The Rise and Demise of Rss (2018)

You must be using different social media than me because it is all pushing celebrities and ads not friends and family that I want to see.

I much prefer being in control of my feed. In an ideal world there would probably be a mix of both (I have a list of people who I see every post and a list where I see popular or major items) but between the current options I far prefer something straightforward. Especially when the algorithm isn't fully tuned to optimize my interests.

The only ways I use social media would be better served by RSS. I follow specific businesses, organizations, and people, and want to see everything they post, in chronological order. I do my best to achieve this with social media, but RSS would be better.

For news: per-topic or per-region feeds would probably help. I think AP used to have those, maybe still does.

Depending on your feed reader you can filter stuff pretty well with custom rules. I use newsboat. Even without hard filtering, thanks to the compact density I can sift through a huge number of articles in barely any time at all. Yes, I am doing it myself, the horror of laboring, but again it takes barely any time at all to go through the days RSS feeds even with a few news sites throwing 100 articles a day. Mark as read. Done.

An RSS client could do that, no?

RSS feeds can drown you in quality content you're not interested in 75% of the time. Social Media can drown you in content that seems interesting, but is worthless 75% of the time. But that's my experience - yours could be different (I totally made up the numbers, but you get the idea).

In theory a market could arise around providing bespoke algorithmic feeds for one's RSS content, in some kind of adapter model, but I don't know enough about ML engineering to suggest whether that is at all economically feasible. Maybe?

On the contrary, IME social media sites seem to fight me on filtering what I get to see. They are happy to show me what they want me to see, but constantly thwart my attempts to decide for myself. How many plugins should I need to install to get FB or twitter to respect my choice to show the timeline chronologically.

The Internet community (and pre-Internet, even) has done a fine job of creating many standards without government instructions. No, that wouldn't be a good thing.

RSS is fine. The article stretches both in how well-known it suggests RSS was a decade ago (leaning hard on the word "might"), and in talking about its "demise" now. Some of its complaints are just silly, like when it agrees with the New York Times that "RSS" isn't a "particularly user-friendly" acronym. So they think if it had been named Bundling Up Feeds For You everyone would be using it now?

RSS never caught on with average users because the average user doesn't want to think that much about his use of the web. He wants to go to one or a few sites he's comfortable with, and read what they choose to show him. That's just how it is. For the minority who aren't satisfied with that, RSS is a useful tool. There's no problem, except for people who get frustrated that the average user isn't sophisticated enough.

Rule number 1 of Hacker News: No matter what subject is discussed, there will always be a top level comment suggesting that the government (preferably the EU) should either ban it worldwide, or make it mandatory worldwide. Usually it is the first comment.

As to the topic: Yes, of course the European Union should make sure that every website uses RSS. It is probably the most pressing issue the alliance faces today.

> I don't use social media, which I imagine wouldn't really be well served by RSS.

I don’t use Bluesky, but there are a few people on there I wish to see updates from (including one webcomic artist without a website) and I use Bluesky’s integrated RSS to do so. Same for Mastodon.

I dropped reddit for my RSS, which I've had some version of since before the demise of Google Reader. RSS is such a great way to keep up on trusted sources, unlike reddit and other various social platforms. It's also a nice way to keep up on some forums, like Macrumors and HackerNews.

I still use RSS, not for all content but for blogs that are now mostly Substack newsletters. Works fine, relatively noise-free.

Some social media has RSS. Reddit, BlueSky, Mastodon, and YouTube all have it. X used to but it was dropped at some point. TikTok, Facebook, Threads, and Instagram don't.

>Pretty much every website out there still has feeds.

Where is the RSS button on Facebook, Instagram, tiktok, twitter, or YouTube? Most websites might have feeds, but not the most used web sites.

It is not at all relevant any more. It will only be "revived" when top browsers and websites support it. The biggest website that I know that supports RSS is (old) reddit, and the biggest web browser that natively supports it is Internet Explorer which is definitely dead.

IMO some people use RSS as a proxy for the decline of 'blogosphere culture', which was already in decline when Google Reader shut down.

Same! I use Feedbin (https://feedbin.com/) to aggregate new posts. On desktop, I'll sync Feedbin up with NetNewsWire (https://netnewswire.com/).

Substack and Medium both support RSS. You can just type /feed after the URL. e.g., tk.substack.com/feed and tk.medium.com/feed

For other newsletters, I use Kill the Newsletter (https://kill-the-newsletter.com/) to subscribe via RSS.

> whats the difference between this and bookmarking the actual site and just manually checking?

For one, not having to manually check is huge. If someone posts once every two months, I’m not going to manually open their website every day (times twenty for every one) or even every week and then have to think “have I read this?”. That would be a colossal waste of time, attention, and mental energy.

For another, there’s a plethora of cases where RSS filters. I subscribe to YouTube channels exclusively through RSS, I never open the website (or even have an account) otherwise. Same for Reddit, they have specific feeds for each subreddit, and for each they can even list just the top daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly posts. I can easily get just the most interesting posts of something like r/toolgifs without ever having to deal with the faff or getting distracted by other junk.

Content comes to me, and on my terms.

Automation, and ease of skimming articles for one.

Reading offline; having a plaintext list of headlines (and optionally the main image) that I can easily look through instead of having to process all the visual noise of a website and click through multiple pages; a lot of websites don't even have a chronological view of their posts.

RSS doesn’t have formatting and interactions.

It’s content only.

It’s also a drastically simpler standard than HTML making creating RSS clients far easier than an HTML client.

Finally it is designed to push new content in a way HTML isn’t. I can tell my RSS client to only download all the titles for all the different posts and only download the content on actually clicking through. Thats something HTML cannot do. Further, my client can easily retrieve changes since it last checked which HTML doesn’t allow.

Lots of differences. Overloading HTML which even at its simplest is about fixed text and overloading that with handling temporal lists of atomic data would be a bad idea.

RSS allows you to check all your sites at once, instead of manually checking many sites just to see nothing new has been posted. I can instantly see in my RSS reader right now that I have 14 articles in my Politics folder, 7 in my Tech, 6 in my YT, 18 in Music.

Yet it survives to this day because of one reason - it's dead simple to serve and consume it. Chrome may need an extension to handle it properly (I use one on Firefox).

The singular challenge it faces is discoverability, as you point out. The above mentioned extension solves that for me. But if it were to be brought back as a default feature on browsers, RSS would be an instant hit again. There's always the opportunity to resurrect it.

a friend of mine host a ttrss for a few of us

i access it via emacs and some lisp code cleans it up the way i like it (remove most AI stuff etc.)

my brother has literally thousands of feeds that he runs through some AI pipelines to get his stuff

there are ways

HN has RSS feeds, I solely access it from there. I can skim titles much faster in the consistent UI of my feed reader then I could visiting the bespoke home pages of HN and many other sites.

When I used Google Reader, I didn't read everything together under one heading for that reason. I clicked on a feed, read the latest, and moved on to the next. So on a slower feed I might always read everything, while on a very busy one I might just occasionally check in or read a little while and then mark the rest read.

Now I use TT-RSS, which looks a lot like Google Reader did, but you run it on a local system. And I still read some feeds completely every day and let others pile up for weeks.

What was needed is your own personal "algorithm" to provide you a feed of the things you'd subscribed to so you didn't have to read and check off every published thing. Imagine if you actually had control of this feed and could have the social aspect but tweaked to your preferences instead of somebody else's

In fact it's not such a bad idea to write this software now

>> I had hundreds of feeds in Google Reader, which quickly became overwhelming

I never used Google Reader, did it not have any ability to put feeds in directories or any other way of prioritizing?

I have hundreds of feeds in my RSS reader, a dozen of them are in the directory titled "Good", and for those I read pretty much every entry in every feed every day. There are a hundred or so of them in the directory titled "Bored". I get to those every once in a while. There's a limit on how many entries it keeps, so most of the entries in the Bored directory will expire unread. But it's good sometimes to have a self-curated source of reading material even if you don't get to it all.

>> I get far more enjoyment browsing HN today than I ever did sifting endlessly through my RSS feeds

HN, of course, has an RSS feed. (It's in "Bored").

Hundreds sounds overwhelming! Did Google Reader let you look at a single feed at a time? I've never found readers that present a single "inbox" combining all my feeds to be usable.

Some of the feeds I subscribe to are effectively curated news from around the web, and I use filters to hide certain topics - e.g. from a newspaper I might filter the entire sport section.

RSS is not an API, though. It's another content type like HTML, typically XML, but in a specific format that makes it easier for programs to consume.

Generating it is trivial in most web frameworks and CMSs, and sites that don't offer it either never bothered to set it up, or actively choose not to. This is hardly a fault of RSS itself.

What you suggest as a successor is a workaround for such sites, not something that should be the norm.

Are you talking about something that can go out to any web site, grab the HTML, and turn it into a feed that's consistent with any other feed and not a big hairy mess of stuff that wasn't actually part of the content?

That doesn't sound trivial at all to me, so maybe I'm misunderstanding.

Agree! Just wrote basically this comment before I saw yours. Disappointingly even pay tools like Feedly have extremely poor RSS creators. All Feedly's features for the past few years seem to focus on some obscure niche of IT security threat awareness.