Itâs Time to Get Back to RSS
RSS is dying (or dead) because it was incompatible with the dominant business model on the internet -- advertising. This is why Google killed it. This is why lots of professional publishers hated it. With HTTP you'd be able to earn money via embedded ads but you'd earn exactly $0 via RSS since the feed was stripped of ads, just content. This forced publishers to put useless blurbs, redirecting to the HTTP version, which was a bad user experience and just sucked.
I'd like to see new innovation around protocols and client 'browsers' that were made with monetization built-in as a first-tier specification.
1) client sends request for content with some header with payment information attached. 2) server verifies payment transferred. 3) server responds to client with content after payment verification.
If this existed, RSS would be alive and well. Internet publishers would be alive and well. The internet would be a more beautiful place with a viable first-party alternative to ads.
Challenges here would be:
- Sufficiently low transaction costs to make micropayments viable. (Bundle payments?) - Verifying proof of payment extremely fast
Someone(s) should create a new protocol.
FTP was invented in 1971. SMTP was invented in 1982. HTTP was invented in 1989. RSS was invented in 1999. Bitcoin was invented in 2008.
The amount of innovation around protocol has been abysmal relative to the explosion in creativity around applications on top of these protocols. And SMTP/HTTP are the only ones with any real mass adoption today.
The single worst offense against the usability of Atom/RSS right now comes from Apple and iOS.
If you click a link to an Atom feed in Mobile Safari, iOS will launch the Apple News app. Which will then show you an error message saying the content is unavailable.
As far as I can tell there is no way for an installed reader app to take over handling of feed URLs. It just makes the entire feed ecosystem look broken for anyone using an iPhone or iPad.
This is why I was so heartbroken when Mozilla removed first party RSS support from Firefox, for what seemed like an extremely flimsy justification.[1]
RSS should be ubiquitous, and seen as an essential part of any service that serves structured incremental content. People should be emailing webmasters asking why there is no little orange icon.
It also serves as a back door form of accessibility. But I strongly suspect that RSS goes against the interests of big tech who don't like RSS, because companies like Facebook go through so much trouble to make it difficult to scrape or modify their content.
I just wish that Mozilla would stand up more to their corporate underwriters. Now RSS is relegated to add-ons, and is on the same tier gopher (no offense to gopher).
This article is completely wrong. Slashdot, Digg and Reddit were already at 100% of full-power way before Google Reader ever shut down. And him citing that the causes are unknown is so completely naive. It's obvious. And it was obvious at the time to many who used RSS in 2012. Google is in the ad business, and RSS doesn't do adds. Not really, and not then. They realized they were competing with themselves and closed it; it's that simple. God, I feel like I got baited to reading that post because there was no new or insightful information whatsoever other than the title line. We should bring back RSS, and make the web more about conversations and communicating, than listicles and click-bait. 5-10MB of Javascript per page load, 1px tracking images, endless stupid ads, and now every single site that I go to has a pop-over that I should sign up for something, which gets in the way of the content that I am only going to spend 30 seconds reading anyway and then never return to that site ever again. The web has very quickly become a cesspool of non-information. It's like a bad shopping mall.
I would like to take one comment in this post to recognize Aaron Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
RSS seems to me to have use cases far beyond website updates, if it was extended a little.
Event syndication. Say that I'd collect the event feeds from a load of cinemas, music venues I like around the world, why not, plus those of musicians. I want my RSS-based events reader to narrow down the date field to be this weekend, location to be my town, and ticket field to be available, and why not price to something I can afford, while I'm at it? Bam, everything I could dream of doing this weekend, no Facebook and using a slightly modified version of a two-decade-old tech.
Similar functionality for shopping.
Why couldn't RSS be extended to something like this?
Customizable HN feeds (inofficial): https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/
It's really easy to get posts on the frontpage only if they have more than x points:
https://hnrss.org/frontpage?points=x
Or contain certain keywords:
As one that loves and RSS and hated that many websites don't offer them anymore, I created a middleware that transforms the static HTML of most websites to an RSS/Atom feed. Its just a proof-of-concept, but maybe you like it :)
The reason RSS failed to reach mainstream adoption by users is because it is not user friendly at all. While I love RSS myself, no amount of tech nerd nostalgia is going to make it popular enough that your mom starts using it.
Most sites still have implemented RSS in a terrible way. For example, many blogs I follow only show excerpts in their feeds. So the feed is worthless to me. Others put every podcast episode they do every day in between their posts. Annoying and worthless.
Then, if you want to follow a site that publishes a lot of content, often you have to subscribe to everything or nothing. Sorry all mainstream tech news sites. I donât want to read 1,000 low quality articles every day.
Then comes the UX nightmare of actually finding the feed on each website you visit. If the site even has one.
If anyone wants to help, here's an open source project I worked on quite a bit: https://github.com/GetStream/winds Goal is to build RSS for regular users instead of the power user audience that RSS readers tend to cater to. I think this is part of the problem. The market for RSS shrank. All commercial RSS readers focused on the people who pay (IE the power users). Creating a user experience that is just not viable for most consumers. You end up in this vicious cycle because of that. RSS usage drops, RSS readers become more power user focused, sites drop support, continue the cycle.
To reroute much of web-based feeds consumption to RSS - check out https://docs.rsshub.app/en/
It works quite well, has vibrant community, and support for ripping twitter and instagram feeds among dozens of other sites. It also has a browser extension to help discover available feeds on sites that it can digest - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rsshub-radar-...
There's also a Chrome extension, but that one is not translated from Chinese yet.
I'm with the author in needing better reading tools, but the 'firehose' of RSS isn't by itself the answer
aggregators solve a different variety problem vs RSS -- RSS gives you access to random sources that you curate yourself, whereas HN or link-heavy blogs give you access to a meaningful amount of high-impact articles from high-diversity sources (i.e. more different websites than you subscribe to in feedly) that everyone else is reading
at minimum, I need a tool that lets me tame the RSS firehose with some kind of ranking or priority queue, plus mix in some aggregator reading so I don't miss things
RSS works pretty well for me. Every single website I follow supports it, both the mainstream and the niche ones. I use on my desktop and phone NetNewsWire, which is a great, fast and simple piece of software. Overall, Iâd say RSS is not the latest and greatest anymore, but it keeps working for me.
In fact, I use RSS for this website as well.
I remember that brief time when free email addresses were being offered up before RSS was created. You could get daily news emailed to your inbox from such as USA Today, Wired, and so forth. An electronic newspaper tossed at your digital front door every morning. I actually looked forward to it.
Then RSS was invented. Now RSS is supposed to be dead, and/or killed, what appears to be several times over. I never did get on the Google Reader bandwagon because I was subscribing to RSS feeds via other means.
Nowadays, I have the app âPodcast Addictâ [free with ads, $0.99 once for no ads; I'm just a user here] installed on my tablet through which I subscribe to over 50 RSS feeds â podcasts, webcomics, even a comedianâs âupcoming showsâ feed. There are countless other RSS feeds available via in-app search and discovery let alone the âadd your ownâ option.
By missing out on an RSS apocalypse folks seem to love to talk about from time to time, have I accidentally become one of those âwelcome backâ guys?
We should go more old-school and resurrect NNTP instead: Have clients that render Markdown, and servers where users can create their own access-controlled groups.
Have a group where only the owner may post: That's a feed.
Have a group where only the owner may post top-level articles, but anyone may respond: That's a blog.
It would be nice to see RSS come back and replace some of the centralized web. In theory social networks could be replaced by event feeds your friends publish. If you use something like IPFS you could, in theory, have a fully decentralized social network.
There's still some business benefit to hosting, scraping, providing search etc. The business models are closer to the open web.
I'm sure there's flaws and challenges in the idea. Even if private posts were encrypted you'd still leak some info publicly. Still I think its a neat idea.
I wrote this just yesterday in another thread but I'll say it here as well:
I think RSS should be better built in to browsers. Make it as simple as a follow button is on centralised websites.
e.g.: A little RSS icon pops up when RSS is available on a page, press it and you're now following that feed. Feeds window in the browser shows your feeds, and a small alert icon shows up somewhere when there's unread content. Your subscriptions are saved to your account. If you want to read the article, you click the link and read it directly on the source website. It doesn't need to be any more complex than that.
Firefox had "Live Bookmarks" for RSS but it was relatively terrible, and eventually got removed.
I never stopped using RSS.
But man -- what a testament to how much I loved Google Reader that it still feels like a fresh wound to have it brought up again.
Damn you, Google!
Feedly seems nice but it's a total non-starter due to the lack of an email-based signup. I have none of the social media accounts it wants you to log in with and it'll be a cold day in hell before I share that much personal information with an RSS reader anyway. But a brief reading of the privacy policy will tell you that Feedly is a data hoarder and has every intention of selling that information:
https://feedly.com/i/legal/privacy
$6-$18/mo should be fucking enough for a service to keep my goddamn information to themselves.
I'm using FeedReader[0], but I'm not especially happy with it. Would love to hear some more recommendations.
The business model of RSS is harder than just slapping ads on your homepage and encouraging more page clicks. I think that's the real reason you don't see a strong RSS ecosystem. The content producers don't have a strong financial incentive to support it well.
If we get back to RSS, can we at least all stick to Atom 1.0 :) ? It's way stricter, simpler and easier to use, and I never found a parser that was not accepting it.
Haven't seen newsboat be mentioned so far. I've written a bunch of scripts that help subscribe to feeds (e.g. search YouTube for keyword and add RSS feed for channel of the top hit), scripts to curate (e.g. extract 'topics' from BBC articles that are only available on the page and not in the RSS feed) and consume (watch videos with mpv, open images in feh, add long videos to a backlog).
It's one of the best news experiences I've had and is an improvement over what I was used to with Google Reader and Feedly. I feel much more in control of my content consumption.
I'm moving from Feedly to self-hosted Tiny Tiny RSS soon: https://tt-rss.org
Would be fun if others did the same and posted about their experiences!
RSS is the only way I consume content regularly -- if Innoreader can't see a feed at a site that I may come across, I won't be visiting regularly. Too much of a PITA otherwise. No Twitter account either -- I don't want a "push" model, and the S/N ratio is way too low...
If self-hosted is your thing I highly recommend tiny-rss and the iOS app accompanying it. https://tt-rss.org/
RSS are great and there are plenty of good RSS aggregators. Been using NetNewsWire (free and open source), again since it returned to its original creator.
I love RSS - it's how I found this article :) I've been using The Old Reader every since Google reader shut down...I love it.
RSS is incredibly far from dead, everything emits RSS (it's really easy to make something emit RSS), the only thing that ever died was Google Reader. It's not user unfriendly, all RSS readers let you put a site URL in and grab the meta tag for the RSS feed.
If you aren't in RSS world, the question is, why aren't you?
You can do this: most rss feed readers allow you to add a website and it will find the feed for you. You can do this with youtube channels too, because youtube publishes an RSS feed for each channel.
There are also RSS feeds for HN, which I know because I arrived here via one of them.
Edit: This should have been in reply to a comment that I now can't find.
RSS was already broken and then medium came along and slurped up the majority of independent/longtail blogs (where most of the good stuff really is) and now we're stuck in some awful state that there seems to be no easy way out of. Content needs to be decentralized again before RSS can rule again.
I can't get back to RSS: I never left it. After the demise of Google Reader I just switched to Feedly and can happily recommend it to anyone. Feedly rocks!
I'm even thinking to make a gate from RSS to XMPP, that would work just like these 'channels' do in Telegram.
As someone who is a heavy user of RSS feeds (check my cryptography RSS feed[1]) and has had to implement RSS feeds for my websites:
1. we need to move away from XML. JSON would be a much better modern candidate.
2. we need better support in all web-first programming languages, and possibly in web frameworks.
3. we need to have a stricter set of rules on how to use HTML5 tags like articles, sections, and such. An RSS feed shouldn't have to be manually produced when a crawler should recognize modern HTML5 tag and produce one on its own.
Site aggregators and RSS don't contradict each other. In fact, I'm reading this very post through my HN RSS feed.
RSS is not only great for providing _content_, but also for learning/trivia/facts. That's why I've created Tip of the Day [1], which provides daily tips on different topics (e.g. logical fallacies, chemical elements etc.). It's open source, so other topics can be added by anyone.
I believe Mastodon should support RSS, at least some users would use it at first as a feed aggregator as then progressively switch to the social media aspects of the platform.
I had my first experience with RSS a few weeks back. I added a feed to my tech blog at request of one of those on my mailing list.
I ended up writing a python script that transforms the HTML of my blog's landing page into an RSS feed. Not elegant, but it got the job done.
My main problem is it seems hard for me to interact with my readers this way. They can, of course, reach out via twitter or some such.
Anyway, I'm not sure there has been much value added on my end. But I'm happy to oblige.
I love RSS, but do think it needs to be developed.
For a start, clients aren't great. Most have poor UX and are clunky, and I've used very few which don't choke on large numbers of feeds.
Second, having lots of subscriptions really shows the value of an editor. I don't often want to scroll through everything that has been published by a recently hyperactive feed in order to see things with a lower cadence. There is no filter for relevance, which is perhaps something that could be added through an external service or added to a hosted reader. Maybe someone has already done this.
Third, search and recommendations is pretty poor. I'd be very much in the market for "if you liked this then you'll like this" for RSS feeds. Perhaps this already exists, but I'm not aware of it.
What I've always liked about RSS is the fact it can keep me in touch with more sources than I can track myself. It highlights the blogs that only publish once a month, and if I only check in weekly, it turns the internet into a handy snapshot of who has updated and who hasn't. The part I like less is filtering between relevance and irrelevance.
Wait, shit. Was all that just an advertisement for Feedly !?
Oh well. Anyway, for some reason, I do usually enjoy reading the 'Why CSS died' debate when it rears it's head from time to time. I have been toying with the idea of dipping my toes back into RSS.
Let's say I don't want to pay for a Feedly subscription. Does anybody know some good places to start, to explore the landscape of available open source RSS readers?
I use RssDaemon on Android, which had been around forever (8-9 years maybe?) is apparently so dead that the author just released a new version with major UI update.
My most used been apps on my phone are RssDaemon and Twitter. I read Hackers news though RSS. Twitter on the other hand has been getting worse.
The backlash against centralized social media platforms is building, but it is hard to say what comes next.
I used Google reader but went for feedly. But I missed some simple reader for the terminal since that's where I spend most of my time. So I built gorss to read rss/atom feeds. Ended up reading more news faster :) take it for a spin: https://github.com/lallassu/gorss
After google reader went dark i used "The Old Reader" and when they moved to pay only (or they closed? i can't remember) i moved to inoreader
its the only way i consume news/blogs. there is no way im checking 40+ websites every day for new content and that way i won't miss anything
if a site has no RSS or its RSS feed doesn't work right chances are i just won't use that site
RSS has been really great for me over the last year or so (when I got back into it). I tried Feedly, and then Inoreader. I was not willing to pay for either and ended up trying out the two popular self-hosted options: ttrss (tiny tiny rss) and Miniflux. Stuck with Miniflux for its simplicity. Using the Fever API with Reeder on my Mac and Readably on my Android.
A newsfeed is an extremely complex and tricky product to get right, even more so when it's an aggregated one.
There are so many competing concerns to handle -- prioritization with a source, prioritization between sources, discoverability, UX flow, preview vs. full content, social content from your friends vs. institutional content, commenting, and last but not least, a business model: what is incentivizing content sources to cooperate in good faith and not ignore it or abuse it?
Fact of the matter is, RSS is just far too simplistic to handle these competing concerns in any kind of balanced or reasonable way. But it's also possible there is no single answer.
Which is why different "newsfeeds" for me (HN, Reddit, NYT, AV Club, Twitter) have drastically different interfaces and interaction models. I don't want my HN to work like Twitter, or my Twitter to work like the NYT. And I can't even imagine of any possible interface that could somehow aggregate them all.
I saw this pop up in my HN RSS feed.
I wasn't aware RSS went anywhere let alone died, I've been using Feedly for years and I couldn't imagine getting blog and product updates any other way. I highly recommend Reeder 4 on macOS/iOS as a client.
I never stopped using RSS but this is a nice thought.
I ain't following anything political, though. Between general news sites I've subscribed to (which I hope are neutral enough) and the many contacts in my social networks that never stop droning about their politics (a few of whom I agree with, many of whom I disagree with), I have enough negativity in my life.
On a lighter note, I prefer "the old reader" over feedly. I feel that it's far less cluttered and gets out of the way. Wish they had an official android application, but their API is good enough that third party clients do the job.
So wait the answer is to move from one big centralizer like Google Reader to another one, Feedly? Why not recommending the hundreds of RSS clients out there instead of selling your data yet again to another entity?
Consuming RSS with Inoreader here. Probably the most used app on my phone.
I've been hosting my own instance of Tiny Tiny RSS ever since Google Reader shut down. Highly recommended.
I don't know why people says that RSS is dead... It is very much alive. I am still using it for everything.
Just because it stagnated and is not as popular as social networks does not mean it is dead.
I recently configured FreshRSS on my Raspberry Pi 4 and I'm using both the web interface as well as Reeder syncing through its greader compatible API. While this setup may not be for everyone, reducing time on twitter in favor of reading blogs notably increased my happiness, and how content I am in terms of intellectual stimulation after taking an RSS reading break.
As a bonus, the FreshRSS web interface, while not being the prettiest, is surprisingly effective for going through the unread articles.
I am building (at infancy stage, now), a subproduct at https://www.pagedash.com/ that behaves as a Reader. It won't be an RSS reader, but it will be an aggregator of websites / blogs in general.
Drop your email here to be notified on launch (and to encourage me to keep building): https://forms.gle/XzZTrTEAtaAXfq6i6
Funny how there was a post earlier today about "is there a search engine that filters out popular media and such. Well you just answered it with this post.
I think the comments here are mixing two different issues: information delivery and creators rewards.
For information delivery, RSS is great and the author of the article is right.
Creators reward is an issue that needs to be solved in any case. Ads help but you need a lot of traffic to make it worth it and they disrupt the reading experience.
Hopefully crypto and tipping will solve this, but I still need to see a good implementation of this.
Personally, can't recommend Inoreader enough for those returning to RSS. They do it well and they're beginning to incorporate some good innovation outside the normal structure what with collecting newsletters, etc. for you. My two cents, at least; I'm a happy customer. (Mentioning this since, as 40four points out, the article is kind of one big Feedly ad.)
The main drawback of RSS IMHO is that it's strictly one-way publishing. You can't comment, or like, or subscribe, or share, or sponsor directly to original author. Author might posted something really exiting and seen none of the reactions happening in all kinds of RSS readers.
I think it's important if we can have a universal two-way format for long, rich written texts.
You can read content from Hacker News, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and a lot of other platforms using an RSS reader. You can even receive newsletters there.
I wrote about the process here: https://blog.mironov.live/how-to-build-your-personal-news-in...
Luckily RSS support was already commonplace in blogging software by the time of Google Reader's demise so at many places, it never disappeared.
I never used Google Reader, the corporation knows too much about me already, I don't want them to know what RSS feeds I subscribe to and what items I click on. Luckily there have always been alternatives.
For me, I joined twitter, followed all the authors I loved, and then my RSS reader became redundant. It wasn't deliberate, it wasn't terribly conscious. I got the same content, a whole lot more personality, and even some interactions and discussions with the author and other readers.
There are several nice apps for RSS feeds, but unfortunately, the low support on OS level makes RSS comfortable for geeks but not for ordinary people, who now mainly consume content in Twitter and Facebook whose feeds btw is a centralized and more comfortable version of their ancestor - RSS.
Some of us never left. Reading this is weird, like someone "rediscovering" your suburban house.
Also if you don't want to sign up for another service there's also a bunch of self hosted RSS readers like https://miniflux.app which I'll never get tired of recommending in threads like this.
Has this guy been living under a rock? Slashdot and Digg? seriously?
RSS died because better systems came along which did a much better job at following sources "directly".
He talks as if we no longer have any relationship with authors anymore, when Twitter and Facebook actually made audience and publishers closer than ever.
RSS died because it wasn't necessary anymore. It's a typical pattern of pendulum swinging between centralization and decentralization.
If you're going to say "It's time to get back to RSS", at least understand why RSS is dead. Then maybe you will have a real solution instead of a non solution like "go download feedly".
Lastly, people blame Google for "killing RSS" by abandoning google reader, but these people have no idea. RSS was dead long before Google discontinued it. Instead of coming up with conspiracy theory, think about more plausible reason for why something would be disrupted by another piece of technology.
Books are dead too! Long live books.
When someone has an opinion like this one should wonder if they ever used RSS. Web applications for RSS aggregation is worse than using IRC in a web interface. I cant take strong opinions about IRC seriously either if the person didn't install a client. With RSS the person is merely describing himself.
Please do go install [or make] a client, gather some feeds, do some filtering. When you have your first 10 000 subscriptions I'd love to hear every angle of your story, the topics, the organization, what client you use, what language it was written in, what database it uses, who wrote it. ETC ETC
The walled gardens full of [self] censorship, data mining, adware and bullshit content have useful features too! Aggregation isn't it. HN headlines only vaguely map to our interest but reading the comments is wonderful.
(Reminds me to install thunderbird and backup my gmail. I'm not young enough to trivialize losing my data.)
Signed up for Feedly, now following danielmiessler.com, and added a super sweet RSS button to my WordPress blog, https://topherpedersen.blog.
I found this article via RSS.
Nitpick: pretty sure Slashdot predated Google reader by almost a decade.
I really like Reeder 4.0. I use it on iOS and Mac and it's a dream.
My I recommend IPTC's NewsML-G2 https://iptc.org/standards/newsml-g2/
> We all mourned when Reader died and took RSS with it, but it's time to return to what made it great
I did not, I just kept using native clients like Outlook. No big deal.
RSS is dead, but API-drive API access to data on a monthly subscription is all over many industries. Why not just sell access to an RSS feed on a subscription?
I so agree with the author. Less effort it takes to retrieve documents, the less it will mean to you, which means that youâll less likely consume it.
One of the best parts about an RSS reader is that it doesnât report every click back to Advertising Central to update the profile they keep on you.
I never left RSS. In fact, I found this in my reader. Unfortunately though Feedly doesn't meet a long list of design criteria I have.
RSS + Dat is a great combo, for what it's worth
I never left: http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?rss
Also has Pingbacks!!!
Is there an up-to-date alternative to Media RSS aiming at sharing feeds of media content (on-demand video, streaming video, photos)?
I would have taken this article more seriously if an RSS feed icon had appeared among the social media icons below the title.
I would have taken this article more serious if an RSS feed icon had appeared among the social media icons below the title.
I got rid of my overloaded feedly account and am now hosting a rss2email service that gathers posts from about 10 feeds
What's the best way to add yahoo pipes like filtering or some sort of programmability?
Was considering node-red for it but not sure
>Reasoning that RSS have less clutter.
>Recommends a webclient.
So the question is dear author: how much did Feedly paid for you?
Oh and by the way, I follow a whole bunch of Subreddits, and a couple Reddit searches via RSS.
Damn I have a draft about RSS languishing in my TODO for weeks. Great stuff though. RSS FTW!
If it wasn't for podcasting, I wonder if RSS wouldn't actually be dead by now.
RSS was very bad at helping sites keep their content monetized. This is why it died.
I think it is too late to go back to RSS, we should adopt the ActivityPub protocol.
I wonder why podcasts are thriving while writing-based RSS is declining.
This could somewhat be the fault of web developers. Unless there's a paywall, the (client|customer|boss) probably wouldn't object to throwing in an RSS feed. Maybe it would require a little extra time, but it's easier than jacking around with HTML / CSS. Most of the time, developers probably don't even think about RSS or it's at the bottom of their list.
I read my feeds in Thunderbird. I don't want yet another 3rd party service for this. I get overloaded, but my web browser is a worse distraction. I probably waste less time surfing through RSS feeds than I do by mindlessly browsing. I can more easily develop a routine for browsing feeds and the view is less distracting.
There's probably a lot of opportunity in aggregation. Newsletters such as "Inside" do a great job of this, but it's just one small slice.
I read this via RSS.
Yes, wtf, I miss the heck out of RSS.
Old time never comes back...
Back to the ~USSR~ RSS
I never stopped using RSS but I'm glad that more people are starting to use it.
Iâve been using BAZQUX which is a nice aggregator and reeder4 Since 2013. I have a nice opml file. And my eyes donât bleed because I could have text only webpages. For those of you who are adventurous you can try TINYTINYRSS. I donât see why everyone said RSS is dead almost every site still supports it.
The first thing I noticed after setting up an RSS reader was gow click batey and dumb everything in my RSS feed was.
Whining about blogs and RSS is the "baby rabbits adopt old dog as their mother" of Hacker News. It just never fails to work y'all nerds into a frenzy
Whining about blogs and RSS is the "baby rabbits adopt old dog as their mother" of Hacker News. It just never fails to work y'all nerds into a frenzy.
From the article:
Hmm, if you get anxiety from closing and opening tabs, you should probably go offline for a while.Not only will this reduce your anxiety and churn from constantly opening and closing various sites, but RSS also shows the content in a standard format, with less to distract you.I agree with this OP/authors thesis...long live RSS!
But don't tell me the answer to anything is found in signing up for / purchasing a specific product, then it becomes a commercial :/
"Itâs unclear what exactly destroyed RSS"
The driving force (well before Google decided to close reader) is that many professional publishers (those who made a living/ran a pubco, notsomuch indie bloggers) stopped supporting RSS because it was harder to monetize RSS content consumers for obvious reasons.
Even mid-late 2000s, I remember literally hacking constantly breaking RSS feeds from major sites or going back n forth with pubco support/webmaster requesting (at times even paying) for a custom feed because the format was so efficient.
Twitter has replaced RSS for all intents and purposes.
I miss Google Reader and RSS too, but the world has changed. Another reason RSS is in the past is because it was a means of delivering long blog articles which only a small minority of internet users has the interest or attention span for.
You miss RSS because you miss 2007.