[HN Gopher] What Happened to RSS?
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What Happened to RSS?
Author : popey
Score : 12 points
Date : 2022-06-11 12:51 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thepcspy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thepcspy.com)
| lapcat wrote:
| So tired of people proclaiming RSS "dead". Some of us have been
| using RSS all along and never stopped using it. There are still
| plenty of native RSS clients. Google Reader is not RSS. In fact
| it's better that Google doesn't control RSS; no company should
| control it.
|
| You can talk about how Google killed their RSS support. How
| Twitter killed their RSS support. How Apple added and then
| removed RSS from Safari. But RSS lives on, it can't be killed.
|
| Many news sites continue to publish RSS feeds, you just need to
| know how to find them.
|
| How many death proclamations does RSS need? At this point it's
| become a joke, like the old Saturday Night Live Weekend Update,
| "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead."
| riedel wrote:
| I agree, it is still the most reliable way to aggregate
| multiple media sources and luckily far from dead.
|
| Does anyone else uses messenger bots to aggregate RSS? I use
| manybot [1] and it has moved RSS to the modern world for me.
|
| [1] https://manybot.io/
| al_borland wrote:
| My theory is that Google killed Google Reader as a means to push
| Google+. Reader's death was a huge blow to the RSS world.
|
| With a majority of the people on Facebook, Twitter, etc it seems
| websites are most concerned with syndicating to those platforms,
| rather than through a shared protocol that anyone can subscribe
| to.
|
| I still use RSS to follow a few sites (with NetNewsWire). I never
| want to overwhelm myself with sources, but have always found RSS
| to be a fantastic way to keep on on a site without going to it
| all the time or seeing the same stories over and over again. I
| see everything one time and can choose to read it or skip it.
|
| I guess that last point may be the problem for websites looking
| to generate revenue. RSS is going to let you filter down to just
| what you actually want to read without ads (for the most part).
| It also doesn't require you obsessively check the site to see if
| you're missing anything. It's very easy to just check once a day,
| or once every couple days, to get all caught up. Sites like
| Facebook or Twitter want you checking over and over again
| throughout the days, and with their feeds you can never be sure
| you've seen everything, while other things you see over and over
| again. More views leads to more money.
|
| From what I understand, podcasts are still using a very similar
| structure to RSS. But I think that might be under attack as
| popularity grows and companies are looking to lock people into
| their specific platforms.
| ianberdin wrote:
| Yea, but you still can use feed generators from any website using
| https://rss.app. (friend's startup).
| Havoc wrote:
| Its the polar opposite of where the web has gone since. Ads.
| Tracking. Dark patterns. A/B tested UX. Walled gardens.
|
| All the things that make it clean, simple and attractive to the
| tech inclined are precisely the reason why it is in decline.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| It was fantastic for the readers, but it did not have a
| sustainable businessmodel for the producers. Not enough eyeballs
| on the actual add stuffed sites when you can just grab the
| content straight.
|
| So Google set out to absolutely dominate the the RSS client space
| with their free Reader. They succeeded, then just terminated the
| product. And that was for many the end of the line.
| MatthiasPortzel wrote:
| > Do people just consume what they're now fed through Platforms:
| Facebook, Twitter and Tiktok? Would I have to hawk myself on each
| platform?
|
| I personally read mostly stories on Hacker News, and the author
| has successfully reached me here.
|
| There's an irony in Hacker News criticizing algorithm based
| feeds, when it itself is proof that Twitter and Facebook are not
| the only alternatives to RSS.
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| RSS is a negative revenue generator. Every person that uses it is
| one less person that will see ads. It's great for users but not
| sites. I suspect Google was losing a lot of ad revenue so they
| mostly killed support.
|
| I ignored it for a long time but decided to start using.
| Unfortunately that's when website support started to decline.
| Shame I really liked it.
| bgs113 wrote:
| Unless a site chooses to make RSS, especially full content
| feeds, part of a subscriber benefit. Ars Technica, for example,
| provides full content feeds to subscribers, while the general
| public can access title + preview snippets.
|
| Approaching it this way (similar to paid mailing lists) is the
| best of both worlds, providing revenue incentives to users
| while removing site ads for users who care about and pay for
| the content.
| Jaruzel wrote:
| The article talks about the unfriendly way a raw RSS feed is
| presented in the browser and how users do not know what to do
| with it.
|
| This is easily fixed by adding an XSL stylesheet reference at the
| top of the RSS XML. The stylesheet not only contains HTML markup
| to format the XML in a friendly manner, but can also be used to
| inform the user what to actually do with the RSS feed.
|
| The BBC do exactly this on all their RSS feeds.
| mdaniel wrote:
| > This is easily fixed by adding an XSL stylesheet reference at
| the top of the RSS XML
|
| I think that only works for Firefox, since I can't recall
| Chrome ever doing the right thing in that setup
| darekkay wrote:
| I can confirm that it's working in Chrome and Firefox. I have
| created an XSL stylesheet for my feed a couple of weeks ago.
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(page generated 2022-06-11 23:01 UTC)