Hacker News Reader

Comment by mandelbulb | Hacker News Reader

First, a shout-out for inoreader.com :)

Really disappointed in Mozilla. After all, it's quite obvious, if you don't modernize and even continue to hide a feature for years, its usage won't improve unless external events drive the demand.

And since RSS readers counter the interests of both ad- and subscription-driven media, it's unlikely there will be any demand generated by anyone else other than RSS aggregators themselves.

View on HN

It used to be a way for media to keep their readers updated about new content, which was in line with the interests of both subscription and ad driven media. But since then we've come to have Twitter, Facebook, mobile apps with notifications, even websites with notifications, so RSS has become somewhat redundant.

Uh, what have notifications anything to do with RSS? Practically all all web services and mobile apps for it offer them.

Social media, on the other hand, is an alternative solution to the consumption of information, not inherently a better form of aggregation.

It is mainly the addiction to social feedback that attracts people to social media, while RSS is a boring stream of data you've specifically decided to process.

RSS was created in 1999, when short of visiting a website it was the only way to get updates about new content. Now, there are other ways which people already use and like, addiction or not.

When RSS was created is irrelevant, when its age does not hinder innovation in its implementations. It's like saying email or phone calls are obsolete because social media has taken over.

I didn't know I could read news by looking at Facebook and Twitter. Seriously, RSS doesn't need to die but there's someone trying to kill it.

RSS was never intended to serve content, it shouldn't be different from a Twitter feed full of "title, link, short summary" posts. Minus the comments.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com