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Comment by throwawayswede | Hacker News Reader

Depends on your definition of dead.

Public recognition of what thing X they're using or relying on is not necessary for something to be "alive" or "dead", otherwise you'd have to say that TCP/IP is dead because I bet less than 10% of internet users know what that is and even less know how it works.

People using podcasts still rely on RSS. Spotify's and Apple's attempt to circumvent an open-standard doesn't seem to be working as podcastindex.org already has double the amount of podcasts registered.

E-commerce product feeds still (mostly) use RSS.

Everyone still uses RSS, they just don't know it.

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> otherwise you'd have to say that TCP/IP is dead because I bet less than 10% of internet users know what that is and even less know how it works.

Barely any user knows about TCP/IP, but everybody uses it daily. Using the Internet basically means using this protocol stack.

The same cannot be said about RSS

Listening to podcasts means using feeds.

I know it may come out as shocking, but majority of Internet users also don't listen to podcasts.

And listening to podcasts doesn't mean using feeds. I personally have listened to some from YouTube; Spotify also offers them.

The point is that it's not dead.

I'm not arguing that. I'm arguing the use of false equivalence.

You haven't provided any evidence for that.

You stated that "RSS is dead because barely anybody knows about it" is the same as saying "TCP/IP is dead because barely anybody knows about it". This is false. You cannot use the Internet without TCP/IP, be it consciously or not. RSS on the other hand isn't widespread enough to be used by ordinary person without knowing about it.

And even if there are cases where RSS is used in background as TCP/IP is, then it doesn't change the fact it's in background. Average Joe still won't know how to subscribe to blog's RSS feed.

Podcasts are basically the only place where feeds still thrive (alas it's also changing). RSS may not be dead, but unfortunately it's a niche which to average consumer is as good as dead.

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