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Comment by iLoveOncall | Hacker News Reader

Bad UX and UI choices have destroyed the adoption of RSS feeds.

RSS has always been a niche solution used only by technically knowledgeable people because of how it was always presented by RSS feed vendors.

Instead of having a button saying "Install this browser extension and click here to get all new articles in your browser", the user is presented with an orange "RSS" button with no explanation of what it is and how to use it, that will show a weird XML file when clicked on by the average user.

How are people supposed to use that feature when it's so obscure?

Better UX would have helped adoption and would have led to Google keeping the RSS button (and Google Reader probably).

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Agree. Text on buttons should be verbs. "Subscribe" or "Follow" would've been 1000x better than "RSS". Of all the sidequests Firefox has put itself on, better supporting RSS would be a good one. Mozilla already owns Pocket, so it would be a very small jump.

"RSS" wasn't very common to put on feed buttons. The standard RSS icon was normal, including in Firefox (where it would display on the URL bar when detected on a site). And commonly web pages linking directly to their feed would say something along the lines of "subscribe via RSS" or just "subscribe" with the icon.

People are definitely used to poking cryptic pictograms on contemporary UIs, and RSS clearly gives off an impression of something being broadcast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#/media/File%3AFeed-icon.sv...

This is such a good point that I hadn't even realized til just now. I'm a pretty tech-savvy user and was never able to really figure out how it worked, or at least how to make it work for me. Can't imagine the average user's experience!

> Better UX would have helped adoption and would have led to Google keeping the RSS button

The most obvious people to have improved that UX is the browser... aka Google. The way that XML rendered was controlled by the browser. This all sounds like Google apologism.

The funny thing is...non-Google browsers had even done that. Chrome was the odd one that didn't, and Firefox was still more popular at the time.

Firefox had Live Bookmarks, which I used for a long time. You'd just drag the icon to your bookmarks toolbar and then it would appear as a folder containing all of the entries as clickable bookmarks to the relevant web pages. The browser alerted you to autodiscovered feeds as well. The orange RSS pictogram (not the initialization) would appear right there in the URL bar if the site was set up right.

As early as OS X 10.4, desktop Safari had a built in RSS reader as well. You'd open the sidebar that's currently mostly used for the reading list and bookmarks, and there was some way to add the current page's discovered RSS feed with a button click or two. It also rendered feed XML in a particularly nice way that looked like a very clean looking blog, so landing on an XML page wouldn't intimidate less technical users.

Chrome deliberately was dysfunctional, and it taking over probably had more to do with RSS not growing more mainstream (as well as the rise of social networks and over commercialization) than Google Reader shutting down.

RSS was already dead long before Chrome was the market leader.

And even if the feed was rendered properly, it's essentially useless without an associated extension or website to aggregate those feeds.

Reader was killed in 2013, Chrome already had ~40% market share by then. It may have not been as dominant as it is now, but Chrome was already a major influence on the web user experience.

That's not even remotely what happened. UX was bad because RSS was barely tolerated in the ad-driven web that was being established. No one had any interest in evolving the UI.

Apple tried. RSS was shoved into every part of OS X at the time, and users were still confused about what it even is.

That would be a compelling argument if the RSS button had never been added to websites in the first place.

The UI and UX was left entirely to the website administrator, not big tech, and even websites that did not have any monetization did not improve the experience for users.

And of course adtech could have invested in RSS to make it financially attractive. But they didn't, cause nobody uses it.

Being the nerdy little kid I was in the 2000s, I tried getting into RSS and even made a presentation in school computer class about it... but actually I never really used it. It just wasn't fun. So who used it if not me?

Me, every day for ... a lot of years!

I had hoped that as more people grew up with computers, the share of sophisticated users who would adopt technologies with higher inherent complexity would increase. I'm disappointed the opposite has happened.

If popular browsers had embraced RSS enthusiastically, it might have taken off with mainstream users. There's nothing about the protocol that makes it difficult to provide a well-integrated experience. Firefox even had a crude built-in reader around the time it was the most popular browser, but did not put in the effort to create a good UX around it.

Opera (12ish) had a built-in email client where you read the RSS feeds.

Oh, and Opera mini had a built-in RSS client too.

Microsoft Outlook still has RSS support: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/subscribe-to-an-r... Basically, an RSS feed is represented as an auto-populating mail folder. As still mentioned on the page linked above, Internet Explorer provided an easy way to subscribe.

Support has been removed from Firefox, but it still exists in Thunderbird.

It's not surprising. It seems that many understand RSS more as a form of news (like a newsgroup or mailing list) than as a form of discovery for web content.

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