Hacker News Reader

Comment by kev_da_dev | Hacker News Reader

I completely agree genmon! RSS / web feeds are a bit hard to grok for the average user.

My belief is that, in order for RSS / ATOM to really catch on, we need to completely abstract those concepts for the end-user.

In my opinion, getting people to care about RSS / ATOM is like getting them to care about HTTP. They do not care about the actual mechanisms - only the end result. That being said, I think all we're missing is GREAT product design. Too many pipes are still exposed and it scares away the average user.

Make webfeeds as intuitive as social media giants and we have a revolution on our hands :p

PS: would love to build this with someone if there's any takers :)

View on HN

> RSS / web feeds are a bit hard to grok for the average user.

I think basically you want reddit's early marketing, "the front page of the web". Except it's your front page. It's a feed where you can go to see the latest stuff from everywhere you're interested in, rather than having to check each site individually. Like how one's reddit home page shows posts from all the different subreddits to which one is subscribed.

I think the best entry point is probably the browser, like Firefox's "top sites" on about:home. The browser is uniquely positioned to know what sites you frequent. If it also knows where to find those sites' rss feeds, it could automatically suggest adding them (also on the home page or similar). Once you've got that -- people actually using it -- you're over the hump, and it's easy enough to for users to transition to curating their feeds, using a different application, etc

Browsers used to have RSS built in — I forget when Safari removed its reader. But you’re right about that button... something that glows when a feed is present.

The current UX, at least on my iPhone, is that I go to a site that looks like it _probably_ has a feed, and then I use the share sheet to push that URL to NetNewsWire. Then RSS auto-discovery takes over.

But there are a growing number of sites that look like they _should_ have feeds (posts on the front page arranged chronologically) but don’t. And the user experience is simply terrible when you attempt to subscribe with auto-discovery and it silently fails.

The problem is getting that in-browser glowing button on mobile. Browsers are too locked down.

> Browsers used to have RSS built in

Yes, but just having that button isn't enough. Consider: I'm someone who understands the benefits of RSS, and despite seeing that button for years, I rarely clicked it, and mostly wasn't sure what to do after I did click it. Because that button showed you the feed, but the browser didn't really have a centralized reader built-in (that I remember, anyway, and if I couldn't find it then you bet the average user can't, either). There's a big difference between just showing the feed and having an "Add stories from {{newspaper}} to my home page" button.

I think history has shown us that there's no use in hoping from change on the browser or OS side. Unless new competitors come in, it seems the majority of people are stuck with Chrome / Firefox / Safari.

On top of that, a big problem with they are walled gardens as well. Some support exporting easy enough, but we've seen firsthand what happens when big readers (google reader, etc) go down.

That being said, I think our best hope is to create an open-source, web-based reader.

raw feeds are one of the last bastions of freedom on the internet, and we can't afford to keep building them on bad foundations.

If I had to imagine it from the ground up, I'm picturing a desktop-esque environment running straight from the browser. almost like google's environment, to be honest. There could be full-blown search, email, news, etc; but they are all intertwined by the ability to 'subscribe' to any of these results, and have them piped right into your homepage.

Sort of like smichel said above, a true front page of the internet, but your front page.

nailed it on the head with that reddit analogy.

unfortunately, I think browsers will continue to be locked down for the foreseeable future. given the locked-down nature of the app store as well, I think our best bet is building an open source, web-based RSS feed.

Absolutely agree.

What’s unusually about the feed ecosystem is that it was once popular, and now it’s present but nobody really understands it. Like, Wordpress sites are 30% of the web and they have RSS by default... but are the site owners really aware? It would be a hard push to get any of them to change.

And, for most technologies, the existing users are the best word of mouth evangelists. But here, the existing users have their own favourite apps, and if you change anything too much then they won’t evangelise.

So (imo) growing the ecosystem means finding ways that respect that situation.

RSS was a perfect example of the tail wagging the dog.

it never caught on because it was a protocol. not a product. and yet stubborn users for years insisted otherwise.

it's like if the internet did not have a browser; only a textfield to input urls. who would use that?

uh, I think "abstracting away concepts" is the base for enduring cluelessness and thus dependencance.

Still the UX has to be excellent. As you wouldn't abstract the fact of a sharp edge off a knife. Still the grip has to be very different from the sharp edge. It's 2 things that have to balance to make sense. The worse limits the result.

No user ever is bothered with Atom spec technicalities, is it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com