharing their metadata". So the privacy conscious crowd can still read RSS items and share them without automatically sharing metadata. Without a way for authors/producers/adnetwork to extract values from the RSS format there's no incentives for them to use it. So give them what they want if we want. Big words for what is just UTM added to the specs. I am saying this tongue in cheek because I doubt people would opt-in if there's nothing for them in it. They opt-in for facebook and google because they get gmail/googlesearch/facebookfeed but with RSS they already have everything they want. RSS is hard to monetize without putting it behind a paywall.

smusamashah 5y ago

I always blame chrome for demise of RSS. When chrome came, all other browser (firefox, opera, even internet explorer) had native RSS view support. To this date, chrome opens RSS as XML garbage e.g. open this in Chrome https://quakkels.com/index.xml https://quakkels.com/index.xml Chrome came, all other browsers lost, then finally Google killed Google Reader and we had nowhere to go. That's how I believe it happened. What's still worse is that Chrome DOES NOT SUPPORT RSS natively.

cabalamat 5y ago
Chrome doesn't care because either Google doesn't care, or because Google is actively hostile to open web technologies.
- thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
  Google killed their very nice (at the time) RSS product, Google Reader, so they could push people to Google+, their solution to compete with Facebook.
  - pphysch 5y ago
    I can see the rationale behind Google's (mis)judgment. Social media was steamrolling RSS in popular adoption, and seemed like the future. Sometimes, new technology does replace old technology. But there were a lot of issues with planning and execution.
    - thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
      >> But there were a lot of issues with planning and execution. That's a very generous understatement: https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/10/18134541/google-plus-privacy-api-data-leak-developers https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/10/18134541/google-plus-pri... https://www.zdnet.com/article/thanks-for-nothing-jerkface/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/thanks-for-nothing-jerkface/ https://mashable.com/archive/google-plus-history https://mashable.com/archive/google-plus-history
5y ago

beckman466 5y ago

> How can we reverse the trend that a wonderful piece of tech such as RSS is obliterated without any regard to implications? RSS being killed is a part of the commodification/privatization of knowledge. RSS simply gives users too much freedom. "What if we thought of some of the most lucrative tech companies as essentially tax collectors, but privately-run (and thus not democratically accountable)? Economists call this rent-seeking, and what we’re seeing with a lot of tech companies is that their telos is little more than “rent-seeking as a service”. It’s basically baked in to their business model. Once you’ve fully developed the technology underpinning your service - be it coordinating food delivery, or processing payments, or displaying intrusive ads to people who just want to read a goddamn page on the Internet without being entreated to buy stuff - then your whole schtick then becomes collecting taxes on a whole ecosystem of economic activity." https://dellsystem.me/posts/fragments-86 https://dellsystem.me/posts/fragments-86

the_snooze 5y ago
You're seeing this in the podcast space, where content is normally distributed via RSS. You have big players like Spotify buying up podcast productions and making them exclusive behind their app. Luckily, right now open RSS distribution is still the norm for the overwhelming majority of podcasts, but who knows how long that'll last. That quote is absolutely right with the MO of a lot of tech companies these days. They don't actually innovate on tech itself---that's too risky and expensive. Instead, they innovate on business models to make themselves toll operators on everyday life.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  "They don't actually innovate on tech itself---that's too risky and expensive. Instead, they innovate on business models " So true. When you look at most of the unicorns most of their tech could have been done 10 or 20 years ago. Considering their size the innovation output of giants like MS, Google or Apple is really low.
- ghaff 5y ago
  >Luckily, right now open RSS distribution is still the norm for the overwhelming majority of podcasts, but who knows how long that'll last. Presumably it will probably last so long as advertising pays the bills for those for whom podcasts are a directly commercial endeavor. At which point they'll go behind paywalls and/or die.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

cabalamat 5y ago

> How can we reverse the trend that a wonderful piece of tech such as RSS is obliterated without any regard to implications? I'm not sure this is doable without government regulations. I'm not sure it is doable with government regulations, as to do it properly would require politicians who're both clueful, and not captured by vested interests.

streamofdigits 5y ago
well governments (and the massive number of associated government funded sites) could start by always having RSS and not sending their citizens towards the social media platforms with gratuitous links and endorsements. that doesn't need much regulation, just an elementary ethical / moral code but you are right about the limited role of governments in resolving this. this is not a complex / high risk / long term project where you need them. actually just the people in this thread could probably solve this from a technical perspective. the elephant in the room is the publishing industry. one could excuse an initial decade of them being dazed and confused, but its 2021 and they should wake up and smell the coffee.
- cabalamat 5y ago
  > well governments could start by always having RSS [...] that doesn't need much regulation But it does require them to be clueful. Does anyone think that Joe Biden or Boris Johnson could give a coherent explanation of RSS (or any other piece of computing technology)?
  - streamofdigits 5y ago
    you are giving the massive number of people below the figureheads at the very top an easy pass... government IT is a major, major, segment and technology, protocol etc choices they make can have huge influence.
    - cabalamat 5y ago
      No-one knows everything, and every national leader has to employ experts on different subject areas. Do you think that Joe Biden or Boris Johnson know enough about computer technology -- or any technology -- to employ staff who're competent? Do you think they can tell the difference between people who really know what they're talking about, and plausible-sounding bullshitters? Particularly when the plausible-sounding bullshitters are executives from Big Tech companies who're trying to persuade a government to do something which is in the interests of Big Tech but not in the interest of the general public? I don't, and I think many world leaders could easily be bamboozled by bullshit. Their thought processes would be something like: "This person is from Google/Microsoft/Facebook/Intel/etc, and that company provably knows a lot about technology. They know what they're talking about, and if I say they're wrong, I risk looking stupid (as I fully admit I don't understand the technology). So my best bet is to go along with them."

grumbel 5y ago

The biggest issue with RSS in my eyes is that it tries to replace the Web instead of just being a better way of viewing the Web. The info RSS provides should be extracted out of the HTML itself by your Web browser, not a separate document provided by the content creator. It should be like a cross between Bookmarks and ReaderView on steroids. Leaving it up to the content creator just makes adoption much harder than it needs to be and is a large part of the reason why the semantic web never really went anywhere. But as long as browser manufacturers don't really care, I don't see much chance of anything changing. Bookmarks haven't changed one bit in 25 years, despite offering so much potential for improvement. And it's not just Google's fault either, even Firefox removed that little bit of RSS integration that they had some years ago, when they really should have done the opposite and made it more useful and flexible.

RNCTX 5y ago
I agree about the "replacing the web" observation, however I think the nostalgia is warranted in that it's people splitting hairs between the lesser of two evils. While RSS replaced web sites (particularly aesthetically), they are less nefarious than social media companies and search companies whose only goal is to use the content of others to sell ads and their own products.
freosam 5y ago
One of the indieweb approaches to feeds is to just structure the HTML sufficiently, and not have separate feed files. This works pretty well, and some feed readers work with it. Some info is at https://indieweb.org/h-entry https://indieweb.org/h-entry

rpastuszak 5y ago

The one-word answer to “why this keeps happening?” would be “advertising”. RSS makes it much harder to control ad inventory. Obviously the bigger problem here is how content creators/publishers are paid for their work. Both Google and FB are often blamed for the current state of things, but the ways in which they impact open standards such as RSS differs.

ako 5y ago

Problem is that RSS is not in the interest of the publishers, but mostly serves the interest of readers: * Hard to keep users on your site - in an RSS reader you just open the next interesting article, most likely from another site. So it reduces page views. * Harder to serve ads - RSS readers show the text of the articles, not all the other stuff on the page of the publisher * Easier to steal content - other sites have an easy way to take your content and republish it on another website. * Harder to track your users - most rss readers just show the content, not all the javascript nonsense required to track the user. * Harder to monetize - for profit sites like to keep their readers behind a paywall, but how likely is it that you'll pay for a new site, if your RSS feed shows content from 20+ news sites? You can't pay for all of them, so you'll most likely pay for none. If you want RSS to succeed, it needs to bring value to the publishers.

clairity 5y ago
> “If you want RSS to succeed, it needs to bring value to the publishers.” rss does bring value to publishers: viewers/listeners. that publishers want more than that is a separate issue.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  RSS is definitely a problem for publishers that depend on ad revenue and "engagement". In RSS it's difficult to develop dark patterns to attract more attention.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  Viewers/listeners are not valuable by themselves. They are only valuable if the publisher gets paid for them, and they get paid via advertising (or a subscription fee). RSS does not provide advertising revenue for publishers. It could work with a subscription model, I suppose, but I am not sure there is the demand to sustain it.
  - clairity 5y ago
    you're looking at the situation too narrowly. publishers & content creators also want esteem and influence, which they can bank to get paid later (perhaps through a related but separate effort, like product 'reviews').

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]