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Comment by sandbags | Hacker News Reader

What I am was trying to express in my post was about the loss of centrality of RSS as a means of distribution of all kind of content. Yes RSS as a protocol works as well as it ever did, but RSS as a system is nowhere.

In 2003/4 which is the period I was writing about there was no Facebook or Twitter and online advertising was not the business it is now. Although publishing via RSS was still relatively new and not well adopted it seemed like a viable way of plugging content together.

Now so much content is in silo's. There are no usable feeds from anyone who cares about advertising because they don't want you to have their content, they want to capture you.

That's what I am getting at. Not whether you can still read some sites that continue to support RSS in a reader.

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I don't understand the blame on ads. The ecosystem with the best RSS support is podcasts - almost every podcast has an RSS feed, and most people consume podcasts using a podcast player, which is essentially an RSS player. But lots of podcasts have ads. I don't see why text RSS feeds couldn't include ads as well. If that motivated more sites to have fulltext RSS feeds it would be a good thing.

The simplest response, although there are several, is control. If I am on your site you have (some) control over my experience and potentially information about me & what I do. If I consume your content via a feed I can (more easily) ignore your ads and you have less information.

Well, the site owner would have 0 control over what extensions I have installed. Asking me to disable them would most definitely result in me leaving.

This is why I caveated my statements. AdBlockers, Privacy guards, and so on change the game as more people use them. That said, I've seen no stats but I wonder if that's even a majority.

It's also worth remembering that they are a relatively new phenomenon developed in response to the snooping. There was a long period where companies like Facebook had it all their own way. And this is the period in which the damage was mostly done.

I'm not sure if it's a majority, however, I certainly recommend them everywhere I can. I've been using them since before Google reader shut down, so they've certainly been around a while.

Ads on a website can be personalized (which is why many RSS feeds for news sites only short the first three paragraphs and then force you to click through into their website). Ads in a podcast delivered by RSS feed are much harder to personalize since the user agent pulling the RSS feed is less identifiable than a browser. That's why podcast platforms offering personalized ads rely on their own walled garden of client apps, like Spotify.

Ever since I started using RSS, back in the Google reader days, I used it in list view and clicked on articles I was interested in. I still do this today. I run ad blockers, so I'm absolutely useless to the sites, but I want to see the article in the original format.

OK sure, but you can create usable feeds. There are services that will do this for you in like 5 seconds.

Could you give me an example of some of the high quality siloed content that isn't available via RSS? I haven't encountered any problems getting to any of the stuff I regularly consume, but I imagine it probably exists.

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