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RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google
- gnabgib 5mo agoRanked yesterday, although not much discussion (18 points, 2 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48022560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48022560
- danpalmer 5mo agoThere's a ton of selection bias going on here. Terence writes mostly about open web standards and topics that would be of significant interest to folks with an RSS feed reader. Also, RSS readers are generally automated. I know I've had them around for years pulling in articles that I never read. Like a podcast "listen" is actually just an automated download, RSS traffic does not necessarily involve anyone actually reading the article, whereas search traffic is generally high intent and is at least resulting in eyeballs on the site, if not actual readers.
- sharkjacobs 5mo ago> RSS readers are generally automated. I know I've had them around for years pulling in articles that I never read They try to address that > I added RSS and Newsletter tracking. These data are very lossy. If someone is subscribed to my RSS feed and opens a post and their client downloads a lazy-loaded image at the end of the post, I get a hit.
- rafram 5mo agoThat very likely won't work. RSS readers that are designed to work offline predownload everything.
- protocolture 5mo ago>There's a ton of selection bias going on here. The data doesnt purport to cover any more than the 1 website. Its not like there are any generalisations about other websites derived from the data. Its just "These are where my hits come from"
- nofriend 5mo agothe only reason anyone would be interested in this result is because of the implication that it generalizes to other sites.
- protocolture 5mo agoThe only generalisation here is that one.
- johanyc 5mo agoNo. I knew it's data point for one website only and I'm still interested.
- frumiousirc 5mo agoRight, I'd say RSS numbers (for a given blog post) mostly reflect cumulative visitors over the lifetime of the RSS feed while number of clicks coming in from a search engine reflect instantaneous popularity. Same pattern as say a sub-reddit subscriber count compared to the number of nicks currently in an associated IRC channel, though IRC lurkers soften that distinction.
- ushimitsudoki 5mo agoIs it possible that the users who used to find us through Google are now satisfied with AI chat summaries and no longer feel the need to click through to the actual page? Meanwhile, the long-time users who subscribed via RSS are still showing up like they always have. If this is the case, it’s a bit of a sad reality for content creators.
- nicbou 5mo agoYes. It caused a major drop in CTR for search. Google Zero is the term for it. It’s murderous for information websites. On my side, traffic is down roughly 70% on the website I live from. It’s still part of the training data though. Not that I consented to this.
- archleaf 5mo agoDo you get attribution from the content they show from your sites at all? Did you notice more direct traffic by any chance?
- nicbou 5mo agoVery rarely. AI traffic is a tiny tiny fraction of total traffic. ChatGPT and Gemini mostly spit out unattributed information, except when queries trigger a web search. I notice many 404s from ChatGPT to hallucinated URLs on my website. Sometimes it hallucinates guides about topics I never covered. So I'm getting cited for things I didn't even say! I also notice that for other topics, the cited sources are crap. The best shaver is a Braun shaver according to Braun.com, and two comments on a 6 years old reddit thread about a different topic.
- tolerance 5mo agoThis is probably the case for most personal websites with considerable cachet in their niche. + With a strong enough social network you probably don't have to care about SEO as much You can title your post about bad customer service practices in a unique way without a second thought [0] and your more traditionally titled posts can still make the first page of a Google search with a reasonable query [1]. + Depending on your niche your target audience is likely to already be tapped in well enough to not have to rely on search engines for content catering to their interests. I feel like search engine practices trend along the curve shown in that meme where it's the "fool" on one end and then the "normie" in the middle and then the "Jedi" on the other end who does the same thing as the idiot. Except in this case "Jedis" only search for what's not present in their feeds (which doesn't have to be only RSS feeds) and fools can eventually cultivate their own feeds for their interests and reserve search engine use for mundane purposes that essentially fulfill the responsibility of some kind of pop culture almanac, phonebook and portal to Wikipedia. [0]: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/03/bored-of-eating-your-own-dogfood-try-smelling-your-own-farts/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/03/bored-of-eating-your-own-do... [1]: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/04/does-mythos-mean-you-need-to-shut-down-your-open-source-repos/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/04/does-mythos-mean-you-need-t... — I Googled "mythos and open source". Interestingly, a forum discussion about this post came before it: https://itsfoss.community/t/does-mythos-mean-you-need-to-shut-down-your-open-source-repositories/15647 https://itsfoss.community/t/does-mythos-mean-you-need-to-shu...
- jillesvangurp 5mo agoI've been toying with LLM based agents for staying on top of feeds lately. Staying on top of the fire hose was always the challenge with RSS readers, a lot of interesting low frequency stuff from people you follow gets buried under the non stop feed of stuff from high volume news that is actively trying to drown everyone out with many updates per day. Back in the day I solved it by simply not using RSS feeds for high volume stuff. But I was following a lot of interesting people. I miss that. This is what lead to algorithm based filtering. Hacker News uses a simplistic algorithm but it is definitely using one and it works well enough. It's why I come here. We all collectively vote things up and what remains is nominally interesting enough to skim from the front page. With a bit of editorializing. Social networks tried to game the algorithms for ad revenue. Which is why they are a lot less popular these days. Sites like Medium, Substack, Tumblr, etc. took over from simple blogs and immediately started raising walled gardens around them to become discovery platforms, have recommendations, etc. But at least they support RSS. A lot of websites still do. If you run any kind of website publishing regular news or article content and you don't support a feed, you are being an idiot. It's easy, doesn't really cost anything, and you might actually get people using your feed once in a while. Your site might actually have one without you realizing. Most news papers have feeds. They are everywhere. The main issue isn't finding them but sifting through them. It always was. With agent based approaches, you control the algorithm. That wasn't possible in the past. LLMs can summarize, aggregate, categorize, group, filter, etc.
- flir 5mo agoJust as a suggestion, but I've been thinking in terms of clustering. If I can figure out that five different posts from five different feeds are about one story, I can collapse them into a single UI element.
- podgietaru 5mo agoI did exactly this with Cohere language embeddings https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/use-language-embeddings-for-zero-shot-classification-and-semantic-search-with-amazon-bedrock/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/use-language-e...
- alt0 5mo agoInteresting to see RSS is still relevant, thanks for sharing.
- i_think_so 5mo agoWow. Dude creates an account more than 5 years ago, doesn't say a single thing until today, posts a completely innocuous thank-you, and gets downvoted into the gray. Shame on whoever did that. You should lose your downvoting rights. The community deserves better.
- the_70x 5mo agoMake RSS Great Again. Besides the jokes, RSS is a great founding pillar to get out of the algorithmic internet that is today.
- 112233 5mo agoI'd much prefer correct sitemap.xml to an RSS. Please let me keep up to date with your site/blog/homepage without scraping it!
- i_think_so 5mo ago[flagged]
- tomhow 5mo agoOmit internet tropes. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- podgietaru 5mo agoI toyed around with using Language Embeddings as a way to categorize my RSS Feeds. It works pretty well. But importantly, it's so cheap that I have never really seen it on my bill. An earlier prototype used OpenAI embeddings. I loaded 5$ API credits and after a year the credits expired. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/use-language-embeddings-for-zero-shot-classification-and-semantic-search-with-amazon-bedrock/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/use-language-e... https://github.com/aws-samples/rss-aggregator-using-cohere-embeddings-bedrock https://github.com/aws-samples/rss-aggregator-using-cohere-e...
- renegat0x0 5mo agoHow else to notify readers? RSS is quite good. Corporations do not like it though, because they want to control spread of information. They prefer you re-enter page, be targeted with more ads, or spoonfed with their news algorithm on-site. However RSS only works, if someone knows about your page. YouTube is quite good with RSS though. You can have channel RSS, be notified about new videos, while channels still are discoverable. Also shameless plug to my own database of RSS feeds h ttps://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-feeds
- dorianmariewo 5mo ago[dead]
- donohoe 5mo agoIt’s not that they don’t like it. It’s more like they don’t care, or it’s not on their radar.
- devonkim 5mo agoBoth ideas can be true. It’s not on their radar because despite their popularity in consumer space they can’t find a business purpose that aligns with their self interests that require such user information. If I’m running a free podcast, in contrast, I might be happy anyone’s even bothering to visit and listen to what I have to say compared to who they are and whether I can assign a monetary value to their attention because spending money on something without clear, intentional, measurable ROI is anathema to our predominant modus operandi in business
- renegat0x0 5mo agoAgree to disagree. I think many platform did support RSS, or API, but at some time it was dropped. It is not that hard to provide RSS. It is not like it has to be implemented from scratch. It is just dropped by platforms. There must be reasons for dropping. One may argue it is not worth it, but even to drop functionality there needs to be a decision from management. The management always think about money. Is RSS or API monetized correctly? Free? No? Then we drop it, because data from algorithms serving user contents can be easily monetized. Just follow the money, the oldest truth.
- rambambram 5mo agoOh yeah, your feed is definitely in my reader. When I click through to your site, in the URL I pass ?rss_ref=mydomain This way you - and other domains I visit - can know where the RSS-visitor is coming from (not foolproof of course, because your average spammer can also put their domain in the URL). More important, when you see my traffic your post is definitely read on your website itself (or at least opened to read). There's no background stuff going on in my reader, pulling in feeds without reading them. My way of reading feeds is more Tinder-style: the latest post from a random feed per time, then another one, etc. I feel irky even thinking about a firehose of content coming my way.
- Eli_EB 5mo ago[flagged]
- brynet 5mo agoShameless low-volume rss feed drop. https://brynet.ca/feed.xml https://brynet.ca/feed.xml Also the embedded mastodon feed on my site uses rss.
- askonomm 5mo agoFrom my analytics, around 85% of visits to my sites are now from bots. It's hard to say if these are oldschool bots or people just browsing the web via chatgpt now, but the reality is that very few actually visit the actual sites I have anymore.
- est 5mo agoI think blogs should have a universal comment function, I'd love to engage ith the author but many blogs don't bother providing a basic textarea.
- philipallstar 5mo agoI think policing all the spam isn't worth the trouble.
- FabCH 5mo agoSend the author an e-mail.
- ffaser5gxlsll 5mo agoThe universal contact function is usually there, and it's email. I tried many times: it works. Authors respond. Only very few people seem to want to keep it hidden. I'm dumbfounded by the number of times I see comments of the form "if the author is reading this ..." on a 3rd party comment side, with a link posted by somebody else, on a forum the author is likely never going to watch, followed by an actually useful comment that you could have _ensured_ the author reads by you know... just contacting him? Forum comments are just recipe for instant spam, and have been so in the last 10+ years. If you want to make them useful, it currently needs to be actively policed (not to mention: you can be responsible for the content posted as well in several countries now). As an author, only if you're trying to create an audience around your blog, all the hassle around it might be worth it.
- donohoe 5mo agoThey typically do but are disabled due to the volume of spam and moderation overhead. Send an email.
- manuelmoreale 5mo agoSame experience. RSS is by far the most requested resource in the server logs. Sometimes up to 70% of the total traffic is coming from RSS. That said though, I wonder how much of that traffic is biological and how much is bots. I also wonder how much is dead traffic. Dead as in people who add a ton of stuff in their RSS readers but don’t actually read. RSS is a bit of a black box when it comes to this but maybe that's a good thing.
- longevitygreenl 5mo ago[dead]
- fdvlol 5mo ago[flagged]
- antonyh 5mo agoWhilst anecdotal, this supports the idea that I should de-index my personal site when I relaunch it. There's no value for me to get indexed by Google or Bing. The only index I care about is Wayback Machine.
- gbrindisi 5mo agoI protest the modern web by trying to consume all content via RSS. The feed reader shall be my main window to the world, and I am sorry that it's not obvious to content creators that I read them so I often send an email on the note of "I enjoyed this article you wrote, thanks". I write a small blog myself and I see the other side of it, but I just gave up on SEO, metrics, etc. I want to be the change I'd like see in the world: I publish full content RSS, I remove all analytics, make the website as lean as I can, put out my contact data and my only success metric is # of interactions I get with occasional readers.
- kinow 5mo agoFor science fiction short stories I get all notifications of new issues and stories via RSS. There are some sites like https://www.freesfonline.net/NewAdditions.html https://www.freesfonline.net/NewAdditions.html that posts new stories every month or so. There are always news sites in that list to get more entries for my RSS reader, so no need to ever search web/agents for more content.
- milesskorpen 5mo agoMy RSS reader downloads a local copy of posts so I can read offline (Reeder). I imagine that would trigger his analytics.
- pavel_lishin 5mo agoDoes it download the web version, or does it copy the content from the RSS feed itself? I believe that Terence's RSS feed includes a full copy of the content you'd see from visiting his site.
- PaulHoule 5mo agoNote I discover content with an RSS reader and then post it to HN and sometimes it frontpages and that traffic ought to be attributed to RSS when it comes to decisions like "should we publish RSS?"
- solomaker282 5mo ago[dead]
- yamanakatakeshi 5mo ago[dead]