RSS is a negative revenue generator. Every person that uses it is one less person that will see ads. It's great for users but not sites. I suspect Google was losing a lot of ad revenue so they mostly killed support.
I ignored it for a long time but decided to start using. Unfortunately that's when website support started to decline. Shame I really liked it.
Unless a site chooses to make RSS, especially full content feeds, part of a subscriber benefit. Ars Technica, for example, provides full content feeds to subscribers, while the general public can access title + preview snippets.
Approaching it this way (similar to paid mailing lists) is the best of both worlds, providing revenue incentives to users while removing site ads for users who care about and pay for the content.
True, but most people don't like to pay. So it's hard to sell people on the idea. Maybe it will be possible in the future as people get used to the idea of paying for content.
> True, but most people don't like to pay. So it's hard to sell people on the idea.
So provide only a title+snippet feed so folks can now when you articles appear on the site, and hopefully go to the 'full' page which has ads. Anything that can drive traffic can be helpful.
I think this is too dichotomous, and misses the mark because of it.
It's not that people don't like to pay; it's that most people don't like to pay what seems like an unjustifiable amount of money for a service which is otherwise nice but not essential.
Especially when the service comes off as "defective by design", in which case rebelliousness kicks in on top of everything.
Problems compounding this effect?
1. The default is ads. This really serves to create the impression that your product isn't really worth that much, if all the user is expected to do is ignore a stupid ad on the page, which you're probably not even seeing on the first place if you have an adblocker. Which is why when the alternative monetization is $30 monthly or whatever, you're like "wat? what for?"
2. Companies rarely let you pay for what you're using. instead, it's a subscription, and it's for all the features of the site, including those 500 features you're never going to use. Hence you're asked to pay $30 a month, for an RSS feed you'd otherwise have been happy paying a far more reasonable amount.
3. Most companies don't make it easy for you to know how much you're using the product or if you're paying too much, if it hurts their "milk as much as possible" approach. If you paid cents per RSS, and had a free trial for a month to see what a typical month will cost you, I think most people wouldn't bat an eyelid when it came to paying.
I tend to agree with this. But most importantly, many sites go at this the wrong way by putting content behind a paywall. Substack and Bandcamp are good examples of ways to pay and get paid for content. If you want to people to pay for content online, incentivize.
Do you know how Ars Technica does it? Is there some personalized URL to the suscriber feed? I imagine those are pretty easily shared among a group of people?
People sharing a feed with one or two people isn't going to account for a huge amount, and one person (accidentially|on purpose) sharing their URL to a bunch of people will become visible pretty quickly in analytics. Nobody's making big dollars on illicit Ars Technica RSS Feed content, especially when a lot of the value of Ars is in their curated forums and discussions.
Ars makes enough off ads that they encourage people to pay to remove ads, get "et subscriptor" appended to their title, and some minor perks across the site (RSS, a slightly nicer forum experience, etc).
A corollary is Linux World News. LWN hides articles with journalistic leverage behind a paywall, marked as such, and offers similar per-subscriber RSS feeds. LWN doesn't have ads.
LWN also allows subscribers to share any article on their behalf; you've probably seen an LWN article or two shared by a subscriber here on HN. They know there's people who generate the share link and dump it into massive aggregators (like HN, Reddit, etc.) but they don't care because it drives people to go "maybe this is worth $20/year" and toss some cash up.
I had an LWN subscription when I was in Google Summer of Code. It was cool, and I read it far more regularly than I would have otherwise, but I decided to allow the subscription to lapse after I didn't read it daily. With my shift to a new job, I'll probably get a new LWN subscription just because it's becoming more salient to my daily work.
If website provides accurate article titles and summaries (not clickbait), clicks from RSS feed should land more quality visitors. And if website treats their visitors fairly, by showing decent ads related to content, they increase chance for a click on banner. Website could even show different type of banner for visitors coming from RSS feed, as RSS users are more technical minded.
The article talks about the unfriendly way a raw RSS feed is presented in the browser and how users do not know what to do with it.
This is easily fixed by adding an XSL stylesheet reference at the top of the RSS XML. The stylesheet not only contains HTML markup to format the XML in a friendly manner, but can also be used to inform the user what to actually do with the RSS feed.
I also had this come across my feed. Always funny to see articles about the death of RSS in my RSS reader. Honestly, the idea of using the web _without_ RSS is entirely alien to me at this point; I don't understand how people keep track of what they've read, what they're going to read, what they liked, etc. without a feed.
I used RSS a bit a few years back. Other than getting a stream of text without ads which was good, I now use reader view for that and bookmarking sites I want to revisit with raindrop. I didn't really see the need for it.. Is there a RSS linux client that has tracking features described above? I want to try it out.
It was fantastic for the readers, but it did not have a sustainable businessmodel for the producers. Not enough eyeballs on the actual add stuffed sites when you can just grab the content straight.
So Google set out to absolutely dominate the the RSS client space with their free Reader. They succeeded, then just terminated the product. And that was for many the end of the line.
I have loads of RSS feeds and I almost universally use them as notifications to go and see the post on the full site.
Most RSS readers I'm aware of prominently include an option to view the full page, often inside the same app (and these apps are less likely to have content-blocking add-ons installed, which would block lucrative surveillance).
I'm quite happy for RSS feeds to include only a summary/thumbnail/excerpt plus a link to the full page.
Still following a lot of RSS feeds aggregated with Feedly. I don’t know any better way to follow a lot of sites (don’t mention fb, twitter or any other social network, those are not for this…)
Google managed to dominate it, then cancelled Google Reader, taking audiences away; just as they did with Usenet (DejaNews). Corrupt antitrust authorities didn't help, nor did it help with Google acquiring DoubleClick and YouTube, nor with Facebook acquiring WhatsApp. That's what happened.
I rediscovered RSS earlier this year when I turned over day to day responsibility for marketing (was managing both product and marketing) to a new manager. All of our marketing tools (website, email, etc...) supported RSS, and to my surprise, a lot of third party sites I like to monitor turned out the have a <link> tag with RSS or atom feeds. I did a quick apt search for rss and realized that akregator is still around, set it up, and now I can keep up with all the content the marketing team (and our competition) is cranking out in few minutes.
I've built more than one product that relies on RSS and after ~20 years, I still make a living from it (Currently https://biztoc.com) — Let me tell you that the death of RSS has been greatly exaggerated and seeing posts like these every month will neither help nor kill the format.
Nothing, RSS is alive and well. I got to this HN post in a RSS reader. But yeah, if it were up to the BigCos it would be dead already. It's kind of funny to think so many companies sponsored the development of both the RSS2 and Atom specs 15+ years ago, and suddenly they must have realized, "Oopsie, we shouldn't have come anywhere near this thing, EVERYONE BACK AWAY SLOWLY".
Something weird is happening with this HN submission. Despite the submission time saying "5 hours ago" and the time on most of the comments saying "2 hours ago" or less, I clearly remember seeing both this submission and several of the exact comments yesterday.
If I hover over "5 hours ago" on the submission at the top, I see the timestamp "2022-06-11T12:51:31". If that's in my time zone, that was 1 day, 10 hours ago. If that's GMT, it was even longer ago.
Clearly this submission has "resurfaced" with all of the relative time information changed, but the underlying timestamps on the post preserved.
I think that's what happens when dang "bumps" submission which was considered interesting but overlooked, but I don't know how exactly that process works, he probably explained it in comments somewhere.
Thanks - it's kind of weird that it screws up the date, though.
Edit: actually, I have a guess. Maybe the moderators don't have access to the algorithm and it isn't that flexible, so the way they hack around it is by changing what the algorithm sees as the posted date of the submission. If the algorithm thinks the submission was made more recently than it actually was, it will bring it back to the front page because the score goes up.
If you ever are trying to find the RSS feed URL for a website, I built a free little tool (https://www.rsslookup.com/) that lets you paste in a website’s URL and it will go out and find a list of available feeds. Some RSS clients have this feature built in, but for websites that don’t have their feed configured correctly this site will check extra paths (ex. /feed) to see if any feeds are available.
I'm using it every day, that's what happens to it. Many sites provide their own feeds and those which don't can often be fed to something like rss-proxy [1] which will create a feed (or several feeds) based on an XPath query [2]. This can be self-hosted so you don't have to inform external entities about your feeding behaviour.
[2] e.g. here's how to get Göteborgs Posten (a Swedish newspaper which ditched its feed some time ago) in an RSS feed reader (Atom is also supported through ...&o=Atom) - note that this is an example.org domain so the link does not work as is - https://rssproxy.example.org/api/feed?url=https://gp.se&pCon...
I don't understand the argument of it not being a money-maker, since the publisher of the feed controls the content. In most cases they would just publish an excerpt or even just the title, which forces you to read the article on their website anyway.
> I don't understand the argument of it not being a money-maker
Right? Gathering RSS users together in one place and being able to see what they like based on their feeds, advertise in and around the content freely based on those inferences.
If it wasn't a money maker, that's surely more Google's fault than a requirement. Hell, this is a service that people pay for too now. Google really dropped the ball.
>Why are Google, Microsoft and Apple so inactive here?
They did by adding push notifications to their browsers.
RSS seems pointless to use now that web push notifications and twitter exist. Twitter solves the scaling problem where you are subscribed to too many things. It has an algorithm to sort your feed so you don't have to waste time scrolling past uninteresting articles from people you've followed if you are following a ton of different content creators.
Twitter is a single, centralised source where RSS is decentralised - everyone and his dog can provide a feed which can be followed by the world. No censorship, no dirty tricks with algorithms between you and your audience, no BigTech Beasts™ feeding on your data. In other words, RSS is clearly the superior solution both for source as well as subscribers. Twitter et al might not like this but... who cares?
Most people aren't going to be subscribing to things that break twitter's tos and if they do there is still push notifications and other platforms willing to platform that kind of content.
Completely outsourcing your process for surfacing interesting information to someone else's algorithm feels like awful idea (and I actually mostly like Twitter).
I use inoreader which also supports twitter feeds so they actually get reported in RSS. When Google killed Reader then it killed most support for RSS but there are still plenty of webpages that support it. For me, personally, I only visit webpages that support RSS as I use it exclusively for reading websites. If a webpage doesn't support RSS then that webpage doesn't exist to me.
> Do people just consume what they’re now fed through Platforms: Facebook, Twitter and Tiktok? Would I have to hawk myself on each platform?
I personally read mostly stories on Hacker News, and the author has successfully reached me here.
There’s an irony in Hacker News criticizing algorithm based feeds, when it itself is proof that Twitter and Facebook are not the only alternatives to RSS.
There are no websites, blogs, whatever, that you want to follow? Or do you bookmark those sites and check them manually?
Looking at my RSS feed, there are quite a lot of active feeds in there. Some I read immediately when I notice something new in them, some when I feel like it.
So tired of people proclaiming RSS "dead". Some of us have been using RSS all along and never stopped using it. There are still plenty of native RSS clients. Google Reader is not RSS. In fact it's better that Google doesn't control RSS; no company should control it.
You can talk about how Google killed their RSS support. How Twitter killed their RSS support. How Apple added and then removed RSS from Safari. But RSS lives on, it can't be killed.
Many news sites continue to publish RSS feeds, you just need to know how to find them.
How many death proclamations does RSS need? At this point it's become a joke, like the old Saturday Night Live Weekend Update, "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead."
It has become increasingly difficult to find RSS feeds for podcasts. More and more podcasts have moved to the various "platforms" like iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and finding a plain old RSS feed has become quite the heroic quest in some cases. :(
Podcasts never moved to iTunes. You submit the URL to your podcast feed to Apple and it scrapes your feed. Once someone subscribe to the feed, iTunes is no longer involved. The directory of podcasts that Apple indexes is available as a free API that anyone can use and has been an open API for over a decade.
Every real podcast player allows you to subscribe directly to a podcast if you know the RSS URL.
When you play a podcast, even through iTunes or the podcast player, the audio is served from your website. None of this is true for either Google or Spotify,
I have noticed a trend, though, for Podcasts to no longer provide a "raw" RSS feed, and point you to "wherever you find your podcasts". It is usually possible to find an RSS URL, but it takes a bit of work sometimes.
Many third party podcast players for both iOS and Android use Apple’s directory as the canonical source of podcast RSS urls and for search. Once they retrieve the RSS feeds, then they poll the RSS feeds directly.
I usually listen to Podcasts on my desktop/laptop, though. I use gPodder, which does not access Apple's directory.
I could switch to another client, ... but I'm a creature of habit. I might try building my own Podcast client, though, I've been looking for a project lately.
Reading the rest of the comments, I was wondering if I missed something. I use awesome-rss firefox extension [1] to discover RSS feeds on firefox. I maintain a list of feeds using elfeed-org and follow them using elfeed on Emacs. It's clean and extremely fast - especially while searching. Granted that it isn't really beginner friendly. But there are nice beginner-friendly alternatives like liferea too. Here are somethings that confuse me while reading these sorts of articles and discussions:
1. I don't see why they say browsers killed RSS/atom feeds. The only casualty was the discoverability of those feeds (like the discontinued live bookmarks on Firefox). But it is easy enough to restore it using extensions like awesome-rss, if you care enough. And I find a lot of dedicated feed reader applications catering to all sorts of users.
2. I don't understand how twitter and firefox killed RSS/Atom feeds. I find it extremely tedious to search for meaningful information with them. These sites are full of material designed to hold your attention captive while frustrating your efforts at finding worthwhile material. In contrast, RSS/Atom is information dense, easy to search, narrow and archive.
3. There is no dearth of RSS/Atom feeds on the web. Every good news website news site seems to host one. Almost all the blog engines and static site generators automatically generate them without any configuration or intervention. I find my feedlist growing very large overtime.
4. It also appears like many people associate RSS/Atom feeds with an online service like feedreader or (the dead) Google reader. My understanding is that you don't need an online service to aggregate feeds. An intermittently online desktop/mobile client can do it just the same. I haven't noticed an RSS/Atom client ever failing to aggregate a feed. The only thing I found missing was an automatic way to share and synchronize the feed list itself - though it's easy enough to implement with something like syncthing. Am I missing something here?
For me, twitter, FB etc are inferior to RSS/Atom feeds in every conceivable way - with the exception of lack of a discussion forum. I too find the death proclamation of RSS/Atom a bit of an overstatement.
This seems a little pedantic. The contrast I'm trying to draw here is the steep drop off from the golden ages of ~2010 where you couldn't move for RSS symbols, aggregators, browsers that would suggest what to do with a RSS if they noticed one in the head, or loaded one directly.
Like most of HN, I've been using it daily for decades, but it's nowhere near as available as it used to be. Neither Firefox or Chrome seem to treat it as content worth looking at, but they used to. Look at the HN RSS feed in your browser for fun: https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
On my website (TFA), I had to add my own XLST. That works well now, for now. But how long until XLST support is removed because "nobody uses it"?
How much more dead do you need something to be before it's worth talking about? Previous conversations haven't accomplished anything, more services ignore RSS, iCal, so maybe it's worth banging on about this stuff until pressure finds the right people, and so that RSS doesn't get further excluded, so that people still think it's worth making feeds for.
> How much more dead do you need something to be before it's worth talking about?
This is a strange question. One normally doesn't talk about dead technologies at all, except perhaps nostalgically. "Hey, remember Netscape Navigator?" Declaring RSS dead doesn't have the rhetorical effect that you intend, as the dead can't be brought back to life.
> I'm sorry you think it's cliché.
It's not just me. A lot of people upvoted and/or agreed with my comment, so I would take that as a sign that the "RSS is dead" rhetoric is counterproductive and distracting to your points.
I feel the same about the old people/kids shtick, by the way. If you're trying to make a serious point and actually change things, don't turn it into a joke.
Hobbyists and scholars still use Latin, despite its death in ~400AD. It quickly fell out of mainstream use through poor education, lost its influence, lost central steering, and only remnants exist through the patchwork of languages over middle-ages Europe.
RSS is still in use, but it's rarely advertised, today's browsers already refuse to speak it without additional stylesheets, and the spec's largely abandoned. Where will it be in another five years?
You're welcome to your views but whether or not RSS has died is immaterial. I was trying to identify what has replaced RSS between the sites that don't provide it, and users who don't know anything about it. The short answer to that seems to be promoting your content on social media.
How even Mozilla tried to make RSS as difficult to use as possible, eventually just removing all but Live bookmarks, and even then pushing that to a separate extension...
In any case, I don't think the problem is lack of clients, but lack of publishers. Most platforms with loginwalls (e.g. Twitter) will never publish RSS feeds...
Corporate persons web applications don't but most web sites run by human persons do. Wordpress, medium, etc, all have easy automatic RSS generation. RSS is only lacking if you live in the megacorp content silos.
Corporations are usually the place where I can most easily find RSS feeds. I can easily find RSS feeds for newspapers, press releases, status of services, etc.
The problem is individuals. Individuals tend to publish on hosts which just are incompatible with RSS (because they are 'platforms' with other goals, like Twitter), or self-host without RSS (yes, happens). Platforms which have automatic RSS generation are a minority in terms of users (and BTW Wordpress and Medium are also 'corporate person silos', save for perhaps self-hosted WP).
Personally I do not assign much value in following the opinions of individuals, so I am still primarily an RSS user. But lately even e.g. political parties tend to publish in these silos and forget about RSS.
Agreed, and some paid plans on dedicated RSS readers(1) can turn the rare twitter/instagram feeds into proto-RSS feeds in a pinch. it's lovely and keeps me far, far away from the dark patterns inherent to those sites.
(1) Inoreader is the one I use with this capability. worth every penny - moved there after Google Reader died.
Came to write practically the same thing, I feel like when some people decide they don't want to use something anymore and their world view quickly becomes biased to think others have had a similar experience.
RSS never went away, RSS apps never went away, RSS users never went away.
My theory is that Google killed Google Reader as a means to push Google+. Reader's death was a huge blow to the RSS world.
With a majority of the people on Facebook, Twitter, etc it seems websites are most concerned with syndicating to those platforms, rather than through a shared protocol that anyone can subscribe to.
I still use RSS to follow a few sites (with NetNewsWire). I never want to overwhelm myself with sources, but have always found RSS to be a fantastic way to keep on on a site without going to it all the time or seeing the same stories over and over again. I see everything one time and can choose to read it or skip it.
I guess that last point may be the problem for websites looking to generate revenue. RSS is going to let you filter down to just what you actually want to read without ads (for the most part). It also doesn't require you obsessively check the site to see if you're missing anything. It's very easy to just check once a day, or once every couple days, to get all caught up. Sites like Facebook or Twitter want you checking over and over again throughout the days, and with their feeds you can never be sure you've seen everything, while other things you see over and over again. More views leads to more money.
From what I understand, podcasts are still using a very similar structure to RSS. But I think that might be under attack as popularity grows and companies are looking to lock people into their specific platforms.
> Reader's death was a huge blow to the RSS world.
As a non Reader user, I can confidently say this statement is false. Nothing in my RSS feeds I was subscribed to changed for years after it shut down. Those relying on RSS and not using Google Reader were not at all impacted by Reader's shut down.
Facebook, Twitter, etc is what caused a lot of major sites to drop the investment on RSS. The number of RSS users was always small, but the number of subscribers using these other services grew exponentially.
right, who needs rss when fb provides a convenient tool to stay in touch with visitors/customers.... wait they want me to pay for notifying the userbase i build myself?....wait, they want me to pay what?....what?...
Luckily, there are many self-hosted alternatives available, one of them being selfoss: https://selfoss.aditu.de/ (not affiliated or anything, just like the reader)
I ignored it for a long time but decided to start using. Unfortunately that's when website support started to decline. Shame I really liked it.