That's because the author is a tool of the global ad-tech agenda, writing articles with click-bait headlines. RSS isn't a particularly profitable utility to inject ads into, or suck personal info out of (less cookies, no pixels, makes an MBA yawn in meetings), so I guess that means it's "dead" right? Oh noes! Markdown is dead! Oh noes! SOAP XML is dead! Oh noes! RESTful JSON is dead! How the fuck would a non-coding j…
Danny Crighton has a CS degree from Stanford. I'm not entirely convinced by the article either, but your criticism would be a bit more credible if you managed to avoid being factually wrong.
RSS never (un)died for me. I run FreshRSS[1]. It works well on shared hosting and it runs on SQLite (no migration troubles!). The best thing about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds. Every and service that I use has an RSS feed, except for Twitter. I use https://twitrss.me/ to follow users. If you don't find a feed, sometimes you just have to dig a little. You learn at which URIs the most commons CMSes…
> The best thing about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds. Honestly, I don't think algorithmically curated feeds are a problem. The main problem is the goal of the given algorithm which is often trying to maximize someone else's profit rather than minimize your time reading the feed... That being said, I am always amazed at the ability of my brain to go through my feed and filter the interesting out qui…
Every feed algorithm's goal is to maximize someone else's profit. Ergo, feed algorithms are the problem.
Is there a real RSS reader for the desktop anymore, besides Thunderbird? And one for iOS and Android? I can only find frontends to online services like Feedly.
This whole "RSS died" narrative illustrates a basic problem with how we understand the internet. Since there's no unified unbiased sort of "index", like GDP, to tell us just what proportion of users on the internet uses RSS anymore, we're stuck having to rely on socially propogated ideas about the state. This leads to all the typical problems with socially defined truth, such as drift as a consequence of incentives (…
Surely Google Reader had numbers that influenced the decision to shut it down?
Or just as likely the inability to monetize those users. Was there any indication that RSS viewership was dropping? I've been using RSS uninterrupted, every day, since the early 2000s. First on Google Reader and then, and now, using Tiny Tiny RSS.
I always find these articles about RSS being dead to be pretty funny, considering I'm usually reading them via RSS.
No one has mentioned NewsBlur yet. It's fantastic as an RSS reader, and provides intelligence training (filtering) for only subjects you might be interested in, allowing you to tame high-rate RSS feeds quite easily: http://newsblur.com/
When Reader shut down I migrated to newsblur, vowing to pay for things I really use, so RSS never died for me :)
Analytics are a hell of a drug. Analytics gave us A/B tested clickbait and listicles. I appreciate it's hard to go cold turkey, but maybe it's even harder to have an analytics system and use it responsibly?
> but maybe it's even harder to have an analytics system and use it responsibly? I'd say it absolutely is harder--on the one hand, you have an opportunity for more money. On the other hand, you have the mass of users that have proven that they don't care enough to react against irresponsible use in any meaningful way. Simple decision in a business context.
> react against irresponsible use in any meaningful way.
Not all reaction is direct. It's a bit like other polluting industries; you can keep doing it right up to the point where public opinion turns on the industry as a whole, and onerous regulations get imposed. I think GDPR is a taste of this.
The important things is to keep the limiting/filtering features client-side. That keeps the user in control and the power dynamic in balance. The protocol should provide as much information as possible (priority level, tags, maybe even attributes for brand name or a logo image link), and it should be up to the client to provide the best possible experience given that information. That also allows for different clients for different types of users.
One thing that could also be interesting is standardizing subscription/donation information as part of the protocol itself. So that users can easily do those things across all their sources at once (via their client), rather than going to separate websites and walking through their unique subscription forms.
> RSS doesn’t allow publishers to track user behavior. This is a feature, not a bug. > Analytics increases revenues from advertising, and that means it is critical for companies to have those trackers in place if they want a chance to make it in the competitive media environment. If you can't survive without tracking my behavior, then I guess you will die. Given the quality of writing I can expect from this "competit…
>> RSS also offers very few opportunities for branding content effectively. > This is a feature, not a bug. I know where you're coming from, but .. I'm one of the rare people who, for a while, read a significant number of blogs without RSS because I actually liked having the different distinctive visual styles to remind me who I was reading. It's a pity we can't have a little bit of styling without going bananas.
I am totally with you on this one. On one hand, I quite like having a uniform experience where text is consistently readable, etc. On the other, I miss the sense of 'place' and identity you get when viewing an article via RSS. I definitely think a compromise would be nice, but tricky. It might be possible to fix on a range of acceptable font styles, and choose the one that best fits each site. Add on a site's logo and colour scheme, and you might be able to come up with a decent approach.
> No. That’s the opposite of why people are again pushing RSS. Maybe the opposite of why users are pushing for RSS, but without analytics content producers have reasonable justification for being hostile instead.
Which is why I suggested the middle ground of a pingback URL that clients or services can hit to give the publishers certain stats like aggregated counts. If certain publishers are not ok with those limitations there will still be a bunch of people writing blog posts that are not so concerned.
Clients are supposed to be user agents, they shouldn't be doing anything in the interest of the publishers especially when it's hostile to the user. It's a shame browsers have lost site of that, let's not let RSS readers forget as well, that would be the real death of RSS.