Hacker News Reader

Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

This quote is exactly right:

"Having only the content I want to see only be shown when I want to see it with the freedom to jump between readers as I please, all with no ads? For me, no other service comes close to the flexibility, robustness, and overall ease-of-use that RSS offers."

I always wonder why they aren't as popular now. It takes more work to add site to a reader, and more effort to even use one I suppose. And maybe it's also missing the social aspect that people seem to love?

I assume they'll be popular again some day like vinyl and static web sites.

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As far as I can tell, because RSS requires the cooperation of actors who have no incentive to cooperate. If I use an RSS reader to support content, then it is under my control when I read it, if I read it, and what format to read it under. I can view the content however I'd like, and no tracking is there.

All of these are unambiguously good things for me, and are anathema for the advertising industry. I cannot use RSS to read a site unless that site provides an RSS feed. Sites whose primary goal is to bring in ad revenue, rather than building a community, have no incentive to provide RSS feeds.

I'm perfectly happy just getting headlines with links, which seems most common these days, at least for what I subscribe to. It requires I go to their site to get the content where they can (try to) shove anything they want in my face and run whatever trackers they normally do.

Absolutely the same, and that's how I usually use RSS feed a anyways, as a source of headlines. Even there, though, it means that my choice of which articles to read isn't influenced by their snazzy new (and slow) layouts, their eye-catching (and emotionally jarring) images. It means that my daily habit is to check my RSS reader, rather than refreshing their site to see if anything has been posted.

With a limited amount of attention, even just exposing the headlines through RSS means that it is more my choice where to distribute my attention, rather than having my attention be drawn elsewhere through dark patterns and marketing tricks.

This why I personally gave up RSS. I used to enjoy reading things in my RSS reader where I could set things up to be clear to me.

Once they started providing only links back to the WWW browser where everything was hard to read I gave up and now I just suffer reading in the WWW browser and frankly don't read nearly half as much online content as a result.

I understand that perspective. And I agree that it would be nice if all sites offered the full-text content in the feed. But on the flip-side, I still use RSS feed readers (Feedly) daily and simply click through the content.

The value of the RSS feed reader is still there because it allows you to monitor potentially hundreds or thousands of sites for content and then skim through to see if any new content was created today that interests you.

This makes it particularly useful for monitoring personal blogs or sites that only publish a few times per month or year. I personally LOVE reading people's personal blogs, but since most people only publish a post a few times a month (or less), I am unlikely to check their website every day. I also don't want to give them my email address and have them clutter my inbox with new posts. So the feed reader is nice because I can go once a day and see what new content exists. I skim through the posts and click through on a handful of content that interests me. If the content is long, I add it to my "Pocket" (getpocket.com) to read later.

In the feed reader I usually get a preview of their content (the first few paragraphs). I can read the content and click through if desired. So the feed reader still provides value for monitoring all these sites that have sporadic posting schedules.

I understand the value of reading the content entirely in the feed reader, but I don't mind clicking through the content once I know it is something that interests me. The feed reader allows me to skim, filter, and screen content so that I am only clicking through on interesting content (similar to how HN works, we still have to click through content). If content is interesting, there is value in supporting creators by visiting them on their site to get the experience that they designed and potentially supporting them with an ad or two. If ad use is egregious then I might retaliate by blocking ads for their site or simply removing them from my feeds.

To me, the time saved not having to rescan headlines alone is worth it. Even if the title was just "New Article" for every item and I had to open each one to see what it was, the time saved would still probably be worth it.

So I take the opposite view of preferring to read on the actual pages.

I'm curious though, I've built a feed reader that caters to my preference, but I'd like to make it useful to more folks. If you could automatically open articles in "Reader Mode" (FireFox supports this for instance) would that make reading in the browser more palatable to you?

Aren't there RSS-readers that offer something like the reader-mode you get on web-browsers?

Yeh, Reeder on mac supports this I think

News Explorer has scraping modes for sites that only publish headlines.

NewsBlur does this

> As far as I can tell, because RSS requires the cooperation of actors who have no incentive to cooperate.

Do you mean in the sense that content providers want to dictate more than just information delivery to consumers, or something else?

Yup, that is exactly the sense that I mean. Ad-supported web sites have an incentive to have information viewable only when viewed alongside advertisements.

>I always wonder why they aren't as popular now.

IMO it's a lot of reasons.

A big one, that was the case even before social media, is the inherent geekiness of it. "RSS" is an acronym after a geek's heart, most people don't like it.

The subscription process is complicated. Go to the site, find the feed (which one? There might be a bunch! eg, main feed, topic feed, comments-per-post feed, etc), take that URL and paste it into your feed reader, then look at that and... you got linked back to the site you were on? Yay... There have been various attempts to streamline this via in-page "add to reader" widgets back in the day, browser plugins, etc. But it was never as frictionless as the Facebook/Twitter/Reddit "follow" button.

Responding to things is harder. There's no comment/like/whatever button right there, you have to go to the site, figure out what's going on there, maybe sign up for yet another damn account if you want to comment. Some sites don't even have comment sections! Or maybe they point you to FB or Twitter anyway. Again there were partial solutions back in the day, but nothing as easy as modern social media.

Last for today, it's not nearly as addictive. Some people (including the author and myself) like that about it... but it doesn't drive adoption nearly as well.

>I assume they'll be popular again some day like vinyl and static web sites.

I think they'll always be niche-popular with geeks, long-form content creators, open web advocates (the "EFF crowd" I guess) and so forth. But I don't think it'll ever be mainstream. At best it could serve as the substrate for something else that becomes mainstream.

Anyway, just my 2 cents from hanging around this space for a decade+.

> A big one, that was the case even before social media, is the inherent geekiness of it. "RSS" is an acronym after a geek's heart, most people don't like it.

Like WWW, RCA, GE.. (the latter two of the most recognizable and successful brands of all time). got it. (And no one cares what an acronym stands for anyway.. you don’t need to know this to make use of it, it has no bearing. RSS is pretty catchy as far as branding goes.)

The subscription process is simplicity itself and there are still some tremendously mainstream popular and well designed for a general audience readers like Feedly. I’ve almost never had to manually cut and paste a feed link (I think the cases were dealing with someone’s broken Linux desktop). Clicking on a link on an iPhone will open it in a reader or take you the App Store to install one.

RSS is simply missing the key feature of social networking “engagement” and these walled gardens are heavily promoted and in your face. It’s not a geekiness issue it’s an attention issue.

RSS as branding - well, I've tried to sell people on it for years. I actually worked at an RSS aggregator startup for 7 years, so I spent a while pushing it. You say "RSS" to most people and their eyes glaze over.

>The subscription process is simplicity itself

You must've found some different sites than I have, because even sites that have a feed don't make it obvious how. For instance, check out Substack, ex: https://steady.substack.com/p/america-the-beautiful

Can I get an RSS feed, and if so how? The giant "Subscribe" button isn't it. So I guess grab the page URL and paste it into Feedly and see what I get. I don't mind this (much), but "mass market" it ain't. And this kind of process is very common in my experience. Back in the day sites would have the little "feed" icon sometimes and that helped, but it was still a 2-3 step process.

My web site has this:

  <html>
    <head>
      <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" href="/updates.xml">
      ...

Unless I screwed something up, it used to be the standard way to tell browsers where the RSS feed for this particular web page are. Back then it was very easy to use, even for Grandma™: just click on the standard RSS icon in your browser, next to the URL bar, and there's your feed. That was your subscribe button.

Then browsers stopped working. No more RSS icon, at least by default. I had to add an explicit <a/> link at the bottom of the page, which when cliked on shows an ugly rendition of plaintext XML.

https://www.apple.com/rss/

Open this on an Apple or android phone. On iOS this will even prompt you to open the App Store to find a feed reader (#1 is still Feedly).

RSS icons were ubiquitous like fb and Twitter icons a few years ago, and anyone could use them. It wasn’t a geek thing, it’s just a market that faded.

I’ve never had the feed icon not work on a phone in the last 10 years or a typically installed browser on Mac or Windows.

I mean this is an absurd conversation. RSS was invented around 1998 and then it was an obscure “geeky” thing.. the only reason we’re having this tedious conversation (and arguably why you’d have had the opportunity to be involved in an RSS startup) is because it had a striking rise from obscurity in the late oughts.

Lol, my bad, you're right. It was wildly popular, random people on the street were talking about RSS, everyone in the general non-blogging populace was swapping their favorite feeds, it was amazing. That's probably why Google shut down Reader right at the height of that amazing, broad-based popularity and basically nobody talks about it anymore.

Even if RSS was popular, how could advertising companies like Google and Facebook make money off of it?

Those companies have no incentive that I know of to give their user a reliable (a.k.a non-personalised) feed that let them chose whether they'll get to click through or not. No, they want you to click through first, so you get to see the ads before you even start doom scrolling.

Google had a reader app, in fact the market-dominant reader app. They could sell advertising next to it, like they do with everything else (probably did, I'm not sure). They also owned a publishing platform (Blogger) and an RSS metrics platform (FeedBurner) that had paid tiers. So they actually did monetize it. Just not enough to bother with.

Facebook for a while was trying to be the commenting system for blogs. Which is not exactly RSS, but they were in an adjacent space and using it to drive traffic.

And yet it still died, or rather has slowly faded away back to the niche market that I originally mentioned.

> it was amazing.

It was, even Firefox users were using it. That's probably why Mozilla had to remove that functionality. /s

> I always wonder why they aren't as popular now.

1) Google makes really quite good RSS reader (Google Reader)

2) Everybody switches to it, competition atrophies

3) Google shuts it down

Google shutting down their RSS reader didn't really have an impact.

They shut it down back in March of 2013. If you look at the trends graph[1] for RSS it was dying out for years.

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...

Long-term Google trends graphs are kind of useless because they're a percentage of queries over a period of time when the demographics of the user base was changing as millions of new people got on the internet.

Here's the one for javascript:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=javascri...

Clearly javascript has been slowly dying out. But wait, that can't be right.

They're also a poor proxy for usage because the existing user base with feeds already set up doesn't have to do a search query to continue using it, so if a large number of them lose access at once, it's barely a blip because they wouldn't be doing searches for it either way.

Do you know a better alternative? I would like to know

You probably didn't want to come across this way, but we should note that the absence of a better metric is not by itself a reason to use a bad one.

If a metric is sufficiently decorrelated with the thing we want to measure, it should be ignored altogether, regardless of whether we have anything better.

"I always wonder why they aren't as popular now. It takes more work to add site to a reader, and more effort to even use one I suppose"

I know for me, I didn't know what RSS truly was until like.. last year? I remember seeing the icon and all that on various sites growing up but I never clicked them as I didn't know it was a straight feed of content.

Whereas last year I read some article or blog about it dying and I decided to look it up. Now it's the only way I read or watch any content becuase it's exactly what I want: straight content with no bs.

Probably for same reasons as why slot machines with minimalist aesthetics don’t exist

> Having only the content I want to see only be shown when I want to see it

I would rather not do my own content discovery and content curation: I see those as literal chores that have to be done before I can consume content.

Like all chores, I'm not keen to do them. Despite years of practice, I'm still not confident I am great at them on my own, and I have the option to employ someone more skilled.

Twitter has done a good job of these chores, making discovery and curation easier (like the parent article, I feel frustrated that Twitter is now broken from this point of view); TikTok does a great job, surely better than I could do myself.

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