Do people still use RSS? | Hacker News Reader

Do people still use RSS?

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9 pointstosbourn23 comments

I use it everyday. In fact, that's how I saw this HN post.

IMO, when it comes to RSS, people are always asking the wrong question. RSS is a technology, not a product. It makes as much sense as asking whether someone is using GSM or TCP. I think a large part of that problem is that the technology appeared before a user-friendly way to consume it. Imagine email addresses being introduced before email clients existed. To most people, clicking on an RSS button displays garbage to the screen. They don't know what to do with it. Even after browsers started displaying RSS feeds in a pretty format, users still didn't know what to do with it. Should they bookmark this link? Why would they consume the barebones RSS feed in their browser instead of the rich and graphical website? RSS enables one to subscribe to a website, it's not the ends but the means. These questions still remain unanswered which is why some people like Gruber and TechCrunch like to claim that Twitter killed RSS, although I think they're completely different things.

word.

I wouldn't have ever seen this submission if it weren't for RSS. Along with almost everything else I'm going to read online today.

I heard this post via FeedSpeak - http://feedspeak.tk

I think my best way of answering the question is that because some magazine authors don't have per-contributor RSS, I don't follow them and forget them.

Twitter is a very interesting development, but the only site whose RSS it's replaced is Daring Fireball.

However, finding a good RSS client is the biggest pain in the ass, and I don't know what I would have done, if I didn't discover Fever, when Bloglines died and took all my data and saved updates with it.

What's wrong with google reader?

My main gripe was that it prunes updates over a certain age (one month?) without telling me, and it pissed me off to no end to find out the way I did.

Fever still prunes updates, albeit with an explicit and definable value. It allows up to eight weeks, which is usually enough for me to catch the important updates and makes sense from a personal server perspective, seeing that I don't have an infinite amount of storage available for the burgeoning database of feed updates.

After Bloglines died, the concept of cloud-based RSS readers made even less sense to me, seeing that it took all my saved updates with it. I feel the same way about e-mail, but I don't really see a dead-easy alternative available at the moment, especially with Gmail's two-factor authentication.

Google Reader also used to, basically, not work at all on Opera, which is normal for any Google service, so it never really grew on me. Its design annoys me to no end as well.

With very few exceptions, if you don't have a feed you don't survive past my first visit. I visit HN manually every day, and stackoverflow and my bank manually when I need to, and documentation sites. That's it. The web is much too large to visit sites manually, and every site is less than a drop in the bucket.

Yes, it's the best way to keep up to date on things that are not updated very often. I probably have 400-500 feeds subscribed to in google reader, but never use google reader directly.

On Mac: Reeder On iPad: Reeder On iPhone: NetNewsWire (until Reeder comes to iPhone??)

Twitter has replaced some of that news gathering, but a lot of times if I'm away for a week, I'm not going to go through thousands of tweets to see what I missed, but it's pretty easy on the lower volume feeds. I don't necessarily read everything, but at least the headlines give me an idea of what's going on.

I don't know what I'd do without them.

...Reeder is on iPhone. And it's brilliant. Go get it.

How did I miss that. Thanks!

I didn't post up my answer on the site because someone else had already covered it. In short, yes people still use them and given how easy they are to implement I see no reason not to put them onto your site.

Absolutely, especially if your readers are tech-savvy. Personally, having a feed drastically lowers the "compellingness barrier" a site must exceed to gain my sustained attention. There are very few sites that are interesting enough to make me visit them manually every day, but lots of sites interesting enough that I'll add them to my feed reader.

The "given how easy they are to implement I see no reason not to" part is what bugs me the most about this. I don't think there's a modern language in existence that doesn't have at least 3 free ways to implement an RSS/Atom feed. Every framework I can think of (ASP.Net (MVC and Web Forms), Django, Rails) has it built in and it takes virtually no resources.

Unless you use an ad service that doesn't support it I can't see a reason why you wouldn't implement (I can't speak for other languages but in ASP.NET MVC I could implement a feed in the time it took him to make that post)

Is there any public data about how many people use Google Reader, Bloglines Reader, Netvibes, iGoogle, My Yahoo! and so forth, all of which are RSS-based?

Not only do I use it (that's how I saw this story) but also advocate it to people who like to consume news. When you think about it, RSS in a news reader is a much more efficient information consumption than visiting sites.

Twitter and other social feeds are interesting but the amount of noise to signal seems to be much lower than what you can get on RSS, even on some of the better sources.

Yes, I believe people still do. RSS is about content and providing information. Everybody needs information, everybody needs something new - so it is here to stay.. I'm assuming by RSS you mean the content, not the technology. In fact, got a site that uses youtube RSS feeds to show videos and create playlists.

I've been using RSS for long and I don't see not using it in any near future. I use a combination of Brief (http://brief.mozdev.org/) and Google Reader.

Yes. That's how I look at HN. RSS is the bomb.

I certainly do. Aside from Twitter it's the only content consumption method I use every single day.

What are the alternatives to RSS? Do people really use Twitter instead? What else is there?

Actually, for websites managed by non-tech people, I see a big shift towards Facebook Pages (and Twitter).

YES.

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