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The Rise and Demise of RSS (2018)

not--felix 1y ago
I think the main reason why rss failed is the lack of an algorithmic feed. If you follow just a few news sites you drown in articles. The social media sites are much better in filtering out stuff you do not want to see.
- kevincox 1y ago
  You must be using different social media than me because it is all pushing celebrities and ads not friends and family that I want to see. I much prefer being in control of my feed. In an ideal world there would probably be a mix of both (I have a list of people who I see every post and a list where I see popular or major items) but between the current options I far prefer something straightforward. Especially when the algorithm isn't fully tuned to optimize my interests.
  - BeFlatXIII 1y ago
    > not friends and family that I want to see My friends and family don’t seem to post anymore. At least FB has groups for shared niche interests.
    - HankStallone 1y ago
      My friends and family either never post, or post garbage several times a day. (Once upon a time it was funny cat pictures and jokes; now it's "reels," whatever those are.) As you say, groups now seem to be the only place to find worthwhile content on FB.
- yepitwas 1y ago
  The only ways I use social media would be better served by RSS. I follow specific businesses, organizations, and people, and want to see everything they post, in chronological order. I do my best to achieve this with social media, but RSS would be better. For news: per-topic or per-region feeds would probably help. I think AP used to have those, maybe still does.
  - throwaway1777 1y ago
    [dead]
  - skeezyboy 1y ago
    > I do my best to achieve this with social media which one? there are a bunch. you could either be talking about whatsapp or youtube
    - yepitwas 1y ago
      Mostly IG (businesses and organizations) and BlueSky (people) right now. IG won't let you set the "following" page to your default any more (boooo) but it's still quick to get to, so you can just ignore the (incredibly, aggressively shit) "feed". RSS would be better, but this works OK.
- ajmurmann 1y ago
  An RSS client could do that, no?
- hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
  In theory a market could arise around providing bespoke algorithmic feeds for one's RSS content, in some kind of adapter model, but I don't know enough about ML engineering to suggest whether that is at all economically feasible. Maybe?
- newscombinatorY 1y ago
  RSS feeds can drown you in quality content you're not interested in 75% of the time. Social Media can drown you in content that seems interesting, but is worthless 75% of the time. But that's my experience - yours could be different (I totally made up the numbers, but you get the idea).
- mrgoldenbrown 1y ago
  On the contrary, IME social media sites seem to fight me on filtering what I get to see. They are happy to show me what they want me to see, but constantly thwart my attempts to decide for myself. How many plugins should I need to install to get FB or twitter to respect my choice to show the timeline chronologically.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  Depending on your feed reader you can filter stuff pretty well with custom rules. I use newsboat. Even without hard filtering, thanks to the compact density I can sift through a huge number of articles in barely any time at all. Yes, I am doing it myself, the horror of laboring, but again it takes barely any time at all to go through the days RSS feeds even with a few news sites throwing 100 articles a day. Mark as read. Done.
cowpig 1y ago
Are there examples of government policies that successfully encourage the adoption/use of open standards? I feel like the EU has successfully pushed the world towards USB-C as a standard, which seems like a big success to me (I no longer need, but obviously still have, my giant tub of various connectors and wires in my garage). Would some kind of policy make sense to encourage an open syndication standard? Would it be a good thing?
- HankStallone 1y ago
  The Internet community (and pre-Internet, even) has done a fine job of creating many standards without government instructions. No, that wouldn't be a good thing. RSS is fine. The article stretches both in how well-known it suggests RSS was a decade ago (leaning hard on the word "might"), and in talking about its "demise" now. Some of its complaints are just silly, like when it agrees with the New York Times that "RSS" isn't a "particularly user-friendly" acronym. So they think if it had been named Bundling Up Feeds For You everyone would be using it now? RSS never caught on with average users because the average user doesn't want to think that much about his use of the web. He wants to go to one or a few sites he's comfortable with, and read what they choose to show him. That's just how it is. For the minority who aren't satisfied with that, RSS is a useful tool. There's no problem, except for people who get frustrated that the average user isn't sophisticated enough.
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  Rule number 1 of Hacker News: No matter what subject is discussed, there will always be a top level comment suggesting that the government (preferably the EU) should either ban it worldwide, or make it mandatory worldwide. Usually it is the first comment. As to the topic: Yes, of course the European Union should make sure that every website uses RSS. It is probably the most pressing issue the alliance faces today.
happytoexplain 1y ago
I still use RSS for 100% of my content: A couple news sources, a bunch of YouTube channels, a couple webcomics. It's easy for me, though, because I don't use social media, which I imagine wouldn't really be well served by RSS.
- latexr 1y ago
  > I don't use social media, which I imagine wouldn't really be well served by RSS. I don’t use Bluesky, but there are a few people on there I wish to see updates from (including one webcomic artist without a website) and I use Bluesky’s integrated RSS to do so. Same for Mastodon.
  - happytoexplain 1y ago
    Yeah, true - I guess it's the same as for YouTube. If you want "the feed", RSS would be overwhelming. If you want "every post by a few people", RSS is perfect.
- scellus 1y ago
  I still use RSS, not for all content but for blogs that are now mostly Substack newsletters. Works fine, relatively noise-free.
- timbit42 1y ago
  Some social media has RSS. Reddit, BlueSky, Mastodon, and YouTube all have it. X used to but it was dropped at some point. TikTok, Facebook, Threads, and Instagram don't.
- jsbisviewtiful 1y ago
  I dropped reddit for my RSS, which I've had some version of since before the demise of Google Reader. RSS is such a great way to keep up on trusted sources, unlike reddit and other various social platforms. It's also a nice way to keep up on some forums, like Macrumors and HackerNews.
Apreche 1y ago
What is up with the people who keep insisting RSS is dead? It never went anywhere. It’s some kind of twisted comedy sketch where someone insists a person is dead when that person is standing right there next to them. I have used RSS continuously since near the beginning. When Google Reader died I just changed clients. There are many client options now, basically all of which are better than Google Reader ever was. Pretty much every website out there still has feeds. I can even use it for extremely old fashioned local news sites.
- mrgoldenbrown 1y ago
  >Pretty much every website out there still has feeds. Where is the RSS button on Facebook, Instagram, tiktok, twitter, or YouTube? Most websites might have feeds, but not the most used web sites.
  - almoni 1y ago
    Twitter used to have that, haven't kept up with if they still do. Youtube can do it also I think in a limited way.
    - extra88 1y ago
      Twitter does not, they dropped their RSS feeds a long time ago. They still had a free API for a while so you could use a twitter-to-RSS tool but early in the Musk era the free API went away. Yes, YouTube has RSS feeds for channels (technically I think the feed is per playlist but channels have a default playlist).
  - badlibrarian 1y ago
    The feeds are there. There are apps that use them, even on TVs. https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCtI0Hodo5o5dUb67FeUjDeA https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCtI0Hod...
  - Apreche 1y ago
    I don’t use those other sites, but YouTube, here ya go. https://chuck.is/yt-rss/ https://chuck.is/yt-rss/ Worst case, pretty much every modern client has features that let you subscribe to things that aren’t RSS friendly. For example Feedly (which I don’t use) has the ability to subscribe to Twitter, Reddit, Mastodon, Facebook, Telegram, Google News search queries, etc.
skeezyboy 1y ago
never understood this idea. whats the difference between this and bookmarking the actual site and just manually checking? if people had been using HTML as originally envisioned, this kind of thing would be parsable by a browser and a new protocol need not be introduced
- hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
  RSS doesn’t have formatting and interactions. It’s content only. It’s also a drastically simpler standard than HTML making creating RSS clients far easier than an HTML client. Finally it is designed to push new content in a way HTML isn’t. I can tell my RSS client to only download all the titles for all the different posts and only download the content on actually clicking through. Thats something HTML cannot do. Further, my client can easily retrieve changes since it last checked which HTML doesn’t allow. Lots of differences. Overloading HTML which even at its simplest is about fixed text and overloading that with handling temporal lists of atomic data would be a bad idea.
- timw4mail 1y ago
  Automation, and ease of skimming articles for one.
- latexr 1y ago
  > whats the difference between this and bookmarking the actual site and just manually checking? For one, not having to manually check is huge. If someone posts once every two months, I’m not going to manually open their website every day (times twenty for every one) or even every week and then have to think “have I read this?”. That would be a colossal waste of time, attention, and mental energy. For another, there’s a plethora of cases where RSS filters. I subscribe to YouTube channels exclusively through RSS, I never open the website (or even have an account) otherwise. Same for Reddit, they have specific feeds for each subreddit, and for each they can even list just the top daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly posts. I can easily get just the most interesting posts of something like r/toolgifs without ever having to deal with the faff or getting distracted by other junk. Content comes to me, and on my terms.
  - 1y ago
hagbard_c 1y ago
Rumours of RSS's demise are greatly exaggerated, I use it every day for dozens of sites. If a site does not offer an RSS feed one can be generated using something like rssproxy [1] or another implementation of this idea. [1] https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy
smusamashah 1y ago
Google didn't just kill feed reader, when Chrome came, other browsers had built in RSS support of some sort (Opera definitely, I think Firefox too, don't remebber about IE). Chrome always opened RSS links as raw XML file with no hint of what to do with it whatsoever.
- goku12 1y ago
  Yet it survives to this day because of one reason - it's dead simple to serve and consume it. Chrome may need an extension to handle it properly (I use one on Firefox). The singular challenge it faces is discoverability, as you point out. The above mentioned extension solves that for me. But if it were to be brought back as a default feature on browsers, RSS would be an instant hit again. There's always the opportunity to resurrect it.
truelson 1y ago
RSS is still extremely useful. It may never have been meant for mass adoption like algorithmic feeds, but that is the point: it is the right counterbalance. I want full control of my feeds, and RSS gives me that. With tools like https://docs.rsshub.app https://docs.rsshub.app almost anything can be made RSS-able. I know I am not the average user, but for those who care about their information diets, RSS is essential. One underappreciated aspect: RSS can forward both machine readable and human readable content at the same time. I am experimenting with it for information processing, and I like that you can always peek into the pipes, even mid-stream, to see what is happening. I will be writing more about this at https://writings.alethia.news https://writings.alethia.news (alongside AI, product design, macroeconomic data, and the occasional bit of trivia).
alberth 1y ago
I know many people feel nostalgic about the days when RSS was everywhere (and a more open web) — and I do too. But my experience must be different than most. I had hundreds of feeds in Google Reader, which quickly became overwhelming. It was hard to tell what was worth reading, and I often just marked everything as “read,” the same way people get email fatigue. While I support a more open web, I think the real missing piece in the conversation is curation. Take HN, for example. It’s essentially community-driven curation, and I get far more enjoyment browsing HN today than I ever did sifting endlessly through my RSS feeds trying to find something interesting.
- colechristensen 1y ago
  What was needed is your own personal "algorithm" to provide you a feed of the things you'd subscribed to so you didn't have to read and check off every published thing. Imagine if you actually had control of this feed and could have the social aspect but tweaked to your preferences instead of somebody else's In fact it's not such a bad idea to write this software now
- HankStallone 1y ago
  When I used Google Reader, I didn't read everything together under one heading for that reason. I clicked on a feed, read the latest, and moved on to the next. So on a slower feed I might always read everything, while on a very busy one I might just occasionally check in or read a little while and then mark the rest read. Now I use TT-RSS, which looks a lot like Google Reader did, but you run it on a local system. And I still read some feeds completely every day and let others pile up for weeks.
- crtasm 1y ago
  Hundreds sounds overwhelming! Did Google Reader let you look at a single feed at a time? I've never found readers that present a single "inbox" combining all my feeds to be usable. Some of the feeds I subscribe to are effectively curated news from around the web, and I use filters to hide certain topics - e.g. from a newspaper I might filter the entire sport section.
- extra88 1y ago
nop_slide 1y ago
I've been using RSS via the Readwise "Reader" app over the last year and it's been awesome. First time using RSS and love that so many developers make sure they have feeds on their blogs. The lack of the algorithmic "feed" and the fact that I'm "pulling" rather than being "fed" content is such a great change in content consumption.
hombre_fatal 1y ago
RSS sucks because it depends on every content source offering the API. The successor to RSS is where each feed is an arbitrary URL that your client hits to generate a feed. With an LLM this is trivial compared to before.
- xnx 1y ago
  Agree! Just wrote basically this comment before I saw yours. Disappointingly even pay tools like Feedly have extremely poor RSS creators. All Feedly's features for the past few years seem to focus on some obscure niche of IT security threat awareness.
- imiric 1y ago
  RSS is not an API, though. It's another content type like HTML, typically XML, but in a specific format that makes it easier for programs to consume. Generating it is trivial in most web frameworks and CMSs, and sites that don't offer it either never bothered to set it up, or actively choose not to. This is hardly a fault of RSS itself. What you suggest as a successor is a workaround for such sites, not something that should be the norm.
  - hombre_fatal 1y ago
    So RSS isn't an API because it returns XML instead of JSON or protobufs? That doesn't sound right. It's an endpoint for machine consumption and that's what most people mean when they refer to an API. But that's a distraction from the point. It's trivial to implement an RSS endpoint, but what's not trivial is requiring everyone to implement it. Needing someone to implement an API just to have machine-friendly pull access to their latest content is only a trade-off that made sense last decade. It's not a good solution if you had the power of generating feeds yourself.
- HankStallone 1y ago
  Are you talking about something that can go out to any web site, grab the HTML, and turn it into a feed that's consistent with any other feed and not a big hairy mess of stuff that wasn't actually part of the content? That doesn't sound trivial at all to me, so maybe I'm misunderstanding.
renewiltord 1y ago
RSS is dead. Netcraft confirms.
xnx 1y ago
The next phase of RSS is having a client ("agent") that can process arbitrary feed-style pages and create sanitized (e.g. ad, tracking, and visual junk free) RSS feeds. RSS isn't "dead", but it (actively?) neglected when even a "blog" like https://waymo.com/blog/ https://waymo.com/blog/ (to pick one random-ish example) doesn't have an RSS or Atom feed. Content sources see zero (or negative) value in RSS.
ageospatial 1y ago
RSS won't be dead. Our AI agents are using RSS as this is still extremely useful for parsing data. Think about the amazing work RSS did for GeoRSS
vamosg 1y ago
[dead]
brycewray 1y ago
(2018)
matteeyah 1y ago
I thought this was about Rainbow Six Siege
matteeyah 1y ago
Initially, I thought this was about Rainbow Six Siege
WaltPurvis 1y ago
This article is seven years old; seems like (2018) should be in the title.
imiric 1y ago
RSS isn't dead, though some companies would certainly like that. The main reason it isn't as popular as it once was is because of advertising. Companies want you on their sites because they can track you and show you ads. They could show ads in RSS feeds as well, but since there's no JavaScript environment, they can't data mine your browser, serve you cookies, profile you, track your behavior, and, ultimately, can't show you valuable microtargetted ads. This is why even when sites offer RSS feeds, it's often a short blurb with a link to the main site. For these, special solutions like RSS-Bridge or RSSHub are needed, which are often blocked and need constant maintenance. I'd rather not have to use these tools, since they're effectively going against the site's wishes and scraping their content, but I think this is justifiable considering that the content is available publicly, and the user should have ultimate control in how they wish to consume it. I'm not going to be forced to accept a business transaction with a shady middleman where my data is mined, sold, and used to manipulate me into buying something or thinking a certain way. In any case, I agree with the article's other reasons for the decline of RSS: it's too technical, most people prefer algorithmic feeds, platform centralization, etc. I think all of those are UX and technical challenges that can be addressed by building on top of RSS, but there is little incentive for a company to take them on.
dang 1y ago
Related: Rise and Demise of RSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18896168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18896168 - Jan 2019 (123 comments) The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18002503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18002503 - Sept 2018 (186 comments)
superkuh 1y ago
Feeds in general, and RSS in particular, are far from dead. But one thing that could kill them quite suddenly is the rise in javascript/etc dependent ostensible "anti-bot" or "anti-dos" MITM services/front-ends. People deploy these solutions across their entire domain without thinking about it and then suddenly all the feed readers cannot access the feeds. I have about 1800 feeds in my feed reader and if the number of bad default cloudflare deployals keeps increasing at the rate I'm seeing by 2026/27 none of my feeds will be acessible at all.
dave333 1y ago
What are your favorite few RSS feeds?
senectus1 1y ago
sigh this narrative again. RSS is far from dead. Edit: lol just noticed the article is from 2018...

I think the main reason why rss failed is the lack of an algorithmic feed. If you follow just a few news sites you drown in articles. The social media sites are much better in filtering out stuff you do not want to see.

kevincox 1y ago
You must be using different social media than me because it is all pushing celebrities and ads not friends and family that I want to see. I much prefer being in control of my feed. In an ideal world there would probably be a mix of both (I have a list of people who I see every post and a list where I see popular or major items) but between the current options I far prefer something straightforward. Especially when the algorithm isn't fully tuned to optimize my interests.
- BeFlatXIII 1y ago
  > not friends and family that I want to see My friends and family don’t seem to post anymore. At least FB has groups for shared niche interests.
  - HankStallone 1y ago
    My friends and family either never post, or post garbage several times a day. (Once upon a time it was funny cat pictures and jokes; now it's "reels," whatever those are.) As you say, groups now seem to be the only place to find worthwhile content on FB.
yepitwas 1y ago
The only ways I use social media would be better served by RSS. I follow specific businesses, organizations, and people, and want to see everything they post, in chronological order. I do my best to achieve this with social media, but RSS would be better. For news: per-topic or per-region feeds would probably help. I think AP used to have those, maybe still does.
- throwaway1777 1y ago
  [dead]
- skeezyboy 1y ago
  > I do my best to achieve this with social media which one? there are a bunch. you could either be talking about whatsapp or youtube
  - yepitwas 1y ago
    Mostly IG (businesses and organizations) and BlueSky (people) right now. IG won't let you set the "following" page to your default any more (boooo) but it's still quick to get to, so you can just ignore the (incredibly, aggressively shit) "feed". RSS would be better, but this works OK.
ajmurmann 1y ago
An RSS client could do that, no?
hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
In theory a market could arise around providing bespoke algorithmic feeds for one's RSS content, in some kind of adapter model, but I don't know enough about ML engineering to suggest whether that is at all economically feasible. Maybe?
newscombinatorY 1y ago
RSS feeds can drown you in quality content you're not interested in 75% of the time. Social Media can drown you in content that seems interesting, but is worthless 75% of the time. But that's my experience - yours could be different (I totally made up the numbers, but you get the idea).
mrgoldenbrown 1y ago
On the contrary, IME social media sites seem to fight me on filtering what I get to see. They are happy to show me what they want me to see, but constantly thwart my attempts to decide for myself. How many plugins should I need to install to get FB or twitter to respect my choice to show the timeline chronologically.
kjkjadksj 1y ago
Depending on your feed reader you can filter stuff pretty well with custom rules. I use newsboat. Even without hard filtering, thanks to the compact density I can sift through a huge number of articles in barely any time at all. Yes, I am doing it myself, the horror of laboring, but again it takes barely any time at all to go through the days RSS feeds even with a few news sites throwing 100 articles a day. Mark as read. Done.

cowpig 1y ago

Are there examples of government policies that successfully encourage the adoption/use of open standards? I feel like the EU has successfully pushed the world towards USB-C as a standard, which seems like a big success to me (I no longer need, but obviously still have, my giant tub of various connectors and wires in my garage). Would some kind of policy make sense to encourage an open syndication standard? Would it be a good thing?

HankStallone 1y ago
The Internet community (and pre-Internet, even) has done a fine job of creating many standards without government instructions. No, that wouldn't be a good thing. RSS is fine. The article stretches both in how well-known it suggests RSS was a decade ago (leaning hard on the word "might"), and in talking about its "demise" now. Some of its complaints are just silly, like when it agrees with the New York Times that "RSS" isn't a "particularly user-friendly" acronym. So they think if it had been named Bundling Up Feeds For You everyone would be using it now? RSS never caught on with average users because the average user doesn't want to think that much about his use of the web. He wants to go to one or a few sites he's comfortable with, and read what they choose to show him. That's just how it is. For the minority who aren't satisfied with that, RSS is a useful tool. There's no problem, except for people who get frustrated that the average user isn't sophisticated enough.
carlosjobim 1y ago
Rule number 1 of Hacker News: No matter what subject is discussed, there will always be a top level comment suggesting that the government (preferably the EU) should either ban it worldwide, or make it mandatory worldwide. Usually it is the first comment. As to the topic: Yes, of course the European Union should make sure that every website uses RSS. It is probably the most pressing issue the alliance faces today.

happytoexplain 1y ago

I still use RSS for 100% of my content: A couple news sources, a bunch of YouTube channels, a couple webcomics. It's easy for me, though, because I don't use social media, which I imagine wouldn't really be well served by RSS.

latexr 1y ago
> I don't use social media, which I imagine wouldn't really be well served by RSS. I don’t use Bluesky, but there are a few people on there I wish to see updates from (including one webcomic artist without a website) and I use Bluesky’s integrated RSS to do so. Same for Mastodon.
- happytoexplain 1y ago
  Yeah, true - I guess it's the same as for YouTube. If you want "the feed", RSS would be overwhelming. If you want "every post by a few people", RSS is perfect.
scellus 1y ago
I still use RSS, not for all content but for blogs that are now mostly Substack newsletters. Works fine, relatively noise-free.
timbit42 1y ago
Some social media has RSS. Reddit, BlueSky, Mastodon, and YouTube all have it. X used to but it was dropped at some point. TikTok, Facebook, Threads, and Instagram don't.
jsbisviewtiful 1y ago
I dropped reddit for my RSS, which I've had some version of since before the demise of Google Reader. RSS is such a great way to keep up on trusted sources, unlike reddit and other various social platforms. It's also a nice way to keep up on some forums, like Macrumors and HackerNews.

Apreche 1y ago

What is up with the people who keep insisting RSS is dead? It never went anywhere. It’s some kind of twisted comedy sketch where someone insists a person is dead when that person is standing right there next to them. I have used RSS continuously since near the beginning. When Google Reader died I just changed clients. There are many client options now, basically all of which are better than Google Reader ever was. Pretty much every website out there still has feeds. I can even use it for extremely old fashioned local news sites.

mrgoldenbrown 1y ago
>Pretty much every website out there still has feeds. Where is the RSS button on Facebook, Instagram, tiktok, twitter, or YouTube? Most websites might have feeds, but not the most used web sites.
- almoni 1y ago
  Twitter used to have that, haven't kept up with if they still do. Youtube can do it also I think in a limited way.
  - extra88 1y ago
    Twitter does not, they dropped their RSS feeds a long time ago. They still had a free API for a while so you could use a twitter-to-RSS tool but early in the Musk era the free API went away. Yes, YouTube has RSS feeds for channels (technically I think the feed is per playlist but channels have a default playlist).
- badlibrarian 1y ago
  The feeds are there. There are apps that use them, even on TVs. https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCtI0Hodo5o5dUb67FeUjDeA https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCtI0Hod...
- Apreche 1y ago
  I don’t use those other sites, but YouTube, here ya go. https://chuck.is/yt-rss/ https://chuck.is/yt-rss/ Worst case, pretty much every modern client has features that let you subscribe to things that aren’t RSS friendly. For example Feedly (which I don’t use) has the ability to subscribe to Twitter, Reddit, Mastodon, Facebook, Telegram, Google News search queries, etc.

skeezyboy 1y ago

never understood this idea. whats the difference between this and bookmarking the actual site and just manually checking? if people had been using HTML as originally envisioned, this kind of thing would be parsable by a browser and a new protocol need not be introduced

hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
RSS doesn’t have formatting and interactions. It’s content only. It’s also a drastically simpler standard than HTML making creating RSS clients far easier than an HTML client. Finally it is designed to push new content in a way HTML isn’t. I can tell my RSS client to only download all the titles for all the different posts and only download the content on actually clicking through. Thats something HTML cannot do. Further, my client can easily retrieve changes since it last checked which HTML doesn’t allow. Lots of differences. Overloading HTML which even at its simplest is about fixed text and overloading that with handling temporal lists of atomic data would be a bad idea.
timw4mail 1y ago
Automation, and ease of skimming articles for one.
latexr 1y ago
> whats the difference between this and bookmarking the actual site and just manually checking? For one, not having to manually check is huge. If someone posts once every two months, I’m not going to manually open their website every day (times twenty for every one) or even every week and then have to think “have I read this?”. That would be a colossal waste of time, attention, and mental energy. For another, there’s a plethora of cases where RSS filters. I subscribe to YouTube channels exclusively through RSS, I never open the website (or even have an account) otherwise. Same for Reddit, they have specific feeds for each subreddit, and for each they can even list just the top daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly posts. I can easily get just the most interesting posts of something like r/toolgifs without ever having to deal with the faff or getting distracted by other junk. Content comes to me, and on my terms.
- 1y ago

hagbard_c 1y ago

Rumours of RSS's demise are greatly exaggerated, I use it every day for dozens of sites. If a site does not offer an RSS feed one can be generated using something like rssproxy [1] or another implementation of this idea. [1] https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy

smusamashah 1y ago

Google didn't just kill feed reader, when Chrome came, other browsers had built in RSS support of some sort (Opera definitely, I think Firefox too, don't remebber about IE). Chrome always opened RSS links as raw XML file with no hint of what to do with it whatsoever.

goku12 1y ago
Yet it survives to this day because of one reason - it's dead simple to serve and consume it. Chrome may need an extension to handle it properly (I use one on Firefox). The singular challenge it faces is discoverability, as you point out. The above mentioned extension solves that for me. But if it were to be brought back as a default feature on browsers, RSS would be an instant hit again. There's always the opportunity to resurrect it.

truelson 1y ago

RSS is still extremely useful. It may never have been meant for mass adoption like algorithmic feeds, but that is the point: it is the right counterbalance. I want full control of my feeds, and RSS gives me that. With tools like https://docs.rsshub.app https://docs.rsshub.app almost anything can be made RSS-able. I know I am not the average user, but for those who care about their information diets, RSS is essential. One underappreciated aspect: RSS can forward both machine readable and human readable content at the same time. I am experimenting with it for information processing, and I like that you can always peek into the pipes, even mid-stream, to see what is happening. I will be writing more about this at https://writings.alethia.news https://writings.alethia.news (alongside AI, product design, macroeconomic data, and the occasional bit of trivia).

alberth 1y ago

I know many people feel nostalgic about the days when RSS was everywhere (and a more open web) — and I do too. But my experience must be different than most. I had hundreds of feeds in Google Reader, which quickly became overwhelming. It was hard to tell what was worth reading, and I often just marked everything as “read,” the same way people get email fatigue. While I support a more open web, I think the real missing piece in the conversation is curation. Take HN, for example. It’s essentially community-driven curation, and I get far more enjoyment browsing HN today than I ever did sifting endlessly through my RSS feeds trying to find something interesting.

colechristensen 1y ago
What was needed is your own personal "algorithm" to provide you a feed of the things you'd subscribed to so you didn't have to read and check off every published thing. Imagine if you actually had control of this feed and could have the social aspect but tweaked to your preferences instead of somebody else's In fact it's not such a bad idea to write this software now
HankStallone 1y ago
When I used Google Reader, I didn't read everything together under one heading for that reason. I clicked on a feed, read the latest, and moved on to the next. So on a slower feed I might always read everything, while on a very busy one I might just occasionally check in or read a little while and then mark the rest read. Now I use TT-RSS, which looks a lot like Google Reader did, but you run it on a local system. And I still read some feeds completely every day and let others pile up for weeks.
crtasm 1y ago
Hundreds sounds overwhelming! Did Google Reader let you look at a single feed at a time? I've never found readers that present a single "inbox" combining all my feeds to be usable. Some of the feeds I subscribe to are effectively curated news from around the web, and I use filters to hide certain topics - e.g. from a newspaper I might filter the entire sport section.
extra88 1y ago

nop_slide 1y ago

I've been using RSS via the Readwise "Reader" app over the last year and it's been awesome. First time using RSS and love that so many developers make sure they have feeds on their blogs. The lack of the algorithmic "feed" and the fact that I'm "pulling" rather than being "fed" content is such a great change in content consumption.

hombre_fatal 1y ago

RSS sucks because it depends on every content source offering the API. The successor to RSS is where each feed is an arbitrary URL that your client hits to generate a feed. With an LLM this is trivial compared to before.

xnx 1y ago
Agree! Just wrote basically this comment before I saw yours. Disappointingly even pay tools like Feedly have extremely poor RSS creators. All Feedly's features for the past few years seem to focus on some obscure niche of IT security threat awareness.
imiric 1y ago
RSS is not an API, though. It's another content type like HTML, typically XML, but in a specific format that makes it easier for programs to consume. Generating it is trivial in most web frameworks and CMSs, and sites that don't offer it either never bothered to set it up, or actively choose not to. This is hardly a fault of RSS itself. What you suggest as a successor is a workaround for such sites, not something that should be the norm.
- hombre_fatal 1y ago
  So RSS isn't an API because it returns XML instead of JSON or protobufs? That doesn't sound right. It's an endpoint for machine consumption and that's what most people mean when they refer to an API. But that's a distraction from the point. It's trivial to implement an RSS endpoint, but what's not trivial is requiring everyone to implement it. Needing someone to implement an API just to have machine-friendly pull access to their latest content is only a trade-off that made sense last decade. It's not a good solution if you had the power of generating feeds yourself.
HankStallone 1y ago
Are you talking about something that can go out to any web site, grab the HTML, and turn it into a feed that's consistent with any other feed and not a big hairy mess of stuff that wasn't actually part of the content? That doesn't sound trivial at all to me, so maybe I'm misunderstanding.

renewiltord 1y ago

RSS is dead. Netcraft confirms.

xnx 1y ago

The next phase of RSS is having a client ("agent") that can process arbitrary feed-style pages and create sanitized (e.g. ad, tracking, and visual junk free) RSS feeds. RSS isn't "dead", but it (actively?) neglected when even a "blog" like https://waymo.com/blog/ https://waymo.com/blog/ (to pick one random-ish example) doesn't have an RSS or Atom feed. Content sources see zero (or negative) value in RSS.

ageospatial 1y ago

RSS won't be dead. Our AI agents are using RSS as this is still extremely useful for parsing data. Think about the amazing work RSS did for GeoRSS

vamosg 1y ago

[dead]

brycewray 1y ago

(2018)

matteeyah 1y ago

I thought this was about Rainbow Six Siege

matteeyah 1y ago

Initially, I thought this was about Rainbow Six Siege

WaltPurvis 1y ago

This article is seven years old; seems like (2018) should be in the title.

imiric 1y ago

RSS isn't dead, though some companies would certainly like that. The main reason it isn't as popular as it once was is because of advertising. Companies want you on their sites because they can track you and show you ads. They could show ads in RSS feeds as well, but since there's no JavaScript environment, they can't data mine your browser, serve you cookies, profile you, track your behavior, and, ultimately, can't show you valuable microtargetted ads. This is why even when sites offer RSS feeds, it's often a short blurb with a link to the main site. For these, special solutions like RSS-Bridge or RSSHub are needed, which are often blocked and need constant maintenance. I'd rather not have to use these tools, since they're effectively going against the site's wishes and scraping their content, but I think this is justifiable considering that the content is available publicly, and the user should have ultimate control in how they wish to consume it. I'm not going to be forced to accept a business transaction with a shady middleman where my data is mined, sold, and used to manipulate me into buying something or thinking a certain way. In any case, I agree with the article's other reasons for the decline of RSS: it's too technical, most people prefer algorithmic feeds, platform centralization, etc. I think all of those are UX and technical challenges that can be addressed by building on top of RSS, but there is little incentive for a company to take them on.

dang 1y ago

Related: Rise and Demise of RSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18896168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18896168 - Jan 2019 (123 comments) The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18002503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18002503 - Sept 2018 (186 comments)

superkuh 1y ago

Feeds in general, and RSS in particular, are far from dead. But one thing that could kill them quite suddenly is the rise in javascript/etc dependent ostensible "anti-bot" or "anti-dos" MITM services/front-ends. People deploy these solutions across their entire domain without thinking about it and then suddenly all the feed readers cannot access the feeds. I have about 1800 feeds in my feed reader and if the number of bad default cloudflare deployals keeps increasing at the rate I'm seeing by 2026/27 none of my feeds will be acessible at all.

dave333 1y ago

What are your favorite few RSS feeds?

senectus1 1y ago

sigh this narrative again. RSS is far from dead. Edit: lol just noticed the article is from 2018...