11 ms·

What Happened to RSS?

83 points by popey 4y ago

al_borland 4y ago
My theory is that Google killed Google Reader as a means to push Google+. Reader's death was a huge blow to the RSS world. With a majority of the people on Facebook, Twitter, etc it seems websites are most concerned with syndicating to those platforms, rather than through a shared protocol that anyone can subscribe to. I still use RSS to follow a few sites (with NetNewsWire). I never want to overwhelm myself with sources, but have always found RSS to be a fantastic way to keep on on a site without going to it all the time or seeing the same stories over and over again. I see everything one time and can choose to read it or skip it. I guess that last point may be the problem for websites looking to generate revenue. RSS is going to let you filter down to just what you actually want to read without ads (for the most part). It also doesn't require you obsessively check the site to see if you're missing anything. It's very easy to just check once a day, or once every couple days, to get all caught up. Sites like Facebook or Twitter want you checking over and over again throughout the days, and with their feeds you can never be sure you've seen everything, while other things you see over and over again. More views leads to more money. From what I understand, podcasts are still using a very similar structure to RSS. But I think that might be under attack as popularity grows and companies are looking to lock people into their specific platforms.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  Yep, google reader was great. Luckily, there are many self-hosted alternatives available, one of them being selfoss: https://selfoss.aditu.de/ https://selfoss.aditu.de/ (not affiliated or anything, just like the reader)
- BeetleB 4y ago
  > Reader's death was a huge blow to the RSS world. As a non Reader user, I can confidently say this statement is false. Nothing in my RSS feeds I was subscribed to changed for years after it shut down. Those relying on RSS and not using Google Reader were not at all impacted by Reader's shut down. Facebook, Twitter, etc is what caused a lot of major sites to drop the investment on RSS. The number of RSS users was always small, but the number of subscribers using these other services grew exponentially.
  - throwaway14356 4y ago
    right, who needs rss when fb provides a convenient tool to stay in touch with visitors/customers.... wait they want me to pay for notifying the userbase i build myself?....wait, they want me to pay what?....what?...
WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
RSS is a negative revenue generator. Every person that uses it is one less person that will see ads. It's great for users but not sites. I suspect Google was losing a lot of ad revenue so they mostly killed support. I ignored it for a long time but decided to start using. Unfortunately that's when website support started to decline. Shame I really liked it.
- bgs113 4y ago
  Unless a site chooses to make RSS, especially full content feeds, part of a subscriber benefit. Ars Technica, for example, provides full content feeds to subscribers, while the general public can access title + preview snippets. Approaching it this way (similar to paid mailing lists) is the best of both worlds, providing revenue incentives to users while removing site ads for users who care about and pay for the content.
  - WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
    True, but most people don't like to pay. So it's hard to sell people on the idea. Maybe it will be possible in the future as people get used to the idea of paying for content.
    - throw0101a 4y ago
      > True, but most people don't like to pay. So it's hard to sell people on the idea. So provide only a title+snippet feed so folks can now when you articles appear on the site, and hopefully go to the 'full' page which has ads. Anything that can drive traffic can be helpful.
    - tpoacher 4y ago
      I think this is too dichotomous, and misses the mark because of it. It's not that people don't like to pay; it's that most people don't like to pay what seems like an unjustifiable amount of money for a service which is otherwise nice but not essential. Especially when the service comes off as "defective by design", in which case rebelliousness kicks in on top of everything. Problems compounding this effect? 1. The default is ads. This really serves to create the impression that your product isn't really worth that much, if all the user is expected to do is ignore a stupid ad on the page, which you're probably not even seeing on the first place if you have an adblocker. Which is why when the alternative monetization is $30 monthly or whatever, you're like "wat? what for?" 2. Companies rarely let you pay for what you're using. instead, it's a subscription, and it's for all the features of the site, including those 500 features you're never going to use. Hence you're asked to pay $30 a month, for an RSS feed you'd otherwise have been happy paying a far more reasonable amount. 3. Most companies don't make it easy for you to know how much you're using the product or if you're paying too much, if it hurts their "milk as much as possible" approach. If you paid cents per RSS, and had a free trial for a month to see what a typical month will cost you, I think most people wouldn't bat an eyelid when it came to paying.
Jaruzel 4y ago
The article talks about the unfriendly way a raw RSS feed is presented in the browser and how users do not know what to do with it. This is easily fixed by adding an XSL stylesheet reference at the top of the RSS XML. The stylesheet not only contains HTML markup to format the XML in a friendly manner, but can also be used to inform the user what to actually do with the RSS feed. The BBC do exactly this on all their RSS feeds.
- mdaniel 4y ago
  > This is easily fixed by adding an XSL stylesheet reference at the top of the RSS XML I think that only works for Firefox, since I can't recall Chrome ever doing the right thing in that setup
  - darekkay 4y ago
    I can confirm that it's working in Chrome and Firefox. I have created an XSL stylesheet for my feed a couple of weeks ago.
    - Jaruzel 4y ago
      I just had a look... nicely done. Mind if I steal it ? :D
      - darekkay 4y ago
        Sure!
    - gerikson 4y ago
      I've recently implemented an Atom feed on a new blog. Do you have any pointers on how to add an XSL stylesheet to it? Edit: linked submission has an example.
- Zababa 4y ago
  Here's the RSS of the BBC: http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/world/europe/rss.xml http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/world/europe/rss.xml
lapcat 4y ago
So tired of people proclaiming RSS "dead". Some of us have been using RSS all along and never stopped using it. There are still plenty of native RSS clients. Google Reader is not RSS. In fact it's better that Google doesn't control RSS; no company should control it. You can talk about how Google killed their RSS support. How Twitter killed their RSS support. How Apple added and then removed RSS from Safari. But RSS lives on, it can't be killed. Many news sites continue to publish RSS feeds, you just need to know how to find them. How many death proclamations does RSS need? At this point it's become a joke, like the old Saturday Night Live Weekend Update, "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead."
- riedel 4y ago
  I agree, it is still the most reliable way to aggregate multiple media sources and luckily far from dead. Does anyone else uses messenger bots to aggregate RSS? I use manybot [1] and it has moved RSS to the modern world for me. [1] https://manybot.io/ https://manybot.io/
  - pkdpic 4y ago
    Not to mention that from what I've read it IS more popular than ever because its used to manage podcasts on apple devices.
    - CharlesW 4y ago
      All podcast apps* on all devices depend on RSS! (*Proprietary audio platforms like Spotify probably do not use RSS, other than to vacuum standards-based audio content into their platform.)
- kradeelav 4y ago
  Agreed, and some paid plans on dedicated RSS readers(1) can turn the rare twitter/instagram feeds into proto-RSS feeds in a pinch. it's lovely and keeps me far, far away from the dark patterns inherent to those sites. (1) Inoreader is the one I use with this capability. worth every penny - moved there after Google Reader died.
ianberdin 4y ago
Yea, but you still can use feed generators from any website using https://rss.app https://rss.app. (friend's startup).
Havoc 4y ago
Its the polar opposite of where the web has gone since. Ads. Tracking. Dark patterns. A/B tested UX. Walled gardens. All the things that make it clean, simple and attractive to the tech inclined are precisely the reason why it is in decline.
PeterStuer 4y ago
It was fantastic for the readers, but it did not have a sustainable businessmodel for the producers. Not enough eyeballs on the actual add stuffed sites when you can just grab the content straight. So Google set out to absolutely dominate the the RSS client space with their free Reader. They succeeded, then just terminated the product. And that was for many the end of the line.
- grey_earthling 4y ago
  I have loads of RSS feeds and I almost universally use them as notifications to go and see the post on the full site. Most RSS readers I'm aware of prominently include an option to view the full page, often inside the same app (and these apps are less likely to have content-blocking add-ons installed, which would block lucrative surveillance). I'm quite happy for RSS feeds to include only a summary/thumbnail/excerpt plus a link to the full page.
MatthiasPortzel 4y ago
> Do people just consume what they’re now fed through Platforms: Facebook, Twitter and Tiktok? Would I have to hawk myself on each platform? I personally read mostly stories on Hacker News, and the author has successfully reached me here. There’s an irony in Hacker News criticizing algorithm based feeds, when it itself is proof that Twitter and Facebook are not the only alternatives to RSS.
- anyfoo 4y ago
  There are no websites, blogs, whatever, that you want to follow? Or do you bookmark those sites and check them manually? Looking at my RSS feed, there are quite a lot of active feeds in there. Some I read immediately when I notice something new in them, some when I feel like it.
indymike 4y ago
I rediscovered RSS earlier this year when I turned over day to day responsibility for marketing (was managing both product and marketing) to a new manager. All of our marketing tools (website, email, etc...) supported RSS, and to my surprise, a lot of third party sites I like to monitor turned out the have a <link> tag with RSS or atom feeds. I did a quick apt search for rss and realized that akregator is still around, set it up, and now I can keep up with all the content the marketing team (and our competition) is cranking out in few minutes.
tannhaeuser 4y ago
Google managed to dominate it, then cancelled Google Reader, taking audiences away; just as they did with Usenet (DejaNews). Corrupt antitrust authorities didn't help, nor did it help with Google acquiring DoubleClick and YouTube, nor with Facebook acquiring WhatsApp. That's what happened.
layer8 4y ago
> Why are […] Microsoft […] so inactive here? Desktop Outlook at least still manages RSS subscriptions. Let’s hope Microsoft doesn’t get “active” and decides to remove that.
- zeeZ 4y ago
  It syncs to the web too. Most of my feeds are GitHub /releases.atom and other software updates.
duplabe 4y ago
Still following a lot of RSS feeds aggregated with Feedly. I don’t know any better way to follow a lot of sites (don’t mention fb, twitter or any other social network, those are not for this…)
the_third_wave 4y ago
I'm using it every day, that's what happens to it. Many sites provide their own feeds and those which don't can often be fed to something like rss-proxy [1] which will create a feed (or several feeds) based on an XPath query [2]. This can be self-hosted so you don't have to inform external entities about your feeding behaviour. [1] https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy [2] e.g. here's how to get Göteborgs Posten (a Swedish newspaper which ditched its feed some time ago) in an RSS feed reader (Atom is also supported through ...&o=Atom) - note that this is an example.org domain so the link does not work as is - https://rssproxy.example.org/api/feed?url=https://gp.se&pContext=//body/div[3]/main[1]/div/div[1]/section&pLink=./article[1]/a[1]&o=RSS&x=shttps://gp.se https://rssproxy.example.org/api/feed?url=https://gp.se&pCon...
mratmeyer 4y ago
If you ever are trying to find the RSS feed URL for a website, I built a free little tool (https://www.rsslookup.com/ https://www.rsslookup.com/) that lets you paste in a website’s URL and it will go out and find a list of available feeds. Some RSS clients have this feature built in, but for websites that don’t have their feed configured correctly this site will check extra paths (ex. /feed) to see if any feeds are available.
- anon_123g987 4y ago
  Thanks! I just found this: https://news.ycombinator.com/rss https://news.ycombinator.com/rss. Perfectly hidden on the site itself. That's what happened to RSS.
  - deleted 4y ago
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- clemens3 4y ago
  And where is the source? Just asking for a friend..
  - mratmeyer 4y ago
    Code quality isn't the greatest(this was my first real React/Next.js project) but I've just published it: https://github.com/mratmeyer/rsslookup https://github.com/mratmeyer/rsslookup.
deleted 4y ago
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marban 4y ago
I've built more than one product that relies on RSS and after ~20 years, I still make a living from it (Currently https://biztoc.com https://biztoc.com) — Let me tell you that the death of RSS has been greatly exaggerated and seeing posts like these every month will neither help nor kill the format.
charcircuit 4y ago
>Why are Google, Microsoft and Apple so inactive here? They did by adding push notifications to their browsers. RSS seems pointless to use now that web push notifications and twitter exist. Twitter solves the scaling problem where you are subscribed to too many things. It has an algorithm to sort your feed so you don't have to waste time scrolling past uninteresting articles from people you've followed if you are following a ton of different content creators.
- the_third_wave 4y ago
  Twitter is a single, centralised source where RSS is decentralised - everyone and his dog can provide a feed which can be followed by the world. No censorship, no dirty tricks with algorithms between you and your audience, no BigTech Beasts™ feeding on your data. In other words, RSS is clearly the superior solution both for source as well as subscribers. Twitter et al might not like this but... who cares?
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    Most people aren't going to be subscribing to things that break twitter's tos and if they do there is still push notifications and other platforms willing to platform that kind of content.
- trowawee 4y ago
  Completely outsourcing your process for surfacing interesting information to someone else's algorithm feels like awful idea (and I actually mostly like Twitter).
- oliwarner 4y ago
  Push notifications being ethereal and unscheduled make for a pretty different content consumption experience; not one I want. Reading RSS feeds is like sitting down to read a pile of newspapers. Perhaps another activity that people don't really do any more, but should.
vandyswa 4y ago
Just ironic, since I saw this entry by way of YC's RSS feed! I feel like RSS dipped, but actually has rebounded a bit in the recent 5-ish years.
- deleted 4y ago
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- BusySkillFool 4y ago
  Same! A kindred RSS spirit
  - trowawee 4y ago
    I also had this come across my feed. Always funny to see articles about the death of RSS in my RSS reader. Honestly, the idea of using the web _without_ RSS is entirely alien to me at this point; I don't understand how people keep track of what they've read, what they're going to read, what they liked, etc. without a feed.
    - trinsic2 4y ago
      I used RSS a bit a few years back. Other than getting a stream of text without ads which was good, I now use reader view for that and bookmarking sites I want to revisit with raindrop. I didn't really see the need for it.. Is there a RSS linux client that has tracking features described above? I want to try it out.
    - j0ba 4y ago
      what reader do you use?
      - trowawee 4y ago
        Feedbin as a backend/web interface, Reeder on iOS.
      - rg111 4y ago
        I use Feeder [0]. Absolutely no complaints. [0]: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/ https://f-droid.org/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/
sys_64738 4y ago
I use inoreader which also supports twitter feeds so they actually get reported in RSS. When Google killed Reader then it killed most support for RSS but there are still plenty of webpages that support it. For me, personally, I only visit webpages that support RSS as I use it exclusively for reading websites. If a webpage doesn't support RSS then that webpage doesn't exist to me.
bscphil 4y ago
Something weird is happening with this HN submission. Despite the submission time saying "5 hours ago" and the time on most of the comments saying "2 hours ago" or less, I clearly remember seeing both this submission and several of the exact comments yesterday. If I hover over "5 hours ago" on the submission at the top, I see the timestamp "2022-06-11T12:51:31". If that's in my time zone, that was 1 day, 10 hours ago. If that's GMT, it was even longer ago. Clearly this submission has "resurfaced" with all of the relative time information changed, but the underlying timestamps on the post preserved. I have archived the page as I see it for future reference: https://web.archive.org/web/20220612175242/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31704074 https://web.archive.org/web/20220612175242/https://news.ycom... Anyone know how this could have happened? @dang?
- lapcat 4y ago
  Yes, the comment timestamps are also wrong. My comment from yesterday now says "2 hours ago".
- r721 4y ago
  I think that's what happens when dang "bumps" submission which was considered interesting but overlooked, but I don't know how exactly that process works, he probably explained it in comments somewhere.
  - bscphil 4y ago
    Thanks - it's kind of weird that it screws up the date, though. Edit: actually, I have a guess. Maybe the moderators don't have access to the algorithm and it isn't that flexible, so the way they hack around it is by changing what the algorithm sees as the posted date of the submission. If the algorithm thinks the submission was made more recently than it actually was, it will bring it back to the front page because the score goes up.
iLoveOncall 4y ago
Google killed Google Reader, which killed RSS. I don't understand the argument of it not being a money-maker, since the publisher of the feed controls the content. In most cases they would just publish an excerpt or even just the title, which forces you to read the article on their website anyway.
- oliwarner 4y ago
  > I don't understand the argument of it not being a money-maker Right? Gathering RSS users together in one place and being able to see what they like based on their feeds, advertise in and around the content freely based on those inferences. If it wasn't a money maker, that's surely more Google's fault than a requirement. Hell, this is a service that people pay for too now. Google really dropped the ball.
Vladimof 4y ago
I still use RSS daily.... Just wish all websites would still have a feed...
jgalvez 4y ago
Nothing, RSS is alive and well. I got to this HN post in a RSS reader. But yeah, if it were up to the BigCos it would be dead already. It's kind of funny to think so many companies sponsored the development of both the RSS2 and Atom specs 15+ years ago, and suddenly they must have realized, "Oopsie, we shouldn't have come anywhere near this thing, EVERYONE BACK AWAY SLOWLY".

83 points by popey 4y ago

My theory is that Google killed Google Reader as a means to push Google+. Reader's death was a huge blow to the RSS world. With a majority of the people on Facebook, Twitter, etc it seems websites are most concerned with syndicating to those platforms, rather than through a shared protocol that anyone can subscribe to. I still use RSS to follow a few sites (with NetNewsWire). I never want to overwhelm myself with sources, but have always found RSS to be a fantastic way to keep on on a site without going to it all the time or seeing the same stories over and over again. I see everything one time and can choose to read it or skip it. I guess that last point may be the problem for websites looking to generate revenue. RSS is going to let you filter down to just what you actually want to read without ads (for the most part). It also doesn't require you obsessively check the site to see if you're missing anything. It's very easy to just check once a day, or once every couple days, to get all caught up. Sites like Facebook or Twitter want you checking over and over again throughout the days, and with their feeds you can never be sure you've seen everything, while other things you see over and over again. More views leads to more money. From what I understand, podcasts are still using a very similar structure to RSS. But I think that might be under attack as popularity grows and companies are looking to lock people into their specific platforms.

deleted 4y ago
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ajsnigrutin 4y ago
Yep, google reader was great. Luckily, there are many self-hosted alternatives available, one of them being selfoss: https://selfoss.aditu.de/ https://selfoss.aditu.de/ (not affiliated or anything, just like the reader)
BeetleB 4y ago
> Reader's death was a huge blow to the RSS world. As a non Reader user, I can confidently say this statement is false. Nothing in my RSS feeds I was subscribed to changed for years after it shut down. Those relying on RSS and not using Google Reader were not at all impacted by Reader's shut down. Facebook, Twitter, etc is what caused a lot of major sites to drop the investment on RSS. The number of RSS users was always small, but the number of subscribers using these other services grew exponentially.
- throwaway14356 4y ago
  right, who needs rss when fb provides a convenient tool to stay in touch with visitors/customers.... wait they want me to pay for notifying the userbase i build myself?....wait, they want me to pay what?....what?...

WheelsAtLarge 4y ago

RSS is a negative revenue generator. Every person that uses it is one less person that will see ads. It's great for users but not sites. I suspect Google was losing a lot of ad revenue so they mostly killed support. I ignored it for a long time but decided to start using. Unfortunately that's when website support started to decline. Shame I really liked it.

bgs113 4y ago
Unless a site chooses to make RSS, especially full content feeds, part of a subscriber benefit. Ars Technica, for example, provides full content feeds to subscribers, while the general public can access title + preview snippets. Approaching it this way (similar to paid mailing lists) is the best of both worlds, providing revenue incentives to users while removing site ads for users who care about and pay for the content.
- WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
  True, but most people don't like to pay. So it's hard to sell people on the idea. Maybe it will be possible in the future as people get used to the idea of paying for content.
  - throw0101a 4y ago
    > True, but most people don't like to pay. So it's hard to sell people on the idea. So provide only a title+snippet feed so folks can now when you articles appear on the site, and hopefully go to the 'full' page which has ads. Anything that can drive traffic can be helpful.
  - tpoacher 4y ago
    I think this is too dichotomous, and misses the mark because of it. It's not that people don't like to pay; it's that most people don't like to pay what seems like an unjustifiable amount of money for a service which is otherwise nice but not essential. Especially when the service comes off as "defective by design", in which case rebelliousness kicks in on top of everything. Problems compounding this effect? 1. The default is ads. This really serves to create the impression that your product isn't really worth that much, if all the user is expected to do is ignore a stupid ad on the page, which you're probably not even seeing on the first place if you have an adblocker. Which is why when the alternative monetization is $30 monthly or whatever, you're like "wat? what for?" 2. Companies rarely let you pay for what you're using. instead, it's a subscription, and it's for all the features of the site, including those 500 features you're never going to use. Hence you're asked to pay $30 a month, for an RSS feed you'd otherwise have been happy paying a far more reasonable amount. 3. Most companies don't make it easy for you to know how much you're using the product or if you're paying too much, if it hurts their "milk as much as possible" approach. If you paid cents per RSS, and had a free trial for a month to see what a typical month will cost you, I think most people wouldn't bat an eyelid when it came to paying.

Jaruzel 4y ago

The article talks about the unfriendly way a raw RSS feed is presented in the browser and how users do not know what to do with it. This is easily fixed by adding an XSL stylesheet reference at the top of the RSS XML. The stylesheet not only contains HTML markup to format the XML in a friendly manner, but can also be used to inform the user what to actually do with the RSS feed. The BBC do exactly this on all their RSS feeds.

mdaniel 4y ago
> This is easily fixed by adding an XSL stylesheet reference at the top of the RSS XML I think that only works for Firefox, since I can't recall Chrome ever doing the right thing in that setup
- darekkay 4y ago
  I can confirm that it's working in Chrome and Firefox. I have created an XSL stylesheet for my feed a couple of weeks ago.
  - Jaruzel 4y ago
    I just had a look... nicely done. Mind if I steal it ? :D
    - darekkay 4y ago
      Sure!
  - gerikson 4y ago
    I've recently implemented an Atom feed on a new blog. Do you have any pointers on how to add an XSL stylesheet to it? Edit: linked submission has an example.
Zababa 4y ago
Here's the RSS of the BBC: http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/world/europe/rss.xml http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/world/europe/rss.xml

lapcat 4y ago

So tired of people proclaiming RSS "dead". Some of us have been using RSS all along and never stopped using it. There are still plenty of native RSS clients. Google Reader is not RSS. In fact it's better that Google doesn't control RSS; no company should control it. You can talk about how Google killed their RSS support. How Twitter killed their RSS support. How Apple added and then removed RSS from Safari. But RSS lives on, it can't be killed. Many news sites continue to publish RSS feeds, you just need to know how to find them. How many death proclamations does RSS need? At this point it's become a joke, like the old Saturday Night Live Weekend Update, "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead."

riedel 4y ago
I agree, it is still the most reliable way to aggregate multiple media sources and luckily far from dead. Does anyone else uses messenger bots to aggregate RSS? I use manybot [1] and it has moved RSS to the modern world for me. [1] https://manybot.io/ https://manybot.io/
- pkdpic 4y ago
  Not to mention that from what I've read it IS more popular than ever because its used to manage podcasts on apple devices.
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    All podcast apps* on all devices depend on RSS! (*Proprietary audio platforms like Spotify probably do not use RSS, other than to vacuum standards-based audio content into their platform.)
kradeelav 4y ago
Agreed, and some paid plans on dedicated RSS readers(1) can turn the rare twitter/instagram feeds into proto-RSS feeds in a pinch. it's lovely and keeps me far, far away from the dark patterns inherent to those sites. (1) Inoreader is the one I use with this capability. worth every penny - moved there after Google Reader died.

ianberdin 4y ago

Yea, but you still can use feed generators from any website using https://rss.app https://rss.app. (friend's startup).

Havoc 4y ago

Its the polar opposite of where the web has gone since. Ads. Tracking. Dark patterns. A/B tested UX. Walled gardens. All the things that make it clean, simple and attractive to the tech inclined are precisely the reason why it is in decline.

PeterStuer 4y ago

It was fantastic for the readers, but it did not have a sustainable businessmodel for the producers. Not enough eyeballs on the actual add stuffed sites when you can just grab the content straight. So Google set out to absolutely dominate the the RSS client space with their free Reader. They succeeded, then just terminated the product. And that was for many the end of the line.

grey_earthling 4y ago
I have loads of RSS feeds and I almost universally use them as notifications to go and see the post on the full site. Most RSS readers I'm aware of prominently include an option to view the full page, often inside the same app (and these apps are less likely to have content-blocking add-ons installed, which would block lucrative surveillance). I'm quite happy for RSS feeds to include only a summary/thumbnail/excerpt plus a link to the full page.

MatthiasPortzel 4y ago

> Do people just consume what they’re now fed through Platforms: Facebook, Twitter and Tiktok? Would I have to hawk myself on each platform? I personally read mostly stories on Hacker News, and the author has successfully reached me here. There’s an irony in Hacker News criticizing algorithm based feeds, when it itself is proof that Twitter and Facebook are not the only alternatives to RSS.

anyfoo 4y ago
There are no websites, blogs, whatever, that you want to follow? Or do you bookmark those sites and check them manually? Looking at my RSS feed, there are quite a lot of active feeds in there. Some I read immediately when I notice something new in them, some when I feel like it.

indymike 4y ago

I rediscovered RSS earlier this year when I turned over day to day responsibility for marketing (was managing both product and marketing) to a new manager. All of our marketing tools (website, email, etc...) supported RSS, and to my surprise, a lot of third party sites I like to monitor turned out the have a <link> tag with RSS or atom feeds. I did a quick apt search for rss and realized that akregator is still around, set it up, and now I can keep up with all the content the marketing team (and our competition) is cranking out in few minutes.

tannhaeuser 4y ago

Google managed to dominate it, then cancelled Google Reader, taking audiences away; just as they did with Usenet (DejaNews). Corrupt antitrust authorities didn't help, nor did it help with Google acquiring DoubleClick and YouTube, nor with Facebook acquiring WhatsApp. That's what happened.

layer8 4y ago

> Why are […] Microsoft […] so inactive here? Desktop Outlook at least still manages RSS subscriptions. Let’s hope Microsoft doesn’t get “active” and decides to remove that.

zeeZ 4y ago
It syncs to the web too. Most of my feeds are GitHub /releases.atom and other software updates.

duplabe 4y ago

Still following a lot of RSS feeds aggregated with Feedly. I don’t know any better way to follow a lot of sites (don’t mention fb, twitter or any other social network, those are not for this…)

the_third_wave 4y ago

I'm using it every day, that's what happens to it. Many sites provide their own feeds and those which don't can often be fed to something like rss-proxy [1] which will create a feed (or several feeds) based on an XPath query [2]. This can be self-hosted so you don't have to inform external entities about your feeding behaviour. [1] https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy [2] e.g. here's how to get Göteborgs Posten (a Swedish newspaper which ditched its feed some time ago) in an RSS feed reader (Atom is also supported through ...&o=Atom) - note that this is an example.org domain so the link does not work as is - https://rssproxy.example.org/api/feed?url=https://gp.se&pContext=//body/div[3]/main[1]/div/div[1]/section&pLink=./article[1]/a[1]&o=RSS&x=shttps://gp.se https://rssproxy.example.org/api/feed?url=https://gp.se&pCon...

mratmeyer 4y ago

If you ever are trying to find the RSS feed URL for a website, I built a free little tool (https://www.rsslookup.com/ https://www.rsslookup.com/) that lets you paste in a website’s URL and it will go out and find a list of available feeds. Some RSS clients have this feature built in, but for websites that don’t have their feed configured correctly this site will check extra paths (ex. /feed) to see if any feeds are available.

anon_123g987 4y ago
Thanks! I just found this: https://news.ycombinator.com/rss https://news.ycombinator.com/rss. Perfectly hidden on the site itself. That's what happened to RSS.
- deleted 4y ago
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clemens3 4y ago
And where is the source? Just asking for a friend..
- mratmeyer 4y ago
  Code quality isn't the greatest(this was my first real React/Next.js project) but I've just published it: https://github.com/mratmeyer/rsslookup https://github.com/mratmeyer/rsslookup.

deleted 4y ago

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marban 4y ago

I've built more than one product that relies on RSS and after ~20 years, I still make a living from it (Currently https://biztoc.com https://biztoc.com) — Let me tell you that the death of RSS has been greatly exaggerated and seeing posts like these every month will neither help nor kill the format.

charcircuit 4y ago

>Why are Google, Microsoft and Apple so inactive here? They did by adding push notifications to their browsers. RSS seems pointless to use now that web push notifications and twitter exist. Twitter solves the scaling problem where you are subscribed to too many things. It has an algorithm to sort your feed so you don't have to waste time scrolling past uninteresting articles from people you've followed if you are following a ton of different content creators.

the_third_wave 4y ago
Twitter is a single, centralised source where RSS is decentralised - everyone and his dog can provide a feed which can be followed by the world. No censorship, no dirty tricks with algorithms between you and your audience, no BigTech Beasts™ feeding on your data. In other words, RSS is clearly the superior solution both for source as well as subscribers. Twitter et al might not like this but... who cares?
- charcircuit 4y ago
  Most people aren't going to be subscribing to things that break twitter's tos and if they do there is still push notifications and other platforms willing to platform that kind of content.
trowawee 4y ago
Completely outsourcing your process for surfacing interesting information to someone else's algorithm feels like awful idea (and I actually mostly like Twitter).
oliwarner 4y ago
Push notifications being ethereal and unscheduled make for a pretty different content consumption experience; not one I want. Reading RSS feeds is like sitting down to read a pile of newspapers. Perhaps another activity that people don't really do any more, but should.

vandyswa 4y ago

Just ironic, since I saw this entry by way of YC's RSS feed! I feel like RSS dipped, but actually has rebounded a bit in the recent 5-ish years.

deleted 4y ago
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BusySkillFool 4y ago
Same! A kindred RSS spirit
- trowawee 4y ago
  I also had this come across my feed. Always funny to see articles about the death of RSS in my RSS reader. Honestly, the idea of using the web _without_ RSS is entirely alien to me at this point; I don't understand how people keep track of what they've read, what they're going to read, what they liked, etc. without a feed.
  - trinsic2 4y ago
    I used RSS a bit a few years back. Other than getting a stream of text without ads which was good, I now use reader view for that and bookmarking sites I want to revisit with raindrop. I didn't really see the need for it.. Is there a RSS linux client that has tracking features described above? I want to try it out.
  - j0ba 4y ago
    what reader do you use?
    - trowawee 4y ago
      Feedbin as a backend/web interface, Reeder on iOS.
    - rg111 4y ago
      I use Feeder [0]. Absolutely no complaints. [0]: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/ https://f-droid.org/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/

sys_64738 4y ago

I use inoreader which also supports twitter feeds so they actually get reported in RSS. When Google killed Reader then it killed most support for RSS but there are still plenty of webpages that support it. For me, personally, I only visit webpages that support RSS as I use it exclusively for reading websites. If a webpage doesn't support RSS then that webpage doesn't exist to me.

bscphil 4y ago

Something weird is happening with this HN submission. Despite the submission time saying "5 hours ago" and the time on most of the comments saying "2 hours ago" or less, I clearly remember seeing both this submission and several of the exact comments yesterday. If I hover over "5 hours ago" on the submission at the top, I see the timestamp "2022-06-11T12:51:31". If that's in my time zone, that was 1 day, 10 hours ago. If that's GMT, it was even longer ago. Clearly this submission has "resurfaced" with all of the relative time information changed, but the underlying timestamps on the post preserved. I have archived the page as I see it for future reference: https://web.archive.org/web/20220612175242/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31704074 https://web.archive.org/web/20220612175242/https://news.ycom... Anyone know how this could have happened? @dang?

lapcat 4y ago
Yes, the comment timestamps are also wrong. My comment from yesterday now says "2 hours ago".
r721 4y ago
I think that's what happens when dang "bumps" submission which was considered interesting but overlooked, but I don't know how exactly that process works, he probably explained it in comments somewhere.
- bscphil 4y ago
  Thanks - it's kind of weird that it screws up the date, though. Edit: actually, I have a guess. Maybe the moderators don't have access to the algorithm and it isn't that flexible, so the way they hack around it is by changing what the algorithm sees as the posted date of the submission. If the algorithm thinks the submission was made more recently than it actually was, it will bring it back to the front page because the score goes up.

iLoveOncall 4y ago

Google killed Google Reader, which killed RSS. I don't understand the argument of it not being a money-maker, since the publisher of the feed controls the content. In most cases they would just publish an excerpt or even just the title, which forces you to read the article on their website anyway.

oliwarner 4y ago
> I don't understand the argument of it not being a money-maker Right? Gathering RSS users together in one place and being able to see what they like based on their feeds, advertise in and around the content freely based on those inferences. If it wasn't a money maker, that's surely more Google's fault than a requirement. Hell, this is a service that people pay for too now. Google really dropped the ball.

Vladimof 4y ago

I still use RSS daily.... Just wish all websites would still have a feed...

jgalvez 4y ago

Nothing, RSS is alive and well. I got to this HN post in a RSS reader. But yeah, if it were up to the BigCos it would be dead already. It's kind of funny to think so many companies sponsored the development of both the RSS2 and Atom specs 15+ years ago, and suddenly they must have realized, "Oopsie, we shouldn't have come anywhere near this thing, EVERYONE BACK AWAY SLOWLY".