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Ask HN: Is RSS making a real resurgence?

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Ask HN: Is RSS making a real resurgence?

#1
I am considering offering some microservices for my job seeking clients whoh hire me for English resume editing, LinkedIn Profile enhancement and interview coaching. Doing a decent search, seems the term is much more in the mainstream than in years past. TIA.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS making a real resurgence?

#2
I don't think RSS ever truly went away. Sure, Google ditched Reader, but (for me, at least) Feedly and other services took its place. The millions of sites running on WordPress have RSS enabled by default. Podcasts are distributed via RSS.

Social media sites and smart news aggregators (e.g. Apple News) have failed to replace RSS for me.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS making a real resurgence?

#3
When I used to use Google reader (RIP) almost every site that posted content weekly had RSS. I personally haven't experienced any indication of a resurgence of using RSS besides some obviously niche technical communities or applications that are using it. Hardly a resurgence from my perspective, though.

RSS is great when people need it and use it, but most 'normal' people don't use it these days from what I can tell. Prove me wrong :)

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS making a real resurgence?

#5
post #3

When I used to use Google reader (RIP) almost every site that posted content weekly had RSS. I personally haven't experienced any indication of a resurgence of using RSS besides some obviously niche technical communities or applications that are using it. Hardly a resurgence from my perspective, though. RSS is great when people need it and use it, but most 'normal' people don't use it these days from what I can tell.…

"Normal" people may not know it, but they use RSS when they download/subscribe to podcasts.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS making a real resurgence?

#6
I feel I've noticed an upswing in RSS recently, but I'm not sure if that's because I'm looking for it.

A lot of people I follow on Twitter (and myself) seemed to quit Twitter around November last year. Some of them went back to blogging instead, and some others went to micro.blog, both of which use RSS as the syndication method.

Feedly also added keyword mute filters to their RSS readers late last year, which I think might be helping adoption. (Lots of personal and news feeds become more tolerable when you add a few political keywords to the mute list.)

But that said, most of the people I follow via RSS only have double digit RSS subscribers. Those same people have/had 10x - 100x the followers on Twitter and Medium.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS making a real resurgence?

#7
post #3

When I used to use Google reader (RIP) almost every site that posted content weekly had RSS. I personally haven't experienced any indication of a resurgence of using RSS besides some obviously niche technical communities or applications that are using it. Hardly a resurgence from my perspective, though. RSS is great when people need it and use it, but most 'normal' people don't use it these days from what I can tell.…

I doubt normal people even used RSS directly during its heyday. Even so, all sites that regularly publish content still seem to have RSS, and very useful it is too.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS making a real resurgence?

#8
RSS/Atom is still used by most syndications. The average user may be unaware of its existence but that same audience is similarly unaware of most technologies that drive the web.

Other than the death of Google Reader, there hasn't been much of a change.

The only alternative to RSS right now (afaik) seems to be bespoke APIs and which is a pain for publishers to maintain and for software to syndicate.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS making a real resurgence?

#9
post #8

RSS/Atom is still used by most syndications. The average user may be unaware of its existence but that same audience is similarly unaware of most technologies that drive the web. Other than the death of Google Reader, there hasn't been much of a change. The only alternative to RSS right now (afaik) seems to be bespoke APIs and which is a pain for publishers to maintain and for software to syndicate.

Yeah I was myself surprised when recently I needed RSS feeds of a few parameters and was pleasantly surprised to see them still inplemented even with API’s on most of the sites.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS making a real resurgence?

#10
Maybe if someone creates a more "social" RSS experience! A Feedly with Friends! (does this already exist?)

Basically a follow-based social graph on top of the excellent feedly experience. So there's a "Social" tab, a timeline of sorts, with things like:

"Your friend just read 'Some Cool Article Title' from 'That publication'"

"X commented on Y: ... "

"X1, X2, X3 subscribed to 'Some Publication Making The Rounds'"

Call it Socialfeeds or Feedbook or something. Bootstrap over twitter/fb social graphs.

Back in the day of google reader I remember there were some basic social features (hope these are not false memories...) and I actually really enjoyed them because of course I want to discuss all the cool shit I'm reading with my friends!

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