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Comment by dabinat | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand why many sites with news updates / blogs don’t offer an RSS feed. Are they expecting me to keep visiting the site over and over to see if there is new content? They’re guaranteeing I’ll never visit their site again.

Perhaps they’re expecting people to subscribe to social media accounts or via email, but those both cost money to reach users. RSS is free.

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I've used it on every blog I've ever built (https://blog.tombert.com/index.xml) because it's super easy to set up, but I really don't know anyone who uses RSS in any serious capacity.

That said, stuff like BBC actually does maintain an RSS feed: https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml

RSS is a free way to reach almost no one.

RSS is a free way to reach content genuinely created for users, not for profit.

Because you can't serve ads as nicely over RSS

Aren't the ads already on the webpage? If the RSS contains snippets of the pages and I have to navigate to the page to view the article, then I see your ads.

Also, can't the ads be a part of the feed just as nicely as the articles? What's stopping publishers from inserting ads as items in the feed?

Can't get the same metrics off the ads in an RSS feed. Companies, like people, are cheap so they don't want to spend money on advertising that doesn't work. RSS feed ads don't report back the same way browser advertising does.

That's only a problem for the engorged advertising industry that's been built up in the past couple decades. Putting ads in an RSS feed is no different than non-algorithmic ads on a webpage or classified sections in newspapers, which worked fine for everybody until targeted advertising was introduced.

Secondly, that just leads back to my first point. The ads (even targeted ads) are already on the final content.

I just can't view this as a failing of RSS. It wasn't intended to help publishers advertise, it was intended to help end users track the sites they wanted to track. I understand these are some of the reasons Google and other publishers disincentivized the usage of RSS but RSS works great for its intended purpose. I want more technology like RSS, not tech that helps publishers exploit us

Because RSS is a way to give your bait content away for free without getting your ad revenue for it. Its a complete misfeature from the perspective of a site.

It seems to me like the common pattern these days is to ask for notification permissions instead.