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Comment by breischl | Hacker News Reader

RSS as branding - well, I've tried to sell people on it for years. I actually worked at an RSS aggregator startup for 7 years, so I spent a while pushing it. You say "RSS" to most people and their eyes glaze over.

>The subscription process is simplicity itself

You must've found some different sites than I have, because even sites that have a feed don't make it obvious how. For instance, check out Substack, ex: https://steady.substack.com/p/america-the-beautiful

Can I get an RSS feed, and if so how? The giant "Subscribe" button isn't it. So I guess grab the page URL and paste it into Feedly and see what I get. I don't mind this (much), but "mass market" it ain't. And this kind of process is very common in my experience. Back in the day sites would have the little "feed" icon sometimes and that helped, but it was still a 2-3 step process.

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My web site has this:

  <html>
    <head>
      <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" href="/updates.xml">
      ...

Unless I screwed something up, it used to be the standard way to tell browsers where the RSS feed for this particular web page are. Back then it was very easy to use, even for Grandma™: just click on the standard RSS icon in your browser, next to the URL bar, and there's your feed. That was your subscribe button.

Then browsers stopped working. No more RSS icon, at least by default. I had to add an explicit <a/> link at the bottom of the page, which when cliked on shows an ugly rendition of plaintext XML.

https://www.apple.com/rss/

Open this on an Apple or android phone. On iOS this will even prompt you to open the App Store to find a feed reader (#1 is still Feedly).

RSS icons were ubiquitous like fb and Twitter icons a few years ago, and anyone could use them. It wasn’t a geek thing, it’s just a market that faded.

I’ve never had the feed icon not work on a phone in the last 10 years or a typically installed browser on Mac or Windows.

I mean this is an absurd conversation. RSS was invented around 1998 and then it was an obscure “geeky” thing.. the only reason we’re having this tedious conversation (and arguably why you’d have had the opportunity to be involved in an RSS startup) is because it had a striking rise from obscurity in the late oughts.

Lol, my bad, you're right. It was wildly popular, random people on the street were talking about RSS, everyone in the general non-blogging populace was swapping their favorite feeds, it was amazing. That's probably why Google shut down Reader right at the height of that amazing, broad-based popularity and basically nobody talks about it anymore.

Even if RSS was popular, how could advertising companies like Google and Facebook make money off of it?

Those companies have no incentive that I know of to give their user a reliable (a.k.a non-personalised) feed that let them chose whether they'll get to click through or not. No, they want you to click through first, so you get to see the ads before you even start doom scrolling.

Google had a reader app, in fact the market-dominant reader app. They could sell advertising next to it, like they do with everything else (probably did, I'm not sure). They also owned a publishing platform (Blogger) and an RSS metrics platform (FeedBurner) that had paid tiers. So they actually did monetize it. Just not enough to bother with.

Facebook for a while was trying to be the commenting system for blogs. Which is not exactly RSS, but they were in an adjacent space and using it to drive traffic.

And yet it still died, or rather has slowly faded away back to the niche market that I originally mentioned.

> it was amazing.

It was, even Firefox users were using it. That's probably why Mozilla had to remove that functionality. /s

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