

Do people subscribe to blogs less now? My blog's numbers. - epi0Bauqu
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/04/do-people-subscribe-to-blogs-less-now-my-blog-by-the-numbers.html

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DavidMcLaughlin
In the last two years I have went from having over 500 RSS feeds in my Firefox
toolbar from various bloggers to narrowing that down to maybe 50 community hub
type blogs like techmeme/DIGG/Reddit and then eventually I had one RSS feed
which was HN. I find the comments to be invaluable so even now it's
inconvenient to read HN stories through the RSS feed, so now I don't use RSS
at all.

I think the general principle behind feeds was always content discovery rather
than loyalty to a particular author. Blogs were so effective because the likes
of Coding Horror didn't just post some insight into programming but generally
linked to lots of other really interesting posts that could educate and
entertain for as much time as you had to burn. The only problem was if you
wanted to do this every day, then it was hit and miss and your reading list
for the day was too dependent on a good writer having something to say when
you wanted entertained (hence the volume of my subscriptions).

Aggregation sites like Reddit and Digg were the next stage in content
discovery but the noise ratio was far too high to replace my RSS feeds. Then
the niche sites like Proggit and Hacker News pretty much eliminated my need
for RSS. Whereas previously I could spend an hour reading my personal feeds
and come away feeling like I wasted an hour, now I feel like an hour on HN
will not only keep me aware of the emerging trends in my profession but also
give me lots of interesting anecdotes from the general interest articles that
are posted here. It's an invaluable source of information.

Content discovery is a really exciting space, and I'm really excited to see
how it will evolve. Twitter is another evolution of this I think, and I think
way more people use twitter as content discovery or a news source as opposed
to "what I am doing right now." But following one of these loudmouths who
retweets and links to articles suffers the same problems as RSS in that there
is this tendency for one of these people to make a huge amount of tweets due
to some event like a conference (or gets drunk one night) and then some stuff
you don't care about pushes a lot of the stuff you do care about off your
page. I only follow 25 people on twitter and if I don't check it for a day
then I have 200+ tweets to dig through, so I have no idea how people with
massive lists make their twitter work for them.

The general problem from all existing solutions I see is that they are too
immediate. Aggregation sites work on a day to day basis where time of upvote
plays more part than overall quality. Twitter goes out of its way to make
anything other than your latest tweets hard to access. And right there at the
side you find emerging trends. It's all about now, now, now. But generally I
find information on the here and now pretty easy to solve, it's those timeless
classics that appeared on HN front page eighteen months ago or were retweeted
by 100 developers last week when I was on vacation that I want to be able to
always have access to. Especially on the days where the whole HN front page is
dominated by some topic that I find mundane (Joe Blogger's latest opinion on
the iPad!).

I hope the next big iteration in content discovery will try to solve that
problem.

~~~
mquander
That's interesting, because I'd say I value RSS for exactly the reasons you
disclaimed. A dozen or two authors online are sufficiently good writers & so
well in tune with my mind (or an area of my interest) that I am interested in
almost anything they have to say. I use RSS in order to not miss their
material. Without RSS, I would have to visit a ton of bookmarks every few days
in order to scan for new posts.

Like you indicated, I don't see any value to a site like HN or Reddit having
an RSS feed. The main page is the RSS feed. For me, RSS feeds excel at keeping
me up to date with authors that only post every few days, or every few weeks.
A couple dozen carefully chosen feeds gives me tremendous pleasure in the form
of a few great posts a day. I've pretty much used RSS like this for five
years, occasionally rotating in and out new blogs and authors.

~~~
mrshoe
That's exactly the way I use RSS as well and that's exactly why I'm building
<http://blogazineapp.com> .

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mey
Personally I use GReader a lot to source content and interesting ideas.
Typically I will instantly subscribe to rss to a blog/etc when I come across
an article I like from another aggregate source (HN/etc). As I see more of the
blog, and get a feel for it's content, I may unsubscribe from it the very next
day, depending on the drivel or quality of content it spews forth. How often a
blog updates has no impact, only the quality and uniqueness of the ideas
presented. (I have very little tolerance for another me too fluff article
about the ipad, for example.)

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wallflower
As long as you are happy writing your blog and you feel that you give a small
amount of value for the blogs you write, I think that is what matters. There
is a reason why inspirational blogs are so popular - people want to believe in
the narrative, that there are others out there experiencing what they think
they are relatively unique in going through. I used to ponder why
<http://thinksimplenow.com> had so many comments per blog posts. Why Roger
Ebert's blog posts generate so many comments. I think it is because they are
sharing a feeling about an experience that encourages others to share their
own personal experiences. Blogging is an ego thing, don't get me wrong, the
real Gutenberg press, but if you are just writing about facts and technology
without delving into the realm of feelings now and then, you might be
editoralizing yourself. For what is Engadget really but a blog about a few of
the seven sins. It's not a blog but check out <http://urbanbaby.com>

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maxklein
I really don't see a point to RSS. I use it to subscribe to a particular
forums category, but that's it. If I want to get a persons blog post, I add
them to my 'Tracking' list on twitter.

Most people don't write consistently good stuff. And I dislike seeing "50
unread items" in my google reader - it seems as if I am obliged to read them,
when most will be bad. Any really good post is either going to show up on
hacker news, on reddit, on delicious.com/popular or on my twitter tracking
list. If it does not show up there, then I probably don't need to read it.

Twitter pre-filters my posts, RSS does not. That's why I use rss.

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aristus
I dunno. As an experiment I turned off RSS on my blog. So far one (1) person
has mentioned it. I get less than 5% of traffic from RSS readers, and those
are people following HN or Reddit's RSS, not mine.

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LiveTheDream
Visiting bookmarked blogs became too cumbersome for me years ago. I switched
to Netvibes as my home page, with RSS feed widgets. That felt clunky, and I
switched to Google Reader. I'm still on Google Reader (where I frequently add
and remove feeds as I find new interesting sites and remove the ones that
produce drivel or content overload). Regarding content overload, on a number
of bigger blogs I switched to following the PostRank "best" RSS feed for them
just so I wouldn't get flooded. That wasn't enough, so I dropped a lot of the
big sites (in one case I felt their good content was just sourced from Reddit
anyway.)

Currently I still use GReader a lot, but more and more often I find good
content via my twitter stream, which acts as a quality filter and as a source
of fresh content.

I do not get much off of Facebook, but I can see the same exact use case as
how I use twitter for finding content.

To answer the question my guess is yes, people use RSS less and rely more on
twitter/facebook/digg/reddit/etc because they provide more diverse content,
but still relevant to an individual's interests, and naturally filtered for
quality.

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ugh
Psst, there is a link element missing in your head when displaying single blog
posts. It’s there on the main blog page. I just wanted to subscribe (there’s
your strategy: write about subscriptions to get people to subscribe) and had
to go looking for a link instead of being able to just click the RSS button in
Safari.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Thx--fixed.

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revorad
I have subscribed to many blogs through Google Reader, but I never use it. The
only blogs I actually read are those I subscribed through email. It's just
much easier.

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pavs
You seem to be doing just fine: [http://www.blogperfume.com/feed-
analysis/index.php?months=12...](http://www.blogperfume.com/feed-
analysis/index.php?months=12&uri=http://feeds.feedburner.com/yegg)

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ryanjmo
We have created Facebook applications that allow people to subscribe to
YouTube Channels on Facebook. We have been getting really great traction. We
want to expand this to Blogs and are currently looking for Beta testers. You
essentially get your own Facebook Application that lets your users know when
you release new content. This may help solve your subscriber problem you
mentioned in the article.

If you (or any other blogger reading this) is interested check out our website
<http://apprats.com/> and an example YouTube channel app
<http://apps.facebook.com/mysteryguitarman/>. If you are interested in being a
Beta tester you can message us through our site.

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ryanb
I personally no longer use RSS.

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jacobbijani
Maybe you're less interesting?

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yanw
I subscribe to my daily reading through GReader and I follow people on twitter
for the serendipitous stuff, both can certainly coexist.

