RSS is still there, it's just that sites don't enable it anymore. Have loads of sites that don't do it that I have to follow manually through crawlers.
I Miss RSS
101–110 of 314 posts
Re: I Miss RSS
#102The author paints it as some kind of conspiracy, but the simple truth is that RSS waned in popularity once push notifications became popular and widespread. Every user's RSS reader polling every website for changes every few minutes for all eternity is horribly inefficient and unfeasible to do on most platforms and devices today (especially on mobile). Pub/sub is the clear way forward, but it's just sad that there is…
Push notifications have a cost too, now you need the server to maintain state of all clients and notify them on changes. This has huge implications at scale, especially if it's extremely cheap or easy for new clients to spin up. Think about every single browser tab now requiring a server to maintain some state on the backend--that's a nightmare with billions and billions of users and tabs. Pull-based architectures have the nice effect that less popular content has almost no cost to continue serving and just falls into the background forever.
Re: I Miss RSS
#103RSS is still alive and kicking. I came here via RSS. But the masses browse a locked down web. That is true. We might have another shot at an open web for the masses via the whole crypto movement. If content goes on decentralized blockchains in the future, nobody can lock the content down like big tech did for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc. Projects like Arweave show how it is possible to store huge amounts…
Mirror.xyz currently renders HTML from its Arweave backend, but not RSS, which is a bit disappointing, as there are a few Mirror blogs I'd love to have in my news reader. If it's capable of rendering HTML, RSS should be just a few lines of code away, but I can't find any repository for the frontend to try and implement it myself. More disappointing is the overall reactions to this comment including totally unhelpful comments that are basically just "OMG GTFO" and likely violating HN guidelines.
Re: I Miss RSS
#104While this topic is still on the front page, does anyone have some feed recommendations? Some of my favorites are Hackaday, Damn Interesting (including curated links), and hnrss for terms like side project.
gwern posted his rss feed which i think it is very interesting.
it includes a lot of rss links and they are all divided by category.
you can find it at this page https://www.gwern.net/Changelog (ctl+f "rss").
Re: I Miss RSS
#105Sort of obvious why RSS went away. It is really hard to put ads into RSS. Sure you can just add a update but that's not really feasible (and could be filtered). So the large sites just started removing it and it helped them capture ad sales.
It's really no different than email lists, medium, substack, etc. which are all working through ways of effectively monetizing themselves. RSS feed for your content + a patreon or similar place (that potentially gives you access to a premium RSS feed with more/expanded content) would totally be feasible.
Re: I Miss RSS
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not true, but might be a common misconception. RSS rode the wave of the realtime hype at that time and has multiple standards for push notifications. RSSCloud und Pubsubhubbub are the two immediately in my mind, note that PuSH got turned into WebSub.
Multiple standards is the same as no standard. Yes there are many ways to do push-based RSS, but there is no single way that everyone uses.
Wordpress does support both. You can make a blog on wordpress.com right now and you get both standards activated by default in the RSS feed. That takes care of half the web ;) (well, it would if it's also true for standalone Wordpress installations, which I don't know). And all relevant readers support at least PuSH. This is really not a standard problem, and I doubt the concept itself is part of the adoption problem.
No, not having a way to subscribe when stumbling over an RSS feed was the main problem in my eyes, and the existence of a feed not being highlighted in browsers anymore. Firefox dropping support was not only an act of treason against the free web, it was also very effective in making it very hard for new users to understand how to use RSS. Not that chrome is any better. Here lies the problem, and that's where it could be solved.
Add into browsers an icon when a site has an RSS feed, and let that point to a foundation managed site that points to RSS readers, where users can select their favorite. I'm 100% certain that would have a huge effect on adoption numbers.
As this comment thread shows very well RSS is not dead at all, but it's not in the mass market right now and that could be changed easily enough.
Re: I Miss RSS
#107RSS is alive and well. I use it daily and I can't even keep up with the feeds I subscribe to (hundreds). In recent years, it has mostly replaced Twitter for me.
I think what the author really means is "I wish I could read tweets as RSS." And the answer to that is that there are several different third party ways of doing so, if you wish.
Re: I Miss RSS
#108as other's pointed out, RSS is still here if you want to use it. It's just not ubiquitous as it once was.
IMO the big thing that killed RSS ubiquity was Google Chrome not having support for it natively. Before that, Firefox, Opera, Safari all had RSS as well-supported, central thing and I remember finding it super annoying that Chrome didn't have it when it launched. But I kept using Chrome for the same reasons everyone else started switching to Chrome. And the RSS extensions all sucked. And eventually I stopped using them. And here I am, no longer reading RSS.
But as Chrome ate up browser share, I'm sure fewer people went to RSS because it wasn't natively there and so the incentives to implement RSS decreased as fewer people expected it to be there, especially as many more people were coming online only having used Chrome.
Oddly enough, I switched back to Firefox years ago and _could_ get back into RSS at any point (or with any number of RSS reader apps, etc.), but the habit has stuck, and I now stay up-to-date on everything via email newsletters, Twitter and this orange website instead. it's worse and I hate it, but oh well
Re: I Miss RSS
#109When I see articles like this, my reaction is always: when did RSS go away? I have close to 200 sites in my Feedly list, and I have trouble keeping up with all the articles I get from RSS every day. I think that what the author really means is that he misses RSS feeds from Twitter. I don't use Twitter, so from my perspective, RSS is as present and useful as it was 20 years ago.
How did you aggregate so many sources to read articles from? What is your discovery process? Do you have any recommendation where I can read good stuff from?
Re: I Miss RSS
#110Sort of obvious why RSS went away. It is really hard to put ads into RSS. Sure you can just add a update but that's not really feasible (and could be filtered). So the large sites just started removing it and it helped them capture ad sales.
Daring Fireball has for years, and Gruber's gotten rich off of it.