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Comment by longnguyen | Hacker News Reader

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

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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)

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.

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.

>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 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

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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