Hacker News Reader

Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

When did we lose RSS? It's going strong right now.

I think that, at least for young people, it is not as popular as it was for us older people.

Things like the death of Google Reader and web browsers making it harder or even disabling subscriptions to websites via RSS were a huge deal. Allegedly all of that was because RSS lost momentum.

People like me had to resort to use things like Feedly, but frankly it is not the same. I for one dream about the resurgence of RSS and making the web again a little less corporation-in-the-middle.

Death of web browsers?

I know many people in my cohort (30+ techies) who still use RSS religiously (myself included).

I have never seen someone under about 20 using RSS (and probably 90% of that age group has never heard of it). They all live in chat apps and algorithmic feeds :(

I couldn't imagine my RSS reader displaying stories that it thinks I'd like (and not all, in chronological order). There's a reason I curate my feeds—I want to see the content in each of them!

I'm a little over 20 and I have used RSS and did not continue. I just don't see why I would want RSS over something like hacker news or visiting my local news website directly. Subscribing to blogs directly creates a huge firehose of mostly boring content while sites like HN sort content vaguely by how interesting it is.

As well as the fact that most of the time, the actual content of the article is less interesting than the discussion it starts in the comments. I imagine most people checking reddit or HN are not there to read a long post but instead looking to discuss various opinions in the comments which RSS does not support.

Blogs and websites that generate lots of content are akin to News. You don't subscribe to them, and have HN to let you know of something important happens.

RSS is for the long tail of blogs that don't post very frequently, but when they do, its worth your while.

The ideal entry in my RSS feed is one that has new addition once per week or less. This way, I can follow a very wide array of people without getting overwhelmed, nor having to miss if their post don't make it to HN front.

I guess the reinvented solution for this use case is email newsletters, that substack and the like have popularized recently. Most people have an email client, no matter how grudgingly.

Email... defeats half the purpose of RSS. With RSS, you control what you want to receive and when. Its a pull mechanism. With email, it becomes push and then it gets abused. Remember when smartphone notifications were actual notifications with useful alert/content? Nowadays they are just another advertisement delivery channel.

That's why RSS is still important, and why RSS feeds should not be delivered via Email.

Guess what? Substack supports RSS. Every substack has a feed.

> RSS is for the long tail of blogs that don't post very frequently, but when they do, its worth your while.

How do you find those?

Its organic discovery. Some I come across in HN discussions. Some I find while googling stuff. Since my interests aren't mainstream, most of the blogs I come across this way are interesting to me and I subscribe.

These days there are few awesome lists or the like for curated, sorted and tagged personal blogs too. Its a great time to start with RSS.

From my own experience: search for blogs of favorite writers, observe aggregate sites like Hacker News and Reddit for authors with a style that resonates with you (subreddits of niche topics are often surprisingly rich in a good content), search for niche topics that are of interest to you, ask friends about any interesting content.

HN’s front page has an RSS feed, that’s how I get to it for titles that catch my interest. 98% of the time I go to the comments first, more often than not I never go to the actual article (this one, for example).

> Subscribing to blogs directly creates a huge firehose of mostly boring content

It's possible that you're reading the wrong blogs.

Possibly some under 20 use Podcasts? That's usually based on RSS.

> I have never seen someone under 20 using RSS

Im under 19 , i use rss daily for a lot of things from reading blogs to sending alerts about new updates in services me and my friends host.

Eh, but despite Slack and Discord, IRC still exists.

I wish more people would join us outside the walled gardens, but I also don't think these tools will die so long as there's people like us that are passionate about staying outside the walled gardens.

IRC is dead in the sense that it is in a late stage of decline that can not be reversed anymore. The death of freenode was a huge hit as well. It seems like there were efforts to fix IRC with IRCv3 but I don't recall any major support from clients and servers and it was too little too late.

I just checked wikipedia and it is coming up on a decade since v3 was started and yet no major network supports it. And v3 was only the bare minimum required to modernize IRC and misses so many other important features people demand like inline images/files and a mobile friendly protocol.

Of course it will never be dead in the sense that literally no one uses it. Almost nothing ever dies that way.

As I've written in some other comments, because of my lack of foresight I wasn't clear enough.

I've put this in other comments but, briefly, it's not the protocol RSS that has a problem. It's the RSS-enabled future that we imagined back in the early 00's that didn't happen. Those opportunities for connecting things together via content (esp. around the RSS micro-formats work that was going on) disappeared when content got swallowed by advserisers.

We didn’t, it’s just folks still I think wanting to complain about Google Reader getting cancelled due to low usage.

NewsBlur and other RSS aggregation sites are still around, have nice UIs and are still doing just fine.

That was my question too. I fell asleep earlier, and I'm like did I wake up in some twilight zone without RSS???

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