RSS Is Great for Recommendations | Hacker News Reader

RSS Is Great for Recommendations

tfos.co

19 pointsjacobobryant4 comments

> s just fundamentally more convenient to put in your email address right there than to copy the URL and subscribe with RSS

If your browser (or an extension) supports discovery then RSS is easier. I just click the feed icon and hit subscribe. Boom I'm subscribed in my favourite reader.

Email subscriptions usually require confirming it by waiting for the email to come through and then clicking a link. That feels laborious. I love RSS.

Both good points! Upon reflection, I guess my main thought here is that from the publisher's perspective, it's difficult to provide a "subscribe with RSS" button and have it be as frictionless as a typical email subscribe form. e.g. even if the user does have an RSS reader, the publisher has no way to know that, let alone which RSS reader they use.

I was thinking about Mastodon while I wrote this--IMO it would be a more approachable experience for many people if Mastodon profiles had a typical email subscribe form where you could put in your own Mastodon username + server, in the same format as an email address (i.e. without the leading @), and then have it send a request to your server. Then next time I open Mastodon I'd have a notification with an "approve" button or something.

Of course that may just open up a whole other can of worms around spam signups, so that may or may not be a worthwhile train of thought.

Nobody needs to know what RSS client people use because it's a standard, mate. It's never been a problem in history even going back to the '90s, in the same way as `mailto:` opens an email client. You don't even need a button when RSS auto-discovery exists. RSS is quite literally as frictionless as it gets, it just works.

Mastodon would be worth learning for the average Joe, in the same way that Twitter was, if their favourite celebs et al were on there generating content. The last thing the world needs is someone generating a few million emails each time they post a short status. Equally, you overestimate the importance of email to the average Joe, but considering you're on HN should tell you that you skew differently demographically than the average person. People are now only just realizing that the value of Twitter wasn't in the company behind it, nor the platform itself, it was quite literally the community and the content it generated, and making that happen again takes a very long time.

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