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Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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:)).

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...

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

"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.

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