Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Meh the ad business was pretty established well before 2013 when Reader shut down. RSS was declining well before that. Google acquired Doubleclick in 2008 aka what became the real Adwords in its prime.

I personally don't expect tech conglomerates to be the ideal solution for niche markets. But I don't see many people providing good arguments why alternatives like Feedly didn't take off if there was really a strong market demand for RSS.

And I say that was an uber-fan of RSS back in the day.

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Yeah. I think what really killed RSS was a change in people's behavior. Twitter, Reddit, and other social media sites gained traction as link sharing communities and RSS became less relevant after that. Instead of subscribing to an RSS feed, you could just follow your favorite sites on Twitter, for example.

How is RSS even dead today? I can’t think of a useful site that doesn’t still have an RSS feed - including Reddit.

That's like saying "how is IRC dead today" when Slack/Discord/WhatsApp/Zoom/etc exists or Yahoo style portals when Google exists (yes Yahoo is still a real business) or "how are horses a dead transportation" when cars exist in 1930s America because horses can still walk on roads (aka takes a minimal investment to support).

Sure they still work and will continue to work but let's be honest it's a super niche technology and it didn't survive/flourish because it was flawed and fundamentally nerdy option people stopped caring about.

Supporting RSS takes the bare minimum of effort. Yet even in 2013 (aka a decade ago) RSS was declining in usage before Reader was killed.

I support open platforms but RSS had a super noise-to-signal UX and I personally don't miss it.

Google didn't kill RSS, they killed the best RSS product at the time and accelerated a dying protocol that would still be only used by HN's demographic and little else.

Why do I care if it’s a “niche” technology as far as other people subscribing if it is still supported by publishers? I can’t think of a single site that I go to and say “I sure wish this site supported RSS” and doesn’t?

Using NetNewsWire and subscribing to subreddits with NNW on one half of my iPad and the Reddit app on the other half is still a great experience for instance.

I click on the date on NNW and the post opens in the Reddit app.

HN also has an RSS feed.

> Why do I care if it’s a “niche” technology as far as other people subscribing if it is still supported by publishers?

If it is a niche technology it will fall out from requirements docs and from CMS implementations.

One can already see that many news sites only provide headlines, not even teasers in the feed and different site generator based blogs (using Hugo and such) forget to create feeds as well.

My feed reader still provides value to me, but I regularly stumble over sites providing interesting content irregularly but no feed. (For irregularly posting blogs it is especially important as manually checking is annoying)

They don’t have the entire article because they can’t display ads.

DaringFireball and a few other blogs get around this by having native ads as an RSS entry.

One could also embed an image on the text or do textual ads in the article. However market is too small, thus they do the simple thing which is limiting the value of the feed, till nobody cares about it anymore and they turn it off.

> I support open platforms but RSS had a super noise-to-signal UX and I personally don't miss it

The problem is that nothing arose that adequately replaces it.

So make one. There's apparently a lively niche market on HN looking for one (allegedly).

I think it's 'dead' in comparison to the way it used to be used.

I was actually just looking for RSS feeds for some of the top news sites, and a lot of them have specialized RSS feeds for a certain category but not for the entire site. (I had to eventually settle for Newsweek)

I genuinely don't know, so this is an honest question. Nowadays, outside of podcast feeds, what's the incentive for media outlets to provide RSS feeds? Isn't it just a fringe assortment of techies still using it? (To be clear, I'm part of that fringe.)

Having specialized feeds prevents the whole “sipping from the firehose”.

It's much easier to whine about Google than accept trends in consumer behaviour.

Programmers get nostalgic about their pet technologies that even the majority of tech-denographic (and often themselves) don't even use when given the option. I don't blame them but they aren't always honest about their favourite niche tech simply being niche technology.

Attention was shifting from basement blogs and projects to professionally made content for the web. Which would only have one paragraph or a title on the RSS feed and the rest was on the site with ads.

Did RSS die???

(I get HN headlines via RSS)

Not for me. It's still the primary way that I stay up to date on the web.

A market dying might not mean what you think it means then.

My usage went downhill, but long after the death of Google Reader. RSS didn't really die, but it never went into mainstream either.

I think the bug factor was Facebook. There were places making money selling ads in feeds but they weren’t making within an order of magnitude what Facebook promised. Google+ was a botched reaction to that but I do wonder what Google could have done embracing the open web instead and actually trying to monetize Reader or provide top-notch feed ads. It might not have made Facebook-level rates but it also wouldn’t have soured a generation on their business.

I wonder how feedly is doing, their higher tier plans focusing on enterprise/analysis/teams suggest the demand for rss still among power users / consumers.

Hi, this is Petr from Feedly, we're doing really well and yes, our focus shifted towards Enterprise - Threat Intelligence and Market Intelligence use cases. Individual users can use our Pro+ plan to access Feedly AI to leverage the power of searching through RSS feeds to get the signals more easily and quickly.

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