8 ms·

How RSS beat Microsoft

315 points by vidyesh 1y ago

PeterStuer 1y ago
And then Google and Facebook killed RSS.
- Semiapies 1y ago
  My having to prune my subscriptions says otherwise.
  - rob 1y ago
    I'm sure there's still some people using a Ford Model T to drive around as well.
- zenmac 1y ago
  One can say that, but can you really kill RSS when it is protocol? It is an easier way to keep track of all the updates from different sites. Bluesky is basically RSS on JSON.
- latexr 1y ago
  RSS is alive and well. It’s rare that I find an interesting website where RSS makes sense and it doesn’t exist. Even if they don’t advertise it, popping the website’s address into a feed reader tends to be enough to find it. Even Mastodon and Bluesky profiles have RSS feeds.
  - pndy 1y ago
    Mozilla decided to remove its fantastic live bookmarks feature that seamlessly integrated RSS within bookmarks in 2018 with Firefox 64. Someone then made an extension which was ported to Chromium, and then back again to Firefox because original one was abandoned. A dedicated extension is needed to have that feature back. Chrome needs one as well, so does Edge; only Vivaldi and Opera come with build-in feed readers. There are of course standalone applications but that seems to be a niche nowadays. I've found an old rssowl opml file from 2014 last week and I decided to see what's still up. I've found some RSS readers in flathub but sadly, majority of what I was visiting back then died.
  - PeterStuer 1y ago
    Ofc I did not mean they literally killed it. But Google improved and pushed Reader to the point where it was the ubiquitous client, then terminated it leaving everyone at the mercy of poor clones or paid options. This was at the precise time social media platforms gained traction, and while some kept up rss, the majority of personal publishing moved to facebook and later other closed platforms. I still use rss daily for keeping up with we bsites, but now it is for 99% of internet users something tech embedded in an application, or just not heard of. So in that sense, the poster child of "Web 2.0" was taken out back and kneecapped.
oDot 1y ago
This is especially timely, as I'm currently building a service that let's you receive your RSS feed as a physical newspaper. Many times this sort of meta information reveals much more than expected
- rafterydj 1y ago
  I've had this same idea! Of course, it remains an idea never taken out of the garage. Are you delivering broadsheet, or formatting a printable file for users to print at home?
  - aa-jv 1y ago
    I have had this idea pitched to me many times over the years, with requests to build a simple prototype practically forced into my dev queue .. but I always resist it. The last time someone tried to convince me this was a good idea was just after the iPhone was announced, and before everyone and their monkey had a super computer in their pocket. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so we almost started - but my advice to the punter then was "lets see what the mobile phone industry looks like next year" .. well that put a pin in it. Nowadays, I'm not so sure I'd be so willing to do this - again, because it requires the user do the printing - but if you were to, say, make this into a vending machine product, which users can walk up to in the street and walk away with a custom 'zine full of their own interests, you might be onto something. Here in Europe we have a lot of old telephone booths converted into mini neighborhood free libraries. I've often wondered whether it would make sense to put a public printer in those libraries and let people print things .. seems like this would be a revolutionary new product to make, with printable broadsheets based on a custom RSS, an obvious killer app .. assuming someone can be found to maintain the printers. (Off to find thermal paper for my ClockworkPi, which I always wanted to turn into a custom RSS printer in the toilet...)
  - oDot 1y ago
    Typesetting is a challenge so broadsheet vs tabloid is undetermined, but whatever it will be it will be delivered to the door. The newspaper paper is a crucial part, I believe.
- 1y ago
charcircuit 1y ago
>All RSS had to do to weather ICE, Twitter, AI, and whatever comes next RSS did not weather Twitter. Social media is huge compared to RSS. It turned out that singular recommendation feeds are able to push URLs around better than needing every site to build in feeds themselves and then still requiring someone to turn those feeds into a singular feed for the user.
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  I was going to say, RSS is not as big as I remember it being back in the late 2000s. I remember people having RSS clients, myself included. Now I can't remember the last time I ever used one. Where RSS is most prominent I guess is podcast feeds which were based on RSS to my understanding.
  - vaylian 1y ago
    > which were based on RSS to my understanding. They still are in most cases.
    - Gormo 1y ago
      A podcast, by definition, is an RSS feed -- if it doesn't have RSS, it's not a podcast.
  - frizlab 1y ago
    I read HN top submissions through RSS \o/ I have a lot of other feeds too in my reader. I don’t think I could function without it, newswise.
  - Gormo 1y ago
    OTOH, I can't imagine not using an RSS reader. I'm sitting here with Liferea on my desktop connected to my TT-RSS server, which I use to manage pretty much everything I subscribe to: blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, webcomics, subreddits, and several aggregators including HN. Having to access all of those separately via their own websites sounds like a nightmare.
- 1y ago
l___l 1y ago
[dead]
lloydatkinson 1y ago
Interesting, I’d never heard of that ICE. Seems that it could be considered a very very early idea in line with ActivityPub, which I also don’t really know much about. I think, as someone that has a RSS feed on my blog, that RSS is a total mess and Atom was probably the better choice. Maybe even some modern JSON based format would be OK, but maybe that’s what ActivityPub is? Anyway, after dealing with the mess of images and inline HTML with CDATA in RSS, I have complete fatigue of the whole endeavour.
- masfuerte 1y ago
  RSS was so badly designed that early versions weren't actually valid XML. I never understood why anyone used it after Atom was created.
  - account42 1y ago
    Because people care about publishing or getting updates, not about the thing delivering them being valid XML or not. RSS works. Atom splitting the standard into two probably did more harm than good. In the end it doesn't matter since every reader supports both and both do the job well.
- latexr 1y ago
  > Maybe even some modern JSON based format would be OK That’s what JSON Feed is. It’s supported by several RSS readers. https://www.jsonfeed.org https://www.jsonfeed.org > but maybe that’s what ActivityPub is? No, that’s for social networking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
factorialboy 1y ago
> Massive tech companies tried to own syndication. They failed. Well, RSS won the battle, but lost the war.
- kevincox 1y ago
  Depends how you define lost. I still use it every day. Is it a popular main stream thing? No. Does every since site offer feeds for every reasonable thing you could want to subscribe to? But does it still work quite well for those that want to use it? Yes.
- piskov 1y ago
  Yet I still use it on all devices and nothing beats it. Moved to Feedly when Google Reader died. For apple ecosystem best client is https://reederapp.com/classic/ https://reederapp.com/classic/
  - frou_dh 1y ago
    Arguably the best is NetNewsWire, which has been around in various forms for over 20 years and is still developed today https://netnewswire.com https://netnewswire.com
    - michaelcampbell 1y ago
      https://theoldreader.com https://theoldreader.com has been my go-to since google reader was killed. It's pretty good at sussing out the rss feed of random blogs if one exists, too.
    - latexr 1y ago
      NetNewsWire doesn’t have an in-app browser, which can be a dealbreaker (it was for me, last I tried it).
    - hckalewine 1y ago
      Cannot agree more.
  - 1y ago
PaulRobinson 1y ago
I still think there is a future for web publishing - from indie to corporate - if people stop feeding the algorithm machine with both sides of the supply and demand market, and move it elsewhere. People found the web more boring, because it became more boring. They found the algorithm more interesting, because it allowed them to see what was going on with people they barely knew (from former school mates they'd lost touch with to celebrities without press filtering), and that was compelling. But there's a next phase available to us, which is to make the web more interesting, entertaining and compelling again. I love that b3ta.com still exists. I love that metafilter.com is moving on. I think it's great that web comics I love still publish to RSS. I just think more of us need to provide more demand, and more people will wake up to supply, and the flywheel will start to turn. RSS beat ICE, and it can beat Meta and X if people want it too, albeit for different reasons.
philistine 1y ago
Let me blow your mind: Betamax was not better quality than VHS. There are many things that can explain why people believed that one was better than the other. People confused Betamax with Betacam, Sony’s professional grade recording medium, which is absolutely better quality. People conflated VHS’ ability to slow the tape for even longer play at the expense of quality. That of course made the recording terrible. Betamax did not initially have this capability. People listened to Sony’s own marketing. When they couldn’t compete on features, they banked on their reputation.
- AtNightWeCode 1y ago
  They were both terrible quality. The thing with VHS is playtime. One movie could fit onto one tape.
  - HPsquared 1y ago
    Laserdisc also had that annoyance; max duration about an hour per side.
  - FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
    The only real advantage VHS had was that JVC broadly licensed the tech so anyone could manufacture devices and/or tapes while Sony heavily restricted Beta.
- theshrike79 1y ago
  Porn went VHS and later on you could fit a whole movie on one cassette. That was it
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGVVAQVdEOs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGVVAQVdEOs => (false, true)
  - cgh 1y ago
    This is discussed and dismissed in the first paragraph of the article.
sexyman48 1y ago
Whatever ICE was, I'm sure it wasn't thinking about RSS. RSS remains a trivial, unhierarchical link dump.
AtNightWeCode 1y ago
Then Microsoft took out revenge by adding the worst RSS integration ever to Windows/Outlook.
Havoc 1y ago
RSS has more of a commercial problem. You can’t put ads in it so sites are incentivized to force a site visit. Which in turn forces them to withhold the bulk of the value from the feed itself. Ie just include first sentence or two. Which kills the usefulness of the feed as anything more thank headlines and link. Headlines in turn are all clickbait these days so those don’t have much info density either.
- Scene_Cast2 1y ago
  Why can't you put ads on RSS? Either in the story itself (by the site or aggregator) or as a "promoted item" in the feed (by the aggregator). If anything, the Google Discover (or whatever it's called) is not too different, just that you don't control which exact news sources you're subscribed to. I can imagine an alternate timeline where Google Reader turned into a sort of Twitter (or FB or IG) feed.
  - danesparza 1y ago
    I'm just here to say that I'm still bitter about Google Reader. :-(
- nashashmi 1y ago
  Ads are a recent innovation on top of existing web standards. A new generation of changeable scripted ads had emerged and this was not compatible with XML. The old generation of ads was still compatible but not scalable, similar to how podcast sponsor ads work (immutable after publishing), and so did not get much traction.
  - scarface_74 1y ago
    Podcasts ads are definitely mutable after publishing. Dynamic ad insertion has been a thing for years. If you download an old Stuff You Should Know podcast, you will get a new ad even based on where you were when you downloaded it.
    - xp84 1y ago
renegat0x0 1y ago
- I still use RSS - Some major platform still provide RSS, which makes me use them (I do not use twitter, because it does not provide RSS - If not for RSS I would not be using Reddit - the moment platform drops RSS, I drop the platform Links: [0] https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive - my own RSS reader
- pavel_lishin 1y ago
  I forgot Reddit ever had RSS, and I think they're doing their best to forget it, too. Viewing the source of a subreddit on old.reddit.com shows an RSS link; viewing it on the new domain does not.
  - kivle 1y ago
    During the whole API debacle all the RSS feeds in my reader got rate limited or blocked, so I just stopped using Reddit. Maybe I'll give it another go if they actually started allowing RSS again.
    - pavel_lishin 1y ago
      I've given up on Reddit, after all of their moves that seemed to be explicitly hostile to their users. I know some people still get value out of it, and I'm happy for them, but I'm not particularly interested anymore.
      - jjordan 1y ago
        It's more bots / paid actors than real conversations at this point anyway. They're just milking the honeypot for that LLM training money until it runs out.
      - justinator 1y ago
        Is there a community that you’ve instead joined?
PaulHoule 1y ago
A lot of discussion around RSS revolves around the format for the data/metadata (e.g. the Atom feud) but the real problem with it is this: To consume an RSS feed you poll it. There are two polling speeds: too fast and too slow, and it's possible to be both at the same time. Note the struggles of this Karen to turn RSS from a simple stateful protocol to a complex stated protocol, and she'll ban you if you ever reset your cache and rerun your fetcher because your cache got corrupted or you suspect it might have been corrupted. http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/03/07/get/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/03/07/get/ You really want to have a stream of feed items and to be able to: (1) replay the whole stream all the way from or to the beginning and (2) query "what got added after time t?" and just get that. ActivityPub accomplishes this but people don't really like it. For Dave Winer it is all blub but even if he doesn't believe in the Fedi, he's on it. I really like https://superfeedr.com/ https://superfeedr.com/ because it does all the polling for you and hits your webhook whenever a new feed item appears. My webhook is about 15 lines of Python running as a Lambda function that posts items to an SQS queue and my YOShInOn RSS reader just drains the queue at its convenience. The pricing at 10 cents/feed/month is a bargain for high volume feeds like MDPI, arXiv, and The Guardian [1] but unfortunately I can't really afford to subscribe to 2000 little blogs that post maybe once a week at that rate. I wish there were more Planets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software) [1] AWS costs would be trivial in comparison even if it got out of the free tier
- jonchang 1y ago
  Her name is actually Rachel, not Karen.
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    I know. Perhaps I should have said "one of those misanthropic online personalities who kills 1000 contributions to open source you never knew you would have had because of their public bad attitude" and the fact that they have supporters is why Facebook wins and open systems lose.
    - 1y ago
zahlman 1y ago
The author seems to live in a bubble where people are aware of RSS feeds. This article is the first I'd even heard of ICE in the first place. While multiple companies are listed as being behind ICE, no examples are given of websites that actually provided a feed for it. Meanwhile, RSS is barely relevant today. For decades (Youtube turned 20 this year), people have had access to feeds curated by "the algorithm" operated by a commercial interest (hoping to maximize the amount of ads you look at); and most people seem to prefer it that way, if they're even aware of alternatives.
firefoxd 1y ago
RSS died so many times. But as my google traffic is steadily declining with AI overviews, my RSS readership has exploded.
jaredcwhite 1y ago
RSS isn't a format that's super-helpful for publishers. There are a variety of reasons why. But it's an absolute dream for consumers. And that's what makes it so awesome, so powerful. Case in point: I saw someone had unsubscribed from one of my email newsletters, and when I went to go read the "reason why" field, they'd filled out: "subscribed to the RSS feed instead." That's right, my email newsletter has an RSS feed (thanks Buttondown!), and they prefer to receive the newsletter that way rather than via email. And can I blame them? Absolutely not! I love RSS. Is it better for my vanity to have their email address in my database instead, rather than some nebulous XML file going out to who-knows? Of course. But again, this format keeps on winning year after year because it's one of the best consumer-first features of the open web.
- rs186 1y ago
  That's an extremely rare edge case that fails to justify your point spectacularly. I thought the comment says "it was an absolute dream for consumers" but actually it says "it's". Sorry to burst your bubble, if you ask any normal person who does not spend 10 hours on HN per week, chances are that they have never heard of the term RSS in their life.
  - AvAn12 1y ago
    I think there are a lot of us out there in fact. Managing a queue of feeds in an RSS reader is much more pleasant than having newsletters mixed with email. Separation of purpose is a good thing for most, imho
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
    Does not help that the browsers killed native RSS support. To bring up the infamous example, many normal people were using Google Reader.
  - skylurk 1y ago
    Nearly everyone I know has a favorite podcast. Even if they never heard of RSS, they are probably using it.
  - 1y ago
Olshansky 1y ago
Small self-promotion: https://github.com/Olshansk/rss-feeds https://github.com/Olshansk/rss-feeds As far as I can tell, it's become the "de-facto" for Anthropic related RSS feeds. You'd think RSS was dead, but I release this earlier this year and it's at 100 start.
tracker1 1y ago
I'd like to see a "new" RSS standard based around newline delimited json, where the summary text is a minor extension to GFM (to support left/right/spread images, minimal formatting, basically match medium.com options). This can allow a common reader to do a display that renders to their own liking (colors, font, etc). Beyond this, maybe a framework to show a single header ad on the reader giving the revenue credit and money to the original content site. The reason for newline separated json, is simply that you can do a partial content download in the reader... the most recent 100kb or 2mb or whatever... you the most recent is on top, and allows a site to publish more than just the most recent, but you don't have to grab that. Or maybe just standardize a since=(iso-style-datetime) or last=## (number of articles). Just a couple loose thoughts on this.
tolerance 1y ago
1 – I had no idea that Buttondown had an active blog. 2 – It feels like RSS is one of those topics where the same old observations and opinions are raised, but nothing new is ever tread for or against it. I’m not sure whether these works address my interest for the former, but I think they’re cool. * https://matklad.github.io/2025/06/26/rssssr.html https://matklad.github.io/2025/06/26/rssssr.html * https://github.com/rsdoiel/antenna https://github.com/rsdoiel/antenna
jmyeet 1y ago
deleted
- whimsicalism 1y ago
  wrong thread :)
samgranieri 1y ago
I’ve been using the internet since 1995 and I’ve never even heard of ICE. Crazy
asadotzler 1y ago
I chatted with Dean Hachomovich at a blogging conference as he was copying our (Firefox) tabbed browsing and RSS implementations. Soon after, a MS lawyer reached out to me to ask what they needed to do to re-use our RSS icon in the upcoming IE 7 release. We gave them the okay. I still have the jacket he gave me with "Longhorn loves RSS" on it.
keithnz 1y ago
Then google killed it, they made a great product, Google Reader, then killed it, and then after that huge amounts of RSS feeds just faded away. Ironically, my microsoft feeds are pretty active, and xkcd is still there, The Daily WTF is still going strong.... but a lot of my feeds are just dead.
maxglute 1y ago
I'm still hoping for AI agents to mature to a point where they can be universal scrapers for my RSS. Have a headless client, scraping, interpreting websites in the background... burn excess cpu cycles and dead dinosaurs to replicate universal RSS dream.
CoUHKT57BSe 1y ago
I, like many others on here, use RSS every day. In Thunderbird I have a whole bunch of feeds I subscribe to, one of which is this very website - Hacker News. I even made my own HackerNews extension in Thunderbird to make it even easier/quicker to open the links from the feed. RSS is great, I check them all throughout the day as I do my emails, all in the same app.

315 points by vidyesh 1y ago

PeterStuer 1y ago

And then Google and Facebook killed RSS.

Semiapies 1y ago
My having to prune my subscriptions says otherwise.
- rob 1y ago
  I'm sure there's still some people using a Ford Model T to drive around as well.
zenmac 1y ago
One can say that, but can you really kill RSS when it is protocol? It is an easier way to keep track of all the updates from different sites. Bluesky is basically RSS on JSON.
latexr 1y ago
RSS is alive and well. It’s rare that I find an interesting website where RSS makes sense and it doesn’t exist. Even if they don’t advertise it, popping the website’s address into a feed reader tends to be enough to find it. Even Mastodon and Bluesky profiles have RSS feeds.
- pndy 1y ago
  Mozilla decided to remove its fantastic live bookmarks feature that seamlessly integrated RSS within bookmarks in 2018 with Firefox 64. Someone then made an extension which was ported to Chromium, and then back again to Firefox because original one was abandoned. A dedicated extension is needed to have that feature back. Chrome needs one as well, so does Edge; only Vivaldi and Opera come with build-in feed readers. There are of course standalone applications but that seems to be a niche nowadays. I've found an old rssowl opml file from 2014 last week and I decided to see what's still up. I've found some RSS readers in flathub but sadly, majority of what I was visiting back then died.
- PeterStuer 1y ago
  Ofc I did not mean they literally killed it. But Google improved and pushed Reader to the point where it was the ubiquitous client, then terminated it leaving everyone at the mercy of poor clones or paid options. This was at the precise time social media platforms gained traction, and while some kept up rss, the majority of personal publishing moved to facebook and later other closed platforms. I still use rss daily for keeping up with we bsites, but now it is for 99% of internet users something tech embedded in an application, or just not heard of. So in that sense, the poster child of "Web 2.0" was taken out back and kneecapped.

oDot 1y ago

This is especially timely, as I'm currently building a service that let's you receive your RSS feed as a physical newspaper. Many times this sort of meta information reveals much more than expected

rafterydj 1y ago
I've had this same idea! Of course, it remains an idea never taken out of the garage. Are you delivering broadsheet, or formatting a printable file for users to print at home?
- aa-jv 1y ago
  I have had this idea pitched to me many times over the years, with requests to build a simple prototype practically forced into my dev queue .. but I always resist it. The last time someone tried to convince me this was a good idea was just after the iPhone was announced, and before everyone and their monkey had a super computer in their pocket. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so we almost started - but my advice to the punter then was "lets see what the mobile phone industry looks like next year" .. well that put a pin in it. Nowadays, I'm not so sure I'd be so willing to do this - again, because it requires the user do the printing - but if you were to, say, make this into a vending machine product, which users can walk up to in the street and walk away with a custom 'zine full of their own interests, you might be onto something. Here in Europe we have a lot of old telephone booths converted into mini neighborhood free libraries. I've often wondered whether it would make sense to put a public printer in those libraries and let people print things .. seems like this would be a revolutionary new product to make, with printable broadsheets based on a custom RSS, an obvious killer app .. assuming someone can be found to maintain the printers. (Off to find thermal paper for my ClockworkPi, which I always wanted to turn into a custom RSS printer in the toilet...)
- oDot 1y ago
  Typesetting is a challenge so broadsheet vs tabloid is undetermined, but whatever it will be it will be delivered to the door. The newspaper paper is a crucial part, I believe.
1y ago

charcircuit 1y ago

>All RSS had to do to weather ICE, Twitter, AI, and whatever comes next RSS did not weather Twitter. Social media is huge compared to RSS. It turned out that singular recommendation feeds are able to push URLs around better than needing every site to build in feeds themselves and then still requiring someone to turn those feeds into a singular feed for the user.

giancarlostoro 1y ago
I was going to say, RSS is not as big as I remember it being back in the late 2000s. I remember people having RSS clients, myself included. Now I can't remember the last time I ever used one. Where RSS is most prominent I guess is podcast feeds which were based on RSS to my understanding.
- vaylian 1y ago
  > which were based on RSS to my understanding. They still are in most cases.
  - Gormo 1y ago
    A podcast, by definition, is an RSS feed -- if it doesn't have RSS, it's not a podcast.
- frizlab 1y ago
  I read HN top submissions through RSS \o/ I have a lot of other feeds too in my reader. I don’t think I could function without it, newswise.
- Gormo 1y ago
  OTOH, I can't imagine not using an RSS reader. I'm sitting here with Liferea on my desktop connected to my TT-RSS server, which I use to manage pretty much everything I subscribe to: blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, webcomics, subreddits, and several aggregators including HN. Having to access all of those separately via their own websites sounds like a nightmare.
1y ago

l___l 1y ago

[dead]

lloydatkinson 1y ago

Interesting, I’d never heard of that ICE. Seems that it could be considered a very very early idea in line with ActivityPub, which I also don’t really know much about. I think, as someone that has a RSS feed on my blog, that RSS is a total mess and Atom was probably the better choice. Maybe even some modern JSON based format would be OK, but maybe that’s what ActivityPub is? Anyway, after dealing with the mess of images and inline HTML with CDATA in RSS, I have complete fatigue of the whole endeavour.

masfuerte 1y ago
RSS was so badly designed that early versions weren't actually valid XML. I never understood why anyone used it after Atom was created.
- account42 1y ago
  Because people care about publishing or getting updates, not about the thing delivering them being valid XML or not. RSS works. Atom splitting the standard into two probably did more harm than good. In the end it doesn't matter since every reader supports both and both do the job well.
latexr 1y ago
> Maybe even some modern JSON based format would be OK That’s what JSON Feed is. It’s supported by several RSS readers. https://www.jsonfeed.org https://www.jsonfeed.org > but maybe that’s what ActivityPub is? No, that’s for social networking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub

factorialboy 1y ago

> Massive tech companies tried to own syndication. They failed. Well, RSS won the battle, but lost the war.

kevincox 1y ago
Depends how you define lost. I still use it every day. Is it a popular main stream thing? No. Does every since site offer feeds for every reasonable thing you could want to subscribe to? But does it still work quite well for those that want to use it? Yes.
piskov 1y ago
Yet I still use it on all devices and nothing beats it. Moved to Feedly when Google Reader died. For apple ecosystem best client is https://reederapp.com/classic/ https://reederapp.com/classic/
- frou_dh 1y ago
  Arguably the best is NetNewsWire, which has been around in various forms for over 20 years and is still developed today https://netnewswire.com https://netnewswire.com
  - michaelcampbell 1y ago
    https://theoldreader.com https://theoldreader.com has been my go-to since google reader was killed. It's pretty good at sussing out the rss feed of random blogs if one exists, too.
  - latexr 1y ago
    NetNewsWire doesn’t have an in-app browser, which can be a dealbreaker (it was for me, last I tried it).
  - hckalewine 1y ago
    Cannot agree more.
- 1y ago

PaulRobinson 1y ago

I still think there is a future for web publishing - from indie to corporate - if people stop feeding the algorithm machine with both sides of the supply and demand market, and move it elsewhere. People found the web more boring, because it became more boring. They found the algorithm more interesting, because it allowed them to see what was going on with people they barely knew (from former school mates they'd lost touch with to celebrities without press filtering), and that was compelling. But there's a next phase available to us, which is to make the web more interesting, entertaining and compelling again. I love that b3ta.com still exists. I love that metafilter.com is moving on. I think it's great that web comics I love still publish to RSS. I just think more of us need to provide more demand, and more people will wake up to supply, and the flywheel will start to turn. RSS beat ICE, and it can beat Meta and X if people want it too, albeit for different reasons.

philistine 1y ago

Let me blow your mind: Betamax was not better quality than VHS. There are many things that can explain why people believed that one was better than the other. People confused Betamax with Betacam, Sony’s professional grade recording medium, which is absolutely better quality. People conflated VHS’ ability to slow the tape for even longer play at the expense of quality. That of course made the recording terrible. Betamax did not initially have this capability. People listened to Sony’s own marketing. When they couldn’t compete on features, they banked on their reputation.

AtNightWeCode 1y ago
They were both terrible quality. The thing with VHS is playtime. One movie could fit onto one tape.
- HPsquared 1y ago
  Laserdisc also had that annoyance; max duration about an hour per side.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
  The only real advantage VHS had was that JVC broadly licensed the tech so anyone could manufacture devices and/or tapes while Sony heavily restricted Beta.
theshrike79 1y ago
Porn went VHS and later on you could fit a whole movie on one cassette. That was it
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGVVAQVdEOs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGVVAQVdEOs => (false, true)
- cgh 1y ago
  This is discussed and dismissed in the first paragraph of the article.

sexyman48 1y ago

Whatever ICE was, I'm sure it wasn't thinking about RSS. RSS remains a trivial, unhierarchical link dump.

AtNightWeCode 1y ago

Then Microsoft took out revenge by adding the worst RSS integration ever to Windows/Outlook.

Havoc 1y ago

RSS has more of a commercial problem. You can’t put ads in it so sites are incentivized to force a site visit. Which in turn forces them to withhold the bulk of the value from the feed itself. Ie just include first sentence or two. Which kills the usefulness of the feed as anything more thank headlines and link. Headlines in turn are all clickbait these days so those don’t have much info density either.

Scene_Cast2 1y ago
Why can't you put ads on RSS? Either in the story itself (by the site or aggregator) or as a "promoted item" in the feed (by the aggregator). If anything, the Google Discover (or whatever it's called) is not too different, just that you don't control which exact news sources you're subscribed to. I can imagine an alternate timeline where Google Reader turned into a sort of Twitter (or FB or IG) feed.
- danesparza 1y ago
  I'm just here to say that I'm still bitter about Google Reader. :-(
nashashmi 1y ago
Ads are a recent innovation on top of existing web standards. A new generation of changeable scripted ads had emerged and this was not compatible with XML. The old generation of ads was still compatible but not scalable, similar to how podcast sponsor ads work (immutable after publishing), and so did not get much traction.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  Podcasts ads are definitely mutable after publishing. Dynamic ad insertion has been a thing for years. If you download an old Stuff You Should Know podcast, you will get a new ad even based on where you were when you downloaded it.
  - xp84 1y ago

renegat0x0 1y ago

- I still use RSS - Some major platform still provide RSS, which makes me use them (I do not use twitter, because it does not provide RSS - If not for RSS I would not be using Reddit - the moment platform drops RSS, I drop the platform Links: [0] https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive - my own RSS reader

pavel_lishin 1y ago
I forgot Reddit ever had RSS, and I think they're doing their best to forget it, too. Viewing the source of a subreddit on old.reddit.com shows an RSS link; viewing it on the new domain does not.
- kivle 1y ago
  During the whole API debacle all the RSS feeds in my reader got rate limited or blocked, so I just stopped using Reddit. Maybe I'll give it another go if they actually started allowing RSS again.
  - pavel_lishin 1y ago
    I've given up on Reddit, after all of their moves that seemed to be explicitly hostile to their users. I know some people still get value out of it, and I'm happy for them, but I'm not particularly interested anymore.
    - jjordan 1y ago
      It's more bots / paid actors than real conversations at this point anyway. They're just milking the honeypot for that LLM training money until it runs out.
    - justinator 1y ago
      Is there a community that you’ve instead joined?

PaulHoule 1y ago

A lot of discussion around RSS revolves around the format for the data/metadata (e.g. the Atom feud) but the real problem with it is this: To consume an RSS feed you poll it. There are two polling speeds: too fast and too slow, and it's possible to be both at the same time. Note the struggles of this Karen to turn RSS from a simple stateful protocol to a complex stated protocol, and she'll ban you if you ever reset your cache and rerun your fetcher because your cache got corrupted or you suspect it might have been corrupted. http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/03/07/get/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/03/07/get/ You really want to have a stream of feed items and to be able to: (1) replay the whole stream all the way from or to the beginning and (2) query "what got added after time t?" and just get that. ActivityPub accomplishes this but people don't really like it. For Dave Winer it is all blub but even if he doesn't believe in the Fedi, he's on it. I really like https://superfeedr.com/ https://superfeedr.com/ because it does all the polling for you and hits your webhook whenever a new feed item appears. My webhook is about 15 lines of Python running as a Lambda function that posts items to an SQS queue and my YOShInOn RSS reader just drains the queue at its convenience. The pricing at 10 cents/feed/month is a bargain for high volume feeds like MDPI, arXiv, and The Guardian [1] but unfortunately I can't really afford to subscribe to 2000 little blogs that post maybe once a week at that rate. I wish there were more Planets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software) [1] AWS costs would be trivial in comparison even if it got out of the free tier

jonchang 1y ago
Her name is actually Rachel, not Karen.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  I know. Perhaps I should have said "one of those misanthropic online personalities who kills 1000 contributions to open source you never knew you would have had because of their public bad attitude" and the fact that they have supporters is why Facebook wins and open systems lose.
  - 1y ago

zahlman 1y ago

The author seems to live in a bubble where people are aware of RSS feeds. This article is the first I'd even heard of ICE in the first place. While multiple companies are listed as being behind ICE, no examples are given of websites that actually provided a feed for it. Meanwhile, RSS is barely relevant today. For decades (Youtube turned 20 this year), people have had access to feeds curated by "the algorithm" operated by a commercial interest (hoping to maximize the amount of ads you look at); and most people seem to prefer it that way, if they're even aware of alternatives.

firefoxd 1y ago

RSS died so many times. But as my google traffic is steadily declining with AI overviews, my RSS readership has exploded.

jaredcwhite 1y ago

RSS isn't a format that's super-helpful for publishers. There are a variety of reasons why. But it's an absolute dream for consumers. And that's what makes it so awesome, so powerful. Case in point: I saw someone had unsubscribed from one of my email newsletters, and when I went to go read the "reason why" field, they'd filled out: "subscribed to the RSS feed instead." That's right, my email newsletter has an RSS feed (thanks Buttondown!), and they prefer to receive the newsletter that way rather than via email. And can I blame them? Absolutely not! I love RSS. Is it better for my vanity to have their email address in my database instead, rather than some nebulous XML file going out to who-knows? Of course. But again, this format keeps on winning year after year because it's one of the best consumer-first features of the open web.

rs186 1y ago
That's an extremely rare edge case that fails to justify your point spectacularly. I thought the comment says "it was an absolute dream for consumers" but actually it says "it's". Sorry to burst your bubble, if you ask any normal person who does not spend 10 hours on HN per week, chances are that they have never heard of the term RSS in their life.
- AvAn12 1y ago
  I think there are a lot of us out there in fact. Managing a queue of feeds in an RSS reader is much more pleasant than having newsletters mixed with email. Separation of purpose is a good thing for most, imho
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
  Does not help that the browsers killed native RSS support. To bring up the infamous example, many normal people were using Google Reader.
- skylurk 1y ago
  Nearly everyone I know has a favorite podcast. Even if they never heard of RSS, they are probably using it.
- 1y ago

Olshansky 1y ago

Small self-promotion: https://github.com/Olshansk/rss-feeds https://github.com/Olshansk/rss-feeds As far as I can tell, it's become the "de-facto" for Anthropic related RSS feeds. You'd think RSS was dead, but I release this earlier this year and it's at 100 start.

tracker1 1y ago

I'd like to see a "new" RSS standard based around newline delimited json, where the summary text is a minor extension to GFM (to support left/right/spread images, minimal formatting, basically match medium.com options). This can allow a common reader to do a display that renders to their own liking (colors, font, etc). Beyond this, maybe a framework to show a single header ad on the reader giving the revenue credit and money to the original content site. The reason for newline separated json, is simply that you can do a partial content download in the reader... the most recent 100kb or 2mb or whatever... you the most recent is on top, and allows a site to publish more than just the most recent, but you don't have to grab that. Or maybe just standardize a since=(iso-style-datetime) or last=## (number of articles). Just a couple loose thoughts on this.

tolerance 1y ago

1 – I had no idea that Buttondown had an active blog. 2 – It feels like RSS is one of those topics where the same old observations and opinions are raised, but nothing new is ever tread for or against it. I’m not sure whether these works address my interest for the former, but I think they’re cool. * https://matklad.github.io/2025/06/26/rssssr.html https://matklad.github.io/2025/06/26/rssssr.html * https://github.com/rsdoiel/antenna https://github.com/rsdoiel/antenna

jmyeet 1y ago

deleted

whimsicalism 1y ago
wrong thread :)

samgranieri 1y ago

I’ve been using the internet since 1995 and I’ve never even heard of ICE. Crazy

asadotzler 1y ago

I chatted with Dean Hachomovich at a blogging conference as he was copying our (Firefox) tabbed browsing and RSS implementations. Soon after, a MS lawyer reached out to me to ask what they needed to do to re-use our RSS icon in the upcoming IE 7 release. We gave them the okay. I still have the jacket he gave me with "Longhorn loves RSS" on it.

keithnz 1y ago

Then google killed it, they made a great product, Google Reader, then killed it, and then after that huge amounts of RSS feeds just faded away. Ironically, my microsoft feeds are pretty active, and xkcd is still there, The Daily WTF is still going strong.... but a lot of my feeds are just dead.

maxglute 1y ago

I'm still hoping for AI agents to mature to a point where they can be universal scrapers for my RSS. Have a headless client, scraping, interpreting websites in the background... burn excess cpu cycles and dead dinosaurs to replicate universal RSS dream.

CoUHKT57BSe 1y ago

I, like many others on here, use RSS every day. In Thunderbird I have a whole bunch of feeds I subscribe to, one of which is this very website - Hacker News. I even made my own HackerNews extension in Thunderbird to make it even easier/quicker to open the links from the feed. RSS is great, I check them all throughout the day as I do my emails, all in the same app.