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Comment by mnls | Hacker News Reader

Every article that I’ve read in the last 5 years about the RSS revival has a big section explaining what is RSS.

And that’s the answer about RSS renaissance. If you have to explain it, there is zero chance of massive adoption.

My take on the RSS-renaissance chestnut: The original sin is the name. Only clueless nerds could come up with such a soporific, opaque, geeky moniker as "RSS". It should have been called "Webfeed". Then there would be no explaining to do.

This is a great point. Maybe we can start now?

Apparently is is called web feed, although I never have heard this until I searched off the back of your comment[0].

Apparently, web feed also encompasses Atom and JSON feed as well as RSS, which is probably more in the spirit of how people actually say "RSS".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed

I think web feed is a good name, though I also think invoking "Web" might put off some users. There are a few things that are unknown to new users:

1. How do you subscribe? 2. How do you post your own? 3. Do I need a browser to read feeds? 4. Can I view my feed from any device?

The current status quo for web feeds is very unfriendly to new users. If you click on an rss icon or an rss feed link, it takes you to a white page with a bunch of text that you don't understand. It just makes you think you're not supposed to be here, so you close the tab and leave.

Many feed readers are old and look dated. The UI can often be confused for an email client. And many of these readers don't support synchronizing feeds with different devices.

Sure, naming is important, but the RSS icon was well known. It was part of the Firefox address bar.

The number of people who will recognize that will only go down over time. I'm not exactly ancient (at least outside tech) at 32 but have no recollection of ever seeing that icon or confidence that I'd recognize it, which I'd argue puts a rough lower bound on how old someone can be while considering it "well-known". Maybe if people only a few years older than me consistently recognize it then my instinct here is wrong, but I'm skeptical that there are enough people who consider this well-known for the supposed renaissance to take place purely from that.

(It's possible I'm entirely missing that this was intended in sarcasm, but it at least seems like it's was intended seriously to me)

If you ask regular people around yourself I'm sure none would recognize the acronym.

And at the same time, the fastest growing consumer product of all time is called ”ChatGPT”.

Perhaps if the product is compelling enough, the name doesn’t matter - and conversely, if the product is borderline, it had better have a great name.

Chat gpt is a great name though — you “chat” with the “GPT” so its self informing (even if you dont know what a GPT is), it’s 4 syllables that roll off the tongue well together.

RSS, has no vowels, no information, and looks like an alphabet term you might see at the doctor’s office or in an HR onboarding form at a corpo.

Randos are just calling it "Chat" now.

"I'll ask Chat about x!"

It’s the new ”I looked it up on wiki”.

I've heard 'just ai it' from high schoolers.

In Japan it's now known colloquially as 「チャッピー」 ("Chappy" or "Chappie"). High praise that it has received such shortened and personified version so quickly.

It's simple. It stands for Radically Syndicated Seeds... right?

But it's pronounced "arses".

You don't need to explain RSS any more than you need to explain SMTP or HTTP. A product that uses RSS could gain traction without the user ever knowing it uses RSS. Products like Google Reader prove that is possible.

Feedly does this. Just drop the URL of whatever source you want to follow and it figures out the feed for it behind the scenes. For popular sources, you don't even need the URL, just type in "Ars Technica" or whatever and it does the right thing.

Yes, but very few people use Feedly, which is why they had to shift to enterprise with trend watching and other tools. Platforms like Inoreader and Feedbin are pure RSS plays and their audience is a good benchmark of how much people actually want this.

RSS support used to be built into the browser, with identifiable iconography.

You'd click a link on a website that says some iteration of "subscribe" or "feed" and the browser would handle it for you, putting the feed into your bookmarks or whatever.

Users never had to know what RSS is. They just clicked "subscribe" and it worked.

You'd have to do the same explaining of Bluetooth or WiFi, both things that non-technical people are familiar with today, if OSes, for some reason, removed support for them.

It just needs to be described in a more concrete way to people. Such as, You know how the podcasts you listen to keep getting updated on your phone? That's RSS. Imagine if other things you liked turned up when they were new and you had a lot of control over that process.

Most non-tech people I know listen to podcasts through Spotify and some think Spotify invented them.

Looking how podcasts advertise themselves, those who do use RSS advertise "Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app" here.

It's been the absolute worst thing for 10+ years that some podcasts have adverts, even their own website, but somehow fail to provide the RSS feed link anywhere - only app specific links for the biggest 2.

You also have people producing "podcasts" that only exist on youtube.

> If you have to explain it, there is zero chance of massive adoption.

Here's the thing, one should not need to explain it no mire. Devices or applications accessing content with an RSS option should present it to the end user through a convenient interface.

So how did it manage to gain wide adoption originally?

There is an economy here that the effort investment is paid with a reward of quality. Many teens feel the discomfort of being locked into platform attention farms and are stoic about it. They deserve the opportunity of being told other options exist.

Are you a teen or you speak on behalf of the whole world? My impression of said demographic is totally different, though. And I would not speak for them just like that, as they be very diverse depending on where you find them.

I've been calling it 'Really Social Sites' for a long time. ;)

I'm happily using RSS despite you needing an explanation. Funny how that works.

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