Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dialamac 1955 days ago
https://www.apple.com/rss/

Open this on an Apple or android phone. On iOS this will even prompt you to open the App Store to find a feed reader (#1 is still Feedly).

RSS icons were ubiquitous like fb and Twitter icons a few years ago, and anyone could use them. It wasn’t a geek thing, it’s just a market that faded.

I’ve never had the feed icon not work on a phone in the last 10 years or a typically installed browser on Mac or Windows.

I mean this is an absurd conversation. RSS was invented around 1998 and then it was an obscure “geeky” thing.. the only reason we’re having this tedious conversation (and arguably why you’d have had the opportunity to be involved in an RSS startup) is because it had a striking rise from obscurity in the late oughts.
1 comments
breischl 1955 days ago
Lol, my bad, you're right. It was wildly popular, random people on the street were talking about RSS, everyone in the general non-blogging populace was swapping their favorite feeds, it was amazing. That's probably why Google shut down Reader right at the height of that amazing, broad-based popularity and basically nobody talks about it anymore.
link
loup-vaillant 1955 days ago
Even if RSS was popular, how could advertising companies like Google and Facebook make money off of it?

Those companies have no incentive that I know of to give their user a reliable (a.k.a non-personalised) feed that let them chose whether they'll get to click through or not. No, they want you to click through first, so you get to see the ads before you even start doom scrolling.

link
breischl 1954 days ago
Google had a reader app, in fact the market-dominant reader app. They could sell advertising next to it, like they do with everything else (probably did, I'm not sure). They also owned a publishing platform (Blogger) and an RSS metrics platform (FeedBurner) that had paid tiers. So they actually did monetize it. Just not enough to bother with.

Facebook for a while was trying to be the commenting system for blogs. Which is not exactly RSS, but they were in an adjacent space and using it to drive traffic.

And yet it still died, or rather has slowly faded away back to the niche market that I originally mentioned.

link
type0 1954 days ago
> it was amazing.

It was, even Firefox users were using it. That's probably why Mozilla had to remove that functionality. /s

link