RSS is the only way I know, without having to scrap things by hand, to get an aggregate of "news/articles" from the sites and blogs I follow, and I consider to be of good quality.
I prefer to filter my information like this, instead of having to rely on some algorithm, or endlessly scrolling in a "social medial wall" full or clickbait articles, immortal/vintage memes or exuberant rants.
If RSS dies, what is the alternative then? I understand that technically speaking it's not a good solution, but let's have something else before killing this.
PS: I've clicked on this link from a RSS reader (just a simple browser extension... that keeps me posted every morning).
> If RSS dies, what is the alternative then? I understand that technically speaking it's not a good solution, but let's have something else before killing this.
Instead of focusing on a technology, let's focus on a problem. This is where users and potential users of RSS have a communication problem with publishers of content.
It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds. So, you could have metrics on that. But, the tech giants shifted from RSS streams (which empower end users) to high control system that operate differently (social media news feeds that empower corps). This lead to a drop is RSS subscriptions.
So, why today is it useful to a publisher to have RSS on their site? This is a question that needs addressing and marketing so that people know why. The business case for them is lacking.
I want RSS. I also realize the usefulness and communication around that needs improvement.
> I prefer to filter my information like this, instead of having to rely on some algorithm, or endlessly scrolling in a "social medial wall" full or clickbait articles, immortal/vintage memes or exuberant rants.
Well, that's the whole point - RSS lets you circumvent all (or most of) the mechanisms that Facebook, Google, Medium etc. etc. have implemented to monetize content. So they are directly interested in killing it off sooner rather than later. And if the big players don't support it, the people/organizations/whatever who still maintain their own blog/news site are also more likely to see it as obsolete (or have web devs who tend to follow the "new shiny" and will advise them that RSS is obsolete).
When Google Reader was still a thing there are at least some consumer knows what that orange button means. ( Now it is only for podcast ) And most browser have RSS support so it has end point for consumer to interact with it. But then for some strange reason most browser vendor decide to kill it.
I still think RSS reader should be a feature on browser. All the modern browser now have sync as well so porting your news feeds isn't even the problem anymore.
> RSS is the only way I know, without having to scrap things by hand, to get an aggregate of "news/articles" from the sites and blogs I follow
I haven't signed up for any so I'm not sure, but don't some places have "newsletters"? I kind of assumed they served the same function but with email. Of course, if it does serve the same function, the bad part about it in comparison to RSS would be that you have to give them an email address.
I'm a very happy daily RSS user, but we ought to be upfront about its ginormous deficiencies:
- every day I deal with broken links and broken images because my feed reader doesn't know from which URL it should resolve relative links
- there's no pagination mechanism, or way for a client to ask for "all posts since last Friday". If you want your feed to always have all posts available, you need to include the entirety of your archive in every feed response.
- if I want to follow any link I get kicked back out to a bloated web page
- lots of posts include iframes, or content that only makes sense with JS enabled
- XML
Despite this, I still love RSS. It's what we've got and we should continue to make the most of it. But it also sucks, and it's not any surprise that mostly only technical people use it. I think feeds are pretty much doomed to keep breaking and disappearing. Many of the replacements or pseudo-replacements that people come up with seem fine, but the problem - as always - is getting people to actually use it, which mostly never happens.
RSS is my preferred way to stay up to date. The only reason to remove it is to force consumers onto a platform that can push more advertisements. So it's not so much obsolete, but it is less profitable.
What's wrong with XML? It has its flaws, but so do JSON, YAML, and all the other formats.
In fact, for a standard, I like XML despite its verbosity because it supports schemas, essentially a machine readable specification. Also, the entire web runs on HTML, which is poorly defined XML, so why not?
> - every day I deal with broken links and broken images because my feed reader doesn't know from which URL it should resolve relative links
> - lots of posts include iframes, or content that only makes sense with JS enabled
These are the fault of broken RSS feed generators. The RSS feed should contain a textual summary of the article.
> - if I want to follow any link I get kicked back out to a bloated web page
This is working as intended and not an issue. I don't think any alternatives would make sense.
> - there's no pagination mechanism, or way for a client to ask for "all posts since last Friday". If you want your feed to always have all posts available, you need to include the entirety of your archive in every feed response.
> every day I deal with broken links and broken images because my feed reader doesn't know from which URL it should resolve relative links
I have never had this problem. Do you have any example feeds you encounter this with? Are you sure its not just a bug in your reader?
> there's no pagination mechanism, or way for a client to ask for "all posts since last Friday". If you want your feed to always have all posts available, you need to include the entirety of your archive in every feed response.
Agreed that this would be nice to have, but for its primary purpose - to syndicate new content - this does not matter in practice. Having RSS completely static means that hosting an RSS feed is super simple and does not require the increased attack potential of a dynamic service - something that the current federated web protocols completely fail at. It should of course be possible to host support retrieval of past posts with a static-hosting-compatible protocol, in theory at least.
> if I want to follow any link I get kicked back out to a bloated web page
If that page has a linked RSS feed and a permalink mathing the URL or embedded in the page metadata then in theory your reader could show you the corresponding RSS post. I don't think creating a separate RSS-only web of links makes sense.
> lots of posts include iframes
Lots? Really? iframes are more dead than RSS, at least for anything outside of ads.
> or content that only makes sense with JS enabled
Limiting RSS to static mostly-text content provides a lot of consistency. Most articles don't need JS. For those that do RSS can still link to a webpage just like podcasts don't embed the audio in the RSS feed. There is also nothing stopping an RSS reader from showing link-only posts as an embedded web view - personally I prefer a link that opens in a new browser tab though.
> XML
Ugly, yes, but how is this a problem in practice? Just because it's not as hip as JSON?
> - every day I deal with broken links and broken images because my feed reader doesn't know from which URL it should resolve relative links
I have a restrictive whitelist configuration for uMatrix and in most cases I don't bother to whitelist images when I read articles. I've found that the vast majority of the time, the images are stock images that only tangentially relate to the subject of the text and add no real value. I guess they're included because editors feel images are essential even if they're unrelated.
I'll add another - Chronological ordering within the day isn't very useful. I'm more interested in what other readers (of my type) have found "important/interesting/insightful/etc", so I care about the likes/upvotes/etc...
I don't want everything every day. I want to read the X most important articles that day, with X being different each day depending upon how much time I have.
The whole (non-Spotify, ugh) podcast ecosystem would like a word about RSS being obsolete.
Patreon (and to a greater extent, the podcasters I support) keep making real money out of me and millions of others every month for personalised RSS feeds for content. That RSS feed is the delivery vehicle. It's very reliable, I can use it in any app, much good, so benefit, wow.
This is a great example of RSS being useful while almost no one realizes is. People have podcast players. There are podcasts. They subscribe to them. RSS is the technology behind the scenes that powers it which almost no one notices.
I bet that most podcast listeners don't know what RSS is or how it impacts their ability to listen to podcasts.
Podcasts also present a different problem from most news. People want to listen to a podcast and know about episodes. A platform can't easily come in and alter the flow of episodes coming without consumers noticing and being annoyed. This works for RSS.
With other news the aggregating platforms want to manipulate the flow of information for their benefit. If I look at my home in Twitter I might see posts from hours or days ago at the top. It's about engagement and they manipulate the order and display of posts to aide that. Their business model doesn't fit well with RSS as a backing technology.
Note, I can't stand the manipulation of my news feed. I just understand the business and other factors behind it.
> The whole (non-Spotify, ugh) podcast ecosystem would like a word about RSS being obsolete
Off topic, but it's insane how Spotify insists on advertising podcasts to paying users. Worse, they advertise podcasts of American right wing extremists, and call it "Something you might like" or similar offensive wording. I'm not even American, and I'm subjected to unwanted foreign political content on my music player's home page.
I contacted their support about this, and apparently they are getting paid to advertise these podcasts to their already paying users.
Most of the listeners of podcasts have moved on to technologies that do not rely on RSS. RSS was like podcasting 1.0. Now people consume podcasts on integrated, centralized platforms.
I got the same argument after I asked why there's no more RSS/Atom feed of the news section in my municipality's website. Some positive people tell me that RSS is not dead and it's still everywhere. Unfortunately, especially after modern redesigns, RSS gets dropped as "obsolete technology". The sad thing is that this doesn't only happen to optional websites which I could choose not to follow out of principle like blogs or niche websites on technology and such. Governmental, municipal, local news websites do this, after which I lose easy and convenient access to this relevant information.
I hate to say it but they are largely correct. The technology isn't obsolete but it is very unknown outside of podcasting, but even these day most people just get their podcasts relayed through a big service that may not even let you subscribe via URL.
I run an RSS-centered service and approximately 0 of my non-tech friends know what RSS is. They get their news from the YouTube, Facebook, Instagram... homepages where the algorithm picks some stuff that they want you to see. When I explain that it is easy to curate what you follow with no ads, no raking and no "algorithm" they are generally on board and are happy to subscribe to some comics, YouTube channels and maybe a web comic or two. But the awareness is basically zero.
I think the following things would help get RSS into the spotlight:
2. We need to get "Subscribe" buttons back into browsers. Right now you need an extension to detect sites that have feeds. Not only is that a huge step for most users but the most popular mobile browsers don't support extensions. (And even Firefox for Android only supports a whitelist on stable right now) IIRC Chrome on Android is experimenting with a very polished-over version, so it will be interesting if this gains traction and helps convince sites to maintain their feeds.
3. We need awareness. A lot of people are being made aware of the downsides of big services recommending them content, but very few are aware of the alternatives. Just helping out a few friends who are interesting in taking more control over their news can be a good start. And remember that it isn't all-or-nothing. I subscribe to a lot of feeds but still browse Hacker News and Reddit. I don't think I need to completely remove the algorithm, but I like to get most of my news "reliably" then when I run out I go into "discovery mode".
That being said it is a huge uphill battle and right now it looks like things are going the other way. I'm not hugely active in this "fight" but it is good to support when you can.
I haven't noticed a WordPress blog where the RSS feed wasn't properly advertised. Does it depend on the theme to include the appropriate link tag? Or maybe it is just sampling bias where I don't notice that WordPress sites are actually wordpress if they don't advertise the feed.
That is a complete nonsense. RSS is one of the most useful tools for those that don't have "social media" accounts.
Don't expect people to keep coming back to your website/blog just to check if there is new content/news. If it doesn't provide a feed (Atom or RSS), the most probable scenario is that I will not remember to comeback any time soon.
> RSS is one of the most useful tools for those that don't have "social media" accounts.
That's why RSS is dying. It doesn't facilitate in-depth surveillance or algorithmic timelines designed to be addictive... err I mean "maximize engagement." RSS is a user-friendly technology not an advertiser-friendly or surveillance-friendly technology and surveillance driven advertising is the business model of the Internet.
I'm not so sure. Take vhs rewinders for example. VHS cassettes and players were obsoleted by DVDs and DVD players respectively but there is no analogous new tech to the rewinder. It was a dead end. Maybe I'm splitting hairs.
RSS is replaced by personalized feeds that people see by logging into specific platforms and participate through the intended user engagement. That is how those companies earn money.
Is there a current and well functioning tool that pulls full articles from the links inside most RSS feeds that only publish teasers?
When I first discovered RSS for me, I wanted news to read on the road. It was before Smartphones became ubiquitous. Unfortunately most news sites only published a few lines of text per article.
Now, I would like to do the same when there is no network coverage. But I still don't know a good tool for that...
I wish that government entities used it, or at least released a changelog for certain pages. Following coronavirus guideline updates in Berlin has been very difficult.
I still maintain an Atom feed on my website and any website I operat, and still curate my offline feed list and reader. I also urge you to do so. It's a remnant of the good old Internet.
Moreover, I enjoyed writing an XSL stylesheet for my Atom feed. It has amazing results, and I wonder why people don't do that.
It's also a great way to back up bulk content from feed sites I create into intuitive files for migration ETC... It's far more readable than JSon by bare eyes as well.
Retiring RSS was a scheme, just like removing headphone jacks on modern cell phones, which was really a ply to make new insecure bluetooth and wireless headphone sales more money.
I get weary of how many unreasonable and dreadful turns tech makes to re-invent wheels that are already installed and working fine.
RSS was also a great way of sharing content from sources without copying and pasting. It's a real tragedy it's barely used/accessible any more... And it's just a personal opinion, but OAuth is also mostly a engineered and tedious end product of retiring RSS that really was only introduced so that platforms can put an incremental price tag on data access.
Somewhat off-topic, but my personal static-site blog has an RSS feed, auto-generated by the same build script that compiles the markdown to HTML via pandoc. I don't particularly care if people read the entire article in their feed reader instead of in a browser, so I want to include the full article content in the feed But it feels silly to have two copies of every article in the output, where one copy of each article is in one giant feed.xml file, so currently I only put the title and URL for each article in the feed.
~15 years ago I had solved this problem on an unrelated website by having the feed be the source of the content and have the feed transformed into (X)HTML by the browser automatically using XSLT. But I don't think that's in favor these days, especially since not all browsers support it.
Personally I hate when articles are in the feed in full. I'd much rather be able to open the articles I want to read in tabs in a browser, and skip past the ones I'm not interested in (marking them as read when I do so). I'd rather have a title, URL, and maybe a short summary in the RSS feed.
I hate to admit it, but I kinda just... stopped looking at my RSS feeds about a year ago. It wasn't intentional, it just kinda happened?
I was (am?) paying for Feedly and then I used a separate app on my phone to consume it (Hated the Feedly UI and I wanted the app I have been using since google reader).
But I costantly found myself with a huge number of unread feeds. They became unmanageable. I would look at headlines and only click a small subset of what I was seeing (likely under 1%).
I think I ended up replacing it with Reddit, Hacker News, and Apple News. Plus the few sites I actually cared about I just regularly checked on my computer.
That being said, I did just open it and scroll a little bit and saw some stuff that I actually would have liked to see. So maybe I should get back into it.
It is sad to see the tech basically disappearing, but almost no one outside of tech knows it exists. I can't remember the last time I actually saw an RSS feed button and I used to have to go digging for it.
I may just need to curate my list of feeds more, or categorize them. I don't know, but I wish Had a better solution to all of the unread stuff.
I think the world would be a better place if in these cases, instead of tweeting a rant and then submitting it to HackerNews, the OP took the effort to explain to that NGO why he thought RSS was a great tool and why they should keep using it.
Honestly, i largely agree with the claim that RSS is dying.
For example, on Windows i wanted to find a decent RSS reader to use, since recently coming to like the technology myself for consumption of news (since all of the sudden everything can just be boring text, as opposed to annoying and attention catching images, styling etc., allowing em to focus on the content), which turned out to be hard.
In my search, i found the following readers:
- Feedly (https://feedly.com/) not really an option for me, since i want downloadable software, which is also why i use Thunderbird instead of web mail clients
- Newsblur (https://www.newsblur.com/) same as above
- Inoreader (https://www.inoreader.com/) same as above
- Feeder (https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/feeder-rss-feed-reader/jlkhefogiiibhgblliimeleiiiijbkjj) not an option, Windows Store app, i avoid that
- Omea Reader (https://www.jetbrains.com/omea/reader/) by JetBrains, but requirements list Windows XP, so not updated in a long time
- RSSOwl (http://www.rssowl.org/) based on Eclipse and fails to launch with new JDK versions
- QuiteRSS (https://quiterss.org/en/screenshots) the layout absolutely breaks because image dimensions are not constrained, no one wants the header of the news story to fill up the entire screen
- RSSGuard (https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard) in the end i stuck with this, because just got tired because of so many bad options out there
Apparently Google Reader was also pretty good but was retired.
How is RSS supposed to survive if there is no good software for it out there? Give me something like LibreOffice that you just download, install and it works in surprisingly sane ways most of the time.
Reminds me a bit of OFX, you know that technology that lets you download statements/etc from financial institutions to your own personal financial applications. Thereby avoiding giving random 3rd parties access to all your financial information.
An advantage of RSS is that most companies that remove it, only remove the link from the website. Even bloggers who somehow feel the need to remove it, remove it from the share options but leave the link tag in the source code intact. The link remains functional.
RSS is not dead for the simple reason that pretty much every podcast relies on it to get distributed to all the major podcasting platforms (iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, etc).
There is a huge difference between RSS as a backend service such as those podcast providers as opposed to being "consumer facing" such as other podcatchers or feed readers. For the former compatibility isn't a major concern, it just needs to work well enough for those use cases and users can't access the content directly (if they don't know the URL or it is IP locked).
RSS users aren’t seem to be concerned with the single most popular way content creators make money: by displaying ads.
While there are RSS-compatible solutions for that (like AdSense in-feed ads), it is obvious that there is not enough financial incentive for content creators and platforms to continue supporting RSS. From consumer perspective, I’m writing this from Safari on iPad, and there is no way to see that RSS is present on the page, neither there is a way to subscribe to RSS without special plugins. Which tells me demand on consumer side also does not justify keeping these features up.
The only reason RSS is alive today is because it’s dirt cheap to implement, and is supported out-of-the-box by most web development frameworks.
[+] [-] nomemory|4 years ago|reply
RSS is the only way I know, without having to scrap things by hand, to get an aggregate of "news/articles" from the sites and blogs I follow, and I consider to be of good quality.
I prefer to filter my information like this, instead of having to rely on some algorithm, or endlessly scrolling in a "social medial wall" full or clickbait articles, immortal/vintage memes or exuberant rants.
If RSS dies, what is the alternative then? I understand that technically speaking it's not a good solution, but let's have something else before killing this.
PS: I've clicked on this link from a RSS reader (just a simple browser extension... that keeps me posted every morning).
[+] [-] mfer|4 years ago|reply
Instead of focusing on a technology, let's focus on a problem. This is where users and potential users of RSS have a communication problem with publishers of content.
It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds. So, you could have metrics on that. But, the tech giants shifted from RSS streams (which empower end users) to high control system that operate differently (social media news feeds that empower corps). This lead to a drop is RSS subscriptions.
So, why today is it useful to a publisher to have RSS on their site? This is a question that needs addressing and marketing so that people know why. The business case for them is lacking.
I want RSS. I also realize the usefulness and communication around that needs improvement.
[+] [-] rob74|4 years ago|reply
Well, that's the whole point - RSS lets you circumvent all (or most of) the mechanisms that Facebook, Google, Medium etc. etc. have implemented to monetize content. So they are directly interested in killing it off sooner rather than later. And if the big players don't support it, the people/organizations/whatever who still maintain their own blog/news site are also more likely to see it as obsolete (or have web devs who tend to follow the "new shiny" and will advise them that RSS is obsolete).
[+] [-] bartread|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksec|4 years ago|reply
I still think RSS reader should be a feature on browser. All the modern browser now have sync as well so porting your news feeds isn't even the problem anymore.
[+] [-] jolmg|4 years ago|reply
I haven't signed up for any so I'm not sure, but don't some places have "newsletters"? I kind of assumed they served the same function but with email. Of course, if it does serve the same function, the bad part about it in comparison to RSS would be that you have to give them an email address.
[+] [-] is_true|4 years ago|reply
For some sites there's also a sitemap for news that includes extra fields, like title, tags and description
[+] [-] 62951413|4 years ago|reply
imply.io/blog
anyscale.com/blog
blog.twitter.com
[+] [-] nathcd|4 years ago|reply
- every day I deal with broken links and broken images because my feed reader doesn't know from which URL it should resolve relative links
- there's no pagination mechanism, or way for a client to ask for "all posts since last Friday". If you want your feed to always have all posts available, you need to include the entirety of your archive in every feed response.
- if I want to follow any link I get kicked back out to a bloated web page
- lots of posts include iframes, or content that only makes sense with JS enabled
- XML
Despite this, I still love RSS. It's what we've got and we should continue to make the most of it. But it also sucks, and it's not any surprise that mostly only technical people use it. I think feeds are pretty much doomed to keep breaking and disappearing. Many of the replacements or pseudo-replacements that people come up with seem fine, but the problem - as always - is getting people to actually use it, which mostly never happens.
[+] [-] lf-non|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymousiam|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GuB-42|4 years ago|reply
In fact, for a standard, I like XML despite its verbosity because it supports schemas, essentially a machine readable specification. Also, the entire web runs on HTML, which is poorly defined XML, so why not?
[+] [-] tantalor|4 years ago|reply
Atom has this:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5005[+] [-] oauea|4 years ago|reply
> - lots of posts include iframes, or content that only makes sense with JS enabled
These are the fault of broken RSS feed generators. The RSS feed should contain a textual summary of the article.
> - if I want to follow any link I get kicked back out to a bloated web page
This is working as intended and not an issue. I don't think any alternatives would make sense.
> - there's no pagination mechanism, or way for a client to ask for "all posts since last Friday". If you want your feed to always have all posts available, you need to include the entirety of your archive in every feed response.
Agree that this sucks.
> - XML
Really?
[+] [-] account42|4 years ago|reply
I have never had this problem. Do you have any example feeds you encounter this with? Are you sure its not just a bug in your reader?
> there's no pagination mechanism, or way for a client to ask for "all posts since last Friday". If you want your feed to always have all posts available, you need to include the entirety of your archive in every feed response.
Agreed that this would be nice to have, but for its primary purpose - to syndicate new content - this does not matter in practice. Having RSS completely static means that hosting an RSS feed is super simple and does not require the increased attack potential of a dynamic service - something that the current federated web protocols completely fail at. It should of course be possible to host support retrieval of past posts with a static-hosting-compatible protocol, in theory at least.
> if I want to follow any link I get kicked back out to a bloated web page
If that page has a linked RSS feed and a permalink mathing the URL or embedded in the page metadata then in theory your reader could show you the corresponding RSS post. I don't think creating a separate RSS-only web of links makes sense.
> lots of posts include iframes
Lots? Really? iframes are more dead than RSS, at least for anything outside of ads.
> or content that only makes sense with JS enabled
Limiting RSS to static mostly-text content provides a lot of consistency. Most articles don't need JS. For those that do RSS can still link to a webpage just like podcasts don't embed the audio in the RSS feed. There is also nothing stopping an RSS reader from showing link-only posts as an embedded web view - personally I prefer a link that opens in a new browser tab though.
> XML
Ugly, yes, but how is this a problem in practice? Just because it's not as hip as JSON?
[+] [-] mantaraygun|4 years ago|reply
I have a restrictive whitelist configuration for uMatrix and in most cases I don't bother to whitelist images when I read articles. I've found that the vast majority of the time, the images are stock images that only tangentially relate to the subject of the text and add no real value. I guess they're included because editors feel images are essential even if they're unrelated.
[+] [-] q1w2|4 years ago|reply
I don't want everything every day. I want to read the X most important articles that day, with X being different each day depending upon how much time I have.
RSS cannot really provide that prioritization.
[+] [-] grozzle|4 years ago|reply
Patreon (and to a greater extent, the podcasters I support) keep making real money out of me and millions of others every month for personalised RSS feeds for content. That RSS feed is the delivery vehicle. It's very reliable, I can use it in any app, much good, so benefit, wow.
[+] [-] mfer|4 years ago|reply
I bet that most podcast listeners don't know what RSS is or how it impacts their ability to listen to podcasts.
Podcasts also present a different problem from most news. People want to listen to a podcast and know about episodes. A platform can't easily come in and alter the flow of episodes coming without consumers noticing and being annoyed. This works for RSS.
With other news the aggregating platforms want to manipulate the flow of information for their benefit. If I look at my home in Twitter I might see posts from hours or days ago at the top. It's about engagement and they manipulate the order and display of posts to aide that. Their business model doesn't fit well with RSS as a backing technology.
Note, I can't stand the manipulation of my news feed. I just understand the business and other factors behind it.
[+] [-] oauea|4 years ago|reply
Off topic, but it's insane how Spotify insists on advertising podcasts to paying users. Worse, they advertise podcasts of American right wing extremists, and call it "Something you might like" or similar offensive wording. I'm not even American, and I'm subjected to unwanted foreign political content on my music player's home page.
I contacted their support about this, and apparently they are getting paid to advertise these podcasts to their already paying users.
[+] [-] sneak|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kgran|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevincox|4 years ago|reply
I run an RSS-centered service and approximately 0 of my non-tech friends know what RSS is. They get their news from the YouTube, Facebook, Instagram... homepages where the algorithm picks some stuff that they want you to see. When I explain that it is easy to curate what you follow with no ads, no raking and no "algorithm" they are generally on board and are happy to subscribe to some comics, YouTube channels and maybe a web comic or two. But the awareness is basically zero.
I think the following things would help get RSS into the spotlight:
1. Highlight that Google News uses RSS. https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9545...
2. We need to get "Subscribe" buttons back into browsers. Right now you need an extension to detect sites that have feeds. Not only is that a huge step for most users but the most popular mobile browsers don't support extensions. (And even Firefox for Android only supports a whitelist on stable right now) IIRC Chrome on Android is experimenting with a very polished-over version, so it will be interesting if this gains traction and helps convince sites to maintain their feeds.
3. We need awareness. A lot of people are being made aware of the downsides of big services recommending them content, but very few are aware of the alternatives. Just helping out a few friends who are interesting in taking more control over their news can be a good start. And remember that it isn't all-or-nothing. I subscribe to a lot of feeds but still browse Hacker News and Reddit. I don't think I need to completely remove the algorithm, but I like to get most of my news "reliably" then when I run out I go into "discovery mode".
That being said it is a huge uphill battle and right now it looks like things are going the other way. I'm not hugely active in this "fight" but it is good to support when you can.
[+] [-] donatj|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevincox|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dethos|4 years ago|reply
Don't expect people to keep coming back to your website/blog just to check if there is new content/news. If it doesn't provide a feed (Atom or RSS), the most probable scenario is that I will not remember to comeback any time soon.
[+] [-] api|4 years ago|reply
That's why RSS is dying. It doesn't facilitate in-depth surveillance or algorithmic timelines designed to be addictive... err I mean "maximize engagement." RSS is a user-friendly technology not an advertiser-friendly or surveillance-friendly technology and surveillance driven advertising is the business model of the Internet.
[+] [-] mdp2021|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelseyfrog|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geerlingguy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] belorn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zozbot234|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway1777|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ttybird2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eloeffler|4 years ago|reply
When I first discovered RSS for me, I wanted news to read on the road. It was before Smartphones became ubiquitous. Unfortunately most news sites only published a few lines of text per article.
Now, I would like to do the same when there is no network coverage. But I still don't know a good tool for that...
[+] [-] nicbou|4 years ago|reply
For now I use Wachete to achieve this.
[+] [-] mehdix|4 years ago|reply
Moreover, I enjoyed writing an XSL stylesheet for my Atom feed. It has amazing results, and I wonder why people don't do that.
[+] [-] winternett|4 years ago|reply
Retiring RSS was a scheme, just like removing headphone jacks on modern cell phones, which was really a ply to make new insecure bluetooth and wireless headphone sales more money.
I get weary of how many unreasonable and dreadful turns tech makes to re-invent wheels that are already installed and working fine.
RSS was also a great way of sharing content from sources without copying and pasting. It's a real tragedy it's barely used/accessible any more... And it's just a personal opinion, but OAuth is also mostly a engineered and tedious end product of retiring RSS that really was only introduced so that platforms can put an incremental price tag on data access.
[+] [-] Arnavion|4 years ago|reply
~15 years ago I had solved this problem on an unrelated website by having the feed be the source of the content and have the feed transformed into (X)HTML by the browser automatically using XSLT. But I don't think that's in favor these days, especially since not all browsers support it.
What do other people with static-site blogs do?
[+] [-] SAI_Peregrinus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nerdjon|4 years ago|reply
I was (am?) paying for Feedly and then I used a separate app on my phone to consume it (Hated the Feedly UI and I wanted the app I have been using since google reader).
But I costantly found myself with a huge number of unread feeds. They became unmanageable. I would look at headlines and only click a small subset of what I was seeing (likely under 1%).
I think I ended up replacing it with Reddit, Hacker News, and Apple News. Plus the few sites I actually cared about I just regularly checked on my computer.
That being said, I did just open it and scroll a little bit and saw some stuff that I actually would have liked to see. So maybe I should get back into it.
It is sad to see the tech basically disappearing, but almost no one outside of tech knows it exists. I can't remember the last time I actually saw an RSS feed button and I used to have to go digging for it.
I may just need to curate my list of feeds more, or categorize them. I don't know, but I wish Had a better solution to all of the unread stuff.
[+] [-] b6dybuyv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KronisLV|4 years ago|reply
Honestly, i largely agree with the claim that RSS is dying.
For example, on Windows i wanted to find a decent RSS reader to use, since recently coming to like the technology myself for consumption of news (since all of the sudden everything can just be boring text, as opposed to annoying and attention catching images, styling etc., allowing em to focus on the content), which turned out to be hard.
In my search, i found the following readers:
Apparently Google Reader was also pretty good but was retired.How is RSS supposed to survive if there is no good software for it out there? Give me something like LibreOffice that you just download, install and it works in surprisingly sane ways most of the time.
[+] [-] StillBored|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idworks1|4 years ago|reply
The best technology are silent and boring.
[+] [-] hammock|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevincox|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Thristle|4 years ago|reply
Go over your feed? useless!
go over my subscribed feed till i get back to last video i saw? way too much work and that feed was known to fail (just like clicking the bell)
the only working solution is RSS feed for every channel i want to follow and automation to add those to my different playlists
[+] [-] smugglerFlynn|4 years ago|reply
While there are RSS-compatible solutions for that (like AdSense in-feed ads), it is obvious that there is not enough financial incentive for content creators and platforms to continue supporting RSS. From consumer perspective, I’m writing this from Safari on iPad, and there is no way to see that RSS is present on the page, neither there is a way to subscribe to RSS without special plugins. Which tells me demand on consumer side also does not justify keeping these features up.
The only reason RSS is alive today is because it’s dirt cheap to implement, and is supported out-of-the-box by most web development frameworks.