Do people subscribe to blogs less now? My blog's numbers. | Hacker News Reader

Do people subscribe to blogs less now? My blog's numbers.

gabrielweinberg.com

26 pointsepi0Bauqu17 comments

In the last two years I have went from having over 500 RSS feeds in my Firefox toolbar from various bloggers to narrowing that down to maybe 50 community hub type blogs like techmeme/DIGG/Reddit and then eventually I had one RSS feed which was HN. I find the comments to be invaluable so even now it's inconvenient to read HN stories through the RSS feed, so now I don't use RSS at all.

I think the general principle behind feeds was always content discovery rather than loyalty to a particular author. Blogs were so effective because the likes of Coding Horror didn't just post some insight into programming but generally linked to lots of other really interesting posts that could educate and entertain for as much time as you had to burn. The only problem was if you wanted to do this every day, then it was hit and miss and your reading list for the day was too dependent on a good writer having something to say when you wanted entertained (hence the volume of my subscriptions).

Aggregation sites like Reddit and Digg were the next stage in content discovery but the noise ratio was far too high to replace my RSS feeds. Then the niche sites like Proggit and Hacker News pretty much eliminated my need for RSS. Whereas previously I could spend an hour reading my personal feeds and come away feeling like I wasted an hour, now I feel like an hour on HN will not only keep me aware of the emerging trends in my profession but also give me lots of interesting anecdotes from the general interest articles that are posted here. It's an invaluable source of information.

Content discovery is a really exciting space, and I'm really excited to see how it will evolve. Twitter is another evolution of this I think, and I think way more people use twitter as content discovery or a news source as opposed to "what I am doing right now." But following one of these loudmouths who retweets and links to articles suffers the same problems as RSS in that there is this tendency for one of these people to make a huge amount of tweets due to some event like a conference (or gets drunk one night) and then some stuff you don't care about pushes a lot of the stuff you do care about off your page. I only follow 25 people on twitter and if I don't check it for a day then I have 200+ tweets to dig through, so I have no idea how people with massive lists make their twitter work for them.

The general problem from all existing solutions I see is that they are too immediate. Aggregation sites work on a day to day basis where time of upvote plays more part than overall quality. Twitter goes out of its way to make anything other than your latest tweets hard to access. And right there at the side you find emerging trends. It's all about now, now, now. But generally I find information on the here and now pretty easy to solve, it's those timeless classics that appeared on HN front page eighteen months ago or were retweeted by 100 developers last week when I was on vacation that I want to be able to always have access to. Especially on the days where the whole HN front page is dominated by some topic that I find mundane (Joe Blogger's latest opinion on the iPad!).

I hope the next big iteration in content discovery will try to solve that problem.

That's interesting, because I'd say I value RSS for exactly the reasons you disclaimed. A dozen or two authors online are sufficiently good writers & so well in tune with my mind (or an area of my interest) that I am interested in almost anything they have to say. I use RSS in order to not miss their material. Without RSS, I would have to visit a ton of bookmarks every few days in order to scan for new posts.

Like you indicated, I don't see any value to a site like HN or Reddit having an RSS feed. The main page is the RSS feed. For me, RSS feeds excel at keeping me up to date with authors that only post every few days, or every few weeks. A couple dozen carefully chosen feeds gives me tremendous pleasure in the form of a few great posts a day. I've pretty much used RSS like this for five years, occasionally rotating in and out new blogs and authors.

That's exactly the way I use RSS as well and that's exactly why I'm building http://blogazineapp.com .

Very interesting! I'm noticing that I'm starting to trend in the opposite direction.

Yes, the main stream aggregation have too much noise to signal, and niche sites like HN, or certain subreddits, have very high signal to noise and have invaluable comments.

I'm noticing that I enjoy certain blogs reliably, though, and I have a greasemonkey script on the backburner to highlight posts on HN that come from a list of favorite domains. (Same for commenters whose opinions I often find valuable.) It would be cool if I could add weight to specific domains (in the context of the algorithm that decides what's on my HN frontpage).

Personally I use GReader a lot to source content and interesting ideas. Typically I will instantly subscribe to rss to a blog/etc when I come across an article I like from another aggregate source (HN/etc). As I see more of the blog, and get a feel for it's content, I may unsubscribe from it the very next day, depending on the drivel or quality of content it spews forth. How often a blog updates has no impact, only the quality and uniqueness of the ideas presented. (I have very little tolerance for another me too fluff article about the ipad, for example.)

As long as you are happy writing your blog and you feel that you give a small amount of value for the blogs you write, I think that is what matters. There is a reason why inspirational blogs are so popular - people want to believe in the narrative, that there are others out there experiencing what they think they are relatively unique in going through. I used to ponder why http://thinksimplenow.com had so many comments per blog posts. Why Roger Ebert's blog posts generate so many comments. I think it is because they are sharing a feeling about an experience that encourages others to share their own personal experiences. Blogging is an ego thing, don't get me wrong, the real Gutenberg press, but if you are just writing about facts and technology without delving into the realm of feelings now and then, you might be editoralizing yourself. For what is Engadget really but a blog about a few of the seven sins. It's not a blog but check out http://urbanbaby.com

I really don't see a point to RSS. I use it to subscribe to a particular forums category, but that's it. If I want to get a persons blog post, I add them to my 'Tracking' list on twitter.

Most people don't write consistently good stuff. And I dislike seeing "50 unread items" in my google reader - it seems as if I am obliged to read them, when most will be bad. Any really good post is either going to show up on hacker news, on reddit, on delicious.com/popular or on my twitter tracking list. If it does not show up there, then I probably don't need to read it.

Twitter pre-filters my posts, RSS does not. That's why I use rss.

I dunno. As an experiment I turned off RSS on my blog. So far one (1) person has mentioned it. I get less than 5% of traffic from RSS readers, and those are people following HN or Reddit's RSS, not mine.

Visiting bookmarked blogs became too cumbersome for me years ago. I switched to Netvibes as my home page, with RSS feed widgets. That felt clunky, and I switched to Google Reader. I'm still on Google Reader (where I frequently add and remove feeds as I find new interesting sites and remove the ones that produce drivel or content overload). Regarding content overload, on a number of bigger blogs I switched to following the PostRank "best" RSS feed for them just so I wouldn't get flooded. That wasn't enough, so I dropped a lot of the big sites (in one case I felt their good content was just sourced from Reddit anyway.)

Currently I still use GReader a lot, but more and more often I find good content via my twitter stream, which acts as a quality filter and as a source of fresh content.

I do not get much off of Facebook, but I can see the same exact use case as how I use twitter for finding content.

To answer the question my guess is yes, people use RSS less and rely more on twitter/facebook/digg/reddit/etc because they provide more diverse content, but still relevant to an individual's interests, and naturally filtered for quality.

Psst, there is a link element missing in your head when displaying single blog posts. It’s there on the main blog page. I just wanted to subscribe (there’s your strategy: write about subscriptions to get people to subscribe) and had to go looking for a link instead of being able to just click the RSS button in Safari.

Thx--fixed.

I have subscribed to many blogs through Google Reader, but I never use it. The only blogs I actually read are those I subscribed through email. It's just much easier.

You seem to be doing just fine: http://www.blogperfume.com/feed-analysis/index.php?months=12...

We have created Facebook applications that allow people to subscribe to YouTube Channels on Facebook. We have been getting really great traction. We want to expand this to Blogs and are currently looking for Beta testers. You essentially get your own Facebook Application that lets your users know when you release new content. This may help solve your subscriber problem you mentioned in the article.

If you (or any other blogger reading this) is interested check out our website http://apprats.com/ and an example YouTube channel app http://apps.facebook.com/mysteryguitarman/. If you are interested in being a Beta tester you can message us through our site.

I personally no longer use RSS.

Maybe you're less interesting?

I subscribe to my daily reading through GReader and I follow people on twitter for the serendipitous stuff, both can certainly coexist.

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