Ask HN: Is RSS dying? Or coming back?

Its very much alive in this way though, at least for now, and I think its important to recognize the role of RSS in keeping podcast distribution fairly uniform and relatively meritocratic. I think this why it has exploded as a medium, in part. Its also why you get such a fantastic selection of great third party players.

Unfortunately, I think RSS for news is already past its prime, though alot of "indie" sites and blogs still do have feeds it seems.

[0]: https://singhkays.com/blog/how-spotify-is-killing-the-open-p...

My my.yahoo.com (yes, I know, Yahoo! Is hardly a worthwhile data point these days) was carefully constructed of a dozen or more RSS feeds, and 80-90% are now dead. I tried resurrecting a few on the assumption that the sources just changed their URI, but all (maybe 3?) that I tried had no RSS feed any more, or none that I could find.

I think two were now paywalled sites, which is probably the broader trend - RSS is just a different form of ad-blocking from the content-provider’s perspective.

Unfortunately, since social media has replaced blogs as the go-to place for discussions and user-generated content in general, this means that a lot of the platforms that people use most frequently don't have an RSS feed, or have it but it's not very useful for whatever reason.

However: many, many other webpages out there do offer RSS, and I'm guessing that plenty of people use it, at least on technical circles. I use it mostly for comics and, to a lesser extent, for a few personal blogs and even news. A lot of people use it for podcasts. It has also been used to automatically download new episodes of TV shows in torrent downloaders (I'm guessing that you could mark this particular application as controversial; I won't comment on that. But it is useful at the very least). Also, if used properly, it allows for a lot of user control. You could, for example, pipe a youtube RSS into yt-dlp so that videos from a particular creator are automatically downloaded into a folder in your computer, or use any alert of new content to trigger whatever you want to do (like custom alerts when someone comments in a blog of yours, or whatever). RSS has a lot of potential, and because of that I don't think it's going away soon.

Now, you are also worried about the problem of content discovery. There is a problem here, because whenever we as users want a source of curated content, advertisers are going to do whatever they can in order to squeeze their shit into our pipes. So I personally prefer a "dumb" protocol like RSS where I just say "give me new updates from just THIS site", and leave discovery to more organic, less automated (therefore less gameable by advertisers) means. The closest I can think of to solve your problem is the usage of blog rings/networks (they used to exist, ten years ago... I don't know the state of the art right now), but this still means that there is someone doing the aggregation.