Hacker News Reader

> So I don't know what's with all this "Google killed RSS". Google didn't kill RSS. Twitter, Facebook and RSS' "geekiness" that made sure it never crossed that "chasm" into mainstream usage (and what doesn't grow will probably die, as nothing is constant) are what killed RSS.

If you ask me, it's the combination of browsers and websites not properly exposing the existence of RSS that has stunted its growth.

Firefox used to have a button for subscribing to any RSS feeds it found in a webpage in the navigation bar. It was the only browser that did it (EDIT: that I was aware of - others have pointed out Safari also had this feature for a while), and it was a fairy obscure button too. Then they removed that.

So now you actually have to hunt for the RSS feeds - and since many webpages use a gif saying "RSS" (meaning text search is useless) that isn't always easy.

It's not difficult to use at all, but it is certainly a very obscure feature of the internet. That halts adoption.

The button still exists, though you may have to add it yourself. Right mouse > Customize.

Done. Thanks!

> Firefox used to have a button for subscribing to any RSS feeds it found in a webpage in the navigation bar. It was the only browser that did it

I'm pretty sure Safari did this as well - it was removed in Mountain Lion.

Opera did it too. Opera mini for lowly java feature phones did it too.

Apologies, I should have said only browser I used (Linux & Windows user)

Agreed, the RSS feed can be really hard to find on many sites.

There are lots of decent external apps, but I'd guess that most of today's web audience prefers consuming in the (already familiar) browser. Seems the situation might be a golden opportunity for someone who's got the chops to take advantage.

Have you seen how Newsblur handles it (including the bookmarklet)? It will automaticalyl search for a feed if you point it to a website and suggest one, and give you a subscription option if you use the bookmarklet. That's already a huge leap forward in my opinion. I'm sure there's other feedreaders doing similar things (and if not the competition should make them catch up soon enough).

Safari had a button for RSS as well. Not sure why they removed it.

That said every single blog I've ever seen has a prominent RSS button. But that isn't the reason for lack of widespread adoption. It's more to do with the fact that most people aren't dedicated "read this every day" consumers of lots of different blogs. Generally it's a small handful which isn't what RSS caters for.

It's obvious why they removed it. It was a weird feature that didn't belong in the browser. Users didn't understand what it was for. (I use RSS and I still didn't understand why I would ever click that button.)

>I use RSS and I still didn't understand why I would ever click that button.

If the current page is a blog, and you want to subscribe to the blog in your RSS reader. (When you go to use the button, it asks you to pick a reader and also gives you the option of making that reader the default choice for the next to you want to use the button.)

Are you saying that a bookmarklet would work just as well?

> the RSS protocol was still dying because most people have moved on to other ways of consuming news

Any evidence to validate this claim? Popularity of Twitter or Facebook doesn't have to be at the cost of RSS. Even if it was, it doesn't make one more relevant or irrelevant. TV did not kill Radio (at least for everyone).

New applications like Pulse depend on RSS. Many users depended on Google Reader. Now they have to learn a new application. Some of them use mobile apps which are pointing to Google Reader. It is not going to be an easy change.

People are mad for a reason.

Do you have any evidence to invalidate Googles claim of declining usage? I trust Google on this one. It served its purpose in 2005 but much better services have replaced it. Move on and get over it.

>It served its purpose in 2005 but much better services have replaced it. Move on and get over it.

Much better services? Name one! (much less "many"....)

Reddit, Hacker News, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Flipboard, and any other service that aggregates good content or allows people to easily share content with one another. Have you not been paying attention?

These things share what is fashionable, not what is important. If I find an interesting, low volume blog, I can subscribe to its feed and I will get an update when content is added. With your scenario, I might get an update if content is added, if I can find it between guff about conference scandals. It's simply not comparable, unless you're forcing worthy content (in my judgement) to have the same value as transitory celebrity gossip.

These services give me a good chance of discovering things, RSS lets me follow them. As a case in point, there are a lot of things in my RSS feed that I have discovered from HN because one single post from them made it to the front page, but no subsequent one has. But I get to see the updates because I subscribed to their feeds. That subsequent ones haven;t made it to the HN front page is absolutely not a value judgement on their worthiness - unless, as I say, you think 5 same-but-different articles on who said what and to whom at a conference is more important than the infrequent technical article by a researcher.

In short, I want to follow the stuff on the right of the bell curve, not in the middle. The stuff that mostly floats to the top of what you're advocating (HN, fb, twitter) is firmly in the middle. A lot of the people posting the content I find interesting don't have twitter feeds announcing their posts - that kind of thing is often the preserve of this week's preferred javascript framework project. My RSS feeds allowed me a much higher SNR than any of these things. So please don't compare them, as if they can serve the same purpose. That's nonsense.

> that kind of thing is often the preserve of this week's preferred javascript framework project

Careful, you're bias is showing.

The only viable alternative you named was Flipboard.

Reddit, HN, Facebook, Twitter and G+ are all user-sponsored aggregators. If I see content there, it must have come from somewhere. Where did I find the articles i share on Facebook? On my RSS feed.

One alternative is to follow your websites you like on a social service like Facebook. That's not as helpful as RSS.

  - No read/unread tracking
  - Depends on news feed algorithms
  - Lots of noise

RSS mean I never miss an update. Your alternatives don't.

These days, I see more "follow me on twitter" links than I do "subscribe to my RSS feed" links. I have no issue with RSS as a technology, but it clearly did not resonate with the non-technical user. Twitter and Facebook did. Geeks can lament this until they're blue in the face, but they're in denial if they believed RSS was ever going to be a viable mainstream solution.

Maybe more of us should use the phrase, "Follow my feed".

[1. Follow instead of subscribe. 2. Feed instead of RSS, because (a) there's also Atom, and (b) neither "RSS" nor "Atom" are quite as friendly as "feed".]

Still, most people are not going to know what the heck a "feed" is. They know what Twitter and Facebook are, but they don't understand finding an RSS reader and using it to follow somebody's "feed".

It is a pretty easy word to learn. Heck, even FB already has a "news feed"

A twitter feed is almost always going to be full of noise updates. An RSS feed from a real blogging platform, especially if you filter to a tag, is going to be far more focused on useful information.

I don't care whether or not it's "mainstream", so long as I can use it.

RSS isn't about aggregating or sharing content it's about following content.

How do I avoid missing each post from a handful of people who publish rarely in an endless stream of chatty publishers? RSS is how I sidestep the stream and catch the important things.

Mark them as Close Friends in Facebook.

I'm not talking about friends on Facebook. I'm talking about blogs for the most part, but sometimes I find an interesting RSS feed in an odd place.

Those allow you to follow people and what they think are important. RSS readers allow me to follow what I think is important.

You clearly haven't been, or don't know what RSS is for as none of those solve the same problem as RSS. Social news != my news.

Different needs. You are clearly a pure consumer of information, whereas GReader users are curators of information. You are the 90 in the 90-9-1 rule and GReader appealed to the 9.

For curators, there are (yet) no good alternatives.

Exactly! It's maddening to hear there are better technologies and services than RSS yet no one can name them...

Well of course usage declined after they cut its features, fucked up the design, and failed to maintain it.

One can make the argument that Reader's dominance in the market helped push the decline of RSS usage. To try and compete in the same space you have to hide the fact that you are an RSS reader; whether that be with gimmicky layouts or by integrating with social networks, or whatever else. You can't be seen as redundant with Reader.

I think we're going to see a lot of advances with RSS due to the closure of Reader and I'm excited to see those.

One counter-point is that the accessibility of Reader due to its presence Google ecosystem also grew the global user base of RSS aggregators. Which is to say its not a given that those using RSS through Google Reader would be using RSS at all if it never existed.

It's also not a given that the sync back-ends built in this Never-Reader parallel universe would've matched what would got with Reader in terms of reliability and speed, since regardless of how you feel about them Google infrastructure is best in class.

It's been great for me. I switched to Feedly after the announcement, and I'm glad I did. It bridges two worlds for me. I get the classic Reader-esque view for the post-a-day people, and the magazine view with features ranked by sharing to filter the top few stories on the 400-a-day sites.

I even made special folders: Tech Gaggle, Science Gaggle, Politics Gaggle. I skim these when I've got nothing else to read, and it doesn't overwhelm me with things.

This gets said a lot 'RSS is dead'. It's very much not, in terms of people consuming news through it? Maybe. But it also powers podcasts, for example, and they're going from strength to strength. Plus a lot of sites showed they still get a large amount of traffic via RSS after the announcement.

A million users isn't a lot at Google scale, but it's by no means dead.

I use RSS for low-traffic sporadic blogs and a handful of higher-traffic news magazines. I don't get too many items a day and it's quite easy to quickly remove the ones I'm not interested in. Then I'm left with about 1-10 interesting articles every day, which is pretty much what I want.

Not providing an RSS feed is like not providing an API; you're giving up control of how scrapers access your website, but I'm sure that readers will find a way to get automate content aggregation either way. It's just annoying to lose standards.

I use Google Reader a lot but I don't care about RSS. I think RSS is unnecessary for news aggregation and the death of Google Reader has little to do with RSS.

If the death of Google Reader was about RSS, Google could have declared RSS legacy and told people to start using the HTML5 article tag plus a few specific metadata attributes.

But how would that have helpled G+ compete against Facebook? It would have taken some creativity to figure that out, but since many Reader users were keen on sharing it shouldn't have been an impossible problem to solve compared to self driving cars.