4 ms·

I don’t think RSS ever had a chance. I ran a site in high school and it was making bank from ads. Why would I provide a feed that earned me no money?

Zak 3y ago
RSS feeds do not need to provide the full article text. On commercial sites, they usually only provide a summary.
sumeno 3y ago
Because you can set up a feed that only provides a short intro and require a click through for the full article, which many websites do with their RSS feed. It increases the number of people regularly visiting your site.
- kevincox 3y ago
  Also people share articles. If you have a feed there is roughly 0% chance of me sharing one of your articles. If I subscribe to your feed and like the article then I may share it with friends or post to Reddit or Hacker News. Of course while you may reach some users that you wouldn't have otherwise, you may also lose some ad views from people who would still check your site if there was no feed. So it is a balance.
- treflop 3y ago
  OP here - I have a desktop RSS reader and I do not subscribe to feeds that only have abstracts. I much rather just go to the site personally. If every feed had just abstracts then I probably wouldn’t even bother with an RSS readers. I’m technical already and I can’t imagine any regular person bothering with RSS if it was just abstracts.
  - AJ007 3y ago
    You just manually go through a long list of sites daily/monthly/yearly?
    - treflop 3y ago
      Yep. Sitting down and reading is an enjoyable thing for me. I’m not trying to hoover up every headline.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        RSS made a lot of sense in a world where many sites published interesting but infrequent material.
  - sumeno 3y ago
    Not everyone is you and you're ignoring the fact that some people do subscribe to those feeds and will drive traffic to your site for a completely negligible effort even if you personally wouldn't. Your original post was about why you, as a website owner, would provide an RSS feed. Not why you personally would use an RSS feed
    - treflop 3y ago
      My original post is about why RSS didn’t take off. My second post is also about why RSS didn’t take off. Together they present an angle from both the provider and consumer sides with the greater point that Google didn’t kill RSS — rather, the relative unpopularity of RSS caused Google to pull out. And guess what, RSS didn’t take off.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ghaff 3y ago
RSS wasn't about monetization. While there were ways you could game it, it really wasn't for content providers who wanted to make money. There were and are some/many of them but you basically weren't the audience.
- treflop 3y ago
  Well I don’t think there is any audience because very few sites had/have any decent RSS feeds. Well except maybe tech sites, but most people are not into tech sites.
  - greenyoda 3y ago
    Lots of standard blog publishing software generates RSS feeds. For example, every Substack site I've ever seen has an RSS feed at "/feed". They don't tell you about it, but it's there if you want it. And the RSS aggregator I use, Newsblur, can automatically find most RSS feeds if you just give it the site's home page URL.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      The issue isn't really that there aren't RSS feeds or that there aren't RSS feed readers. But it's easier to demonize Google for killing Reader (which they probably shouldn't have done) than it is to admit that reading info from RSS feeds just isn't mainstream behavior--and really never was but now there are more alternatives.
082349872349872 3y ago
> Why would I provide a feed that earned me no money? Because (unless you have infinite greed?) at some point in your life you will have enough money, and then you might wish to provide a feed for other reasons?
- treflop 3y ago
  Ah yes, most people running sites are rolling in dough, especially journalism…
ghaff 3y ago
Because not everything has to be about making money? I understand that monetization is the goal for some people but it wasn't how the web historically worked and RSS probably isn't the right mechanism in a world where everything is about how much money you can make.

Zak 3y ago

RSS feeds do not need to provide the full article text. On commercial sites, they usually only provide a summary.

sumeno 3y ago

Because you can set up a feed that only provides a short intro and require a click through for the full article, which many websites do with their RSS feed. It increases the number of people regularly visiting your site.

kevincox 3y ago
Also people share articles. If you have a feed there is roughly 0% chance of me sharing one of your articles. If I subscribe to your feed and like the article then I may share it with friends or post to Reddit or Hacker News. Of course while you may reach some users that you wouldn't have otherwise, you may also lose some ad views from people who would still check your site if there was no feed. So it is a balance.
treflop 3y ago
OP here - I have a desktop RSS reader and I do not subscribe to feeds that only have abstracts. I much rather just go to the site personally. If every feed had just abstracts then I probably wouldn’t even bother with an RSS readers. I’m technical already and I can’t imagine any regular person bothering with RSS if it was just abstracts.
- AJ007 3y ago
  You just manually go through a long list of sites daily/monthly/yearly?
  - treflop 3y ago
    Yep. Sitting down and reading is an enjoyable thing for me. I’m not trying to hoover up every headline.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      RSS made a lot of sense in a world where many sites published interesting but infrequent material.
- sumeno 3y ago
  Not everyone is you and you're ignoring the fact that some people do subscribe to those feeds and will drive traffic to your site for a completely negligible effort even if you personally wouldn't. Your original post was about why you, as a website owner, would provide an RSS feed. Not why you personally would use an RSS feed
  - treflop 3y ago
    My original post is about why RSS didn’t take off. My second post is also about why RSS didn’t take off. Together they present an angle from both the provider and consumer sides with the greater point that Google didn’t kill RSS — rather, the relative unpopularity of RSS caused Google to pull out. And guess what, RSS didn’t take off.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ghaff 3y ago

RSS wasn't about monetization. While there were ways you could game it, it really wasn't for content providers who wanted to make money. There were and are some/many of them but you basically weren't the audience.

treflop 3y ago
Well I don’t think there is any audience because very few sites had/have any decent RSS feeds. Well except maybe tech sites, but most people are not into tech sites.
- greenyoda 3y ago
  Lots of standard blog publishing software generates RSS feeds. For example, every Substack site I've ever seen has an RSS feed at "/feed". They don't tell you about it, but it's there if you want it. And the RSS aggregator I use, Newsblur, can automatically find most RSS feeds if you just give it the site's home page URL.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    The issue isn't really that there aren't RSS feeds or that there aren't RSS feed readers. But it's easier to demonize Google for killing Reader (which they probably shouldn't have done) than it is to admit that reading info from RSS feeds just isn't mainstream behavior--and really never was but now there are more alternatives.

082349872349872 3y ago

> Why would I provide a feed that earned me no money? Because (unless you have infinite greed?) at some point in your life you will have enough money, and then you might wish to provide a feed for other reasons?

treflop 3y ago
Ah yes, most people running sites are rolling in dough, especially journalism…

ghaff 3y ago

Because not everything has to be about making money? I understand that monetization is the goal for some people but it wasn't how the web historically worked and RSS probably isn't the right mechanism in a world where everything is about how much money you can make.