This is the year of the RSS reader? | Hacker News Reader

This is the year of the RSS reader?

niemanlab.org

460 pointsalexzeitler321 comments

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Related ongoing threads:

Ask HN: What RSS Reader do you use in 2022? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34108413

It's time for an RSS revival (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105558

As someone who has used RSS since NetNewsWire looked like this…

https://ranchero.com/images/nnw2/nnwtoolbarhidden.png

…get off my lawn, kids.

And then let grandpa here hitch up his britches even higher: people still lament the end of Google Reader for a reason.

In retrospect, it was the least toxic social network. You added your friends, their recommendations bubbled up in the interface, so you saw cool new stuff. Was that perfect? Of course not—you were still in a filter bubble, and what bleeds, leads. But, it surfaced interesting stories, it let you follow news sources you wanted to see, and it did so without the screaming madness of Twitter and Facebook.

Be humble grandpa! There were people who used to use Google Reader without any of its social network shenanigans. And of course, there were people who have been using RSS readers before Google Reader was even born. But, no RSS reader has ever reached the ceiling of common usage, which is not a bad deal.

In my circles, which admittedly may not be representative, RSS is/was a tool for people whose job it was in part to proactively ferret out a wide range of information and insights from obscure corners of the internet--so journalists, analysts, and the like. Which just doesn't describe a mainstream audience.

While it's satisfying to blame Google, the killing of Reader always seemed like a natural effect of RSS not being popular than its cause. It's not like there aren't other RSS alternatives. And, of course, social media does a pretty good job--for all its faults--of surfacing those various tidbits with or without RSS.

It was successful enough that a much smaller business than Google would have tried to keep it going, probably as a subscription service. But for Google it was a rounding error, and the code base needed a rewrite.

It seems hard to argue that it would have become more successful, given that its successors are pretty good but they’re small businesses.

Right. And the problem with rounding error businesses at large companies is that:

1. They're a distraction and

2. It's probably very career limiting to work on them.

Someone at IBM told me years ago that if something wasn't going to be a billion dollar business they weren't interested. And Google walked away years ago from organizing the world's knowledge if advertising wasn't attached.

There is an argument to be made that these… micro services were a part of a bigger offering from Google. Maybe by itself Reader wasn’t a billion dollar business, but together with other niche features Reader attracted an influential and wealthy audience.

> There were people who used to use Google Reader without any of its social network shenanigans.

I was even blissfully ignorant to the existence of these social features in Google Reader until this moment.

Same. I am glad of that too. I loved it and probably wouldn’t have if the social aspect was in your face.

I don't think OP was referring to any social features beyond what RSS specified:

> In retrospect, it was the least toxic social network. You added your friends, their recommendations bubbled up in the interface, so you saw cool new stuff.

This is just "subscribe to people's blogs". That's still the ideal social media for me.

No, Google Reader had a social layer where you could add friends, see items that they recommended, and comment on them. It was really great, but it was ruined by the migration to Google+ before Reader was actually killed.

Was this the same as Google Buzz?

My friends and I loved Buzz and lamented its loss. We tried Google+, but it couldn't even really do what Buzz could do, and it certainly didn't have any other killer features, so it didn't take.

Google killing of Reader was the symbolic point where the business plan of the internet moved from "Let's sell stuff to users!" to "Let's sell users to advertisers!".

Thank you for making my exact comment. I was too stressed out today and you nailed it ;)

Google Reader was a free product, subsidized by google ads.

Google Reader was a service that brought in good will, subsidized by people trusting Google to "not be evil" and provide useful services. This subsequently turned into people using Google's money-making products, like ads.

At least to most I've spoken with on the subject (a few dozen, so informal straw poll), killing Google Reader turned people's opinion of Google from scrappy startup to untrustworthy behemoth.

> At least to most I've spoken with on the subject (a few dozen, so informal straw poll), killing Google Reader turned people's opinion of Google from scrappy startup to untrustworthy behemoth.

You can add me to that informal poll. I moved to Feedly, but Google Reader was my go to for a whole lot of years. My opinion of Google changed the day they announced its demise. I am probably an outlier but the only way I want to consume content on the web is via RSS feeds. Allows me to curate what I see and if subscribed sites start delivering me poor content, I drop them from the feed list.

Right, but it was an early step in Google’s now-classic playbook of undercutting existing paid solutions by subsidizing a free, shiny alternative, driving the paid versions out of business, then either turning their product into a surveillance nightmare or shutting it down.

So is Mail, Maps, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Youtube, etc.

What’s your point?

Indeed, spot on. And given the internet is the computer this is (as good as any) a representation of the fatal bifurcation that has essentially destroyed the potential of digitization for at least a generation (and maybe forever)

Agreed. And that while I am not claiming Apple as a savior here or anything, imagine how bad it could be if we didn’t have at least 1 company still in the business of selling computers. At least to SOME degree. Things could be a lot worse

Apple does some amazing things with network protocols, but they are a leading force in pushing walled gardens, locked down devices, and such.

Other companies give you less privacy, but more functionality exposed to the user.

Of course, without Apple's walled gardens, google might lock down their stuff too, no longer needing to have a bit of openness to differentiate themselves.

I'm going to disagree with that.

It was when business plans from moved from letting users control what they consume to being in control of what users consume.

Why did they want to do that, if not to be more effective, in the long run, for advertisers?

There are a variety of motivations. These include...

The biggest is that they are trying to maximize revenue/profits. In controlling the flow of information to people they are in better control of that. A lot has been studied about this.

I didn't realize there were other motivations until FB started to publish studies they carried out on people. Some of those (which they published awhile ago) were around the manipulation of users emotions and their ability to target voting groups (to increase people going to vote in target groups) around elections.

Yeah I can think of a few. That sort of influence is one, benefiting advertisers is another, positioning themselves to get a cut of all transactions is another. Is there an alternate universe where in order to get your content in front of users, it has to be AMP and in order to be AMP, it has to meet a new requirement that all payments must be done through a payment framework that lets google control the user experience (“purely for the end users’ benefit” of course)? Probably.

I hear what you guys are saying, but "maximize revenue/profits" means "benefit advertisers so they come to us instead of anybody else." "Getting a cut of all transactions" means benefitting advertisers who sell anything through the site.

It's all advertising all the time.

What? Getting a cut of transactions has nothing to do with advertisers. Are you saying apple forcing app payments through the App Store is about advertisers? Seems like you are trying to fit all scenarios to a predetermined narrative here.

YOU are 100 percent correct.

Generally speaking when Google prevents and limits what end users can control -- the offending product gets worse and eventually dropped.

This is exactly what users want. Tiktok is so successful because you don’t have to pick the content you consume. RSS on the other hand is far too manual and too much bad content gets mixed in with the good.

I don’t know, to me it feels like it was 10 years ago.

The light social layer on top of stories was super interesting. You could comment on articles with your friends. There was a lot of potential there.

This!

Instead, you create a link with a comment in Signal to a group of friends, copy that to a few other Signal groups who are mutually exclusive of those other groups, then paste into a few Discord groups...

Literally a manual social network.

If you're wise enough to use Signal, why would you also be using Discord?

It's the original FB problem all over again: if that's where all the people are, you don't really have much choice if you want to reach them.

Newsblur has this feature although I don't think it's used much.

This is where that gab project from a couple years ago was amazing (although the most generous thing I can say about the user content created by it was that it was not amazing lol). it had an extension you would install and it would overlay a comments section on any webpage on the internet.I would love to see something like that but with properly threaded comments and an easy way to subscribe to specific communities commenting, or ideally, federated but you could choose the communities you wanted to overlay moderation from. even better if it has support for easy account switching so you could bin your comment into the proper group for the level of moderation it would pass.

activity pub almost does this but comment threading has been universally garbage on every instance I have tried (how hard is it to thread stuff like comments on hacker news are threaded????) but the method is wrong in that you scroll activity pub feeds instead of surfing the net and finding the rich and interesting comment sections for what you are seeing.

Much like Reddit, or you know, Hacker News.

And NNTP before that...

Still a fan of NNTP... thinking of doing something similar with HTTP and Cloudflare workers (and adjacent service). Durable Objects for incrementing counters per group, and R2 for header/body storage. Not inherently distributed to separate servers, but an open enough API that it would be similar and allow for other implementations. Only thinking CF, in that I wouldn't have the issues of trying to self-scale in the same way something that could be simple if it gained wider usage.

With "nntp//rss" you could get the best of both worlds. It contained both an NNTP server and an RSS aggregator, with a web interface for administration.

It's no longer maintained, but it was a great concept

Gnus having NNTP and it's "nnrss" module means its my default newsreader.

I stopped appreciating RSS after "below the fold" content started being hidden by default.

It was when the Internet died. We have been basking in the glory of a dead innovation ever since.

I don't mind so long as there is a summary/abstract for me to assess if it's worth my time, and their site is accessible. Press a button from the feed reader and now elinks opens up for me to read it. Some site's this is better. But with malice or carelessness others don't cater to a TUI (no skip link, navigation is duplicated for mobile for no reason, etc.) well or on the GUI they'll pile in targeted ads/trackers (though blocked) but will also hide a bunch of useful stuff carelessly behind JavaScript, like image loading or the entire article (which if your primary site purpose is content, you should be obligated to make sure at least the noscript situation is covered as folks don't want to trust code execution for what is likely a one-off read).

Some sites*

There are tools like five filters that follow the links, and download the whole story. O think RSS is unusable without them.

Which tools do you recommend?

Feedly does not do this (at least, not by default?), and I consider the experience substandard.

If you're on a Mac or iOS, NetNewsWire can fetch and extract the whole article for an individual item, or you can set it to automatically do it for an entire feed: https://netnewswire.com/help/mac/5.1/en/reader-view

On Apple devices Reeder 5, NetNewsWire and Feedbin all use the Mercury parser API (hosted by Feedbin) to extract the full article text. I believe Fiery Feeds also includes this functionality (with a subscription) although I am uncertain of the process used. Lire is yet another reader that includes this functionality by default.

Of those above I recommend Reeder 5 if you don’t care about web accessibility and Feedbin if you do.

The bit I find fascinating about Reader, and its impact (I’m convinced that its death resulted in an immediate strong surge towards social media centralisation), is that it was entirely contingent; it didn’t have to happen. There are many parallel universes where Google (a) didn’t make an rss reader so dominant that it became The RSS Reader and then (b) kill it. In a healthier market with a bunch of widely used readers, things would have been very different.

(Reader’s impact was particularly dramatic because a lot of ostensibly separate products like NNW started using it as a backend…)

And, if, as seems at least plausible, over the next year or so Twitter crumbles and decentralised social media (whether in the form of Mastodon et al, blogs or something else) comes back, again, totally contingent! An idiot buying Twitter and breaking it wasn’t some sort of historical inevitability, just a weird high-impact thing that happened.

It think you got things very mixed up here.

Google Reader was shut down in 2013.

At that time Facebook was THE hugely dominant social network, with Twitter solidly established, and Instagram rapidly becoming popular.

Google Reader was well past it's prime, most "regular" users had already moved to those platform, outside of the more hardcore Tech circles.

Google Plus was also really struggling,so they probably wanted to push the user base on to their "real" social network.

Yeah, the RSS ecosystem was never the leading ‘social network’ by number of users, but it used to be systemically important, in a way that it isn’t today. Keeping track of what was happening in many fields (particularly tech, but also others) used to be primarily via RSS, now Twitter (and in some cases moving to Mastodon, now).

I never used Reader but I did use another one that also folded, a year or two before Reader went away. Then it got bought and came back, changed, and that stutter interrupted my process and I never really recovered. I set up Feedly and then don’t use it.

I think I’m from the generation(s) that expect to spend a lot of time in a browser window instead of hopping between applications triggered by notifications. So the moment I put something into an app, if it’s not situation dependent like Apple Fitness, or team chat for work, it’s just too much friction to make it a habit.

The most fascinating bit for me is that people actually used any of the social features of Google Reader. I just read my feeds and interacted with nobody, and that wasn't too uncommon in my circles.

Oh, I’m not sure how many people ever used Google Reader’s _own_ social features. But RSS facilitated social networking via blog (remember, for a while ~every blog had comments and trackbacks, on which twitter quote-retweets are based), and, unfortunately, Reader became so synonymous with RSS that its death largely killed that ecosystem. It was really noticeable at the time; blog activity really fell off, and even if you switched to an alternative RSS reader which stayed working (a lot of readers used Reader as a backend!) you had to switch to Twitter to keep up with what was going on.

For me RSS worked very well at a time when mobile data connection/wifi was not ubiquitous yet. For a year or two, every morning when I came to school I went directly to that one place where there was the one Wi-Fi router. I downloaded all the new articles in my NetNewsWire feed and then read them over the day.

The tech is nice, but I have no desire to use it anymore. I no longer follow specific blogs. Now I just open hacker news or reddit any time I want to read something.

Ah, it's hard to see those 15 unread items from Aaron Swartz. What an optimistic time that was for the internet.

Same here — first piece of Mac software that I ever paid for, in 2002. Still use it.

Akregator still looks exactly like that, I guess if it works, it works.

The way I mitigated this problem was to periodically check places like Reddit or Slashdot, noting which sources were cropping up for things I found interesting, and then adding those to my feed reader, skipping the middle man.

Once a week or when I ran out of feed I’d go hunting for more. The friends aspect diminished greatly but I had plenty to read.

1. You're a kid yourself if you were that late.

2. No-one used the social features.

As someone who has used RSS since NetNewsWire looked like this… https://www.coolaboo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/cuneifor... …get off my lawn, kids.

In retrospect, the end of Google Reader was nothing compared to the neolithic revolution.

I think the reason RSS is not appealing to content creators is because authors don't "own" the email list. And it's quite difficult to have paid content delivered via RSS (still pretty much open/sharable)

But from reader perspective, RSS is awesome. You don't have to deal with all the email subscriptions double opt-in etc. The ability to unsubscribe/resubscribe in one click is fantastic. And you have number of good RSS readers to fit your need.

Pro tip: you can add “/feed” to any Substack publication to subscribe to its RSS feed

To my surprised, RSS is still my most requested feature for my little SaaS[0]

I wrote a short blog post on how to read RSS on Kindle here[1]

[0]: https://ktool.io

[1]: https://ktool.io/blog/read-rss-on-kindle

> authors don't "own" the email list

Well, what does this gain them? People still can count how many readers they have, and still have a dedicated readership (and no antagonistic middleman filtering them). What difference does the list of those people make?

Segmentation. You can send offer to a segment of your audience. I don't think you can do that with RSS unless you have a sophisticated setup where each reader has a slightly different feed url.

> And it's quite difficult to have paid content delivered via RSS (still pretty much open/sharable)

Excerpt that you can then read fully on the website after authentication?

Not the best UX for readers IMO. That defeats the purpose of a RSS "reader".

I still see a lot of value of having a tool that aggregates new items and snippets from all the content creators I enjoy, even if it's only previews/snippets in the tool. It shows me there's new content and if it's content I might be interested in.

Also, it seems to me one could provide authentication tokens I'm the request for the feed. I don't see why one couldn't have a complete stream for subscribers and a minimal stream for previews for the unauthenticated requests.

Not the best UX for readers IMO. That defeats the purpose of a RSS "reader".

Works fine with the New York Times.

The Times RSS feed includes a headline and a summary. If I'm interested in the article, I press F19 and it opens in my browser.

Since I'm a subscriber, I'm logged in already, and it just appears.

Pressing one button doesn't seem like much of a burden.

> I think the reason RSS is not appealing to content creators is because authors don't "own" the email list. And it's quite difficult to have paid content delivered via RSS (still pretty much open/sharable)

I think ActivityPub is interesting as an RSS replacement for these reasons. The content is pushed out to an address, so you get much better insights into who your audience is.

Right now Mastodon is the the biggest ActivityPub software[1] so it's encouraging people to post microbloggy content, but that could easily be the inroad to a more RSS-like reader. WordPress's ActivityPub plugin allows people to syndicate their blogs directly to the Fediverse, and other longform platforms can follow suit.

1: https://fediverse.observer/stats

Paid content with RSS has been solved for a long, long time. It is how paid subscriber feeds for podcasts work.

I’m not familiar with this — how is it solved?

Some provide a unique feed with an unguessable URL (very convenient, but easily shared).

Some require auth with Http BasicAuth (I think that’s mostly podcast and I don’t think it’s used very much)

Some show a preview snippet in the feed and you can view the whole article/thing after opening the link and authenticating

But I still need another membership somewhere else with a payment method/subscription in order to actually pay them, right? It seems like it could be streamlined.

Email isn't ideal for content creators either. It costs money to deliver the content and delivery is not guaranteed. If has the knowledge and resources, or they have a heavily engaged audience, great, but that's not a pretty small group.

Add in the ever growing panopticon of privacy legislation (yes, that's an oxymoron) and doing anything with email has become onerous to sole and/or non-commercial operators (because email qualifies as PII.)

That said, email and RSS are fantastic. They work. For the most part you aren't paying a tax to the mega-platforms to reach your audience. Both should be supported and their use encouraged.

Hard to say. It's definitely more expensive to send emails, yes. But the upside is well worth it IMO.

For example, some services allow you to send content at a specific time based on audience's timezone. This increases open rate.

Or you can choose to resend the same email to audience who haven't opened the first time.

This could boost sales.

I'm not sure RSS can achieve that (there might be solution I don't know about)

On the other hand, users who prefer RSS can consume emails in much the same fashion, by auto-filtering into separate folders, or by using one of the existing email-to-RSS tools. For users, RSS and email are both fine in the sense that users can always convert one into the other, depending on their preferences.

I was recently sent a message that I was going to be unsubscribed from a list because they thought I hadn't opened my emails. I did read the emails but just don't allow tracking pixels.

At first I thought it was nice of them to unsubscribe me, but then I realized that they are probably doing it because keeping me on their list makes their stats worse since I don't allow them to track me.

>Or you can choose to resend the same email to audience who haven't opened the first time.

I know there used to be tricks to find out whether an email was opened. But my impression was that Gmail and others prevent this nowdays?

> Pro tip: you can add “/feed” to any Substack publication to subscribe to its RSS feed

For most readers you can just paste the main URL or the URL of any article and it will autodiscover tehe feed without any URL futzing required.

Nice. I didn't know. I thought my discovery was cool xD

Yeah, auto-discovery has fallen into the realm of obscure once browsers removed their RSS icons. I would recommend grabbing an extension that will add it back for you. Then you can see if a site has a feed just by glancing at your URL bar.

A few sites don't support it but most with feeds do. Including YouTube channel pages (but not videos) Wordpress, Tumblr, Blogger and more.

I don’t know about the “year of…” but RSS readers are definitely the best option to consume information in a manner that leaves the individual with control, while being exposed to a broad range of thinking. And consuming content from a broad range of media.

I do hope 2023 becomes the year of the comeback of RSS.

For me the biggest selling point of RSS is never having to rescan over feed items I've already read, or decided to skip, to find the new stuff. Another big one is that there's an end to the list. Neither of those are a huge deal for low-volume feeds but for HN and Reddit, they're priceless to me.

>consume information in a manner that leaves the individual with control

This is both the main feature, and the biggest obstacle. The people with the money do no want the individual to have control. Thus it has always been and shall always be.

Folks are banging on Elon because they feel he's using Twitter to manipulate, but it's not like Twitter was different pre-Elon. Elon simply gave The Man a face, voice and smell.

Back in the blogosphere (I hate that word) days, a lot of RSS was floating around. It wasn't very good, as RSS implementations varied a lot. But when it was working well, it was so good. If I have a complaint about returning to RSS it would be that we will return to the days of clickbaity headlines.

> we will return to the days of clickbaity headlines

We entered those days and have yet to leave. If anything, the rise of social media (at RSS's expense) turbo-charged clickbait headlines, since now it's easy to measure engagement around those stories, both in terms of views and in terms of comments/likes/shares/etc.

Gated through fewer sources providing much more analytics definitely changes the game there.

> If I have a complaint about returning to RSS it would be that we will return to the days of clickbaity headlines

Wait, what do you mean? Clickbaiting (and borderline misinformation) has been getting only worse ever since

Fair enough, "return" is not the correct word here. Maybe "we will solidify the importance of clickbaity headlines"?

I first noticed the up-tick of clickbait headlines in the salad days of RSS. Due to this, I tend to ignore headlines these days, because I was trained to assume the headline was complete nonsense. So my internal metrics are a bit wonky.

I don't understand the love of RSS readers. The basic concept is trivial; you could write one in five minutes. It doesn't seem radically different from any of thousands of news aggregator type web sites, including HN.

I read upthread that Google Reader had a social mechanism for recommending feeds to friends. That's great for discovery, but it still hardly seems earth-shaking.

It feels an awful lot like a rose-colored-glasses situation, where something existed that wasn't horrible but doesn't reappear because it wasn't all that great, either. What is it I'm missing?

It doesn't seem radically different from any of thousands of news aggregator type web sites, including HN.

It allows you to tailor your aggregation, and create you own aggregation of topics if there isn't another aggregator out there.

Are you into kumquats, ancient Mesopotamia, and The Buzzcocks? You're not going to find a web aggregator for that. But you can put together several RSS feeds into your own aggregation.

Couldn't I just subscribe to kumquats, ancient Mesopotamia, and The Buzzcocks groups on Facebook? Yeah, I know "the algorithm" means that I'd miss some things and have other things injected into my feed, but it doesn't sound like the total content is radically different.

I understand the idea of wanting to feel more control by seeing precisely and exactly the groups you asked for, but I feel like it's not really a radical change in terms of content.

Facebook shoves content I don't care about in my face, and frequently hides content from pages and people that I do care about (who don'y pay Zuck's troll toll or play visibility optimization games like emphasizing useless Story content).

My RSS reader (FreshRSS, self-hosted, and NetNewsWire on macOS/iOS) shows me all posts from all feeds I've chosen to subscribe to. Nothing more, nothing less. No ads, no murky VC cloud funding -- I self host on my own raspberry pi -- and no privacy concerns.

Social media is kind of like a flaky RSS feed with comments from people I don't know or care about that sometimes doesn't show me content I DO want to see but also constantly shows me ads, tries to manipulate me into spending more time browsing, and hoovers up as much data as humanly possible. Oh, and it changes the UI every 6-8 months in seemingly random UX a/b tests in the name of "optimization." And it radicalizes my older relatives politically.

That seems like a pretty shitty RSS feed to me.

Most of the sites that I follow do not have a presence on Facebook. Plus it's nice to have the info sent to you unencumbered by the nonsense/ads/privacy concerns on social media sites.

Then you need to check Facebook everyday to not miss stuff, whereas with RSS you have full control WHEN you consume your feeds.

Couldn't I just subscribe to kumquats, ancient Mesopotamia, and The Buzzcocks groups on Facebook?

Sure, you could. I can't. I'm locked out of Facebook. And in spite of sending a photo of my government ID into Facebook's customer service black hole, nothing has changed.

RSS gives me the freedom to aggregate information without relying on some faceless tech company to decide when I can have it, and when I should be cut off.

I'm not sure what you're missing. I think aggregators are great for a lot of things, but I primarily use it for discovery. I infrequently contribute (like this, I guess?). After discovery, RSS is really convenient to continue consuming that source's content, regardless of its appearance on an aggregator a second time.

Its not about discovery or aggregation or being social. Its a way to keep up to date with things you explicitly subscribe to. You have a bunch of sites that you like, which puts out periodic updates. Like a weekly webcomic, or a news site, or local weather alerts. Then you subscribe to those feeds. Then whenever they make a new post, it shows as an update in your reader. Think Twitter, but instead of 280 character posts, they're previews of other webpages.

It's about the locus of control. HN, or other aggregators, are about the crowd curating your feed; RSS is about you curating your feed. The unit of attention, namely some headline, is either presented to you by The Algorithm (whether human-powered or otherwise) if on a modern aggregator, or your own previous choices if using RSS.

In modernity, we might call that latter a "filter bubble", but in the parlance of the 00s, we thought of it as a "personal newspaper".

Isn't your source of RSS feeds the curation? Is that very different from Facebook or Twitter showing you the people you subscribe to?

I know Facebook and Twitter play stupid games with "the algorithm", injecting stuff you didn't ask for and hiding stuff from your friends, but in the end it's not as if you were just being force-fed solely stuff you had no interest in.

So wouldn't an RSS feed be just as much of a filter bubble, based on who you choose to subscribe to? You might feel better knowing that you were seeing it in a simple chronological order without the algorithmic opinion, but it doesn't seem like a solution to filter bubbles.

I don't think anyone is claiming that RSS a solution to the filter bubble problem. But the benefit of RSS is that you create your own filter bubble, rather than relying on someone else's (often malicious) algorithm to do it for you.

With Facebook and Twitter you subscribe to people and brands. It is trivially easy to make a social media post so they tend to be more numerous and less useful/informative. RSS is usually used to subscribe to blog posts/articles which tend to be more in depth. Someone upthread mentioned a magazine and I think that is a good comparison. Curated long form writing about subjects that interest you makes it quite a bit different than social media.

RSS is also handy for following blogs or websites that only post intermittently.

RSS and filter bubbles could go either way. Nothing stopping you from filling your feeds with folks that don't think the way you do. Most of us don't have the patience to wade through thoughts contrary to our own. That's the real issue when it comes to popping your filter bubble, not which tool you use to get the info.

>Isn't your source of RSS feeds the curation?

Like I said, RSS is about you curating your feed. Using RSS, you don't see headlines from anything you didn't choose to see.

>in the end it's not as if you were just being force-fed solely stuff you had no interest in

That's trivially true. That said, if the choice, regarding seeing shit I'm not interested in/calculated ragebait/for-profit spam/etc, is between seeing it "never" and seeing it "sometimes, when someone else wants me to see it", the choice seems obvious.

>it doesn't seem like a solution to filter bubbles

I don't think it is either; that said, I still think it's better. Part of the conceptual transition from "personal newspaper" to "filter bubble" was the increasing prevalence of calculated ragebait/for-profit spam/etc on aggregators -- the pressures present in aggregators, and the inevitable comment sections, help shape content to be more ragey or spammy, to get that all-important engagement. That shaping happens everywhere on the aggregator -- here on HN, for instance, dang goes around silencing non-HNish comments with impunity and without appeals. This isn't a bad thing, but it is a shaping of the aggregator's content by shaping the aggregator's culture. If one spends all one's time on an aggregator, consuming that shaped culture, one's perspective can easily start to skew. With a "personal newspaper", one is more aware of the artificiality -- it's not a site itself, it's just the sum total of the RSS feeds of blogs X, Y, and Z. A "filter bubble"'s ostensibly organic culture, and ostensibly broader curation, helps one convince oneself that it's a community with justified beliefs.

RSS doesn't really afford that kind of escalation. If HN were dang's blog, the pressure he exerts would only affect the comments section of that blog. Sure, audience pressure can help make an RSS'd source more extreme, but if that pressure happens it's got to be occurring on the site's own commenting infrastructure, which means local moderation can sort it out. At a minimum, there's no chance of the contamination hopping RSS feed sources (at least, via RSS itself).

> It doesn't seem radically different from any of thousands of news aggregator type web sites, including HN.

RSS lets me subscribe to everything jfengel (say) posts, not just the minority of jfengel posts that make it onto HN. That matters for those who are jfengel fans.

Edit: of course, it's also useful if jfengel only posts about once a month. You don't want to miss anything, but neither do you want to visit the blog every day to see if there's something new. Facebook is terrible at this -- I regularly find that I've missed something that a friend who is an occasional FB user has posed.

>of course, it's also useful if jfengel only posts about once a month.

I think that's the point a number of people on this thread are missing. Newsletters, for example, are fine if there are a handful of people who publish regularly/frequently who you want to follow. They're less useful if you want to follow what 50 people who may only publish something once a month are writing.

I don’t think the tech is the interesting part. Most websites I want to read don’t even post the whole article on an RSS feed, and you’re at the mercy of every website offering a feed.

The better solution is a post-RSS smart reader where you can drop links into it and it figures out how to turn the website into a feed and it caches all the content so the origin never needs to be available.

We over cling to RSS the same way we over cling to IRC instead of looking for ways to build on the good parts. Then we’re always stuck reminiscing and over glamorizing a past that wasn’t as good as we remember.

One of the problems with RSS is lack of a feedback loop from mere reader to content creator. Said another way, RSS doesn't have a reply function and that makes it harder to iterate around user feedback. Some of which can be very valuable.

I don't want content creators to shape their content according to feedback and popularity. I want content creators who shape their content according to their interests and desires and experiences.

Then why did you write this feedback?

Because posting in a forum doesn't make you a content creator, and this isn't an RSS feed?

I feel like there's been an extremely strong push in our current culture against actual artistic visionairies that's being driven by toxic and infantile "fan communities" that screech endlessly on the internet about anything they don't like.

Art apparently isn't about a creative realizing their unique vision, its about doing things mouthbreathers like. People seem to be viscerally offended when someone unapologetically makes something that isn't for them.

Bring back gatekeeping.

One of the problems with RSS is lack of a feedback loop from mere reader to content creator.

That's a feature, not a bug.

It's the difference between publish/subscribe and social chat.

When people unsubscribe, there's your feedback. Just like with newspapers.

Email? Response blogs? This has been a solved problem for a while now.

> One of the problems with RSS is lack of a feedback loop from mere reader to content creator. Said another way, RSS doesn't have a reply function and that makes it harder to iterate around user feedback. Some of which can be very valuable.

Did any RSS readers build commenting into them - or even the viewing of comments? I remember subscribing to a blog, and then having to visit the site to view the comments or post a comment. And then subscribing to a separate RSS feed to subscribe to the comments for any post that I wanted updates on.

For me that was where RSS fell short.

Most RSS readers will only show whatever the author wants to share via RSS. Often times you need to click through to the actual blog to read the rest. That's where you can comment.

Unread is the RSS reader I use on iOS and iPadOS. It does scrape the site and give the entire article. I love it but now I wonder if it's a good idea to circumvent the wishes of the blogger. I use Newsblur as the aggregator and tie Unread to it. The Newsblur portal to my RSS feeds works well enough in the browser on computers.

I think the biggest thing holding back the development of the next generation of social networks is this pernicious belief that it is mandatory to put some sort of public comment section on everything, where anybody with a pulse (or the technical wherewithal to fake it adequately enough) can slap anything they want down next to your content. Context matters, and this has a certain inevitable effect even on the original content.

It is a tool. It has times and places. It is not mandatory, nor is it always a good thing. It is quite often a really, really bad thing. It can always be adjoined to a piece of content, like we're doing right now. It is not mandatory for the original poster to host it.

If you want a social network that works that way, you are spoiled for choice. If you are unhappy with those social networks, consider the possibility that much of your unhappiness may in fact stem from this very idea. If it seems like everywhere you go is kind of a cacophony of regression-to-the-mean discussion, insults, lowest-common-denominator... this is the root cause.

It is not a bad thing that "replying" to the creator of an RSS-based blog is exactly as hard as they choose to make it, up to and including making it impossible.

I completely agree. I used to have a Wordpress blog with comments enabled, and that brought me a few headaches at some point.

Later on, I moved to Pelican, which is a static generator, and below every article there's an info box that indicates that no, there's no commenting system, and lists a couple of ways someone can reach me if they wish to discuss that particular article. So far, it's working.

Some of the best info and discussions I've stumbled upon were under someone's article in the comments.

It's not always just for the benefit of the writer, I mean.

Suppose all those people causing you headaches got together and started a subreddit and wrote all the same comments there. Everyone who reads you either hears about your new posts that way, or they follow otherwise but still jump over to the subreddit to see what's going on. Does this state of affairs make you as unhappy as the comment section? Is it possible that your issue is really with critiques and criticism?

No, there were legal issues involved, due in part to me not running a tight a moderation as I should have, and in part due to one person completely losing his mind and suing a bunch of people, me included.

It'd actually be great if this would have happened on Reddit. I learned my lesson: do you want to comment about anything I've written? Please, do so. But not on my piece of land.

This is why I charitably say “_some_ of which”.

Why does user feedback need to happen on the same channel as new content notifications? In my mind keeping a distinction is a huge advantage because it puts the creator in charge of how they interact with their audience.

They could add a comment section to their WordPress blog. They could cross-post to Reddit. They could have an email dedicated to comments and feedback. They could do none of those things because they really don't care what the audience thinks.

Because RSS/Atom doesn't integrate two-way interaction, there are no preconceived notions of how the second direction ought to work.

>They could have an email dedicated to comments and feedback.

Some technical blogs I follow use this. They create a public mailing list that they treat as their “public inbox”. Anyone can send an email to it, and all messages are publicly viewable. No signup or account required either since it’s all just email.

I’m a fan of this solution personally.

On a similar note, however, how many sites have explicitly removed comments at this point?

I know there was a Gab browser extension that would effectively make all sites have comment sections, and there are other similar attempts, but none seemed to gain any significant traction.

I had a nice conversation last week with someone on HN discussing how I went about making items on my RSS feeds commentable.[1]

I think with a little bit of creativity it's still possible to innovate quite a bit with/on top of RSS.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33978500

If you want it, just add a link to a feedback page on the bottom of your posts.

Email address for feedback at the bottom of the post? Easily fixed problem.

The best thing about rss is that after i read my 30 unread articles, i can just close my laptop and walk away. Who ever said that twitter was going to make rss obsolete has never experienced this digital freedom.

What we need to revive RSS is have a true integration into browsers. Your bookmarks would display the numbers of unread posts and there is probably more great stuff to do.

That was removed from Firefox in version 64

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks

Honestly just returning the icon that appeared when the site had a feed would be a huge win. Browser integrated feed-readers and bookmark notifications were nice but dedicated RSS readers are probably going to be better. You can click the feed icon and the browser can redirect you to your preferred feed reader.

There are extensions that do this but having it built-in would make it widely available and easier to set up.

Vivaldi has had an in-built RSS client for years now, taking after Opera's original feature years back.

Edit: link since I notice they have a page about it. https://vivaldi.com/features/feed-reader/

Without having dipped into the code before, how hard would it be run a fork of Chromium that did this?

Any RSS support I've seen in web browser sucked. Use a real RSS reader like QuiteRSS and you won't care to have it in your browser.

When saying "RSS" are we talking about the protocol/file format, or using it proverbially for 'syndication'/feeds?

Any reason(s) to use RSS (0.9x/1.0/2.0) over Atom (RFC 4287)?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed

I'm pretty sure they are doing the latter. I'm not aware of any feed readers that don't accept Atom and you will get much more consistent results as it is more clearly specified.

Syndication. Virtually no one refers to a protocol or file format in common jargon and dialect.

Yes, Atom is fine (preferable, even...at least to me). We're probably stuck with "RSS" as the generic term, though, for much the same reason we still say "making a record" for music or the floppy disk icon for "save".

I’ve tried twice now, and for the life of me, I have absolutely no idea what this post is trying to say. For an associate professor of communications, the writing is absolutely atrocious. I can’t make heads or tails of this rambling multitude of grammatical errors, passive aggressive insults, and buzz-word saturated soup.

I get that it one of a collection of predictions about how media in 2023 will look. But besides the title invoking the usual, repetitive conversations we have about the ‘State of RSS’, I have no idea why it’s here. I might bookmark this just as an example of how not to write a post. Especially if you don’t want to confuse your reader, and actually express a clear thesis.

Regardless, I’m an every day user of NetNewsWire on my phone, and I hope their prediction is right. It is about the only way I consume my news at this point. Even if RSS doesn’t have a revival, it’s fine. As long as all the major news orgs continue to provide RSS feeds, I will be here consuming them.

> I’ve tried twice now, and for the life of me, I have absolutely no idea what this post is trying to say.

It's answering the question: "Each year, Nieman Lab asks some of the smartest people in journalism what they think is coming in the new year. Here are their predictions for 2023."

> For an associate professor of communications, the writing is absolutely atrocious. I can’t make heads or tails of this rambling multitude of grammatical errors, passive aggressive insults, and buzz-word saturated soup.

Is that true? Heads or tails? Seemed trivial to understand this for me.

> I get that it one of a collection of predictions about how media in 2023 will look,

Oh, and you still don't get that it's saying that 2023 will be the rise of the RSS reader? I thought that was pretty obvious.

> I have no idea why it’s here

Here on HN? Because someone shared it and people upvoted it. That's how HN works.

Or do you mean on the site? I think we've discussed that already.

> Especially if you don’t want to confuse your reader, and actually express a clear thesis.

I don't think it was meant to convince you of anything. It was merely predictions. A simple question, and simple answers, shared online. It's not complicated.

> I might bookmark this just as an example of how not to write a post.

I'm doing the same for your comment, for similar reasons.

Note: Don't like the tone of this comment? Just reflecting the energy you put out.

I agree with GP.

"The difference, going into 2023, is that even the Inbox Zero people are going to have a reason to complain. Left without a better way to quickly zoom in and zoom out on the state of the universe (also known as the world according to Twitter), I predict those people will reach a point of frustration in even their ability to manage email."

What does this even mean? This is a massive non-sequitur. I stopped reading here.

That is totally written by a robot.

It means the person is getting paid by the number of words in the article.. so adding a bunch of fluff to increase that count

Is that true? Heads or tails? Seemed trivial to understand this for me.

I understood it, too. But then, I have a degree in Communications.

People on HN think that just because they can understand written source code that they can automatically understand any writing.

ChatGPT summarized: "Something something Twitter bad."

People, including the person reading this comment right now, just see “RSS good” in the title and click the upvote button.

Yeah, I think you’re right. It rode to the top on the title alone. I might have been a little harsh, but things like this really grind my gears :)

The first thing we did when we entered mobile in 2004 was build an RSS reader for 'dumb' phones. It was the perfect way to bring information to very limited phones. All the extra stuff was stripped away, just the content remained. The phone could handle it in a way that the WAP browsers would fail.

It is hard to see the value, beyond advertising / affiliate sales, to just about anything that has been added to the modern web experience since that time. I still use 'reader mode' on Safari to bring it back to the basics.

Newsletters and RSS feeds are not the same thing. If I send a newsletter to a list of subscribers then, as long as their email server receives the email, they can retrieve it and read it whenever they want. But most importantly, if I don't set up an archive of all the newsletters, then only the people who subscribed will ever be able to read it.

On the other hand it's impossible to achieve the same level of one-timeness with RSS. You either publish the feed for a limited amount of time (and the subscribers have to get lucky and synchronize their feeds during this time window), or you publish the feed indefinitely (which maybe you wouldn't want to do)

This is a very niche difference. In general once you send something "to the public" you can't expect that it stays private. So if you need to keep items on your feed for a few weeks after publishing it will have a near-zero difference to the availability of that piece and be picked up by almost all subscribers.

> it's impossible to achieve the same level of one-timeness with RSS.

No it's not (not that I can really think of why you'd want that). Generate user-bound rss feed urls with GUIDs or a signed "start date" that provides only entries since that date. That can also allow you to track how many times that url gets retrieved and eventually block it if it's too many.

Or have the rss reader only send an excerpt and have people auth before they access the content on your website.

>most importantly, if I don't set up an archive of all the newsletters, then only the people who subscribed will ever be able to read it.

On the other end once the email left your box, you don't control it anymore, and I can give you a well hidden hack that allows someone not subscribed to read it if they know someone subscribed.

Podcasts are all RSS too, lots of hidden use of RSS out there.

https://podcastindex.org/

I got a Firefox extension that looks for rss in a page and gives you a little icon in the titlebar. Some webmasters don't even bother to put the link in their page visibly.

Nice, I wonder why they wouldn't surface that? Speculating they got it included in their CMS and decided they didn't want it.

I'm sure you're right

It's on by default in wordpress I think, but most site builders either don't know or have forgotten, most probably have no clue it's running.

Back in the day all major browser provided their own "feed available" icon so including an extra icon on your site was pointless. The browser's icon was consistent across sites instead of the user needing to look around for a feed link on your site.

Of course now most popular browsers don't show this icon so it is more important to advertise it yourself. (Although there are extensions to bring this icon back)

I got a Firefox extension that looks for rss in a page and gives you a little icon in the titlebar.

This used to be the default condition for all web browsers. Even Safari did it.

I forget which browser dropped that feature first. My guess is that it was Google Chrome, and everyone else just did the same thing because following is easier than leading.

Some intros on how to build your own RSS feed (structure of the XML file):

https://www.xul.fr/en-xml-rss.html

https://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_rss.asp

However, I notice that JSON feeds are also an option and might be preferable for various reasons (i.e. Python's json module makes parsing easy, etc.):

https://www.jsonfeed.org/version/1.1/

As far as Twitter, I'm not sure it was ever that great of an information source. Musk has at least said they're trying to improve Twitter search, but who knows what it will look like. It's still pretty weak at present.

Why corporate media journalists and politicians flocked to Twitter in the past is unclear, unless that it was that Twitter's structure was deliberately designed for propaganda distribution. The low character count and leader-follower structure helps with the standard propaganda routine, which typically involves reducing complex arguments and ideas to the point that a small child could understand them, and then repeating that dumbed-down argument over and over while browbeating anyone who raises objections.

Ideally you'll want to make both. RSS is most widely supported, while JSON Feed is (arguably) easier to parse.

I'd recommend just using Atom. It is as widely supported as RSS but far better specified so your readers will have a consistent result.

JSON Feed is fine but provides very little benefit and isn't as widely supported. Having multiple feed links for the same content will give some users analysis paralysis. (What we really need is an update to the auto-discovery spec that says "these two feeds have the exact same content, if you support both formats only show your preferred format to the user")

I wrote up a guide for my recommended RSS Best Practices which while not aimed at how to create your own feed contains enough information to do that.

https://kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-practices/

JSON Feed is in a catch-22. Not many websites use it (and none can use it exclusively) because not as many clients support it. Few clients support it because not many websites use it. While an auto-discovery spec would be great, having multiple feeds is currently the only way to add JSON Feed and break the cycle.

> What we really need is an update to the auto-discovery spec that says "these two feeds have the exact same content, if you support both formats only show your preferred format to the user"

You could do that right now by having 1 URL that changes what type it returns based on the request's "Accept" type. However, I don't know if any websites/clients actually do that, or if it would break older clients.

Yeah, it is a catch-22, but there is little reason to break it IMHO since it doesn't bring much extra to the table. My feed reader does support it but I would still recommend Atom. It is more mature, has more features and extensions and is supported everywhere.

The main thing JSON Feed seems to have going for it is that it isn't XML which honestly isn't a very compelling argument.

The accept type is a good idea. Unfortunately few static site hosts (which is common for RSS feeds) support this. And many CDNs don't either. It also doesn't play the best with HTTP caching.

If technology was at the service of the individual rather than the other way aroud, RSS would have been a centerpiece of our information universe, with something like ActivityPub the path to enhance information exchange in a bidirectional way when that is applicable...

RSS is alive and kicking. I created a little Web 2.0 phenomenon named Popurls and recently launched https://biztoc.com — ~65% of the site is still RSS driven.

Tell us greenies a little more? I don’t use RSS for writing or reading, but maybe I should.

Is this consuming other RSS feeds? Is it publishing a feed and 65% of its traffic comes from feed consumers?

That would be nice, since I don’t want to be at the whim of search engines anymore (for blog type content).

Great website, Sir. I have a question, can't we create our own new category "Tech News" like "Crypto" and "Media"

The "Year of RSS" people have been sounding like the "Year of Linux Desktop" people for a while now. It's not coming back. It just isn't.

I'm not sure it ever left. There are still RSS feeds around, though it would be better if their use was more widespread.

It only has a shot of coming back if enough people decide that Google searches are pointless. We might be getting there, actually. I'm not optimistic, but the idea that Google search results suck seems to be more mainstream in the last year outside of the HN crowd.

Oh, I say this because Google and other search engines that derive from it are unlikely to yield results that are worth reading or subscribing to. If this were the Google of 2006, RSS might have been something they'd bake into their results. They'd never allow that today. It's all about serving ads on GPT generated bloogs now.

This year is the year of TV. Tiktok brought the continuous, low effort video feed to everyone. TV will take this even further with continuous video feeds. Probably twitter will start autoscrolling like a teleprompter as well . The demand for feeding tubes and catheters will also skyrocket.

Chrome in Android has a built in RSS reader in chrome now labeled the 'following' tab in your new tab page. I've been using this with great success lately. The key for me was to pick only a few really high quality sources instead of 99999 sources. https://9to5google.com/2021/10/08/chrome-rss-web-feed/

There's a flag for desktop too. You can enable 'Feed' in the sidebar, but it doesn't work for me on any platform at the moment.

How long will this feature last until it inevitably gets canned?

It needs some adoption first… no point in canning something nobody uses. It'd be too simple.

yeah they'll have to wait until they ship physical RSS readers out

The longevity of Chrome features generally seems to be much better than that of Google products in general. I can only think of a few major removals: FTP, NSAPI and the ongoing MV2 debacle, Chrome apps, Gears; I don’t remember if any variant of NaCl ever shipped as non-beta, and I’m sure Dart-in-<script> never did.

I don't know. For a "few" high quality sources you can just check the sources directly. For me, the big win for RSS in the blogosphere world was you could follow a lot of sources that published pretty sporadically but sometimes had interesting things when they did publish.

Yeah, I still have quiterss setup like that, but this is my alternative to doom scrolling Reddit/pop news sites. I use this Chrome extension and the feed mode to be more selective about my news. https://archive.is/

> pick only a few really high quality sources

That's an interesting point of view. I tend to find that the high quality sources I tend to follow are very low volume. So I've subscribed to hundreds of personal blogs, YouTube channels and similar to produce a steady (but not high volume) flow of good content.

Most of the higher-volume sources that I have considered following are either low quality or most of the content isn't within my interests.

Basically I tend to prefer 100 good sources that post a few times a year than 2 sources that post daily. Of course this isn't a hard rule, it is just the collaboration that I have seen. There are obviously some teams that put out high-quality content on a regular schedule.

Is managing email really an unsolved problem? I mean, every email client has already way too many "organizing thingies": folders, filters, bookmarks, categories, labels, stars, flags, and archives. What value RSS brings alone except from being different and therefore having its separate tab in a client?

No, I don't think there is much fundamental difference. Some RSS readers support inbound emails as a feed source and I get my RSS feeds delivered via email. I think the main reason newsletters are "winning" over RSS right now is that everyone has an email address but not everyone has a feed reader configured. It provides an easy onboarding where you can start getting it in your inbox available on all of your devices and once that becomes annoying you can easily set up filters to organize.

I thought email was dead. I treat email like I treat voice messages, they are just out there waiting to be deleted without ever being read/listened to. Do people actually use email still outside of a work situation?

A federated near-instant messenger, not being controlled by a single corporate entity, designed on top of a well-defined Internet standard, with both commercial and open-source clients existing for every platform?

Seems like RSS comeback gets discussed often: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=RSS

THE YEAR OF, THE YEAR OF ----------------------- (a poem)

This is the year of the RSS reader, said Hacker News.

This is the year of the Linux desktop.

This is the year of IPv6.

This is the year of ____ battery technology that is ____ times better than Li-ion for ____ application, but is impractical because it _______

This is the year of the portable fission reactor.

This is the year of the tokamak; this is the year of the stellarator; this is the year of quantum supremacy.

This is the year of not quite-yet.

This is the year that we finally expose those weird woke people.

This is the year that we finally expose those flagrant futurist-fascists.

This is the year that there was another shooting, and then another, but we were fascinated by the ghost guns, not the torn flesh.

This is the year we invented "freedom of reach", because it rhymed, and there is no tax on superfluous fine distinctions. Nor, it would seem, on rich mens' folly.

This is the year, this is the year, this is the year.

This is the gyre, this is the gyre, this is the gyre.

We love the merry-go-round; for when it goes fast enough, it really feels like you're getting somewhere.

I used to be a big fan of RSS readers, and I even built one, of sorts, as a startup at one point in 2009. But these days, I tend to just use Instapaper.

I have the plugin installed in all my browsers, and if I'm looking for something to read, I swipe thru my saves using the Instapaper Chrome web interface, Android app, or (most commonly) iPad app. I have Instapaper and Readwise synced up, which adds a little extra incentive (highlights) for doing things that way.

How do I find stuff to Instapaper? These days, it's TechMeme, Hacker News, Lobste.rs, Reddit, Twitter, Google News, Apple News (on iPad). Heavily weighted to the first four sources, with #1-#4 being maybe 80% of my saved links that come from aggregators.

Recently I have been beta testing Readwise Reader. It's probably as good a reading experience as I could currently imagine (it's sort of Instapaper on steroids, and it even syncs with Instapaper). But, even still, I find the entire category a little tired.

The big issue is source quality. It's harder to find a small group of regular bloggers that might make a curated RSS reader experience worthwhile. When I was younger, I'd read Joel Spolsky, Paul Graham, and dozens of developer blogs, and that was "enough". These days, to get the same sort of volume and quality, I'd need to curate hundreds (maybe thousands) of sources. It's also sad, but true, that the average blog on the internet is simply no longer publishing new posts. That is, the typical blog with an interesting archive is likely abandoned in terms of new posts going online, or has the publishing rate reduced to an annual trickle. So it's not worth my time to predict and curate the exceptions.

> RSS readers may need their own ecology of analytics > in order to be commercially desirable and worthy of > tech investment.

Those sound like the criteria of it's going to be the year of large investments going down the drain amidst a lot of hype.

----

Anyway,

Twitter has 396.5 Million users (Monthly Active Users): https://backlinko.com/twitter-users#twitter-users

4.3 Billion people use email: https://wpdevshed.com/email-usage-statistics/

so 9 times as many. Also, most users of Twitter probably don't even notice the latest Musk controversies, since those things aren't the tweets they follow. So, it seems to me like the author is mostly looking just past her own nose.

Any recommendations for an RSS reader?

Reader: https://readwise.io/read

I like The Old Reader: https://theoldreader.com/

It's largely a reimplementation of the Google Reader experience.

I can't find any pricing info, what's the deal?

I use the free version and for my needs it's fine (basically 100 feed limit and after a while old posts drop off the feed, I'm not sure how long).

For 25 dollars a year you get 500 feeds and one year retention (up to 1000 posts per feed) and you can pay more for a larger number of feeds.

I’ve been using miniflux, and it’s quite cool. David Winer’s Feedland is nifty too.

NetNewsWire if you're on macOS/iPhone

I use this as well, source on GitHub:

https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire

Inoreader

I use Newsblur, mostly. It feels a bit dated at times, but does what I want it to do and has an email address that you can send newsletters to to read like feeds. I've been meaning to switch over to miniflux for a while, but can never really get up the momentum. It seems nice.

https://feedbin.com/ for a reader designed with admirable restraint, resulting in a lack of feature creep.

I have been using feedbin since Google Reader was killed. No regrets, I happily pay for it.

NewsBlur - I'm on a paid plan since I'm a packrat with almost 700 feeds. It is a pretty busy interface but has tons of functionality. Their mobile app is also pretty good.

https://newsblur.com/

what do you do with 700 news feeds?!

I moved all my stuff to Thunderbird a while ago, and unless you have more specific demands, having a basic self-run RSS reader beats just about all fancy hosted solutions out there. Old-school e-mail works well a lot of the time too.

I use FreshRSS and host my own after Google Reader died - https://freshrss.org/

On the Apple ecosystem, Reeder remains my favorite: https://reederapp.com

It's got a simple and clean user interface, and it stores the feed in iCloud, so no need for a third-party server application.

I prefer a daily digest so I use this tool which I built, easy to setup:

https://github.com/piqoni/matcha

It generates markdown locally but Obsidian is also on my phone so its also mobile.

I've heard nothing but bad things, and had nothing but good experiences with Thunderbird.

I've been using my aggregator since google reader died: https://github.com/urandom/readeef

newsboat if you want something for the CLI

I use an RSS-to-email service to email them to me. Then most feeds get sorted into folders for reading later. A few got to my inbox for more urgent response.

I currently use an RSS-to-email service that I operate but I used other services for almost a decade before that. There are a handful available ad supported and paid or you can self-host.

I personally prefer to read my feeds via my email client, and hacked up an RSS to email script:

https://github.com/skx/rss2email/

Having the feeds in your mail client makes sorting, and searching trivial. Plus you get the content archived for future reference.

I use @rss2tg_bot that channels RSSes to a telegram chat.

I use Feedly, which is more a scraper, but can be pointed at RSS sources.

I use Feedly for RSS exclusively. Works great, simple and clean.

I like Newsblur on the web. Also use Unread on iOS/iPadOS with Newsblur as the aggregator.

if you like the cli on linux/unix then newsboat is great

Feedbro extension on Firefox

I know NetNewsWire and NewsBlur have already been mentioned, but I use both of them together. I use NewsBlur on Windows, and NetNewsWire with my NewsBlur account on Mac/iOS. NetNewsWire also supports iCloud, Feedbin, Feedly, and other services (and locally without syncing).

https://www.qireader.com/ A modern PWA RSS Reader

QuiteRSS on Windows and Linux.

Flym on Android.

I will not be surprised if Google relaunches Google Reader in 2023. Without fanfare, and as a simple, limited and low-effort product as Google Podcasts (https://podcasts.google.com).

It will be a nice experiment for them, they don't dominate on the Social Media or Newsletters field, and a RSS reader challenges that field in some ways. Also a act of redeeming the killing of that product 10 years earlier (for a mostly nerdy/vocal minority).

If successful obviously they will put ads on them later (Google Podcasts remains ad-free for now).

It would be a good April Fools event, a few of their good products were launched in that date, like gmail.

Or a Halloween one, the launch of Google Zombie Reader.

Google reader was such a great product. Why oh why did they get rid of it. I'm using rss2email + opensmtpd on a virtual machine to email me my rss to a special news email account. It updates every hour and sends me emails of my rss. I see it on my iphone home screen but not notifications so I can view them at my leisure.

The year of RSS reader will be when users decide to be users again instead of lusers (from Simon's Chronicles CL definition), witch unfortunately it's not something really in agenda...

I was wondering recently whether AIs like ChatGPT had the potential to break search engines. Already today, I often end up on useless machine-generated pages (typically if I want a comparison between two "things" and type "A vs B"). Until now it's been pretty easy to see that it was machine-generated. But that will probably change.

Also, already today, depending on the topic, the search engine is completely useless and I end up going straight to e.g. Wikipedia or Stackoverflow or a reference website I trust (e.g. I want a technical explanation about how something works, and my search engine shows me ten pages on tutorials about where to click on my phone to use that something). Again, ChatGPT will make it easy to generate such low-quality content.

Long story short, I was wondering if that would bring RSS back: that would allow me to manually aggregate websites I trust. Maybe I could trust a friend and transitively trust the feeds they trust (à la PGP, even though PGP trust rings seem to be hated :)).

That would close the loop: algorithms came to help organise the growing quantity of data, then started flooding the world with generated data (what they were initially built to control). And now somehow we would have to go back to manual treatment using old school trust (with RSS, or similar), because AIs can't differentiate the good content from the bad one.

I hate newsletters. They break my workflow, and I don't want to redesign my workflow for the handful of bloggers who insist on making a newsletter instead of a feed.

I'm just not using my email in the same way I use news or blogs. I made a couple of tentatives to build a mail to rss system and stopped both times because I lacked the motivation, then suggested it to feedly while I was using them and they added it to the product... While I was moving to self-hosted miniflux.

I’m a happy user of https://notifier.in/ for this purpose.

You may find this service useful (not an affiliate, just found it recently) https://kill-the-newsletter.com

Thanks!

I setup filters in gmail to archive my newsletters, add the label 'Newsletters', and forward them to my RSS reader app (in this case Readwise (paid), which has a personalized email that accepts inbound traffic). Any new newsletters I sign up with myname+news@gmail.com. That suffix means it still arrives at my email address, but I can use that recipient to create filters. I never see these emails unless I click on the 'Newsletters' label.

This keeps my inbox clean.

That's fine, but apart from HN I read all my stuff from miniflux. That's where I tag and organize stuff, and also send to Walabag whatever I want to keep long term. Email is something in addition to that

Are people still working on improving the standards behind RSS/Atom? Or did that fizzle out with the rise of social media?

For example one thing I've wondered about are signed feed entries. At some point I'd like to be more certain about the author of the media I'm reading, while also being able to prove I've not modified anything. I guess I'm kind-of describing Signed Exchanges but less restrictive, maybe it could be done in conjunction with GPG?

What a coincidence—this is also the year of the Linux desktop!

And that desktop is Steam Deck.

I tried to set this up earlier this year, but what I realized I really wanted was RSS + change detection for some discussion forums and other sites that didn't offer RSS.

That companies like feedly didn't seem to offer this functionality but were trying to emphasize social networking and tagging my articles (for who?) made it easy to walk away after the trial.

For sites that don't offer feeds you may want to check out rss-bridge: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/

I've tried out RSS a couple times, but the intermittent support for full article makes it not a tenable alternative for me. Is this a solved problem, and I just haven't found it yet?

Also, what do "Inbox Zero people" have to do with any of this? Is this a reference to people reading more newsletters now? I honestly don't understand.

'inbox zero' in this context is for the RSS reader's inbox, not email.

I remember my satisfaction w/ hitting "no new stories available" back in the 'Google Reader' days!

I don't read any articles in my RSS reader. I prefer to read in my favourite web browser that is customized to my preferences.

Pretty sure if there was ever "the year of the RSS reader" it was somewhere between 2005 to 2013.

RSS is too lean, it's a format, the majority of people don't know what it is or how to use it. A lot of sites don't even support RSS anymore. Like IRC, its userbase is tech people. Sorry guys, you don't make up the rest of the world...

It's an outdated concept, we all know people don't surf the web anymore. And the larger it will get, the less likely people will. Have you tried using RSS, just measly collecting your favorite sites with the off chance that they support it? It's a mess and no surprise it died as everyone flocked to Facebook, Twitter, etc.

People need some sort of platform and that's why ActivityPub / Fediverse is a lot more promising. Social networks aren't the problem, just the one's we've been using.

Funny timing - I just switched all my email newsletter subscriptions that I used to read on Gmail Web to Inoreader.

The reason was fairly simple - I wanted a better way to organize my newsletters and make it feel more “reading list” like than “task list” like. On email, unopened newsletters always felt like tasks.

My simple solution is to filter them all into a "News" folder that doesn't notify. Then I can just open it whenever I have some spare time.

Agreed—I love RSS, but don’t really see “organizing newsletters” as its killer app, or experience “newsletters come via email” as a pain point. Filters seem to serve basically the same purpose.

Yeah, I see RSS and newsletters as largely equivalent technologies. The have minor technical differences but 99% of the read differences are social.

Pro Feeds:

1. Once you subscribe the publisher has no way to contact you. Email relies on the publisher being honest.

2. Provides some history (or full history with archiving/pagination atom extensions)

Pro Newsletter:

3. Push based system by default (Feeds can use WebSub but it isn't that common).

4. ~everyone already has it set up.

At the end of the day they both transmit blobs of HTML to you with some minimal metadata.

This is the year of the linux desktop

Lol I see what you did there

I'm a happy user of an RSS reader, but the chance of having a "year of the RSS reader" died with Google Reader, and nothing has come along to make it any more likely. Most people want centralization and to not have to mess with things.

Why couldn't someone else recreate Google Reader?

You can pretty much add anything to an rss reader. I read my friends Twitter post, watch YouTube channels I’m subscribed to etc all in a rss reader app. Filter out the bullsh*t ads.

Problem is, most people don’t know about. It’s still used. I love it.

Twitter dropped RSS support years ago when they were locking down clients and otherwise siloing themselves. Have they added it back?

If not, open a poll and Elon will add it. And then remove it. And then add it again, but for 8$.

Is there a way to feed your list of subscribed Youtube channels into an rss reader without having to add each of them manually?

But how do I get that all caps scifi font to my reader? It's just not the same...

Use an RSS reader that supports custom fonts, like QuiteRSS.

I’d just like to give miniflux a mention. Web-based, self-hosted or SaaS. Available and synced across devices, no fluff, great UX / UI in my book. Not as snappy as some desktop keyboard driven ones, but I love it.

I was looking for solutions to get RSS feeds of twitter and YouTube profiles and came across this useful tool: https://rssbox.fly.dev/

For YouTube, the channel page has auto-discovery links. So you should just be able to paste the channel URL (https://www.youtube.com/@examplechannel) into your feed reader and it will find the right link.

2006 called and want their headline back ..

Here are just some of the reasons why RSS fell out of favor...

1) It's great for consumers of content, but not so great for content producers or RSS reader vendors, in terms of monetization or even analytics.

2) It's great for tech-savvy folks, but not so great for mass market reach, and the incentives to make mass market reach feasible are low.

3) It worked better back when most content was free. Paywalls are a more sustainable business model, but aren't very compatible with RSS.

1) Newsblur has been a nice lifestyle business for Sam Clay. I suppose it won't ever be a billion dollar unicorn, but it works beautifully for consumers of content.

2022 made me rethink my stance. My goal used to be to create as much as possible in the best quality I could muster. Give it all and make it available for free for all on the internet.

Now that everything you write is used to train an AI that will be used to generate the content, I don't feel the need to contribute. Plus they'll use this content for their own commercial benefit. I don't feel the same way anymore about the internet.

Google had such a great opportunity and still does to support and enhance rss with Google reader.

They had Google news. They had YouTube. They had Google buzz and Google plus. And Google books. They were the king of media!

But there was no media Barron to tie and visualize the peices at Google. And that wad the biggest loss to google.

Coincidentally, I got Newsboat+Podboat mostly set up today on NixOS to disconnect from the feed cycle that wants me to continually engage. The sad fact was learning after not having subbed to anything after two years to find a lot of news channels, like AP and Reuters, have stopped publishing feeds.

Really? I must be a trendsetter then.

The article gets some things right, but RSS as a private, protected medium just never took off, and I don't think it ever will--but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

I would like an RSS Reader that I pay for once rather than subscribe to, and which allows me to filter out keywords of my choosing. That’s it. I hate that for this feature with Feedly I would have to pay monthly.

There are a ton of free readers if you’re willing to step outside your web browser.

QuiteRSS for Windows or Linux is free. No ads.

Flym for Android is free. No ads.

> We are just at peak newsletter via email delivery

The thing that makes substack work for me is that every one has an RSS feed. Otherwise it would simply be another thing for me to ignore.

Cool, what does your list of favorite feeds look like? Please share.

https://hackaday.com/blog/feed/

https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

https://api.quantamagazine.org/feed/

https://www.wowhead.com/news/rss/wotlk-classic

https://alerts.weather.gov/ (chose your region)

https://www.pine64.org/feed/

https://www.factorio.com/blog/rss

Awesome, thx!

I have built my list up over time. Generally I will discover new stuff from hacker news or other aggregators (which I browse once I am caught up on my feeds). I add things to my list very often, but also am quick to unsubscribe if I'm not enjoying the content.

The types of content I tend to follow are:

- Videos. YouTube, Nebula, PeerTube and a few other sources.

- Blogs. These are mostly personal blogs that I have found interesting articles on. A few company blogs too.

- Social media searches. This is more for productivity but I follow a bunch of searches across various social media sites to stay up to date on specific topics.

- Comics

- Software releases.

I have very few high-volume sources. I much prefer quality content from hundreds of sources instead of frequent content from a few big sources like news sites.

I realize I didn't answer your question but that is sort of intended. Each person's favourite feeds will be different and depend on your interests. The best way to get stared is just to start subscribing to the things that you are enjoying today. Then over time you will build up a list of things that interest you. Especially when getting started it makes sense to over-subscribe, you can always prune down if you had a "false positive".

Ah, your approach makes a lot of sense. Me, I've put together a number of Twitter lists over the years, to serve as faux-newsfeeds. Well, it doesn't work very well and right now it leads more often to aggravation than discovery. So, here come 2023 and RSS. Thanks for the hints!

Note that you can use third-party services to create feeds for Twitter users. (example https://nitter.net/) This can provide a good way to get some content into your reader, then you can add/remove feeds based on how you are enjoying them.

The process you are describing can be automated a bit.

Imagine your feed reader automatically subscribes you to feeds of articles you liked (star/thumbs up/favorite). Let's say you start subscribed to an HN feed of items that got more than 100 upvotes: https://hnrss.org/newest?points=100&count=100 Then you find the OP link and like it in your feed reader: https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/12/this-is-the-year-of-the-rs... Your reader automatically subscribes you to the source feed of this article: https://feeds.feedburner.com/NiemanJournalismLab

You like more content => you get subscribed to more feeds automatically.

Your feed reader can also take care of unsubscribing you from feeds that are posting too often or are not posting interesting to you content. If you don't like the content of a feed for awhile then your connection to that feed becomes weaker and the content from that feed is ranked less prominently. The content from feeds with a high signal-to-noise ratio (ie, how often you like content from that feed) is ranked higher for you.

This is how my little project https://linklonk.com works. If you'd like to give it a try: "thumb up" a few items from the above HN feed: https://linklonk.com/feed?url=https:%2F%2Fhnrss.org%2Fnewest... and then check your recommendations on the home page.

Through this mechanism I am currently subscribed to 201 RSS feeds and I know that I won't miss content from high "signal-to-noise ratio" feeds. Here is a sample of my top feeds:

https://blog.piekniewski.info/feed/ https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/rss/ https://karpathy.github.io/feed.xml https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/feed/ https://www.inference.vc/rss/ https://openai.com/blog/rss/ https://stratechery.com/feed/ https://medium.com/feed/@yonatanzunger https://rachelbythebay.com/w/atom.xml https://openai.com/blog/rss/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/feed/ https://computer.rip/rss.xml https://timharford.com/feed/ https://idlewords.com/index.xml https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC9-y-6c... - Computerphile videos https://www.granolashotgun.com/granolashotguncom?format=rss https://daringfireball.net/feeds/main

Here are the ~thousand feeds I subscribe to formatted in HTML with links to the site and the RSS feed: http://superkuh.com/feeds9.html

Here are the ~thousand feeds I subscribe to formatted in opml for direct import into feed readers: http://superkuh.com/2022-11-04-feedlist.opml

Ah, I didn't know about OPML. I like that it's readable and editable so you can make adjustments before importing. Thanks!

I have over 200 feeds that generate over 5,000 articles per day. You probably don't want it.

90% of websites have RSS, including news media, Mastodon, YouTube, Blogs, Torrent sites, and sub-reddits. eBay used to but disabled it earlier this year.

I setup a selfhosted RSS reader called FreshRSS... I migrated from reader to feedly to this and have never been happier.

Self hosting services via docker has been a game changer for me.

So why is there no RSS feed link on the Neiman Lab page?

There is an RSS feed link in the footer. There's also a "link" tag to tell your browser that there's an RSS feed available for the page.

Oh, right. A tiny "RSS" in dark grey type on a light grey background at the bottom of what looked like an infinite scroll.

“It’s the wild colour scheme that freaks me,” said Zaphod whose love affair with this ship had lasted almost three minutes into the flight, “Every time you try to operate on of these weird black controls that are labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you’ve done it. What is this? Some kind of galactic hyperhearse?”

A: 2022 is the year RSS readers died B: 2022 is the year of RSS readers

Me: I've been using an RSS reader all this time without hiccups.

I've had a few hiccups.

eBay disabled RSS. It was a great way to quickly now when something you were looking for was posted.

A couple of news media sites I'd like to follow on RSS disabled their RSS feeds a couple of years ago.

I alway liked RSS readers and look forward to a renaissance, but the idea Twitter no longer has utility is absurd.

https://theoldreader.com/ ?

someone please make a gpt based rss feed summarizer. i use rss but it would be great if gpt could just read all the titles for me and give me a summary.

would be great if you could give it feedback after reading over the feed yourself and highlight areas you think it missed or got right

I built a small tool that helps to discover feed urls. It uses various hardcoded and dynamic rules: https://discovery.thirdplace.no/?q=https://www.tek.no

It's FOSS and has an http json api.

if we can figure out how the people putting out RSS feeds can make money, then yes, this could be the year of RSS again.

It’s time to switch business models back to something sustainable and not something that incentivizes addicting you

All they need to do is offer RSS on their site and only include the headline and maybe a short blurb to further entice people to want to read it. Then put it behind a paywall so when they click to the site to read it, they have to log in to read it.

So the whole opinion piece hinges on unpopularity of Twitter? Bold move.

The main problem I found with RSS in these days is the lack of access to they. I want access the RSS of NYT, where I find it? I want X blog, where? After the web migrated from RSS to paywalls, I have no option to just choice some news webs/blogs and focus on that.

> I want access the RSS of NYT, where I find it?

https://www.nytimes.com/rss

With Feedbin (which I use, guess others work similar), pasting the website URL is enough. It’ll scan for feeds and that’s it.

Generally they have a RSS icon along side the Twitter, Facebook, etc icons. It looks like a wi-fi symbol. They're also often linked in the footer.

If you paste https://www.nytimes.com/ into your feed reader it will likely discover https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml automatically. This tends to work very well for most blogs and many sites. I often just assume that there is a feed available and past article URLs into my feed reader, most of the time the feed is automatically discovered.

Back in the day browsers had icons that would light up when a feed was available, however all of the most popular browsers have removed this feature. You can add it back with an extension easily if you are so inclined.

Sure, NYT is an easy one, but if you try some more "expensive" (they really do not enjoy your free read) like Bloomberg the your RSS feed will keep small.

I agree with you, sites tend to hide the link nowadays, even when it's there, and that's frustrating.

Most modern client manage to discover them anyhow though

Is it also going to be the year of the Linux desktop?

Yes. It's called SteamDeck.

Why would I use RSS when HN does it all for me?

I use an RSS reader for HN! A couple other feeds, but that’s it.

I was just thinking about how much world-class content is available between podcasts and email newsletters, and it's all free. Whereas if you wanted to say, read an article on the web from the same sources, you're looking at a huge paywall. The "podcast app" market is heavily saturated with many great competitors. Yet the "newsletter reader app" just...doesn't exist? I'm stuck using iOS Mail with its lack of reading options, no saving my place or otherwise bookmarking. I just can't believe nobody's made something to fill in this need?

Journalism is a curious profession: you are taught how to write, but your knowledge of any other field is high school level at best, and that is what you write.

I think it should be a master degree, not an independent career anymore.

I agree with this wholeheartedly: if someone “wants to be a writer” the best thing they can do is read and experience life until they understand something so well they don’t want to do it anymore.

Then maybe they can write about it.

What we have instead is people selected for syntax, network, and ego, vomiting as loudly and often as possible.

Journalism is a curious profession: you are taught how to write, but your knowledge of any other field is high school level at best, and that is what you write.

You demonstrate a high school-level knowledge of journalism.

What you describe are "generalist" reporters. They are necessary, and ubiquitous. But there are also very many specialist reporters, who have specific knowledge of the areas in which they write. The guy who reports at the Pentagon is not the same person who writes car crash stories.

You also presume that once someone gets a journalism degree, that's all the education they have or ever will have. Many (most?) journalists have multiple degrees. They also engage in continuing university-level education, either on their own, or paid for by their employer.

Also, experience is a great teacher. Do you today know only exactly the same about of computer skills you had when you graduated from high school 20 years ago? No. Just like a journalist learns over time from experience and furthering his education.

going around in circles is bad news

In reality, content will be over in 2 years. AI is just better content, well sourced, well written and quantifiably intentional. Humans no longer need to apply for making content just like we dont hunt for meat

> better content, well sourced, well written and quantifiable intentional

I've not seen AI create "better content" than even a moderately competent human, let alone an expert writer and researcher. How do you know AI content is well-sourced when it's generated by an AI which makes it up based on a statistical model? Well-written is somewhat subjective, but ChatGTP is repetitive, overly verbose, and the opposite of intentional.

AI content will be great for repetitive copy like eCommerce descriptions, simple business and sports reports, and maybe API documentation, but it won't replace human writers in most contexts humans care about.

Cgpt is great at writing like a good copywriter, which is already above average human. When journalists lose their advantage, it becomes a matter of putting out there novel ideas, which models can do, too. The 'journalism' of the future will be basically curation of ideas.

And if we have an overabundance of good content then attention will shift away from it because it gets boring.

I am a professional copywriter and technical writer, so I have a dog in this race. But I don't agree that Cgpt is anywhere near a professional standard. It can produce mostly coherent and correct English, but not concise, creative, or empathetic English. It's good enough to replace human writing in some scenarios, but far from all.

Sim e I've started using hey.com, I'm more prone to subscribing to newsletters than to use RSS readers.

I'm not affiliated. Just a happy customer.

I love using RSS to subscribe to blogs. Many of my favorite personal developer blogs have RSS feeds, and I have them on my blog. I'm currently using Readwise to get all my feeds in one place. This filters out a lot of noise prevalent in social media like Twitter.

Two RSS threads on HN frontpage today? Great! RSS never went away but I hope it becommes much more prominent again. The last lost decade of walled-garden social has been a relative disaster.

I still have no idea what RSS is used for.

Instead of manually checking each website of interest to you individually, you can subscribe to their RSS feeds and then just use your feed reader to access everything, and it automatically updates and lets you know when there’s new content.

You use it to download article titles from your favourite websites. Saves you going to each website manually to check for new articles. All the new ones will be listed chronologically.

I have over 200 feeds in my RSS Reader which pull in 5,000 headlines a day. I can scan through those headlines a lot faster than hitting each of those 200 websites, and I only open the articles I want to read.

“just because of Elon Musk mucking up Twitter”

i get that the tv says we’re supposed to hate him… but is anyone ever going to explain why? because he’s racist? bc the tv said so? bc he doesn’t support the ghost of kyiv? lol

All politics aside, he's showing himself to be incompetent in really surprising ways.

This whole time he's been trading on his personal brand of futurism and technical acumen, and this Twitter business lets everyone see behind the curtain, and it's really easy to be angry when someone is shown to be such a hollow fraud.

No more benefit of the doubt for him.

He's always been a bumbling idiot. His skills are getting government grant money to prop up his businesses to increase his personal wealth, and hiring smart people and letting them do their thing. At least daily, he gets in the way and causes messes.

The panic about right wing intrusion of social media ownership keeps getting to new highs, now even predicts a come back of RSS because woke people don't want to be seen using Twitter any more... #fail #them

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