At my work we considered removing the RSS functionality, a quick analysis showed it fed a whole bunch of apps both internal and external. It's definitely alive and heavily used just not as much by humans
Ask HN: Is RSS dead?
111–120 of 211 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?
#112No. My entire business is based on RSS. And it's doing great. I'm a podcaster. All podcasts are RSS feeds.
Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?
#113Google Reader literally killed all Web and Clients side RSS development. It make sense it lives on the web rather than an App. And it was one of the best RSS Reader.
I am not sure what RSS Reader people are using these days, but I have been using Feedly since Reader discontinued. And as long as they keep their free tier I dont see myself stop using them.
I think most people who use RSS are nerds or geeks anyway. So in terms of usage it is very small in the world where we have 4 billion Smartphone users. And I dont even look for RSS icon in website. I just search it inside Feedly to see if they have it listed. And most of the time they do.
The problem with RSS is no one has figure out a sustainable business model or UX for the majority of the market.
Is Something "Dead" in tech often means something entirely different to its literal sense. What the precise word you are / may be looking for is declining.
Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?
#114The reason RSS is not dead is because it is relatively free. The people who don't want it on their website remove the RSS button from their list of share-buttons. They have no clue that their website still supports it.
Example: Vice wrote an article titled "The rise and demise of RSS" (you can google it). Now go to their homepage, look at the page source, and there you go:
Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?
#115I've recently released a new type of reader: https://fraidyc.at/
It's a bit much to try to explain in the comments here - but I am glad to answer questions and hear from others who are trying this kind of thing. RSS isn't dead at all - in fact, I'm introducing some extensions for it next week.
Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?
#116I've used RSS in some form for several years. I've lately gotten quite a bit of use from rss2email, some .forward rules, and mutt.
Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?
#117RSS the protocol, or RSS the experience? The Protocol is alive and kicking, as far as being available, but it's been more or less killed by publishers not promoting it out of the box. AFAIK ad revenue is basically the reason. The replacement set of broadcast tools is still Facebook, Twitter, Direct, and Newsletters. Newsletters are really the new feed.
> Newsletters are really the new feed. I've noticed this as well, and it boggles my mind. If ever there was a use case for RSS, this would be it.
With RSS, the user is in control. Unsubscribe, and it's gone. "Newsletters", which are mostly ads, are much harder to stop.
Hence the demand for MailChump, Constant Spammer, and SpamBlast.
Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?
#118Google Reader literally killed all Web and Clients side RSS development. It make sense it lives on the web rather than an App. And it was one of the best RSS Reader. I am not sure what RSS Reader people are using these days, but I have been using Feedly since Reader discontinued. And as long as they keep their free tier I dont see myself stop using them. I think most people who use RSS are nerds or geeks anyway. So i…
The model is to use RSS feed of intelligent stuff to drive folks to my revenue machine. Exactly what blogs do. You don't monitize the feed, it feeds the machine.
Like how, just recently, Tailwind leveraged is feed followers (but not on rss, on other streams) to $$$.
RSS, and other streams (your insta, Twitter, etc) monitize the same way.
Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
The podcast industry might be booming, but the days of nearly every podcast being freely available with an RSS feed is certainly over. Granted this is mostly a business decision rather than a technical decision. Companies like Spotify want you to listen to their podcasts on their platform. This allows them to better track ad statistics and push other revenue streams compared to podcasts served over traditional RSS fe…
> This allows them to better track ad statistics and push other revenue streams compared to podcasts served over traditional RSS feeds. It's not just better ad statistics -- with apps like Stitcher/Spotify, the app contains both discovery and download, and also the player. When you listen to podcasts on their apps, they're able to report useful, interesting metrics to podcast producers like skip rate, bounce rate, et…
You are correct and that data certainly has other uses that can benefit content creators. However let's be honest, the primary reason for gathering those statistics is to leverage them for ads.
Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?
#120Using it daily… reading 300+ titles and around 50 full articles every day of the year… Definitely not dead for me. I can't even imagine how I'd read as much /interesting/ content in as little time without RSS.