The Rise and Demise of RSS (2018)
twobithistory.org35 points by appreciatorBus 5 days ago
35 points by appreciatorBus 5 days ago
RSS is still extremely useful. It may never have been meant for mass adoption like algorithmic feeds, but that is the point: it is the right counterbalance. I want full control of my feeds, and RSS gives me that. With tools like https://docs.rsshub.app almost anything can be made RSS-able.
I know I am not the average user, but for those who care about their information diets, RSS is essential.
One underappreciated aspect: RSS can forward both machine readable and human readable content at the same time. I am experimenting with it for information processing, and I like that you can always peek into the pipes, even mid-stream, to see what is happening.
I will be writing more about this at https://writings.alethia.news (alongside AI, product design, macroeconomic data, and the occasional bit of trivia).
I still use RSS for 100% of my content: A couple news sources, a bunch of YouTube channels, a couple webcomics. It's easy for me, though, because I don't use social media, which I imagine wouldn't really be well served by RSS.
I dropped reddit for my RSS, which I've had some version of since before the demise of Google Reader. RSS is such a great way to keep up on trusted sources, unlike reddit and other various social platforms. It's also a nice way to keep up on some forums, like Macrumors and HackerNews.
> I don't use social media, which I imagine wouldn't really be well served by RSS.
I don’t use Bluesky, but there are a few people on there I wish to see updates from (including one webcomic artist without a website) and I use Bluesky’s integrated RSS to do so. Same for Mastodon.
Yeah, true - I guess it's the same as for YouTube. If you want "the feed", RSS would be overwhelming. If you want "every post by a few people", RSS is perfect.
Some social media has RSS. Reddit, BlueSky, Mastodon, and YouTube all have it. X used to but it was dropped at some point. TikTok, Facebook, Threads, and Instagram don't.
I still use RSS, not for all content but for blogs that are now mostly Substack newsletters. Works fine, relatively noise-free.
What is up with the people who keep insisting RSS is dead? It never went anywhere. It’s some kind of twisted comedy sketch where someone insists a person is dead when that person is standing right there next to them.
I have used RSS continuously since near the beginning. When Google Reader died I just changed clients. There are many client options now, basically all of which are better than Google Reader ever was. Pretty much every website out there still has feeds. I can even use it for extremely old fashioned local news sites.
Same! I use Feedbin (https://feedbin.com/) to aggregate new posts. On desktop, I'll sync Feedbin up with NetNewsWire (https://netnewswire.com/).
Substack and Medium both support RSS. You can just type /feed after the URL. e.g., tk.substack.com/feed and tk.medium.com/feed
For other newsletters, I use Kill the Newsletter (https://kill-the-newsletter.com/) to subscribe via RSS.
IMO some people use RSS as a proxy for the decline of 'blogosphere culture', which was already in decline when Google Reader shut down.
That culture also still exists. People just stopped reading it. The way I see it, that culture has improved.
You see, there are still more blogs than you can shake a stick at. What left isn’t the content, it’s the money. Blogs are for people who are intrinsically motivated. They are publishing on the web because they want to, and for no other reason. They don’t care how many readers there are, if any.
All the extrinsically motivated people who need likes, views, subscribes, dollars, fame, they are the ones who left. If you believe that the presence of those people determines what is alive and dead, then sure, blogs are dead.
My personal view is the opposite. People who have nostalgia for the old web. It’s not the aesthetic. It’s not the technology. It’s that extrinsic motivations hadn’t yet fully taken hold. People made a Geocities website just because they wanted to. That web still exists. You just have to go to it on purpose, and you have to ignore the very loud platforms full of those with extrinsic motivations.
Yeah, there are more great bloggers just on Substack than I can even keep up with, and that's just one corner of the blogosphere. Some of the ones I read use a partial paywall, but all of them publish some free content and some post everything for free. Blogging is far from dead; it's just not the latest thing anymore.
It is not at all relevant any more. It will only be "revived" when top browsers and websites support it. The biggest website that I know that supports RSS is (old) reddit, and the biggest web browser that natively supports it is Internet Explorer which is definitely dead.
RSS is core to how I use the web but I agree that it's now a niche technology.
Note that a plurality of websites use Wordpress which has RSS feeds by default.
Vivaldi, a Chromium browser, has a built-in RSS feed reader. There's also Brave's News feature.
This is a really bad take.
First, almost all big websites support RSS. Just because there's no giant yellow RSS icon doesn't mean it's not supported, autodiscovery is the main way people subscribe to feeds these days. YouTube supports RSS. Nearly every news site supports it. Every blog. Every podcast. Substack supports it despite launching long after RSS supposedly died.
Even when a website has no RSS support, there's often a way to subscribe anyway using a scraper tool.
There's no reason for it to be supported in browsers when third party clients work great. By this standard email would be dead since browsers don't support it anymore. Most people would rather keep their subscriptions in an online service that can synchronize between devices and has native mobile apps.
>Pretty much every website out there still has feeds.
Where is the RSS button on Facebook, Instagram, tiktok, twitter, or YouTube? Most websites might have feeds, but not the most used web sites.
The feeds are there. There are apps that use them, even on TVs.
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCtI0Hod...
I don’t use those other sites, but YouTube, here ya go.
Worst case, pretty much every modern client has features that let you subscribe to things that aren’t RSS friendly. For example Feedly (which I don’t use) has the ability to subscribe to Twitter, Reddit, Mastodon, Facebook, Telegram, Google News search queries, etc.
Looks like Feedly relies on third party websites to create the RSS, like FetchRss, which has limitations. I guess the existence of all these intermediate tools means some people do still care about RSS, even if the big companies are trying to keep us through walled garden.
https://docs.feedly.com/article/660-can-i-follow-facebook-fe...
Twitter used to have that, haven't kept up with if they still do. Youtube can do it also I think in a limited way.
Twitter does not, they dropped their RSS feeds a long time ago. They still had a free API for a while so you could use a twitter-to-RSS tool but early in the Musk era the free API went away.
Yes, YouTube has RSS feeds for channels (technically I think the feed is per playlist but channels have a default playlist).
I know many people feel nostalgic about the days when RSS was everywhere (and a more open web) — and I do too.
But my experience must be different than most. I had hundreds of feeds in Google Reader, which quickly became overwhelming. It was hard to tell what was worth reading, and I often just marked everything as “read,” the same way people get email fatigue.
While I support a more open web, I think the real missing piece in the conversation is curation.
Take HN, for example. It’s essentially community-driven curation, and I get far more enjoyment browsing HN today than I ever did sifting endlessly through my RSS feeds trying to find something interesting.
HN has RSS feeds, I solely access it from there. I can skim titles much faster in the consistent UI of my feed reader then I could visiting the bespoke home pages of HN and many other sites.
When I used Google Reader, I didn't read everything together under one heading for that reason. I clicked on a feed, read the latest, and moved on to the next. So on a slower feed I might always read everything, while on a very busy one I might just occasionally check in or read a little while and then mark the rest read.
Now I use TT-RSS, which looks a lot like Google Reader did, but you run it on a local system. And I still read some feeds completely every day and let others pile up for weeks.
Hundreds sounds overwhelming! Did Google Reader let you look at a single feed at a time? I've never found readers that present a single "inbox" combining all my feeds to be usable.
Some of the feeds I subscribe to are effectively curated news from around the web, and I use filters to hide certain topics - e.g. from a newspaper I might filter the entire sport section.
a friend of mine host a ttrss for a few of us
i access it via emacs and some lisp code cleans it up the way i like it (remove most AI stuff etc.)
my brother has literally thousands of feeds that he runs through some AI pipelines to get his stuff
there are ways
What was needed is your own personal "algorithm" to provide you a feed of the things you'd subscribed to so you didn't have to read and check off every published thing. Imagine if you actually had control of this feed and could have the social aspect but tweaked to your preferences instead of somebody else's
In fact it's not such a bad idea to write this software now
>> I had hundreds of feeds in Google Reader, which quickly became overwhelming
I never used Google Reader, did it not have any ability to put feeds in directories or any other way of prioritizing?
I have hundreds of feeds in my RSS reader, a dozen of them are in the directory titled "Good", and for those I read pretty much every entry in every feed every day. There are a hundred or so of them in the directory titled "Bored". I get to those every once in a while. There's a limit on how many entries it keeps, so most of the entries in the Bored directory will expire unread. But it's good sometimes to have a self-curated source of reading material even if you don't get to it all.
>> I get far more enjoyment browsing HN today than I ever did sifting endlessly through my RSS feeds
HN, of course, has an RSS feed. (It's in "Bored").
RSS isn't dead, though some companies would certainly like that.
The main reason it isn't as popular as it once was is because of advertising. Companies want you on their sites because they can track you and show you ads. They could show ads in RSS feeds as well, but since there's no JavaScript environment, they can't data mine your browser, serve you cookies, profile you, track your behavior, and, ultimately, can't show you valuable microtargetted ads.
This is why even when sites offer RSS feeds, it's often a short blurb with a link to the main site. For these, special solutions like RSS-Bridge or RSSHub are needed, which are often blocked and need constant maintenance. I'd rather not have to use these tools, since they're effectively going against the site's wishes and scraping their content, but I think this is justifiable considering that the content is available publicly, and the user should have ultimate control in how they wish to consume it. I'm not going to be forced to accept a business transaction with a shady middleman where my data is mined, sold, and used to manipulate me into buying something or thinking a certain way.
In any case, I agree with the article's other reasons for the decline of RSS: it's too technical, most people prefer algorithmic feeds, platform centralization, etc. I think all of those are UX and technical challenges that can be addressed by building on top of RSS, but there is little incentive for a company to take them on.
Are there examples of government policies that successfully encourage the adoption/use of open standards?
I feel like the EU has successfully pushed the world towards USB-C as a standard, which seems like a big success to me (I no longer need, but obviously still have, my giant tub of various connectors and wires in my garage).
Would some kind of policy make sense to encourage an open syndication standard? Would it be a good thing?
The Internet community (and pre-Internet, even) has done a fine job of creating many standards without government instructions. No, that wouldn't be a good thing.
RSS is fine. The article stretches both in how well-known it suggests RSS was a decade ago (leaning hard on the word "might"), and in talking about its "demise" now. Some of its complaints are just silly, like when it agrees with the New York Times that "RSS" isn't a "particularly user-friendly" acronym. So they think if it had been named Bundling Up Feeds For You everyone would be using it now?
RSS never caught on with average users because the average user doesn't want to think that much about his use of the web. He wants to go to one or a few sites he's comfortable with, and read what they choose to show him. That's just how it is. For the minority who aren't satisfied with that, RSS is a useful tool. There's no problem, except for people who get frustrated that the average user isn't sophisticated enough.
Rule number 1 of Hacker News: No matter what subject is discussed, there will always be a top level comment suggesting that the government (preferably the EU) should either ban it worldwide, or make it mandatory worldwide. Usually it is the first comment.
As to the topic: Yes, of course the European Union should make sure that every website uses RSS. It is probably the most pressing issue the alliance faces today.
I've been using RSS via the Readwise "Reader" app over the last year and it's been awesome. First time using RSS and love that so many developers make sure they have feeds on their blogs.
The lack of the algorithmic "feed" and the fact that I'm "pulling" rather than being "fed" content is such a great change in content consumption.
Google didn't just kill feed reader, when Chrome came, other browsers had built in RSS support of some sort (Opera definitely, I think Firefox too, don't remebber about IE).
Chrome always opened RSS links as raw XML file with no hint of what to do with it whatsoever.
Yet it survives to this day because of one reason - it's dead simple to serve and consume it. Chrome may need an extension to handle it properly (I use one on Firefox).
The singular challenge it faces is discoverability, as you point out. The above mentioned extension solves that for me. But if it were to be brought back as a default feature on browsers, RSS would be an instant hit again. There's always the opportunity to resurrect it.
Feeds in general, and RSS in particular, are far from dead. But one thing that could kill them quite suddenly is the rise in javascript/etc dependent ostensible "anti-bot" or "anti-dos" MITM services/front-ends.
People deploy these solutions across their entire domain without thinking about it and then suddenly all the feed readers cannot access the feeds. I have about 1800 feeds in my feed reader and if the number of bad default cloudflare deployals keeps increasing at the rate I'm seeing by 2026/27 none of my feeds will be acessible at all.
I think the main reason why rss failed is the lack of an algorithmic feed. If you follow just a few news sites you drown in articles. The social media sites are much better in filtering out stuff you do not want to see.
You must be using different social media than me because it is all pushing celebrities and ads not friends and family that I want to see.
I much prefer being in control of my feed. In an ideal world there would probably be a mix of both (I have a list of people who I see every post and a list where I see popular or major items) but between the current options I far prefer something straightforward. Especially when the algorithm isn't fully tuned to optimize my interests.
> not friends and family that I want to see
My friends and family don’t seem to post anymore. At least FB has groups for shared niche interests.
My friends and family either never post, or post garbage several times a day. (Once upon a time it was funny cat pictures and jokes; now it's "reels," whatever those are.) As you say, groups now seem to be the only place to find worthwhile content on FB.
The only ways I use social media would be better served by RSS. I follow specific businesses, organizations, and people, and want to see everything they post, in chronological order. I do my best to achieve this with social media, but RSS would be better.
For news: per-topic or per-region feeds would probably help. I think AP used to have those, maybe still does.
> I do my best to achieve this with social media
which one? there are a bunch. you could either be talking about whatsapp or youtube
Mostly IG (businesses and organizations) and BlueSky (people) right now. IG won't let you set the "following" page to your default any more (boooo) but it's still quick to get to, so you can just ignore the (incredibly, aggressively shit) "feed".
RSS would be better, but this works OK.
RSS feeds can drown you in quality content you're not interested in 75% of the time. Social Media can drown you in content that seems interesting, but is worthless 75% of the time. But that's my experience - yours could be different (I totally made up the numbers, but you get the idea).
Depending on your feed reader you can filter stuff pretty well with custom rules. I use newsboat. Even without hard filtering, thanks to the compact density I can sift through a huge number of articles in barely any time at all. Yes, I am doing it myself, the horror of laboring, but again it takes barely any time at all to go through the days RSS feeds even with a few news sites throwing 100 articles a day. Mark as read. Done.
On the contrary, IME social media sites seem to fight me on filtering what I get to see. They are happy to show me what they want me to see, but constantly thwart my attempts to decide for myself. How many plugins should I need to install to get FB or twitter to respect my choice to show the timeline chronologically.
In theory a market could arise around providing bespoke algorithmic feeds for one's RSS content, in some kind of adapter model, but I don't know enough about ML engineering to suggest whether that is at all economically feasible. Maybe?
The next phase of RSS is having a client ("agent") that can process arbitrary feed-style pages and create sanitized (e.g. ad, tracking, and visual junk free) RSS feeds.
RSS isn't "dead", but it (actively?) neglected when even a "blog" like https://waymo.com/blog/ (to pick one random-ish example) doesn't have an RSS or Atom feed. Content sources see zero (or negative) value in RSS.
Related:
Rise and Demise of RSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18896168 - Jan 2019 (123 comments)
The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18002503 - Sept 2018 (186 comments)
Rumours of RSS's demise are greatly exaggerated, I use it every day for dozens of sites. If a site does not offer an RSS feed one can be generated using something like rssproxy [1] or another implementation of this idea.
RSS sucks because it depends on every content source offering the API.
The successor to RSS is where each feed is an arbitrary URL that your client hits to generate a feed. With an LLM this is trivial compared to before.
Are you talking about something that can go out to any web site, grab the HTML, and turn it into a feed that's consistent with any other feed and not a big hairy mess of stuff that wasn't actually part of the content?
That doesn't sound trivial at all to me, so maybe I'm misunderstanding.
It's a trivial task for an LLM to take the HTML at https://techcrunch.com/latest/ and extract a perfect list of only the article URLs. And if you can do this, then you can build the tool that I describe.
From there you can extract each article content with an LLM or use something like readability.js or just download the whole page for later consumption.
I have a prototype of it. You add a feed as { feedUrl, feedPrompt, articlePrompt }.
`feedPrompt` lets you append rules for extracting the article url list from the `feedUrl` like "ignore video articles". `articlePrompt` lets you append rules for how to extract article content for a given website, like "translate to english".
RSS is not an API, though. It's another content type like HTML, typically XML, but in a specific format that makes it easier for programs to consume.
Generating it is trivial in most web frameworks and CMSs, and sites that don't offer it either never bothered to set it up, or actively choose not to. This is hardly a fault of RSS itself.
What you suggest as a successor is a workaround for such sites, not something that should be the norm.
So RSS isn't an API because it returns XML instead of JSON or protobufs? That doesn't sound right. It's an endpoint for machine consumption and that's what most people mean when they refer to an API. But that's a distraction from the point.
It's trivial to implement an RSS endpoint, but what's not trivial is requiring everyone to implement it.
Needing someone to implement an API just to have machine-friendly pull access to their latest content is only a trade-off that made sense last decade.
It's not a good solution if you had the power of generating feeds yourself.
Agree! Just wrote basically this comment before I saw yours. Disappointingly even pay tools like Feedly have extremely poor RSS creators. All Feedly's features for the past few years seem to focus on some obscure niche of IT security threat awareness.
RSS won't be dead. Our AI agents are using RSS as this is still extremely useful for parsing data. Think about the amazing work RSS did for GeoRSS
This article is seven years old; seems like (2018) should be in the title.
Initially, I thought this was about Rainbow Six Siege
I thought this was about Rainbow Six Siege
RSS is dead. Netcraft confirms.
sigh this narrative again.
RSS is far from dead.
Edit: lol just noticed the article is from 2018...
(2018)
[dead]
never understood this idea. whats the difference between this and bookmarking the actual site and just manually checking? if people had been using HTML as originally envisioned, this kind of thing would be parsable by a browser and a new protocol need not be introduced
> whats the difference between this and bookmarking the actual site and just manually checking?
For one, not having to manually check is huge. If someone posts once every two months, I’m not going to manually open their website every day (times twenty for every one) or even every week and then have to think “have I read this?”. That would be a colossal waste of time, attention, and mental energy.
For another, there’s a plethora of cases where RSS filters. I subscribe to YouTube channels exclusively through RSS, I never open the website (or even have an account) otherwise. Same for Reddit, they have specific feeds for each subreddit, and for each they can even list just the top daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly posts. I can easily get just the most interesting posts of something like r/toolgifs without ever having to deal with the faff or getting distracted by other junk.
Content comes to me, and on my terms.
I don't know why it never occurred to me before to see if Reddit has per-subreddit RSS feeds. I still go to subs individually, which is annoying for the lightly-used ones. I either check in every day, seeing nothing new 90% of the time, or I check in every week or two, and miss the one conversation that actually happened. And even in busier subs, the default sorting can make it easy to miss new posts.
Time to add a new section in my RSS reader (TT-RSS). Thanks!
RSS doesn’t have formatting and interactions.
It’s content only.
It’s also a drastically simpler standard than HTML making creating RSS clients far easier than an HTML client.
Finally it is designed to push new content in a way HTML isn’t. I can tell my RSS client to only download all the titles for all the different posts and only download the content on actually clicking through. Thats something HTML cannot do. Further, my client can easily retrieve changes since it last checked which HTML doesn’t allow.
Lots of differences. Overloading HTML which even at its simplest is about fixed text and overloading that with handling temporal lists of atomic data would be a bad idea.
Reading offline; having a plaintext list of headlines (and optionally the main image) that I can easily look through instead of having to process all the visual noise of a website and click through multiple pages; a lot of websites don't even have a chronological view of their posts.
RSS allows you to check all your sites at once, instead of manually checking many sites just to see nothing new has been posted. I can instantly see in my RSS reader right now that I have 14 articles in my Politics folder, 7 in my Tech, 6 in my YT, 18 in Music.