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- Hacker News
- I think the core issue is that it is hard to sell why you need an RSS, especially for the average user. It would not be uncommon to meet an IT professional who has at best heard the term, but never really tried to delve further. Sadly by the time the average internet dweller hears of RSS, their mind is already so ingrained in the "usual" browsing experience that anything that is out of the ordinary feels instinctively wrong, even if it clearly has multiple merits.by GrayHerring
- I don’t understand why many sites with news updates / blogs don’t offer an RSS feed. Are they expecting me to keep visiting the site over and over to see if there is new content? They’re guaranteeing I’ll never visit their site again.
Perhaps they’re expecting people to subscribe to social media accounts or via email, but those both cost money to reach users. RSS is free.
by dabinat - Just why bother relying on Google products for RSS?
I use for the last many years NetNewsWire and have never had any problems reading the news I want to read.
by konsalexee - Don't forget Mozilla removing Live Bookmarks (RSS feeds showed up directly in your bookmarks menu) and RSS feed subscriptions in Firefox 64.
https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-prod...
by orzi - Google Reader going away felt like the beginning of the end the internet as I knew it. I miss websitesby betenoire
- Google’s obviously fake excuse for killing their RSS reader (declining usage) was especially maddening at the time because they were pushing Google+ - which _nobody_ used.
- Google tried to kill RSS, but it is not dead, in fact it is still a huge part of the Open Web Initiative. There is no performance hit or real resource cost in supporting RSS. If big platforms like Shopify can do it, we can support RSS feeds (and more) too! I've recently added RSS and other alternative representations to our Rails based ecom store[1] and rails makes it super easy[1a].
If you're using Rails it is basically free to add RSS feeds w/ the 'feed' or 'rss' gems[2]. Because of this we provide RSS feeds for everything, including customer orders and their tracking.
If you want to support the Open Web Initiative[3], I'd also encourage you to support alternative representations[4] of your content (markdown, CSVs, etc), add support for ActivityPub / Fediverse directly and webhooks to your site/app.
Stay open!
1. https://littlebirdelectronics.com.au/help/atom-feeds 2. https://github.com/ruby/rss 3. https://littlebirdelectronics.com.au/open-web 4. https://guides.rubyonrails.org/v5.0/layouts_and_rendering.ht...
by schappim - The Internet in the early 2000s felt a little more special as compared to today, when 99.999 % of content is locked in a handful of walled gardens. I mean sure everything we had then is still possible but let’s be honest everything about the web is fine tuned to deliver ads to our eyeballs, browsers, operating systems and even protocols are being designed with ad delivery in mind. Even the privacy friendly browsers just exist to serve ads when I think about it. Kind of sad really, but I guess you could be happy as it’s so big now and there’s so much to do. Just makes you wonder what stuff would thrive if ads didn’t exist. As of now every niche thing that gets successful will be invariably pulled into the ad ecosystem as it’s very hard to say no to money.
RSS wasn’t in the interest of the big platforms as it’s decentralized and there’s no good way to deliver ads through it, simple as that.