
Rise and Demise of RSS - ForHackernews
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3mm4z/the-rise-and-demise-of-rss
======
burtonator
I was one of the inventors of RSS. I was on the RSS 1.0 RSS-DEV Working Group.

I'm also the creator of Datastreamer
([http://www.datastreamer.io/](http://www.datastreamer.io/)) which you could
think of as a massive petabyte-scale RSS aggregator.

Seeing that I helped invent RSS, and have probably parsed more RSS than anyone
(hundreds of petabytes), I'm going to call it and say that RSS is dead.

Datastreamer used to index RSS and we've long since deprecated it as a
secondary data source. It's really not our primary content source.

We prefer to index raw HTML.

HTML can do exactly what you want and you don't need RSS thanks to
microformats and microdata.

Here's the main problem:

1\. Publishers don't care about your use case. They WANT you go to back to the
site and click their ads.

2\. Publishers want to hoard their content and sell it if possible. This is
the exact antithesis of RSS content distribution (that the Internet should be
open).

What's the way forward?

1\. HTML microdata parsing RSS but implemented in microdata.

Publishers actually WANT their data to be distributed this way as they're
hoping their content is distributed over Twitter and Facebook.

The only downside here is that full content is often not used.

2\. Metadata sharing.

SELF metadata sharing where communities of users markup and share their own
content.

I'm going to be working on some ideas around this in Polar (my project around
distributed content sharing).

[https://getpolarized.io/](https://getpolarized.io/)

I think you're going to start seeing some of the ideas around the next gen of
content syndication in a few months.

Right now I'm trying to build a large network of users by building an amazing
tool to handle your content.

Once the user base is there then I can enable content collaboration where
users are sharing content to each other.

This will also include some RSS-like features at some point but indexed around
microdata.

~~~
panic
Every blog I've tried to follow for years has had an RSS feed. Are
microformats really as reliable? Like, picking a blog at random from my feed,
I don't see any microdata on the page.

~~~
burtonator
The biggest challenge with this strategy is discovering which links to index.

The microdata is much more data.

You can see this metadata when you post to Twitter or Facebook and it shows a
preview.

We have the internal stats to show that this is MUCH more reliable than RSS
but I don't really have it in a format that I can readily share.

Discovering the links can be done by just spidering every post on the front
page.

The biggest challenge is the timestamp. We handle that by just keeping a
fingerprint of all the URLs and we only index URLs that have either never been
seen before or have timestamps.

I honestly with timestamps were required by Facebook and Twitter or at least
given special treatment.

The special treatment strategy by Google and others has REALLY done a great
job at upgrading the quality of the Internet by not breaking it.

Basically saying that your site will get some tangible financial benefit if
you run X spec.

So if you enable IPv6 or HTTPS you get an SEO boost.

Companies actually pay attention to this and implement these changes.

~~~
girzel
Out of everything you've said, my only takeaway is that og:image is useful for
Facebook and Twitter. I'll happily admit that's true, and I use it on my own
sites.

Otherwise... What does "MUCH more reliable" even mean?

The rest of it seems to be you trying to catch up to RSS...

------
forgotAgain
RSS did not decline due to technical differences. By the time Google Reader
was killed, RSS readers had advanced to the point where wide public usage was
possible because the readers dealt with the incompatibility problems outlined
in the article.

RSS declined because major tech companies convinced large media companies that
they had a better future publishing to their walled gardens and not directly
to the public.

The walled gardens only benefited the garden owners, not independent
publishers. Now that that is recognized there is again a chance for
independent publishers both big and small.

~~~
lallysingh
RSS declined because nobody wanted to put up content on 3rd party systems that
didn't pay them.

Large media companies had to actively do work to shut down their RSS feeds,
when they could've just done both. They took them down because they weren't
making money on keeping them up.

~~~
JohnFen
> RSS declined because nobody wanted to put up content on 3rd party systems
> that didn't pay them.

Probably 2/3 of the RSS feeds I use come directly from the content producers,
not from third party systems.

~~~
lallysingh
I meant people's RSS readers as the 3rd party, vs the 1st party website hosted
by the producer. Not the clearest way to say it, I admit.

~~~
JohnFen
Ah, I understand. RSS is often used for things that aren't connected to a
website at all, so I don't automatically make that connection.

------
peterwwillis
_" But I use RSS every day!"_ \- a Hacker News reader

I think this tweet at the end of the article answers that well:

    
    
      "Who is going to tell the normal people that RSS is dead?
       Wait.
       Who is going to explain to normal people what RSS was?"
    

The articles aren't claiming the _standard_ is dead, they're claiming that the
_use by normal users_ is dead. The RSS standard is still used to make billions
of dollars of money (as a backend tech for content licensing & syndication),
but users don't touch it.

This article from last year has some better examples of why RSS is dead:
[https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/07/rss-is-
undead/](https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/07/rss-is-undead/)

~~~
pvorb
But most people never knew what it is. Why would RSS be any more dead than 10
years ago?

~~~
bryanrasmussen
Because 10 years ago there was quite a bit of hope if not absolute certainty
that RSS or some syndication format was going to 'conquer the world'. Now
there is a certainty that this will never happen.

In our world the certainty of diminishment is equated to death.

And really at some point in the future it will diminish enough that Google
Chrome will announce a release not supporting RSS in the browser (but you can
still get it via plugins!) and then we can have some more RSS is really dead
now articles.

on edit: assuming Google chrome supports it now which I wouldn't know because
I don't use chrome as my primary browser.

~~~
mcv
Not conquering the world doesn't mean you're dead. I never conquered the
world, but I'm very much alive.

We need to get rid of this idea that the only way to survive is to dominate.
You can survive in a niche. There are still people using IRC, even. New things
become popular, but there will always be people who don't go along with the
latest fad and either stick with a previous one or jump ahead to the next one.

Personally, I've never really used RSS, but I'm seriously thinking of
starting, particularly because of the demise of Google+. (Google+ really is
dead, or at least dying soon, but that is because Google is actively pulling
the plug.) Google+ got me into contact with a number of blogs whose owners
posted their blog updates on G+. Now that G+ is dying, I need a new way to
keep up to date, and I find myself looking for a new social network that
allows me to follow blogs of people who themselves may not be using that
network. RSS is the obvious answer here. I believe Hubzilla supports RSS, so
that's immediately an interesting candidate to me.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
you will note that I did not say it was dead, I explained the urge on other
people's part to label it as such. I do believe it is dying in the same way
someone with a degenerative disease is, slowly over years, with a few major
hits to come that will make everyone say 'now it's really happening. It's also
sad because this disease is one that could be halted, even turned around, if
it was to the interest of anyone with the power to do so.

you may be alive, but xlink is pretty much dead.

irc may be alive but I don't think anyone argues it is in good health.

RSS is alive but it doesn't get out of the house much and there are a lot of
rumours as to how bad exactly the condition is.

on edit: formatting

------
bastawhiz
I run a podcast hosting service. Every day we push between 20 and 30GB of RSS
feeds out into the world. In the same time frame, we push about 150KB of
JSONFeed data.

RSS is a clunky tool that's difficult to extend. Extensions end up being
duplicated by vendors that consume the data in slightly different ways. The
ability to embed rich content in a feed is limited and nonstandard. To your
average user, the functionality comes off as "this seems broken" instead of
"what an amazing ubiquitous standard." If I had a quarter for every support
request about why "Podcast App X isn't showing my links" I could cut my
prices. RSS is not a good format.

On top of that, it has obvious omissions. There is no standard way to do
pagination. Podcast feeds need to include _every episode_ with full metadata
for the back catalog to be available. For podcasts that publish every day for
years, this adds up to megabytes. If you think parse/execution times are bad
with JS, imagine the work your phone is doing when it chews on a few meg of
XML every half hour for all those shows you're subscribed to that don't
publish episodes anymore.

RSS is bad and broken. It still works, but it's like IRC (or how IRC used to
be): it solves the core needs of many people in the most mediocre way possible
and everything else is a hack or just outright doesn't work. I really wish
there was enough demand for a better standard.

~~~
monksy
JSON won't resolve that issue for podcasts that you've subscribed to that
don't publish anymore. That's either a cache issue from a static resource or a
service issue that doesn't support the cache response.

Also, the issue with the size of the rss feed:

It all comes down to how the settings are set. Is it set to full syndication
of the article, or is it summaries. Either way, JSON won't solve that issue.

JSON isn't going to fix your issue with non-standard attachments to the
articles. It's going to make it worse.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
You keep referring to "JSON," but the parent post referenced "JSONFeed." The
question you should be looking at isn't whether JSON is somehow better than
XML in an objectively measurable way; it's whether JSONFeed is somehow better
than RSS in an objectively measurable way.

And in fact, JSONFeed _does_ resolve that issue for podcasts that don't
publish anymore, because it has an "expired" key that indicates that. One of
the other problems that the parent post mentioned has to do with pagination,
and JSONFeed handles that issue, too -- which again, RSS doesn't. JSONFeed
also supports attachments in a better fashion, allowing for alternate
representations of the same thing (e.g., different audio formats). Extensions
are baked into JSONFeed rather than being a slightly dubious hack. The spec
also supports things that have become common in the last decade-plus that RSS
and Atom simply don't handle, from simple things like including favicons and
banners to real-time notification endpoints.

[https://jsonfeed.org/version/1](https://jsonfeed.org/version/1)

JSONFeed has come up before on HN and the same kind of "why do you think it's
better because it's JSON" questions came up. I guess we can argue about
whether the bike shed looks better when it's painted with braces or with angle
brackets, sure. But it's not the JSON part that makes JSONFeed better; it's
the "we've thought about what we've learned in the 16 years since RSS was last
materially updated" part that makes it better.

~~~
nickm12
"JSONFeed has come up before on HN and the same kind of 'why do you think it's
better because it's JSON' questions came up."

If JSONFeed has practical improvements over RSS/Atom, they've done a terrible
job of promoting that. The initial (and to this day only) blog post and the
intro to the spec imply that the only problem JSONFeed is trying to solve is
to avoid parsing XML, which is just not a problem to many developers.

------
chicob
I hope RSS keeps being provided for most sites. I listen to a lot of podcasts,
and I keep track thanks to RSS.

Most podcasting platforms behave the same way: they put themselves in between
listeners and broadcasters and limit the way people can share the audio, how
it is synchronized with some device, and always making sure that our browsing
data can me monetized in some way.

So podcasters usually have a never-ending list of platforms, which not always
overlap, and which I would never subscribe anyway.

I find this annoying, and that is why I've always used RSS. For news, it
allowed me to skim through the stuff I didn't want to read and also to miss
all of the annoying ads.

Now, it seems many RSS reader behave the same way: users need a login in order
to access a closed environment that monetizes your reading habits.

Fortunately, I found QuiteRSS ([https://quiterss.org](https://quiterss.org)),
a cross-platform FOSS for RSS with backup, import/export, and adblocking.

I like it a lot. I guess the only way it could be improved is by making it
fully portable.

~~~
burtonator
Podcasts are amazing. I helped invent that too.. I actually created the
mod_link spec for this purpose:

[http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/modules/link/](http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/modules/link/)

interestingly I was attacked for it and people thought it was an anti-RSS
feature and that it was "dangerously stupid"

... I didn't expect that reaction but looks like I was right. Podcasts provide
for most of the value in RSS right now.

Podcasts aren't going anywhere!

The main reason podcasting was successful IMO is apple supporting it.

------
mapgrep
Although it's silly to say RSS is dead given how pervasive the feeds remain
and that it's used for podcasting, one of the most vibrant corners of online
media, it is interesting to think about why it has fallen out of favor as a
way to follow updates and news.

For me it just doesn't scale beyond a certain volume of posts. It is great for
10-20 sporadically updated blogs but as you start going beyond that, for
example by adding a critical mass of frequent posting writers or professional
news sites or aggregators, it becomes stressful to keep up and the signal to
noise ratio drops. For all their faults, Twitter and Facebook both do a
reasonable job of assisting with moving good stuff to the top of the "river"
of news.

Personally I've started using tools that sit one level above Twitter and show
me things a certain number of my "friends" liked or retweeted over the prior
24 hours or 8 hours or whatever. (Right now that's Nuzzle app, previously it
was news.me email newsletter.) I follow nearly 1000 accounts on Twitter, and
while this is excessive it is manageable and I see things I'm interested in
without much stress.

RSS could hypothetically feed into an algorithmic sorting tool but it tends
not to be used this way. My theory as to why this is is that, at least in the
text news use case, it has a small and opinionated user base and only a subset
of that base would _want_ their news sorted for them -- and many RSS users
vocally do not want that -- so it never gets built and RSS never gets the
chance to grow to a broader audience.

Another issue is that there are slightly too many choices. It's not trivial to
1> pick a reader and 2> pick what feeds you want to follow 3> figure out how
to follow them. It's not that it's so hard it's just not as easy as say
Twitter.

~~~
impostir
Just wanted to say that many rss feeds come with a legal disclaimer that
prohibits filtering. It is without teeth, but it could still cause problems
for businesses.

------
SamWhited
I still don't understand how people who don't use RSS/Atom get by day to day…
during development of software projects I subscribe to tags on GitHub for
dependencies that I may need to update, same thing for stuff I package in the
Arch User Repos and need to update promptly after a release, for services that
I host I subscribe to lots of services blogs and status pages so that I get
news of security updates or outages quickly, etc.

Even for non development stuff I can't imagine going to each blog I read
individually or just hoping that I see it on a social network; instead they
all come to me and I don't have to do any work to read through all the various
blogs I like, news sites, etc.

~~~
hycaria
I had a RSS reader. I am bothered by unread emails or notifications. It was a
big waste of time for me to clean up all the "new stuff". And just marking as
read felt like missing out.

Now I just browse a blog when I feel like it. If there's nothing new, I might
reread some old post. That's it!

~~~
SamWhited
yah, I only subscribe to things where I actually want to read every article;
otherwise there's just too much stuff (well, with a few exceptions where I
want to read most of it and don't mind skipping over the occasional post I
don't care about or where I don't care to read some of it, but it's critical
that I don't miss certain posts like security updates to an important product
I use).

------
_emacsomancer_
The title is somewhat contracted by the content itself:

"...Today, RSS is not dead. But neither is it anywhere near as popular as it
once was...."

Though I think that more moderate conclusion is debatable as well. I continue
to new sites which offer RSS etc., and it seems to be the exception rather
than the rule that (relevant) rites lack RSS.

~~~
SllX
I find the only sites lacking a feed of some RSS-equivalent format are the
ones that have commercial interests that are not compatible with RSS or really
many other open standards and principles of good web design but might
otherwise make good _app_ design, and home made sites that don’t account for
the _idea_ that one might want to read a feed instead of visiting the web
page, if they even considered that some out there might still use feed
readers.

------
Juliate
Wait. Who is going to explain to normal people what HTTP is?

~~~
stevewillows
I was at a party a few weeks ago explaining Usenet to a crowd of confused
faces. When I said, 'its sort of like reddit.. but not reddit', that seemed to
satisfy them.

Just tonight I had to explain what a .exe file extension is for to another
friend.

Its easy for those of us who are technically minded to 'just get it' when we
use a new system, tool, etc -- and its also incredibly easy to forget how
little the general public truly understands (or even cares) about the
technology they operate on a daily basis.

The day I meet a woman who cares about scraping websites to create RSS feeds
is the day I consider marriage again.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _The day I meet a woman who cares about scraping websites to create RSS
> feeds is the day I consider marriage again._

My wife is also the first woman I met who knew what IRC is, even though she's
non-technical (apparently they covered it on her journalist studies). One of
the many little things that impressed me about her :).

------
craftyguy
This seems to be a popular meme, especially on HN. RSS is not 'demised'. It's
still used heavily for podcasts, wordpress (and many other blog sites) expose
it, and there are countless mobile and desktop apps for fetching RSS and
displaying them. RSS is alive and well, even if Google Reader is no longer a
thing. Or is considering that RSS did not replace everything on the internet
'proof' that it is dying?

~~~
unicornporn
True dat!

For me, RSS is by far (still) the best way to access web content.

I've tried some self hosted RSS readers over the years but I've stayed with
FreshRSS[1] for the last year. It has been a marvelous experience. Zero
trouble, zero administrative burden. Self-hosted bliss. Best of all is the
fact that it uses a flat file DB so it can easily be backed up, moved around
and migrated. Can not recommend it enough. Also, it's PHP, so works on any
cheap shared hosting. That's how I use it.

One of the best things about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds.

Every site and service that I wish to follow has an RSS feed, except for
Twitter. I use RSS-Bridge[2] (self hosted too) to follow users. RSS-Bridge[2]
will give you feeds for just about every service you can think of.

If you don't find a feed for a site, sometimes you just have to dig a little.
You learn at which URIs the most commons CMSes presents their Atom/RSS feeds
(hello /feed/).

[1] [https://freshrss.org/](https://freshrss.org/)

[2] [https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge](https://github.com/RSS-
Bridge/rss-bridge)

~~~
stunt
> For me, RSS is by far (still) the best way to access web content.

Same for me. I'm using Feedly atm. But the majority of users don't use RSS and
they never did. Perhaps that is never going change.

------
ivanhoe
People use Facebook and Twitter (and Hacker News) as a kind of crowd-sourced
RSS, but with the fall of trust in soc. media and the rise of fake news
retweets, I wouldn't completely dismiss a big come back of rss in the future.

------
JohnFen
I use RSS (as a user) every single day. It's one of the core technologies I
use. Although I've been hearing that it is dead for years now, it is very much
the opposite for me!

~~~
nokya
Same here.

To be honest, I was quite surprised to read about the "death" of RSS in
Motherboard, I would have hoped they would rather write about how alive it
still is despite uncountable attempts by tech and press Goliaths to get rid of
it...

Being forced to choose to visit each website or to basically surrender to
Facebook's or Google's interpretation of "what I should focus my attention to"
seems surreal to me.

I understand that I'm surrounded by people who enjoy these choices being taken
for them, but for me, RSS feeds are still my gateway between the web and my
time.

------
campuscodi
Remember that time when bots manipulated RSS to push fake news and political
agendas? Yeah. I'm so glad Twitter and Facebook replaced RSS. We dodged a
bullet there.

~~~
lotu
Why do you assume RSS is immune to bots? The attacks on the election focused
on Twitter and Facebook because they where dominate not because they were
uniquely vulnerable.

------
pvorb
It's not dying at all. The death of Google Reader led to a healthier ecosystem
with many competitors.

------
tushar-r
Don't most podcast players use RSS? Isn't this the age of the podcast? :-)

~~~
toyg
Like most SGML/XML languages, RSS as a tool for machines is pretty great:
server pushes data out, dedicated client (podcast player) retrieves it (often
through a directory/aggregator), the user is happy without ever having to know
RSS exists.

As a document format for chronological, uniform data streams that need to
carry human-readable metadata, RSS is just fine. What is unrealistic is the
delusion (of which I was complicit, like many) that it could also become the
standard way to retrieve most or all information on the planet. There are too
many incentives against that.

------
joecool1029
I've not really used RSS and it's certainly never been a critical part of my
Desktop/Laptop workflow. The first time it was exposed to me was through
Firefox live bookmarks which I thought was pretty cool. Then I believe they
removed the feature or just took out the bundled ones.

It wasn't until working on blogs that I became aware that RSS was much used.
If we had some javascript get injected into the generated rss files (common
with wordpress), users would complain the feeds would stop working. I'd get it
fixed, but unless someone was asking for a live feed to be syndicated on
another website, I just haven't used it personally.

I remember some news apps for phones like Pulse that seemed to run on RSS
feeds for a bit. But that's about what I assume the majority of the population
experiences of RSS. It runs some things like podcasts 'under the hood' but
where does a new user get introduced to it?

I run entirely off emails, every email that comes in gets an action (usually
delete, respond, or file). People in here talking about relying on RSS, what
software do you even use it with? (don't give podcast apps please)

~~~
SyneRyder
_> People in here talking about relying on RSS, what software do you even use
it with?_

While I wouldn't say I rely on RSS, I use Feedly [1] as my RSS reader on
Android & sometimes through the browser. I think Feedly are the biggest player
in the space now that Google Reader is gone, but they have lots of
competitors. On the Mac, I tend to use Reeder [2] as my desktop client, though
I hear NetNewsWire [3] is being rewritten & re-released soon.

A few years ago I did some work with a law firm that used RSS to keep up with
what's new in their field, and they wanted me to develop RSS feeds for sites
that didn't provide one. Instead of visiting dozens of websites every morning
to check for updates (and delegating that task to an assistant), RSS brings
all the latest news in one place they can check each morning. A pro/commercial
reader like Feedly also provides highlighting & note-taking functions, so you
can highlight/quote important paragraphs in an article & keep them in a
searchable database, together with your own annotations.

[1] [https://feedly.com/](https://feedly.com/)

[2] [http://reederapp.com/mac/](http://reederapp.com/mac/)

[3] [http://netnewswireapp.com/](http://netnewswireapp.com/)

~~~
username223
NetNewsWire works fine right now, and I have been using it for over a decade
to follow various blogs and tech sites. I doubt there's VC-level money to be
made in RSS, but it's actually useful, so I believe it will be at least as
alive as it is now in another decade.

------
jayalpha
RSS is not dead. I could not live without it. Besides the news.

1\. I don't like twitter but follow to Twitter accounts. Twitter to RSS:
[http://twitrss.me/](http://twitrss.me/)

2\. A site has no feed? Make one: [https://feedity.com/](https://feedity.com/)

3\. Looking for a job? Use RSS:
[https://www.indeed.com/rss?q=telecommute&l=Canoga+Park%2C+CA...](https://www.indeed.com/rss?q=telecommute&l=Canoga+Park%2C+CA&radius=100)

------
BariumBlue
What's a good RSS page / app?

On android, Google chrome has a RSS like feed that I rather like, but it feels
weird to use - I never intended to have it or use it, and I have no real
insight into it.

~~~
erikrothoff
I have built [https://feeder.co](https://feeder.co) would love HN’s feedback.

~~~
gbear605
Big fan, I use it everyday.

That said, I do have one small complaint. It is with a change just made in the
last few days: the new iOS app update makes it so if you are on the list of
all unread articles and you swipe left to mark an article as read, then the
article disappears from the list. I’ve repeatedly accidentally marked an
article as read and then had to go searching through all my feeds to find it.
Instead, it should have the old behavior where it removes the “NEW” icon but
otherwise doesn’t change. The app currently still had this behavior when you
actually open the article and view it. Even better would be a complete feed
sorted by date that shows both read and unread but has unread at the top. This
would be similar to how the iOS mail app works.

~~~
erikrothoff
Thanks for the feedback. Cool to find a user on Hacker News! That's something
I hadn't considered. I personally felt it more satisfying to mark as read when
the post flies out. But I agree that it can be inconvenient. Do you think an
Undo button would help (not sure if you've tried the Outlook iOS app, but it
does it really well)?

We have better sorting options in the web and browser extensions, adding them
to our iOS and Android apps is prio though. I like the idea with unread at the
top!

~~~
gbear605
An undo button would definitely help, especially if it is able to undo
multiple times.

Thanks for the fast help! I really appreciate it, and it will make me even
more likely to keep on using Feeder in the future

------
ccnafr
I'm so tired of these headlines. How many of these articles are going to
appear every month until people realize they're trash?

------
m-p-3
The day RSS dies will be a sad one for my email inbox. I don't want to get all
those updates by emails, and the RSS reader service I use works perfectly for
my need.

It's also an easy system to deal with when automating, especially with systems
like IFTTT, etc.

------
asdf333
demise? I use an rss reader every day and consider it one of my most important
news sources.

------
woodman
Wow, to base such a lengthy article on a google trend search of "rss"...

Queue rekt.webm:
[https://trends.builtwith.com/feeds/RSS](https://trends.builtwith.com/feeds/RSS)

~~~
MarsAscendant
Quite a spike in 2011. What happened that year?

~~~
woodman
The insane spike is for low traffic sites, so I'm guessing a blog platform
defaulted RSS.

------
RickJWagner
Social networks are taking the place of RSS? Ugh.

RSS allows intelligent selection of what you put in front of yourself every
day. I suppose Social media _could_ be used in the same way, but I don't think
anybody does it.

------
edhelas
Article reachable using the Motherboard - VICE RSS feed
[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/rss](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/rss).
Ironic?

------
molticrystal
If anybody wants to try RSS a great desktop app for Windows,Mac OSX, OS/2, and
of course Linux/BSD, I recommend quiterss.

The feature that converted me was the ability to have notifications, but
adblock is nice as well. I have feeds for when an item appears that I want to
purchase in search results at the price I want, I get notification when
stories appear on reddit according to my criteria, and when I want to catch a
livestream live or just a newly uploaded video, you can use the channel's feed
to be notified as Youtube notification is quite often broken.

Here is the list of most significant features:
[https://quiterss.org/en/about](https://quiterss.org/en/about)

I also tried rssowl, thunderbird, and more, but quiterss is one of the few
still actively developed.

\---

Just to give some examples for people who haven't tried it out before, to get
the latest JoeRogan podcast for example you can use the following url in your
rss reader:

[https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCzQUP1q...](https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCzQUP1qoWDoEbmsQxvdjxgQ)

You can replace channel_id with whoever you want to monitor.

Like a blog on blogspot? Then try
[https://username.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss](https://username.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss)
and get notified for all the latest stories, and on most of them, read them as
well without ever leaving your reader.

For reddit just add .rss to then end of almost any url, like
[https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/.rss](https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/.rss)
, many also support .json for the programmer in you.

While there are dozens of decent ways to get notified about changes on a
project at github, if you just want a quick way to watch things, add ".atom"
to the end of urls involving but not limited to commits,tags,and releases,
such as
[https://github.com/HackerNews/API/commits/master.atom](https://github.com/HackerNews/API/commits/master.atom)
and also consider looking at [https://bandito.re/](https://bandito.re/) .

You can usually check the source code for a page for the words rss/feed/atom
if your reader is having trouble and find the url manually. Also try appending
/feed or /rss yourself and see what happens. Also try googling, which also
still has rss feeds for google news among other places on their site if you
look hard enough, it is used internally quite extensively.

And of course this place supports it, the feed for here is
[https://news.ycombinator.com/rss](https://news.ycombinator.com/rss) , give it
a shot.

------
parrellel
Oh. Another one. It's been a couple months hasn't it.

At this point I'm assuming the death of Google Reader has lead to an RSS
explosion that's annoying some corporate creature.

------
rado
I use RSS for news, just need
[http://cappuccinoapp.com](http://cappuccinoapp.com) to be stable and to sync
via iCloud properly.

------
altmind
i quite happy most websites that i regularily read still provide rss. its a
strong word - demise, it just was disabled on some websites that want to wall
in their customers.

------
diminish
Wasn't the demise of RSS readers a good example of Embrace and Extinguish
strategy by the big G?

It paved the way to the bloated, paywalled, app-siloed, dumbified media
consumption of today.

------
senectus1
pfft RSS has just changed to a power user tool.

people who have a clue use it extensively.

------
hmans
I find articles like this obnoxious because

1) they (implicitly or explicitly) claim that RSS was at some point popular
(with "normal users") in some way that it is not today, which is wrong.

2) they completely ignore the fact that RSS today is significantly more
widespread than it was a decade ago.

Yes, Google Reader is gone. Get over it. Flipboard and similar have heaps and
heaps of users, and they're all RSS-based.

