[hombre_fatal]

Begging website operators to implement RSS is a dead end. If it worked, RSS would be ubiquitous and we wouldn't have these kinds of futile submissions that preach to the choir.

Instead of hoping every website operator in the world does something, it seems far more scalable to centralize efforts into a youtube-dl style repository so anyone can host their own website-to-RSS gateway.

[nijave]

I think lart of the problem is RSS is sort of orthogonal to hyper targeted marketing and tracking.

With email, you can track who reads the mail, how often, what times, etc. You can tailor recommendations and content to the specific person

RSS is just a generic feed that's the same for everyone. Great for consumers--less useful for people trying to optimize monetization

[hombre_fatal]

You don't even need to get cynical.

Implementing RSS is extra work, thus not everyone is going to implement it. Even if it contributed to the bottom line. It's the same reason every website that publishes information doesn't have an email newsletter.

Since it's a consumption optimization, it makes sense for us, those who may want to consume a given website, to implement it (while we wait around for utopia).

[bccdee]

RSS is easy to add to a website. It's a ubiquitous standard — whatever language or framework you're using has a library or plugin that you can integrate in under an hour.

[nijave]

I wouldn't say cynical so much as pointing out it just doesn't make much business sense to add.

[webmaven]

Keep in mind the example the OP is using; a profit motive doesn't need to exist, the motivation is simply informing the public. If you go to the trouble of creating a website for that purpose, there isn't really any excuse for not including an RSS or Atom feed unless you're somehow still stuck in the "edit pages by hand and upload with FTP" era, or perhaps (I'm being extremely charitable here) if you're stuck in the slightly later "I had to write my own CMS from scratch" or "I'm still using Microsoft Frontpage" era.

[k1m]

I work on a project that lets you use CSS selectors to build RSS feeds from web pages: https://createfeed.fivefilters.org

But for trickier sites, or ones that are popular and need more maintenance, projects like RSS Bridge and RSS Hub are worth a look.

[3pt14159]

I dunno. When I was still writing publicly someone reached out for me to add RSS to my website and it took me like 3 hours maybe to add it to my hand written static site compiler.

It's a pretty simple protocol, even if I would have done things differently. For example, relative paths should be supported with some sort of top level setting called "root" or something like that. That way I wouldn't have to convert relative paths.

[webmaven]

> It's a pretty simple protocol, even if I would have done things differently. For example, relative paths should be supported with some sort of top level setting called "root" or something like that. That way I wouldn't have to convert relative paths.

Atom feeds support xml:base explicitly.

[3pt14159]

Oh nice! Thanks for letting me know.

[winternett]

They killed RSS because there was no solid means for data providers to ration, monetize and control individual access to their content. The decline of availability for RSS feeds wasn't based on waning popularity from what I observed. Back then RSS feeds simply went offline in droves, as everyone scrambled to figure out how in the heck to implement OAuth, and most people gave up trying to implement feeds after they came with monthly fees and when OAuth was forced on us by Twitter and Facebook etc... I'd even go as far as to say the requirements introduced for OAuth mainly served the horrible purpose of turning connecting to most (previously free and open) data sources into a fee based and tightly controlled commodity economy that made everyone go closed-data after external data became too janky, costly, and difficult to support.

[Volker_W]

I don't know a single website that does not implement RSS.