I've been subscribed to news.ycombinator.com/rss for a few years, but (more often lately) I have noticed that it does not update frequently, and many stories that have appeared on the desktop site (not "new", but on the front page) do not appear in the feed.
I have also been using 'news.ycombinator.com/rss' for years, I have no problem with it, but then I only fetch and view the actual content of the xml in real time, and don't have a reader storing and sorting the entries.
What I can say is, the /rss feed always 100% matches the frontpage at the time of it's fetch.
EDIT: looking at the /rss feed, it's missing a <guid> tag for articles, which maybe confusing some readers that rely on that tag for article uniqueness.
I saw that too. I used to run my own HN RSS feed that was just a pass-thru to HN's RSS feed, but with the comments as the primary link. No matter how often my feed reader fetched, I routinely saw links show up on HN Daily or HN Blogs that my pass-thru feed hadn't captured.
Eventually I learned that hnrss has a flag to make the comments the primary link. I switched to that, and no more problem.
HN also frequently changes post titles and these show up as different articles on my RSS reader. I think RSS allows specifying a unique feed item id so this can be avoided but HN doesn't set it.
The 90s had competition here. There was MSN, FirstClass, Internet, Compuserve, AOL. The Internet won, but no it's not as simple as "we already had email". It didn't start out unified.
I'm talking about for the consumer. Sure, the Internet sure had a leg up on winning, in retrospect, because it was open and built by schools too. But imagine if Microsoft had successfully pushed MSN as "the" network for high schools?
These competitors were point-and-click easy for nontechies long before the Internet was.
Google reader leveraged Googles search index to allow users to easily find RSS feeds on any topic, and build a personal feed of all the articles from their chosen topics.
Think a Gmail type interface, but for RRS with a built in RSS search.
Then one day, Google just killed it, and over night millions of RSS feeds cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
Google Reader disappearing certainly had an impact, but I think there is another factor that contributed to companies abandoning RSS: user tracking & advertising.
For example: our country's version of eBay used to have a great RSS service where you could set up a feed for search queries on their site. I would skim through all the feeds once a day to see if there where any deals I liked. But now they have replaced it with an email service, which requires me to visit their website to see the results of the queries (every query also has it's own notification email). Which means they get data on the things I am potentially buying and how engaged I'm with them (since the email is coupled to my account, the RSS was not). It would also give them an opportunity to present some ads, because I have to visit their site every time I want to see if there are any interesting results.
> I tried many times to use rss but found the ecosystem to be terrible.
If you are in the apple ecosystem, I would recommend giving it a try with NetNewsWire + A feedbin subscription.
NetNewsWire has an iOS and a macOS client and has a clean UI. FeedBin's killer feature is that they provide an email address that you can use to subscribe to newsletters - being able to read these along with other blog updates is a game changer.
I have found that the best content is from people who write their own newsletters or blog on their own platform. After experiencing the internet liberated from all pop ups, pay walls, advertisements, GDPR harassment and google AMP, I don't think I can ever go back.
Not op, but my guess is that by creating a centralised service which abstracted RSS away, it meant that when Google killed the reader it damaged the ecosystem as a whole, including the underlying protocol.
Google making Reader very good, and it becoming the most popular method of using RSS (for reading articles, at least - not for podcasts), and then suddenly killing it, can be seen as pretty much an "embrace, extend, extinguish" move.
Just loading all feeds and keeping them in sync. I can use my phone, the website or my terminal client and at the end of the day I got my list of read and unread articles whether I'm on my phone or laptop
Not exactly a reader, but I use rss2email[0]. It’s pretty easy to setup, has optional HTML/CSS support, and I run a cron job to pull feeds daily. I like being able to browse through articles wherever I can get email without having to rely on a separate, proprietary service or self-hosting.
NetNewsWire for macOS/iOS[0]. It was the best RSS reader for Mac OS X in the far past and they have now revived it and made it open source. I particularly like that you can sync feeds via iCloud or self-hosted instead of an external service.
I use (and made) https://sumi.news - RSS, newsletter, and Twitter support. No subscription. Clean chronological feed, and a per-feed recent entry view.
See also: the builtin HN RSS feed at https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
And also the RSSHub capabilities here: https://docs.rsshub.app/en/programming.html#hacker-news