Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#1

Post by ciokan » Fri, Sep 11, 2015, 4:44 AM UTC

I'm dealing with a project that lives through content and I was wondering if it's still worth the time to invest making some RSS features that someone suggested.

I honestly rarely hear about RSS. My idea is to build whatever users are asking and stop investing time in features that will go unnoticed but, since this is a young project, I might be wrong and losing something.

My question towards this community is...how many of you still use RSS to subscribe to content?

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#2

Post by emiunet » Fri, Sep 11, 2015, 4:49 AM UTC

Please don't kill RSS just yet. Since the death of Google Reader, I've been using selfoss[1] actively to subscribe to news sources (HN is one of them). I can't live without RSS.

[1] http://selfoss.aditu.de/

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#3

Post by duncan_bayne » Fri, Sep 11, 2015, 4:51 AM UTC

I do. Search HN to find out how many people were disappointed by Google shuttering Reader, and how many people migrated to other services (e.g. Newsblur, which I use).

RSS might not be as popular as it once was, but it certainly seems very popular in the our demographic :)

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#4

Post by Turing_Machine » Fri, Sep 11, 2015, 4:52 AM UTC

I'd say it depends on your audience. If it's a technology-oriented site, RSS (or better, Atom... it won't make you tear your hair out nearly as much as the umpteen different versions of RSS, and most readers support it just fine) is going to be a win.

Spitting out an Atom feed really isn't that hard.

Edit: since it sounds like you have an existing feed, you could try going to some of the big reader sites (e.g., feedly) that tell you how many subscribers you have. For individuals using their own reader app, your server logs should give you an idea.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#5

Post by kseistrup » Fri, Sep 11, 2015, 4:54 AM UTC

I used feeds to subscribe to content, but I prefer Atom to RSS.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#6

Post by mindcrime » Fri, Sep 11, 2015, 5:04 AM UTC

Oh hell yeah. I love RSS and would not even consider any kind of content oriented project that didn't support RSS/Atom. If you believe that a decentralized / distributed Web is better than a centralized / walled-garden model, then RSS / Atom is a must.

Disclaimer: One of our products is heavily rooted in consume large amounts of content from RSS feeds and providing tools to help users filter/sort/mine that content to find the really useful stuff, etc. So I do have something of a biased position here. But my position is truly as much ideological as anything.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#7

Post by lewisl9029 » Fri, Sep 11, 2015, 5:41 AM UTC

I arrived at this Ask HN through RSS.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#8

Post by phodo » Fri, Sep 11, 2015, 5:50 AM UTC

The "fall" of rss has been one of the worst things to happen to Internet tools. Many thought rss would be replaced by Twitter it doesn't provide the same utility. I recall tools like netvibes, google reader, and others where I could consume vast amounts of information. Even the old pulse on iOS was great and was soon replaced by inferior versions. As the fall of rss tools happened, less sites published rss and we ended up in a negative reinforcing spiral.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#9

Post by jdboyd » Fri, Sep 11, 2015, 5:55 AM UTC

I use RSS or Atom to read content constantly.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#10

Post by tomku » Fri, Sep 11, 2015, 5:58 AM UTC

I use Reeder/Feedly every day to keep up with a ton of different information sources. There's just too many interesting sources to manually check them all and aggregators like HN or Reddit can be hit-or-miss.

Edit: Something to consider is that the people who submit links to places like Reddit and HN are probably much more likely than the rest of your users to use some kind of feed reader. Even if feed subscription numbers are low, those few "power users" might have a disproportionate effect on how much your content gets shared.