Hacker News Reader

Comment by loktarogar | Hacker News Reader

why though?

No ads to be pushed in an RSS feed.

I see this argument pretty regularly, but I don't understand it. Of course you can run ads in RSS feeds; you can put whatever you want in an RSS feed.

Ads in Internet are the whole ecosystem, they are served based on info you provide in cookies, browser fingerprint and some javascript magic. There is non of that in RSS reader as it is separate from your daily browsing.

The ads I hear on podcasts and radio shows and read in newsletters might beg to differ.

adds in RSS offer much less tracking, spying, etc... of course they are still ads, but that's not the same animal at all.

So - putting my Dr. Evil hat on - what about if on your homepage the link to the rss feed has a unique identifier, the same way the alert emails people send out tend to have a unique identifier in every url so you can track what email was successful for which user.

It doesn't help with auto discovering rss tools, but it does handle the person who right clicks and copies the url of the feed to put in their feed reader.

I'm not contending that dumb ads are the same as ads on the web. I'm saying that the killing off of RSS feeds is not due to lack of ability to advertise.

If it were simply about only showing "smart ads", Reuters could just continue to publish headlines and links without content in their RSS feeds, but they're not.

Entirely depends on what you post in the feed. Only a link to an ad driven website? Text directly from the advertisement company?

I'm perfectly happy with just getting headlines and a link which is what I get from most sources. If I want to see the content, I'll go to the page. Of course, I'm going to block the ads there too, and that might be true of most RSS users. Maybe sites are just figuring out the "RSS User" demographic is one they'd rather not target.

Maybe this'll work for you. You can use this tool to generate an RSS feed from their Twitter account

http://fetchrss.com/twitter

Ask average Joe what's an RSS feed and you'll know. Supporting effectively dead technology doesn't make financial sense for any company.

Whilst it’s true that fewer and fewer consumers use RSS, it’s still a very powerful way for aggregators to source stories and drive readers to the original publisher. Think about it more as an api for building a “shopfront” for your news stories and the fact that most publishers still provide RSS makes much more sense.

You can do that question for anything. TCP, HTTP, DNS ...

For those you, can show people that they do use it. For RSS, they don't use it.

I love RSS as much as most of older tech geeks, but I'm fully aware it's as relevant nowadays as usenet, and don't expect non-geeky surfaces to support it.

RSS isn't dead, it's just not popular (never has been). Teletype wasn't popular either, still it was essential to some. And while teletype clearly requires costly specialized hardware, RSS doesn't.

If you'd asked me a half hour ago I would definitely have said RSS' lack of movement was due to it being tired and shagged out after a long squawk, but then this Reuters thing happened and I can categorically assure any one who would like to know that RSS is not dead, it's just pining for the fjords.

Ask average joe what IMAP is? People don't need to understand the technology they use. Anybody who can use an email client can also use a feed reader.

No one wants 255556 notifications/news per day.

RSS has nothing to do with notifications. In many ways it is actually the antithesis to them.

I'm not sure you're familiar with RSS. By default, you don't receive notifications for each item, nor do you have to explicitly mark them as read or scroll through their contents.

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