Hacker News Reader

Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

RSS doesn’t move the needle. Only a super tiny, insignificant number of people care about RSS. Social aggregators like HN and Reddit won. RSS lost.

I have a blog and try my best to maintain the RSS feed. But if we’re being honest it’s a waste of time.

I stopped using RSS readers when half my subs required me to open a browser tab to go to the actual website to view the actual content. Webcomics were particularly annoying about this.

I mean I get it. The ideal RSS feed has no ads which means no revenue for people working hard to create interesting things I want to read! Alas.

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I never actually expected my rss reader to provide a place for viewing the content. I treat it as a notification service. There is usually enough info in the subject line for me to decide whether I want to open the notification in a browser or dismiss it as read.

In addition to a few blogs, I use rss for news pages (including hacker news front page) and to get notified about new package releases in pypi and rubygems. For the package releases, I just mark them as read as soon as I upgrade my virtualenvs.

> Social aggregators like HN and Reddit won. RSS lost.

Social aggregators are great for discovery, they can let the community surface good items, but they suck for subscription. Once I have found authors that I like I want a way to reliably see their content, not hoping that it happens to be popular on the site at around the time that I happen to visit. Unless you are refreshing your feed hourly you are going to miss a lot of content from your favourite authors, and even the most addicted users won't see it all. As an author I also appreciate loyalty of subscribers more than viral surges, but I understand that the money is probably better with the viral surges.

"Expose" was the key word here. A ton of sites already have feeds and just don't make them easy to get to. It's honestly not hard.

It's also a category error to compare RSS and social aggregators.

I'm saying that social aggregators killed RSS. Not that they're equal in use case. Where "killed" means "some minuscule percentage that is large than 0 but less than an arbitrary threshold of my choosing".

Where do you think we find the posts we submit to HN?

If the target audience for a blog is HN readers, then RSS is probably worth it (since HN readers use RSS, myself included).

The biggest issue I have with RSS is that by the time I find interesting blogs, they’ve stopped posting, so I never see updates in their feeds. But that’s an issue with blogs, not RSS.

I don’t agree — RSS was only ever meant really to show the title and some few paragraphs, maybe a photo — exactly like Reddit does. I for one would hate to scroll through that much content.

Talking about RSS in terms of 'winning and losing' is exactly why I use RSS over the mainstream social media. Not everything is a competition.

> I stopped using RSS readers when half my subs required me to open a browser tab to go to the actual website to view the actual content.

The RSS client that I use, InoReader, has an option to fetch full content if it is just a blurb. So, I have to never deal such annoyances.

FreshRSS and Miniflux both have the option. The former can even let you customize some css filters to cleanup the stuff it retrieves.

> The ideal RSS feed has no ads which means no revenue for people working hard to create interesting things I want to read!

I don't see a problem with this at all, the best things on the internet are free and open source.

Everyone gets content for free and the author gets more views everybody wins.

And what quality content are you creating to contribute to this?

As an independent content creator I just called my rental agency and asked them if they would take ‘views’ as partial payment and I can confirm that they will not.

Bummer!

> The ideal RSS feed has no ad

Isn't that like the ideal anything-else? What's specific about RSS on ads?

RSS users are the Linux gamers of the podcast & blog world - tiny amount of people but all the problems in the world.

Ok, as both of these… this made me laugh

> Reddit won. RSS lost.

Reddit supports RSS.

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