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Comment by mfer | Hacker News Reader

> If RSS dies, what is the alternative then? I understand that technically speaking it's not a good solution, but let's have something else before killing this.

Instead of focusing on a technology, let's focus on a problem. This is where users and potential users of RSS have a communication problem with publishers of content.

It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds. So, you could have metrics on that. But, the tech giants shifted from RSS streams (which empower end users) to high control system that operate differently (social media news feeds that empower corps). This lead to a drop is RSS subscriptions.

So, why today is it useful to a publisher to have RSS on their site? This is a question that needs addressing and marketing so that people know why. The business case for them is lacking.

I want RSS. I also realize the usefulness and communication around that needs improvement.

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> It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds

Uh, really? When I was younger I came across RSS a few times but could never figure what it was or how it worked. When I clicked RSS links, big walls of XML appeared. And when I looked for what it was, all I could find was something along the lines of « it’s to syndicate content ». Or in French: « c’est de la syndication de contenus ». I don’t know if the term « syndication » is widely used in English but in French it didn’t (and still doesn’t) mean anything to me. Also in French the term happens to be close to our word for worker unions (syndicats) so it confused me even more. All this to say RSS didn’t make sense to me and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one. Still today almost no one I know uses or used RSS one day.

I like RSS now that I understand what it is and that I have a proper reader but it’s still been perverted with ads, feeds without any content, etc.

The masses may never have consumed RSS feeds directly, but there was a lot of stuff like "Portals" and "Home Pages" that consumed them indirectly that were pretty well consumed by the masses. Companies like Yahoo! relied on RSS feeds well before companies like Google turned news acquisition and scraping into its own business, closer to the search engine arm than not, and mostly divorced from RSS.

I use a desptop RSS reader to this day to keep of numerous podcasts. I wonder if people realize that podcast feeds are RSS. Even Spotify, and some other proprietary networks. Google still maintains Feedburner too, if a bit lazily.

> When I clicked RSS links, big walls of XML appeared

Putting a (small) tinfoil hat on, Google intentionally chose to botch the handling of rss links in Chrome because they couldn't collect ad revenue through text-only RSS feeds.

Look I don’t have sources but I remember Opera being the only browser back then that would handle RSS

Firefox also had native support for RSS: detecting feeds, rendering them reasonably, even subscription via "live bookmarks." Removed in 2018: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks

litterally my experience. it was some weird inside joke a very limited generation got.

thats why its dead.

> Instead of focusing on a technology, let's focus on a problem.

This would be good, but it seems most people are too focused on RSS and not much on the actual usage. The point of RSS is to receive changes in a structured way. RSS is just a tool for this. But there are also other ways and other tools for this.

> It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds.

No, this was never the case. Newsfeeds were always a minority-feature. The mass of user used to be bigger, but not to the level where it could be called a mass medium.

We don't need to communicate better to the publisher to force our will onto them. Instead, we should find ways to ease their work and help them satisfy our demands. For example, there was a movement for embedding semantic and structural data right into a document. Something came out of this, but maybe we should light up that flame again and move it more into a direction where it could be used for our feedreaders. Or just adapt the feedreader to better support the already existing structures?

This could easily sold with support for accessibility, and everyone would win here. Thinking about, how is the state of accessibility-technologies today? Could it be used for easy and reliable parsing?

> > It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds.

> No, this was never the case. Newsfeeds were always a minority-feature. The mass of user used to be bigger, but not to the level where it could be called a mass medium.

True, but that minority included a very influential segment (journalists, podcasters, and bloggers).

The turning point of when the blogosphere lost out to the centralized walled gardens of social media was probably around 2009 (though it wasn't obvious at the time); that was the year of the FriendFeed (an aggregator of your social accounts across multiple sites into one profile/timeline) acquisition by Facebook and of Farmville's explosive growth. After that point, Facebook and Twitter started being treated as infrastructure by startups and media organizations, a trend that accelerated during the 'Arab Spring' of the 2010s.

RSS is very much alive in the podcast world.

With podcasts the ads are naturally served as part of the audio content. That model doesn't work with text feeds, and there may even be parents on including ads in line with text.

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