[cykros]

RSS if anything is in decline, rather than its ascent, because of the fact that in many ways it offers access to content in a way that diminishes ad views.

It's not impossible that it could come back from this state, and indeed, outside of this issue, there's nothing wrong with it as a system, and podcasts make heavy use of it. But it's worth being aware of this headwind.

[throwaway14356]

rss is the advertising.

It allows me to conveniently keep track of tens of thousands of websites.

If you don't have a feed, no problem. Ill just read something else.

With few exceptions I can't be bothered to keep looking at a web page hoping something new has happened.

[toyg]

RSS advertises the content, but not the actual sponsors of such content (i.e. commercial ads). It's also pretty hard to make it track readers.

That's why the likes of Meta and Google just don't like it.

[throwaway14356]

you want to advertise your sponsors in your advertising??

[keepamovin]

No I totally know it's in ascent, that's my point! Haha! :) Hmm, how to express what I'm saying more clearly -- seems it's been missed? Haha! :)

I mean, like RSS seems like where the web was in 1996 - on the ascent! - waiting for its "Google Search" moment, whereas these types of RSS curations in this product and others like it recently, a little bit like Yahoo Directory!

[tl]

> No I totally know it's in ascent, that's my point! Haha! :)

How do you "know" this? Show some proof! RSS has two well-known use cases: news and podcasts. It is fighting a pitched battle against players with deep pockets who want you to consume content where they can monetize it with ads.

Google Reader survived for as long as it did because such a service is incredibly cheap to run. Google only ended it to push people to Google+. Many of the various competing providers that popped up during that period are still around, but I would not say it is flourishing.

This is what Google thinks of RSS:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=R...

Note a rise and plateau centered around 2005 and a brief peak in 2013 (when Google killed Reeder).

[toyg]

I agree with your view, but if we put down our old greybeard hats for a minute - isn't it nice to see a new generation of people potentially getting excited about RSS? The parent comment is clearly by an optimistic youngster, who has just discovered an awesome technology that (he thinks) could change the world. And maybe it can! Just because we've seen it beaten once (well, a few times), it doesn't mean it's dead, and maybe, just maybe, there is something we can't see that will be the real RSS killer app.

Take podcasting - when RSS was first devised, nobody thought of such a use-case; it just happened that the media-attachment hacks tacked on top of it merged, at a particular time and place, with some other emerging tech (the iPod), creating something so good that it's still around.

[throwaway14356]

I keep wanting to build a PICS rating service and (humorously) add it to my feeds.

https://www.w3.org/PICS/

The use as parential control is clutter to me. The referring to content selection as filtering was a terrible idea.

The content labels can exist on a different website, they can live in the html document and there is an rss element specifically for it.

You make up your own rating label and put a score behind it. There was an example for example that rated by canadiannes

https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-PICS-labels/#Example

As usual they spend a lot of words explaining something simple.

In its almost most simple form:

(PICS-1.1 "http://www.example.org/ratingservice" label for "http://www.example.com/foobar" rating (javascript 5 php 4 mysql 6 bloomfilter 10))

Looks a lot like hand crafted weights to me. If widely adopted you could make a fascinating tag cloud from your 100k rss subscriptions.

[tl]

> The parent comment is clearly by an optimistic youngster

My only objection is when the "youngster" had his viewpoint questioned, his response was "no I totally know it's in ascent". Objective evidence points in the opposite direction.

[toyg]

Youth be youth, innit ;)

[keepamovin]

Hahah yeah based on your misinterpreted comment thread hahaah! :)

[keepamovin]

Ahahaha, yeah the original cykros comment was "If anything RSS is in ascent" because he took my parent comment to mean it was going down somehow, then I replied and sometime later he changed his comment. Then you guys came along hahahaha@! So funny hahaha :)

You know mercury is retrograde right now so there's a lotta confusion on here hahahah! :)

[keepamovin]

It's so funny how people take this stuff, it's so funny. Yeah I was resopnding to that vibe but it's more like the greybeards who love RSS who keep it alive, but what I see is it keeps building over time.

Hahahaah and it's so funny to see contrarian or animosity against RSS on HN because usually it's the total opposite. I guess it's just 'cause I'm saying it people love to disagree, right? Hahahah! :) so hilarios hahah omg :)

[keepamovin]

Hahaha, this is so funny because the original cykros comment was like "RSS is in ascent", and I was just agreeing with that in the course of the discussion. And then he changed hahaha! :)

So like the whole conversation became a non sequitur after that so I understand if you're confused. Hahahaha! :) The issues with async I guess hahaha so funny :)

[pantulis]

I think you are being slightly over enthusiastic here.

[keepamovin]

Hahah! :) yeah in the context of the negativity on this thread and the changes in the comments it might seem like that but in a different context it will look right hahaah! :)