Ask HN: Is RSS dead?

It still exists but awareness that it exists is at an all time low with both users, web developers, and SEO specialists.

Valid reasons for continuing to invest in having this feature on your websites include better discoverability of your content by various content aggregators that still depend on this. In short, if you are running any kind of blog or news site, it probably helps you to have some RSS feeds but not not a lot.

But lets be real, a lot of RSS out there is just a side effect of many companies having used the same CMS for more than a decade. It's just something the CMS does by default. I stopped using feed readers some time after Google reader shut down. I used feedly and inoreader for a while but found myself opening that less and less over the years. I still have the bookmark but haven't looked at it in over a year and have not added any new feed in probably close to five years.

These days I depend on HN, twitter, and a few other social media accounts to discover content. I use but am increasingly unhappy with Google News; or rather what's left of it after Google's AI hipsters got their hands on it and turned into a clickbait aggregator to drive their ad revenue. Trump trump trump, more trump, did you know trump farted? etc. It's hopelessly biased to crap I definitely don't care about. All my attempts to nudge it away to more interesting stuff seem to be not working. I hope he loses the election; mainly it because it might clean up my news feed.

By chance I'm actually working on a project currently where I'm dealing with RSS feeds. A lot of feeds out there are actually shockingly bad in terms of content, usage of fields, etc. You get stupid things like brain-dead marketeers putting their company name in every title and description; people forgetting to add a timestamp. Or categories. Or an image. These things kind of matter if you want to aggregate and present content from multiple sources. Looking bad is never a good thing for any company whose primary business model is content distribution (i.e. major news papers and magazines).

Thanks for start.me. I just registered. I forgot these kind of portals still exist. I used to have netvibes.com but for some reason I stopped using it. I will give another try with Start.me.

No. I read HN through RSS, as well as around 200 other sites. I would never be bothered to check them all manually, and this affords me a much higher signal to noise ratio over a much shorter period of time.

There simply is no substitute.

I think there is hope. Ask sites for RSS feeds (especially podcasts, which often forget to link to the RSS feeds). Build interesting new things with it that inspire other people to build things with it. Convince browsers to make RSS friendlier. Mozilla should have Firefox at least tell people what do with RSS when they click the button instead of downloading a raw XML file: "you clicked an RSS feed -- would you like to download this extension to read it?"

Still using RSS and Feedly! Perfect to get passive information.