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Comment by derekzhouzhen | Hacker News Reader

> RSS is one-way publishing; there is no way for content creators and their audience to interact

I consider this as the main strength of RSS; respecting the privacy of the audience. If the audience want to interact they can still choose to do so. The small amount of friction actually helps to beat down the noises.

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Atom even allows specifying an Email address: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4287#section-3.2.3

So if someone wants to contact you, they can do so directly.

RSS too:

  managingEditor Email address for person responsible for editorial content. geo@herald.com (George Matesky)
  webMaster Email address for person responsible for technical issues relating to channel. betty@herald.com (Betty Guernsey)

https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html#requiredChannel... (but was also present in 0.91)

This really only benefits the audience, though, which means there is little to no incentive on the part of the creator to use RSS.

Reaching the audience that value their privacy is a good incentive, at least for most personal bloggers. I don't care who is reading my blog but I do want to make the process as hassle free as possible.

If you don’t have a RSS feed, I won’t see your content. There are only a handful of sites I view direct any more and most likely you are not going to make the cut.

Sure, but you represent what is likely to be a very, very small percentage of readers. There are a lot of people on HN that have that same orientation toward content. But, as with so many things, they're on the periphery of the zeitgeist because they're technologists for the most part.

Most blog readers don't share your perspective, and, unless a creator's audience skews very heavily toward a group that does, it would be hard to say the incentives are aligned in the direction that makes a tangible difference for them to support RSS for their posts.

That would be a compelling argument if any substantive number of each site's potential viewers did this. But they don't. Publishers don't care about RSS because hardly anyone uses RSS because publishers don't care about RSS. Publishers would care more about RSS if they didn't have to sacrifice things they cared about to serve a small minority of viewers.

> Publishers would care more about RSS if they didn't have to sacrifice things they cared about

What sacrifice are you talking about? For instance, Substack supports RSS, even for paid items. They just only include the teaser portion in the feed. The paying customers can click though.

If you don't click through, you don't get ads. The publisher makes no money from you browsing the content with a feed. Moreover, they can't quantify what you passed over before clicking something.

These aren't things users care about, but it's what the publishers care about.

I think this is why the answer to RSS is an RSS client that can create feeds from arbitrary sources. (RSS being less a technology/protocol and more a general concept of fetching/consuming content for local consumption)

The original model never made too much sense to me: why do I depend on every single website to implement something that I want? If a website doesn't implement it, I just don't get to use my RSS client with it at all? Not very compelling.

You can see the same inconsistency in the finger-pointing that comes up on this topic. RSS benefits us, the audience, yet it's {X,Y,Z}s fault for not implementing it for us. And we need to somehow compel them to do it or something.

Nah, an RSS reader in 2022 should be able to create feeds from websites. There are already solutions here.

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