Hacker News Reader

Comment by DevX101 | Hacker News Reader

RSS is dying (or dead) because it was incompatible with the dominant business model on the internet -- advertising. This is why Google killed it. This is why lots of professional publishers hated it. With HTTP you'd be able to earn money via embedded ads but you'd earn exactly $0 via RSS since the feed was stripped of ads, just content. This forced publishers to put useless blurbs, redirecting to the HTTP version, which was a bad user experience and just sucked.

I'd like to see new innovation around protocols and client 'browsers' that were made with monetization built-in as a first-tier specification.

1) client sends request for content with some header with payment information attached. 2) server verifies payment transferred. 3) server responds to client with content after payment verification.

If this existed, RSS would be alive and well. Internet publishers would be alive and well. The internet would be a more beautiful place with a viable first-party alternative to ads.

Challenges here would be:

- Sufficiently low transaction costs to make micropayments viable. (Bundle payments?) - Verifying proof of payment extremely fast

Someone(s) should create a new protocol.

FTP was invented in 1971. SMTP was invented in 1982. HTTP was invented in 1989. RSS was invented in 1999. Bitcoin was invented in 2008.

The amount of innovation around protocol has been abysmal relative to the explosion in creativity around applications on top of these protocols. And SMTP/HTTP are the only ones with any real mass adoption today.

View on HN

Maybe the world needs an unmonetizable space.

I keep hearing how RSS is dead for many years. My favorite blogs seem to be doing fine, its not like my newsblur stream of posts has decreased over the years.

Many people are unhappy about non-monetized readers and authors just being happy off by themselves. The people most able to "fix" that are the happy readers and authors, and the readers are not very motivated to spam and tax themselves, and the authors obviously don't mind not monetizing or they wouldn't be blogging to begin with.

There doesn't seem to be an obvious disruptive force or angle to apply force to "improve" the stable situation of a distributed decentralized happy unmonetized ecosystem.

For the blogs and writers you follow that use RSS, are they really choosing to forgo a meaningful monetization opportunity?

Unless a blog really has ~50,000+ daily uniques, or a lucractive audience niche, I suspect there’s not much opportunity to monetize even if they wanted to.

Their headlines in my aggregator are advertisement.

Well, there are still affiliate links, you can still promote your own products like courses or books and invite readers to subscribe to paid newsletter. Most of my subscribed authors have Patreon now and it generates much more than ads would.

Quality content doesn't happen without costs.

A lot of top-quality dev blogs are written by people who have existing well-paying opportunities. A lot of these people aren’t making an income writing blogs, just sharing the lessons they’ve learned from their jobs. Dan Abramov’s blog is a good example.

idk but that does seem like it comes from costs, just not from viewer funding.

That is a highly disaggregated long-tail group of content with lots of low-quality content mixed in. Not only that, there's still the opportunity cost for the writer, and secondary non-monetary benefits that "pay" for the effort, be but let's ignore all of that for now.

It isn't practical for consumers of content to try and find the quality content mixed among the mass of dross when content is spread out among individual creators. This gives rise to aggregators. And even aggregators of quality content cost money to run. Maybe you'd use HN as a counter example but HN isn't run out of the benevolence of ycombinator, there are secondary benefits that justify the costs.

So my comment shouldn't be taken as "there's no such thing as quality content without costs" and if I made it too easy to interpret that way instead of more charitably, that's my fault.

So let me amend it: You don't get concentrations of quality content without costs.

"Costs" does not have to mean "advertising".

Here's some quality content: https://www.raptitude.com/

I've been following that blog for years, via RSS. Every article he writes, I read. He gives it away. You can support him by becoming a patron or signing up to courses, etc. he offers. No advertising, and very high quality.

I often ponder about the current push towards federation in tech such as Mastodon, and wonder if the issue isn't more around the issue of finding the sites in the first place, rather than being able to access sites via RSS. RSS is usually a default in many web publishing tools (wordpress, hugo etc).

As someone getting into RSS more recently, I've definitely struggled to find decent sites to follow (though trawling hackernews totally helps:)).

You might like Baldur Bjarnason's link blog: https://notes.baldurbjarnason.com/

He always seems to have interesting links to good blog posts.

Building a list of RSS feeds takes time. I find that when I stumble across a new site (regardless of how I got there), I poke around to see if the content is interesting. If so, I seek out an RSS feed for it.

Note there are ways to get an RSS feed from some sites without them (RSS-Bridge[0] is what I use), but the experience is much better if the site natively produces one.

In time, you'll find yourself with hundreds of feeds on a variety of topics.

[0] https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge

Last month Inoreader introduced this feature too: https://blog.inoreader.com/2020/04/convert-almost-any-webpag...

People say that RSS is dead, but actually I think it's doing pretty much the same, if not better, than before Reader shut down.

Right now the top reply's first sentence is this: > Maybe the world needs an unmonetizable space.

I have noticed that people in hackernews generally tend to look things from a, excuse me for saying so, narrow business "make money" perspective. Or maybe it's somewhat US related, I'm not sure.

There are thousands of sites that don't live from advertising. Government, universities, and every public or even private institute has a site to provide information, news, announcements etc. There are also hobbyists' sites who are never going to make money from adverts.

Not everything should be reduced to a Facebook page.

Not everything should be about money.

First and foremost I think there is a need to recalibrate what matters and what actions that requires.

I do a lot of things for free because I have the luxury of a job that pays well. Not everyone has that kind of freedom and if someone wants to put food on the table, then money has to be a factor. Otherwise you'd lock a lot of things to only people who have extra time to take risks on activities that won't get them anything in return. Saying not everything should be about money is a pretty privileged position.

This threshold has been measured. Everything stops being about money when household income hits about $70k-90k. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-exactly-how-much-m...

Not every activity needs to be a viable way to make money. If you're struggling to put food on the table, maybe you should explore other avenues for making money besides blogging. If you want to write, there are lots of ways to get paid for writing.

Everyone has activities they enjoy that don't produce any income. Just because people enjoy an activity doesn't mean that there has to be a way to make a living from it. People enjoy playing video games, riding horses, sailing, painting. For most people they will not be able to support themselves with these things and we generally don't think that we have to go out of our way to make it possible for them to, so why is blogging different?

The general order of business goes "Here is something people are willing to pay money for -> You can do this and make money" not "Here is something I want people to pay me money for -> Pay me money for this"

Not only this, but blogging can also be a marketing tool, where you (or a company you're writing for) publish articles not as an end in themselves, but as a way to show you're an expert in a given domain. For SEO reasons, but not only. These blogs don't need advertisement to make money, they are the advertisement. I'm pretty sure nowadays, this is where money is in blogging. If you want to make money as a blogger, I think it's a way safer road than the advertisement-centered approach.

This website was started by a venture capitalist firm and its original name was "Startup News". The user base certainly reflects that.

I agree, I think good thing to point out is that incentivizing and monetizing is not the same thing. If you would excuse a tangential argument, I notice that in Eastern culture 'social cache' is much stronger contender to monetary benefit than west; and in Western incentivization = monetization is more stronger. (my theory is that with more individualistic society with less strict societal norm money is one thing most can agreed upon)

The blog itself seemed like an example of content marketing, As is evident from "I challenge you to signup for Feedly" at the end of the article.

Yeah, I can't decide if that was a "this is convenient" or "I'm getting paid to hock this service." Either way, there are other ways to get RSS feeds; I run my own FreshRSS server, but there are apps for your phone/tablet that can use instead.

> This forced publishers to put useless blurbs, redirecting to the HTTP version, which was a bad user experience and just sucked.

Is this that bad? I personally don't mind this at all, I subscribe to RSS feeds so I can easily tell at a glance who has an update in one place. If they then want to redirect me for the full content, then so be it, especially if the alternative is me loading every single one of those sites every day to check anyway.

I do mind such RSS feeds that just try to force people to load the webpage. With the vast majority of my RSS feeds, I never have to leave Emacs’ Elfeed RSS reader to consume daily news. If a feed won't let me see the full content in RSS, then I am more likely to delete the feed than become a pair of eyeballs for the website’s advertisers.

I work on a project to convert partial feeds into full-text versions. It pulls in the article content from each feed item and then creates a new full-text feed. Feel free to try it out here: http://ftr.fivefilters.org/

If somebody chooses to make their (complete) writing available only on their site, I can choose not to read it (and often do!) But I don't think it's right to pull it from their site and repackage it.

Absolutely agree. I just can't get why in every discussion about RSS somebody mentions that y it's dead because publishers had to give away content for free. Feed could contain full article, but don't have to.

Agreed. The RSS can easily be equivalent to a Tweet with a link attached. I like Thunderbird on desktops including RasPi, have yet to explore cross platform + floss mobile or web readers, but have built my own little youtube-like stack with RSS that is similar to YT’s feed format and can aggregate them, in the iSpooge Live project in Clojure + ClojureScript.

Thing is, RSS didn’t “die”. It only ever filled a couple of niches, and arguably it is more popular than it ever was because not only are people still continuing to use RSS readers, podcasts are arguably more popular than they’ve ever been (this period of time with the coronavirus possibly excepted).

I get that when people think of “RSS”, they’re thinking of tech that downloads text and maybe some images into a reader, but it’s just another means of syndicating media. The same places that disseminate the full text continue to do so because they’re not invested in making money directly off the writing, and the same places that have an investment in you going directly to the site continue to operate their feeds in that manner. If you have a browser extension that can discover it, or are willing to do a bit of guesswork, it’s amazing how many new sites launched in the last year that might not expose it on the website (because the webmaster didn’t think it was important to expose even when the CMS has it) actually have a feed you can pass off to a reader.

I don’t think RSS is ever going be competitive with a service like Instagram or Reddit for what they do, but the full value of these services doesn’t lie entirely within a feed and wouldn’t be neatly exposed within the constraints of the RSS or Atom specs to begin with. It’s different, and therefore have other, albeit less popular than social media, uses.

If someone prefers a stream of photographs to a stream of blogs and news sites, and that’s a lot of people, then RSS isn’t going to be competitive for their attention. If somebody prefers the discussions on Reddit and the semi-randomness of sources, RSS isn’t going to be competitive for their attention either. If you don’t care about an image stream (with comments, reactions, stories and whatever else Instagram has), and you can do without the Reddit commentary, well, you may very well have a use for RSS. Or maybe not. If it hasn’t gone away yet (and it really hasn’t), I have a hard time believing it is going anywhere in the near future.

While RSS doesn't replace a site like Reddit, it's great that Reddit has RSS support built-in.

Much of my browsing of the site at least starts off in a feed reader, to make it quick to find what I'm interested in. From there, I'll open links to the site proper, with all the comments and such that make the experience what it is.

Actually forgot about this! That said I do remember trying it some years ago; Reddit RSS just ended up providing too little signal for too much noise. I came to the same conclusion with Twitter RSS and certain types of Tumblogs.

Twitter RSS works fine if you want to follow certain users and/or searches, which is what I use it for.

No, I understand that basic premise, it's what I did too, it's just, well this is an old outstanding complaint I've had about Twitter and not so much Twitter RSS, and really the main reason I don't consistently use it anymore. Every now and then I re-install Tweetbot on my phone, create a new account, carefully curate a list of Accounts to follow based off whatever I'm thinking Twitter might be useful for this time.

I personally think it's really cool that I can follow people I respect and see a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, but inevitably some stupid controversy erupts and all of them have to get their opinion in on the subject.

The other problem I have is that generally, people tweet too much. It is too easy to compose a tweet and fire it off into the void and and while they're at it, about five or six retweets. RSS didn't improve this for me, I look for ways to make Twitter work for me, and it's just unworkable. The one time the list of accounts I came up with was political (that is to say rather than being constantly exposed to the abhorrent politics of people I otherwise respect for other reasons, I picked people who I respected in the field of politics), it was still an irredeemable crapshoot.

If Twitter works for you, I have no doubt Twitter RSS can also work for you, but Twitter doesn't work for me. Too much noise, not enough signal. Same with any kind of firehose feed, I think I even followed an HN firehose feed at one point six or seven years ago which just overwhelmed my reader within a week. I mean if you tried following Tumblogs as I did at one point in my youth, I tried to treat them like blogs, but what I didn't realize was that nobody was really interested in using Tumblr like a blogging platform. Your typical user that posted at all, was generally going through their feed and reblogging whatever they liked, and they'd do this 30 or 40 or 50 reblogs at a time. It was asinine, I gave it the old college try because a few of my friends really seemed to like it and I wanted to see what they saw, and it was just asinine.

Anyway it sounds like you're still using Twitter RSS, and, I mean this sincerely, kudos to Twitter that they're apparently still maintaining RSS feeds. I really thought that would have been killed off by now. More choices are generally better, so I'm glad that's still a thing.

Twitter got rid of RSS years ago, I use a service for that. I did the Tumblr thing for a while as well, and the hole reblogging thing was extremely annoying. It's a blogging platform, which is exactly how I used it.

> podcasts are arguably more popular than they’ve ever been (this period of time with the coronavirus possibly excepted).

There's been a worrying trend of some podcasts shifting to a "get our app" mode of delivery. I've been boycotting each one, and been encouraging the podcasts I donate to to explicitly keep the RSS delivery.

This is news to me, and I’ll keep it in mind. Personally I’m not so sure I would boycott for the sake of effecting a policy change as I simply wouldn’t continue listening because the only thing that makes podcasts tolerable is that I’m filtering them through Overcast’s smart speed. Can’t stand talk shows at the pace of a normal conversation.

> This is news to me, and I’ll keep it in mind.

Granted, I only have two immediate examples:

* Season 2 of The Onion's hilarious true crime parody (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Fatal_Murder) is exclusively on a platform called Luminary. I can't even figure out exactly what Luminary is, because they serve me with a special can of "Luminary is not yet available in your location" crap. Not that I care anyway. The first season is on regular old RSS and is fantastic (if you like the true crime genre and The Onion-style silliness).

* Wind of Change (https://crooked.com/podcast-series/wind-of-change/) investigates the (serious!) conspiracy theory that the CIA created the hit "Wind of Change" by The Scorpions. Now, this is borderline, but the podcast is available over RSS – however they're clearly trying to push people onto Spotify by releasing all episodes there at once and only dripping out an episode a week over RSS. I'll allow it.

I woke up today, checked Hacker News and saw Joe Rogan setup an exclusive deal with Spotify or more specifically, Spotify setup an exclusive deal with Joe Rogan. I was thinking about this thread all day. I've never listened to any of his podcasts because there's so many podcasts out there that I'm more interested in I just haven't gotten around to trying the Joe Rogan Experience. I like the idea of someone that just gets someone into a room and let's them speak from the heart or shoot from the hip about whatever their pet issue, policy, thing they are known for is, but I also have plenty of other discussion format podcasts I'm subscribed to and working through the backlog of.

Luminary by the way is one of those "we're going to do podcasting but it's not really podcasting because we're going to lock things up behind our paywall." kinds of "podcasting" apps. Think of it as Spotify but without the music or (I believe) without the free tier. Mind I've never signed up, but I remember there were a big story last year, or maybe it was the year before? Either way, they aspire to be the Spotify of Podcasts and Spotify is also trying to be the Spotify of Podcasts. I think Spotify is probably winning that exchange.

The strange thing is, a lot of these podcasts could probably get away with charging more directly if they wanted to. Joe Rogan has literally millions of fans, and charging for episodes isn't exactly incompatible with RSS. It just means you need to authenticate for access to the feed which is fine. I do that with TechMeme Ride Home subscribing to their ad-free feed. I think I'm paying $5 a month for that at the moment. I also pay for podcasts that don't have a premium feed per se and can be found in every podcast directory, but are products of news and political commentary organizations to which I pay a monthly or annual sum to support, primarily because I enjoy their podcasts (and newsletters) so much. I get access to their websites and dead tree print editions, but really it's the podcasts I find I like the most out of the deal and am happy to pay for just those.

And Joe Rogan is bigger than almost all of those, so selling out to Spotify to try to be the next Howard Stern feels a bit like he's selling himself short. Welp, we live in a free society with free markets and he's free to do that if he wants to. I get that he's a controversial figure for some, but so are Howard Stern and PewDiePie and last I checked, they're doing fine.

I used to speed them up as well but I stopped doing it for now as I feel like the time is not only there to hear the words and the surface meaning (I can do that at 2x), but to digest it and take it further inspire thought in myself. I sometimes even pause and think.

Depends on the type of show of course. But if they are talking about some interesting deep topic, I find it useful to use that time to think more. It's kind of the difference between skimming and flipping through a book vs reading a paragraph and looking up, pondering a bit, then reading along, after a chapter standing up and walking back and forth a bit in the room, thinking.

I use userscripts to try and find those hidden feeds, but sometimes they still can't be found. Sites like that are the bane of my existence!!!!!!

I mean if browsers hadn't gone out of their way to remove RSS discovery, it wouldn't be necessary. I don't remember if I mentioned this in my above post and I don't want to re-read every word I wrote, but I've got the NetNewsWire Safari extension which finds feeds for me. Pretty sure I also have some extension in my current Firefox install, but I haven't opened that in a while. Sometimes the feed really doesn't exist anymore, which is unfortunate.

I use a service to create feeds from pages if they really don't exist. It's a paid service, but worth it!

Micropayments have been tried. They all failed. The fair market price for content is $0. What is happening is that the only publishers that will exist shall be only those who create it for free. There is simply a glut of content out there because the barrier to creating content is completely gone.

Free, loss leader, or honeypot.

Most places use content to get you to look at ads, but some places write content as a sort of ad itself - we said something thoughtful to build brand recognition, consumer confidence.

Ja, I've seen enough of these sites, the content is awful but filled the first pages in my Google search.

I used to call them malicious SEO sites, but your point makes better sense than my hatred.

> Micropayments have been tried. They all failed

Would be interesting to read about that — you happen to have any links?

I websearched for "failed micropayments" and found: "One type of micropayment that does work — one you might not even think of as a micropayment — is in-app-purchases (IAP). IAP are a huge source of revenue [...]"

And: "One reason users don’t like micropayments for content [to read] is it requires a decision ... waste the users’ mental effort ... costs so little that its implied worth is almost nothing" (here: https://blog.applovin.com/why-micropayments-fail-and-one-not... )

Sure, just look around, do you see any successful micropayments processing companies? Do you use any of them? If any of them were successful, you wouldn't be asking this question.

There was a wave of micropayments startups about 6 years ago. The only one I remember is Flattr. The crypto bubble came and gave new hope because maybe the reason micropayments failed before was the credit card processing fees. Nope, still didn't work. I don't use Brave Rewards and have never heard of anyone making more than pennies with it.

Xanadu was one of the original visions of the internet from the 1960s. It sounded like a lot of the idealistic plans people come up with for micropayments where content creators can collect micropayments from viewers. Of course it didn't work.

Micropayments is an absolute cemetery of a business model.

Thanks for the reply, didn't know about Xanadu. Didn't come to think about Flattr.

> If any of them were successful, you wouldn't be asking this question

If you change from to: "successful" to "hugely successful in all English speaking countries" then I agree ... almost,

But there're also different continents and countries and different languages

... Which prompted me to now search for "Chinese micropayments" — and:

> "[the company's] growing profit margins are riding the wave of China's exploding media micropayment economy"

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/tencent-music-uses-ti...

Reading a bit more on different sites: Apparently this started 5 years ago and has been working well, in China. Micropayments. A little bit I got the impression it's currently being used primarily for tipping.

>The fair market price for content is $0.

That's a gross oversimplification. Lots of content isn't worth anything but some is. If you're a stock trader, for example, certain timely information is well-worth paying for. And there's a market for that served by Bloomberg, Thomson-Reuters, and so on.

The term "content" obscures the differences by suggesting its all interchangeable. That's certainly in the interest of the Googles and Facebooks of the world: When all content is equal, no content creator has any negotiating power.

But there's a distinction between a multi-month investigative report and hastily paraphrased rewrite at some fly-by-night website intent on capturing algorithmic ad dollars.

Pricing news content is hard because it has a different value to different people and often the value is only apparent after it has been consumed.

It's worth asking how much we will pay for reports on political corruption, civic injustice, and so on. If the price for content is $0, the signal to noise ratio will disappear.

I think journalism is going to have to clean up its act a lot before I'm willing to trust it enough to pay for it.

I'm seeing more credible journalism done by bloggers than the mainstream media at the moment.

I meant "content" as in cultural content--articles, Q&A submissions, blog posts, takes, memes, recipes, how-tos, tutorials. Content that makes up >80% of G search results. At one time, there was a price for such content because you could only get it from a print publication or from broadcast television. Now that there are no barriers to posting, we see how many people actually want to publish content even if they have to pay out of pocket to host it (i.e., making the price of their content negative since the consumer gets to freeload bandwidth without ads and consume content).

> Pricing news content is hard because it has a different value to different people and often the value is only apparent after it has been consumed.

You're suggesting that journalism is a public good because the value is captured by society as a whole as opposed to by the individual newspaper subscriber. I wouldn't argue against investigative journalism being important for democracy etc., but why does it need to cost anything (even by the public)? What about the whole Harvey Weinstein/MeToo saga which started after some individuals made some tweets without being paid by a journalism company to do so. There is no shortage of outraged citizen activists who will do "investigative journalism". I don't know why their free work should automatically be considered inferior just because they don't have a journalism degree and aren't being paid by a journalism company.

How do the patreons of the world fit in there? There is such content creators that I enjoy enough to give them a few bucks every month to make sure they can keep doing it

Stuff like Bloomberg, Thomson-Reuters, etc is valuable to a specific type of professional and will always have a niche audience. That isn't really what the discussion is about.

Reporting on corruption and injustice is critical to a society, but doesn't have any monetary value. The way I see it, we already have a way we choose to fund that kind of thing: non-profits/NGOs. Some media outlets (Vox, The Guardian) are already turning to just asking for money in this way, and over time journalism might become more formalised as something funded by the public for civic ends, not as a commercial product. To that end it should be unbundled from stuff like sports coverage and celebrity gossip - which might really end up disappearing as a viable career and be done exclusively by amateurs.

ProPublica seems to break a couple of huge stories every year operating as a nonprofit. The fact that they aren't ad funded means they don't have to churn out lots of Content to keep eyeballs coming, so I know every story I hear from them is worth my attention.

Yeah, it's a good example.

What about games? People pay tons of money for them, and they are content too. When Cyberpunk 2077 comes out later this year, try telling people it's worth $0. I think the difference is social norms. The internet having no real built-in payment mechanism has obliterated the norm of paying for most content. Games have held the line, but things like Google Stadia and Apple Arcade are working to change that.

A game is intellectual property like a movie. If I copy and paste 1/5th of your game, you can sue me and win. If I copy and paste 1/5th of your blog post, as long as I put quote marks around it, I'm safe.

Games won't become free until it's easy for commoners to make them. Even with Unity and all the easy plug and chug game dev resources, it's still hard and requires multiple people with different talents.

It's social norms and perceived value (which are interrelated). From sampling music to quoting literature - there is case precedent and fair use.

Software is no different. When Compaq reverse-engineered the IBM PC BIOS, the standards were incredibly high. If I violate a GPL license or steal some copywritten Unity code for my game - I'm probably pretty safe. Unless, of course, a bunch of people agree that my software is valuable. I could be in big trouble if that's the case, even if I give it away for free (as in beer) and never make a cent off it.

> Micropayments have been tried. They all failed. The fair market price for content is $0.

To be fair, most were aweful and never reached critical mass. And many were to early and badly placed. Today situation is different. Patreon, twitch, youtube, netflix, spotify and all the other paid services proof that people are willing to pay something for content, to their conditions.

I think a well implemented micro-payment could work out today well enough to be viable. Something build into the browsers and aggregator-sites (reddit, hackernews, google news, facebook...) first. Most users don't wanna waste their time with micromanaging their bills, so make it optional, and automate it for the rest of the time.

>The fair market price for content is $0.

I would have agree with this two years ago but things have changed. I'm just worn down with the huge volume of free dross that doesn't tell you anything. This year I've started subscribing to a bunch of resources and stopped with google news/fb noise.

The legions of small publishers making a living on substack beg to differ.

1) Subscription is not the same thing as micropayments (as they are commonly understood)

2) It's pretty unclear to me that Substack actually lets "legions" of writers make a living. https://substack.com/discover lists the top (income making?) writers, and it drops off very quickly. By number 25, it is "hundreds of subscribers" paying $10/month. That's a nice hobby income but isn't really "a living".

> This is why Google killed it.

Is this true? It certainly doesn't feel like it. Reader was a first party branded reader. Google could put ads on Reader relevant to your interests (which they'd have been more keenly aware of than if you weren't using Reader), and they didn't have to pay out the publishers.

Google killed Reader, I think, for the second reason you mentioned: publishers were neutering their feeds. Reader had gone from a tool for consuming content to a tool for being notified about content.

Google would have been rightfully sued to hell and back if they started putting ads in the reader client with no compensation back to the publishers.

Why? Many RSS readers have ads, and the publisher is making their feed available to readers.

Google never made an public attempt to show ads in their Reader, unlike GMail. Publisher feeds were also still prospering and widely used when Google killed the reader. It all started to die fast in years after.

Also, IIRC they specifically killed it because of Google Plus, which according to their plans should replace Google Reader and the demand for RSS.

Google says they killed Reader because of declining usage[1], and there was little reason to doubt that at the time. It's very true that people were switching to mobile consumption and no longer reading lots of news all at once.

I was a heavy user of Reader (and did huge amounts of work on RSS/Atom/etc), and I agreed with this assessment at the time.

More and more publishers were just putting headlines in RSS, so you had to click through anyway, and commercial blog sites were publishing a much larger volume of content, most of which I ignored. But I didn't want to unsubscribe, because occasionally there was something good.

Given that, I was finding much better content through aggregators like HN or via Twitter/FB.

Maybe they could have iterated and built something different, but what they had really wasn't useful.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2013/06/why-google-reader-got-the-ax/

"In December 2007, Reader linked up with Google Talk (the chat feature in Gmail) to display shared streams from friends. Within the context of feed reading, it fomented something of a Neolithic Revolution. Foragers, hitherto gathering headlines on a crude and solitary basis, became farmers, cultivating streams of information for their neighbors. Sharing increased 25% overnight." [1]

[1]: https://www.buzzfeed.com/robf4/googles-lost-social-network

What they didn't point out there was that feature was a disaster for many users.

There was no separation of the chat friends and the people that you followed.

I've still got random people in my address books from that debacle.

>1) client sends request for content with some header with payment information attached. 2) server verifies payment transferred

What you describe looks like authentication and authorization rather than payment processing. Which may be a good thing. Adding support for authentication to the RSS protocol (OAuth for RSS anyone?) and RSS clients can potentially make it more interesting for publishers and solve the problem with monetization.

RSS is very much alive and aggregators like Feedly are way more powerful than Google Reader. All media website still use them, and even some major ones post full-text, The Verge does that, for example.

Monetization is rather simple, people visit a website if they want to read more about the news. In exchange you get guaranteed access to their attention not intermediated by Facebook, Google or Twitter.

Someone explain to me why the following combination of steps wouldn't solve all problems - for both content publishers, and RSS app creators.

Content publishers: Update the RSS feed generator to include the ads associated with the post. Write tools for dynamic ad insertion that actually updates the syndicated feed.

RSS App creators: Build ad networks that work with both ad buyers and content creators to match content-relevant ads, and either replace the dynamic in-post ads (and share revenue), or add additional intra-post ads.

Someone explain to me why this couldn't work with the existing technology stack - no new protocol, or client-side changes required.

It wouldn't work because it doesn't support the intrusive tracking (including "telemetry" and "analytics"), giant slide-over windows that obscure the content, repeated pop-ups demanding your email address, announcements that "you have 1 free article remaining unless you pay for a subscription," social media integration buttons, solicitations to "download our mobile app," CAPTCHA loops, "DDoS protection" delays and redirects, ad-blocker-blockers and autoplaying videos that are integral to web sites in 2020.

Also it is too lightweight in terms of cpu, memory, network and power usage, so it wouldn't push users to upgrade to the latest and greatest hardware (and data plans) every year just to maintain the same performance they had last year.

But the thing is, it’s not dead nor dying. I don’t think very many major websites have stopped their rss feeds. Maybe it’s just you that isn’t using it. There is rarely a webpage that I find that can’t be followed via rss, either natively which is most always the case, but there are also services that an rss-ize content.

Agree here. I don't think many sites have either. You have to dig a little, open the code-behind, but they're there.

How is it any harder for a publisher to embed a display ad than do what John Gruber does and have a weekly sponsor in his RSS feed? It's easy to insert ads into any RSS feed. The publisher/advertising argument for the death of RSS doesn't hold water. Folks prefer Twitter and Facebook to get a feed of news. The majority of people don't want to do the work of manually curating their feed. RSS just didn't win on the merits as a feature. I still love RSS and use it every day, but it wasn't "killed by publishers."

The protocols are designs as small layers and on top of one-another. I wouldn't expect a new protocol to be invented every year or even decades.

I think what you mentioned could be accomplished using existing protocols. There isn't a need for a new protocol for this specific purpose.

For this specific purpose, what if we just had personalized/signed RSS feeds per payer?

> 1) client sends request for content with some header with payment information attached. 2) server verifies payment transferred. 3) server responds to client with content after payment verification.

This is exactly the recently-proposed LSAT protocol[0]. It uses the HTTP402 response code to prompt for payment over the Lightning Network in exchange for a cryptographic bearer credential that may be used in future requests to the server.

[0] https://lsat.tech/

I am building my business fully based on RSS. It is a news API. I got all my data solely form RSS. And I can confirm that the vast majority of news outlets still have it.

https://newscatcherapi.com/

I probably should write a post with exact numbers: * how frequently it is updated * how many websites still support it * etc

I think you gotta connect the dots with UBI here. You wouldn't have to monetize if you didn't have to monetize.

While I agree with this take on UBI. There are middle grounds to explore.

The streaming and game services seems to point at monthly subscription fee from an aggregator as a working model. Not sure how they distribute royalties though, I suspect there are many models I won’t agree with based on what they incentivize.

Then there are the Kickstarter/patreon. Where money is given more in support than for a specific product. This is more like the UBI approach.

I think there is room for a hybrid approach here, merging the two.

I'm keeping my eye on a few people, like Abbadon who makes "Kill Six Billion Demons" and Andrew Kelley the creator of Zig.

But really I think we need a major reconfiguration of our global economic structure.

> RSS is dying (or dead) because it was incompatible with the dominant business model on the internet -- advertising. This is why Google killed it. This is why lots of professional publishers hated it.

> I'd like to see new innovation around protocols and client 'browsers' that were made with monetization built-in as a first-tier specification.

I don't think the solution should be to cater to what big platforms want.

If we did that, then the logical conclusion of that is that we would have to download some bloated locked down app for each platform we wanted to visit, and we would have a plethora of walled gardens. Copying and pasting text would be very limited, and we certainly could not "view source". The best we could do to save content was take screen shots, we certainly could not click on an image and save it. Basically what they are doing now.

Platforms would like nothing better than to completely deprecate access by web browsers all together. (Didn't Instagram do that recently?) Perhaps in the near future, websites will require that you use an "Apple approved" web browser, if they let you access them outside of the app at all.

But, they fact that they present any of their content at all is because of the ubiquity of web browsers. They could probably make more money if they had complete control of their platform, and could do things like prevent ad-blocking.

So, we should have pushed more for RSS to be de-facto requirement of serving content. Firefox, and other browsers, should have advertised when RSS was available, and make it highly discoverable for users.

> The amount of innovation around protocol has been abysmal relative to the explosion in creativity around applications on top of these protocols. And SMTP/HTTP are the only ones with any real mass adoption today.

I don't personally care that much about the protocol itself, I care about the content that the protocol makes available. If reading an RSS story required unpacking a bloated js runtime and fetching even more content, then why not just use a browser?

Publishers also hate SMTP and IMAP, and would love to force users to log into their platform and view ads, just to send an email to someone. And Google is certainly doing their part to eventually kill off these protocols.

AOL and many 90s ISPs did not support these protocols either (even though they used them internally) because they wanted to make users log into their platform instead of using their own mail client.

But the reason that SMTP still exists today is because of its ubiquity. The more RSS is adopted, the more popular it becomes, and the more platforms had to support it, even if they did not want to.

Being able to programmatically send emails is incredibly useful and helpful. I'm sure that when the last SMTP server shuts down, they will tell you that it is ok, because you can still use the mutually incompatible GMail or Outlook.com APIs. Pending approval.

> Firefox, and other browsers, should have advertised when RSS was available, and make it highly discoverable for users.

Firefox did, with a subscribe button in the address bar. https://mariolurig.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/firefox-rs...

> Firefox did, with a subscribe button in the address bar. https://mariolurig.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/firefox-rs...

Is that from Firefox 3.6? I would have to confirm this, but I'm pretty sure they started de-emphasizing RSS around 2011 with Firefox 4.0.

It was many years ago, I was looking at some discussion about it here: https://decafbad.com/blog/2011/01/15/how-to-use-feed-auto-di...

I remember being rustled about it back then, also.

Re: rss being dead, many US govt sites still have RSS feeds for data updates and even your saved searches:

- PubMed

- Dailymed

- clinicaltrials.gov

Slack has a slash command for ‘/feed subscribe https://foo.bar/baz.rss’ so we use that plus the above sites RSS feed for real time notices on when new data is added.

+1. This is one of the areas where the profit motive leaders to a worse user experience in a competitive environment.

So maybe a combination of RSS and Brave?

I've seen a number of news RSS feeds that only give you the first paragraph or a summary in RSS, and to get the rest, you need to log into the site (paywall). I think this is quite an OK RSS business model - it's like a preview, and you pay to get the rest.

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