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Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

I disabled it on my blog a long time ago because I want people to actually come to my website to read my posts. See the "related" posts and the "comments" section etc...

I guess it's even more obvious if you have ads on the website.

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If you don't have a news feed, how would a reader know to check for new posts?

If you expect readers to check your site daily, that doesn't scale very well. I follow 200+ blogs; I would never be able to remember/bookmark all of them to visit regularly.

Dont know your site, but be sure I would never come back to it if you dont have a RSS feed (and leave it within 2 secs if there is any ad on it).

I know this is some people's problems. But I believe it is the minority. So I've made my decision. I also don't support old IE browsers.

But why disable something that you don't have to even support, most (if not all) blog time sites provide an easy way to provide RSS.

You are alienating maybe a minority, but I think maybe a more valuable part of you readers - large part of HN readers use RSS (at least it seams so based on latest Google Reader deprecation).

There is no value in removing RSS, you are just crippling your site.

You can have an RSS feed that doesn't include the full post, just a title and maybe the first sentence or two. A lot of sites do that (Salon.com comes to mind immediately).

But that's also not what I want. I want people to come check regularly (or not) if something is new. That's a way to create loyal visitors.

It's also a great way to piss people off and have them go "fuck this guy and his shitty blog with no RSS feed" and mentally assign it to bin 13 and never come back.

When I visit a blog or site with no RSS feed, I know my first thought is something like "What a bunch of amateurs, why would I waste my time with this?"

Now, of course, people like me (and other HN readers) may not be your target audience, and your decision may actually work out best for you in the long run. It's your choice, I just hope it was made with full consideration for how some people will react to it. :-)

I feel like you're over reacting. It's really not a game changer feature. I know I'll hurt the feeling of 1% of my visitors by not including it, the clever rest of the RSS users will first judge whether the content is worth it or not.

Could be. But lots of people "overreact". Not everyone who reacts differently than you expect or anticipate is "overreacting".

But, again, if you've made a conscious decision that it's OK to alienate a certain subset of potential visitors, and your business can withstand that, then you've made a rational - and possibly quite correct - decision.

I don't begrudge you the right to make that decision, although I might say I dislike it or whatever.

But whether or not it is a game changer depends on the value of your users time and mental real estate. When you tell the rss crowd that they should remember to regularly come to your site, what you are actually telling them is that you consider your output to be so valuable that other people should regularly reserve time and effort just to see it. You are basically saying that you consider yourself at least as interesting as sites such as reddit.

I'm of course not sure, but it might well be a really bad move to not offer a rss feed, although feed subscriber numbers are not that high. People using rss are people that consciously manage the way they interact with inforation and the internet. It is possible that these people are also more valuable as multipliers.

A blog almost never grabs me immediately. Usually, if I get sent back there a time or two, I subscribe. If I can't subscribe, you have to have some extraordinary content for me to return. As in "man I've got to read as much as I have time for". Usually even for my favorite stuff, that's not the case. For even my favorite blogs, I rarely read more than 1/2. Most of the stuff I sub to is more like 1/10.

Basically, for users like me (which I'm guessing a lot of HN users are), you're killing your blog in the cradle. Especially given that there isn't a lot of likelihood that your blog is entirely unique, I'll likely just go with an alternative that I can subscribe to, and click through when I want to read something.

Anyway, my two cents. I also recognize that I am definitely not the average user. But if you're catering to a technical crowd...

I'm not addressing to a technical crowd and I doubt the majority of HN uses RSS.

And cut 99% of your visitors?

I have a handful that I visit often, reddit (heavily changed which subreddits I follow), hn, facebook, a local news site and google.

Anyway your site is never going to make that list, but I am prepared to go visit it if it shows up in my feed - that is the reason I have a feed in the first place.

If you have amazing updates daily, I might do that. If I'm seeing the same thing I read a week ago 90% of the time, and I can't have a feed reader ping me when there's a reason to come back, forget it.

That's what Yahoo! Pipes is for.

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