3 ms·

What killed RSS for me was when providers switched from putting the whole article into the feed to just putting one sentence or paragraph. Often the first para

What killed RSS for me was when providers switched from putting the whole article into the feed to just putting one sentence or paragraph. Often the first paragraph of an article is the intro so I had no idea if the article would be interesting. It killed my ability to quickly skim a bunch of articles. I understand why the providers did it — they need the clicks to survive. So I’d say Google did kill RSS but it had nothing to do with Reader and everything to do with the click based ad model they made the de facto standard.

crabmusket 3y ago
It's frustrating that the balance of providing enough content to gauge interest of often not struck. I follow some personal blogs which have title-only feeds which I do think reduces my click through rate significantly. I follow a few niche news sites which post essentially a long descriptive title, which is workable. The best balance I've seen for non-full-post feeds was Guardian Australia which posted a fairly decent introductory paragraph to their feed, enough for me to gauge whether to click in. Annoyingly though news organisations seem to be bad at properly tagging their posts, so I stopped using RSS with large mainstream news sites as the firehouse was too much.
- crabmusket 3y ago
  Update: 404media.co also has a great above-the-fold feed.
alisonatwork 3y ago
This is the answer. RSS without the full article is just Twitter. If you need to click through to an ad-ridden or paywalled website to read the content, then you might as well have just visited the website in the first place. The primary benefit of RSS from my perspective was being able to fetch news while online and then read it offline. That implies being able to consume information without obtrusive tracking and popups and marketing gimmicks. Once RSS feeds just became their own marketing gimmick, a way to hook you back into the site's ad-driven ecosystem, they lost their utility. Mailing lists are now the better alternative, although Substack is rapidly killing that medium too by consolidating every provider onto a single platform so they can correlate subscriptions, hijack img and href tags, and track every open and click.

crabmusket 3y ago

It's frustrating that the balance of providing enough content to gauge interest of often not struck. I follow some personal blogs which have title-only feeds which I do think reduces my click through rate significantly. I follow a few niche news sites which post essentially a long descriptive title, which is workable. The best balance I've seen for non-full-post feeds was Guardian Australia which posted a fairly decent introductory paragraph to their feed, enough for me to gauge whether to click in. Annoyingly though news organisations seem to be bad at properly tagging their posts, so I stopped using RSS with large mainstream news sites as the firehouse was too much.

crabmusket 3y ago
Update: 404media.co also has a great above-the-fold feed.

alisonatwork 3y ago

This is the answer. RSS without the full article is just Twitter. If you need to click through to an ad-ridden or paywalled website to read the content, then you might as well have just visited the website in the first place. The primary benefit of RSS from my perspective was being able to fetch news while online and then read it offline. That implies being able to consume information without obtrusive tracking and popups and marketing gimmicks. Once RSS feeds just became their own marketing gimmick, a way to hook you back into the site's ad-driven ecosystem, they lost their utility. Mailing lists are now the better alternative, although Substack is rapidly killing that medium too by consolidating every provider onto a single platform so they can correlate subscriptions, hijack img and href tags, and track every open and click.