Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

By asking the question using the word "dead"[0] which has such offensive connotations, it will spur some to say "it's not dead" -- which isn't really going to be productive for what I think you're really asking.

First, in one sense (but doesn't really answer your question) ... the old protocols like RSS (feeds), NNTP (news), IRC (chat), etc are never going to be "dead" because somebody somewhere will always be providing it and somebody somewhere will always be consuming it. Just like horse & buggies are not truly "dead" because a few are being run for tourists and the Amish communities, there are some old dialup BBS's serving callers with old modems even though the internet+web has supplanted it.

I think the longer form of your question for productive discussion is this: Is RSS usage decline possible to reverse with new clients on the web & mobile?

The answer is no. RSS/NNTP/IRC don't have the incentives (both economic and social) that allow them to experience a renaissance. E.g. StackOverflow may someday be supplanted by another Q&A site but it won't be supplanted by NNTP news forums. Same with RSS. Typical mass consumers use Facebook as their "rss" reader. It won't matter what kind of new RSS reader you develop, the typical web surfers don't want to manage RSS feeds.

[0] to the replies below about why "dead" often triggers unproductive arguments:

In observing decades of debates on USENET,BBSs,web, etc... the word "dead" has 2 very different meanings which needlessly causes participants to talk right past each other.

meaning #1: "dead" is harmless synonym for "decline", "losing popularity", "no longer supported", "no longer in mainstream use", etc.

meaning #2: "dead" is provocative synonym for "no longer worth learning", "useless", "stopped working forever", "nobody intelligent is using it", etc.

The amazing phenomenon that happens with asking "Is X Dead?" is that the question asker is almost always innocently using meaning #1 but the most enthusiastic answerers are using meaning #2. This is why "dead" triggers unproductive threads because both sides are talking past each other with different semantics of "dead".

RSS does play a growing role in a few places: podcasts [1] and virtual assistant apps (e.g. Alexa [2], Google Home[3], etc.) Although in both cases consumers do not tend to have direct access to it.

1. https://itunespartner.apple.com/podcasts/articles/creating-y...

2. https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/flashbriefing/...

3. https://developers.google.com/news/assistant/newsbriefings/t...

I remember a time before RSS in the late 1990s.

Now, for the past 6 years, I use RSS as my primary method of downloading podcast episodes and webcomic issues. I'm currently subscribed to about 60.

Dead? No. Declining? I can't say that for myself let alone writ large.

If some site chirps 'listen to our podcast', I'll have a look for acceptable (e.g. no password) feed URLs. If they don't make one obvious, they've lost their chance. Generally, IME those worth downloading offer RSS.

I'm not sure its role is growing. I fret a bit about Spotify and Stitcher becoming the defacto place to discover and consume podcasts, because podcasts seem to be the last bastion of steady RSS usage.

While I agree with everything you wrote, I think it is fair to add that an eventual demise does not mean it is quite dead yet, especially among the HN audience. I use RSS to follow a number of blogs and I know that a lot of other nerds follow some of my stuff using the RSS feed. It works just fine and until it gets replaced, a new client might receive a warm welcome by this large-in-absolute-numbers audience.

> meaning #1: "dead" is harmless synonym for "decline", "losing popularity", "no longer supported", "no longer in mainstream use", etc.

> meaning #2: "dead" is provocative synonym for "no longer worth learning", "useless", "stopped working forever", "nobody intelligent is using it", etc.

IMO if you can identify two major audiences who will have two different interpretations for your statements, then both interpretations are simultaneously "live" for your context. It is for that reason that Group #2 should always rise to the defense of a technology they don't want derided as terribly useless. It doesn't matter if Group #1 meant something else, because they weren't in full control of their meaning as they spoke into a larger audience.

This is a really great answer and analysis. By my rough estimate 90% of internet arguments boil down to people using different definitions of the same word and talking past each other.

Not just the internet. Consider differing definitions of "freedom" in politics.

Or Socialism.

I don't think you can meaningfully talk about this without distinguishing between user facing applications and server to server aggregation.

RSS/Atom serves a purpose in federation of content that is not necessarily visible to people so much any more.

We spoke about RSS and Atom more before in part because it wasn't ubiquitous, but today it's almost hard to find a blogging platform or CMS that is post oriented that doesn't expose feed endpoints by default - I have a hobby project that relies on feeds to aggregate content, and the proportion of sites I've wanted to add that has lacked feed is miniscule. It's become boring plumbing.

At the same time we have gotten more ways of consuming aggregated content. Some uses feeds, some rely on social aggregation. Combined that may have reduced the number proportion of users that run apps that hit feeds direction rather than seeing the content elsewhere. That's fine. But at the same time my impression at least is that a large proportion of clients accessing feeds are doing it on behalf of services rather than end users.

The word "dead" is hardly offensive. It's a common and universal part of nature. All things eventually die, including software.

I don't think the word itself is what's offensive; rather it's connecting it to a particular thing which some people cherish. If I'm a fan of ska music and active in that scene, I'm obviously going to take umbrage with "ska is dead", even if it's vastly less popular than its apex. And "dead" is clearly an exaggerated euphemism in the vast majority of cases: even "Latin is a dead language" isn't strictly true.

"Dead" may not be intrinsically offensive, but in practice "X is dead" is at least triggering (by the casual/mild definition of the term). :)

I think what's really prevented RSS from recovering after the death of Google Reader is the cultural shift toward content farms. Most news sites have started to publish as many articles as possible to drive as much ad revenue as possible; unfortunately, most RSS platforms still treat every entry in a feed as equally important as another. IOW, if you add something like Engadget to your feed reader, be prepared to be flooded by nothing but their content.

This is what Facebook and Twitter are good at and why people are choosing it for consuming news: they recommend relevant content. If feed readers are to take off today, I think figuring out a way to promote posts from my feeds that I'd find relevant is key; this sounds like something Fever[1] was good at, although I was never interested in self-hosting it.

Sidenote: it seems like an obvious play for Facebook/Twitter to add a toggle to filter their algorithmic feeds to just news to become a hub for personalized information.

[1]: https://feedafever.com/

In a certain sense Google Reader killed a lot of RSS feeds and users because it was an excellent passive content distribution platform which hurts the ad revenue stream f Google. Google requires maximal active engagement of people. If people start getting stuff news etc passively why would people go to the default search engine?

I have to say that whether or not RSS is dead it is quite obviously pining for the fjords.

Thank you for articulating that.

The fact that 2/3rd of the answers - so far - to your post seems to completely miss the point and some are even back to arguing about the definition of `dead` or RSS's relevance as a tech running thing in the background is... depressing.

I’ve not before seen such an insightful explanation of communication breakdown on the internet. Thank you.

How is using the word “dead” offensive?

"Unproductive for discussion", then. Calling RSS "dead" will offend people who are partial to it, because there are fanboys everywhere, and that's not going to lead to a particularly useful discussion.

Asking if something is "dead" generally offends people passionate about that thing, as to them it's obviously not dead, which makes them passionately defend that it's NOT "dead".

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