
It’s Time to Get Back to RSS - danielrm26
https://danielmiessler.com/blog/its-time-to-get-back-into-rss/
======
DevX101
RSS is dying (or dead) because it was incompatible with the dominant business
model on the internet -- advertising. This is why Google killed it. This is
why lots of professional publishers hated it. With HTTP you'd be able to earn
money via embedded ads but you'd earn exactly $0 via RSS since the feed was
stripped of ads, just content. This forced publishers to put useless blurbs,
redirecting to the HTTP version, which was a bad user experience and just
sucked.

I'd like to see new innovation around protocols and client 'browsers' that
were made with monetization built-in as a first-tier specification.

1) client sends request for content with some header with payment information
attached. 2) server verifies payment transferred. 3) server responds to client
with content after payment verification.

If this existed, RSS would be alive and well. Internet publishers would be
alive and well. The internet would be a more beautiful place with a viable
first-party alternative to ads.

Challenges here would be:

\- Sufficiently low transaction costs to make micropayments viable. (Bundle
payments?) \- Verifying proof of payment extremely fast

Someone(s) should create a new protocol.

FTP was invented in 1971. SMTP was invented in 1982. HTTP was invented in
1989. RSS was invented in 1999. Bitcoin was invented in 2008.

The amount of innovation around protocol has been abysmal relative to the
explosion in creativity around applications on top of these protocols. And
SMTP/HTTP are the only ones with any real mass adoption today.

~~~
zelly
Micropayments have been tried. They all failed. The fair market price for
content is $0. What is happening is that the only publishers that will exist
shall be only those who create it for free. There is simply a glut of content
out there because the barrier to creating content is completely gone.

~~~
Dotnaught
>The fair market price for content is $0.

That's a gross oversimplification. Lots of content isn't worth anything but
some is. If you're a stock trader, for example, certain timely information is
well-worth paying for. And there's a market for that served by Bloomberg,
Thomson-Reuters, and so on.

The term "content" obscures the differences by suggesting its all
interchangeable. That's certainly in the interest of the Googles and Facebooks
of the world: When all content is equal, no content creator has any
negotiating power.

But there's a distinction between a multi-month investigative report and
hastily paraphrased rewrite at some fly-by-night website intent on capturing
algorithmic ad dollars.

Pricing news content is hard because it has a different value to different
people and often the value is only apparent after it has been consumed.

It's worth asking how much we will pay for reports on political corruption,
civic injustice, and so on. If the price for content is $0, the signal to
noise ratio will disappear.

~~~
zelly
I meant "content" as in cultural content--articles, Q&A submissions, blog
posts, takes, memes, recipes, how-tos, tutorials. Content that makes up >80%
of G search results. At one time, there was a price for such content because
you could only get it from a print publication or from broadcast television.
Now that there are no barriers to posting, we see how many people actually
want to publish content even if they have to pay out of pocket to host it
(i.e., making the price of their content negative since the consumer gets to
freeload bandwidth without ads _and_ consume content).

> Pricing news content is hard because it has a different value to different
> people and often the value is only apparent after it has been consumed.

You're suggesting that journalism is a public good because the value is
captured by society as a whole as opposed to by the individual newspaper
subscriber. I wouldn't argue against investigative journalism being important
for democracy etc., but why does it need to cost anything (even by the
public)? What about the whole Harvey Weinstein/MeToo saga which started after
some _individuals_ made some tweets without being paid by a journalism company
to do so. There is no shortage of outraged citizen activists who will do
"investigative journalism". I don't know why their free work should
automatically be considered inferior just because they don't have a journalism
degree and aren't being paid by a journalism company.

~~~
charles_f
How do the patreons of the world fit in there? There is such content creators
that I enjoy enough to give them a few bucks every month to make sure they can
keep doing it

------
simonw
The single worst offense against the usability of Atom/RSS right now comes
from Apple and iOS.

If you click a link to an Atom feed in Mobile Safari, iOS will launch the
Apple News app. Which will then show you an error message saying the content
is unavailable.

As far as I can tell there is no way for an installed reader app to take over
handling of feed URLs. It just makes the entire feed ecosystem look broken for
anyone using an iPhone or iPad.

~~~
znpy
I wonder if the EU could, in theory, take action about this behavior.

Apple is basically monopolizing the whole market for rss readers.

~~~
tolle
How many EU countries are Apple News available in?

~~~
tpush
After UK exits, none.

Apple News is available in a whopping 4 countries, 4 years after its
introduction.

~~~
tolle
Yeah so the EU can't do much about it.

------
apostacy
This is why I was so heartbroken when Mozilla removed first party RSS support
from Firefox, for what seemed like an extremely flimsy justification.[1]

RSS should be ubiquitous, and seen as an essential part of any service that
serves structured incremental content. People should be emailing webmasters
asking why there is no little orange icon.

It also serves as a back door form of accessibility. But I strongly suspect
that RSS goes against the interests of big tech who don't like RSS, because
companies like Facebook go through so much trouble to make it difficult to
scrape or modify their content.

I just wish that Mozilla would stand up more to their corporate underwriters.
Now RSS is relegated to add-ons, and is on the same tier gopher (no offense to
gopher).

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17613051](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17613051)

~~~
jjordan
Smart Bookmarks were fantastic. Add your favorite sites' RSS feeds to your
bookmark toolbar and you'd have all the recent headlines from all your
favorite sites at one click. Fortunately I wasn't the only one that
appreciated this long neglected feature so someone created Livemarks
([https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/](https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/))
that mostly replicated its functionality. I highly recommend it as I've been
on the web a long time and have yet to come across a faster way to check all
my favorite sites at once.

~~~
ObsoleteNerd
Thank you so much for that, I am/was a HUGE fan of that feature in Firefox,
and it was actually one of the main features that got me to switch to Firefox
in the first place. I was gutted when they removed it, and while I still swear
by Firefox over Chrome, I'm finding they're making more and more questionable
decisions lately when it comes to their supposed love for a free/open
Internet.

------
gregn
This article is completely wrong. Slashdot, Digg and Reddit were already at
100% of full-power way before Google Reader ever shut down. And him citing
that the causes are unknown is so completely naive. It's obvious. And it was
obvious at the time to many who used RSS in 2012. Google is in the ad
business, and RSS doesn't do adds. Not really, and not then. They realized
they were competing with themselves and closed it; it's that simple. God, I
feel like I got baited to reading that post because there was no new or
insightful information whatsoever other than the title line. We should bring
back RSS, and make the web more about conversations and communicating, than
listicles and click-bait. 5-10MB of Javascript per page load, 1px tracking
images, endless stupid ads, and now every single site that I go to has a pop-
over that I should sign up for something, which gets in the way of the content
that I am only going to spend 30 seconds reading anyway and then never return
to that site ever again. The web has very quickly become a cesspool of non-
information. It's like a bad shopping mall.

~~~
6510
I completely agree except that I think google did it intentionally. They did a
fine job shutting down other things in similar ways like newsgroups.

------
Zaskoda
I would like to take one comment in this post to recognize Aaron Swartz
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz)

~~~
catacombs
What's his connection to RSS?

~~~
adambyrtek
It's literally in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia link above...

~~~
wmeredith
RTFA has never been more appropriate.

------
nanna
RSS seems to me to have use cases far beyond website updates, if it was
extended a little.

Event syndication. Say that I'd collect the event feeds from a load of
cinemas, music venues I like around the world, why not, plus those of
musicians. I want my RSS-based events reader to narrow down the date field to
be this weekend, location to be my town, and ticket field to be available, and
why not price to something I can afford, while I'm at it? Bam, everything I
could dream of doing this weekend, no Facebook and using a slightly modified
version of a two-decade-old tech.

Similar functionality for shopping.

Why couldn't RSS be extended to something like this?

~~~
Crespyl
It's really not that RSS couldn't handle (/be extended to handle) this use
case, it's that the parties publishing this information _do not want you to
have that much control over the feed_.

See how much effort Netflix puts into making their catalog hard to browse, to
obfuscate the actual size of the catalog and promote specific things they need
to show a large return on, or all the sponsorships/ad-deals/promotions that
inevitably begin to clutter almost any commercial news feed.

We have the technology, but publishers will fight tooth and nail to keep
control over the platform away from the end user.

~~~
geerlingguy
Remember the heady days when Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, et all had almost
open access to their 'social graphs', allowing people to grab content from one
place, post to another, build connections using tools like Yahoo Pipes? I
sometimes long for simpler days when companies were more open with their data.
Didn't Netflix even have a more open api back in the day that you could rank
and sort, and see new release dates, etc?

~~~
nl
You realise what the most successful thing built on top of that open social
graph was, right?

Cambridge Analytica.

~~~
bhashkarsharma
The issue there was collection of massive amounts of public data by Facebook.
Open data APIs can be used to build nice things, if the data isn't user
information.

~~~
nl
No, it was Cambridge Analytica using the old FB social graph API ("Open
Graph") to build a network of people that they could make predictions on.

The app "This is your digital life" let people do a psychological profile
linked to their FB profile. The Open Graph API then gave Cambridge Analytica
to (some of) their friend's data as well,

[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/facebook-cambridge-
analytica...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/facebook-cambridge-analytica-a-
timeline-of-the-data-hijacking-scandal.html)

[https://medium.com/tow-center/the-graph-api-key-points-in-
th...](https://medium.com/tow-center/the-graph-api-key-points-in-the-facebook-
and-cambridge-analytica-debacle-b69fe692d747)

[https://about.fb.com/news/2018/04/restricting-data-
access/](https://about.fb.com/news/2018/04/restricting-data-access/)

~~~
saagarjha
The problem here is that we don’t really have a consensus on what should
happen if people share the information they know about you with others without
asking you, not that we should not have API access to our own content on
social networks.

~~~
nl
No particular argument there - just noting that the original comment was
calling for return to "the heady days when Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, et all
had almost open access to their 'social graphs'".

Turns out that wasn't a great idea. Disappointing because it's what I wanted
too.

------
nsuser3
Customizable HN feeds (inofficial):
[https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/](https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/)

It's really easy to get posts on the frontpage only if they have more than x
points:

[https://hnrss.org/frontpage?points=x](https://hnrss.org/frontpage?points=x)

Or contain certain keywords:

[https://hnrss.org/newest?q=git+OR+linux](https://hnrss.org/newest?q=git+OR+linux)

~~~
franky47
This is awesome, configurable RSS feeds are critical for large-scale
publishing platforms, thanks for sharing!

------
pedro1976
As one that loves and RSS and hated that many websites don't offer them
anymore, I created a middleware that transforms the static HTML of most
websites to an RSS/Atom feed. Its just a proof-of-concept, but maybe you like
it :)

[https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy/](https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy/)

~~~
k1m
This looks interesting, thanks for sharing the link! I work on a project
that's somewhat similar but users have to be explicit (using CSS selectors)
about the elements that will be used to create the feed.[1] I like that yours
appears to try to pick out the best elements without user input.

[1] [http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/](http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/)

------
pembrook
The reason RSS failed to reach mainstream adoption by users is because it is
not user friendly at all. While I love RSS myself, no amount of tech nerd
nostalgia is going to make it popular enough that your mom starts using it.

Most sites still have implemented RSS in a terrible way. For example, many
blogs I follow only show excerpts in their feeds. So the feed is worthless to
me. Others put every podcast episode they do every day in between their posts.
Annoying and worthless.

Then, if you want to follow a site that publishes a lot of content, often you
have to subscribe to everything or nothing. Sorry all mainstream tech news
sites. I don’t want to read 1,000 low quality articles every day.

Then comes the UX nightmare of actually finding the feed on each website you
visit. If the site even has one.

~~~
akkartik
High-volume sites are not a good use case for RSS. We already have various
social ways to filter. Like the site you're on. I think RSS should be for
high-quality niche sites where you care about every single post.

I subscribe to 200+ feeds, but only read a dozen or so stories a week on them:
[http://akkartik.name/feeds.xml](http://akkartik.name/feeds.xml)

~~~
wmeredith
What kind of reader can I import this into? I'd like to get back into RSS.

~~~
akkartik
Most of them, I hope! It's a pretty standard OPML file.

------
tschellenbach
If anyone wants to help, here's an open source project I worked on quite a
bit: [https://github.com/GetStream/winds](https://github.com/GetStream/winds)
Goal is to build RSS for regular users instead of the power user audience that
RSS readers tend to cater to. I think this is part of the problem. The market
for RSS shrank. All commercial RSS readers focused on the people who pay (IE
the power users). Creating a user experience that is just not viable for most
consumers. You end up in this vicious cycle because of that. RSS usage drops,
RSS readers become more power user focused, sites drop support, continue the
cycle.

~~~
ghostpepper
I don't mean to sound harsh but if a user is either required to run their own
React/NodeJS (which is not going to happen for your stated target audience of
"regular users") or to use a centrally managed RSS service that could go away
at any moment... doesn't this defeat the purpose of syndication / federation a
little bit?

If

~~~
tschellenbach
Yup, also picking up the tab to host it:
[https://winds.getstream.io/](https://winds.getstream.io/)

Not sure if I'll keep on doing it though, bit expensive for a side project

------
synchrone
To reroute much of web-based feeds consumption to RSS - check out
[https://docs.rsshub.app/en/](https://docs.rsshub.app/en/)

It works quite well, has vibrant community, and support for ripping twitter
and instagram feeds among dozens of other sites. It also has a browser
extension to help discover available feeds on sites that it can digest -
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rsshub-
radar-...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rsshub-radar-en/)

There's also a Chrome extension, but that one is not translated from Chinese
yet.

------
awinter-py
I'm with the author in needing better reading tools, but the 'firehose' of RSS
isn't by itself the answer

aggregators solve a different variety problem vs RSS -- RSS gives you access
to random sources that you curate yourself, whereas HN or link-heavy blogs
give you access to a meaningful amount of high-impact articles from high-
diversity sources (i.e. more different websites than you subscribe to in
feedly) that everyone else is reading

at minimum, I need a tool that lets me tame the RSS firehose with some kind of
ranking or priority queue, plus mix in some aggregator reading so I don't miss
things

~~~
trynewideas
That was why the friend-of-a-friend social features of Google Reader were such
a big deal for me — I got curation and aggregation from a person I trusted,
and the people they trusted.

I didn't have to subscribe to anything to get content, I just had to follow
people I knew, and even if they weren't sharing a lot, their first-level
connections collectively shared plenty. The interface let me subscribe to
whatever feeds they were sharing from, which is how I discovered a lot of
content I never would've on my own, and in a lot of cases likely not through
other aggregation methods either.

Add the content they were clipping content with the bookmarklet and even sites
that weren't syndicating their content were getting my regular traffic via
shares.

~~~
awinter-py
+1

all kinds of trust networks are good

~~~
qznc
Devil's advocate: A public trust network is great for advertisers. They would
know exactly who the influencers are and how to cover the population with a
minimum of influencers.

~~~
skoocda
If influencers choose to work with advertisers, then jeopardize their circle's
trust due to advertiser affiliation, they would lose that trust. It self-
corrects; as long as the system doesn't reinforce the network effect.

------
dantondwa
RSS works pretty well for me. Every single website I follow supports it, both
the mainstream and the niche ones. I use on my desktop and phone NetNewsWire,
which is a great, fast and simple piece of software. Overall, I’d say RSS is
not the latest and greatest anymore, but it keeps working for me.

In fact, I use RSS for this website as well.

------
drdeadringer
I remember that brief time when free email addresses were being offered up
before RSS was created. You could get daily news emailed to your inbox from
such as USA Today, Wired, and so forth. An electronic newspaper tossed at your
digital front door every morning. I actually looked forward to it.

Then RSS was invented. Now RSS is supposed to be dead, and/or killed, what
appears to be several times over. I never did get on the Google Reader
bandwagon because I was subscribing to RSS feeds via other means.

Nowadays, I have the app ‘Podcast Addict’ [free with ads, $0.99 once for no
ads; I'm just a user here] installed on my tablet through which I subscribe to
over 50 RSS feeds – podcasts, webcomics, even a comedian’s “upcoming shows”
feed. There are countless other RSS feeds available via in-app search and
discovery let alone the “add your own” option.

By missing out on an RSS apocalypse folks seem to love to talk about from time
to time, have I accidentally become one of those “welcome back” guys?

~~~
BrunoBernardino
I felt very similarly.

If you’re interested in getting “the news” delivered to you daily, instead of
having to check a reader app, I’ve built something that aggregates all your
feeds (and websites without feeds) into a daily digest via email.

I don’t want to “spam” so I won’t link here, but you can check on my
submissions for “News, calm”.

On the “RSS apocalypse” front, I can say that on this product I noticed that
most websites “non-tech people” follow don’t offer RSS feeds, apparently over
monetization concerns.

I was definitely in a filter bubble as everything I followed had RSS.

------
cygx
We should go more old-school and resurrect NNTP instead: Have clients that
render Markdown, and servers where users can create their own access-
controlled groups.

Have a group where only the owner may post: That's a feed.

Have a group where only the owner may post top-level articles, but anyone may
respond: That's a blog.

~~~
zzo38computer
I had the same ideas about feeds and blogs as you have, and I agree.

I have seen the idea about Markdown before, and have considered that too; it
is not a bad idea. However, clients should only render Markdown if the article
contains a "Content-type: text/markdown" header, and assume plain text
otherwise. Clients that don't understand Markdown you can still read the
article, since Markdown is meant as readable even when not rendered, so that
is good, too.

I even wrote a simple NNTP server software and NNTP client software. Both
programs are based on SQLite.

I have not considered your idea of servers where users can create their own
access-controlled groups, although that doesn't seem so bad; some people may
wish to run such servers, and may have some way of users controlling them.

Also note, you could have multiple interfaces if wanted: HTML, RSS, email, and
NNTP, with NNTP as the primary and preferred interface. (To these, Gopher can
also be added for read-only access, if wanted.)

~~~
cygx
_I have not considered your idea of servers where users can create their own
access-controlled groups [...]_

One of the properties of traditional Usenet I don't like is that creating
groups isn't a matter of minutes, but a matter of days or weeks. If we want an
NNTP-based alternative to blogs, twitter and reddit, we can't have that.
Instead, a user should just get control of a namespace managed by the server
he's registered with.

 _Also note, you could have multiple interfaces if wanted: HTML, RSS, email
[...]_

That's a very important part of the equation: The server should auto-generate
HTML pages and RSS feeds for the messages to allow seemless integration into
the WWW. Let the power user use their news reader, but don't deny access to
the 'layperson'.

~~~
zzo38computer
Namespaces is an idea that I have considered, and I have defined a kind of
namespacing called "Unusenet", which uses "un" followed by the number of
components of the domain name that the namespace belongs to, a reverse domain
name, and then the rest of the components. The domain name is normally the
domain name of the server where the newsgroup originated; if it is then
federated with other servers, they use the original domain name for that
newsgroup and not their own. (For example, a newsgroup originating on
"example.org" named "misc.xyzzy" will have the full name
"un2.org.example.misc.xyzzy".) This is what I have on my own NNTP server. (You
do not have to use the Unusenet convention, but I use it in order to avoid
namespace collision.) However, I currently have no "feeds" or "blogs", but
only "forums"; if I do implement a blog then I would probably implement in
that way, though (and as I already mentioned, this was even my idea before you
mentioned it; we just happen to have the same idea). But I run my own server
rather than using those of others. Of course, not all users will want that,
but that is why they can have a server where users can create their own
access-controlled groups in a namespace in a few minutes easily like you
mentioned.

------
jayd16
It would be nice to see RSS come back and replace some of the centralized web.
In theory social networks could be replaced by event feeds your friends
publish. If you use something like IPFS you could, in theory, have a fully
decentralized social network.

There's still some business benefit to hosting, scraping, providing search
etc. The business models are closer to the open web.

I'm sure there's flaws and challenges in the idea. Even if private posts were
encrypted you'd still leak some info publicly. Still I think its a neat idea.

~~~
cwmartin
That seems like the idea behind the ActivityPub protocol that Mastodon and
other similar social media platforms are based around.

------
Nition
I wrote this just yesterday in another thread but I'll say it here as well:

I think RSS should be better built in to browsers. Make it as simple as a
follow button is on centralised websites.

e.g.: A little RSS icon pops up when RSS is available on a page, press it and
you're now following that feed. Feeds window in the browser shows your feeds,
and a small alert icon shows up somewhere when there's unread content. Your
subscriptions are saved to your account. If you want to read the article, you
click the link and read it directly on the source website. It doesn't need to
be any more complex than that.

Firefox had "Live Bookmarks" for RSS but it was relatively terrible, and
eventually got removed.

------
danesparza
I never stopped using RSS.

But man -- what a testament to how much I loved Google Reader that it still
feels like a fresh wound to have it brought up again.

Damn you, Google!

------
ddevault
Feedly seems nice but it's a total non-starter due to the lack of an email-
based signup. I have none of the social media accounts it wants you to log in
with and it'll be a cold day in hell before I share that much personal
information with an RSS reader anyway. But a brief reading of the privacy
policy will tell you that Feedly is a data hoarder and has every intention of
selling that information:

[https://feedly.com/i/legal/privacy](https://feedly.com/i/legal/privacy)

$6-$18/mo should be fucking enough for a service to keep my goddamn
information to themselves.

I'm using FeedReader[0], but I'm not especially happy with it. Would love to
hear some more recommendations.

[https://jangernert.github.io/FeedReader/](https://jangernert.github.io/FeedReader/)

~~~
akerl_
Given that one of the options for Feedly is “Continue with Feedly”, which
offers a “sign up” option where you provide a name, email, and password, I’m
not sure what you mean about forcing social media access.

~~~
ddevault
Thanks, somehow I missed it. But with a privacy policy like that, I'm still a
hard pass.

------
mmcconnell1618
The business model of RSS is harder than just slapping ads on your homepage
and encouraging more page clicks. I think that's the real reason you don't see
a strong RSS ecosystem. The content producers don't have a strong financial
incentive to support it well.

~~~
hkt
In my experience RSS is at its best when dealing with infrequent publishers or
niche audiences. People who don't expect to be paid for their writing because
they want a wider audience, like think tanks or university departments.

~~~
wpietri
That's definitely where it shines for me. I follow hundreds of infrequently-
updated sites using Newsblur. It's sort of the same value proposition for me
as Twitter. I'd never follow the New York Times in either place; what I want
is to get beyond what's commercially viable to publish.

~~~
hopesthoughts
The nice thing about RSS is a lot of sites offer filtered feeds. I only follow
a few feeds from the NYT, for instance.

------
edhelas
If we get back to RSS, can we at least all stick to Atom 1.0 :) ? It's way
stricter, simpler and easier to use, and I never found a parser that was not
accepting it.

~~~
chrismorgan
I strongly agree: Atom is technically _substantially_ superior to RSS, and in
regular feed readers is supported universally (with fewer issues, e.g. fields
like title and description are _definitely_ plain text or HTML, as specified,
rather than the RSS approach which leads to clients guessing all sorts of
different things so that you can’t safely use things like angle brackets in
titles).

However, the podcasting industry seems to have ignored Atom, which is
_stupid_. Podcast feeds are exclusively RSS, and from information found, most
major clients _probably_ don’t support Atom. But the area is a mess with no
good documentation _anywhere_ on what works or doesn’t (and all of the even-
halfway-decent content of this sort is from 2006–2010).

————

People colloquially refer to feeds as RSS, even when they’re mostly Atom.
Reminds me a bit of the SSL/TLS situation (where I _think_ the name “TLS” is
finally more popular than the name “SSL”).

------
Zhyl
Haven't seen newsboat be mentioned so far. I've written a bunch of scripts
that help subscribe to feeds (e.g. search YouTube for keyword and add RSS feed
for channel of the top hit), scripts to curate (e.g. extract 'topics' from BBC
articles that are only available on the page and not in the RSS feed) and
consume (watch videos with mpv, open images in feh, add long videos to a
backlog).

It's one of the best news experiences I've had and is an improvement over what
I was used to with Google Reader and Feedly. I feel much more in control of my
content consumption.

~~~
niemenmaa
Care to share your scripts? Avid newsboat user here also!

~~~
Chirael
I used commafeed with various categories and have a mixture of websites and
YouTube channels. It was a game-changer for me when I discovered that you can
“subscribe” to a YouTube channel’s videos as an RSS feed by pasting the
channel URL into a feed reader. All of a sudden YT became usable again.

------
Andrex
I'm moving from Feedly to self-hosted Tiny Tiny RSS soon: [https://tt-
rss.org](https://tt-rss.org)

Would be fun if others did the same and posted about their experiences!

~~~
taborj
I used tt-rss for a long time, but about 6 months ago I moved over to
FreshRSS.

But either way, self-hosted RSS is the way to go. Nobody can take it away from
you...

~~~
Andrex
Why did you move? What's your experience with FreshRSS been compared to TT-
RSS?

~~~
taborj
Honestly, it's hard to articulate or even pinpoint one thing. I like the
layout and options of FreshRSS, and a few little things; for example, I use
categories, and when I hit 'mark as read' on a category in tt-rss, it would
indeed mark everything as read, including items that had refreshed behind the
scenes since the last time I opened the category, effectively marking items as
read that I hadn't seen yet. FreshRSS seems smart enough to realize that those
items haven't been displayed.

Also, tt-rss' developer, fox, is rather abrasive, akin to Theo de Raadt from
OpenBSD (which I _love_ and will always use, despite Theo's abrasiveness). I
will admit, the projects do generally benefit from this unyielding approach,
but it makes it a chore to request help, knowing that you'll likely be
upbraided for asking questions.

I also like that FreshRSS has better 3rd party app support (at least on
Android).

------
thelazydogsback
RSS is the only way I consume content regularly -- if Innoreader can't see a
feed at a site that I may come across, I won't be visiting regularly. Too much
of a PITA otherwise. No Twitter account either -- I don't want a "push" model,
and the S/N ratio is way too low...

~~~
jadell
Same. A site having a feed is much more likely to get consistent recurring
traffic from me than a site I can only consume via social network posts.

~~~
hopesthoughts
I turn those into feeds too.

------
devinegan
If self-hosted is your thing I highly recommend tiny-rss and the iOS app
accompanying it. [https://tt-rss.org/](https://tt-rss.org/)

~~~
kc0bfv
I came here via ttRSS, with the Android app. I host it via the hosting service
I've used for years, it only requires PHP and a Cron job. The Android app lets
me keep ttRSS and its authentication behind a separate HTTP basic auth, which
I think keeps the attack surface low and security high-ish.

I think it's fantastic.

------
Hoasi
RSS are great and there are plenty of good RSS aggregators. Been using
NetNewsWire (free and open source), again since it returned to its original
creator.

------
gmoore
I love RSS - it's how I found this article :) I've been using The Old Reader
every since Google reader shut down...I love it.

~~~
encom
Though I don't use it for reading HN, I've been using The Old Reader since
Google Reader shut down. It's basically a copy of Google Reader as it was.

[https://theoldreader.com/](https://theoldreader.com/)

~~~
hopesthoughts
RSS is pretty much the only way I read HN.

------
tomjen3
You can do this: most rss feed readers allow you to add a website and it will
find the feed for you. You can do this with youtube channels too, because
youtube publishes an RSS feed for each channel.

There are also RSS feeds for HN, which I know because I arrived here via one
of them.

Edit: This should have been in reply to a comment that I now can't find.

------
juped
RSS is incredibly far from dead, everything emits RSS (it's really easy to
make something emit RSS), the only thing that ever died was Google Reader.
It's not user unfriendly, all RSS readers let you put a site URL in and grab
the meta tag for the RSS feed.

If _you_ aren't in RSS world, the question is, why aren't _you_?

------
debaserab2
RSS was already broken and then medium came along and slurped up the majority
of independent/longtail blogs (where most of the good stuff really is) and now
we're stuck in some awful state that there seems to be no easy way out of.
Content needs to be decentralized again before RSS can rule again.

------
Andrew_nenakhov
I can't get back to RSS: I never left it. After the demise of Google Reader I
just switched to Feedly and can happily recommend it to anyone. Feedly rocks!

I'm even thinking to make a gate from RSS to XMPP, that would work just like
these 'channels' do in Telegram.

------
baby
As someone who is a heavy user of RSS feeds (check my cryptography RSS
feed[1]) and has had to implement RSS feeds for my websites:

1\. we need to move away from XML. JSON would be a much better modern
candidate.

2\. we need better support in all web-first programming languages, and
possibly in web frameworks.

3\. we need to have a stricter set of rules on how to use HTML5 tags like
articles, sections, and such. An RSS feed shouldn't have to be manually
produced when a crawler should recognize modern HTML5 tag and produce one on
its own.

[1]:
[https://github.com/mimoo/crypto_blogs](https://github.com/mimoo/crypto_blogs)

~~~
j-f1
For #1, check out JSON Feed ([https://jsonfeed.org/](https://jsonfeed.org/)).
It’s at least supported by Feedly, and it’s probably supported elsewhere too.

~~~
juliogreff
I wonder how many websites publish JSON feeds though. I don't recall ever
coming across one, or maybe have I just not been paying enough attention?

------
darekkay
Site aggregators and RSS don't contradict each other. In fact, I'm reading
this very post through my HN RSS feed.

RSS is not only great for providing _content_, but also for
learning/trivia/facts. That's why I've created Tip of the Day [1], which
provides daily tips on different topics (e.g. logical fallacies, chemical
elements etc.). It's open source, so other topics can be added by anyone.

[1] [https://tips.darekkay.com/](https://tips.darekkay.com/)

------
lildata
I believe Mastodon should support RSS, at least some users would use it at
first as a feed aggregator as then progressively switch to the social media
aspects of the platform.

~~~
hopesthoughts
They do, or at least they used to. What I mean by that is they used to offer
RSS feeds for user timelines.

------
andrewnc
I had my first experience with RSS a few weeks back. I added a feed to my tech
blog at request of one of those on my mailing list.

I ended up writing a python script that transforms the HTML of my blog's
landing page into an RSS feed. Not elegant, but it got the job done.

My main problem is it seems hard for me to interact with my readers this way.
They can, of course, reach out via twitter or some such.

Anyway, I'm not sure there has been much value added on my end. But I'm happy
to oblige.

~~~
hopesthoughts
For me personally, I always click the link to read any articles I'm interested
in. If there are comments, and I'm really interested in what you said, I'll
probably post one.

------
40four
Wait, shit. Was all that just an advertisement for Feedly !?

Oh well. Anyway, for some reason, I do usually enjoy reading the 'Why CSS
died' debate when it rears it's head from time to time. I have been toying
with the idea of dipping my toes back into RSS.

Let's say I don't want to pay for a Feedly subscription. Does anybody know
some good places to start, to explore the landscape of available open source
RSS readers?

~~~
pinkano
This is Petr from Feedly, we have read this article this morning, Daniel
hasn't even let us know about it, so this is definitely not an ad paid by us
(we don't pay publishers to write about us)

~~~
40four
Thanks for the response Petr, and for being transparent. I appreciate that. I
didn't mean to suggest foul play on either party.

In my head I was saying it in a facetious way, but I see it didn't come across
that way. I was hoping to get recommendations on open source solutions that I
could maybe integrate in a hobby project, or self-host.

I will consider Feedly in the future though. By many accounts I've seen, you
guys are the best.

~~~
pinkano
There are plenty of solutions for sure, some of the local/self-hosted, some of
them open sources, some of them cheaper, etc. It is great that the variety is
there and maybe they are not all listed in the article, but I guess that was
not the point as David uses Feedly and wanted to showcase how he uses it.

------
hkt
I love RSS, but do think it needs to be developed.

For a start, clients aren't great. Most have poor UX and are clunky, and I've
used very few which don't choke on large numbers of feeds.

Second, having lots of subscriptions really shows the value of an editor. I
don't often want to scroll through everything that has been published by a
recently hyperactive feed in order to see things with a lower cadence. There
is no filter for relevance, which is perhaps something that could be added
through an external service or added to a hosted reader. Maybe someone has
already done this.

Third, search and recommendations is pretty poor. I'd be very much in the
market for "if you liked this then you'll like this" for RSS feeds. Perhaps
this already exists, but I'm not aware of it.

What I've always liked about RSS is the fact it can keep me in touch with more
sources than I can track myself. It highlights the blogs that only publish
once a month, and if I only check in weekly, it turns the internet into a
handy snapshot of who has updated and who hasn't. The part I like less is
filtering between relevance and irrelevance.

~~~
hopesthoughts
Google reader used to do the recommendations thing. I loved that!! Also not
having to scroll through everything at once is the beauty of the feeds list
format. In other words, you have a list of feeds, that should be the only
thing on the page. When you open a single feed, the content is displayed. I
won't use a reader that doesn't do things that way. They might have articles
on the bottom, after the list of feeds OK fine I guess. I never use that part
of the page willingly. The problem is that too many feed readers are being
developed to look like HN. No, that isn't how readers should be.

------
tetron
I use RssDaemon on Android, which had been around forever (8-9 years maybe?)
is apparently so dead that the author just released a new version with major
UI update.

My most used been apps on my phone are RssDaemon and Twitter. I read Hackers
news though RSS. Twitter on the other hand has been getting worse.

The backlash against centralized social media platforms is building, but it is
hard to say what comes next.

------
nergal
I used Google reader but went for feedly. But I missed some simple reader for
the terminal since that's where I spend most of my time. So I built gorss to
read rss/atom feeds. Ended up reading more news faster :) take it for a spin:
[https://github.com/lallassu/gorss](https://github.com/lallassu/gorss)

------
Thristle
After google reader went dark i used "The Old Reader" and when they moved to
pay only (or they closed? i can't remember) i moved to inoreader

its the only way i consume news/blogs. there is no way im checking 40+
websites every day for new content and that way i won't miss anything

if a site has no RSS or its RSS feed doesn't work right chances are i just
won't use that site

~~~
stevekemp
I always used rss2email (wrote a simple clone of that application in golang,
so I could drop python from my servers), which ensures I don't miss updates
and I have a local history I can search along with my email.

[https://github.com/skx/rss2email](https://github.com/skx/rss2email)

~~~
wei8wahL
+1, that's my favorite way of consuming rss as well. I love the fact that it
takes advantage of all the privacy features of the mail (like not phoning home
when you open the content).

I rewrote it as well, but for an other reason: when the app on my server
fetches an item, it will issue a http request to get the content of the actual
article and put it as attachment of the email - because on many feeds, the rss
item content is just an excerpt, sometimes useless.

Although, it works well for me because I use mutt and it displays the
attachment with `lynx -dump`, other mail clients may phone home to fetch
images/css/js/whatever when you display the mail.

------
mcescalante
RSS has been really great for me over the last year or so (when I got back
into it). I tried Feedly, and then Inoreader. I was not willing to pay for
either and ended up trying out the two popular self-hosted options: ttrss
(tiny tiny rss) and Miniflux. Stuck with Miniflux for its simplicity. Using
the Fever API with Reeder on my Mac and Readably on my Android.

~~~
psycadet
Spinned up Miniflux a couple of hours a go, thanks for the recommendation.
Software like this makes my self hosting cravings very satisfied.

~~~
hopesthoughts
My thing with self hosting is that I'm using a shared plan. I currently have
over 500 feeds, and I don't think they'd be all that happy about it if well...
um... I decided to use RSS on their servers.

------
crazygringo
A newsfeed is an extremely complex and tricky product to get right, even more
so when it's an aggregated one.

There are so many competing concerns to handle -- prioritization with a
source, prioritization between sources, discoverability, UX flow, preview vs.
full content, social content from your friends vs. institutional content,
commenting, and last but not least, a business model: what is incentivizing
content sources to cooperate in good faith and not ignore it or abuse it?

Fact of the matter is, RSS is just far too simplistic to handle these
competing concerns in any kind of balanced or reasonable way. But it's also
possible there _is_ no single answer.

Which is why different "newsfeeds" for me (HN, Reddit, NYT, AV Club, Twitter)
have drastically different interfaces and interaction models. I don't want my
HN to work like Twitter, or my Twitter to work like the NYT. And I can't even
imagine of any possible interface that could somehow aggregate them all.

------
generalpass
I saw this pop up in my HN RSS feed.

~~~
number6
All this talk about rss being dead. Almost every major side offers an rss feed
somewhere.

I self host an rssreader and use it for new YouTube videos or release on
github or hackernews and my favourite blogs.

------
smcleod
I wasn't aware RSS went anywhere let alone died, I've been using Feedly for
years and I couldn't imagine getting blog and product updates any other way. I
highly recommend Reeder 4 on macOS/iOS as a client.

------
coronadisaster
I never stopped using RSS but I'm glad that more people are starting to use
it.

------
luord
I never stopped using RSS but this is a nice thought.

I ain't following anything political, though. Between general news sites I've
subscribed to (which I hope are neutral enough) and the many contacts in my
social networks that never stop droning about their politics (a few of whom I
agree with, many of whom I disagree with), I have enough negativity in my
life.

On a lighter note, I prefer "the old reader" over feedly. I feel that it's far
less cluttered and gets out of the way. Wish they had an official android
application, but their API is good enough that third party clients do the job.

------
ekianjo
So wait the answer is to move from one big centralizer like Google Reader to
another one, Feedly? Why not recommending the hundreds of RSS clients out
there instead of selling your data yet again to another entity?

------
puzzlingcaptcha
I've been hosting my own instance of Tiny Tiny RSS ever since Google Reader
shut down. Highly recommended.

[https://tt-rss.org/](https://tt-rss.org/)

~~~
pk78
Same! Started from: Google reader -> Digg reader -> Ino reader -> tried a
bunch of other things and didn't like any -> settled on a self-hosted TT-RSS
instance.

------
mrsaint
Consuming RSS with Inoreader here. Probably the most used app on my phone.

------
Seb-C
I don't know why people says that RSS is dead... It is very much alive. I am
still using it for everything.

Just because it stagnated and is not as popular as social networks does not
mean it is dead.

------
hopesthoughts
I never left RSS. In fact, I found this in my reader. Unfortunately though
Feedly doesn't meet a long list of design criteria I have.

------
ernsheong
I am building (at infancy stage, now), a subproduct at
[https://www.pagedash.com/](https://www.pagedash.com/) that behaves as a
Reader. It won't be an RSS reader, but it will be an aggregator of websites /
blogs in general.

Drop your email here to be notified on launch (and to encourage me to keep
building):
[https://forms.gle/XzZTrTEAtaAXfq6i6](https://forms.gle/XzZTrTEAtaAXfq6i6)

~~~
hopesthoughts
What do you mean by it won't be an RSS reader? you have to allow custom feed
URLs right?

------
durandal1
I recently configured FreshRSS on my Raspberry Pi 4 and I'm using both the web
interface as well as Reeder syncing through its greader compatible API. While
this setup may not be for everyone, reducing time on twitter in favor of
reading blogs notably increased my happiness, and how content I am in terms of
intellectual stimulation after taking an RSS reading break.

As a bonus, the FreshRSS web interface, while not being the prettiest, is
surprisingly effective for going through the unread articles.

------
citizenpaul
Funny how there was a post earlier today about "is there a search engine that
filters out popular media and such. Well you just answered it with this post.

------
botolo
I think the comments here are mixing two different issues: information
delivery and creators rewards.

For information delivery, RSS is great and the author of the article is right.

Creators reward is an issue that needs to be solved in any case. Ads help but
you need a lot of traffic to make it worth it and they disrupt the reading
experience.

Hopefully crypto and tipping will solve this, but I still need to see a good
implementation of this.

------
WCityMike
Personally, can't recommend Inoreader enough for those returning to RSS. They
do it well and they're beginning to incorporate some good innovation outside
the normal structure what with collecting newsletters, etc. for you. My two
cents, at least; I'm a happy customer. (Mentioning this since, as 40four
points out, the article is kind of one big Feedly ad.)

------
est
The main drawback of RSS IMHO is that it's strictly one-way publishing. You
can't comment, or like, or subscribe, or share, or sponsor directly to
original author. Author might posted something really exiting and seen none of
the reactions happening in all kinds of RSS readers.

I think it's important if we can have a universal two-way format for long,
rich written texts.

~~~
hopesthoughts
Accept you can because you don't have to stay inside the reader.

------
mironov
You can read content from Hacker News, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and a lot of
other platforms using an RSS reader. You can even receive newsletters there.

I wrote about the process here: [https://blog.mironov.live/how-to-build-your-
personal-news-in...](https://blog.mironov.live/how-to-build-your-personal-
news-inbox/)

------
hopesthoughts
Oh and by the way, I follow a whole bunch of Subreddits, and a couple Reddit
searches via RSS.

------
Tepix
Luckily RSS support was already commonplace in blogging software by the time
of Google Reader's demise so at many places, it never disappeared.

I never used Google Reader, the corporation knows too much about me already, I
don't want them to know what RSS feeds I subscribe to and what items I click
on. Luckily there have always been alternatives.

------
mememem
There are several nice apps for RSS feeds, but unfortunately, the low support
on OS level makes RSS comfortable for geeks but not for ordinary people, who
now mainly consume content in Twitter and Facebook whose feeds btw is a
centralized and more comfortable version of their ancestor - RSS.

------
_samjarman
For me, I joined twitter, followed all the authors I loved, and then my RSS
reader became redundant. It wasn't deliberate, it wasn't terribly conscious. I
got the same content, a whole lot more personality, and even some interactions
and discussions with the author and other readers.

~~~
adrian1973
I heard this same sentiment a ton when Twitter first got big. But there are
things that RSS is incredibly useful for that Twitter is terrible for, and
vice versa.

For RSS, I use it to follow company and engineering feeds: every web browser
and every major product all have feeds. e.g., I follow the Safari, Google
Chrome, and Firefox browser feeds to learn about current and upcoming updates.
And the best part is I can read them only once a week, and they do not
disappear from my "timeline".

OTOH, I stopped subscribing to news via RSS years ago. Trying to make sense of
every single headline some news site published--usually dozens per day for
most of them--is impractical. And while there's a lot of blog authors I like
to read, I just can't keep up with them either. Better to just set aside some
time once a week and skim their sites.

The thing about Twitter I never liked is the feeling that I had to be on it
all the time, every second, or I would "miss" something. But screw that, I
have things to do, and I'll catch up when I catch up.

------
jtth
Some of us never left. Reading this is weird, like someone "rediscovering"
your suburban house.

~~~
wasdfff
I’ve been hearing the death bell for RSS for over a decade and here I am not
noticing any difference in the quanitity or availability of feeds. RSS is no
longer mainstream and deep into the nerd territory, but claims about its death
have been greatly exaggerated.

~~~
hopesthoughts
Was it ever mainstream though? I mean I think the closest we've come is
podcasts.

------
dewey
Also if you don't want to sign up for another service there's also a bunch of
self hosted RSS readers like [https://miniflux.app](https://miniflux.app)
which I'll never get tired of recommending in threads like this.

------
cocktailpeanuts
Has this guy been living under a rock? Slashdot and Digg? seriously?

RSS died because better systems came along which did a much better job at
following sources "directly".

He talks as if we no longer have any relationship with authors anymore, when
Twitter and Facebook actually made audience and publishers closer than ever.

RSS died because it wasn't necessary anymore. It's a typical pattern of
pendulum swinging between centralization and decentralization.

If you're going to say "It's time to get back to RSS", at least understand why
RSS is dead. Then maybe you will have a real solution instead of a non
solution like "go download feedly".

Lastly, people blame Google for "killing RSS" by abandoning google reader, but
these people have no idea. RSS was dead long before Google discontinued it.
Instead of coming up with conspiracy theory, think about more plausible reason
for why something would be disrupted by another piece of technology.

------
6510
Books are dead too! Long live books.

When someone has an opinion like this one should wonder if they ever used RSS.
Web applications for RSS aggregation is worse than using IRC in a web
interface. I cant take strong opinions about IRC seriously either if the
person didn't install a client. With RSS the person is merely describing
himself.

Please do go install [or make] a client, gather some feeds, do some filtering.
When you have your first 10 000 subscriptions I'd love to hear every angle of
your story, the topics, the organization, what client you use, what language
it was written in, what database it uses, who wrote it. ETC ETC

The walled gardens full of [self] censorship, data mining, adware and bullshit
content have useful features too! Aggregation isn't it. HN headlines only
vaguely map to our interest but reading the comments is wonderful.

(Reminds me to install thunderbird and backup my gmail. I'm not young enough
to trivialize losing my data.)

~~~
MPSimmons
This comment is needless gatekeeping. Nobody cares how many RSS feeds you
subscribed to back in your hayday. Really.

~~~
6510
It doesn't matter how much other people care. It is that you want to have an
informed opinion - for yourself.

If I make an opinion prematurely I see myself defend it while familiarizing
myself with the topic. I go blind to what contradicts it and remember only
what fits my preconceived ideas. This is why I try to avoid it.

Perhaps other people (you) are able to suspend their uninformed opinion but I
highly doubt it.

But okay, I will at least try (and no doubt fail) to describe the taste of the
soup before you try it:

The issue is that it gets so much better if you have a lot of subscriptions
(sorted by pubDate) The experience is much like a search result but with
everything you enjoy mixed together.

There are no notifications of course since new articles happen much to
frequently. In stead you gaze over the headlines periodically and open a few
articles (in the browser)

Because there are few people as interested in (the proverbial) antique silver
thimbles as you those articles need to float to the top or live in a different
folder.

I for example one time crawled a bunch of fortune 500 websites looking for
feeds. The flood of press releases really gave me a sense what is going on.
Lots of boring corporate speak but at least every page described a serious
effort to accomplish something.

You really need to subscribe to every remotely interesting small weblog you
can still find so that you can at least bother to read the headlines. The
small blog really needs you. This is where the original content happens.

You will also find out that the rest of the web is a giant echo chamber with
thousands upon thousands of websites recycling the same topics.

Trump is no doubt important enough to have thousands of articles written about
a single sentence he spoke.

David Bowie was no doubt important enough to have a millions articles about
his death.

Think of the bizarre number of topics handed down to us by Rupert Murdoch?

But is it what I should be filling my head with?

I tried lots of online aggregators. Around 1000 subscriptions they stopped
working. How do I get my data out?

Ill just put
[https://danielmiessler.com/feed/](https://danielmiessler.com/feed/) on the
pile and ill be checking his headlines for years to come. Until the death of
the website or the end of my existence. It's a perfect relationship. No need
for a middle man - no thank you.

------
topherPedersen
Signed up for Feedly, now following danielmiessler.com, and added a super
sweet RSS button to my WordPress blog,
[https://topherpedersen.blog](https://topherpedersen.blog).

------
SlippyCrisco
I found this article via RSS.

------
jadell
Nitpick: pretty sure Slashdot predated Google reader by almost a decade.

------
stevewilhelm
My I recommend IPTC's NewsML-G2
[https://iptc.org/standards/newsml-g2/](https://iptc.org/standards/newsml-g2/)

------
docdeek
I really like Reeder 4.0. I use it on iOS and Mac and it's a dream.

------
pjmlp
> We all mourned when Reader died and took RSS with it, but it's time to
> return to what made it great

I did not, I just kept using native clients like Outlook. No big deal.

------
bane
RSS is dead, but API-drive API access to data on a monthly subscription is all
over many industries. Why not just sell access to an RSS feed on a
subscription?

------
Chirael
One of the best parts about an RSS reader is that it doesn’t report every
click back to Advertising Central to update the profile they keep on you.

------
mkchoi212
I so agree with the author. Less effort it takes to retrieve documents, the
less it will mean to you, which means that you’ll less likely consume it.

------
bullen
I never left: [http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?rss](http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?rss)

Also has Pingbacks!!!

------
macawfish
RSS + Dat is a great combo, for what it's worth

------
ghostwriter
Is there an up-to-date alternative to Media RSS aiming at sharing feeds of
media content (on-demand video, streaming video, photos)?

------
Havoc
What's the best way to add yahoo pipes like filtering or some sort of
programmability?

Was considering node-red for it but not sure

------
larsrc
I would have taken this article more seriously if an RSS feed icon had
appeared among the social media icons below the title.

------
larsrc
I would have taken this article more serious if an RSS feed icon had appeared
among the social media icons below the title.

------
627467
I got rid of my overloaded feedly account and am now hosting a rss2email
service that gathers posts from about 10 feeds

------
dollers
The first thing I noticed after setting up an RSS reader was gow click batey
and dumb everything in my RSS feed was.

------
extro
>Reasoning that RSS have less clutter.

>Recommends a webclient.

So the question is dear author: how much did Feedly paid for you?

------
mikestaub
I think it is too late to go back to RSS, we should adopt the ActivityPub
protocol.

------
HaoZeke
Damn I have a draft about RSS languishing in my TODO for weeks. Great stuff
though. RSS FTW!

------
iagooar
If it wasn't for podcasting, I wonder if RSS wouldn't actually be dead by now.

------
ineedasername
RSS was very bad at helping sites keep their content monetized. This is why it
died.

------
afterwalk
I wonder why podcasts are thriving while writing-based RSS is declining.

------
gexla
This could somewhat be the fault of web developers. Unless there's a paywall,
the (client|customer|boss) probably wouldn't object to throwing in an RSS
feed. Maybe it would require a little extra time, but it's easier than jacking
around with HTML / CSS. Most of the time, developers probably don't even think
about RSS or it's at the bottom of their list.

I read my feeds in Thunderbird. I don't want yet another 3rd party service for
this. I get overloaded, but my web browser is a worse distraction. I probably
waste less time surfing through RSS feeds than I do by mindlessly browsing. I
can more easily develop a routine for browsing feeds and the view is less
distracting.

There's probably a lot of opportunity in aggregation. Newsletters such as
"Inside" do a great job of this, but it's just one small slice.

------
rado
I read this via RSS.

------
purplezooey
Yes, wtf, I miss the heck out of RSS.

------
autorun
Back to the ~USSR~ RSS

------
xmly
Old time never comes back...

------
symgryph
I’ve been using BAZQUX which is a nice aggregator and reeder4 Since 2013. I
have a nice opml file. And my eyes don’t bleed because I could have text only
webpages. For those of you who are adventurous you can try TINYTINYRSS. I
don’t see why everyone said RSS is dead almost every site still supports it.

------
bertman
From the article:

    
    
      Not only will this reduce your anxiety 
      and churn from constantly opening and 
      closing various sites, but RSS also 
      shows the content in a standard format, 
      with less to distract you.
    

Hmm, if you get anxiety from closing and opening tabs, you should probably go
offline for a while.

~~~
iotku
>Hmm, if you get anxiety from closing and opening tabs, you should probably go
offline for a while.

You'll be able to go offline for a while thanks to RSS feeds.

You can click one button to check for feed updates and know you're up to date
on things or what's new.

vs.

1) Open browser

2) Load folder of bookmarks for favorite sites

3) Look through each tab to see if there's new content.

To me given those two scenarios RSS feeds seem much more efficient and I do
get anxiety when I'm repeating menial tasks potentially multiple times a day
for no perceivable benefit.

RSS is another victim of the manipulation of social media companies trying to
steal everyone's attention and time.

------
_curious_
I agree with this OP/authors thesis...long live RSS!

But don't tell me the answer to anything is found in signing up for /
purchasing a specific product, then it becomes a commercial :/

"It’s unclear what exactly destroyed RSS"

The driving force (well before Google decided to close reader) is that many
professional publishers (those who made a living/ran a pubco, notsomuch indie
bloggers) stopped supporting RSS because it was harder to monetize RSS content
consumers for obvious reasons.

Even mid-late 2000s, I remember literally hacking constantly breaking RSS
feeds from major sites or going back n forth with pubco support/webmaster
requesting (at times even paying) for a custom feed because the format was so
efficient.

------
zelly
Twitter has replaced RSS for all intents and purposes.

I miss Google Reader and RSS too, but the world has changed. Another reason
RSS is in the past is because it was a means of delivering long blog articles
which only a small minority of internet users has the interest or attention
span for.

You miss RSS because you miss 2007.

~~~
hopesthoughts
Um... I was on Twitter in 2007. I think both things can coexist. It doesn't
have to be one or the other.

