Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

shkspr.mobi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 88 posts

Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

#41

Post by jesuslop »

renegat0x0 wrote: post #33
donohoe wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not that they don’t like it. It’s more like they don’t care, or it’s not on their radar.

Agree to disagree. I think many platform did support RSS, or API, but at some time it was dropped. It is not that hard to provide RSS. It is not like it has to be implemented from scratch. It is just dropped by platforms. There must be reasons for dropping. One may argue it is not worth it, but even to drop functionality there needs to be a decision from management. The management always think about money. Is RSS or…

Not just no money in, but actual money out. RSS is a hole in user funnel inflow to platform.

Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

#43

Post by naravara »

renegat0x0 wrote: post #16

How else to notify readers? RSS is quite good. Corporations do not like it though, because they want to control spread of information. They prefer you re-enter page, be targeted with more ads, or spoonfed with their news algorithm on-site. However RSS only works, if someone knows about your page. YouTube is quite good with RSS though. You can have channel RSS, be notified about new videos, while channels still are di…

There’s non-corpo reasons you might not want to expose all the content into an RSS feed. https://ciechanow.ski/ can only really be appreciated from the browser. In the salad days of blogging, it was as much about what kind of fun shit you could do with HTML or CSS as it was about writing and distributing your thoughts. The Yamauchi family office website could have just been a templates squarespace page, but they opted to make it look like this instead: https://www.y-n10.com/

Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

#45

Post by coldpie »

est wrote: post #23
askonomm wrote: post #21

From my analytics, around 85% of visits to my sites are now from bots. It's hard to say if these are oldschool bots or people just browsing the web via chatgpt now, but the reality is that very few actually visit the actual sites I have anymore.

I think blogs should have a universal comment function, I'd love to engage ith the author but many blogs don't bother providing a basic textarea.

I got so much spam on my blog, I turned comments off. There's an email in the footer if readers want to contact me.

Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

#46

Post by gbrindisi »

I protest the modern web by trying to consume all content via RSS.

The feed reader shall be my main window to the world, and I am sorry that it's not obvious to content creators that I read them so I often send an email on the note of "I enjoyed this article you wrote, thanks".

I write a small blog myself and I see the other side of it, but I just gave up on SEO, metrics, etc. I want to be the change I'd like see in the world: I publish full content RSS, I remove all analytics, make the website as lean as I can, put out my contact data and my only success metric is # of interactions I get with occasional readers.

Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

#47

Post by kinow »

For science fiction short stories I get all notifications of new issues and stories via RSS. There are some sites like https://www.freesfonline.net/NewAdditions.html that posts new stories every month or so. There are always news sites in that list to get more entries for my RSS reader, so no need to ever search web/agents for more content.

Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

#48

Post by PunchyHamster »

renegat0x0 wrote: post #16

How else to notify readers? RSS is quite good. Corporations do not like it though, because they want to control spread of information. They prefer you re-enter page, be targeted with more ads, or spoonfed with their news algorithm on-site. However RSS only works, if someone knows about your page. YouTube is quite good with RSS though. You can have channel RSS, be notified about new videos, while channels still are di…

In some parallel universe, the RSS is tightly integrated with browser and main way to "subscribe" to site's updates

Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

#49

Post by nozzlegear »

askonomm wrote: post #21

From my analytics, around 85% of visits to my sites are now from bots. It's hard to say if these are oldschool bots or people just browsing the web via chatgpt now, but the reality is that very few actually visit the actual sites I have anymore.

The Huawei bot in particular is a scourge.

Re: RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google

#50

Post by nicbou »

ushimitsudoki wrote: post #5

Is it possible that the users who used to find us through Google are now satisfied with AI chat summaries and no longer feel the need to click through to the actual page? Meanwhile, the long-time users who subscribed via RSS are still showing up like they always have. If this is the case, it’s a bit of a sad reality for content creators.

Yes. It caused a major drop in CTR for search. Google Zero is the term for it. It’s murderous for information websites. On my side, traffic is down roughly 70% on the website I live from.

It’s still part of the training data though. Not that I consented to this.

Post reply on HN