
RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried - sant0sk1
http://camendesign.com/blog/rss_is_dying
======
angrycoder
I have used RSS for years now. I check google reader about as often as I check
hacker news. I start my morning off with a cup of coffee while I read my feeds
using Reeder on the iphone or ipad.

Not once have I used any of the RSS features of a browser. I really don't see
the point. I guess google doesn't either.

~~~
Sindisil
Sadly, some blogs have begun to rely on RSS functionality in the browser, and
don't place an RSS link visibly on the page. That makes it rather difficult to
subscribe.

~~~
thebooktocome
Most of the time you can copy the site's URL into Google Reader and it will
try to find the proper RSS feed. It works for blogs hosted on Blogger and
Wordpress, at least; not sure how it does it.

~~~
troels
"not sure how it does it."

The same way that some browsers do it. There is a meta-tag in the page, which
describes which feed formats are available, and where to find them.

~~~
thebooktocome
I think it's a bit more than that. It's worked on sites that Safari can't find
a feed for, and I presume Safari looks for the meta-tag.

~~~
TomasSedovic
I guess Google Reader uses a database of feeds that other people subscribed
to.

For one thing, it shows you the whole history of the feed -- even when the XML
itself contains just the few most recent items.

------
stanleydrew
RSS isn't dying because browsers are deciding not to build native readers into
their UIs. It's dying because it's not terribly easy to understand for most
users. The article readily points this out.

And even for technical users like me, it isn't solving the main problem I have
which is discovering new and interesting content. Sure, once I've found some
new source of content it's nice to put its RSS feed into a reader. But really,
bookmarking is pretty good too. Yes there are clear benefits to RSS over naked
bookmarks, but the discoverability problem is still paramount.

Anyway this is kind of inconsequential to the point of whether native RSS
functionality should be included in a browser. Mozilla is right to kill this
"feature." RSS is an application-level protocol on top of HTTP, itself an
application-level protocol. Browsers are built to perform HTTP requests. In my
opinion they shouldn't do much else. A feature that displays and helps you
manage RSS content falls into the category of bloat.

~~~
sudont
> _Sure, once I've found some new source of content it's nice to put its RSS
> feed into a reader_

This is why most linkblogs are now twitter feeds. Even Andy Baio’s is still a
subset of what he twitters.

My problem in RSS feeds is importance, some sort of metric of popularity would
be good. A lot of times I’ll remove a feed for curatorial purposes to have
that site drop some major project that goes viral, and I then find out several
weeks later.

The entire concept of RSS is somewhat flawed for what happens in the real
world. It would be a lot better to create some XML encapsulation of what the
front page of the NYT does in terms of curatorial importance.

~~~
jerf
"It would be a lot better to create some XML encapsulation of what the front
page of the NYT does in terms of curatorial importance."

RSS would be a critical tool for anyone trying to solve that problem.

A lot of the complaints here are that RSS isn't what RSS isn't. OK, that's
great, but those are more "entrepreneurial opportunities" than problems with
RSS. Toss out RSS (and I assume by extension Atom and all similar friends) and
those opportunities recede, they recede a _lot_ , they don't get better. It is
what it is and it has always been designed from day one to be a foundational
infrastructure on top of which to build more things, not the Final Answer To
All Problems.

~~~
sudont
RSS is strictly linear, largely chronological.

The NYT front page, while changing day-to-day still has a layout that embodies
importance. There needs to be some sort of semantic interpretation of how
important something is other than h1’s. How do we replicate the 144pt super-
important headings while removing presentation from content?

The web was built for rationalist minds and papers, and the separation of html
elements furthers this goal, yet hampers any sort of human-ness of
communication.

RSS is great for a blog, but bad for newspapers. Check out NYT’s RSS feed.
Every article ticks in at an equal level of importance and requires the
viewer’s mental acuity to discern what’s #1. Not so with their web-front or
printed sheet.

Syndication, while essential, needs to be extended.

~~~
jerf
It also has to be some sort of project that uses RSS, not something built into
an RSS-replacement. It requires some sort of third-party interaction with your
input to determine "importance". Leave it to the New York Times and at _best_
their decisions about importance merely won't match yours; at worse they'll
simply label everything "important", sort of like the way my HR department
seems to reflexively tick that box in Outlook regardless of whether open
enrollment is about to close or somebody's parking job is a bit off and could
they please correct it?

~~~
sudont
You bring up a good point, importance is a human attribution to information,
and a lot of people are either stupid or self-important. Impartial judgement
is important, but NPR's music segments demonstrate that trending topics are
middling and not truly important.

If the curator is strictly online popularity, news sites invariably turn into
people magazine. You need some high-and-mighty news nerd to determine what's
truly important. Sure, the curator's occasionally wrong or late, but it's a
lot better than pointless water-cooler talk.

------
corin_
I can't imagine that browser button pursuading anyone who doesn't already
understand and appreciate RSS to start using it. Anyone tech-savvy enough to
see it, and start googling to find out how to use it properly has certainly
already heard of RSS.

And on the other side, anyone who does use RSS, and anyone in the future who
learns to use it, won't be put off using it by the loss of that button.

The worse statement in this article (other than the french man smoking) is:

    
    
      Mozilla’s mistake here is to associate low usage with user dis-interest.
    

Ummm... they're correct. He claims that, just because only 3-7% use it, it
must be kept in because "what regular user wouldn’t want this feature!?"
Clearly the answer to that question is "93-97% of regular users". Touché?

~~~
ianl
3%-7% that use the button are most likely power users. It would be unwise to
disenfranchise them as they are the ones who normally advocate your software
to their friends (regular users).

~~~
lftl
In chrome at least you can install a plugin to add an RSS icon to the URL bar.
Easy enough for power users.

~~~
Groxx
That seems like it's the best option, actually. For power-users, a 3rd-party
built extension is more likely to be updated / have the options you want than
the button built into every version of the browser.

~~~
imrehg
Actually, it is a plugin made by Google, so they must know there's a need...
[https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nlbjncdgjeocebhn...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmkbbbdekmmmcbfjd)

------
TomOfTTB
RSS is not dying.

There are very few individual users of it but there are literally millions of
web sites that use it. Almost everyone on the Internet uses a portal site of
some kind and the only way to be included on one of those sites is RSS/Atom
feeds.

So as long as people want to use RSS for a personal reader it will be there to
do it. And there will always be RSS readers because every programming
environment I can think of has a pre-built library for feed reading meaning a
programmer could whip a reader up in under an hour.

As far as the button disappearing from browsers that just makes UI sense.
Chrome Browser taught the rest of the industry that most people hate clutter
in their browser. So buttons that 93% of the users don't use are being taken
out. But they can be added back with a simple browser extension/plug-
in/whatever. So even here the people who want to use an RSS reader aren't
losing anything

(and even without an extension/plug-in/whatever any user savvy enough to be
using a reader will know how to cut and paste a url)

------
Lagged2Death
The implementation of RSS in Firefox was always an "ultra-lite" version that I
doubt will be missed by any serious RSS enthusiasts. A full-featured RSS
reader feels a lot like a mailing list, so I think it's appropriate to keep
RSS in Thunderbird rather than Firefox.

In some respects, a web-app RSS reader (like Bloglines or Google Reader) is
better. You can access your feeds from any computer, the read/unread status is
kept synchronized between PCs, and the centralized web-app arrangement makes
more efficient use of network resources. Better to have Google Reader poll a
site every 30 minutes than to have 10,000 Firefox installs each polling it
every few hours.

The only browsers I know of that ever had good in-browser RSS readers were
Opera and Seamonkey. But even in those cases, RSS was included as part of the
mail client, not shoehorned into the browsing paradigm.

~~~
nakkiel
Agreed.

I once wrote a Python script that would parse RSS feeds and write emails in a
maildir (or whatever is supported by Python); one was then able to read news
from an MUA which was comfortable (Mutt by then). I lost that script when I
did a 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda' before quitting my last job and realizing
2 minutes later that I forgot to backup many useful scripts I wrote over the
course of my year and half in that NGO.

Being a smoking Frenchman, I'm tempted to be gratuitously insulting to the
author but there's one interesting problem that could come from RSS'
disappearance from browsers: the lack of visibility may very well "destroy"
the format in the long term. Also, as the web is increasingly publicized, the
incentive to remove a format that generates traffic but may hardly generate
revenue might be high.

~~~
joeyh
The canonical one is called "rss2email"

~~~
turbodog
I'm the maintainer of the project and it's homepage is
<http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/>

------
GBKS
From the user flow, RSS doesn't make much sense. Clicking an RSS button shows
you the same thing you just looked at, except without the site design and only
partial content (Safari). Currently, in Chrome, I just see a dense block of
text.

RSS is an amazing tool, but maybe we just haven't found the right UI for it
yet. Exposing it in the browser doesn't work very well and treating RSS as an
Inbox (like Google Reader) where every item needs to be marked as read is too
overwhelming. Personally, I think a social approach to RSS that puts content
and personal preferences at the fore-front would solve a lot of this.

------
patio11
_RSS saves me from having to load up 100 different sites several times a day
just to check what’s ‘new’._

Everything wrong with RSS in a nutshell: this is a problem real people don't
have.

~~~
erikpukinskis
I fully appreciate the sentiment, I hate when people build stuff people don't
need.

But I want to dig a little at this. I think the fact that most people only
have access to CNN or Time or Fox News or Cosmopolitan or Maxim or whatever...
that there is not an easy way for people to get news aggregated from 100's of
their peers and thought leaders in their affinity groups.... I think that IS a
problem people have. It may not be a problem they are aware of, but I think
the social cost of consolidated media is very high.

I think RSS, and technologies like it (Twitter, Facebook) are an important
part of the solution to that problem. RSS is obviously not very user friendly,
and I'm not sure if it will have a place at the table 10 years from now.

But the problem it solves (a standard interchange format for syndication) is
absolutely real, and it's not going away.

~~~
philwelch
Your comment reminds me of this Calvin and Hobbes strip:
[http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_RbiRIw_w4rU/SNkssvl3KeI/AAAAAAAAAC...](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_RbiRIw_w4rU/SNkssvl3KeI/AAAAAAAAACQ/whLxzvwCU9k/s1600-h/calvinandhobbes.png)

~~~
erikpukinskis
Maybe it's too late, but I don't quite see the connection. Regardless, I
consider Calvin to be "good company".

------
pamelafox
RSS readers may be dying (I admit that I once was a Google Reader fanatic and
now only log in time to time), but RSS/ATOM as a format for communicating
between websites is still pretty decent. I often setup an ATOM feed for the
data on whatever webapp I'm building, and usually end up using that feed to
integrate with other webapps. (And as a bonus, I can hand it out to techie
users).

I don't know, do you think that RSS readers dying will mean websites will stop
producing RSS feeds? The output seems to be built in to many systems these
days already.

------
bretpiatt
It is pretty clear why Google doesn't like RSS, it stops you from browsing the
web and that is how they get paid. As a user though I also don't like it
anymore and I'll share why...

This isn't 1970 anymore where I want to read "What's New" from a small list of
new sources. I prefer to go each day to a list of curated aggregators like HN
or what the people I follow on Twitter or saying. This is vastly superior to
RSS and this is why at least one technical user no longer uses it.

~~~
stanleydrew
"It is pretty clear why Google doesn't like RSS, it stops you from browsing
the web and that is how they get paid."

But they built and are actively maintaining Google reader. I don't think
Google dislikes RSS, rather they are hesitant to build a browser feature for
something that should really be a separate application.

~~~
wyclif
Robert Scoble says he was told (ostensibly by someone at Google) that the
Google Reader team has been largely disbanded, and that the project is no
longer maintained. He's mentioned this a couple of times on Quora, on Buzz,
and on his blog.

~~~
stanleydrew
Well I'll go one step further then and point out that Google is the creator of
PubSubHubbub (<http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/>). My point is that I
don't think Google hates users aggregating content and having it pushed to
them rather than browsing for it.

~~~
TomOfTTB
I don't disagree but in fairness it was created by 3 people one of which
worked at SixApart

~~~
stanleydrew
Thanks for the info. Before posting my comment I did some quick Googling and
couldn't find much about the history of PubSubHubbub. I did want to be sure
that I wasn't wrong about Google's involvement. Using the word "creator" with
respect to Google itself was probably a little strong.

------
petervandijck
RSS isn't dying, it's become so pervasive that it's now invisible
infrastructure.

------
jonnii
I'm glad my browser doesn't support RSS natively when other apps offer a far
greater experience. Have you tried the safari rss reader? It's awful.

As a chrome user I'm happy that it does one thing well and that's displaying
web pages. Now I'm free to use any online RSS reader I want and be able to
access my RSS feeds from anywhere.

------
ghurlman
It's hard to take the author's concern seriously, when I can't even find the
RSS link on his/her page.

~~~
kroc
_because the browser is supposed to provide the button_.

Why do you think I’m worried? I don’t want to have to clutter my site with a
button to an XML feed that nobody understands. I want the browser auto-
discovery to do the right thing and present the right interface to make RSS
worthwhile.

Turning the key in a car shouldn’t present you a diagram on how to connect the
battery. Browsers shouldn’t sit there dumbfounded when presented a piece of
RSS.

~~~
DougBTX
_Why do you think I’m worried?_

Because auto-discovery isn't working on his site either? (At least in Safari)

~~~
ugh
It is working. Safari changed the way it displays RSS feeds. You have to click
and hold on the “Reader” button to display any RSS feeds.

------
k33n
> Mozilla outright refuse to listen (33 bloody votes!)

Wow, 33 votes. They're really ignoring the masses on that one.

~~~
bzbarsky
For a bug in Mozilla's Bugzilla installation, that's high.

Of course all the high-vote bugs are special-interest-advocacy stuff like
"bring back MNG support" and "bring back gopher support" and "bring back the
RSS button"... So high vote count is actually a reliable indicator that the
bug should be wontfixed, more often than not.

------
tlianza
Curious why none of the comments, nor the original article, mentions Internet
Explorer. They've continued to add new features in this area ever since IE7.
The icon is hidden now in IE9 (as are most of the icons... less browser chrome
is fashionable) but I believe they still consider this a first-class feature.

They are still the world's most popular browser... and presumably their users
are _less_ technical, so presumably it's usage is _less_ than what Mozilla
reports, but it remains.

~~~
Groxx
> _They are still the world's most popular browser_

Because of their _history_. Because users aren't technical. Because IE is
_bundled with Windows_. And look how quickly they've been falling in use.
Methinks they won't be the most popular for much longer, which is an
_incredible_ mark against their design decisions because of how fast and how
far they've fallen from such complete domination.

~~~
tlianza
The story is about RSS dying, and the author is upset that Mozilla is removing
RSS features and Chrome never had any. Are you also arguing that IE is failing
because they still have those features (possibly a bad design decision)?

In which case, what is it we're complaining about? Browsers that have RSS
readers are bad and browsers that don't have RSS readers are bad?

~~~
Groxx
Not at all. I'm arguing that taking your design decisions from IE based on
IE's popularity is illogical when looked at in context.

------
corywilkerson
This. "Every website should not look like a NASCAR advert for every sharing
service in existence."

~~~
thwarted
That's one reason I've always thought bookmarklets were better for sharing,
not the least of which is because you don't need to wait/hope the website
operator adds support for the sharing site you are using.

------
ryanwaggoner
The replacement for RSS isn't Facebook and Twitter...it's email. People don't
understand RSS but they understand: "Enter your email address to subscribe to
updates." Hence the reason that CPM rates for email are so much higher...

------
bl4k
Users shouldn't need to know what RSS is to use it just as they don't need to
know what HTTP is to read a website or what SMTP is to send email.

The interface to using RSS has always been flawed, that is where the problem
is.

------
Groxx
> _IF RSS DIES, WE LOSE THE ABILITY TO READ IN PRIVATE_

Based on what causal chain? At best, it's an _incredible_ stretch of a
slippery slope fallacy.

~~~
codeup
Disagree. The author clearly refers to corporations like Facebook and Twitter
tracking your reading behavior.

~~~
Groxx
So run NoScript. Run in private mode. Block their cookies. Block their address
in your hosts file. You can use wget, curl, or any other cookieless
downloading tools, none of which will expose you reading The Times to
Facebook. RSS doesn't even prevent against this; it can be behind a login, it
can require cookies or not serve up info, and it can send info to Facebook
denoting you viewed article X. All of which is determined by the _server_ it's
running on, not the format of data it serves up.

Browsers are unnecessary for RSS _or tracking_ , and it's a very poor match
for browsing behaviors anyway.

~~~
codeup
Why should I have to do all that if RSS already exists? There's no reason to
accept letting this working technology die.

I agree that browsers are unnecessary for RSS though.

~~~
Groxx
Because if you're that worried about Facebook tracking your browsing habits,
accessing information via RSS will only prevent _some_ tracking. The Like
button is damn near everywhere, not just on news sites. The only way to
prevent it is to prevent your browsing tools from communicating with Facebook
_at all_ , and hope the servers you're accessing aren't doing it behind the
scenes. And/or anonymize your connection (TOR), so even that doesn't give them
anything.

The point is that paranoia (valid or not) is _not_ a reason to keep a
technology alive when that technology does not solve the problem, especially
when solutions _do_ exist. If you want a solution, _use a solution_ , not a
crippled, bundled-in-your-browser partial solution that only works under
certain circumstances / assumptions.

~~~
codeup
Are you trying to pitch RSS against privacy enhancing technologies such as
NoScript, TOR, etc.? The point is rather that more privacy is a neat side
effect of RSS, not its primary purpose.

The primary purpose of RSS - aggregation of content -- works very well,
irrespective of bad UI decisions which have nothing to do with RSS itself. And
when you pull a full text RSS feed, you're probably far away from "Like"
buttons and the like while reading content.

~~~
Groxx
RSS is an exchange format, nothing more. Don't conflate it with _some_
historical transmission methods, nor ignore cases where it's behind a paywall,
nor embedded tracking images (since nearly any reader will allow images).

Privacy has _nothing_ to do with RSS. Some feeds I subscribe to have
JavaScript _and_ Flash - where's the privacy there? Some are behind paywalls -
I'm identified by logging in, and even more so by providing payment info to be
_able_ to log in.

Thus, by losing RSS, we would lose _zero_ ability to read privately. It's only
viewed as being without all the privacy-sniffing bells and whistles because
_most_ providers don't do so. RSS can lose all its currently-common privacy
attributes while still being RSS. We should be worried about the loss of
_privacy_ online, which is rampant, not the loss of RSS (if it does die). And
RSS is a particularly bad flagpole to gather around; anyone up in arms about
it is much more likely to be up in arms about privacy than the reverse.

------
zoul
RSS is dying because browser vendors do not want to implement or maintain
integrated RSS readers? That does not sound very convincing.

~~~
kroc
RSS aggregators are used by the elite few. When websites start deciding to use
Twitter and Facebook instead of RSS because it’s faster and gives them better
features, and regular users understand it better, then there will be
complaints.

------
beej71
RSS is really cheap to set up compared to the cost of an entire site, and for
news sites, it makes economic sense to add a feed on the off-chance that you
might get 0.1% more readers.

The technology that is the RSS reader is not the driver of RSS. The feed is
what drives it. NYT is putting up a feed even if is has zero browser support,
I'll bet.

Until it's not worth the practically-zero cost of setting up a feed, there
will be piles of feeds out there. Publishers will use anything they can to get
more eyeballs, and feeds like RSS fit perfectly into that strategy.

I use RSS all the time. That's how I got to this article. And I'm not worried
about it one bit.

------
bendauphinee
RSS is not dying. It's just not based in the browser, and I'm fine with that.
I use an RSS aggregation program, and if I really wanted to, there is open
source software available to build and host my own RSS portal.

------
smcl
"It gives less of a shite than a French man smoking a cigarette in public"

Um...what?

~~~
stanleydrew
Really HN? We're upvoting this? No offense to the commenter, but we can do
better.

~~~
mechanical_fish
I don't think so, actually. I'd be hard put to make that comment's point any
more elegantly.

In person, the right response to the original sentence would be a polite
cough, followed by a brief but significant silence, followed by a slight but
detectable face-saving change of subject. We can't do those things on the web,
but in this case "um... what?" is an artful alternative.

~~~
stanleydrew
I question the comment's usefulness to this discussion, not the elegance with
which it was made (although I think I disagree on that as well).

The comment, to me, is a distraction. Not purposeful I'm sure, but it's had
that effect. The fact that the community would vote it up to the point where
it might be the first comment someone reads when seeing this thread is
disappointing.

~~~
smcl
> The comment, to me, is a distraction

Perhaps a little reflection is in order, you were originally unhappy that the
comment I made might have distracted from, or derailed, any possible
discussion. Then, rather than turning the other cheek, you opted to kick off a
discussion which has ironically created a genuine distraction.

update: This reply was a little bit cheeky and I subsequently sent stanleydrew
an email to apologise.

~~~
stanleydrew
The irony is not lost on me, certainly. I think this is the first time I've
ever called out a comment as inappropriate in my nearly two years of active HN
participation. Usually I read comments like this, downvote and flag, and then
move on.

My intention was not to start a discussion. My intention was to make people
think before upvoting, and to make people think before they consider posting a
similar comment in the future. Hopefully, despite derailing the larger thread
a bit, I achieved that goal.

I'm happy to take this discussion offline though, in order to prevent further
derailment. My email is in my profile.

------
gregory80
just b/c rss is dying, thank god too, doesn't mean syndication is dying.
already ideas like pubsubhubbub have provided realtime syndication in a more
compact format.

The web is just moving to realtime and ingesting a big long text file and
determining deltas sucked. For that matter, XML as a data transport vehicle
should end in favor of more compact and type friendly solutions like JSON.

Don't be so alarmist that a crappy tech is being phased out. Now, where's my
Tandy 1000.

------
shaver
What would an RSS reader good enough for Kroc's grandmother and 419,999,999
other Firefox users look like? I would be genuinely interested in his designs
for one. Of the many different RSS reader add-ons I've tried for Firefox, for
example, there haven't been any that made me say "we've gotta put this in
Firefox, let's delay $otherwork instead". If we had an energetic contributor
like Kroc, though, it's quite possible that we could end up in a great place.
I'm not trying to say "patches talk, chump", though of course they _do_ speak
quite compellingly. I'm trying to indicate that via open projects like Mozilla
technical people can have agency beyond voting in bugzilla (!) or a letter-
writing campaign.

It'll be interesting to test Kroc's thesis, though: if he's right that RSS
will be harmed a lot by Firefox removing the RSS icon, then hits to the RSS
stream from Firefox UAs should change trend-line between 3.6.x and 4. I look
forward to such a follow-up, it would be interesting data!

~~~
dlsspy
I think it'd look like it looks for many of us.

I go to a web site and see a little orange button that I can click and it will
add this web site flipbook.

Yay, now I can read the web site like a magazine with consistent and readable
formatting and not have to remember what that site was I wanted to go back and
look at the next time they posted something.

------
Create
I think it is plain and simply facebook and twitter which are killing RSS.
Most normal people have heard about twitter and facebook and have no clue
about the cryptic acronym RSS. Which, by-the-way requires a technical degree
to understand, and to use (should it rather be v1 v2 or atom? does my pc
support the best option?). Is it really a bookmark? Or an inbox? Or a
notification? Now one should go through hidden features and install new apps.
No sane person would set this up as opposed to a single click in a browser to
a twitter feed or the push of a like button.

Like webmail displaced most "normal" people's imap/smtp (with all the firewall
misery). Google groups/forums displaced NNTP.

I also feel sad, because RSS was free, while twitter and facebook are careless
computing.

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/dec/14/chrome...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/dec/14/chrome-
os-richard-stallman-warning?INTCMP=SRCH)

------
mmphosis
Okay, I haven't really used RSS before. I'm diving in. In Safari Version 5.0.3
(6533.19.4), I view all of the RSS Feeds by choosing the following (buried)
menu item:

Bookmarks > Bookmarks Bar > View All RSS Articles

I can't find a "View All RSS Articles" button. By default, I hide the
"Bookmarks Bar" toolbar (because I want as much vertical screen real estate as
I can get.) The "View All RSS Articles" item does not appear in the "Bookmarks
Bar" toolbar when I make this toolbar visible.

I am looking into the NetNewsWire app for Mac.
<http://netnewswireapp.com/mac/>

No RSS feed for Wikipedia portal:Current events?
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events>

Hacker News RSS is broken? <http://news.ycombinator.com/rss>

~~~
jschuur
Try this improved full text HN feed:

[http://preona.net/2010/12/hackernews-full-feed-for-your-
read...](http://preona.net/2010/12/hackernews-full-feed-for-your-reading-
pleasure/)

------
draebek
Lack of a browser button doesn't put me off using RSS, as many have pointed
out. There are browser extensions and GreaseMonkey scripts for me to add feeds
to Google Reader.

I'd be more concerned that RSS is dying because many content providers--from
big media to bloggers--seem to prefer to only show me a short excerpt, or even
a title in their RSS feeds. I don't want to leave Google Reader to read your
articles! When I have to open every single RSS item's link (in a new tab) from
Reader, that either discourages me from visiting your site... or discourages
me from using RSS, as it adds little to no value, and indeed just introduces
frustration.

The other reason I avoid RSS is for sites like HN and Reddit, where the order
of links, their scores, and their ages are important. Maybe RSS should be
updatable (which may be what PubSubHubbub is designed for?).

------
lwhi
RSS is not dying! One of the traditional applications for RSS (a browser-based
RSS feed-reader) is becoming obsoleted because most browsers aren't
particularly good at managing feeds.

I can understand why the benefits of RSS aren't more widely understood by the
general public; the technology makes use of an abbreviation (an abbreviation
that isn't actually much more comprehensible when its spelt out).

RSS is a service, used by applications to make content portable. It's not a
final solution, it's a tool that can be integrated into a number of different
applications. It's quite likely that many of the applications it could be used
for haven't been created yet.

A slightly ridiculous article.

------
doorty
I frankly never got into RSS until I started using RockMelt about a month ago.
Now I use it all the time to tell me when there are new Hacker News post, etc.
But unfortunately the only clickable link for the Hacker News RSS takes me to
the story, which is often an external link. If I want to see the "discuss" of
the story I have to manually go the website and find the post and click the
discuss link. Perhaps RSS needs a more robust protocol that wouldn't require
others to make their own API. Then I think browsers like Rock Melt might bring
this new kind of RSS to the masses.

~~~
gnosis
The reader I use, newsbeuter, always shows two links: the article link, and
the discussions link.

<http://www.newsbeuter.org>

You might also be interested in trying these alternate HN feeds:

    
    
      http://andrewtrusty.appspot.com/readability/feed?url=http://news.ycombinator.com/rss
    

<http://feeds.feedburner.com/HackerNewsFullFeed>

------
Kilimanjaro
Change the RSS button for a 'Follow' button.

------
geoffw8
RSS is the pipe, its not a solution. Your average joe doesn't "know" what
TCP/IP is and frankly its the same for RSS. Something needs to sit at either
end and actually make use of the RSS "pipe".

------
agavin
RSS brings me 90% of my outside information. And by doing it with programs
like Reeder that use Google Reader to sync the feeds and what's been read
allow me to do it on 3 computers, an iphone, and an ipad without ever seeing
the same junk twice

But, it does require some computer savvy to setup and operate. You need
programs, you need to sometimes figure out your feed URL's. Good reader has a
really weird and lousy interface.

As a computer guy I don't care, but I rarely recommend it to even medium tech
savvy friends because I don't see them dealing.

------
bsg75
RSS is a tool for technologists. The average user will not find it attractive
enough, so RSS will always be used by the minority. This does not necessarily
make it a dying technology however.

------
bambax
An interesting point of this post is that Twitter is effectively about to
replace RSS, and that in order to use Twitter one has to have an account with
it and "follow" such and such.

But is this really true? Wouldn't it be possible to build an (authorized)
interface to Twitter that would serve search results according to
topics/keywords without actually creating an account with Twitter?

Something along the lines of

    
    
        twitfeed.com/topics?q=topic1+topic2+topic3
    

I'm sure this already exists somehow?

~~~
rjvir
Kind of:
[http://twitter.com/search?q=node.js%20OR%20from:reddit%20OR%...](http://twitter.com/search?q=node.js%20OR%20from:reddit%20OR%20from:hackernewsbot)

This searches all posts that contain "node.js", are from reddit, or are from
hackernewsbot. You can even get an RSS feed for it, at
[http://search.twitter.com/search?q=node.js%20OR%20from:reddi...](http://search.twitter.com/search?q=node.js%20OR%20from:reddit%20OR%20from:hackernewsbot&format=rss)

------
nycticorax
I use Google Reader, because I want to know when there's new stuff on certain
sites without visiting them all, but I don't like it that much. I prefer to
read the stories on the web site, with its "native" formatting and whatnot. Is
there a tool in any of the common browsers that will highlight a bookmark (or
something like that) when there's new content on the site? I think I'd greatly
prefer that to the whole business of using a feed reader. Am I the only one?

------
tel
Recently Flipboard added a Google Reader section. I've started using this and
never turned back. It solves perfectly pretty much every problem with RSS via
attractive presentation, quick access to full content, social connectivity,
and getting rid of the "inbox feel".

Like a few others here, I look at RSS in the morning. As it turns out, what I
really wanted was a sort of newspaper/magazine format. Flipboard delivers that
perfectly.

------
zzzeek
RSS is primarily used by aggregation widgets and sites as a server-to-server
protocol for retrieving lists of links from blogs and news sites, and I see no
evidence offered that anything is changing in that regard.

As far as people actually using their "RSS" buttons to read websites, I've
actually never heard of anyone doing that. The author appears to misunderstand
the primary rationale of modern RSS.

------
kinnth0
Can't we just use Google reader and be done with it?

------
omaranto
I won't miss the RSS browser button: I hardly ever use it! While I read many
RSS feeds I almost never subscribe to them (which is what I've used the button
for). The average number of times I've subscribed to a feed I read is
extremely close to 1, and the average number of times I've subscribed to each
existing feed in the world is extremely close to 0.

------
stan_d
I'd be interested to know the number of people using Google Reader as their
primary tool to read stuff from the web. I'm sure the numbers would skew
heavily towards the tech/geek crowd. But I have no idea how popular it is.

------
macco
RSS is dying only if Bloggers don't support it anymore. But I can't see that.

------
EGreg
This is ridiculous. First of all what about the ATOM format? I don't think
it's dying.

Anyway, why not simply have an RSS plugin / extension as some have suggested?
You can do this in all the browsers.

------
antidaily
Most of what I need to read shows up on HN or Reddit or Twitter. I know that
sounds incredibly lazy, but I don't have time to mark 233 Lifehacker posts as
read every week.

------
hsmyers
I only indirectly depend on browser based RSS feeds as I use Google Reader.
Which does precisely what I want it to and is available without regard to
browser.

------
asadotzler
The only problem with Kroc's rant is that RSS auto discovery and UI wasn't
removed from Firefox. It was moved from the addressbar to the Bookmarks menu.

------
eitan
I find myself more & more use blekko to replace my RSS feeds, maybe this is
the future of feeds.

But then again maybe blekko doesn't have a future....

------
dennyferra
I want to read my RSS feeds like a newspaper. I think formatting is really the
issue. I don't necessarily want a list of links.

------
yycom
Why should this particular <link> incantation receive special treatment over
others?

~~~
nakkiel
How are other <link> elements not specially treated?

    
    
        <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://ycombinator.com/news.css"> 
        <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/favicon.ico"> 
    

Also, this will make a good reading:
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#h-12.3>

_"Although LINK has no content, it conveys relationship information that may
be rendered by user agents in a variety of ways (e.g., a tool-bar with a drop-
down menu of links)."_

~~~
kroc
Well put; what I believe in is that user agents should do their absolute best
to make the most sense of what information is available to it in the context
of the UI paradigm of the user agent. i.e. there is not enough screen space on
phones for every website to fit an RSS icon; the browser should do the best
thing that befits its UI and help minimise the efforts of the user to get the
information they want. RSS can massively help with that.

Imagine for example that on the Chrome home page, where sites you visit often
appear, Chrome also was following the RSS of these sites in the background,
and listing new news items for those sites on the home page, all without you
having to do anything.

There is infinite possibility here for browser vendors to make browsing
quicker, easier and more intelligent and RSS is a key part of that. The
browser vendors are not interested in exploring this avenue and as such
everybody is stuck doing the same stupid routine every single day. This is
dumb! Our computers should be smarter than this!

~~~
nakkiel
_Imagine for example that on the Chrome home page, where sites you visit often
appear, Chrome also was following the RSS of these sites in the background,
and listing new news items for those sites on the home page, all without you
having to do anything._

That's a hell of a good idea actually. Having a count of items that popped on
a website since your last visit would be a really useful information.

------
gurraman
I have -- without giving it much thought -- stopped using RSS. Many friends
have done the same. Now browsers seem to be dropping support. Maybe this is
proof that RSS/Atom wasn't the panacea we thought it was. Maybe it is actually
time for RSS to die?

------
axod
RSS never really caught on beyond a geek crowd. I've never used it.

~~~
dlsspy
I had a lot of TiVo conversations like this ten or eleven years ago. Lots of
people who never used the technology would tell me why it didn't make sense to
them.

~~~
axod
Is TiVo still big in the US? (It doesn't exist in the UK). We have various
hard disk based recorders, and sky plus etc

~~~
dlsspy
TiVo itself isn't huge, but pretty much everyone has a DVR these days.

I just use that as an example because 10-11 years ago nobody knew what it was,
but they knew they didn't need it... until they tried it.

~~~
axod
But RSS is like 10-15 years old. How long until it takes off?

------
stretchwithme
Cobol's been dying too and I'm not concerned about that either.

------
zandorg
I think Dave Winer, basically inventor of RSS, would disagree.

~~~
markg
Dave Winer did not invent RSS. You might want to know your history before
spouting such nonsense.

------
peterbotond
many users use webkit and write a program that evaluates, stores the content
effectively building a personal rss.

moreover.com has many precompiled rss feeds for various subjects.

------
emef
If there was really enough demand for RSS, it wouldn't die.

~~~
kroc
How can there be demand if nobody is making it easy to use?

~~~
emef
It seems like the incentive is missing. Browser developers have to prioritize
what users use and what they know how to use. The author made the point that
very few people even know what RSS is, and I think it's the content
deliverers' responsibility to make users aware of that feature; there's only
so much a browser can do to help with that.

------
ThePinion
I just want you to know years ago I vowed to use RSS in all of my websites for
the rest of my life. I would hate an Internet without RSS feeds (and Google
Reader!)

------
mcnemesis
am probably contributing late, but i have recently worked on something that
might solve this "rss hunger" or at least provide a better alternative
eventually. am calling my creation "razor" and it runs right in the brwser, is
totally free, doesn't sacrifice privacy to corporations, is customizable by
the user (only knowledge of regular expressions required - in case one wants
to craft their own feeds)

i've developed my solution as a firefox addon, and you can download it from
here -- <http://fixx.yolasite.com/razor>

i'd never used rss feeds before (probably wouldn't have invented razor then?),
but razor is different and to me is more powerful!

i use razor to check newest stuff from hacker_news using the following saved
razor-expression:

[http://news.ycombinator.com/newest)))<a](http://news.ycombinator.com/newest\)\)\)<a)
href=".+">. _< /a>%%%>[^<]_<%%%[^>]. _[^ <]((([0-9]+._ago---[0-9]+.
_point---\s_ by\s _\---^[0-9]_ \\.$---^\s _\\(._ \\)\s _$---^[0-9]+[
]comment._ \s _$---^\w_ $---^\s _[\|\\[]\s_ $---^Feature Requests$---^Y
Combinator$---^Hacker News$---^(News\s _)_ $

It might look "geeky" and intimidating, but check the above razor link (it has
docs too) and you'll see why this solution is promising.

nice feeds hacking!

~~~
jerf
Thank you for demonstrating so clearly why we need RSS.

If you don't get it yet, check back in two years. You'll be able to tell us
all about why that doesn't scale and can't work and RSS is a lot better. You
may not believe me yet, but I can wait.

~~~
mcnemesis
well help by clarifying why. as i said, this might not be the best, but
probably the difference between this and RSS is that razor isn't solely meant
to create information feeds, it is a quicker and more succinct way of scraping
the web for arbitrary information.

it solves the problem of having to build a new scraper tool every time you
have some site you want to programatically pick something from.

maybe i didn't clarify its purpose well, or i gave the wrong examples? imagine
using it to track malformed tags in web pages of your choice in real-time,
this is another way it could be used.

------
u48998
If Mozilla is getting rid of it and if Chrome doesn't have it, than that's
just proof enough that big companies are conspiring against RSS. My fingers
crossed for the Adblocker.

