By asking the question using the word "dead"[0] which has such offensive connotations, it will spur some to say "it's not dead" -- which isn't really going to be productive for what I think you're really asking. First, in one sense (but doesn't really answer your question) ... the old protocols like RSS (feeds), NNTP (news), IRC (chat), etc are never going to be "dead" because somebody somewhere will always be provid…
This is a really great answer and analysis. By my rough estimate 90% of internet arguments boil down to people using different definitions of the same word and talking past each other.
Ask HN: Is RSS dead?
121–130 of 211 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?
#122Using 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.
Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?
#123I don't know how younger people do it but I can't see any other way to get my preferred news in one organized headline only in an outline-like place. Maybe I am just old school but I really like RSS as I am able to get through headlines from tech, finance, etc on daily basis and go through them quickly. Anything that pikes my interest I click on the headline and it takes me to the site to read whole article. One of my favorite things to do while winding down in bed.
RSS though is like a foreign language to the under 35 crowd when I have brought it up or they have seen me using it. So it is already dead in that sense. They just prefer to get their news through Instagram/Facebook feeds or just visiting their few preferred websites directly.
Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a really great answer and analysis. By my rough estimate 90% of internet arguments boil down to people using different definitions of the same word and talking past each other.
Not just the internet. Consider differing definitions of "freedom" in politics.
Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?
#125Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?
#126RSS was largely supposed to be a hidden bit of infrastructure, allowing some intermediary (like an RSS-to-email-digest gateway, or a news aggregator service) to scrape the RSS feed and convert that into useful notifications/events/messages in some form. The idea was that you, as an author, would pick one of these services, set up an account with it, and point it at your RSS feed URL; and then you'd put a link to that service on your page, which your users could then subscribe to, in place of subscribing to your site itself. Just like a regular email-notification service, but with the webhook part "turned around" so that it's the service poking your server, rather than your server poking the service.
"RSS Readers" were never meant to happen; RSS was never meant to be used as a direct link between authors and users. If you think about it, such a direct M:N link is exactly the opposite of what an author with a simple static resource-constrained blog wants—their whole user-base would now constantly be polling their (or their ISP's) dinky little server! (But it's fine in practice, since we eventually got Cloudflare and PuSH.)
If you're a content author with a full-on web-app, you can call out (with webhooks, or messages in a message queue, or even API calls to a service like Sendgrid or Twilio), and so, for you, RSS is unnecessary. As we've seen higher-level PaaS-style personal web hosts like Netlify, Squarespace, and WordPress.com supplant the old-school Apache public_html/-style hosting, fewer and fewer authors have needed RSS, because they've had access to other methods to deliver notifications directly.
As well, microblogging (mostly in the form of posting links to your new blog posts on either a Twitter account, Facebook page, or subreddit dedicated to your blog) also take the place of notifications of new content on the blog, as well as providing the bonus feature of moving the "comments section" of your posts outside the blog itself, such that you no longer need to host or moderate it. Many people today combine a static-site-generator blog on S3/Github Pages/etc. (having no real "front page", only at most an "all posts" archive for web spiders) with an external, mostly-ephemeral social-network-microblog "index" of their blog.
RSS still exists for those authors who it serves, of course; but it's always been an author-side feature, and so, if you're seeing it less, it's because fewer authors need it.
(And, if this annoys you as a consumer-of-feeds, know that RSS is probably not the universal-notifications-infrastructure you want. Please don't write gateways that scrape pages and spit out RSS. If anything, emit emails. Mail readers are a strict superset of RSS readers, and usually do everything RSS readers do better than RSS readers do those things; but that's a topic for another post.)
Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?
#127RSS feeds aren't dead. On the contrary, their usage for content aggregation, media monitoring and podcasts has increased in the past few years, specially by power users (inforvores) and in the business world. Speaking from my own experience running Feedity - https://feedity.com , a growing service that helps with custom feeds for unstructured sources like webpages.
Does feedity allow me to generate an RSS feed for sites that do not provide it?
Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?
#128Opened this post using RSS in Inoreader. All my news comes via RSS. I use it for news sites, I use it for Medium and I also use it for Reddit. The nice thing about it, is that everything stays in one place, categorized and I can see unread counts. Especially useful while checking reddit feeds. There's no infinite scroll and I can clearly see/mark what's been read and what's not. I can come back later and continue fro…
Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dead?
#129I think a lot of people think RSS is dead because they never see it promoted anywhere. Pretty much every web site has a row of social media icons, but hardly ever is there an RSS icon in the row, even if the web site supports it. Frankly, I don't think most people who run web sites even know that the framework/CMS/rolfburger they're using automatically publishes RSS feeds for them. Yesterday I stumbled across an app…
I had a few emails recently asking if my site had an RSS feed. I have never used RSS and had no idea. Went into Squarespace settings, messed around for 2 mins, it gave me a button and set it all up for me. Honestly I thought it was already dead until I had those emails come in...