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Comment by darekkay | Hacker News Reader

Author here. What many people claiming "RSS is dead" for the last 20+ years mean is that RSS-as-feed (for written content) is not mainstream, and that's somewhat true. Most podcast listeners don't have a proper RSS reader apart from their podcast app. Also, big platforms removing existing RSS support is often taken as another sign of RSS dying.

What's interesting is that this particular post had been posted by someone on HN before I've shared it anywhere. So it got through RSS right onto the HN front page. This is what I meant with "thriving, especially among tech users".

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My experience as someone who's in the tech sphere but writes not only about tech is that RSS is all but dead. Not sure if i'm an outlier in this but the % of requests in my server logs coming from RSS is very high.

Like you I tried to figure out how many of those are actual users to have a sense of how many people still use it and the numbers still don't make any sense to me.

That said, what do you think is the benefit of styling an RSS page? The point of the rss is to be consumed via an RSS reader so I don't see the benefit of having styles on a page like that. But maybe there's something I'm missing here.

The author is pointing out that someone who clicks an RSS/Atom link and gets a page of gibberish is not going to understand all that XML, and they will likely just go back to the site confused.

Instead, you can have a readable page with a message like the one in the post: "This is an RSS feed. Subscribe by copying the URL from the address bar into your newsreader. Visit About Feeds to learn more and get started. It’s free."

I can see some value in redirecting people towards a page that explain what RSS is. Not entire sure about the first part about letting people know how to subscribe to an rss feed because people who decide to use an RSS reader probably know already how to use it since it's a somewhat technical tool but still, probably doesn't hurt to provide extra info.

Yes, styled RSS feeds don't provide any value when consumed by RSS readers. But when I visit a blog and click an RSS feed link for the first time, it's nice to have a short preview of the existing posts without having to parse XML visually. The main benefit I see is however to educate people who don't know what RSS is. Imagine a person clicks "RSS feed" and all they see is some strange-looking file. On my feed [0], there is a big banner with a short explanation and a link to learn more about the technology.

[0] https://darekkay.com/atom.xml

Yeah that's probably useful. Btw your recent blog posts are sorted in a weird order according to the dates.

Also, and not sure why this is happening, I have the Reeder extension installed on safari and it usually automatically prompts me to open an rss link in the app but it doesn't happen in your case.

I can't even use the button in the browser toolbar to open the feed in the app directly. The only way for me to add it is to manually copy paste the url.

The posts are sorted by date, newest being at the top. I haven't posted much in 2022 and 2023, so maybe "Jun → Dec → Mar → Dec" looks confusing if you miss the according year?

Regarding Reeder, I've included the feed in the markup, so I'm not sure what is going on. I will definitely have a look, thanks for the finding!

Ah I was confused because you have the last modified date displayed and those are all over the place.

Oh, you mean in the feed preview. Yeah, they're sorted by publish date but I only display the last update date. I see that it's quite confusing, I'll fix that. Thanks!

I work in podcasts and not with written content RSS feeds, but at least in the podcasting world, I would take traffic from RSS endpoints with a grain of salt - a lot of reader clients like to request updates very frequently, and it's not unreasonable at all that a user that consumes your content primarily through RSS makes one or even two order of magnitudes more requests than someone who visits your site.

The parent might be referring to my other post [0]. Some RSS readers - at least Inoreader, Feedbin and Feedly - send the actual subscriber count as part of their HTTP request. Which is nice to get at least a minimum number of total subscriptions. Not sure if popular podcasting apps do that as well, though.

[0] https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-subscriber-count/

I wrote about my findings here[0] and honestly I don’t even know what to make of those numbers. RSS stats are stupidly hard to track, especially if you only rely on server logs which is what I do.

[0] https://manuelmoreale.com/poking-around-my-server-logs

> ... tech is that RSS is all but dead. Not sure if i'm an outlier in this but the % of requests in my server logs coming from RSS is very high.

I'm not sure which you meant here—is your perspective that RSS is thriving (judging from your traffic) or nearly dead?

There are two very similar English idioms that have opposite meanings: "all but dead" means basically dead, "anything but dead" means not even a little bit dead.

I appreciate the correction and yes, I meant anything but dead. English is hard ahah

But again, appreciate the correction.

Haha, no worries! I know how it is.

> Most podcast listeners don't have a proper RSS reader apart from their podcast app.

Sure, but I would assume that "RSS is dead" isn't so much about consumer awareness of RSS, but rather about the technology being invisibly supported and used in the infrastructure they make use of (through podcast clients et al) such that content producers still care about publishing through RSS.

Like, if I said "TLS1.0 is dead", I wouldn't be referring to greenfield projects not using it any more; but rather to the fact that the browsers and libraries that invisibly use it (and nothing newer) are themselves not being used by anyone any more — so nobody on the content-delivery end has to think about supporting TLS1.0 clients any more, and can drop any code that was supporting that.

But that's definitely not the case with RSS. There are still many important systems that depend on consuming RSS feeds. So there are people who still need to support RSS. So it's alive.

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