Ask HN: Do you have RSS on your site?

1 point·Turboblack··5 comments

How do you think, migration towards the RSS will be promising?

I think that horse has left the barn. The golden age of RSS / Atom / Content syndication was ~10 years ago. Two trends have moved everyone away from it: (1) Paywalls and content monetization, and (2) content distribution via socials not blogs/websites. A decade ago, web-based content producers were incentivized to have RSS feeds to grow their audience; now socials provide the vector, and restrict what can be done w/ content.

So it turns out that you are considering the Internet only for money?

? What ? I'm a big advocate of RSS. But it has dropped off in the last decade.

RSS isn't as ubiquitous as it used to be, but it's still very common. It's pretty much the only way that I keep up with websites I care about, and there are very few of those that don't offer an RSS feed.

They don't always advertise the feed, though, and since browsers stopped being RSS-aware, I've taken to looking at the page source for a new site to find if there's an RSS feed mentioned in the metadata. Very often there is.

> (1) Paywalls and content monetization

You absolutely can provide RSS feeds that require a login, so paywalls and such are a supported use case.

To answer your direct question, I do provide RSS feeds for my sites, but all of my sites now require a login.

Often RSS feeds are not even in the page's metadata. There are tools that can help find them, basically by trying out common suffixes for feeds.

One such tool is https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder

(Disclaimer: I'm the developer)

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