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Please, also expose that you're subscribed to a blog's feed. I sometimes sent an email to site owners to compliment them with a nice article I just read. Someti

Please, also expose that you're subscribed to a blog's feed. I sometimes sent an email to site owners to compliment them with a nice article I just read. Sometimes I leave a short comment here on HN to let somebody know I subscribed to their feed. I hope it encourages people that put energy and heart into quality content to keep making that content. I try to not overdo that here on HN, because it adds little to the general discussion. What I also do with my homegrown RSS reader (see https://www.heyhomepage.com https://www.heyhomepage.com if you're interested) is adding a parameter to the links I click, like /?rss_ref=heyhomepage.com Site owners get my traffic and they can easily see where it comes from if they happen to look at their visitor statistics.

darekkay 3y ago
> Site owners get my traffic and they can easily see where it comes from if they happen to look at their visitor statistics. I suggest to also put the name of your reader and the total number of subscribers into the HTTP request (as user agent), if possible. https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-subscriber-count/ https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-subscriber-count/
- manuelmoreale 3y ago
  My understanding is that because of the way the various aggregators work is basically impossible to quantify the audience of RSS feeds, and that’s a good thing.
  - darekkay 3y ago
    Getting an exact number is impossible, that's what I wrote in the linked blog post as well. But every RSS reader that requires user accounts knows the exact numbers, and 4 of the main readers expose those numbers via HTTP requests.
    - manuelmoreale 3y ago
      From my personal digging [0] RSS is way too noisy. Just a wild guess but the 4 main readers are not where the majority of the RSS users are. [0] https://manuelmoreale.com/poking-around-my-server-logs https://manuelmoreale.com/poking-around-my-server-logs
- rambambram 3y ago
  If I have more users than just a couple, I would definitely look into doing that. But my feed reader is part of a website system (together with it's own feed) that sits nicely separated on a different domain for each client. I have to centralize things to even get this number. Somewhere in this same thread I said: "Exposing the number of subscribers from large RSS readers is a nice addition, but it also slightly nudges one to centralization." After second thought, I think it's better to just show this number if possible. It's better for RSS as a whole, it shows it's still alive.

darekkay 3y ago

> Site owners get my traffic and they can easily see where it comes from if they happen to look at their visitor statistics. I suggest to also put the name of your reader and the total number of subscribers into the HTTP request (as user agent), if possible. https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-subscriber-count/ https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-subscriber-count/

manuelmoreale 3y ago
My understanding is that because of the way the various aggregators work is basically impossible to quantify the audience of RSS feeds, and that’s a good thing.
- darekkay 3y ago
  Getting an exact number is impossible, that's what I wrote in the linked blog post as well. But every RSS reader that requires user accounts knows the exact numbers, and 4 of the main readers expose those numbers via HTTP requests.
  - manuelmoreale 3y ago
    From my personal digging [0] RSS is way too noisy. Just a wild guess but the 4 main readers are not where the majority of the RSS users are. [0] https://manuelmoreale.com/poking-around-my-server-logs https://manuelmoreale.com/poking-around-my-server-logs
rambambram 3y ago
If I have more users than just a couple, I would definitely look into doing that. But my feed reader is part of a website system (together with it's own feed) that sits nicely separated on a different domain for each client. I have to centralize things to even get this number. Somewhere in this same thread I said: "Exposing the number of subscribers from large RSS readers is a nice addition, but it also slightly nudges one to centralization." After second thought, I think it's better to just show this number if possible. It's better for RSS as a whole, it shows it's still alive.