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Comment by tacostakohashi | Hacker News Reader

Yep, "vodcast" used to be a word in regular use, referring to RSS feeds of videos/eposides often provided by TV channels for episodes of their content.

Now that RSS has been effectively killed, this word/concept has disappeared without trace.

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RSS is not dead, it is still alive. Websites are still using them. Yes, Google Reader and browsers (well, most of them) ended support for RSS. The readers and community are still around. RSS is increasing popularly again.

I have over 400 RSS feeds subscribed in QuiteRSS and FreshRSS.

I prefer inoreader.

> RSS is increasing popularly again.

Is this true?

Every time RSS comes up we have this same discussion

A: “RSS is dead”

B: “well, I’m still using it and it’s great. Clearly it’s not dead!”

But A and B are having two different conversations.

For broad public consumption the only success RSS had was podcasts, and Spotify is actively trying to capture that open ecosystem and make it their cash cow.

Kids aren’t sitting around sharing the RSS feeds they like, it’s YouTube, TikTok, Discord; all proprietary walled gardens of content.

So yes, the technology isn’t dead, and the world is big enough there’s even a self-sustaining (probably) community of RSS users, but it still hasn’t quite lived up to it’s promise.

Streambus is exciting because the cost of hosting content keeps dropping, maybe we can reproduce the podcast model with video now. But as always the network effect and discoverability are big hurdles to overcome.

Podcasts succeeded not just because of RSS, they succeeded because Apple supported them in the iTunes Store (which is _still_ the most important place to get reviewed as a podcast) solving the discoverability problem.

Depends on your definition of dead.

Public recognition of what thing X they're using or relying on is not necessary for something to be "alive" or "dead", otherwise you'd have to say that TCP/IP is dead because I bet less than 10% of internet users know what that is and even less know how it works.

People using podcasts still rely on RSS. Spotify's and Apple's attempt to circumvent an open-standard doesn't seem to be working as podcastindex.org already has double the amount of podcasts registered.

E-commerce product feeds still (mostly) use RSS.

Everyone still uses RSS, they just don't know it.

> otherwise you'd have to say that TCP/IP is dead because I bet less than 10% of internet users know what that is and even less know how it works.

Barely any user knows about TCP/IP, but everybody uses it daily. Using the Internet basically means using this protocol stack.

The same cannot be said about RSS

Listening to podcasts means using feeds.

I know it may come out as shocking, but majority of Internet users also don't listen to podcasts.

And listening to podcasts doesn't mean using feeds. I personally have listened to some from YouTube; Spotify also offers them.

The point is that it's not dead.

I'm not arguing that. I'm arguing the use of false equivalence.

You haven't provided any evidence for that.

You stated that "RSS is dead because barely anybody knows about it" is the same as saying "TCP/IP is dead because barely anybody knows about it". This is false. You cannot use the Internet without TCP/IP, be it consciously or not. RSS on the other hand isn't widespread enough to be used by ordinary person without knowing about it.

And even if there are cases where RSS is used in background as TCP/IP is, then it doesn't change the fact it's in background. Average Joe still won't know how to subscribe to blog's RSS feed.

Podcasts are basically the only place where feeds still thrive (alas it's also changing). RSS may not be dead, but unfortunately it's a niche which to average consumer is as good as dead.

As throwawayswede said, people are still using this technology and to my opinion, that is still active. There are a lot of things that are using RSS, it is not oblivious to us which why people believe it is dead.

Yes, RSS specification haven't made any improvement since 2010ish. However, the community are still using this technology. It honestly blew my mind that it is still around when I decided to go back to RSS few months ago. The community have developed various tools to make RSS amazing to use. There is RSS-Bridge (souped up RSS on steroid), RSSHub, RSS.app, Feedburner, FetchRSS, etc. RSS readers and it tools are still active and making improvement.

The main issue is with the funding model of open ecosystem. Once open models have a viable business model they'll all flourish. As consumers start realizing the dark side of closed systems and thus the need of open models it'll drive companies to go open and engineer models to cater them.

Ahhh yes. 95% of the population isn't using something means it's lost to history for all time never to be seen again. Things like RSS aren't designed by a company so there's no marketing budget. It's only going to spread through word of mouth. There are more ways than ever to turn sites and newsletters into RSS feeds. YouTube channels have feeds. Reddit has feeds. Frontends like Nitter to Twitter allow you to have RSS feeds. RSS feels very much alive.

Another word that I liked better was IPTV. These days it's used more to describe cable-style TV channels that use IP instead of DOCSIS though. And Leo Laporte called them "netcasts" but I don't think that took off anywhere beyond his TWiT network.

> Now that RSS has been effectively killed

Does that mean that my hundreds of still-functioning RSS subscriptions are undead?

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