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Ask HN: What's the replacement for RSS?
I've seen mentioned several times that RSS is obviated technology, but I have yet to read about what it's been replaced with. What is it?
- slater 14y agoIMHO, it's not the technology that's the problem - RSS is excellent for what it does. Or at least, for what it's used for. The disconnect happens at the worst place - subscribing. Browsers don't really support it (see Chrome's feed button removal, and now you have to get an add-on from the Chrome store to reinstate that functionality), few outside of geeky/nerdy circles even know about RSS, and that's why everyone thinks they have to replace RSS with something else. See also the circular "E-mail needs to be fixed" non-problem.
- 27182818284 14y agoTwitter. I'm not kidding. I don't understand why this is overlooked so much.
- slater 14y agoBecause you're comparing an open, royalty-free technology with something a company controls? Ask former 3rd-party twitter client makers how they feel about Twitter, Inc. these days ;)
- 27182818284 14y agoOn a grid-by-grid feature list it loses, but Twitter is EXACTLY what is used by millions of people instead of RSS. They subscribe to Regexp facts instead of an RSS feed of facts. Instead of CNN RSS they subscribe to CNN Breaking News, etc.
- ChrisClark 14y agoCan Twitter give me a full list of only headlines that link directly to the article? Not in any of the current clients. Ok, I could write a new client that does that, and be limited by Twitter's API, to be cut off at any point. And even if I had an information dense client I wrote for myself, does every website automatically post every article of theirs, headline only to Twitter, and refrain from any other postings or comments? Can't force them to do that. Twitter is not a good replacement for a lot of the RSS use cases.
- AznHisoka 14y agoIt's definitely not. RSS is great because nobody owns it. I can pull feeds from whatever websites I want. Don't need to worry about rate-limited (ie Twitter), or being banned by some algorithm (ie Google)
- chc 14y agoI don't believe anyone said it was good, but it is what people use instead. Worse is better.
- benologist 14y agoI think there is an argument that it doesn't need replacing, if it had some greater value it wouldn't be fading away.
- ibudiallo 14y agoI don't think RSS has been replaced, or is being replaced. All you need is a good good parser.