What Happened to RSS?
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I ignored it for a long time but decided to start using. Unfortunately that's when website support started to decline. Shame I really liked it.
Approaching it this way (similar to paid mailing lists) is the best of both worlds, providing revenue incentives to users while removing site ads for users who care about and pay for the content.
So provide only a title+snippet feed so folks can now when you articles appear on the site, and hopefully go to the 'full' page which has ads. Anything that can drive traffic can be helpful.
It's not that people don't like to pay; it's that most people don't like to pay what seems like an unjustifiable amount of money for a service which is otherwise nice but not essential.
Especially when the service comes off as "defective by design", in which case rebelliousness kicks in on top of everything.
Problems compounding this effect?
1. The default is ads. This really serves to create the impression that your product isn't really worth that much, if all the user is expected to do is ignore a stupid ad on the page, which you're probably not even seeing on the first place if you have an adblocker. Which is why when the alternative monetization is $30 monthly or whatever, you're like "wat? what for?"
2. Companies rarely let you pay for what you're using. instead, it's a subscription, and it's for all the features of the site, including those 500 features you're never going to use. Hence you're asked to pay $30 a month, for an RSS feed you'd otherwise have been happy paying a far more reasonable amount.
3. Most companies don't make it easy for you to know how much you're using the product or if you're paying too much, if it hurts their "milk as much as possible" approach. If you paid cents per RSS, and had a free trial for a month to see what a typical month will cost you, I think most people wouldn't bat an eyelid when it came to paying.
I would happily pay 10 cents a month for a full RSS feed to content I already had access to. I'm paying for convenience, nothing more.
I'm not paying Netflix money for content I already have access to.
People sharing a feed with one or two people isn't going to account for a huge amount, and one person (accidentially|on purpose) sharing their URL to a bunch of people will become visible pretty quickly in analytics. Nobody's making big dollars on illicit Ars Technica RSS Feed content, especially when a lot of the value of Ars is in their curated forums and discussions.
Ars makes enough off ads that they encourage people to pay to remove ads, get "et subscriptor" appended to their title, and some minor perks across the site (RSS, a slightly nicer forum experience, etc).
A corollary is Linux World News. LWN hides articles with journalistic leverage behind a paywall, marked as such, and offers similar per-subscriber RSS feeds. LWN doesn't have ads.
LWN also allows subscribers to share any article on their behalf; you've probably seen an LWN article or two shared by a subscriber here on HN. They know there's people who generate the share link and dump it into massive aggregators (like HN, Reddit, etc.) but they don't care because it drives people to go "maybe this is worth $20/year" and toss some cash up.
I had an LWN subscription when I was in Google Summer of Code. It was cool, and I read it far more regularly than I would have otherwise, but I decided to allow the subscription to lapse after I didn't read it daily. With my shift to a new job, I'll probably get a new LWN subscription just because it's becoming more salient to my daily work.
This is easily fixed by adding an XSL stylesheet reference at the top of the RSS XML. The stylesheet not only contains HTML markup to format the XML in a friendly manner, but can also be used to inform the user what to actually do with the RSS feed.
The BBC do exactly this on all their RSS feeds.
I think that only works for Firefox, since I can't recall Chrome ever doing the right thing in that setup
Edit: linked submission has an example.
Mind if I steal it ? :D
I feel like RSS dipped, but actually has rebounded a bit in the recent 5-ish years.
[0]: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/
All the things that make it clean, simple and attractive to the tech inclined are precisely the reason why it is in decline.
So Google set out to absolutely dominate the the RSS client space with their free Reader. They succeeded, then just terminated the product. And that was for many the end of the line.
Most RSS readers I'm aware of prominently include an option to view the full page, often inside the same app (and these apps are less likely to have content-blocking add-ons installed, which would block lucrative surveillance).
I'm quite happy for RSS feeds to include only a summary/thumbnail/excerpt plus a link to the full page.
If I hover over "5 hours ago" on the submission at the top, I see the timestamp "2022-06-11T12:51:31". If that's in my time zone, that was 1 day, 10 hours ago. If that's GMT, it was even longer ago.
Clearly this submission has "resurfaced" with all of the relative time information changed, but the underlying timestamps on the post preserved.
I have archived the page as I see it for future reference: https://web.archive.org/web/20220612175242/https://news.ycom...
Anyone know how this could have happened? @dang?
Edit: actually, I have a guess. Maybe the moderators don't have access to the algorithm and it isn't that flexible, so the way they hack around it is by changing what the algorithm sees as the posted date of the submission. If the algorithm thinks the submission was made more recently than it actually was, it will bring it back to the front page because the score goes up.
Just asking for a friend..
[1] https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy
[2] e.g. here's how to get Göteborgs Posten (a Swedish newspaper which ditched its feed some time ago) in an RSS feed reader (Atom is also supported through ...&o=Atom) - note that this is an example.org domain so the link does not work as is - https://rssproxy.example.org/api/feed?url=https://gp.se&pCon...
I don't understand the argument of it not being a money-maker, since the publisher of the feed controls the content. In most cases they would just publish an excerpt or even just the title, which forces you to read the article on their website anyway.
Right? Gathering RSS users together in one place and being able to see what they like based on their feeds, advertise in and around the content freely based on those inferences.
If it wasn't a money maker, that's surely more Google's fault than a requirement. Hell, this is a service that people pay for too now. Google really dropped the ball.
They did by adding push notifications to their browsers.
RSS seems pointless to use now that web push notifications and twitter exist. Twitter solves the scaling problem where you are subscribed to too many things. It has an algorithm to sort your feed so you don't have to waste time scrolling past uninteresting articles from people you've followed if you are following a ton of different content creators.
Reading RSS feeds is like sitting down to read a pile of newspapers. Perhaps another activity that people don't really do any more, but should.
Desktop Outlook at least still manages RSS subscriptions. Let’s hope Microsoft doesn’t get “active” and decides to remove that.
I personally read mostly stories on Hacker News, and the author has successfully reached me here.
There’s an irony in Hacker News criticizing algorithm based feeds, when it itself is proof that Twitter and Facebook are not the only alternatives to RSS.
Looking at my RSS feed, there are quite a lot of active feeds in there. Some I read immediately when I notice something new in them, some when I feel like it.
You can talk about how Google killed their RSS support. How Twitter killed their RSS support. How Apple added and then removed RSS from Safari. But RSS lives on, it can't be killed.
Many news sites continue to publish RSS feeds, you just need to know how to find them.
How many death proclamations does RSS need? At this point it's become a joke, like the old Saturday Night Live Weekend Update, "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead."
Does anyone else uses messenger bots to aggregate RSS? I use manybot [1] and it has moved RSS to the modern world for me.
(*Proprietary audio platforms like Spotify probably do not use RSS, other than to vacuum standards-based audio content into their platform.)
(1) Inoreader is the one I use with this capability. worth every penny - moved there after Google Reader died.
Author make new version update with new purchase but worth it now
RSS never went away, RSS apps never went away, RSS users never went away.
1. I don't see why they say browsers killed RSS/atom feeds. The only casualty was the discoverability of those feeds (like the discontinued live bookmarks on Firefox). But it is easy enough to restore it using extensions like awesome-rss, if you care enough. And I find a lot of dedicated feed reader applications catering to all sorts of users.
2. I don't understand how twitter and firefox killed RSS/Atom feeds. I find it extremely tedious to search for meaningful information with them. These sites are full of material designed to hold your attention captive while frustrating your efforts at finding worthwhile material. In contrast, RSS/Atom is information dense, easy to search, narrow and archive.
3. There is no dearth of RSS/Atom feeds on the web. Every good news website news site seems to host one. Almost all the blog engines and static site generators automatically generate them without any configuration or intervention. I find my feedlist growing very large overtime.
4. It also appears like many people associate RSS/Atom feeds with an online service like feedreader or (the dead) Google reader. My understanding is that you don't need an online service to aggregate feeds. An intermittently online desktop/mobile client can do it just the same. I haven't noticed an RSS/Atom client ever failing to aggregate a feed. The only thing I found missing was an automatic way to share and synchronize the feed list itself - though it's easy enough to implement with something like syncthing. Am I missing something here?
For me, twitter, FB etc are inferior to RSS/Atom feeds in every conceivable way - with the exception of lack of a discussion forum. I too find the death proclamation of RSS/Atom a bit of an overstatement.
In any case, I don't think the problem is lack of clients, but lack of publishers. Most platforms with loginwalls (e.g. Twitter) will never publish RSS feeds...
The problem is individuals. Individuals tend to publish on hosts which just are incompatible with RSS (because they are 'platforms' with other goals, like Twitter), or self-host without RSS (yes, happens). Platforms which have automatic RSS generation are a minority in terms of users (and BTW Wordpress and Medium are also 'corporate person silos', save for perhaps self-hosted WP).
An example of this irony is that Twitter itself publishes RSS feeds for their investor news -- https://investor.twitterinc.com/rss-feeds/default.aspx -- yet fails to provide RSS feeds for their actual user content.
Personally I do not assign much value in following the opinions of individuals, so I am still primarily an RSS user. But lately even e.g. political parties tend to publish in these silos and forget about RSS.
Every real podcast player allows you to subscribe directly to a podcast if you know the RSS URL.
When you play a podcast, even through iTunes or the podcast player, the audio is served from your website. None of this is true for either Google or Spotify,
I have noticed a trend, though, for Podcasts to no longer provide a "raw" RSS feed, and point you to "wherever you find your podcasts". It is usually possible to find an RSS URL, but it takes a bit of work sometimes.
I could switch to another client, ... but I'm a creature of habit. I might try building my own Podcast client, though, I've been looking for a project lately.
Like most of HN, I've been using it daily for decades, but it's nowhere near as available as it used to be. Neither Firefox or Chrome seem to treat it as content worth looking at, but they used to. Look at the HN RSS feed in your browser for fun: https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
On my website (TFA), I had to add my own XLST. That works well now, for now. But how long until XLST support is removed because "nobody uses it"?
How much more dead do you need something to be before it's worth talking about? Previous conversations haven't accomplished anything, more services ignore RSS, iCal, so maybe it's worth banging on about this stuff until pressure finds the right people, and so that RSS doesn't get further excluded, so that people still think it's worth making feeds for.
I'm sorry you think it's cliché.
This is a strange question. One normally doesn't talk about dead technologies at all, except perhaps nostalgically. "Hey, remember Netscape Navigator?" Declaring RSS dead doesn't have the rhetorical effect that you intend, as the dead can't be brought back to life.
> I'm sorry you think it's cliché.
It's not just me. A lot of people upvoted and/or agreed with my comment, so I would take that as a sign that the "RSS is dead" rhetoric is counterproductive and distracting to your points.
I feel the same about the old people/kids shtick, by the way. If you're trying to make a serious point and actually change things, don't turn it into a joke.
RSS is still in use, but it's rarely advertised, today's browsers already refuse to speak it without additional stylesheets, and the spec's largely abandoned. Where will it be in another five years?
You're welcome to your views but whether or not RSS has died is immaterial. I was trying to identify what has replaced RSS between the sites that don't provide it, and users who don't know anything about it. The short answer to that seems to be promoting your content on social media.
With a majority of the people on Facebook, Twitter, etc it seems websites are most concerned with syndicating to those platforms, rather than through a shared protocol that anyone can subscribe to.
I still use RSS to follow a few sites (with NetNewsWire). I never want to overwhelm myself with sources, but have always found RSS to be a fantastic way to keep on on a site without going to it all the time or seeing the same stories over and over again. I see everything one time and can choose to read it or skip it.
I guess that last point may be the problem for websites looking to generate revenue. RSS is going to let you filter down to just what you actually want to read without ads (for the most part). It also doesn't require you obsessively check the site to see if you're missing anything. It's very easy to just check once a day, or once every couple days, to get all caught up. Sites like Facebook or Twitter want you checking over and over again throughout the days, and with their feeds you can never be sure you've seen everything, while other things you see over and over again. More views leads to more money.
From what I understand, podcasts are still using a very similar structure to RSS. But I think that might be under attack as popularity grows and companies are looking to lock people into their specific platforms.
Luckily, there are many self-hosted alternatives available, one of them being selfoss: https://selfoss.aditu.de/ (not affiliated or anything, just like the reader)
As a non Reader user, I can confidently say this statement is false. Nothing in my RSS feeds I was subscribed to changed for years after it shut down. Those relying on RSS and not using Google Reader were not at all impacted by Reader's shut down.
Facebook, Twitter, etc is what caused a lot of major sites to drop the investment on RSS. The number of RSS users was always small, but the number of subscribers using these other services grew exponentially.