Hacker News Reader

Comment by xnorswap | Hacker News Reader

I might cop a lot of hate for saying this, but it's been 10 years, it's time to stop mourning RSS and move on.

I loved RSS, I sorely miss the protocol based internet rather than the web based internet we have now. I miss when my emails didn't have adverts pretending to be emails at the top of my inbox.

Advertising was a lot less prevalent when applications had protocols and you could simply move to a different client with fewer (or no) adverts.

But that's not the reality of the modern web.

And it doesn't do much good to pine for the past.

View on HN

There's nothing to mourne. I use dozens of RSS feeds every day and have been for many years.

WHOA! This is shocking ignorance for an HN user. RSS still exists for most of the web if you can be bothered to use it. It just isn't in your face anymore. I consume a lot of content through RSS to this day. You also don't need to look at those email adverts if you can be bothered to use real email apps. It's your choice to soak yourself in the dumbed down garbage interfaces.

They are not ignorant just for holding a different opinion.

My entire reading system is built on RSS but I don’t think it’s an invalid take to say that RSS is a thing of the past, or at the very least that the train has left the station. Every month I have some feed just randomly die because nobody paid attention or cares anymore. It’s pretty unfortunate.

Browsers should never have backed off exposing it, IMO.

> They are not ignorant just for holding a different opinion.

No, but this isn't a contest of opinions. The claim that RSS unsupported, no longer in widespread use, and/or is merely a remnant of a previous era is factually incorrect.

> don’t think it’s an invalid take to say that RSS is a thing of the past

Sorry, but it's an invalid take. I don't know what sites you're using that stopped offering RSS, but I have hundreds of blogs, podcasts, and aggregators, along with my favorite subrreddits, YouTube channels, etc. all subscribed via RSS, and the only time anything "dies" is when a blog or podcast changes its URL.

> The claim that RSS unsupported, no longer in widespread use, and/or is merely a remnant of a previous era is factually incorrect.

I did not say they were factually correct, merely that I'd lump RSS in with "things of the past" given how many sites and developers neglect it nowadays. I was pretty clearly saying that their opinion isn't unfathomable to me.

The slow decline of RSS is not some new topic and this very site has discussed the topic for the better part of a decade. You're free to feel whatever you'd like tho.

> I did not say they were factually correct, merely that I'd lump RSS in with "things of the past" given how many sites and developers neglect it nowadays.

I mean, I assume that number must be greater than zero, and yet I seem to be having a hard time identifying any sites or blogging applications that do indeed neglect RSS. All of the sites I frequent support it. Do you have any meaningful examples of this alleged lack of widespread RSS support?

> The slow decline of RSS is not some new topic

Unfortunately not -- people have been pretending it's happening for years without any real evidence to sustain the claim. If I were more of a conspiracy theorist, I'd suspect that maybe it's something they're trying to make happen.

In this case "moving on" means adding in social media "share beacons", which just so happens to load their 3rd party cookies and analytics scripts, and shuttle that web traffic information back to the motherships.

No thanks. I'll stick to RSS.

> I might cop a lot of hate for saying this, but it's been 10 years, it's time to stop mourning RSS and move on.

I can't comprehend where this notion that RSS is somehow "dead" is coming from. RSS is ubiquitous: every major blogging platform, aggregator, and other media site continues to offer feeds, including all of the major video sharing sites. The entire podcasting ecosystem is based on RSS.

I consume HN, Reddit, Lobste.rs, about a hundred blogs, a hundred podcasts, YouTube and lots of other sui generis stuff all via RSS feeds, subscribed in TT-RSS with Liferea as a frontend.

RSS hasn't gone away and is not going away.

> I loved RSS, I sorely miss the protocol based internet rather than the web based internet we have now.

It hasn't gone anywhere. If you miss it, consider the possibility that you yourself have followed the garden path away from it, and forgotten the way back.

Yeah I subscribe to everything from major tech news sites (Ars Technica, The Verge for example) to tiny blogs. RSS is very widely adopted, even if nobody is making noise about it or trying to hype it up. Anything but dead.

Old protocols never die.

But they can extended or innovated beyond!

There's just no candidates of note for any other strategies.

This take, popular though it is, seems to be more vibes-based than reality based. Most blogs I visit have RSS feeds. The site we’re both currently posting on has a fully functional RSS feed. It’s hardly dead.

I always thought HN doesn't have RSS, that's why https://hnrss.org was created if I'm not mistaken. I just saw there is actually a feed for the main page.

HN has never not had RSS, at least for as long as I've been using it (15 years): https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

Mourning? Past? I'm still using it.

Most of my media content is podcasts, and I still consume all of my podcasts via RSS feeds. I have yet to run into a podcast where this did not work. RSS isn't the past, it's the future, and painting it as dead is an odd characterization in my view when it's alive and well.

> and I still consume all of my podcasts via RSS feeds.

Considering that a podcast is an RSS feed, it's not like there's any other option. People using fancy modern podcast apps might not be interacting with the RSS feed directly, but the software they're using certainly is.

The world's most popular podcast is the Joe Rogan Experience. Which part of Spotify is using an RSS feed for that?

Spotify exclusive "podcasts" aren't really podcasts any longer. They're Spotify Exclusive Content calling themselves something that's no longer valid. The same is true of any platform exclusive content.

The world's most popular podcast used to be The Joe Rogan Experience, but since Spotify acquired exclusive rights to it, it is no longer distributed as a podcast, and is only available as a Spotify channel. Despite continuing to call it a "podcast", it isn't actually a podcast anymore.

UPDATE: Just found out that earlier this year, Spotify abandoned its exclusive content strategy, and Joe Rogan is once again distributed as a podcast:

https://feeds.megaphone.fm/GLT1412515089

Looks like Megaphone is a real, honest-to-goodness podcast hosting service that's owned and operated by Spotify, with proper RSS feeds and everything.

https://openrss.org/open.spotify.com/show/4rOoJ6Egrf8K2Irywz...

OpenRSS is a service that creates RSS feeds using web scraping. Unfortunately, it can't create enclosure links for audio content that's sitting behind Spotify's paywall, so this isn't a podcast feed.

JRE simply isn't a podcast anymore. It's just a Spotify channel.

It still exists, even if it is not used as much these days.

I have email without advertisements.

Some web sites will have RSS, and you can add it to your own if you want to do. (Although I think Hina-Di is better in some ways)

Other protocols also are still used, even if not as commonly. (I use IRC and NNTP, too.)

Most major websites continue to offer RSS. Considering that some people apparently believed that HN itself did not have RSS, I suspect that some people just don't know where to look for feed URLs.

How is it better to not talk about that something became worse according to somebody?

>I miss when my emails didn't have adverts pretending to be emails at the top of my inbox.

Here's a nickel, get yourself a better email client.

Yeah honestly if you're using Gmail as a "client" you're kinda causing your own problem.

Time to move on to what? Time to move back to everything being a chaotic jungle of different designs & experiences? I think not. Even if sites themselves don't support rss, there's many tools out there to help res-ify various sources. If there was a way to move on maybe we might eventually drop rss/atom, but it seems highly highly unlikely we'll move back from rss.

I love the web & it's great solid platform. But rss holds a special place in my heart too. Calling rss "not the reality of the modern web", saying that we should just except captive experiences by the valent forces doesn't seem very web-like to me, doesn't bespeaks the user-agency that so critically distinguishes the web from everything else. The internet is for end users, rfc8890, and rss is a strong manifestation of that value.

If we do want to move on we have to make that new place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com