22 ms·

This is the year of the RSS reader?

460 points by alexzeitler 4y ago

senectus1 4y ago
I setup a selfhosted RSS reader called FreshRSS... I migrated from reader to feedly to this and have never been happier. Self hosting services via docker has been a game changer for me.
nitin-pai 4y ago
I don’t know about the “year of…” but RSS readers are definitely the best option to consume information in a manner that leaves the individual with control, while being exposed to a broad range of thinking. And consuming content from a broad range of media. I do hope 2023 becomes the year of the comeback of RSS.
- kgwxd 4y ago
  For me the biggest selling point of RSS is never having to rescan over feed items I've already read, or decided to skip, to find the new stuff. Another big one is that there's an end to the list. Neither of those are a huge deal for low-volume feeds but for HN and Reddit, they're priceless to me.
- deltarholamda 4y ago
  >consume information in a manner that leaves the individual with control This is both the main feature, and the biggest obstacle. The people with the money do no want the individual to have control. Thus it has always been and shall always be. Folks are banging on Elon because they feel he's using Twitter to manipulate, but it's not like Twitter was different pre-Elon. Elon simply gave The Man a face, voice and smell. Back in the blogosphere (I hate that word) days, a lot of RSS was floating around. It wasn't very good, as RSS implementations varied a lot. But when it was working well, it was so good. If I have a complaint about returning to RSS it would be that we will return to the days of clickbaity headlines.
  - ascagnel_ 4y ago
    > we will return to the days of clickbaity headlines We entered those days and have yet to leave. If anything, the rise of social media (at RSS's expense) turbo-charged clickbait headlines, since now it's easy to measure engagement around those stories, both in terms of views and in terms of comments/likes/shares/etc.
    - tracker1 4y ago
      Gated through fewer sources providing much more analytics definitely changes the game there.
  - _xivi 4y ago
    > If I have a complaint about returning to RSS it would be that we will return to the days of clickbaity headlines Wait, what do you mean? Clickbaiting (and borderline misinformation) has been getting only worse ever since
    - deltarholamda 4y ago
      Fair enough, "return" is not the correct word here. Maybe "we will solidify the importance of clickbaity headlines"? I first noticed the up-tick of clickbait headlines in the salad days of RSS. Due to this, I tend to ignore headlines these days, because I was trained to assume the headline was complete nonsense. So my internal metrics are a bit wonky.
- jfengel 4y ago
  I don't understand the love of RSS readers. The basic concept is trivial; you could write one in five minutes. It doesn't seem radically different from any of thousands of news aggregator type web sites, including HN. I read upthread that Google Reader had a social mechanism for recommending feeds to friends. That's great for discovery, but it still hardly seems earth-shaking. It feels an awful lot like a rose-colored-glasses situation, where something existed that wasn't horrible but doesn't reappear because it wasn't all that great, either. What is it I'm missing?
  - reaperducer 4y ago
    It doesn't seem radically different from any of thousands of news aggregator type web sites, including HN. It allows you to tailor your aggregation, and create you own aggregation of topics if there isn't another aggregator out there. Are you into kumquats, ancient Mesopotamia, and The Buzzcocks? You're not going to find a web aggregator for that. But you can put together several RSS feeds into your own aggregation.
    - jfengel 4y ago
      Couldn't I just subscribe to kumquats, ancient Mesopotamia, and The Buzzcocks groups on Facebook? Yeah, I know "the algorithm" means that I'd miss some things and have other things injected into my feed, but it doesn't sound like the total content is radically different. I understand the idea of wanting to feel more control by seeing precisely and exactly the groups you asked for, but I feel like it's not really a radical change in terms of content.
      - vanilla_nut 4y ago
        Facebook shoves content I don't care about in my face, and frequently hides content from pages and people that I do care about (who don'y pay Zuck's troll toll or play visibility optimization games like emphasizing useless Story content). My RSS reader (FreshRSS, self-hosted, and NetNewsWire on macOS/iOS) shows me all posts from all feeds I've chosen to subscribe to. Nothing more, nothing less. No ads, no murky VC cloud funding -- I self host on my own raspberry pi -- and no privacy concerns. Social media is kind of like a flaky RSS feed with comments from people I don't know or care about that sometimes doesn't show me content I DO want to see but also constantly shows me ads, tries to manipulate me into spending more time browsing, and hoovers up as much data as humanly possible. Oh, and it changes the UI every 6-8 months in seemingly random UX a/b tests in the name of "optimization." And it radicalizes my older relatives politically. That seems like a pretty shitty RSS feed to me.
clircle 4y ago
The best thing about rss is that after i read my 30 unread articles, i can just close my laptop and walk away. Who ever said that twitter was going to make rss obsolete has never experienced this digital freedom.
sherlock_h 4y ago
Funny timing - I just switched all my email newsletter subscriptions that I used to read on Gmail Web to Inoreader. The reason was fairly simple - I wanted a better way to organize my newsletters and make it feel more “reading list” like than “task list” like. On email, unopened newsletters always felt like tasks.
- kevincox 4y ago
  My simple solution is to filter them all into a "News" folder that doesn't notify. Then I can just open it whenever I have some spare time.
  - kshay 4y ago
    Agreed—I love RSS, but don’t really see “organizing newsletters” as its killer app, or experience “newsletters come via email” as a pain point. Filters seem to serve basically the same purpose.
    - kevincox 4y ago
      Yeah, I see RSS and newsletters as largely equivalent technologies. The have minor technical differences but 99% of the read differences are social. Pro Feeds: 1. Once you subscribe the publisher has no way to contact you. Email relies on the publisher being honest. 2. Provides some history (or full history with archiving/pagination atom extensions) Pro Newsletter: 3. Push based system by default (Feeds can use WebSub but it isn't that common). 4. ~everyone already has it set up. At the end of the day they both transmit blobs of HTML to you with some minimal metadata.
perardi 4y ago
As someone who has used RSS since NetNewsWire looked like this… https://ranchero.com/images/nnw2/nnwtoolbarhidden.png https://ranchero.com/images/nnw2/nnwtoolbarhidden.png …get off my lawn, kids. And then let grandpa here hitch up his britches even higher: people still lament the end of Google Reader for a reason. In retrospect, it was the least toxic social network. You added your friends, their recommendations bubbled up in the interface, so you saw cool new stuff. Was that perfect? Of course not—you were still in a filter bubble, and what bleeds, leads. But, it surfaced interesting stories, it let you follow news sources you wanted to see, and it did so without the screaming madness of Twitter and Facebook.
- JKolios 4y ago
  Google killing of Reader was the symbolic point where the business plan of the internet moved from "Let's sell stuff to users!" to "Let's sell users to advertisers!".
  - b33j0r 4y ago
    Thank you for making my exact comment. I was too stressed out today and you nailed it ;)
  - amadeuspagel 4y ago
    Google Reader was a free product, subsidized by google ads.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - tomrod 4y ago
      Google Reader was a service that brought in good will, subsidized by people trusting Google to "not be evil" and provide useful services. This subsequently turned into people using Google's money-making products, like ads. At least to most I've spoken with on the subject (a few dozen, so informal straw poll), killing Google Reader turned people's opinion of Google from scrappy startup to untrustworthy behemoth.
college_physics 4y ago
If technology was at the service of the individual rather than the other way aroud, RSS would have been a centerpiece of our information universe, with something like ActivityPub the path to enhance information exchange in a bidirectional way when that is applicable...
Group_B 4y ago
Any recommendations for an RSS reader?
- semasad 4y ago
  Reader: https://readwise.io/read https://readwise.io/read
- ink_13 4y ago
  I like The Old Reader: https://theoldreader.com/ https://theoldreader.com/ It's largely a reimplementation of the Google Reader experience.
  - jrochkind1 4y ago
    I can't find any pricing info, what's the deal?
    - darreninthenet 4y ago
      I use the free version and for my needs it's fine (basically 100 feed limit and after a while old posts drop off the feed, I'm not sure how long). For 25 dollars a year you get 500 feeds and one year retention (up to 1000 posts per feed) and you can pay more for a larger number of feeds.
- nitin-pai 4y ago
  I’ve been using miniflux, and it’s quite cool. David Winer’s Feedland is nifty too.
- tommoor 4y ago
  NetNewsWire if you're on macOS/iPhone
  - onnnon 4y ago
    I use this as well, source on GitHub: https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire
semasad 4y ago
The main problem I found with RSS in these days is the lack of access to they. I want access the RSS of NYT, where I find it? I want X blog, where? After the web migrated from RSS to paywalls, I have no option to just choice some news webs/blogs and focus on that.
- FrontAid 4y ago
  > I want access the RSS of NYT, where I find it? https://www.nytimes.com/rss https://www.nytimes.com/rss
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ro-ka 4y ago
  With Feedbin (which I use, guess others work similar), pasting the website URL is enough. It’ll scan for feeds and that’s it.
- weberer 4y ago
  Generally they have a RSS icon along side the Twitter, Facebook, etc icons. It looks like a wi-fi symbol. They're also often linked in the footer.
- kevincox 4y ago
  If you paste https://www.nytimes.com/ https://www.nytimes.com/ into your feed reader it will likely discover https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml automatically. This tends to work very well for most blogs and many sites. I often just assume that there is a feed available and past article URLs into my feed reader, most of the time the feed is automatically discovered. Back in the day browsers had icons that would light up when a feed was available, however all of the most popular browsers have removed this feature. You can add it back with an extension easily if you are so inclined.
  - semasad 4y ago
    Sure, NYT is an easy one, but if you try some more "expensive" (they really do not enjoy your free read) like Bloomberg the your RSS feed will keep small.
AstixAndBelix 4y ago
Newsletters and RSS feeds are not the same thing. If I send a newsletter to a list of subscribers then, as long as their email server receives the email, they can retrieve it and read it whenever they want. But most importantly, if I don't set up an archive of all the newsletters, then only the people who subscribed will ever be able to read it. On the other hand it's impossible to achieve the same level of one-timeness with RSS. You either publish the feed for a limited amount of time (and the subscribers have to get lucky and synchronize their feeds during this time window), or you publish the feed indefinitely (which maybe you wouldn't want to do)
- kevincox 4y ago
  This is a very niche difference. In general once you send something "to the public" you can't expect that it stays private. So if you need to keep items on your feed for a few weeks after publishing it will have a near-zero difference to the availability of that piece and be picked up by almost all subscribers.
- charles_f 4y ago
  > it's impossible to achieve the same level of one-timeness with RSS. No it's not (not that I can really think of why you'd want that). Generate user-bound rss feed urls with GUIDs or a signed "start date" that provides only entries since that date. That can also allow you to track how many times that url gets retrieved and eventually block it if it's too many. Or have the rss reader only send an excerpt and have people auth before they access the content on your website. >most importantly, if I don't set up an archive of all the newsletters, then only the people who subscribed will ever be able to read it. On the other end once the email left your box, you don't control it anymore, and I can give you a well hidden hack that allows someone not subscribed to read it if they know someone subscribed.
asicsp 4y ago
Seems like RSS comeback gets discussed often: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=RSS https://hn.algolia.com/?q=RSS
hed 4y ago
I tried to set this up earlier this year, but what I realized I really wanted was RSS + change detection for some discussion forums and other sites that didn't offer RSS. That companies like feedly didn't seem to offer this functionality but were trying to emphasize social networking and tagging my articles (for who?) made it easy to walk away after the trial.
- thirdplace_ 4y ago
  For sites that don't offer feeds you may want to check out rss-bridge: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/ https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/
HissingMachine 4y ago
So the whole opinion piece hinges on unpopularity of Twitter? Bold move.
frouge 4y ago
What we need to revive RSS is have a true integration into browsers. Your bookmarks would display the numbers of unread posts and there is probably more great stuff to do.
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  That was removed from Firefox in version 64 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks
- kevincox 4y ago
  Honestly just returning the icon that appeared when the site had a feed would be a huge win. Browser integrated feed-readers and bookmark notifications were nice but dedicated RSS readers are probably going to be better. You can click the feed icon and the browser can redirect you to your preferred feed reader. There are extensions that do this but having it built-in would make it widely available and easier to set up.
- Springtime 4y ago
  Vivaldi has had an in-built RSS client for years now, taking after Opera's original feature years back. Edit: link since I notice they have a page about it. https://vivaldi.com/features/feed-reader/ https://vivaldi.com/features/feed-reader/
- TrevorAustin 4y ago
  Without having dipped into the code before, how hard would it be run a fork of Chromium that did this?
- timbit42 4y ago
  Any RSS support I've seen in web browser sucked. Use a real RSS reader like QuiteRSS and you won't care to have it in your browser.
nickdothutton 4y ago
One of the problems with RSS is lack of a feedback loop from mere reader to content creator. Said another way, RSS doesn't have a reply function and that makes it harder to iterate around user feedback. Some of which can be very valuable.
- vidanay 4y ago
  I don't want content creators to shape their content according to feedback and popularity. I want content creators who shape their content according to their interests and desires and experiences.
  - JonathanBeuys 4y ago
    Then why did you write this feedback?
    - reaperducer 4y ago
      Because posting in a forum doesn't make you a content creator, and this isn't an RSS feed?
  - anthonypasq 4y ago
    I feel like there's been an extremely strong push in our current culture against actual artistic visionairies that's being driven by toxic and infantile "fan communities" that screech endlessly on the internet about anything they don't like. Art apparently isn't about a creative realizing their unique vision, its about doing things mouthbreathers like. People seem to be viscerally offended when someone unapologetically makes something that isn't for them. Bring back gatekeeping.
- reaperducer 4y ago
  One of the problems with RSS is lack of a feedback loop from mere reader to content creator. That's a feature, not a bug. It's the difference between publish/subscribe and social chat. When people unsubscribe, there's your feedback. Just like with newspapers.
- 4y ago
pwillia7 4y ago
Chrome in Android has a built in RSS reader in chrome now labeled the 'following' tab in your new tab page. I've been using this with great success lately. The key for me was to pick only a few really high quality sources instead of 99999 sources. https://9to5google.com/2021/10/08/chrome-rss-web-feed/ https://9to5google.com/2021/10/08/chrome-rss-web-feed/ There's a flag for desktop too. You can enable 'Feed' in the sidebar, but it doesn't work for me on any platform at the moment.
- Jackevansevo 4y ago
  How long will this feature last until it inevitably gets canned?
  - bombolo 4y ago
    It needs some adoption first… no point in canning something nobody uses. It'd be too simple.
    - pwillia7 4y ago
      yeah they'll have to wait until they ship physical RSS readers out
  - mananaysiempre 4y ago
    The longevity of Chrome features generally seems to be much better than that of Google products in general. I can only think of a few major removals: FTP, NSAPI and the ongoing MV2 debacle, Chrome apps, Gears; I don’t remember if any variant of NaCl ever shipped as non-beta, and I’m sure Dart-in-<script> never did.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I don't know. For a "few" high quality sources you can just check the sources directly. For me, the big win for RSS in the blogosphere world was you could follow a lot of sources that published pretty sporadically but sometimes had interesting things when they did publish.
Maxburn 4y ago
Podcasts are all RSS too, lots of hidden use of RSS out there. https://podcastindex.org/ https://podcastindex.org/
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  I got a Firefox extension that looks for rss in a page and gives you a little icon in the titlebar. Some webmasters don't even bother to put the link in their page visibly.
  - Maxburn 4y ago
    Nice, I wonder why they wouldn't surface that? Speculating they got it included in their CMS and decided they didn't want it.
    - acidburnNSA 4y ago
      I'm sure you're right
    - dageshi 4y ago
      It's on by default in wordpress I think, but most site builders either don't know or have forgotten, most probably have no clue it's running.
    - kevincox 4y ago
      Back in the day all major browser provided their own "feed available" icon so including an extra icon on your site was pointless. The browser's icon was consistent across sites instead of the user needing to look around for a feed link on your site. Of course now most popular browsers don't show this icon so it is more important to advertise it yourself. (Although there are extensions to bring this icon back)
  - reaperducer 4y ago
    I got a Firefox extension that looks for rss in a page and gives you a little icon in the titlebar. This used to be the default condition for all web browsers. Even Safari did it. I forget which browser dropped that feature first. My guess is that it was Google Chrome, and everyone else just did the same thing because following is easier than leading.
BruceEel 4y ago
Cool, what does your list of favorite feeds look like? Please share.
- weberer 4y ago
  https://hackaday.com/blog/feed/ https://hackaday.com/blog/feed/ https://news.ycombinator.com/rss https://news.ycombinator.com/rss https://api.quantamagazine.org/feed/ https://api.quantamagazine.org/feed/ https://www.wowhead.com/news/rss/wotlk-classic https://www.wowhead.com/news/rss/wotlk-classic https://alerts.weather.gov/ https://alerts.weather.gov/ (chose your region) https://www.pine64.org/feed/ https://www.pine64.org/feed/ https://www.factorio.com/blog/rss https://www.factorio.com/blog/rss
  - BruceEel 4y ago
    Awesome, thx!
- kevincox 4y ago
  I have built my list up over time. Generally I will discover new stuff from hacker news or other aggregators (which I browse once I am caught up on my feeds). I add things to my list very often, but also am quick to unsubscribe if I'm not enjoying the content. The types of content I tend to follow are: - Videos. YouTube, Nebula, PeerTube and a few other sources. - Blogs. These are mostly personal blogs that I have found interesting articles on. A few company blogs too. - Social media searches. This is more for productivity but I follow a bunch of searches across various social media sites to stay up to date on specific topics. - Comics - Software releases. I have very few high-volume sources. I much prefer quality content from hundreds of sources instead of frequent content from a few big sources like news sites. I realize I didn't answer your question but that is sort of intended. Each person's favourite feeds will be different and depend on your interests. The best way to get stared is just to start subscribing to the things that you are enjoying today. Then over time you will build up a list of things that interest you. Especially when getting started it makes sense to over-subscribe, you can always prune down if you had a "false positive".
  - 4y ago
moolcool 4y ago
This is the year of the linux desktop
- Valord 4y ago
  Lol I see what you did there
Mark33 4y ago
The panic about right wing intrusion of social media ownership keeps getting to new highs, now even predicts a come back of RSS because woke people don't want to be seen using Twitter any more... #fail #them
okaleniuk 4y ago
Is managing email really an unsolved problem? I mean, every email client has already way too many "organizing thingies": folders, filters, bookmarks, categories, labels, stars, flags, and archives. What value RSS brings alone except from being different and therefore having its separate tab in a client?
- kevincox 4y ago
  No, I don't think there is much fundamental difference. Some RSS readers support inbound emails as a feed source and I get my RSS feeds delivered via email. I think the main reason newsletters are "winning" over RSS right now is that everyone has an email address but not everyone has a feed reader configured. It provides an easy onboarding where you can start getting it in your inbox available on all of your devices and once that becomes annoying you can easily set up filters to organize.
- RavingGoat 4y ago
  I thought email was dead. I treat email like I treat voice messages, they are just out there waiting to be deleted without ever being read/listened to. Do people actually use email still outside of a work situation?
  - Hackbraten 4y ago
    A federated near-instant messenger, not being controlled by a single corporate entity, designed on top of a well-defined Internet standard, with both commercial and open-source clients existing for every platform?
marban 4y ago
RSS is alive and kicking. I created a little Web 2.0 phenomenon named Popurls and recently launched https://biztoc.com https://biztoc.com — ~65% of the site is still RSS driven.
- codazoda 4y ago
  Tell us greenies a little more? I don’t use RSS for writing or reading, but maybe I should. Is this consuming other RSS feeds? Is it publishing a feed and 65% of its traffic comes from feed consumers? That would be nice, since I don’t want to be at the whim of search engines anymore (for blog type content).
- kishmat 4y ago
  Great website, Sir. I have a question, can't we create our own new category "Tech News" like "Crypto" and "Media"
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jawns 4y ago
Here are just some of the reasons why RSS fell out of favor... 1) It's great for consumers of content, but not so great for content producers or RSS reader vendors, in terms of monetization or even analytics. 2) It's great for tech-savvy folks, but not so great for mass market reach, and the incentives to make mass market reach feasible are low. 3) It worked better back when most content was free. Paywalls are a more sustainable business model, but aren't very compatible with RSS.
- wffurr 4y ago
  1) Newsblur has been a nice lifestyle business for Sam Clay. I suppose it won't ever be a billion dollar unicorn, but it works beautifully for consumers of content.
_Algernon_ 4y ago
Is it also going to be the year of the Linux desktop?
- timbit42 4y ago
  Yes. It's called SteamDeck.
thirdplace_ 4y ago
I built a small tool that helps to discover feed urls. It uses various hardcoded and dynamic rules: https://discovery.thirdplace.no/?q=https://www.tek.no https://discovery.thirdplace.no/?q=https://www.tek.no It's FOSS and has an http json api.
throw0101a 4y ago
When saying "RSS" are we talking about the protocol/file format, or using it proverbially for 'syndication'/feeds? Any reason(s) to use RSS (0.9x/1.0/2.0) over Atom (RFC 4287)? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed
- kevincox 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure they are doing the latter. I'm not aware of any feed readers that don't accept Atom and you will get much more consistent results as it is more clearly specified.
- tomrod 4y ago
  Syndication. Virtually no one refers to a protocol or file format in common jargon and dialect.
- Turing_Machine 4y ago
  Yes, Atom is fine (preferable, even...at least to me). We're probably stuck with "RSS" as the generic term, though, for much the same reason we still say "making a record" for music or the floppy disk icon for "save".
photochemsyn 4y ago
Some intros on how to build your own RSS feed (structure of the XML file): https://www.xul.fr/en-xml-rss.html https://www.xul.fr/en-xml-rss.html https://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_rss.asp https://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_rss.asp However, I notice that JSON feeds are also an option and might be preferable for various reasons (i.e. Python's json module makes parsing easy, etc.): https://www.jsonfeed.org/version/1.1/ https://www.jsonfeed.org/version/1.1/ As far as Twitter, I'm not sure it was ever that great of an information source. Musk has at least said they're trying to improve Twitter search, but who knows what it will look like. It's still pretty weak at present. Why corporate media journalists and politicians flocked to Twitter in the past is unclear, unless that it was that Twitter's structure was deliberately designed for propaganda distribution. The low character count and leader-follower structure helps with the standard propaganda routine, which typically involves reducing complex arguments and ideas to the point that a small child could understand them, and then repeating that dumbed-down argument over and over while browbeating anyone who raises objections.
- notpushkin 4y ago
  Ideally you'll want to make both. RSS is most widely supported, while JSON Feed is (arguably) easier to parse.
- kevincox 4y ago
  I'd recommend just using Atom. It is as widely supported as RSS but far better specified so your readers will have a consistent result. JSON Feed is fine but provides very little benefit and isn't as widely supported. Having multiple feed links for the same content will give some users analysis paralysis. (What we really need is an update to the auto-discovery spec that says "these two feeds have the exact same content, if you support both formats only show your preferred format to the user") I wrote up a guide for my recommended RSS Best Practices which while not aimed at how to create your own feed contains enough information to do that. https://kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-practices/ https://kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-practices/
  - ihuman 4y ago
riwsky 4y ago
What a coincidence—this is also the year of the Linux desktop!
- yreg 4y ago
  And that desktop is Steam Deck.
longnguyen 4y ago
I think the reason RSS is not appealing to content creators is because authors don't "own" the email list. And it's quite difficult to have paid content delivered via RSS (still pretty much open/sharable) But from reader perspective, RSS is awesome. You don't have to deal with all the email subscriptions double opt-in etc. The ability to unsubscribe/resubscribe in one click is fantastic. And you have number of good RSS readers to fit your need. Pro tip: you can add “/feed” to any Substack publication to subscribe to its RSS feed To my surprised, RSS is still my most requested feature for my little SaaS[0] I wrote a short blog post on how to read RSS on Kindle here[1] [0]: https://ktool.io https://ktool.io [1]: https://ktool.io/blog/read-rss-on-kindle https://ktool.io/blog/read-rss-on-kindle
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  > authors don't "own" the email list Well, what does this gain them? People still can count how many readers they have, and still have a dedicated readership (and no antagonistic middleman filtering them). What difference does the list of those people make?
  - longnguyen 4y ago
    Segmentation. You can send offer to a segment of your audience. I don't think you can do that with RSS unless you have a sophisticated setup where each reader has a slightly different feed url.
- charles_f 4y ago
  > And it's quite difficult to have paid content delivered via RSS (still pretty much open/sharable) Excerpt that you can then read fully on the website after authentication?
  - longnguyen 4y ago
    Not the best UX for readers IMO. That defeats the purpose of a RSS "reader".
kkfx 4y ago
The year of RSS reader will be when users decide to be users again instead of lusers (from Simon's Chronicles CL definition), witch unfortunately it's not something really in agenda...
pixelmonkey 4y ago
I used to be a big fan of RSS readers, and I even built one, of sorts, as a startup at one point in 2009. But these days, I tend to just use Instapaper. I have the plugin installed in all my browsers, and if I'm looking for something to read, I swipe thru my saves using the Instapaper Chrome web interface, Android app, or (most commonly) iPad app. I have Instapaper and Readwise synced up, which adds a little extra incentive (highlights) for doing things that way. How do I find stuff to Instapaper? These days, it's TechMeme, Hacker News, Lobste.rs, Reddit, Twitter, Google News, Apple News (on iPad). Heavily weighted to the first four sources, with #1-#4 being maybe 80% of my saved links that come from aggregators. Recently I have been beta testing Readwise Reader. It's probably as good a reading experience as I could currently imagine (it's sort of Instapaper on steroids, and it even syncs with Instapaper). But, even still, I find the entire category a little tired. The big issue is source quality. It's harder to find a small group of regular bloggers that might make a curated RSS reader experience worthwhile. When I was younger, I'd read Joel Spolsky, Paul Graham, and dozens of developer blogs, and that was "enough". These days, to get the same sort of volume and quality, I'd need to curate hundreds (maybe thousands) of sources. It's also sad, but true, that the average blog on the internet is simply no longer publishing new posts. That is, the typical blog with an interesting archive is likely abandoned in terms of new posts going online, or has the publishing rate reduced to an annual trickle. So it's not worth my time to predict and curate the exceptions.
sudo_navendu 4y ago
I love using RSS to subscribe to blogs. Many of my favorite personal developer blogs have RSS feeds, and I have them on my blog. I'm currently using Readwise to get all my feeds in one place. This filters out a lot of noise prevalent in social media like Twitter.
seydor 4y ago
going around in circles is bad news In reality, content will be over in 2 years. AI is just better content, well sourced, well written and quantifiably intentional. Humans no longer need to apply for making content just like we dont hunt for meat
- Veen 4y ago
  > better content, well sourced, well written and quantifiable intentional I've not seen AI create "better content" than even a moderately competent human, let alone an expert writer and researcher. How do you know AI content is well-sourced when it's generated by an AI which makes it up based on a statistical model? Well-written is somewhat subjective, but ChatGTP is repetitive, overly verbose, and the opposite of intentional. AI content will be great for repetitive copy like eCommerce descriptions, simple business and sports reports, and maybe API documentation, but it won't replace human writers in most contexts humans care about.
  - seydor 4y ago
    Cgpt is great at writing like a good copywriter, which is already above average human. When journalists lose their advantage, it becomes a matter of putting out there novel ideas, which models can do, too. The 'journalism' of the future will be basically curation of ideas. And if we have an overabundance of good content then attention will shift away from it because it gets boring.
    - Veen 4y ago
      I am a professional copywriter and technical writer, so I have a dog in this race. But I don't agree that Cgpt is anywhere near a professional standard. It can produce mostly coherent and correct English, but not concise, creative, or empathetic English. It's good enough to replace human writing in some scenarios, but far from all.
toastal 4y ago
Coincidentally, I got Newsboat+Podboat mostly set up today on NixOS to disconnect from the feed cycle that wants me to continually engage. The sad fact was learning after not having subbed to anything after two years to find a lot of news channels, like AP and Reuters, have stopped publishing feeds.
sergioreus 4y ago
[dead]
LightG 4y ago
Two RSS threads on HN frontpage today? Great! RSS never went away but I hope it becommes much more prominent again. The last lost decade of walled-garden social has been a relative disaster.
miiiiiike 4y ago
The "Year of RSS" people have been sounding like the "Year of Linux Desktop" people for a while now. It's not coming back. It just isn't.
- contravariant 4y ago
  I'm not sure it ever left. There are still RSS feeds around, though it would be better if their use was more widespread.
- ravenstine 4y ago
  It only has a shot of coming back if enough people decide that Google searches are pointless. We might be getting there, actually. I'm not optimistic, but the idea that Google search results suck seems to be more mainstream in the last year outside of the HN crowd. Oh, I say this because Google and other search engines that derive from it are unlikely to yield results that are worth reading or subscribing to. If this were the Google of 2006, RSS might have been something they'd bake into their results. They'd never allow that today. It's all about serving ads on GPT generated bloogs now.
delecti 4y ago
I'm a happy user of an RSS reader, but the chance of having a "year of the RSS reader" died with Google Reader, and nothing has come along to make it any more likely. Most people want centralization and to not have to mess with things.
- timbit42 4y ago
  Why couldn't someone else recreate Google Reader?
luoc 4y ago
But how do I get that all caps scifi font to my reader? It's just not the same...
- timbit42 4y ago
  Use an RSS reader that supports custom fonts, like QuiteRSS.
MobileVet 4y ago
The first thing we did when we entered mobile in 2004 was build an RSS reader for 'dumb' phones. It was the perfect way to bring information to very limited phones. All the extra stuff was stripped away, just the content remained. The phone could handle it in a way that the WAP browsers would fail. It is hard to see the value, beyond advertising / affiliate sales, to just about anything that has been added to the modern web experience since that time. I still use 'reader mode' on Safari to bring it back to the basics.
charles_f 4y ago
I hate newsletters. They break my workflow, and I don't want to redesign my workflow for the handful of bloggers who insist on making a newsletter instead of a feed. I'm just not using my email in the same way I use news or blogs. I made a couple of tentatives to build a mail to rss system and stopped both times because I lacked the motivation, then suggested it to feedly while I was using them and they added it to the product... While I was moving to self-hosted miniflux.
- gpanders 4y ago
  I’m a happy user of https://notifier.in/ https://notifier.in/ for this purpose.
- longnguyen 4y ago
  You may find this service useful (not an affiliate, just found it recently) https://kill-the-newsletter.com https://kill-the-newsletter.com
  - charles_f 4y ago
    Thanks!
- DevX101 4y ago
  I setup filters in gmail to archive my newsletters, add the label 'Newsletters', and forward them to my RSS reader app (in this case Readwise (paid), which has a personalized email that accepts inbound traffic). Any new newsletters I sign up with myname+news@gmail.com. That suffix means it still arrives at my email address, but I can use that recipient to create filters. I never see these emails unless I click on the 'Newsletters' label. This keeps my inbox clean.
  - charles_f 4y ago
    That's fine, but apart from HN I read all my stuff from miniflux. That's where I tag and organize stuff, and also send to Walabag whatever I want to keep long term. Email is something in addition to that
vesinisa 4y ago
2006 called and want their headline back ..
zzzzzzzza 4y ago
someone please make a gpt based rss feed summarizer. i use rss but it would be great if gpt could just read all the titles for me and give me a summary. would be great if you could give it feedback after reading over the feed yourself and highlight areas you think it missed or got right
firatsarlar 4y ago
https://theoldreader.com/ https://theoldreader.com/ ?
itsjustmath 4y ago
I was looking for solutions to get RSS feeds of twitter and YouTube profiles and came across this useful tool: https://rssbox.fly.dev/ https://rssbox.fly.dev/
- kevincox 4y ago
  For YouTube, the channel page has auto-discovery links. So you should just be able to paste the channel URL (https://www.youtube.com/@examplechannel https://www.youtube.com/@examplechannel) into your feed reader and it will find the right link.
rcarmo 4y ago
<looks at his 200-odd feeds in Reeder> Really? I must be a trendsetter then. The article gets some things right, but RSS as a private, protected medium just never took off, and I don't think it ever will--but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
voisin 4y ago
I would like an RSS Reader that I pay for once rather than subscribe to, and which allows me to filter out keywords of my choosing. That’s it. I hate that for this feature with Feedly I would have to pay monthly.
- freeAgent 4y ago
  There are a ton of free readers if you’re willing to step outside your web browser.
- timbit42 4y ago
  QuiteRSS for Windows or Linux is free. No ads. Flym for Android is free. No ads.
pipeline_peak 4y ago
Pretty sure if there was ever "the year of the RSS reader" it was somewhere between 2005 to 2013. RSS is too lean, it's a format, the majority of people don't know what it is or how to use it. A lot of sites don't even support RSS anymore. Like IRC, its userbase is tech people. Sorry guys, you don't make up the rest of the world... It's an outdated concept, we all know people don't surf the web anymore. And the larger it will get, the less likely people will. Have you tried using RSS, just measly collecting your favorite sites with the off chance that they support it? It's a mess and no surprise it died as everyone flocked to Facebook, Twitter, etc. People need some sort of platform and that's why ActivityPub / Fediverse is a lot more promising. Social networks aren't the problem, just the one's we've been using.
pmarreck 4y ago
if we can figure out how the people putting out RSS feeds can make money, then yes, this could be the year of RSS again. It’s time to switch business models back to something sustainable and not something that incentivizes addicting you
- timbit42 4y ago
  All they need to do is offer RSS on their site and only include the headline and maybe a short blurb to further entice people to want to read it. Then put it behind a paywall so when they click to the site to read it, they have to log in to read it.
uses 4y ago
I was just thinking about how much world-class content is available between podcasts and email newsletters, and it's all free. Whereas if you wanted to say, read an article on the web from the same sources, you're looking at a huge paywall. The "podcast app" market is heavily saturated with many great competitors. Yet the "newsletter reader app" just...doesn't exist? I'm stuck using iOS Mail with its lack of reading options, no saving my place or otherwise bookmarking. I just can't believe nobody's made something to fill in this need?
Animats 4y ago
So why is there no RSS feed link on the Neiman Lab page?
- ihuman 4y ago
  There is an RSS feed link in the footer. There's also a "link" tag to tell your browser that there's an RSS feed available for the page.
  - Animats 4y ago
    Oh, right. A tiny "RSS" in dark grey type on a light grey background at the bottom of what looked like an infinite scroll.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - timbit42 4y ago
      “It’s the wild colour scheme that freaks me,” said Zaphod whose love affair with this ship had lasted almost three minutes into the flight, “Every time you try to operate on of these weird black controls that are labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you’ve done it. What is this? Some kind of galactic hyperhearse?”
nashashmi 4y ago
Google had such a great opportunity and still does to support and enhance rss with Google reader. They had Google news. They had YouTube. They had Google buzz and Google plus. And Google books. They were the king of media! But there was no media Barron to tie and visualize the peices at Google. And that wad the biggest loss to google.
seydor 4y ago
This year is the year of TV. Tiktok brought the continuous, low effort video feed to everyone. TV will take this even further with continuous video feeds. Probably twitter will start autoscrolling like a teleprompter as well . The demand for feeding tubes and catheters will also skyrocket.
olivermarks 4y ago
I alway liked RSS readers and look forward to a renaissance, but the idea Twitter no longer has utility is absurd.
40four 4y ago
I’ve tried twice now, and for the life of me, I have absolutely no idea what this post is trying to say. For an associate professor of communications, the writing is absolutely atrocious. I can’t make heads or tails of this rambling multitude of grammatical errors, passive aggressive insults, and buzz-word saturated soup. I get that it one of a collection of predictions about how media in 2023 will look. But besides the title invoking the usual, repetitive conversations we have about the ‘State of RSS’, I have no idea why it’s here. I might bookmark this just as an example of how not to write a post. Especially if you don’t want to confuse your reader, and actually express a clear thesis. Regardless, I’m an every day user of NetNewsWire on my phone, and I hope their prediction is right. It is about the only way I consume my news at this point. Even if RSS doesn’t have a revival, it’s fine. As long as all the major news orgs continue to provide RSS feeds, I will be here consuming them.
- jasonlotito 4y ago
  > I’ve tried twice now, and for the life of me, I have absolutely no idea what this post is trying to say. It's answering the question: "Each year, Nieman Lab asks some of the smartest people in journalism what they think is coming in the new year. Here are their predictions for 2023." > For an associate professor of communications, the writing is absolutely atrocious. I can’t make heads or tails of this rambling multitude of grammatical errors, passive aggressive insults, and buzz-word saturated soup. Is that true? Heads or tails? Seemed trivial to understand this for me. > I get that it one of a collection of predictions about how media in 2023 will look, Oh, and you still don't get that it's saying that 2023 will be the rise of the RSS reader? I thought that was pretty obvious. > I have no idea why it’s here Here on HN? Because someone shared it and people upvoted it. That's how HN works. Or do you mean on the site? I think we've discussed that already. > Especially if you don’t want to confuse your reader, and actually express a clear thesis. I don't think it was meant to convince you of anything. It was merely predictions. A simple question, and simple answers, shared online. It's not complicated. > I might bookmark this just as an example of how not to write a post. I'm doing the same for your comment, for similar reasons. Note: Don't like the tone of this comment? Just reflecting the energy you put out.
  - deleted 4y ago
haolez 4y ago
Sim e I've started using hey.com, I'm more prone to subscribing to newsletters than to use RSS readers. I'm not affiliated. Just a happy customer.
nomdep 4y ago
Journalism is a curious profession: you are taught how to write, but your knowledge of any other field is high school level at best, and that is what you write. I think it should be a master degree, not an independent career anymore.
- svnt 4y ago
  I agree with this wholeheartedly: if someone “wants to be a writer” the best thing they can do is read and experience life until they understand something so well they don’t want to do it anymore. Then maybe they can write about it. What we have instead is people selected for syntax, network, and ego, vomiting as loudly and often as possible.
- reaperducer 4y ago
  Journalism is a curious profession: you are taught how to write, but your knowledge of any other field is high school level at best, and that is what you write. You demonstrate a high school-level knowledge of journalism. What you describe are "generalist" reporters. They are necessary, and ubiquitous. But there are also very many specialist reporters, who have specific knowledge of the areas in which they write. The guy who reports at the Pentagon is not the same person who writes car crash stories. You also presume that once someone gets a journalism degree, that's all the education they have or ever will have. Many (most?) journalists have multiple degrees. They also engage in continuing university-level education, either on their own, or paid for by their employer. Also, experience is a great teacher. Do you today know only exactly the same about of computer skills you had when you graduated from high school 20 years ago? No. Just like a journalist learns over time from experience and furthering his education.
alar44 4y ago
I still have no idea what RSS is used for.
- freeAgent 4y ago
  Instead of manually checking each website of interest to you individually, you can subscribe to their RSS feeds and then just use your feed reader to access everything, and it automatically updates and lets you know when there’s new content.
- timbit42 4y ago
  You use it to download article titles from your favourite websites. Saves you going to each website manually to check for new articles. All the new ones will be listed chronologically. I have over 200 feeds in my RSS Reader which pull in 5,000 headlines a day. I can scan through those headlines a lot faster than hitting each of those 200 websites, and I only open the articles I want to read.
pentagrama 4y ago
I will not be surprised if Google relaunches Google Reader in 2023. Without fanfare, and as a simple, limited and low-effort product as Google Podcasts (https://podcasts.google.com https://podcasts.google.com). It will be a nice experiment for them, they don't dominate on the Social Media or Newsletters field, and a RSS reader challenges that field in some ways. Also a act of redeeming the killing of that product 10 years earlier (for a mostly nerdy/vocal minority). If successful obviously they will put ads on them later (Google Podcasts remains ad-free for now).
- gmuslera 4y ago
  It would be a good April Fools event, a few of their good products were launched in that date, like gmail. Or a Halloween one, the launch of Google Zombie Reader.
- puffybuf 4y ago
  Google reader was such a great product. Why oh why did they get rid of it. I'm using rss2email + opensmtpd on a virtual machine to email me my rss to a special news email account. It updates every hour and sends me emails of my rss. I see it on my iphone home screen but not notifications so I can view them at my leisure.
firefoxd 4y ago
2022 made me rethink my stance. My goal used to be to create as much as possible in the best quality I could muster. Give it all and make it available for free for all on the internet. Now that everything you write is used to train an AI that will be used to generate the content, I don't feel the need to contribute. Plus they'll use this content for their own commercial benefit. I don't feel the same way anymore about the internet.
1attice 4y ago
THE YEAR OF, THE YEAR OF ----------------------- (a poem) This is the year of the RSS reader, said Hacker News. This is the year of the Linux desktop. This is the year of IPv6. This is the year of ____ battery technology that is ____ times better than Li-ion for ____ application, but is impractical because it _______ This is the year of the portable fission reactor. This is the year of the tokamak; this is the year of the stellarator; this is the year of quantum supremacy. This is the year of not quite-yet. This is the year that we finally expose those weird woke people. This is the year that we finally expose those flagrant futurist-fascists. This is the year that there was another shooting, and then another, but we were fascinated by the ghost guns, not the torn flesh. This is the year we invented "freedom of reach", because it rhymed, and there is no tax on superfluous fine distinctions. Nor, it would seem, on rich mens' folly. This is the year, this is the year, this is the year. This is the gyre, this is the gyre, this is the gyre. We love the merry-go-round; for when it goes fast enough, it really feels like you're getting somewhere.
einpoklum 4y ago
> RSS readers may need their own ecology of analytics > in order to be commercially desirable and worthy of > tech investment. Those sound like the criteria of it's going to be the year of large investments going down the drain amidst a lot of hype. ---- Anyway, Twitter has 396.5 Million users (Monthly Active Users): https://backlinko.com/twitter-users#twitter-users https://backlinko.com/twitter-users#twitter-users 4.3 Billion people use email: https://wpdevshed.com/email-usage-statistics/ https://wpdevshed.com/email-usage-statistics/ so 9 times as many. Also, most users of Twitter probably don't even notice the latest Musk controversies, since those things aren't the tweets they follow. So, it seems to me like the author is mostly looking just past her own nose.
Avamander 4y ago
Are people still working on improving the standards behind RSS/Atom? Or did that fizzle out with the rise of social media? For example one thing I've wondered about are signed feed entries. At some point I'd like to be more certain about the author of the media I'm reading, while also being able to prove I've not modified anything. I guess I'm kind-of describing Signed Exchanges but less restrictive, maybe it could be done in conjunction with GPG?
fnordpiglet 4y ago
Why would I use RSS when HN does it all for me?
- berniedurfee 4y ago
  I use an RSS reader for HN! A couple other feeds, but that’s it.
olol 4y ago
“just because of Elon Musk mucking up Twitter” i get that the tv says we’re supposed to hate him… but is anyone ever going to explain why? because he’s racist? bc the tv said so? bc he doesn’t support the ghost of kyiv? lol
- parrellel 4y ago
  All politics aside, he's showing himself to be incompetent in really surprising ways. This whole time he's been trading on his personal brand of futurism and technical acumen, and this Twitter business lets everyone see behind the curtain, and it's really easy to be angry when someone is shown to be such a hollow fraud. No more benefit of the doubt for him.
- timbit42 4y ago
  He's always been a bumbling idiot. His skills are getting government grant money to prop up his businesses to increase his personal wealth, and hiring smart people and letting them do their thing. At least daily, he gets in the way and causes messes.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
dang 4y ago
Related ongoing threads: Ask HN: What RSS Reader do you use in 2022? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34108413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34108413 It's time for an RSS revival (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105558
gnicholas 4y ago
I've tried out RSS a couple times, but the intermittent support for full article makes it not a tenable alternative for me. Is this a solved problem, and I just haven't found it yet? Also, what do "Inbox Zero people" have to do with any of this? Is this a reference to people reading more newsletters now? I honestly don't understand.
- sunsetMurk 4y ago
  'inbox zero' in this context is for the RSS reader's inbox, not email. I remember my satisfaction w/ hitting "no new stories available" back in the 'Google Reader' days!
- timbit42 4y ago
  I don't read any articles in my RSS reader. I prefer to read in my favourite web browser that is customized to my preferences.
gumby 4y ago
> We are just at peak newsletter via email delivery The thing that makes substack work for me is that every one has an RSS feed. Otherwise it would simply be another thing for me to ignore.
pletnes 4y ago
I’d just like to give miniflux a mention. Web-based, self-hosted or SaaS. Available and synced across devices, no fluff, great UX / UI in my book. Not as snappy as some desktop keyboard driven ones, but I love it.
josephd79 4y ago
You can pretty much add anything to an rss reader. I read my friends Twitter post, watch YouTube channels I’m subscribed to etc all in a rss reader app. Filter out the bullsh*t ads. Problem is, most people don’t know about. It’s still used. I love it.
- gdwatson 4y ago
  Twitter dropped RSS support years ago when they were locking down clients and otherwise siloing themselves. Have they added it back?
  - palata 4y ago
    If not, open a poll and Elon will add it. And then remove it. And then add it again, but for 8$.
- BrotherBisquick 4y ago
  Is there a way to feed your list of subscribed Youtube channels into an rss reader without having to add each of them manually?
palata 4y ago
I was wondering recently whether AIs like ChatGPT had the potential to break search engines. Already today, I often end up on useless machine-generated pages (typically if I want a comparison between two "things" and type "A vs B"). Until now it's been pretty easy to see that it was machine-generated. But that will probably change. Also, already today, depending on the topic, the search engine is completely useless and I end up going straight to e.g. Wikipedia or Stackoverflow or a reference website I trust (e.g. I want a technical explanation about how something works, and my search engine shows me ten pages on tutorials about where to click on my phone to use that something). Again, ChatGPT will make it easy to generate such low-quality content. Long story short, I was wondering if that would bring RSS back: that would allow me to manually aggregate websites I trust. Maybe I could trust a friend and transitively trust the feeds they trust (à la PGP, even though PGP trust rings seem to be hated :)). That would close the loop: algorithms came to help organise the growing quantity of data, then started flooding the world with generated data (what they were initially built to control). And now somehow we would have to go back to manual treatment using old school trust (with RSS, or similar), because AIs can't differentiate the good content from the bad one.
ymolodtsov 4y ago
A: 2022 is the year RSS readers died B: 2022 is the year of RSS readers Me: I've been using an RSS reader all this time without hiccups.
- timbit42 4y ago
  I've had a few hiccups. eBay disabled RSS. It was a great way to quickly now when something you were looking for was posted. A couple of news media sites I'd like to follow on RSS disabled their RSS feeds a couple of years ago.

460 points by alexzeitler 4y ago

I setup a selfhosted RSS reader called FreshRSS... I migrated from reader to feedly to this and have never been happier. Self hosting services via docker has been a game changer for me.

nitin-pai 4y ago

I don’t know about the “year of…” but RSS readers are definitely the best option to consume information in a manner that leaves the individual with control, while being exposed to a broad range of thinking. And consuming content from a broad range of media. I do hope 2023 becomes the year of the comeback of RSS.

kgwxd 4y ago
For me the biggest selling point of RSS is never having to rescan over feed items I've already read, or decided to skip, to find the new stuff. Another big one is that there's an end to the list. Neither of those are a huge deal for low-volume feeds but for HN and Reddit, they're priceless to me.
deltarholamda 4y ago
>consume information in a manner that leaves the individual with control This is both the main feature, and the biggest obstacle. The people with the money do no want the individual to have control. Thus it has always been and shall always be. Folks are banging on Elon because they feel he's using Twitter to manipulate, but it's not like Twitter was different pre-Elon. Elon simply gave The Man a face, voice and smell. Back in the blogosphere (I hate that word) days, a lot of RSS was floating around. It wasn't very good, as RSS implementations varied a lot. But when it was working well, it was so good. If I have a complaint about returning to RSS it would be that we will return to the days of clickbaity headlines.
- ascagnel_ 4y ago
  > we will return to the days of clickbaity headlines We entered those days and have yet to leave. If anything, the rise of social media (at RSS's expense) turbo-charged clickbait headlines, since now it's easy to measure engagement around those stories, both in terms of views and in terms of comments/likes/shares/etc.
  - tracker1 4y ago
    Gated through fewer sources providing much more analytics definitely changes the game there.
- _xivi 4y ago
  > If I have a complaint about returning to RSS it would be that we will return to the days of clickbaity headlines Wait, what do you mean? Clickbaiting (and borderline misinformation) has been getting only worse ever since
  - deltarholamda 4y ago
    Fair enough, "return" is not the correct word here. Maybe "we will solidify the importance of clickbaity headlines"? I first noticed the up-tick of clickbait headlines in the salad days of RSS. Due to this, I tend to ignore headlines these days, because I was trained to assume the headline was complete nonsense. So my internal metrics are a bit wonky.
jfengel 4y ago
I don't understand the love of RSS readers. The basic concept is trivial; you could write one in five minutes. It doesn't seem radically different from any of thousands of news aggregator type web sites, including HN. I read upthread that Google Reader had a social mechanism for recommending feeds to friends. That's great for discovery, but it still hardly seems earth-shaking. It feels an awful lot like a rose-colored-glasses situation, where something existed that wasn't horrible but doesn't reappear because it wasn't all that great, either. What is it I'm missing?
- reaperducer 4y ago
  It doesn't seem radically different from any of thousands of news aggregator type web sites, including HN. It allows you to tailor your aggregation, and create you own aggregation of topics if there isn't another aggregator out there. Are you into kumquats, ancient Mesopotamia, and The Buzzcocks? You're not going to find a web aggregator for that. But you can put together several RSS feeds into your own aggregation.
  - jfengel 4y ago
    Couldn't I just subscribe to kumquats, ancient Mesopotamia, and The Buzzcocks groups on Facebook? Yeah, I know "the algorithm" means that I'd miss some things and have other things injected into my feed, but it doesn't sound like the total content is radically different. I understand the idea of wanting to feel more control by seeing precisely and exactly the groups you asked for, but I feel like it's not really a radical change in terms of content.
    - vanilla_nut 4y ago
      Facebook shoves content I don't care about in my face, and frequently hides content from pages and people that I do care about (who don'y pay Zuck's troll toll or play visibility optimization games like emphasizing useless Story content). My RSS reader (FreshRSS, self-hosted, and NetNewsWire on macOS/iOS) shows me all posts from all feeds I've chosen to subscribe to. Nothing more, nothing less. No ads, no murky VC cloud funding -- I self host on my own raspberry pi -- and no privacy concerns. Social media is kind of like a flaky RSS feed with comments from people I don't know or care about that sometimes doesn't show me content I DO want to see but also constantly shows me ads, tries to manipulate me into spending more time browsing, and hoovers up as much data as humanly possible. Oh, and it changes the UI every 6-8 months in seemingly random UX a/b tests in the name of "optimization." And it radicalizes my older relatives politically. That seems like a pretty shitty RSS feed to me.

clircle 4y ago

The best thing about rss is that after i read my 30 unread articles, i can just close my laptop and walk away. Who ever said that twitter was going to make rss obsolete has never experienced this digital freedom.

sherlock_h 4y ago

Funny timing - I just switched all my email newsletter subscriptions that I used to read on Gmail Web to Inoreader. The reason was fairly simple - I wanted a better way to organize my newsletters and make it feel more “reading list” like than “task list” like. On email, unopened newsletters always felt like tasks.

kevincox 4y ago
My simple solution is to filter them all into a "News" folder that doesn't notify. Then I can just open it whenever I have some spare time.
- kshay 4y ago
  Agreed—I love RSS, but don’t really see “organizing newsletters” as its killer app, or experience “newsletters come via email” as a pain point. Filters seem to serve basically the same purpose.
  - kevincox 4y ago
    Yeah, I see RSS and newsletters as largely equivalent technologies. The have minor technical differences but 99% of the read differences are social. Pro Feeds: 1. Once you subscribe the publisher has no way to contact you. Email relies on the publisher being honest. 2. Provides some history (or full history with archiving/pagination atom extensions) Pro Newsletter: 3. Push based system by default (Feeds can use WebSub but it isn't that common). 4. ~everyone already has it set up. At the end of the day they both transmit blobs of HTML to you with some minimal metadata.

perardi 4y ago

As someone who has used RSS since NetNewsWire looked like this… https://ranchero.com/images/nnw2/nnwtoolbarhidden.png https://ranchero.com/images/nnw2/nnwtoolbarhidden.png …get off my lawn, kids. And then let grandpa here hitch up his britches even higher: people still lament the end of Google Reader for a reason. In retrospect, it was the least toxic social network. You added your friends, their recommendations bubbled up in the interface, so you saw cool new stuff. Was that perfect? Of course not—you were still in a filter bubble, and what bleeds, leads. But, it surfaced interesting stories, it let you follow news sources you wanted to see, and it did so without the screaming madness of Twitter and Facebook.

JKolios 4y ago
Google killing of Reader was the symbolic point where the business plan of the internet moved from "Let's sell stuff to users!" to "Let's sell users to advertisers!".
- b33j0r 4y ago
  Thank you for making my exact comment. I was too stressed out today and you nailed it ;)
- amadeuspagel 4y ago
  Google Reader was a free product, subsidized by google ads.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - tomrod 4y ago
    Google Reader was a service that brought in good will, subsidized by people trusting Google to "not be evil" and provide useful services. This subsequently turned into people using Google's money-making products, like ads. At least to most I've spoken with on the subject (a few dozen, so informal straw poll), killing Google Reader turned people's opinion of Google from scrappy startup to untrustworthy behemoth.

college_physics 4y ago

If technology was at the service of the individual rather than the other way aroud, RSS would have been a centerpiece of our information universe, with something like ActivityPub the path to enhance information exchange in a bidirectional way when that is applicable...

Group_B 4y ago

Any recommendations for an RSS reader?

semasad 4y ago
Reader: https://readwise.io/read https://readwise.io/read
ink_13 4y ago
I like The Old Reader: https://theoldreader.com/ https://theoldreader.com/ It's largely a reimplementation of the Google Reader experience.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  I can't find any pricing info, what's the deal?
  - darreninthenet 4y ago
    I use the free version and for my needs it's fine (basically 100 feed limit and after a while old posts drop off the feed, I'm not sure how long). For 25 dollars a year you get 500 feeds and one year retention (up to 1000 posts per feed) and you can pay more for a larger number of feeds.
nitin-pai 4y ago
I’ve been using miniflux, and it’s quite cool. David Winer’s Feedland is nifty too.
tommoor 4y ago
NetNewsWire if you're on macOS/iPhone
- onnnon 4y ago
  I use this as well, source on GitHub: https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire

semasad 4y ago

The main problem I found with RSS in these days is the lack of access to they. I want access the RSS of NYT, where I find it? I want X blog, where? After the web migrated from RSS to paywalls, I have no option to just choice some news webs/blogs and focus on that.

FrontAid 4y ago
> I want access the RSS of NYT, where I find it? https://www.nytimes.com/rss https://www.nytimes.com/rss
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ro-ka 4y ago
With Feedbin (which I use, guess others work similar), pasting the website URL is enough. It’ll scan for feeds and that’s it.
weberer 4y ago
Generally they have a RSS icon along side the Twitter, Facebook, etc icons. It looks like a wi-fi symbol. They're also often linked in the footer.
kevincox 4y ago
If you paste https://www.nytimes.com/ https://www.nytimes.com/ into your feed reader it will likely discover https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml automatically. This tends to work very well for most blogs and many sites. I often just assume that there is a feed available and past article URLs into my feed reader, most of the time the feed is automatically discovered. Back in the day browsers had icons that would light up when a feed was available, however all of the most popular browsers have removed this feature. You can add it back with an extension easily if you are so inclined.
- semasad 4y ago
  Sure, NYT is an easy one, but if you try some more "expensive" (they really do not enjoy your free read) like Bloomberg the your RSS feed will keep small.

AstixAndBelix 4y ago

Newsletters and RSS feeds are not the same thing. If I send a newsletter to a list of subscribers then, as long as their email server receives the email, they can retrieve it and read it whenever they want. But most importantly, if I don't set up an archive of all the newsletters, then only the people who subscribed will ever be able to read it. On the other hand it's impossible to achieve the same level of one-timeness with RSS. You either publish the feed for a limited amount of time (and the subscribers have to get lucky and synchronize their feeds during this time window), or you publish the feed indefinitely (which maybe you wouldn't want to do)

kevincox 4y ago
This is a very niche difference. In general once you send something "to the public" you can't expect that it stays private. So if you need to keep items on your feed for a few weeks after publishing it will have a near-zero difference to the availability of that piece and be picked up by almost all subscribers.
charles_f 4y ago
> it's impossible to achieve the same level of one-timeness with RSS. No it's not (not that I can really think of why you'd want that). Generate user-bound rss feed urls with GUIDs or a signed "start date" that provides only entries since that date. That can also allow you to track how many times that url gets retrieved and eventually block it if it's too many. Or have the rss reader only send an excerpt and have people auth before they access the content on your website. >most importantly, if I don't set up an archive of all the newsletters, then only the people who subscribed will ever be able to read it. On the other end once the email left your box, you don't control it anymore, and I can give you a well hidden hack that allows someone not subscribed to read it if they know someone subscribed.

asicsp 4y ago

Seems like RSS comeback gets discussed often: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=RSS https://hn.algolia.com/?q=RSS

hed 4y ago

I tried to set this up earlier this year, but what I realized I really wanted was RSS + change detection for some discussion forums and other sites that didn't offer RSS. That companies like feedly didn't seem to offer this functionality but were trying to emphasize social networking and tagging my articles (for who?) made it easy to walk away after the trial.

thirdplace_ 4y ago
For sites that don't offer feeds you may want to check out rss-bridge: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/ https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/

HissingMachine 4y ago

So the whole opinion piece hinges on unpopularity of Twitter? Bold move.

frouge 4y ago

What we need to revive RSS is have a true integration into browsers. Your bookmarks would display the numbers of unread posts and there is probably more great stuff to do.

acidburnNSA 4y ago
That was removed from Firefox in version 64 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks
kevincox 4y ago
Honestly just returning the icon that appeared when the site had a feed would be a huge win. Browser integrated feed-readers and bookmark notifications were nice but dedicated RSS readers are probably going to be better. You can click the feed icon and the browser can redirect you to your preferred feed reader. There are extensions that do this but having it built-in would make it widely available and easier to set up.
Springtime 4y ago
Vivaldi has had an in-built RSS client for years now, taking after Opera's original feature years back. Edit: link since I notice they have a page about it. https://vivaldi.com/features/feed-reader/ https://vivaldi.com/features/feed-reader/
TrevorAustin 4y ago
Without having dipped into the code before, how hard would it be run a fork of Chromium that did this?
timbit42 4y ago
Any RSS support I've seen in web browser sucked. Use a real RSS reader like QuiteRSS and you won't care to have it in your browser.

nickdothutton 4y ago

One of the problems with RSS is lack of a feedback loop from mere reader to content creator. Said another way, RSS doesn't have a reply function and that makes it harder to iterate around user feedback. Some of which can be very valuable.

vidanay 4y ago
I don't want content creators to shape their content according to feedback and popularity. I want content creators who shape their content according to their interests and desires and experiences.
- JonathanBeuys 4y ago
  Then why did you write this feedback?
  - reaperducer 4y ago
    Because posting in a forum doesn't make you a content creator, and this isn't an RSS feed?
- anthonypasq 4y ago
  I feel like there's been an extremely strong push in our current culture against actual artistic visionairies that's being driven by toxic and infantile "fan communities" that screech endlessly on the internet about anything they don't like. Art apparently isn't about a creative realizing their unique vision, its about doing things mouthbreathers like. People seem to be viscerally offended when someone unapologetically makes something that isn't for them. Bring back gatekeeping.
reaperducer 4y ago
One of the problems with RSS is lack of a feedback loop from mere reader to content creator. That's a feature, not a bug. It's the difference between publish/subscribe and social chat. When people unsubscribe, there's your feedback. Just like with newspapers.
4y ago

pwillia7 4y ago

Chrome in Android has a built in RSS reader in chrome now labeled the 'following' tab in your new tab page. I've been using this with great success lately. The key for me was to pick only a few really high quality sources instead of 99999 sources. https://9to5google.com/2021/10/08/chrome-rss-web-feed/ https://9to5google.com/2021/10/08/chrome-rss-web-feed/ There's a flag for desktop too. You can enable 'Feed' in the sidebar, but it doesn't work for me on any platform at the moment.

Jackevansevo 4y ago
How long will this feature last until it inevitably gets canned?
- bombolo 4y ago
  It needs some adoption first… no point in canning something nobody uses. It'd be too simple.
  - pwillia7 4y ago
    yeah they'll have to wait until they ship physical RSS readers out
- mananaysiempre 4y ago
  The longevity of Chrome features generally seems to be much better than that of Google products in general. I can only think of a few major removals: FTP, NSAPI and the ongoing MV2 debacle, Chrome apps, Gears; I don’t remember if any variant of NaCl ever shipped as non-beta, and I’m sure Dart-in-<script> never did.
ghaff 4y ago
I don't know. For a "few" high quality sources you can just check the sources directly. For me, the big win for RSS in the blogosphere world was you could follow a lot of sources that published pretty sporadically but sometimes had interesting things when they did publish.

Maxburn 4y ago

Podcasts are all RSS too, lots of hidden use of RSS out there. https://podcastindex.org/ https://podcastindex.org/

acidburnNSA 4y ago
I got a Firefox extension that looks for rss in a page and gives you a little icon in the titlebar. Some webmasters don't even bother to put the link in their page visibly.
- Maxburn 4y ago
  Nice, I wonder why they wouldn't surface that? Speculating they got it included in their CMS and decided they didn't want it.
  - acidburnNSA 4y ago
    I'm sure you're right
  - dageshi 4y ago
    It's on by default in wordpress I think, but most site builders either don't know or have forgotten, most probably have no clue it's running.
  - kevincox 4y ago
    Back in the day all major browser provided their own "feed available" icon so including an extra icon on your site was pointless. The browser's icon was consistent across sites instead of the user needing to look around for a feed link on your site. Of course now most popular browsers don't show this icon so it is more important to advertise it yourself. (Although there are extensions to bring this icon back)
- reaperducer 4y ago
  I got a Firefox extension that looks for rss in a page and gives you a little icon in the titlebar. This used to be the default condition for all web browsers. Even Safari did it. I forget which browser dropped that feature first. My guess is that it was Google Chrome, and everyone else just did the same thing because following is easier than leading.

BruceEel 4y ago

Cool, what does your list of favorite feeds look like? Please share.

weberer 4y ago
https://hackaday.com/blog/feed/ https://hackaday.com/blog/feed/ https://news.ycombinator.com/rss https://news.ycombinator.com/rss https://api.quantamagazine.org/feed/ https://api.quantamagazine.org/feed/ https://www.wowhead.com/news/rss/wotlk-classic https://www.wowhead.com/news/rss/wotlk-classic https://alerts.weather.gov/ https://alerts.weather.gov/ (chose your region) https://www.pine64.org/feed/ https://www.pine64.org/feed/ https://www.factorio.com/blog/rss https://www.factorio.com/blog/rss
- BruceEel 4y ago
  Awesome, thx!
kevincox 4y ago
I have built my list up over time. Generally I will discover new stuff from hacker news or other aggregators (which I browse once I am caught up on my feeds). I add things to my list very often, but also am quick to unsubscribe if I'm not enjoying the content. The types of content I tend to follow are: - Videos. YouTube, Nebula, PeerTube and a few other sources. - Blogs. These are mostly personal blogs that I have found interesting articles on. A few company blogs too. - Social media searches. This is more for productivity but I follow a bunch of searches across various social media sites to stay up to date on specific topics. - Comics - Software releases. I have very few high-volume sources. I much prefer quality content from hundreds of sources instead of frequent content from a few big sources like news sites. I realize I didn't answer your question but that is sort of intended. Each person's favourite feeds will be different and depend on your interests. The best way to get stared is just to start subscribing to the things that you are enjoying today. Then over time you will build up a list of things that interest you. Especially when getting started it makes sense to over-subscribe, you can always prune down if you had a "false positive".
- 4y ago

moolcool 4y ago

This is the year of the linux desktop

Valord 4y ago
Lol I see what you did there

Mark33 4y ago

The panic about right wing intrusion of social media ownership keeps getting to new highs, now even predicts a come back of RSS because woke people don't want to be seen using Twitter any more... #fail #them

okaleniuk 4y ago

Is managing email really an unsolved problem? I mean, every email client has already way too many "organizing thingies": folders, filters, bookmarks, categories, labels, stars, flags, and archives. What value RSS brings alone except from being different and therefore having its separate tab in a client?

kevincox 4y ago
No, I don't think there is much fundamental difference. Some RSS readers support inbound emails as a feed source and I get my RSS feeds delivered via email. I think the main reason newsletters are "winning" over RSS right now is that everyone has an email address but not everyone has a feed reader configured. It provides an easy onboarding where you can start getting it in your inbox available on all of your devices and once that becomes annoying you can easily set up filters to organize.
RavingGoat 4y ago
I thought email was dead. I treat email like I treat voice messages, they are just out there waiting to be deleted without ever being read/listened to. Do people actually use email still outside of a work situation?
- Hackbraten 4y ago
  A federated near-instant messenger, not being controlled by a single corporate entity, designed on top of a well-defined Internet standard, with both commercial and open-source clients existing for every platform?

marban 4y ago

RSS is alive and kicking. I created a little Web 2.0 phenomenon named Popurls and recently launched https://biztoc.com https://biztoc.com — ~65% of the site is still RSS driven.

codazoda 4y ago
Tell us greenies a little more? I don’t use RSS for writing or reading, but maybe I should. Is this consuming other RSS feeds? Is it publishing a feed and 65% of its traffic comes from feed consumers? That would be nice, since I don’t want to be at the whim of search engines anymore (for blog type content).
kishmat 4y ago
Great website, Sir. I have a question, can't we create our own new category "Tech News" like "Crypto" and "Media"

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jawns 4y ago

Here are just some of the reasons why RSS fell out of favor... 1) It's great for consumers of content, but not so great for content producers or RSS reader vendors, in terms of monetization or even analytics. 2) It's great for tech-savvy folks, but not so great for mass market reach, and the incentives to make mass market reach feasible are low. 3) It worked better back when most content was free. Paywalls are a more sustainable business model, but aren't very compatible with RSS.

wffurr 4y ago
1) Newsblur has been a nice lifestyle business for Sam Clay. I suppose it won't ever be a billion dollar unicorn, but it works beautifully for consumers of content.

_Algernon_ 4y ago

Is it also going to be the year of the Linux desktop?

timbit42 4y ago
Yes. It's called SteamDeck.

thirdplace_ 4y ago

I built a small tool that helps to discover feed urls. It uses various hardcoded and dynamic rules: https://discovery.thirdplace.no/?q=https://www.tek.no https://discovery.thirdplace.no/?q=https://www.tek.no It's FOSS and has an http json api.

throw0101a 4y ago

When saying "RSS" are we talking about the protocol/file format, or using it proverbially for 'syndication'/feeds? Any reason(s) to use RSS (0.9x/1.0/2.0) over Atom (RFC 4287)? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed

kevincox 4y ago
I'm pretty sure they are doing the latter. I'm not aware of any feed readers that don't accept Atom and you will get much more consistent results as it is more clearly specified.
tomrod 4y ago
Syndication. Virtually no one refers to a protocol or file format in common jargon and dialect.
Turing_Machine 4y ago
Yes, Atom is fine (preferable, even...at least to me). We're probably stuck with "RSS" as the generic term, though, for much the same reason we still say "making a record" for music or the floppy disk icon for "save".

photochemsyn 4y ago

Some intros on how to build your own RSS feed (structure of the XML file): https://www.xul.fr/en-xml-rss.html https://www.xul.fr/en-xml-rss.html https://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_rss.asp https://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_rss.asp However, I notice that JSON feeds are also an option and might be preferable for various reasons (i.e. Python's json module makes parsing easy, etc.): https://www.jsonfeed.org/version/1.1/ https://www.jsonfeed.org/version/1.1/ As far as Twitter, I'm not sure it was ever that great of an information source. Musk has at least said they're trying to improve Twitter search, but who knows what it will look like. It's still pretty weak at present. Why corporate media journalists and politicians flocked to Twitter in the past is unclear, unless that it was that Twitter's structure was deliberately designed for propaganda distribution. The low character count and leader-follower structure helps with the standard propaganda routine, which typically involves reducing complex arguments and ideas to the point that a small child could understand them, and then repeating that dumbed-down argument over and over while browbeating anyone who raises objections.

notpushkin 4y ago
Ideally you'll want to make both. RSS is most widely supported, while JSON Feed is (arguably) easier to parse.
kevincox 4y ago
I'd recommend just using Atom. It is as widely supported as RSS but far better specified so your readers will have a consistent result. JSON Feed is fine but provides very little benefit and isn't as widely supported. Having multiple feed links for the same content will give some users analysis paralysis. (What we really need is an update to the auto-discovery spec that says "these two feeds have the exact same content, if you support both formats only show your preferred format to the user") I wrote up a guide for my recommended RSS Best Practices which while not aimed at how to create your own feed contains enough information to do that. https://kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-practices/ https://kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-practices/
- ihuman 4y ago

riwsky 4y ago

What a coincidence—this is also the year of the Linux desktop!

yreg 4y ago
And that desktop is Steam Deck.

longnguyen 4y ago

I think the reason RSS is not appealing to content creators is because authors don't "own" the email list. And it's quite difficult to have paid content delivered via RSS (still pretty much open/sharable) But from reader perspective, RSS is awesome. You don't have to deal with all the email subscriptions double opt-in etc. The ability to unsubscribe/resubscribe in one click is fantastic. And you have number of good RSS readers to fit your need. Pro tip: you can add “/feed” to any Substack publication to subscribe to its RSS feed To my surprised, RSS is still my most requested feature for my little SaaS[0] I wrote a short blog post on how to read RSS on Kindle here[1] [0]: https://ktool.io https://ktool.io [1]: https://ktool.io/blog/read-rss-on-kindle https://ktool.io/blog/read-rss-on-kindle

marcosdumay 4y ago
> authors don't "own" the email list Well, what does this gain them? People still can count how many readers they have, and still have a dedicated readership (and no antagonistic middleman filtering them). What difference does the list of those people make?
- longnguyen 4y ago
  Segmentation. You can send offer to a segment of your audience. I don't think you can do that with RSS unless you have a sophisticated setup where each reader has a slightly different feed url.
charles_f 4y ago
> And it's quite difficult to have paid content delivered via RSS (still pretty much open/sharable) Excerpt that you can then read fully on the website after authentication?
- longnguyen 4y ago
  Not the best UX for readers IMO. That defeats the purpose of a RSS "reader".

kkfx 4y ago

The year of RSS reader will be when users decide to be users again instead of lusers (from Simon's Chronicles CL definition), witch unfortunately it's not something really in agenda...

pixelmonkey 4y ago

I used to be a big fan of RSS readers, and I even built one, of sorts, as a startup at one point in 2009. But these days, I tend to just use Instapaper. I have the plugin installed in all my browsers, and if I'm looking for something to read, I swipe thru my saves using the Instapaper Chrome web interface, Android app, or (most commonly) iPad app. I have Instapaper and Readwise synced up, which adds a little extra incentive (highlights) for doing things that way. How do I find stuff to Instapaper? These days, it's TechMeme, Hacker News, Lobste.rs, Reddit, Twitter, Google News, Apple News (on iPad). Heavily weighted to the first four sources, with #1-#4 being maybe 80% of my saved links that come from aggregators. Recently I have been beta testing Readwise Reader. It's probably as good a reading experience as I could currently imagine (it's sort of Instapaper on steroids, and it even syncs with Instapaper). But, even still, I find the entire category a little tired. The big issue is source quality. It's harder to find a small group of regular bloggers that might make a curated RSS reader experience worthwhile. When I was younger, I'd read Joel Spolsky, Paul Graham, and dozens of developer blogs, and that was "enough". These days, to get the same sort of volume and quality, I'd need to curate hundreds (maybe thousands) of sources. It's also sad, but true, that the average blog on the internet is simply no longer publishing new posts. That is, the typical blog with an interesting archive is likely abandoned in terms of new posts going online, or has the publishing rate reduced to an annual trickle. So it's not worth my time to predict and curate the exceptions.

sudo_navendu 4y ago

I love using RSS to subscribe to blogs. Many of my favorite personal developer blogs have RSS feeds, and I have them on my blog. I'm currently using Readwise to get all my feeds in one place. This filters out a lot of noise prevalent in social media like Twitter.

seydor 4y ago

going around in circles is bad news In reality, content will be over in 2 years. AI is just better content, well sourced, well written and quantifiably intentional. Humans no longer need to apply for making content just like we dont hunt for meat

Veen 4y ago
> better content, well sourced, well written and quantifiable intentional I've not seen AI create "better content" than even a moderately competent human, let alone an expert writer and researcher. How do you know AI content is well-sourced when it's generated by an AI which makes it up based on a statistical model? Well-written is somewhat subjective, but ChatGTP is repetitive, overly verbose, and the opposite of intentional. AI content will be great for repetitive copy like eCommerce descriptions, simple business and sports reports, and maybe API documentation, but it won't replace human writers in most contexts humans care about.
- seydor 4y ago
  Cgpt is great at writing like a good copywriter, which is already above average human. When journalists lose their advantage, it becomes a matter of putting out there novel ideas, which models can do, too. The 'journalism' of the future will be basically curation of ideas. And if we have an overabundance of good content then attention will shift away from it because it gets boring.
  - Veen 4y ago
    I am a professional copywriter and technical writer, so I have a dog in this race. But I don't agree that Cgpt is anywhere near a professional standard. It can produce mostly coherent and correct English, but not concise, creative, or empathetic English. It's good enough to replace human writing in some scenarios, but far from all.

toastal 4y ago

Coincidentally, I got Newsboat+Podboat mostly set up today on NixOS to disconnect from the feed cycle that wants me to continually engage. The sad fact was learning after not having subbed to anything after two years to find a lot of news channels, like AP and Reuters, have stopped publishing feeds.

sergioreus 4y ago

[dead]

LightG 4y ago

Two RSS threads on HN frontpage today? Great! RSS never went away but I hope it becommes much more prominent again. The last lost decade of walled-garden social has been a relative disaster.

miiiiiike 4y ago

The "Year of RSS" people have been sounding like the "Year of Linux Desktop" people for a while now. It's not coming back. It just isn't.

contravariant 4y ago
I'm not sure it ever left. There are still RSS feeds around, though it would be better if their use was more widespread.
ravenstine 4y ago
It only has a shot of coming back if enough people decide that Google searches are pointless. We might be getting there, actually. I'm not optimistic, but the idea that Google search results suck seems to be more mainstream in the last year outside of the HN crowd. Oh, I say this because Google and other search engines that derive from it are unlikely to yield results that are worth reading or subscribing to. If this were the Google of 2006, RSS might have been something they'd bake into their results. They'd never allow that today. It's all about serving ads on GPT generated bloogs now.

delecti 4y ago

I'm a happy user of an RSS reader, but the chance of having a "year of the RSS reader" died with Google Reader, and nothing has come along to make it any more likely. Most people want centralization and to not have to mess with things.

timbit42 4y ago
Why couldn't someone else recreate Google Reader?

luoc 4y ago

But how do I get that all caps scifi font to my reader? It's just not the same...

timbit42 4y ago
Use an RSS reader that supports custom fonts, like QuiteRSS.

MobileVet 4y ago

The first thing we did when we entered mobile in 2004 was build an RSS reader for 'dumb' phones. It was the perfect way to bring information to very limited phones. All the extra stuff was stripped away, just the content remained. The phone could handle it in a way that the WAP browsers would fail. It is hard to see the value, beyond advertising / affiliate sales, to just about anything that has been added to the modern web experience since that time. I still use 'reader mode' on Safari to bring it back to the basics.

charles_f 4y ago

I hate newsletters. They break my workflow, and I don't want to redesign my workflow for the handful of bloggers who insist on making a newsletter instead of a feed. I'm just not using my email in the same way I use news or blogs. I made a couple of tentatives to build a mail to rss system and stopped both times because I lacked the motivation, then suggested it to feedly while I was using them and they added it to the product... While I was moving to self-hosted miniflux.

gpanders 4y ago
I’m a happy user of https://notifier.in/ https://notifier.in/ for this purpose.
longnguyen 4y ago
You may find this service useful (not an affiliate, just found it recently) https://kill-the-newsletter.com https://kill-the-newsletter.com
- charles_f 4y ago
  Thanks!
DevX101 4y ago
I setup filters in gmail to archive my newsletters, add the label 'Newsletters', and forward them to my RSS reader app (in this case Readwise (paid), which has a personalized email that accepts inbound traffic). Any new newsletters I sign up with myname+news@gmail.com. That suffix means it still arrives at my email address, but I can use that recipient to create filters. I never see these emails unless I click on the 'Newsletters' label. This keeps my inbox clean.
- charles_f 4y ago
  That's fine, but apart from HN I read all my stuff from miniflux. That's where I tag and organize stuff, and also send to Walabag whatever I want to keep long term. Email is something in addition to that

vesinisa 4y ago

2006 called and want their headline back ..

zzzzzzzza 4y ago

someone please make a gpt based rss feed summarizer. i use rss but it would be great if gpt could just read all the titles for me and give me a summary. would be great if you could give it feedback after reading over the feed yourself and highlight areas you think it missed or got right

firatsarlar 4y ago

https://theoldreader.com/ https://theoldreader.com/ ?

itsjustmath 4y ago

I was looking for solutions to get RSS feeds of twitter and YouTube profiles and came across this useful tool: https://rssbox.fly.dev/ https://rssbox.fly.dev/

kevincox 4y ago
For YouTube, the channel page has auto-discovery links. So you should just be able to paste the channel URL (https://www.youtube.com/@examplechannel https://www.youtube.com/@examplechannel) into your feed reader and it will find the right link.

rcarmo 4y ago

<looks at his 200-odd feeds in Reeder> Really? I must be a trendsetter then. The article gets some things right, but RSS as a private, protected medium just never took off, and I don't think it ever will--but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

voisin 4y ago

I would like an RSS Reader that I pay for once rather than subscribe to, and which allows me to filter out keywords of my choosing. That’s it. I hate that for this feature with Feedly I would have to pay monthly.

freeAgent 4y ago
There are a ton of free readers if you’re willing to step outside your web browser.
timbit42 4y ago
QuiteRSS for Windows or Linux is free. No ads. Flym for Android is free. No ads.

pipeline_peak 4y ago

Pretty sure if there was ever "the year of the RSS reader" it was somewhere between 2005 to 2013. RSS is too lean, it's a format, the majority of people don't know what it is or how to use it. A lot of sites don't even support RSS anymore. Like IRC, its userbase is tech people. Sorry guys, you don't make up the rest of the world... It's an outdated concept, we all know people don't surf the web anymore. And the larger it will get, the less likely people will. Have you tried using RSS, just measly collecting your favorite sites with the off chance that they support it? It's a mess and no surprise it died as everyone flocked to Facebook, Twitter, etc. People need some sort of platform and that's why ActivityPub / Fediverse is a lot more promising. Social networks aren't the problem, just the one's we've been using.

pmarreck 4y ago

if we can figure out how the people putting out RSS feeds can make money, then yes, this could be the year of RSS again. It’s time to switch business models back to something sustainable and not something that incentivizes addicting you

timbit42 4y ago
All they need to do is offer RSS on their site and only include the headline and maybe a short blurb to further entice people to want to read it. Then put it behind a paywall so when they click to the site to read it, they have to log in to read it.

uses 4y ago

I was just thinking about how much world-class content is available between podcasts and email newsletters, and it's all free. Whereas if you wanted to say, read an article on the web from the same sources, you're looking at a huge paywall. The "podcast app" market is heavily saturated with many great competitors. Yet the "newsletter reader app" just...doesn't exist? I'm stuck using iOS Mail with its lack of reading options, no saving my place or otherwise bookmarking. I just can't believe nobody's made something to fill in this need?

Animats 4y ago

So why is there no RSS feed link on the Neiman Lab page?

ihuman 4y ago
There is an RSS feed link in the footer. There's also a "link" tag to tell your browser that there's an RSS feed available for the page.
- Animats 4y ago
  Oh, right. A tiny "RSS" in dark grey type on a light grey background at the bottom of what looked like an infinite scroll.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - timbit42 4y ago
    “It’s the wild colour scheme that freaks me,” said Zaphod whose love affair with this ship had lasted almost three minutes into the flight, “Every time you try to operate on of these weird black controls that are labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you’ve done it. What is this? Some kind of galactic hyperhearse?”

nashashmi 4y ago

Google had such a great opportunity and still does to support and enhance rss with Google reader. They had Google news. They had YouTube. They had Google buzz and Google plus. And Google books. They were the king of media! But there was no media Barron to tie and visualize the peices at Google. And that wad the biggest loss to google.

seydor 4y ago

This year is the year of TV. Tiktok brought the continuous, low effort video feed to everyone. TV will take this even further with continuous video feeds. Probably twitter will start autoscrolling like a teleprompter as well . The demand for feeding tubes and catheters will also skyrocket.

olivermarks 4y ago

I alway liked RSS readers and look forward to a renaissance, but the idea Twitter no longer has utility is absurd.

40four 4y ago

I’ve tried twice now, and for the life of me, I have absolutely no idea what this post is trying to say. For an associate professor of communications, the writing is absolutely atrocious. I can’t make heads or tails of this rambling multitude of grammatical errors, passive aggressive insults, and buzz-word saturated soup. I get that it one of a collection of predictions about how media in 2023 will look. But besides the title invoking the usual, repetitive conversations we have about the ‘State of RSS’, I have no idea why it’s here. I might bookmark this just as an example of how not to write a post. Especially if you don’t want to confuse your reader, and actually express a clear thesis. Regardless, I’m an every day user of NetNewsWire on my phone, and I hope their prediction is right. It is about the only way I consume my news at this point. Even if RSS doesn’t have a revival, it’s fine. As long as all the major news orgs continue to provide RSS feeds, I will be here consuming them.

jasonlotito 4y ago
> I’ve tried twice now, and for the life of me, I have absolutely no idea what this post is trying to say. It's answering the question: "Each year, Nieman Lab asks some of the smartest people in journalism what they think is coming in the new year. Here are their predictions for 2023." > For an associate professor of communications, the writing is absolutely atrocious. I can’t make heads or tails of this rambling multitude of grammatical errors, passive aggressive insults, and buzz-word saturated soup. Is that true? Heads or tails? Seemed trivial to understand this for me. > I get that it one of a collection of predictions about how media in 2023 will look, Oh, and you still don't get that it's saying that 2023 will be the rise of the RSS reader? I thought that was pretty obvious. > I have no idea why it’s here Here on HN? Because someone shared it and people upvoted it. That's how HN works. Or do you mean on the site? I think we've discussed that already. > Especially if you don’t want to confuse your reader, and actually express a clear thesis. I don't think it was meant to convince you of anything. It was merely predictions. A simple question, and simple answers, shared online. It's not complicated. > I might bookmark this just as an example of how not to write a post. I'm doing the same for your comment, for similar reasons. Note: Don't like the tone of this comment? Just reflecting the energy you put out.
- deleted 4y ago

haolez 4y ago

Sim e I've started using hey.com, I'm more prone to subscribing to newsletters than to use RSS readers. I'm not affiliated. Just a happy customer.

nomdep 4y ago

Journalism is a curious profession: you are taught how to write, but your knowledge of any other field is high school level at best, and that is what you write. I think it should be a master degree, not an independent career anymore.

svnt 4y ago
I agree with this wholeheartedly: if someone “wants to be a writer” the best thing they can do is read and experience life until they understand something so well they don’t want to do it anymore. Then maybe they can write about it. What we have instead is people selected for syntax, network, and ego, vomiting as loudly and often as possible.
reaperducer 4y ago
Journalism is a curious profession: you are taught how to write, but your knowledge of any other field is high school level at best, and that is what you write. You demonstrate a high school-level knowledge of journalism. What you describe are "generalist" reporters. They are necessary, and ubiquitous. But there are also very many specialist reporters, who have specific knowledge of the areas in which they write. The guy who reports at the Pentagon is not the same person who writes car crash stories. You also presume that once someone gets a journalism degree, that's all the education they have or ever will have. Many (most?) journalists have multiple degrees. They also engage in continuing university-level education, either on their own, or paid for by their employer. Also, experience is a great teacher. Do you today know only exactly the same about of computer skills you had when you graduated from high school 20 years ago? No. Just like a journalist learns over time from experience and furthering his education.

alar44 4y ago

I still have no idea what RSS is used for.

freeAgent 4y ago
Instead of manually checking each website of interest to you individually, you can subscribe to their RSS feeds and then just use your feed reader to access everything, and it automatically updates and lets you know when there’s new content.
timbit42 4y ago
You use it to download article titles from your favourite websites. Saves you going to each website manually to check for new articles. All the new ones will be listed chronologically. I have over 200 feeds in my RSS Reader which pull in 5,000 headlines a day. I can scan through those headlines a lot faster than hitting each of those 200 websites, and I only open the articles I want to read.

pentagrama 4y ago

I will not be surprised if Google relaunches Google Reader in 2023. Without fanfare, and as a simple, limited and low-effort product as Google Podcasts (https://podcasts.google.com https://podcasts.google.com). It will be a nice experiment for them, they don't dominate on the Social Media or Newsletters field, and a RSS reader challenges that field in some ways. Also a act of redeeming the killing of that product 10 years earlier (for a mostly nerdy/vocal minority). If successful obviously they will put ads on them later (Google Podcasts remains ad-free for now).

gmuslera 4y ago
It would be a good April Fools event, a few of their good products were launched in that date, like gmail. Or a Halloween one, the launch of Google Zombie Reader.
puffybuf 4y ago
Google reader was such a great product. Why oh why did they get rid of it. I'm using rss2email + opensmtpd on a virtual machine to email me my rss to a special news email account. It updates every hour and sends me emails of my rss. I see it on my iphone home screen but not notifications so I can view them at my leisure.

firefoxd 4y ago

2022 made me rethink my stance. My goal used to be to create as much as possible in the best quality I could muster. Give it all and make it available for free for all on the internet. Now that everything you write is used to train an AI that will be used to generate the content, I don't feel the need to contribute. Plus they'll use this content for their own commercial benefit. I don't feel the same way anymore about the internet.

1attice 4y ago

THE YEAR OF, THE YEAR OF ----------------------- (a poem) This is the year of the RSS reader, said Hacker News. This is the year of the Linux desktop. This is the year of IPv6. This is the year of ____ battery technology that is ____ times better than Li-ion for ____ application, but is impractical because it _______ This is the year of the portable fission reactor. This is the year of the tokamak; this is the year of the stellarator; this is the year of quantum supremacy. This is the year of not quite-yet. This is the year that we finally expose those weird woke people. This is the year that we finally expose those flagrant futurist-fascists. This is the year that there was another shooting, and then another, but we were fascinated by the ghost guns, not the torn flesh. This is the year we invented "freedom of reach", because it rhymed, and there is no tax on superfluous fine distinctions. Nor, it would seem, on rich mens' folly. This is the year, this is the year, this is the year. This is the gyre, this is the gyre, this is the gyre. We love the merry-go-round; for when it goes fast enough, it really feels like you're getting somewhere.

einpoklum 4y ago

> RSS readers may need their own ecology of analytics > in order to be commercially desirable and worthy of > tech investment. Those sound like the criteria of it's going to be the year of large investments going down the drain amidst a lot of hype. ---- Anyway, Twitter has 396.5 Million users (Monthly Active Users): https://backlinko.com/twitter-users#twitter-users https://backlinko.com/twitter-users#twitter-users 4.3 Billion people use email: https://wpdevshed.com/email-usage-statistics/ https://wpdevshed.com/email-usage-statistics/ so 9 times as many. Also, most users of Twitter probably don't even notice the latest Musk controversies, since those things aren't the tweets they follow. So, it seems to me like the author is mostly looking just past her own nose.

Avamander 4y ago

Are people still working on improving the standards behind RSS/Atom? Or did that fizzle out with the rise of social media? For example one thing I've wondered about are signed feed entries. At some point I'd like to be more certain about the author of the media I'm reading, while also being able to prove I've not modified anything. I guess I'm kind-of describing Signed Exchanges but less restrictive, maybe it could be done in conjunction with GPG?

fnordpiglet 4y ago

Why would I use RSS when HN does it all for me?

berniedurfee 4y ago
I use an RSS reader for HN! A couple other feeds, but that’s it.

olol 4y ago

“just because of Elon Musk mucking up Twitter” i get that the tv says we’re supposed to hate him… but is anyone ever going to explain why? because he’s racist? bc the tv said so? bc he doesn’t support the ghost of kyiv? lol

parrellel 4y ago
All politics aside, he's showing himself to be incompetent in really surprising ways. This whole time he's been trading on his personal brand of futurism and technical acumen, and this Twitter business lets everyone see behind the curtain, and it's really easy to be angry when someone is shown to be such a hollow fraud. No more benefit of the doubt for him.
timbit42 4y ago
He's always been a bumbling idiot. His skills are getting government grant money to prop up his businesses to increase his personal wealth, and hiring smart people and letting them do their thing. At least daily, he gets in the way and causes messes.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

dang 4y ago

Related ongoing threads: Ask HN: What RSS Reader do you use in 2022? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34108413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34108413 It's time for an RSS revival (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105558

gnicholas 4y ago

I've tried out RSS a couple times, but the intermittent support for full article makes it not a tenable alternative for me. Is this a solved problem, and I just haven't found it yet? Also, what do "Inbox Zero people" have to do with any of this? Is this a reference to people reading more newsletters now? I honestly don't understand.

sunsetMurk 4y ago
'inbox zero' in this context is for the RSS reader's inbox, not email. I remember my satisfaction w/ hitting "no new stories available" back in the 'Google Reader' days!
timbit42 4y ago
I don't read any articles in my RSS reader. I prefer to read in my favourite web browser that is customized to my preferences.

gumby 4y ago

> We are just at peak newsletter via email delivery The thing that makes substack work for me is that every one has an RSS feed. Otherwise it would simply be another thing for me to ignore.

pletnes 4y ago

I’d just like to give miniflux a mention. Web-based, self-hosted or SaaS. Available and synced across devices, no fluff, great UX / UI in my book. Not as snappy as some desktop keyboard driven ones, but I love it.

josephd79 4y ago

You can pretty much add anything to an rss reader. I read my friends Twitter post, watch YouTube channels I’m subscribed to etc all in a rss reader app. Filter out the bullsh*t ads. Problem is, most people don’t know about. It’s still used. I love it.

gdwatson 4y ago
Twitter dropped RSS support years ago when they were locking down clients and otherwise siloing themselves. Have they added it back?
- palata 4y ago
  If not, open a poll and Elon will add it. And then remove it. And then add it again, but for 8$.
BrotherBisquick 4y ago
Is there a way to feed your list of subscribed Youtube channels into an rss reader without having to add each of them manually?

palata 4y ago

I was wondering recently whether AIs like ChatGPT had the potential to break search engines. Already today, I often end up on useless machine-generated pages (typically if I want a comparison between two "things" and type "A vs B"). Until now it's been pretty easy to see that it was machine-generated. But that will probably change. Also, already today, depending on the topic, the search engine is completely useless and I end up going straight to e.g. Wikipedia or Stackoverflow or a reference website I trust (e.g. I want a technical explanation about how something works, and my search engine shows me ten pages on tutorials about where to click on my phone to use that something). Again, ChatGPT will make it easy to generate such low-quality content. Long story short, I was wondering if that would bring RSS back: that would allow me to manually aggregate websites I trust. Maybe I could trust a friend and transitively trust the feeds they trust (à la PGP, even though PGP trust rings seem to be hated :)). That would close the loop: algorithms came to help organise the growing quantity of data, then started flooding the world with generated data (what they were initially built to control). And now somehow we would have to go back to manual treatment using old school trust (with RSS, or similar), because AIs can't differentiate the good content from the bad one.

ymolodtsov 4y ago

A: 2022 is the year RSS readers died B: 2022 is the year of RSS readers Me: I've been using an RSS reader all this time without hiccups.

timbit42 4y ago
I've had a few hiccups. eBay disabled RSS. It was a great way to quickly now when something you were looking for was posted. A couple of news media sites I'd like to follow on RSS disabled their RSS feeds a couple of years ago.