
The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS - ttepasse
https://twobithistory.org/2018/09/16/the-rise-and-demise-of-rss.html
======
MikeGale
I still use RSS and it's, in many ways, better than the web stupidity that
surrounds us.

The title is misleading.

People who captured the feedreader market, killed the competitors then dropped
it did a lot of damage. Maybe deliberately. LESSON: Never trust a big company
that relies on advertising.

RSS is a way to escape the nonsense that has come with those, who have no idea
what the web can be, but have flooded in and drowned so much in their
ignorance and lack of vision.

~~~
abtinf
Having worked at a giant company, I know there are many competing motivations,
teams, and personalities involved - companies are not uniform entities.

Still...

Google Reader did more to destroy my perception of Google's reputation than
everything else evil they've ever done. Conspiracy to suppress wages for tech
workers, James Damore, the Snowden revelations - all of those bugged me, but
not like Reader.

They killed Reader, I suspect to support Plus, just as the walled gardens of
the social networks turned into iron curtains, destroying the only viable
alternative decentralized content distribution mechanism. And now we get to
live in that world.

~~~
sakri
Other than my own list of unread bookmarks, Google Readers signal to noise
ratio (as a platform) was second to none. The feeds I followed would post 95%
worthwhile content. A blog post is like a dinner speech, don't want to miss
it. In social media the dinner speech is also available, only sandwiched
somewhere between all the small talk and pleasantries. I never found a
replacement, and quite a few people I followed cut down on blogging.

~~~
patrickmay
Feedly still works. I wouldn't be able to follow as many blogs as I do without
it.

~~~
WalterSear
Their pricing and paid features scare me, because it's clearly intended for
professional news gatherers, which means I'm not their actual customer.

------
Animats
As I point out occasionally, most hard news sources have RSS feeds. The New
York Times, Reuters, the BBC, CNN, and Fox News all have RSS feeds. The Hill,
Roll Call, and Politico have RSS feeds. The Congressional leadership has an
RSS feed. NASA and the ESA have RSS feeds. The National Weather Service has
RSS feeds. New York City and the LAPD have RSS feeds.

If it matters, it's probably in an RSS feed. It's social media blithering
that's left out. And ads.

~~~
ehnto
Stuff that the creator/producer wants syndicated will probably have an RSS
feed still. As social media platforms benefit from content lock in as opposed
to syndication, the publisher (the platform) has no incentive to offer RSS.

I am not particularly bothered by the lack of RSS on social platforms.

~~~
Hnrobert42
I dont know if that’s true. If I could consume Facebook via RSS, I might
follow it a bot more. When I wanted to respond or like, I would have to switch
to the app.

~~~
ehnto
FB couldn't collect data on your usage from an RSS feed, which is what they
use to drive their advertising platform, which you are also not participating
in. So having you read outside of FBs site or app is not in their best
interests.

~~~
walterbell
You would think that small and upcoming social media sites would support RSS,
at least to attract users.

Apparently Mastodon generates an Atom RSS feed for every user,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16755553](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16755553)

~~~
extra88
Twitter used to have RSS feeds for every user. I still follow a few accounts
using code that converts them to RSS but I probably would not have bothered if
I didn't already have a Twitter API key.

------
lkrubner
Back in 2006 I wrote an extremely detailed history of some of the infighting
that shaped the history of RSS. It was a popular article at the time. For
anyone interested in this bit of history, written at a formative moment, the
article is here:

[http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-
damaged-...](http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-by-
in-fighting-among-those-who-advocate-for-it)

~~~
nsriv
This was a great read, thank you!

------
nreece
RSS never died. On the contrary, its usage for content aggregation &
monitoring has been increasing over the years, specially in the business world
and niche markets.

I'm speaking from my own experience running Feedity -
[https://feedity.com](https://feedity.com), a growing startup that helps with
custom feeds for unstructured sources like webpages.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
I've been wondering why Feedly, which I use exclusively to follow webcomics,
has been hammering me with ad copy about "the news you need to stay on the
cutting edge" lately.

(RSS is, like, objectively the best way to follow multiple webcomics. I don't
understand why it's not more popular.)

~~~
kakarot
I use RSS for webcomics as well as visiting the actual websites, but a few
things:

1\. You miss out on the aesthetics each comic's website brings to the table

2\. Sometimes you miss things like "hidden panels" or blog posts you're
interested in.

3\. No advertisement money going towards the artists (Not a big deal if you
support them by buying merch and the comics don't need a lot of bandwidth)

I would really love to develop a reader that focused on webcomics, having both
a dynamically curated section as well as all of your subscribed comics.
Newspaper-like layout. Customized borders around each comic to add back some
of the flair each comic's website offers. Quick links to the artist's
blog/website/comic permalink. Text/image-only advertisements interleaved
between comics, with 100% revenue going back to artists. Even merch
advertisements which occasionally appear under an artist's comic, offering
links to their storefronts.

Basically an open source Funny Papers for the web, which would offer content
discovery for artists through its curated/related sections, as well as revenue
from advertisements. It would update daily and could be used to follow both
new and old comics serially.

I just need someone to help me build it because I'm juggling too many things
to devote all of my attention to it.

~~~
fredsir
I don't think 1., 2., and 3. is applicable to at least how I use my RSS
reader. Also, I don't understand why that is not the norm...

The way I use my RSS reader is that I scroll through the list of posts, and if
it's something I wish to check back on later, I press the shortcut to send it
to instapaper, and if it's something I wish to check now, I press the shortcut
to open it in a new tab, and then I go on. When I'm done, all posts have been
marked as read, and then I have a few tabs open that I immediately check out,
and a few links in instapaper that I check out later. I never actually read an
article or a comic or a video in my reader. It's terrible interface, I find. I
much rather check out the actual website. I do the exact same for instapaper;
open in a new tab and archive the link.

~~~
kakarot
It sounds like you are using RSS as a way to generalize your access to each
provider, but only as a delivery mechanism. The viewing is still done in the
browser.

With the exception of web apps / extensions, it's my understanding that RSS
feeds were originally meant to be consumed by a program specifically optimized
for handling feeds, instead of a bloated, slow, unsafe web browser.

In the end, your RSS flow could mostly be replaced by a set of live bookmarks
in your bookmark toolbar, then you wouldn't even have to leave the browser.
Plus you would get easy multi-platform synchronization of your feeds. A hell
of a lot easier than running an RSS reader on a private server like a lot of
us.

~~~
fredsir
Well, that might be the intention, but I have never experienced an "RSS
Reader" that have left me with the want to actually consume the content inside
it. I much prefer opening say an article in a browser and reading it with
"reader mode" if it has bad text-layout.

Also, my RSS reader is just a web app, not a native application, so when I get
through my list of new posts in my feeds, I'm already in the browser.

------
guybedo
I might be biased here as i've built a news aggregator/RSS reader
([https://aktu.io](https://aktu.io)) but imho RSS was and still is the best
way to get news from sources you like. This is so obvious when you compare RSS
to social platforms... I mean Facebook was great to share stuff with your
friends and get updates but now it's become a huge mess where you get a little
bit of everything, you're not even sure you'll ever see all the publications
from sources you like/follow thanks to obscure algorithms, and to make things
worse, priority is given to images and videos...

~~~
com2kid
And yet here we are on Hacker News, a social platform for news stories.

I honestly have never used a feed aggregator, I used Slashdot, then Reddit,
and now a mix of Reddit and HN.

Having a filter of some sort is really useful.

~~~
shakna
And I'm here because this story appeared in my RSS feed.

I 'consume' other people's thoughts and opinions via HN, after 'consuming' the
story via my feed.

Different purposes.

------
CharlesW
Podcasting _is_ RSS. That means that 26% of Americans (I don't have worldwide
stats handy) depend on RSS every month.

So, more Americans use RSS every month than use Twitter.

~~~
erikb
That's quite interesting. Do you have more stuff to read about it? I never
really used podcasts so I always wondered how people listen to it and assumed
people use spotify or something like that.

~~~
ourcat
Podcast 'subscriptions' are a perfect RSS use-case.

A 'podcatcher' (ie whatever app downloads it) is downloading the 'enclosure'
url (which can point to any type of media) of the latest RSS 'item'.

------
dugite-code
As a maintainer of the FeedIron plugin for Tiny Tiny RSS I see RSS as quite
alive and kicking.

[https://github.com/feediron/ttrss_plugin-
feediron](https://github.com/feediron/ttrss_plugin-feediron)

On occasion I have needed to use a site parser like rss-bridge but honestly
it's so rare that a site doesn't have rss (albeit often hidden from view).
Just a hint for people searching for rss feeds the most common I find are:

/rss

/rss.xml

/feed

/feed.xml

/index.php/feed

/index?format=xml

------
bmn__
The article downplays the significance of Atom.

Today, nearly all Web feeds are available as Atom. Hackers, learn from this.
Specs matter.

[https://web.archive.org/web/2004/http://diveintomark.org/arc...](https://web.archive.org/web/2004/http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-
rss)

Atom exists precisely because RSS is a clusterfuck that could not be salvaged.

~~~
CharlesW
Regarding the "The myth of RSS compatibility" article, at one point RSS was
evolving and changes broke stuff. But the article overstates the case, and the
RSS spec has been boringly frozen for almost two decades now.

> _The article downplays the significance of Atom._

Does it? Atom Syndication Format seems like a vestigial feed format, so I'm
interested in cases where it's used and RSS isn't also available.

------
spc476
A point not mentioned was Dave Winer's refusal to clarify if excerpts in his
version of RSS feed needed to be plain text or contain HTML (either as HTML
tags or entity encoded). He just kept saying "Keep it simple, people!"

~~~
CharlesW
There's no concept of an "excerpt" in RSS, but if we're talking item
descriptions, the RSS 2.0 spec says that HTML is allowed and provides
examples.

[http://www.rssboard.org/rss-encoding-examples](http://www.rssboard.org/rss-
encoding-examples)

~~~
ttepasse
Those examples came later than Dave Winer's stewardship. Those were made by
the RSS Board which is its own point of weirdness in RSS' history.

------
clacke2
> Maybe RSS could have been extended somehow so that friends subscribed to the
> same channel could syndicate their thoughts about an article to each other.

@dang Congratulations, you just invented OStatus. :-)

OStatus is a combination of Atom+ActivityStreams+Salmon+WebFinger+WebSub for
exactly this purpose. It was created in 2009 and was even partially used by
Google Buzz. I could post something on identi.ca and see it pop up in my
timeline on Google Buzz. But as you indicate regarding RSS, Google didn't know
how to monetize it, and they soon killed Google Buzz in favor of the closed
Google+, years before they killed Google Reader.

When Mastodon arrived in 2016 it used OStatus as its primary protocol until
the new ActivityPub was recommended by the W3C as a replacement. OStatus is
still supported by Mastodon as a secondary protocol, and part of the Fediverse
still runs on pure OStatus.

Diaspora was inspired by OStatus, but removes the WebSub part in favor of
going full Salmon, and does a few of the details differently.

~~~
jwilk
dang?

~~~
clacke2
Seems to be one of the people responsible for the article:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18003343](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18003343)

~~~
jwilk
dang is a HN moderator. This comment is about the HN submission, not about the
original article.

------
marban
Since the discussion about RSS is popping up every month now, I'll just repeat
myself that RSS is still doing great in terms of publisher support. See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17684481](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17684481)

~~~
erikb
Maybe someone is paying a PR company do push the topic because they plan to
release a new product around RSS. Would certainly be interesting.

~~~
justtopost
Any casual HN browser has seen the scores of "Google is evil... and they
killed Reader!" comments endemic to the discussions of any produt release or
shuttering by the former tech darling. It was just a matter of time before
some smart reader figured out how to leverage the sentiment with code and vc
funding. Thats what we do.

------
osterwood
I see a resurgence happening and a great example of that is Micro.blog -- a
social network built on top of RSS, JSON Feed, and other open standards for
posting and comments.

[https://micro.blog/](https://micro.blog/)

[https://help.micro.blog/2015/why-i-created-
this/](https://help.micro.blog/2015/why-i-created-this/)

------
orev
Also use it every day, but there is something to be said about the issues with
it, mainly that it’s invisible to most people. It’s very much a techie thing
and I think the only reason it’s still around is because it’s default in a lot
of site software. It’d be interesting to see what kind of engagement larger
news organizations get from RSS links.

~~~
lsh
> ... it’s invisible to most people.

that's a really general statement but I'm going to bite. Tech need not be up
front and in everybody's face. I think HTTP is the same. It seems reasonable
that most people don't know or care what http is or what it's doing at the
beginning of urls. Or why it sometimes has an 's' on the end. And I'm even
more confident saying that 'most people' don't know about how amazing TCP over
IP is.

I'd like RSS/feeds of strongly typed content to be _more_ invisible and
prevalent. We're living in the HTML dark ages here.

~~~
orev
This is a very odd comparison and I think a straw man, unless you just
misunderstand. Everything you mention is internal plumbing, so of course
people don’t need to care about it, by design. HTTP however does have a very
“in your face” interface, which are the hypertext links themselves. People
know the system exists because it _is_ actually right there in their face. In
RSS, maybe the xml is the plumbing, but there’s no clear and obvious way to
access it, so much so that most people wouldn’t even know it exists. It’s hard
to build and justify a system if a majority of people have no idea about it.

------
jgalvez
Just came in to say I read this in a RSS reader.

~~~
kgwxd
Did you read it or get a link to it? That's a subtle but important difference.
I love RSS and it seems to be available every where I want it to be, even if
it's a bit hidden, but it's almost always just links, maybe a snippet. The
only exception in my current list is Planet GNU.

~~~
danmg
You can read it with:

[https://github.com/damng/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-
content](https://github.com/damng/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content)

This generates an RSS feed with the contents of the articles inlined and
available at [https://damng.github.io/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-
content/...](https://damng.github.io/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-
content/output.rss)

By-passes most soft paywalls. No Javascript. No Tracking. No 'social' media
buttons. No modal dialogs. Just text you can read in a terminal based rss
reader like canto.

~~~
kgwxd
Cool, I'll use it, at least until the hosted site gets a take-down request :)

~~~
danmg
that's ok. i'll just make a new github account or host a static file somewhere
else

------
jonnytran
> He pointed out that Twitter was basically a better RSS feed, since it could
> show you what people thought about an article in addition to the article
> itself. It allowed you to follow people and not just channels.

This is why I absolutely LOVED FriendFeed. Not only could you follow arbitrary
RSS feeds and FriendFeed users, but you could group feeds into "imaginary
users". This was great because you could follow anyone you wanted, even if
they didn't use FriendFeed themselves.

So what happened to FriendFeed? Acquired by Facebook and then killed.

~~~
clacke2
Friendica is still alive and can do this!

It's primarily microblogging-oriented, but you can subscribe to any RSS feed
too. And users (including RSS feeds) can be grouped, so you could have one
group "tech feeds", one group "cat accounts" etc.

------
niftich
This is a remarkable deep-dive into the history of RSS and the ideas and
vision behind it, and how those camps diverged. But despite beginning the
article with Kevin Werbach's prediction that syndication was going to become a
dominant business model on the web, this never quite came to pass, and RSS
took on the role of moving media between aggregators and consumers, rather
than between authors and aggregators as originally intended.

With the shift in usage to the edge, RSS found itself in the company of adhoc
webpages that disseminated the same content but supported scripted adtech to
enable just-in-time display advertising -- advertising which, over time,
became a significant source of publisher revenue. RSS was often surfaced in a
different user-agent and unable to clearly accommodate scripted ads, so first-
party RSS feeds were practically giving away the content for free. With time,
this greatly contributed to the waning appetite of commercial publishers for
RSS, despite it remaining popular in circles were the content was meant to be
spread wide at no cost. Although many news organizations still offer RSS
feeds, they're not really marketed prominently, and remain a loss leader to
make savvy readers happy.

Since alternate business models never achieved the same uptake, efforts like
Google's AMP (and its offshoots like webpackage [1]) are a practical take on
the syndication concept again, where the usage of adtech is assumed from the
start, and the surfacer of the content becomes decoupled from its author.

[1] [https://github.com/WICG/webpackage](https://github.com/WICG/webpackage)

~~~
toyg
_> syndication was going to become a dominant business model on the web, this
never quite came to pass_

This has happened in at least one media segment: podcasting. Ads are simply
inserted in the medium proper, or the feed gets paywalled, or money is
generated while producing the content (live shows).

It is entirely possible to reproduce this achievement in other media sectors,
it just needs to be done wisely:

1\. a catchy name ("rss" or "atom" are too geeky, "feeds" or "syndication" are
too generic, "newscasting" is another thing).

2\. leave clients and formats independent, so the immediate needs of users
prevail over broadcasters' ones. Broadcasters are good at telling people what
to think, but terrible at telling them how to use or consume anything. It also
removes the petty fighting like "we won't rely on a platform built by
$competitor".

3\. Leave ad-management and general money-making schemes up to _publishers_.
They can license feeds to specific clients only, they can do paywalls,
micropayments, embedded ads, whatever. The client should assume nothing,
simply move content from A to B on a schedule. All this can easily be
implemented on HTTP codes, they are all there already.

4\. The real point of feeds is exactly this: move stuff from A to B on a
schedule. Metadata is almost irrelevant. Content display is a side-show. What
podcasting delivers is _control_ : it gets the content a user wants, as soon
as it's available, and makes it ready to be consumed when the user needs it,
in the way s/he prefers. This concept is what should move the effort, not
dreams of semantic sheeps.

5\. Because it optimizes pre-fetching, the format shines where on-demand
fetching is time or money-expensive. Niches where it would (or does already)
work well, ae things like auto-downloading TV episodes, delivering big images
(something for visual artists to cut off Pixiv and friends... ?), delivering
big binary updates and so on. With the rise of single-page-applications, one
could even devise a format that delivers an entire website, ready to be
consumed instantaneously without requiring lots of mobile data usage.
Bootstrapping it in "stingy" markets (Southern EMEA etc) could help.

6\. Good directories for clients to use. Podcasting really took fire when good
directories emerged.

(on a sidenote: AMP is evil and publishers are shooting themselves in the
foot. It seriosly risks to become an "iTunes" moment, where an entire industry
relinquishes control of their market because they don't understand long-term
consequences.)

~~~
whateveruser
Rest of your suggestions are quite thoughtful, but

> They can license feeds to specific clients only

this is a bad idea.

------
carc1n0gen
I still use it every day. I run a python script through Cron that parses a
list of feeds and caches new items in a sqlite database. Then it pulls the
most recent 100 items out of the database and generates a static html page in
which I read them

~~~
Complexicate
This is what I've been telling my grandmother to do, but for some reason she
keeps using Facebook instead.

~~~
carc1n0gen
I recommend your grandmother try feedly if she finds rolling her own too
daunting.

------
guybedo
Might be useful to some: i realized some time ago (yeah it took me a while...)
that most websites that don't have a RSS feed do have a Facebook page. So now
i just add those Facebook pages as RSS feeds in my reader and i can follow
with RSS those websites that don't have a RSS feed. At least Facebook is
useful now.... :-)

~~~
schizoidboy
How do you do this? I did a bit of research and it looks like FB have
deprecated their old RSS feeds based on page `id`.

~~~
guybedo
well i guess there are other ways but as i built a RSS reader, i've added this
feature. But you're right they deprecated the api, so it only works for public
pages, and not people's profiles.

~~~
schizoidboy
Ok, so you use their JSON API with an FB app token?

~~~
guybedo
well you don't need to login to access these pages, they are public, i ended
up doing some html parsing :-)

~~~
schizoidboy
Makes sense

------
upofadown
>That little tangerine bubble has become a wistful symbol of defiance against
a centralized web increasingly controlled by a handful of corporations, ...

Just a quibble about terminology. Those handful of corporations do not control
the web; they merely dominate it. It's an important distinction. Actual
control is censorship, which is an important issue these days. The fact that a
lot of people are using systems associated with a few companies is in the end
relatively unimportant.

RSS is quite important simply because it is used to discover individual
articles from lots of different sources. People who post things with RSS feeds
are not raging against the dark but instead are routinely maintaining the
light.

------
fluxsauce
> After all, The Onion is a publication that relies on syndication through
> Facebook and Twitter

[https://www.theonion.com/rss](https://www.theonion.com/rss)

That didn't take long to find. Why use that as an example?

~~~
cwyers
I think you misunderstood the point there. Facebook and Twitter is what drives
traffic for The Onion. They can and do syndicate via RSS. But it doesn't help
them reach most of their readers.

~~~
scarface74
From a user’s standpoint, who cares? Just because most people don’t use RSS,
doesn’t really matter. Every continuously updated news site and blogging site
still supports it - as well as HN.

Once I start finding sites that don’t support RSS, then I worry.

~~~
cwyers
I mean, care about whatever you want to. I find it odd that someone who
doesn't care posts in an RSS-related thread, but maybe you post about things
you don't care about all of the time.

But if you care about what content is available, if you care about how people
who create work you enjoy are able to make a living about it, if you care
about things like who's the president of the US. Then it might behoove you to
care about the fact that between them, Google, Twitter and Facebook control
the majority of the referral traffic for the most popular 100 websites. A
future where RSS prevailed over social media as a way of curating content for
most people is a different world than the one we live in, and if you care
about the world you live in, you might care about why RSS didn't prevail, even
if it's still usable for the minority who prefer it.

~~~
scarface74
_I mean, care about whatever you want to. I find it odd that someone who doesn
't care posts in an RSS-related thread, but maybe you post about things you
don't care about all of the time._

Reread my post. There is a difference between caring about whether the
majority of _users_ are using RSS and caring about whether _publishers_ are
creating RSS feeds.

I specifically said “Once I start finding sites that don’t support RSS then I
worry.”

------
PaulHoule
Like almost every article about RSS it seems more concerned with people
writing than it is with the needs of the readers. That was always the problem
with David Weiner and his pals.

For instance what the exact format is does not matter. Supporting RSS, Atom
and a few similar formats from a reader perspective is just no problem
compared to parsing bad HTML, dealing with JS Hell, etc.

The real issue is a lack of innovation on the part of feed readers,
particularly that we still see the "here is a list of all your feeds" viewed
separately and no effort to make a workflow where you can make it so your time
is not wasted by articles from Tedium and sensationalistic sites like Fox News
and the New York Times, etc.

see

[http://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/](http://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/)
[http://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/](http://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/)

the machine learning technology to do this is ten years old and if the kids
out there weren't so interested in word embeddings, functional programming and
other fads, they could bring this to the people.

------
sbov
I tried using twitter to get news before. But the news magazines I subscribed
to on twitter tweeted out the same article more than once. It was rather
frustrating.

~~~
erikb
Also nowadays they manipulate what you see. From one source you like you might
only get 1 out of 100 posts into your stream, and another source you don't
care so much about you get 10.

------
m-p-3
Inoreader is my main source of gathering news. Social Medias are IMO ill-
equiped for this tasks, mainly drowning useful info in a ton of noise.

------
lhball
Another tragedy is that RSS dropped in popularity at the same time that
appreciation for the "open" web did. The great fake-news scare has greenlit
walled gardens of the kind people never envisioned back when RSS started.

Content discovery for the everyday internet user consists of either Facebook,
Google, or Twitter. And none of them are opaque about their SERPS / timelines.

------
noirscape
I miss Apples native RSS readers (Safari and Mail used to have native readers,
with Mail being configurable to send you RSS feeds to your inbox). Sadly they
dropped them with Lion if I'm not mistaken.

RSS is/was nice to be able to stay up-to-date with infrequently updating
blogs, and it's honestly a shame that it's no longer used as much as it used
to.

One thing that could possibly re-ignite the use of RSS feeds is a button in
the adress bar (I recall Safari having this option) to indicate that the site
has an RSS feed and taking you to it when you click on it. Maybe look in a
couple of predetermined places to find this feed (feed.xml and rss.xml are
almost universally the common feed names I've seen used on the sites that I
frequent, with the exception of reddit, which simply lets you append .rss to
any URL).

~~~
occamrazor
MS Outlook still has a feed reader, although it is pretty limited.

------
senectus1
what? no one told me!

I still use it every day, its a vital part of my controlling what info I see
every day process...

------
amyjess
Sadly, the article glosses over what a mess RSS 2.0 was. There were actually
three different, slightly incompatible releases of 2.0. It's not really
relevant anymore because so many years have passed, but it used to be that in
order to parse an RSS 2.0 feed, you'd have to know when the feed was created
and parse it differently depending on the creation time.

I read a post about the contentious history of RSS several years ago, similar
to this one, and that bit really jumped out at me. I'll see if I can find it
again.

------
bitcuration
Fundamentally, RSS is supposed to be a tool to deal with information overflow
yet it failed.

The demand is how to get the content of what you want and when you want in the
quickest and easiest way.

Social networks, Tweets, FB, RSS subscriber, flipboard etc. all attempted
despite the Ad revenue must be taken care along the way, yet none has really
met the demand.

Do you get news from your friends, or subscribe people, or visiting sites? To
me it is as much as mundane as 20 years ago when internet started. The problem
has been resolved except many have made tons of money while tackling it. The
fundamental problem remains unresolved and still waiting for answers.

------
xte
Good "history" post that anyone who do not know should read as personal IT
history culture however their conclusion IMVHO are wrong.

When RSS concept started we simply do not have always-on tech, ads-tech,
aggregator's tech and software itself was a business. Now that we have the
above TheBig simply prefer control their consumers better. RSS-web-client like
Google reader are simply ancestor of modern aggregator, a way to control users
while leaving a bit of freedom, aggregator's suppress this last bit of
freedom, that's for me the real reason behind RSS/Atom decline.

Sorry for my poor English.

------
airstrike
I'll say it: I miss RSS.

~~~
scarface74
How do you “miss it”? It hasn’t gone anywhere.

~~~
vhf
Shameless plug backing up the fact it hasn't gone anywhere:
[https://draft.li/blog/2016/03/21/rss-usage-on-the-
web/](https://draft.li/blog/2016/03/21/rss-usage-on-the-web/)

~~~
matkins
Amount of websites that offer RSS != Amount of users who still use RSS

~~~
scarface74
As long as RSS is available and not being abandoned by publishers, why do you
care about the number of _users_?

------
walterbell
What's the best iOS RSS reader for iPad (split view support) and iPhone, which
manages a local-only database of RSS subscriptions, without requiring iCloud
or other cloud-based login and surveillance?

~~~
rimliu
iCloud has surveillance now? Interesting.

~~~
walterbell
[https://money.cnn.com/2016/02/22/technology/apple-privacy-
ic...](https://money.cnn.com/2016/02/22/technology/apple-privacy-
icloud/index.html)

 _> Apple's stance on privacy and security applies only if you don't back up
your data to iCloud ... In the first half of 2015, police agencies _around the
globe _asked to explore 4,472 Apple customer accounts, according to the
company. Apple disclosed data to police on 1,886 them, of which 1,407 were
provided to law enforcement in the United States. In these instances, Apple
gave investigators contents of customer iCloud, iTunes and Game Center
accounts. Apple didn 't always turn over the information. It objected 401
times in all._

~~~
rimliu
This is no more surveillance than police coming to your house with a search
warrant is though.

~~~
walterbell
Occupants of a house are usually aware when a warrant is served.

"Exploration" of iCloud accounts is remote, e.g. ongoing surveillance in
search of data to justify a warrant. It can be done by law enforcement from
multiple countries _globally_ , while searching of a house is performed by
local law enforcement operating under local law.

------
jrochkind1
This is really good, this story of RSS ends up being a representative
illustrative example (synecdoche?) of a couple interesting themes in "what's
happened with the internet".

------
forgotpwd16
I never saw social networks as a replacement to RSS/Atom feeds. Feeds were
about checking news/articles directly from a client, whereas social networks
are about sharing a link.

------
peter_todorov
Still using it everyday:)

------
vshabanov
As a developer of a feed reader that supports both RSS/Atom and
Twitter/Facebook/Google+/Instagram/VK
([https://bazqux.com](https://bazqux.com)) I say that making client for well
defined API hosted by one provider (silo) was much more simple than support
RSS/Atom feeds.

Here is an incomplete list of various problems you'll have if you want to
write a feed reader
[http://inessential.com/2013/03/18/brians_stupid_feed_tricks](http://inessential.com/2013/03/18/brians_stupid_feed_tricks)

It requires a lot of work to make a feed reader that supports all possible
feed generators from all possible sites. And it's more related to multiple
buggy producers than to multiple feed formats (for example repeating item IDs,
different item IDs for the same items, missing IDs -- no matter what format
you use you get same issues).

Another complexity is feed updating itself. Silo hosts content and knows what
was updated. Feed readers don't. So they need to poll and update a lot of
content even if they have just a few users (but with thousand feeds each).
There is a PubSubHubbub, but again, lots of providers and implementations
could be buggy (for most feeds I just fetch them directly when receiving a
push instead of use push data itself since it's more reliable).

So the open nature of web syndication itself dampens its usage by making
developing and running feed reader a costly task. It's really simpler (and
maybe more profitable if you're lucky) to write a silo.

And there are more problems that are not related to feed format at all:
relative complexity of subscribing, not everybody need syndication (many
people prefer occasional visiting of the site instead of reading each
article), new forms of "syndication" (related videos, algorithmic feeds), less
blogs (maybe it's good -- let people post cat pics in social media), less
popularity (not a part of big sites, browsers), less education (social media
and messaging apps is the only Internet some people know) and so on.

But there are people who want to follow every article from interesting sources
in software optimized for this task. And feed readers are the best thing here.
For example, some people use my feed reader for Facebook/Twitter feeds only
(no RSS feeds at all) just because it's more convenient to read them here.

In the end, I think, process of reading subscriptions is more important than
underlying format. If RSS will die (quite unlikely) another methods of getting
articles will appear.

------
therobot24
still use RSS via newsblur, hope this never goes away

------
ehnto
I still use RSS to power my little podcast syndication platform.

While I was building it I did notice it had become harder to find a poscasts
RSS feed but they definitely all still used it. I suspect it is used more as a
business to business/platform to platform transport these days.

Certainly beats building thirty API integrations for people who want to roll
their own syndication for their podcast.

~~~
wenbin
You can find the rss feeds of (almost) all podcasts in the world here:
[https://www.listennotes.com/](https://www.listennotes.com/)

Or use the API:
[https://www.listennotes.com/api/](https://www.listennotes.com/api/)

~~~
ijustwanttovote
I was planning to build something similar to your app, but you built exactly
what I was looking for.

How is the audience feedback so far?

~~~
wenbin
So far so good :)

June, 2018: [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/listen-
notes-3-0](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/listen-notes-3-0)

Dec, 2017:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15825900](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15825900)

But one comment that I heard again and again is: It's meaningless to build a
podcast search engine, because Google and Apple can easily build something
similar :)

------
gtramont
What a well written piece! Thank you for that!

------
saran945
I have been using RSS for 12 years. It has been transformed by big players, Is
n't it Facebook a RSS reader with social features? I only unsubscribed my
friends rss and connected in facebook, other sources like news, releases etc
still I am using RSS.

------
runningmike
I use RSS for machine to machine syndication. It still is a real simple and
brilliant way to scrap content in an easy way. For me RSS is part of the open
web.

------
lkuty
The title article is missing "and re-rise". I use it regularly and I am happy
how it gets the job done : no social stuff, no ads.

------
amanzi
I just read this post via RSS in Feedbin. Still very much alive and kicking.

Also... that website proudly displays an RSS feed button on every page.

------
nopreserveroot
I'm subscribing to this blog out of spite.

------
lokedhs
The irony is that I saw this headline using an RSS reader. That's how I read
the Hacker News stories.

------
RandomInteger4
RSS is a nice format, but it'd be even nicer as json.

Recently had a client that needed me to read their RSS feed into email
templates and update their template after they switched their email service.
First time working with RSS. 10/10, would do so again.

~~~
avhon1
> [RSS would] be even nicer as json.

Already a standard! [https://jsonfeed.org/](https://jsonfeed.org/)

~~~
nicolaslem
I recently added support for JSON feed in my feed reader and blog. After
playing with it for a while, I doubt it will be a wildly supported standard.

\- It is really just RSS/Atom wrapped in JSON. Sure it changes a few names,
makes some elements mandatory and other elements optional but overall it does
not attempt to fix core problems (consistent item IDs to avoid reruns,
embedding messy HTML with relative links...).

\- Besides a dozen of JSON feeds mentioned in the documentation or in the
Github repo, there are very few feeds published in the wild.

\- Its authors seem to have kind of given up already, a lot of open issues and
PRs but not much happening.

Don't get me wrong, I'd like a successor to come and fix the issues that RSS
and Atom have but this successor would need much more traction than what JSON
feed has.

------
lowry
I am reading HN through RSS, what demise?

------
jhabdas
Missing some important discussion topics such as PubSubHubub and WebSub. As
the Web-based ad industry continues to crumble under the ideal of privacy as a
basic human right my vision brings Web feeds back into the limelight but not
as a metadata description frameworks but as monetized content upgrades.

------
RandyRanderson
We need to write some software that generates low-quality articles like this
and then submits them to hn automatically. Candidates:

. $x is dead

. the rise and fall of $x

. new battery breakthrough claims to $x

. Ask HN: $question_where_the_answer_is_my_own_business

. <Google|Apple> <unveils|retires> create_rand_product_name($technology)

. Study reveals random_food() <increases|decreases> risk of random_quality()

. <any string of english words that contains "Machine Learning" or "AI">

. A random_quality() RayTracer in random_tech()

. ??? suggestions welcome

This would then force hn to have some sort of filtering/moderation.

Randy's law 247: The easiest way to fix a non-trivial system is to abuse it.

~~~
bopbop
This article is quite a poor example of the issue you are referring to - it's
quite a detailed look at the technical history of RSS - but I love your regex
spam queries.

Ask HN: $question_where_the_answer_is_my_own_business is my personal
favourite.

~~~
RandyRanderson
They changed the hn title at least once. It was "rise and demise". Go here [0]
and click on past:

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18002503](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18002503)

~~~
bopbop
Understood - that's also the name of the actual article, although on
reflection this article is a bit weirder then your average click bait.

Normally a rise and fall, etc, is only a title looking for eyeballs - what's
most odd about this otherwise well researched article is that the last two
paragraphs actually proclaim RSS's death, when this is clearly not the case.
It's not as prominent without a flagship corporate app like google reader, as
noted by the author, but it's nearly everywhere and there are a large number
of very usable readers on mobile.

It is a good argument against corporate walled gardens, however.

------
tannhaeuser
With the EU parliament's recent voting in favour of requiring
consent/royalties for "rich linking" (eg. previewing content without sending
the user to the original site), I can see a renaissance for RSS as an accepted
and practical means for federated personal news aggregation. But then for me
and many others, RSS has never gone away.

While we are at it, we should also bring back Usenet/nntp (though obviously I
have nothing against news aggregators with discussion boards such as hn). But
long term, only a new distributed p2p web will be able to escape the ever-
increasing shilling and censorship. You can start this process right now and
be prepared for the future by separating content strictly from web apps and
avoiding JavaScript-heavy approaches for content.

~~~
clacke2
> With the EU parliament's recent voting in favour of requiring
> consent/royalties for "rich linking" (eg. previewing content without sending
> the user to the original site), I can see a renaissance for RSS as an
> accepted and practical means for federated personal news aggregation.

That's funny, I see the same legislation as the death of all unauthorized RSS
aggregation. The "link tax" provision isn't about links, it's about excerpts
of content.

~~~
tannhaeuser
But with RSS you're receiving content directly from the publisher's site.
There's no third-party involved, and the publisher can provide as many text
bites as desired. There is no problem there as long as no content aggregation
web site is acting as middleman.

~~~
toyg
_> as long as no content aggregation web site is acting as middleman._

That would imply people will go back to installing things, hunting for feeds,
copypasting urls... As much as I like desktop tech, that boat has likely
sailed, at least for the mass-consumer market. You might _maybe_ get away with
a mobile app, but you'd still need help from browsers to "subscribe" to feeds
- something that was pretty awful the first time it was tried, and has been
basically abandoned or removed since.

~~~
walterbell
We can invent new, mobile-friendly protocols for discovery, especially if
existing methods become difficult under new laws.

~~~
toyg
I was going to say "you can invent anything you want, but good luck convincing
"Appoogle" to help you", but in truth, they've actually let the door open on
mobile with their support for custom urls, so you are right there.

On the desktop it would be harder though.

