Hacker News Reader

Comment by yokoprime | Hacker News Reader

> RSS is effectively dead

I assume you mean this in context of Google groups, because otherwise it seems RSS is doing OK. I mean, there's that whole podcasts thing and whatnot

View on HN

I'm afraid they mean it in the sense of "popular use of the protocol". I'm on Firefox right now, navigate to my personal blog that offers RSS... And none of the buttons in the UI seems to refer to that. If I navigate directly to the RSS, it just shows me the XML. Back in the day, I'd have a button in the URL bar to do something with it.

So, when I work at Google, I don't see any mention of RSS anywhere. It just isn't a thing users would demand. There might be semi-forgotten API endpoints here and there. But I assure you - when the server inevitably gets hit by some deprecation or its team gets reorged enough, it will be rewritten. And the rewrite will almost surely not have such an endpoint, simply because nobody will ever think of it. No vendetta, just lifecycle.

> It just isn't a thing users would demand.

Hi, user here. RSS is absolutely something that I would demand, if I could.

Oh, me too. But unless we get a couple dozen million Americans to share the sentiment, we won't get what we want. And that doesn't seem like a battle worth fighting.

Yep, me too!! However I've already stopped with the Google stuff so my opinion doesn't matter much.

> users would demand

A world with policies based on the median is a dystopia.

But trivially so: "No, we only sell mid-sized shoes, aren't you supposed to be at the top of the bell curve"?

We are supposed to running towards the good extreme tail of the bell curve.

Median guy does not use the tools you use - it's another world completely, and it's not your world.

Dialogue with a village librarian: "You should acquire more journalism on AI" // "Disgust, usrs demand novels" // "Yeah, current concentration of importance is more towards AI".

You want this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/rsspreview/

I use this with reasonable results: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/want-my-rss/

I recently installed the Feedbro addon on Firefox. It is a pretty decent RSS reader.

Podcasts are one thing. Additionally, almost all blogs based on WordPress have RSS enabled, from what I gather. I would say that for a technology clearly not to the liking of services basing their operation on a walled garden principle it stands quite firmly.

[edit]: a missing -s

The vast majority of RSS support seems to be an accident or it just happens to work because of the software they use. That is a pretty fragile state to be in since they are a redesign or software switch away from breaking and removing support. And they will not put in any effort to fix it since it was never intentionally a feature of the site.

It was, 20 years ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com