
Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time? - ciokan
I&#x27;m dealing with a project that lives through content and I was wondering if it&#x27;s still worth the time to invest making some RSS features that someone suggested.<p>I honestly rarely hear about RSS. My idea is to build whatever users are asking and stop investing time in features that will go unnoticed but, since this is a young project, I might be wrong and losing something.<p>My question towards this community is...how many of you still use RSS to subscribe to content?
======
afloatboat
I fear the day that RSS will become so unpopular that developers won't support
it anymore. RSS is the basis of my information aggregation and is a necessity
for me. It allows me to read news at my own pace and to get all the news with
a backlog so that I'm sure I don't miss anything.

RSS allows me to go directly to an article without having to navigate through
the website. Some websites (TheVerge comes to mind) have a pretty nice design,
but make it hard to get an overview of all the news and you easily miss
things. With RSS I know that when I start my client all the articles they
posted will be there and they will still be there when I start my client next
month. I can manually mark articles that don't interest me as read, but keep
others for when I have more time.

I follow about 50 sites, so if I had to check manually if any of them had
updates (often in various sections, because they don't have a main overview
that shows everything) I'd lose way more time. It's also synced over all my
devices. I use the Reederapp in combination with Feedly, and it syncs over my
Macs, iPhone and iPad. I have a backlog of about 500 articles, some months
old, imagine having to go through a specific site and scrolling back page
after page after page to get to that specific article you saw the title of 2
months ago.

I wish more sites would show the entire article in RSS feeds instead of a
short preview. I understand the advertising reasons behind requiring users to
click through, but with RSS you have a plain article that's optimized for
reading without all the distractions of a website.

~~~
jeremysmyth
RSS has largely become invisible. Many CMSs just support it, which is great if
you use RSS, and irrelevant if you don't. Many RSS readers are flexible enough
to find the feed if you point at a site's base URL too, so while that implicit
contract is in place, life is good.

However, that very invisibility might prove to be its downfall: RSS is so
incredibly useful to those who know about it that the only way to keep it
going is for those of us who _create_ to ensure our platforms keep creating
it.

I miss seeing that little orange RSS icon though.

edit: I also miss seeing Dave Winer comment on threads like this!

~~~
davewiner
I just posted a long comment at the top level of this thread. ;-)

~~~
lectrick
I just want to take a moment to hat-tip a legendary dev. I've heard of you at
LEAST since MORE for the Mac rocked the sales charts when I was a teen (I also
FONDLY miss Macworld Expos, attended a bunch of them!) Thanks for being an
awesome nerd!

------
hyperion2010
RSS is still the best tool out there for aggregating and curating written
content on a personal basis. (One of) The reason you don't hear much about it
is that it works and isn't sexy and breaks down walled garden monetization
schemes.

------
davewiner
Without a doubt RSS is worth the time.

Think of RSS as an advertisement for the stuff on your news site or blog. If
you don't publish RSS, how will people find your stuff? By visiting the home
page of your site and looking for stuff they haven't seen before? Sure, some
people will do that. But people who read your site systematically, people who
you would think of as members of your community, can benefit from more
automatic notification. That's what RSS is for. All kinds of networks have
developed around RSS. If you don't provide a feed, your site can't participate
in those networks.

Also, how do you think links make it to Twitter and Facebook? Very often they
were posted by people who follow your site's feed. So while most people aren't
aware they're getting their links from feeds, they are.

I'm not aware of how the plumbing works in NYC, but I live there, and depend
on it. Water flows in and out. Treated on both sides. RSS is the plumbing for
news. It's best when it just works without you having to even be aware of it.

Here's an example. Sometimes I get so interested in a subject I put together a
river site dedicated to news in that area. Earlier this week I did one for
Major League Baseball.

[http://mlbriver.com/](http://mlbriver.com/)

The vast majority of the sites I went looking for feeds on had them, and they
worked with my aggregator. I didn't need to contact anyone. And now they have
a new source of flow, that didn't cost them anything, since they were already
supporting RSS.

~~~
drydiggins
Preach it from the mountaintops!

And Thanks so much for mlbriver. It will be a tonic for my seasonal affective
disorder that I blame on the NBA and NFL seasons.

~~~
davewiner
Glad you like mlbriver.com. I can't believe how it's expanded my knowledge of
baseball in just a few days. It's been a long time since I got caught up. Too
busy with other things I guess.

------
tomku
I use Reeder/Feedly every day to keep up with a ton of different information
sources. There's just too many interesting sources to manually check them all
and aggregators like HN or Reddit can be hit-or-miss.

Edit: Something to consider is that the people who submit links to places like
Reddit and HN are probably much more likely than the rest of your users to use
some kind of feed reader. Even if feed subscription numbers are low, those few
"power users" might have a disproportionate effect on how much your content
gets shared.

------
Xylemon
Let's just say that if it wasn't for RSS, I wouldn't have seen this page.

~~~
romulomachado
Neither would I.

------
avian
I use The Old Reader to follow around 500 feeds. Basically all of them are
blogs and sites that update less than once per week. I get a few new items per
day into my reading list this way. I newer use feeds of news sites that have a
lot of traffic, like HN. I visit those directly.

For me, RSS or Atom is the only usable way to keep up with rarely-updated
sites. Twitter is too-fast moving, since it's very easy to miss interesting
things in the noise. I don't like to use email because going through my inbox
and acting on mail is very different from reading articles and blog posts and
I like to keep them separate.

~~~
lectrick
What's your opinion about bloggers that enjoy getting a bit of ad revenue from
their posts?

------
mindcrime
Oh hell yeah. I love RSS and would not even consider any kind of content
oriented project that didn't support RSS/Atom. If you believe that a
decentralized / distributed Web is better than a centralized / walled-garden
model, then RSS / Atom is a must.

Disclaimer: One of our products is heavily rooted in consume large amounts of
content from RSS feeds and providing tools to help users filter/sort/mine that
content to find the really useful stuff, etc. So I _do_ have something of a
biased position here. But my position is truly as much ideological as
anything.

------
emiunet
Please don't kill RSS just yet. Since the death of Google Reader, I've been
using selfoss[1] actively to subscribe to news sources (HN is one of them). I
can't live without RSS.

[1] [http://selfoss.aditu.de/](http://selfoss.aditu.de/)

------
cosenal
It's interesting that you asked that on the very same day that Github
introduced a plug-in that automatically generate an Atom (RSS) feed from your
posts on Github Pages: [https://help.github.com/articles/atom-rss-feeds-for-
github-p...](https://help.github.com/articles/atom-rss-feeds-for-github-
pages/)

RSS ain't dead!

------
husted
I prefer to use RSS and daily use a combination of Feedly and Reeder for iOS.
I haven't found any better for keeping on-top of daily news.

I guess it depends on the content you're offering.

------
waterhouse
I use an RSS reader (Vienna) and check it multiple times per day. I have,
let's see, 28 active subscriptions in it. Most of them don't update often at
all.

The best use case for RSS is if there's a source that occasionally puts out
highly interesting content, on an unpredictable schedule. (This describes most
of the feeds I'm subscribed to.) RSS (or something equivalent to it) enables
you to not waste time checking it manually every day or whatever, while also
being sure you won't miss anything when/if they do finally update. It's like
switching from poll-driven to interrupt-driven I/O. I wish more things
provided RSS feeds.

------
perlgeek
Yes.

There isn't much buzz around RSS anymore, but there isn't buzz around
telephony or email either, and yet all three technologies are still used every
day by many people.

------
Turing_Machine
I'd say it depends on your audience. If it's a technology-oriented site, RSS
(or better, Atom... it won't make you tear your hair out nearly as much as the
umpteen different versions of RSS, and most readers support it just fine) is
going to be a win.

Spitting out an Atom feed really isn't that hard.

Edit: since it sounds like you have an existing feed, you could try going to
some of the big reader sites (e.g., feedly) that tell you how many subscribers
you have. For individuals using their own reader app, your server logs should
give you an idea.

------
janvdberg
Yes! I use theoldreader.com to follow around ~100 blogs/sites. RSS is
particularly perfect for keeping track of sites that don't update often. I
don´t use RSS to keep track of sites like HN/Reddit because their content is
always changing rapidly.

------
icewater0
Every single day. It's how I get 99% of my news and other periodical written
content.

Actually something will have to be extremely compelling for me to bother
keeping up with it if it _doesn 't_ offer an RSS feed.

------
xuh3
I feel RSS/Atom feeds are still an extremely important way to subscribe to
informational updates online - particularlly for news following/reading. I
have always been hopeful for projects like Zone
([https://github.com/abouaziz/ZONE](https://github.com/abouaziz/ZONE)) to get
more public interest, and RSS-social-reader products aimed at the facebook
folks - such as [http://newsbae.com](http://newsbae.com),
[http://popurls.com](http://popurls.com),
[http://alltop.com](http://alltop.com),
[http://skimfeed.com](http://skimfeed.com), etc - will raise awareness of the
need for the public to still want this simple service to exist.

------
duncan_bayne
I do. Search HN to find out how many people were disappointed by Google
shuttering Reader, and how many people migrated to other services (e.g.
Newsblur, which I use).

RSS might not be as popular as it once was, but it certainly seems very
popular in the our demographic :)

------
lewisl9029
I arrived at this Ask HN through RSS.

------
presty
My RSS reader (digg reader) is my most visited site/app, far ahead of the
social sites and only closely followed by gmail.

I would say that the people who do use RSS use it a lot. There might not be
many left, but I'd say they would fit the "power user" category.

On the other hand, you might be able to skip building RSS features (idk
exactly what kind of feature you were suggested) as long as you provide some
kind of endpoint where people can plug ifttt and the like to get the same
result (you can create the recipe yourself and advertise it)

------
gazab
It's not dead! Without RSS I can't even use the internet properly. The hole
that Google Reader left in my heart has since then been filled by
newsblur.com.

------
knight17
I use it with Feedly with around 600+ feeds. I also have a Google CSE set up
with my subscriptions. Google Reader had the best search ever. Sad that it was
shuttered.

The majority of content comes from few big sites so I put them into HF and
just scan them and mark as read while others are organised as folders like:

    
    
      Interesting	|
      Interesting	| Australians
      Interesting	| Prose
    
      My state	| General
      My state	| Films
      My state	| Religion
    
      Religion	| General
      Religion	| Catholic
      Religion	| Orthodox
    
      Tech		| Personal Computing
      Tech		| Vendors
    
      Tools		| Excel
      Tools		| Emacs
      Tools		| Vim
      Tools		| PIM
    
      Career	| General
      Career	| SAP
      Career	| Professional accounting
    
      Books		| General
      Books		| Public domain
      Books		| University Press
    
      Language	| Blogs
      Language	| English
      Language	| Advice
    
      Country	| Defence
      Country	| Nutjobs
      Country	| Foreign media
    

RSS is really great and I wouldn't replace it with anything else from the
restricted web.

------
alexlatchford
You also don't want to forget about aggregators who automatically grab your
content and make it accessible to their audience. This is either a positive or
a negative depending on your viewpoint, it's certainly a positive for me
because it allows domain-specific search engines possible simply by collating
a few feeds together for example.

------
sdfsdfsdfsdf1
Yes - and the people who use RSS often are news sources for other people and
are more likely to share your stuff. So even though there were only 100,000
Google Reader users, they probably shared to n+10 yet you won't see those
stats in just people consuming your RSS feed.

------
insin
I stopped using RSS altogether when Google killed Reader.

~~~
unimpressive
If you're worried about being burned again, there's two good self hosted RSS
readers out there:

Tiny Tiny RSS: [https://tt-rss.org/gitlab/explore](https://tt-
rss.org/gitlab/explore)

SelfOSS: [http://selfoss.aditu.de/](http://selfoss.aditu.de/)

Both include mobile apps and are open source with web based interfaces and
JSON based API's to let you implement your own clients.

~~~
leejoramo
And almost all of the RSS web services and apps I have looked at support OPML
to import and export your feeds. It is really easy to move between RSS systems
with minimal loss.

~~~
unimpressive
Nope. What about your _archives_?

I know that for me having an archive of the feeds is pretty darn important.

~~~
leejoramo
I can certainly see that for some (many?) people archives are important. I
currently use Feedbin.com, and I have occationally searched for a past story.

Mostly, I bookmark and archive important articles, and use a search engine to
find more general more none specific info

------
endijs
I still use RSS for about 250 blogs/sites (tracked by Feedly). That's no near
to what it was in times of Google Reader. Some sites stopped providing RSS.
For some there was just too much content and it was a pain to filter out
everything. I have settled down on those two approaches:

1) If blog/site generates content rare and provides RSS, I use Feedly to track
it.

2) If blog/sites generates a lot of content I expect that someone in my
Twitter feed will post link to really good article.

So yeah - RSS is still valuable.

~~~
leejoramo
Like you, some of the high volume sites I have removed from RSS. Others, I
have organized into a high volume group or folder of my RSS Reader. Then I use
some keyword filters to notify me of when stuff I really want to read comes
through the high volume feeds.

------
phodo
The "fall" of rss has been one of the worst things to happen to Internet
tools. Many thought rss would be replaced by Twitter it doesn't provide the
same utility. I recall tools like netvibes, google reader, and others where I
could consume vast amounts of information. Even the old pulse on iOS was great
and was soon replaced by inferior versions. As the fall of rss tools happened,
less sites published rss and we ended up in a negative reinforcing spiral.

------
newtronic
Many people in this thread have given different reasons why they use RSS. I
emphatically agree that it's important, even vital. I use Feedbin to report
new items to me.

------
unimpressive
I just added RSS to my blog[0] after this thread reminded me, thanks. For
anybody else who runs Jekyll it's about five minutes of work and well worth
supporting the tech.[1]

[0]:
[http://softholmsyndrome.com/feed.xml](http://softholmsyndrome.com/feed.xml)

[1]: [http://joelglovier.com/writing/rss-for-
jekyll/](http://joelglovier.com/writing/rss-for-jekyll/)

------
sam_lowry_
I read my news exclusively through RSS. Including Hacker News.

------
kurttheviking
+1 for RSS; I use digg reader[1] multiple times per day

[1] [https://digg.com/reader](https://digg.com/reader)

(edit for spelling mistake)

------
kyriakos
I get my RSS fix on Feedly everyday.

I haves feeds grouped in the following Categories:

Tech News (all the major news tech sites which I check when I'm bored)
Software (feeds from all the software I use so I get notified for updates
etc). Photography (photography blogs I like to follow)

I still think its relevant and I actually find it very frustrating when I
visit a site with content that could fit in RSS format but they don't publish
a feed.

------
daurnimator
Yes! I use liferea to keep up to date on many things. e.g.

\- You can watch your Github feed: it'll give you notifications of all pushes
on repos you watch + things that people you follow do.

\- You can watch JIRA and Confluence: I haven't found a better way to catch up
on what happened overnight with the team members on other side of the world

\- I subscribe to LWN.net for linux security alerts

\- I subscribe to ~30 blogs of developers I respect

\- I watch various comic strips.

------
euyyn
People that still use it will think "of course!" and tell you so. People that
don't use it anymore will think "probably not, but maybe; I wouldn't know
myself" and thus be silent. So you have a high prior chance of getting a ton
of "yes" answers even if the real answer is "no".

------
brador
Aggregators like [http://skimfeed.com](http://skimfeed.com) use RSS/XML feeds
to send you free traffic.

As a developer, you need to decide if it's worth your time to implement (it's
a single database query and some layout code to build an RSS/XML feed, not
difficult at all).

------
xcyu
Either RSS itself is fading or RSS might be called something else these days
according to Google Trends
[https://www.google.ca/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0n5tx](https://www.google.ca/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0n5tx).
I personally don't use RSS.

------
firegrind
My RSS feed is like my bookmarks, except I actually read, listen to and watch
the content that arrives by RSS.

Rawdog generates a new homepage for me a few times a day. I don't even have to
put up with other people's crappy design and can enjoy information presented
in my OWN crappy design.

------
Concours
You should add RSS, it's one of the most passive ways ro share your content
and gain new inbound traffic, you users will thank you, all prominents news
web/mobile applications make use of rss to distribute their content and get
new inbound traffic.

------
mariobyn
From my opinion RSS it's a must for each content site. We use RSS at
[http://grobyk.com](http://grobyk.com) for news aggregation in this way we
deliver to teams the best articles.

------
hobs
I would say it depends on your target market, but most of the time programming
a RSS feed is pretty dang easy, so I would generally put it on my todo list
for that type of site.

------
kseistrup
I used feeds to subscribe to content, but I prefer Atom to RSS.

------
FennNaten
I couldn't stay up to date on all the topics I'm interested in in an efficient
manner without RSS. BTW I came here to comment through my HN RSS feed ;)

------
webwanderings
I wouldn't care about any website if it does not come with RSS. I've been
using Digg Reader and it's been working flawlessly.

------
e19293001
Although I use RSS everyday and every hour, I hate RSS because it is the
reason why I am my procrastinating.

------
3do
RSS is the best thing has discovered yet :D Are you joking? I'm using feedly
constantly.

------
jwr
It is very simple to implement and provides immense utility to many.
Definitely worth doing.

------
VOYD
Nobody but techies use RSS, so it likely depends on the target clientele.

------
imartin2k
I cannot and don't want to imagine a web without RSS.

------
jdboyd
I use RSS or Atom to read content constantly.

------
iliaznk
Of course! Reading it from the diggreader.

------
aidenn0
I love RSS, I use it.

------
senectus1
oh hell yes.

------
CodingGuy
RSS +1

------
blumkvist
I use RSS heavily. Many people do. It is one of those things that is good as
it is, so there's nothing to talk about.

I use inoreader.

