Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

Food for thought, RSS is dead because it does not provide an incentive for the author. If you do not collect a mailing list/email list you do not have a known audience. If you dont have a known audience there is no way to measure growth and monetize it. You also would struggle to monitor popular articles over time without your own web real estate and analytics.

I am an RSS noob.. so maybe some of the above IS possible with RSS but consider the case of Medium.

Medium thought to incentivize content creators with cross-pollination of readers. Person A is an author and writes on medium because medium will promote content to its network of readers which is larger than the auidence that Person A has today. Person A inevitably also brings an audience with them albiet likely humble.

Medium MAY have failed for a few different reasons but I suspect retention being low for the larger majority of its visitors and also being unable to monetize in a meaningful way - I know this team is actively working on this and more and I am rooting for them!!

Substack is the new platform.. it focuses on the ease of capturing an audience and monetizing it. Today that is what most writers want for their efforts.

If you could somehow bake the ability to capture and monetize an audience into the RSS subs then perhaps we'd have something.. the reality is whatever RSS becomes it needs to provide a 10x better incentive to the content creator than the traditional means.. and if its just "another" channel.. likely it will be ignored for the more lucrative channels (ie build my own list.. or even sites like medium)

Its also worth mentioning Master Class .. but I dont know enough about them to make any real conjecture.. just that they seem to have cracked the nut on reputation and content creation. Who doesn't wanna learn how to shoot threes from Steph Curry?

I would like to see a new web with a reduced feature set. Something like web 1.0 pages but with only semantic tags like RSS. Remove the ability to create user interfaces and forms. Could we build a spec for this new WWW and create a way for it to crawl and search RSS at the same time? It's time to go backwards. We lost the good Internet along the way to getting the crap we have today. Let's build Web -1.0

I agree that rss as a protocol doesn’t have clear incentives but I don’t think the right people have given a serious attempt at building said incentives (via examples).

One such example could be building a rss based content publisher that gives money, spotify-style, to the authors via view on their own rss clients. The publisher would have to have a good value add for a premium, too, so it’s not just an easy business but I could absolutely see it work.

Essentially it’s the same as the Spotify model. A lot of good content is available in one spot, for free, with ads and premium features, and authors are getting money for it.

Of course, if you do this, nothing stops you from … not using rss, and instead using some proprietary crap. But using rss means most blogs will already have compatibility with you ready to go so it’s a huge get for lowering the barrier of entry to your service.

This is just a 5 minutes idea I’m sure there’s lots of issues with it but I’d put money on a model like this working, given good marketing and evangelism.

News aggregators are my main business since 2001 and all I can say is that reports of the death of RSS have been greatly exaggerated. Recently launched https://biztoc.com where 75% is still RSS, the rest being APIs and custom scraping. Yes, support is not increasing but drops among established sites are very rare — Even all major crypto news sites sport a feed.

Can you get substack to start using rss?