[HN Gopher] What Happened to RSS?
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What Happened to RSS?
Author : popey
Score : 65 points
Date : 2022-06-11 12:51 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (thepcspy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thepcspy.com)
| indymike wrote:
| I rediscovered RSS earlier this year when I turned over day to
| day responsibility for marketing (was managing both product and
| marketing) to a new manager. All of our marketing tools (website,
| email, etc...) supported RSS, and to my surprise, a lot of third
| party sites I like to monitor turned out the have a <link> tag
| with RSS or atom feeds. I did a quick apt search for rss and
| realized that akregator is still around, set it up, and now I can
| keep up with all the content the marketing team (and our
| competition) is cranking out in few minutes.
| bscphil wrote:
| Something weird is happening with this HN submission. Despite the
| submission time saying "5 hours ago" and the time on most of the
| comments saying "2 hours ago" or less, I clearly remember seeing
| both this submission and several of the exact comments yesterday.
|
| If I hover over "5 hours ago" on the submission at the top, I see
| the timestamp "2022-06-11T12:51:31". If that's in my time zone,
| that was 1 day, 10 hours ago. If that's GMT, it was even longer
| ago.
|
| Clearly this submission has "resurfaced" with all of the relative
| time information changed, but the underlying timestamps on the
| post preserved.
|
| I have archived the page as I see it for future reference:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220612175242/https://news.ycom...
|
| Anyone know how this could have happened? @dang?
| lapcat wrote:
| Yes, the comment timestamps are also wrong. My comment from
| yesterday now says "2 hours ago".
| r721 wrote:
| I think that's what happens when dang "bumps" submission which
| was considered interesting but overlooked, but I don't know how
| exactly that process works, he probably explained it in
| comments somewhere.
| bscphil wrote:
| Thanks - it's kind of weird that it screws up the date,
| though.
|
| Edit: actually, I have a guess. Maybe the moderators don't
| have access to the algorithm and it isn't that flexible, so
| the way they hack around it is by changing what the algorithm
| sees as the posted date of the submission. If the algorithm
| thinks the submission was made more recently than it actually
| was, it will bring it back to the front page because the
| score goes up.
| marban wrote:
| I've built more than one product that relies on RSS and after ~20
| years, I still make a living from it (Currently
| https://biztoc.com) -- Let me tell you that the death of RSS has
| been greatly exaggerated and seeing posts like these every month
| will neither help nor kill the format.
| 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."
| kradeelav wrote:
| Agreed, and some paid plans on dedicated RSS readers(1) can
| turn the rare twitter/instagram feeds into proto-RSS feeds in a
| pinch. it's lovely and keeps me far, far away from the dark
| patterns inherent to those sites.
|
| (1) Inoreader is the one I use with this capability. worth
| every penny - moved there after Google Reader died.
| yinyang_in wrote:
| Reeder recently added this feature, made the purchase entire
| worth it.
|
| Author make new version update with new purchase but worth it
| now
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| How even Mozilla tried to make RSS as difficult to use as
| possible, eventually just removing all but Live bookmarks, and
| even then pushing that to a separate extension...
|
| In any case, I don't think the problem is lack of clients, but
| lack of publishers. Most platforms with loginwalls (e.g.
| Twitter) will never publish RSS feeds...
| superkuh wrote:
| Corporate persons web applications don't but most web sites
| run by human persons do. Wordpress, medium, etc, all have
| easy automatic RSS generation. RSS is only lacking if you
| live in the megacorp content silos.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Corporations are usually the place where I can most easily
| find RSS feeds. I can easily find RSS feeds for newspapers,
| press releases, status of services, etc.
|
| The problem is individuals. Individuals tend to publish on
| hosts which just are incompatible with RSS (because they
| are 'platforms' with other goals, like Twitter), or self-
| host without RSS (yes, happens). Platforms which have
| automatic RSS generation are a minority in terms of users
| (and BTW Wordpress and Medium are also 'corporate person
| silos', save for perhaps self-hosted WP).
|
| An example of this irony is that Twitter itself publishes
| RSS feeds for their investor news --
| https://investor.twitterinc.com/rss-feeds/default.aspx --
| yet fails to provide RSS feeds for their actual user
| content.
|
| Personally I do not assign much value in following the
| opinions of individuals, so I am still primarily an RSS
| user. But lately even e.g. political parties tend to
| publish in these silos and forget about RSS.
| [deleted]
| sreevisakh wrote:
| Reading the rest of the comments, I was wondering if I missed
| something. I use awesome-rss firefox extension [1] to discover
| RSS feeds on firefox. I maintain a list of feeds using elfeed-
| org and follow them using elfeed on Emacs. It's clean and
| extremely fast - especially while searching. Granted that it
| isn't really beginner friendly. But there are nice beginner-
| friendly alternatives like liferea too. Here are somethings
| that confuse me while reading these sorts of articles and
| discussions:
|
| 1. I don't see why they say browsers killed RSS/atom feeds. The
| only casualty was the discoverability of those feeds (like the
| discontinued live bookmarks on Firefox). But it is easy enough
| to restore it using extensions like awesome-rss, if you care
| enough. And I find a lot of dedicated feed reader applications
| catering to all sorts of users.
|
| 2. I don't understand how twitter and firefox killed RSS/Atom
| feeds. I find it extremely tedious to search for meaningful
| information with them. These sites are full of material
| designed to hold your attention captive while frustrating your
| efforts at finding worthwhile material. In contrast, RSS/Atom
| is information dense, easy to search, narrow and archive.
|
| 3. There is no dearth of RSS/Atom feeds on the web. Every good
| news website news site seems to host one. Almost all the blog
| engines and static site generators automatically generate them
| without any configuration or intervention. I find my feedlist
| growing very large overtime.
|
| 4. It also appears like many people associate RSS/Atom feeds
| with an online service like feedreader or (the dead) Google
| reader. My understanding is that you don't need an online
| service to aggregate feeds. An intermittently online
| desktop/mobile client can do it just the same. I haven't
| noticed an RSS/Atom client ever failing to aggregate a feed.
| The only thing I found missing was an automatic way to share
| and synchronize the feed list itself - though it's easy enough
| to implement with something like syncthing. Am I missing
| something here?
|
| For me, twitter, FB etc are inferior to RSS/Atom feeds in every
| conceivable way - with the exception of lack of a discussion
| forum. I too find the death proclamation of RSS/Atom a bit of
| an overstatement.
|
| [1] https://github.com/shgysk8zer0/awesome-rss
|
| [2] https://lzone.de/liferea/
| krylon wrote:
| It _has_ become increasingly difficult to find RSS feeds for
| podcasts. More and more podcasts have moved to the various
| "platforms" like iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and finding
| a plain old RSS feed has become quite the heroic quest in some
| cases. :(
| scarface74 wrote:
| Podcasts never moved to iTunes. You submit the URL to your
| podcast feed to Apple and it scrapes your feed. Once someone
| subscribe to the feed, iTunes is no longer involved. The
| directory of podcasts that Apple indexes is available as a
| free API that anyone can use and has been an open API for
| over a decade.
|
| Every real podcast player allows you to subscribe directly to
| a podcast if you know the RSS URL.
|
| When you play a podcast, even through iTunes or the podcast
| player, the audio is served from your website. None of this
| is true for either Google or Spotify,
| mimimi31 wrote:
| Interestingly Youtube still provides RSS feeds for all channels
| (https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<channel
| ID>). They're linked in the head element, so just the normal
| channel URL should work with most RSS readers.
| 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/
| pkdpic wrote:
| Not to mention that from what I've read it IS more popular
| than ever because its used to manage podcasts on apple
| devices.
| CharlesW wrote:
| All podcast apps* on all devices depend on RSS!
|
| (*Proprietary audio platforms like Spotify probably do not
| use RSS, other than to vacuum standards-based audio content
| into their platform.)
| smcleod wrote:
| Came to write practically the same thing, I feel like when some
| people decide they don't want to use something anymore and
| their world view quickly becomes biased to think others have
| had a similar experience.
|
| RSS never went away, RSS apps never went away, RSS users never
| went away.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Why are Google, Microsoft and Apple so inactive here?
|
| They did by adding push notifications to their browsers.
|
| RSS seems pointless to use now that web push notifications and
| twitter exist. Twitter solves the scaling problem where you are
| subscribed to too many things. It has an algorithm to sort your
| feed so you don't have to waste time scrolling past uninteresting
| articles from people you've followed if you are following a ton
| of different content creators.
| trowawee wrote:
| Completely outsourcing your process for surfacing interesting
| information to someone else's algorithm feels like awful idea
| (and I actually mostly like Twitter).
| the_third_wave wrote:
| Twitter is a single, centralised source where RSS is
| decentralised - everyone and his dog can provide a feed which
| can be followed by the world. No censorship, no dirty tricks
| with algorithms between you and your audience, no _BigTech
| Beasts(tm)_ feeding on your data. In other words, RSS is
| clearly the superior solution both for source as well as
| subscribers. Twitter et al might not like this but... who
| cares?
| charcircuit wrote:
| Most people aren't going to be subscribing to things that
| break twitter's tos and if they do there is still push
| notifications and other platforms willing to platform that
| kind of content.
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Yep, google reader was great.
|
| Luckily, there are many self-hosted alternatives available, one
| of them being selfoss: https://selfoss.aditu.de/ (not
| affiliated or anything, just like the reader)
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Reader's death was a huge blow to the RSS world.
|
| As a non Reader user, I can confidently say this statement is
| false. Nothing in my RSS feeds I was subscribed to changed for
| _years_ after it shut down. Those relying on RSS and not using
| Google Reader were not at all impacted by Reader 's shut down.
|
| Facebook, Twitter, etc is what caused a lot of major sites to
| drop the investment on RSS. The number of RSS users was always
| small, but the number of subscribers using these other services
| grew exponentially.
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| right, who needs rss when fb provides a convenient tool to
| stay in touch with visitors/customers.... wait they want me
| to pay for notifying the userbase i build myself?....wait,
| they want me to pay what?....what?...
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Google managed to dominate it, then cancelled Google Reader,
| taking audiences away; just as they did with Usenet (DejaNews).
| Corrupt antitrust authorities didn't help, nor did it help with
| Google acquiring DoubleClick and YouTube, nor with Facebook
| acquiring WhatsApp. That's what happened.
| layer8 wrote:
| > Why are [...] Microsoft [...] so inactive here?
|
| Desktop Outlook at least still manages RSS subscriptions. Let's
| hope Microsoft doesn't get "active" and decides to remove that.
| zeeZ wrote:
| It syncs to the web too. Most of my feeds are GitHub
| /releases.atom and other software updates.
| ianberdin wrote:
| Yea, but you still can use feed generators from any website using
| https://rss.app. (friend's startup).
| Vladimof wrote:
| I still use RSS daily.... Just wish all websites would still have
| a feed...
| 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.
| duplabe wrote:
| Still following a lot of RSS feeds aggregated with Feedly. I
| don't know any better way to follow a lot of sites (don't mention
| fb, twitter or any other social network, those are not for
| this...)
| vandyswa wrote:
| Just ironic, since I saw this entry by way of YC's RSS feed!
|
| I feel like RSS dipped, but actually has rebounded a bit in the
| recent 5-ish years.
| rreyes1979 wrote:
| Me too. Reading both this article and HN comments from HN RSS
| feed using Inoreader on Android. Love it!!!
| BusySkillFool wrote:
| Same! A kindred RSS spirit
| trowawee wrote:
| I also had this come across my feed. Always funny to see
| articles about the death of RSS in my RSS reader. Honestly,
| the idea of using the web _without_ RSS is entirely alien to
| me at this point; I don't understand how people keep track of
| what they've read, what they're going to read, what they
| liked, etc. without a feed.
| j0ba wrote:
| what reader do you use?
| trowawee wrote:
| Feedbin as a backend/web interface, Reeder on iOS.
| [deleted]
| 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.
| grey_earthling wrote:
| I have loads of RSS feeds and I almost universally use them as
| notifications to go and see the post on the full site.
|
| Most RSS readers I'm aware of prominently include an option to
| view the full page, often inside the same app (and these apps
| are less likely to have content-blocking add-ons installed,
| which would block lucrative surveillance).
|
| I'm quite happy for RSS feeds to include only a
| summary/thumbnail/excerpt plus a link to the full page.
| 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.
| anyfoo wrote:
| There are no websites, blogs, whatever, that you want to
| follow? Or do you bookmark those sites and check them manually?
|
| Looking at my RSS feed, there are quite a lot of active feeds
| in there. Some I read immediately when I notice something new
| in them, some when I feel like it.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Google killed Google Reader, which killed RSS.
|
| I don't understand the argument of it not being a money-maker,
| since the publisher of the feed controls the content. In most
| cases they would just publish an excerpt or even just the title,
| which forces you to read the article on their website anyway.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| I use inoreader which also supports twitter feeds so they
| actually get reported in RSS. When Google killed Reader then it
| killed most support for RSS but there are still plenty of
| webpages that support it. For me, personally, I only visit
| webpages that support RSS as I use it exclusively for reading
| websites. If a webpage doesn't support RSS then that webpage
| doesn't exist to me.
| 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.
| butz wrote:
| If website provides accurate article titles and summaries (not
| clickbait), clicks from RSS feed should land more quality
| visitors. And if website treats their visitors fairly, by
| showing decent ads related to content, they increase chance for
| a click on banner. Website could even show different type of
| banner for visitors coming from RSS feed, as RSS users are more
| technical minded.
| 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.
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| True, but most people don't like to pay. So it's hard to sell
| people on the idea. Maybe it will be possible in the future
| as people get used to the idea of paying for content.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _True, but most people don 't like to pay. So it's hard
| to sell people on the idea._
|
| So provide only a title+snippet feed so folks can now when
| you articles appear on the site, and hopefully go to the
| 'full' page which has ads. Anything that can drive traffic
| can be helpful.
| pvorb wrote:
| Do you know how Ars Technica does it? Is there some
| personalized URL to the suscriber feed? I imagine those are
| pretty easily shared among a group of people?
| Teslazar wrote:
| Some of my RSS feeds have ads in them.
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| Yes, but compare what you seen in RSS vs what you see when
| you see the home page. Even one less is lost money for the
| site.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| I'm using it every day, that's what happens to it. Many sites
| provide their own feeds and those which don't can often be fed to
| something like _rss-proxy_ [1] which will create a feed (or
| several feeds) based on an XPath query [2]. This can be self-
| hosted so you don 't have to inform external entities about your
| feeding behaviour.
|
| [1] https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy
|
| [2] e.g. here's how to get _Goteborgs Posten_ (a Swedish
| newspaper which ditched its feed some time ago) in an RSS feed
| reader (Atom is also supported through _... &o=Atom_) - note that
| this is an example.org domain so the link does not work as is -
| https://rssproxy.example.org/api/feed?url=https://gp.se&pCon...
| mratmeyer wrote:
| If you ever are trying to find the RSS feed URL for a website, I
| built a free little tool (https://www.rsslookup.com/) that lets
| you paste in a website's URL and it will go out and find a list
| of available feeds. Some RSS clients have this feature built in,
| but for websites that don't have their feed configured correctly
| this site will check extra paths (ex. /feed) to see if any feeds
| are available.
| anon_123g987 wrote:
| Thanks! I just found this: https://news.ycombinator.com/rss.
| Perfectly hidden on the site itself. That's what happened to
| RSS.
| [deleted]
| 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.
| gerikson wrote:
| I've recently implemented an Atom feed on a new blog. Do
| you have any pointers on how to add an XSL stylesheet to
| it?
|
| _Edit_ : linked submission has an example.
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(page generated 2022-06-12 23:02 UTC)