My take on the RSS-renaissance chestnut: The original sin is the name. Only clueless nerds could come up with such a soporific, opaque, geeky moniker as "RSS". It should have been called "Webfeed". Then there would be no explaining to do.
You don't need to explain RSS any more than you need to explain SMTP or HTTP. A product that uses RSS could gain traction without the user ever knowing it uses RSS. Products like Google Reader prove that is possible.
RSS support used to be built into the browser, with identifiable iconography.
You'd click a link on a website that says some iteration of "subscribe" or "feed" and the browser would handle it for you, putting the feed into your bookmarks or whatever.
Users never had to know what RSS is. They just clicked "subscribe" and it worked.
You'd have to do the same explaining of Bluetooth or WiFi, both things that non-technical people are familiar with today, if OSes, for some reason, removed support for them.
It just needs to be described in a more concrete way to people. Such as, You know how the podcasts you listen to keep getting updated on your phone? That's RSS. Imagine if other things you liked turned up when they were new and you had a lot of control over that process.
> If you have to explain it, there is zero chance of massive adoption.
Here's the thing, one should not need to explain it no mire. Devices or applications accessing content with an RSS option should present it to the end user through a convenient interface.
There is an economy here that the effort investment is paid with a reward of quality. Many teens feel the discomfort of being locked into platform attention farms and are stoic about it. They deserve the opportunity of being told other options exist.
> With RSS, you subscribe directly to websites, blogs, or news outlets, meaning there is no middleman algorithm deciding what you see.
This enters a failure mode very soon, especially because most people using RSS-like technologies would typically subscribe to more sources than they can typically read through. Like it or not, _the algorithm_ does serve the purpose in prioritizing and discovery. The trouble, IMO, is with the objectives for these recommendation and ranking algorithms.
A middleman/aggregator who is paid by subscribers would be incentivized for the users, a marketplace-like aggregator would always have trade-offs.
Algorithms other than FIFO are fine when they serve you. Way back when I had a mail reader (Gnus) that used a Bayesian classifier to predict which emails I might especially want to read, based on past reading experiences. That was nifty! An RSS reader could do the same, on my own machine, based on my own preferences and not some marketer’s. I’d like that an awful lot.
This is already a problem with things like Mastodon - as soon as you subscribe to some more "spammy" accounts such as news outlets, all the other content is drowned out.
So yes, having kind of re-ranking _algorithm_ can be a good thing, whether we like it or not.
The solution I've found, whether with RSS or other feed-based platforms (e.g., Mastodon / the Fediverse), is 1) organise feeds (by topic using RSS, by interest generally); 2) to ruthlessly prune feeds particularly in my high-interest list/category/tag; and 3) park any voluble feeds into their own "voluble / noise" group. They can drown out each other, but not lower-volume, higher-quality feeds.
Interest level works far better than category for social-media feeds, if only because few people (as opposed to organisations) tend to stick to a given topic. On Google+, one feature I used for my own outbound content was its own classification system, such that my tech posts went to a tech channel, science to science, news/current events, etc. to their own. Those following me could choose which of those they were interested in or not.
Didn't Bluesky solve this problem already by allowing anyone to publish their own algorithms?
I feel like user generated sorting algorithms would be a great fit for RSS. Power users would get an ability to tweak their feeds to their liking, while other users would have a lot to choose from
I'm now building an RSS reader that is specifically designed around the algorithm that learns what sources you like the most. It also slightly adjusts the rankings for high/low frequency feed so subscribing to The Verge won't lead to you skipping updates from some personal blogs.
And I now use it far more than I ever used Reeder.
I've been using one of the numerous "RSS to Email" programs for the past 20 years.
To me that's peak usability, I can use my mail workflow to have cross-device state, I can use my mail clients tagging and spam support to filter, and I have a reasonably good searching facility too.
Some sites only include "teasers" rather than full posts, but they're a minority.
I've been using Feedly ever since the death of Google Reader. If you ignore all the ai bullshit it's simple to use and I've had no issues with cross-device sync.
We used to live counting the days in awe for the surprisingly new Google invention or release.
Then, one by one, Google started killing more services than it was announcing (Wave, News, +, etc), and enshittifying with spyware those that were still up
I’ve left social networks behind and returned to RSS, and I couldn't be happier. I’m using Delta Chat as an interface with FeedsBot, so the whole setup feels just like Telegram channels, but without Pavel Durov reading everything. It’s been a great experience so far.
If you count Podcasts as RSS then surely RSS is more popular than ever. I can imagine that if Apple bundled a hypertext version of the Podcasts app it would be similarly popular. But they won't because it would compete with their own News+ subscriptions.
This just won’t work. If RSS becomes popular, there will be discovery platforms with “algorithm”s. It will be the same thing, just the discovery and content separated.
RSS appears good now only because it’s not popular enough for LLMs to meddle with. I don’t use RSS, so I don’t really mind, but those who use RSS are making disservice to its _purity_ by trying to popularize it.
RSS is just one element of the ecosystem - the input.
I envision that the filtering mechanism CAN use any rules - hand-written, heuristics, old-school machine learning, LLMs. Just with a key difference - you are the one controlling it. No hidden tricks to make you "engaged" (read: addicted) or "sold".
If you feel it is too much politics, you reduce it. If too little - add. If you want less clickbaits and intellectual fast food, you filter it. Etc, etc.
I don't quite use "social media" per se, unless of course hackernews is part of it (which, kind of, is ... anything we can use other people can read or relate to, is kind of social, by definition. I think Facebook etc... tried to claim ownership over the term "social media", and I disagree with this notion). Having said that, I don't use or need RSS, so I don't think there will be a renaissance for RSS for most people.
I do agree that AI is killing tons of things right now. This monster must be stopped; it is worse than Skynet in that it really, really sucks. Things started to decay before AI took over, though - for instance, Google search has been garbage since years. It was useful before that.
I used to compare the decay of google search with how youtube search works. You search for, say, "ninja cats". You get some results about cats. Perhaps also ninjas. After like 10 or 20 results, you suddenly get other videos that are totally unrelated, but you may click on it. That's addictive design. People click on it suddenly when it is interesting to them - but this also takes them away from their original search. Something similar happened to google search. The UI is total crap, it shows semi-related videos (I don't want to watch videos when I search for a specific term), some ads for companies (Google is milking it here) and then also useless entries such as "other people searched for sick grannies instead, do you want to search for this as well" and similar UI-ruining components. Without ublock origin I'd be quite lost already - lo and behold, Google killed ublock origin because it threatened their business model (another reason to use ublock origin; we really need to get rid of Google. It is no longer a useful corporation - just greedy).
Considering the topic of this article I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt, but to be honest - if you're not writing your articles with LLMs, you should strongly consider changing your writing style. I peeked some of your other articles, like the one about half your readers being bots, and it reads straight out of ChatGPT. I trust given your framing in this article that you know that's not a good thing.
> Platforms increasingly prioritized advertisers over users, forcing ad overload onto feeds. Algorithms replaced user choice with automated curation.
This is ideology, not facts. They specifically prioritized the users as shown by the fact their userbase and engagement have only grown. Is this a good thing for the users? Hard to say and we can argue, but the only "hard" metric we have says they indeed prioritize users. It's just that users love the social media so much they are willing to tolerate ads. And for advertisers it is simply the place with the most users and engagements.
I like RSS, I'm even building my own RSS reader right now has an algorithmic feed. But the tech itself is pretty much as good as dead. Some news media websites don't even have it anymore. The ones that do tend to have only one global feed even though nothing prevents them from running multiple ones (per category, per author, etc). Good that Substack and platforms like it have RSS at least.
I self host miniflux. Elfeed in Emacs, read you on android. The read status syncs between devices and clients.
I have miniflux set up so it integrates with instapaper so I get interesting articles on my kindle. And saving an article will send it to karakeep automatically for permanent storage! (image, video, screen shots and text storage).
What are the economic prerequisites for the revival of RSS?
They did not exist even at the height of its popularity, when problems began to emerge that are present in any open source of information.
The author is mistaking his desires for reality, for example, describing the advantages and omitting the disadvantages (which evolve from the advantages).
Either the author is an old man who believes that “the grass used to be greener,” or a young man who believes such old men, but has never used RSS himself.
To really read what you want, there is only one way: to create your own parsers for each source, on top of which there will be various filters, both based on simple words/phrases and contextual.
For example, I do this either in the form of plugins or scripts for ViolentMonkey, including here on HN, where the design has been completely changed to tabular. Many topics, domains, and authors are not even displayed. Comments that contain 1-2-3 mentions of a certain word/phrase are also hidden.
For example, I have completely blocked everything related to “AI”: famous people, companies, programs, products.
As well as various hot topics: the US military, ICE, age verification (because there are two stupid camps for and against, without an objective approach and assessment).
And many other topics (discussions/comments): political, military, or mentions of specific countries or peoples whose bots are numerous here: israel, russia, china, iran, india. And the corresponding users are blocked.
Why do I block so much? Because on these topics, either stupid people or bots write the same thing year after year. Why should I see this spam?
For politics and economics, I go to other resources, and there are other filters there.
I digress a little. Overall, RSS won't help here.
Someone will mention tagging, and we've all been through that too, when whole paragraphs of tags start to form, where blocking one tag that could have been left out hides a good article.
Then someone will say that such filters could be configured in RSS... well, yes, if you take it again and make your own client/wrapper, because all clients are limited in their own way, just like website designs.
the obvious problem with replacing the algorithm is that people actually crave that shit, after all there have been tens of thousands of highly trained engineers making it as addictive as possible. So, no chance.
recently I had a thought that the AI revolution will actually be a good thing for the web.
it kills SEO advertising. someone writing an article for the purpose of ranking high and making money off of clicks doesnt get clicks anymore because of AI summaries.
direct content-to-ad-revenue is dead. Either you're a hobbyist and write for the heck of it - so your writing will be honest and better quality. Or, you're a product vendor and your writing is documentation meant to be found by AI summaries, again - that's honest.
Until one day you start craving brief rants from people or random cat pictures, and suddenly your RSS reader overflows with an endless stream of unread items. Then you find yourself wanting to interact with those posts. Congratulations, you've invented social media. No, social media will never die, and RSS will never die either, because they're part of the same lineage. The only difference is what extra features people have tacked onto them—and those can't be turned off.
The problem is that the majority of people who used to visit websites just ask LLMs nowadays. They don't visit the site itself, where the work origins from, so they also can't give back / support the source.
It's similar to the viewership of coding tutorials having sunk incredibly low these, creators, especially the ones creating high quality content, can't finance such work / content anymore.
Someone said, “if you have to explain it, then you’ve already failed”. That’s basically the problem in a nutshell. It would be great to see someone build a service based on an open standard, but then you have no moat. Anyone else can come along and build the same service using the same format.
No one wants to make a bet like that, so they don’t. That’s why RSS doesn’t get pushed or used more often.
[+] [-] mnls|19 days ago|reply
And that’s the answer about RSS renaissance. If you have to explain it, there is zero chance of massive adoption.
[+] [-] bluebarbet|19 days ago|reply
[+] [-] 8organicbits|19 days ago|reply
[+] [-] heavyset_go|19 days ago|reply
You'd click a link on a website that says some iteration of "subscribe" or "feed" and the browser would handle it for you, putting the feed into your bookmarks or whatever.
Users never had to know what RSS is. They just clicked "subscribe" and it worked.
You'd have to do the same explaining of Bluetooth or WiFi, both things that non-technical people are familiar with today, if OSes, for some reason, removed support for them.
[+] [-] gonzo41|19 days ago|reply
[+] [-] NL807|19 days ago|reply
Here's the thing, one should not need to explain it no mire. Devices or applications accessing content with an RSS option should present it to the end user through a convenient interface.
[+] [-] qsera|19 days ago|reply
[+] [-] jesuslop|19 days ago|reply
[+] [-] rambambram|19 days ago|reply
[+] [-] izacus|19 days ago|reply
[+] [-] raghavbali|19 days ago|reply
This enters a failure mode very soon, especially because most people using RSS-like technologies would typically subscribe to more sources than they can typically read through. Like it or not, _the algorithm_ does serve the purpose in prioritizing and discovery. The trouble, IMO, is with the objectives for these recommendation and ranking algorithms.
A middleman/aggregator who is paid by subscribers would be incentivized for the users, a marketplace-like aggregator would always have trade-offs.
[+] [-] kstrauser|19 days ago|reply
[+] [-] cloud-oak|19 days ago|reply
So yes, having kind of re-ranking _algorithm_ can be a good thing, whether we like it or not.
[+] [-] Serenacula|19 days ago|reply
Given the amount of AI generated content out there, I am increasingly searching for ways to keep track of the sources I DO trust to be human-made.
RSS would completely solve that problem in a way that algorithms just reintroduce, because it forces you to tailor the content yourself.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|19 days ago|reply
Interest level works far better than category for social-media feeds, if only because few people (as opposed to organisations) tend to stick to a given topic. On Google+, one feature I used for my own outbound content was its own classification system, such that my tech posts went to a tech channel, science to science, news/current events, etc. to their own. Those following me could choose which of those they were interested in or not.
[+] [-] lesostep|19 days ago|reply
I feel like user generated sorting algorithms would be a great fit for RSS. Power users would get an ability to tweak their feeds to their liking, while other users would have a lot to choose from
[+] [-] ymolodtsov|18 days ago|reply
And I now use it far more than I ever used Reeder.
[+] [-] sdsd|19 days ago|reply
[+] [-] crote|19 days ago|reply
There are plenty of RSS reader apps, but there are very few with good cross-device sync - let alone self-hosted cross-device sync.
[+] [-] stevekemp|19 days ago|reply
To me that's peak usability, I can use my mail workflow to have cross-device state, I can use my mail clients tagging and spam support to filter, and I have a reasonably good searching facility too.
Some sites only include "teasers" rather than full posts, but they're a minority.
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|19 days ago|reply
[+] [-] lexoj|19 days ago|reply
https://github.com/piqoni/matcha
[+] [-] theshrike79|19 days ago|reply
[+] [-] coldpie|19 days ago|reply
Self-hosted is its own can of worms. Google Reader was not self-hosted either.
[+] [-] rainmaking|19 days ago|reply
[+] [-] bleuarff|19 days ago|reply
[+] [-] create-username|19 days ago|reply
Then, one by one, Google started killing more services than it was announcing (Wave, News, +, etc), and enshittifying with spyware those that were still up
[+] [-] pqs|19 days ago|reply
[+] [-] rbc|19 days ago|reply
[+] [-] owisd|19 days ago|reply
[+] [-] create-username|19 days ago|reply
[+] [-] ThoAppelsin|19 days ago|reply
RSS appears good now only because it’s not popular enough for LLMs to meddle with. I don’t use RSS, so I don’t really mind, but those who use RSS are making disservice to its _purity_ by trying to popularize it.
[+] [-] stared|19 days ago|reply
I envision that the filtering mechanism CAN use any rules - hand-written, heuristics, old-school machine learning, LLMs. Just with a key difference - you are the one controlling it. No hidden tricks to make you "engaged" (read: addicted) or "sold".
If you feel it is too much politics, you reduce it. If too little - add. If you want less clickbaits and intellectual fast food, you filter it. Etc, etc.
[+] [-] wmeredith|19 days ago|reply
[+] [-] shevy-java|19 days ago|reply
I do agree that AI is killing tons of things right now. This monster must be stopped; it is worse than Skynet in that it really, really sucks. Things started to decay before AI took over, though - for instance, Google search has been garbage since years. It was useful before that.
I used to compare the decay of google search with how youtube search works. You search for, say, "ninja cats". You get some results about cats. Perhaps also ninjas. After like 10 or 20 results, you suddenly get other videos that are totally unrelated, but you may click on it. That's addictive design. People click on it suddenly when it is interesting to them - but this also takes them away from their original search. Something similar happened to google search. The UI is total crap, it shows semi-related videos (I don't want to watch videos when I search for a specific term), some ads for companies (Google is milking it here) and then also useless entries such as "other people searched for sick grannies instead, do you want to search for this as well" and similar UI-ruining components. Without ublock origin I'd be quite lost already - lo and behold, Google killed ublock origin because it threatened their business model (another reason to use ublock origin; we really need to get rid of Google. It is no longer a useful corporation - just greedy).
[+] [-] catskull|19 days ago|reply
It’s my primary hn reader now.
[+] [-] vanillameow|19 days ago|reply
[+] [-] abc123abc123|19 days ago|reply
[+] [-] ymolodtsov|18 days ago|reply
This is ideology, not facts. They specifically prioritized the users as shown by the fact their userbase and engagement have only grown. Is this a good thing for the users? Hard to say and we can argue, but the only "hard" metric we have says they indeed prioritize users. It's just that users love the social media so much they are willing to tolerate ads. And for advertisers it is simply the place with the most users and engagements.
I like RSS, I'm even building my own RSS reader right now has an algorithmic feed. But the tech itself is pretty much as good as dead. Some news media websites don't even have it anymore. The ones that do tend to have only one global feed even though nothing prevents them from running multiple ones (per category, per author, etc). Good that Substack and platforms like it have RSS at least.
[+] [-] bergheim|19 days ago|reply
I have miniflux set up so it integrates with instapaper so I get interesting articles on my kindle. And saving an article will send it to karakeep automatically for permanent storage! (image, video, screen shots and text storage).
Pretty pretty pretty good.
[+] [-] AbstractH24|19 days ago|reply
In a world where every site with a feed is algorithm-driven makes sense that RSS would eventually come back around.
Didn’t/doesnt have to be RSS, I’m no devotee to it. But some standard that lets you import things into your own “feed”
[+] [-] Oleksa_dr|19 days ago|reply
To really read what you want, there is only one way: to create your own parsers for each source, on top of which there will be various filters, both based on simple words/phrases and contextual. For example, I do this either in the form of plugins or scripts for ViolentMonkey, including here on HN, where the design has been completely changed to tabular. Many topics, domains, and authors are not even displayed. Comments that contain 1-2-3 mentions of a certain word/phrase are also hidden.
For example, I have completely blocked everything related to “AI”: famous people, companies, programs, products. As well as various hot topics: the US military, ICE, age verification (because there are two stupid camps for and against, without an objective approach and assessment). And many other topics (discussions/comments): political, military, or mentions of specific countries or peoples whose bots are numerous here: israel, russia, china, iran, india. And the corresponding users are blocked.
Why do I block so much? Because on these topics, either stupid people or bots write the same thing year after year. Why should I see this spam? For politics and economics, I go to other resources, and there are other filters there.
I digress a little. Overall, RSS won't help here. Someone will mention tagging, and we've all been through that too, when whole paragraphs of tags start to form, where blocking one tag that could have been left out hides a good article. Then someone will say that such filters could be configured in RSS... well, yes, if you take it again and make your own client/wrapper, because all clients are limited in their own way, just like website designs.
[+] [-] twelve40|19 days ago|reply
[+] [-] sznio|19 days ago|reply
it kills SEO advertising. someone writing an article for the purpose of ranking high and making money off of clicks doesnt get clicks anymore because of AI summaries.
direct content-to-ad-revenue is dead. Either you're a hobbyist and write for the heck of it - so your writing will be honest and better quality. Or, you're a product vendor and your writing is documentation meant to be found by AI summaries, again - that's honest.
Once profit is gone, love is all left.
[+] [-] cxplay|19 days ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanhogan|19 days ago|reply
It's similar to the viewership of coding tutorials having sunk incredibly low these, creators, especially the ones creating high quality content, can't finance such work / content anymore.
[+] [-] deafpolygon|19 days ago|reply
No one wants to make a bet like that, so they don’t. That’s why RSS doesn’t get pushed or used more often.
[+] [-] pipeline_peak|19 days ago|reply
These evangelists want to make it sound like all we need to do is get everyone on board with RSS and we’ll all just hold hands and share the web.
People don’t browse the web, there’s like 10 websites, that’s the whole internet.
Everything else is just asteroids and abandoned space stations.
[+] [-] cosmicgadget|18 days ago|reply
[+] [-] theshrike79|19 days ago|reply