One advantage of RSS is incremental updates, which means that by subscribing, I can only view the author's new updates without going through the entire stream of information again. I think it is an efficient method of obtaining information.
I liked RSS. And then most of the things I followed in RSS destroyed their RSS feed in one way or another. For a while, I used scrapers to turn the real pages into RSS, but as most killed their feeds, I gave up on it.
It's all well and good to say how awesome it can be, but there's so much friction to getting there that I don't care enough any more.
What you describe as friction was largely caused by misaligned incentives between readers and content creators who felt the need to kneecap their RSS feeds.
The difficulties of monetization and the (at least perceived) lack of control over repurposing, etc. are significant (and persistent) problems with RSS.
This is an interesting and relevant point. What is repurposing in this context? In what way does RSS allow someone’s content to be repurposed more easily? How does this make monetization more difficult?
When the "creator" runs ads on their webpage they get paid per impression. With RSS they can't lock content behind a wall of JavaScript (and the associated AdTech). So they want to drive clicks to their ads.
This all means content creators are incentivized to make feeds that only link to their ad-laden web content. At best they'll put a tiny snippet of content in the post's description but the common case is just an empty description. End users of RSS want to have the actual content inside their reader. Reader apps often have features to detect link-only feeds and then go fetch the web content and display it in a Reader Mode fashion. This is at odds with the co tent creator wanting to show their ads.
This feeds (pun intended) into the question of repurposing. If a site has an easy way to find all the latest posts it becomes relatively easy for a third party grab that content and repost it. This was an explicit function of the old Planet software. It would aggregate a bunch of feeds together into a "river of news" format.
You efficiently move through content on multiple sites in one place without ads. No dark patterns to rope you on there longer to view some ads like on the major site. No trackers.
What I've found is that many sites are offering an RSS feed even if they don't necessarily know about it. If I had to guess Wordpress has it built in and so many sites are built on heavily customized Wordpress instances that it still works. You usually have to search the page source to get the link though
My problem with RSS is that I am a completionist. I add too many different blogs and aggregators and then can't keep up. Then reading this becomes basically work. And then I lose interest.
But I still want to return to RSS. Is there a good - ideally minimalistic - RSS client that anyone here recommends?
Joke: RSS Completionism is easy when there are so many fewer websites with good RSS feeds these days.
More seriously, a big shift in some of the modern RSS clients is feeding that completionism in tunable ways. I know Newsblur the best because that's what I've used for a number of years now, and it's got a number of tools like the ability to demote/mute certain tags or authors from given feeds or promote other tags or others to a "Focused" feed. It has a concept of "infrequently updated feeds" to bubble up those quiet but powerful feeds you might follow that you want to read first before diving into the river of whatever firehose feeds you also like to subscribe.
Some of the other modern RSS readers have their own similar tools.
The nice thing about RSS is that completion is still possible. All of the newer social media want to give you an illusion of infinite feeds that go on forever to keep you locked inside and "engaged". But RSS doesn't work on "engagement" and there's a natural end of new content each day.
You'd want the opposite - maximalistic client that let's you filter out what you can't keep up with (e.g., separate stories from one other you don't like from the stories from the author you love, short stories from long ones, stories on topics you don't care about from the ones on topics you're very interested in, etc.), hiding that out of the UI to a dark corner (so that you satisfy that completionist feeling you're not missing anything, but will practically never visit it), but also trying to simplify the experience of creating those filters manually and with suggestions based on what you read.
Though I don't know of any services/cross-platform clients (for syncing state) that do that well
I built a different kind of RSS reader that might help with that. It's called Lighthouse, and the tagline is "Inbox zero for RSS feeds".
The idea is that instead of showing feeds separately, there's an inbox where all new content lands. Then you look over that, and add only the articles you find interesting to your library. The other articles you can mark as read, and then they are removed from the inbox (directly to the archive).
This way you still keep up with all rss feeds, and it's much easier to filter which content you read.
Please let me know what you think. I'm always looking for advice on how to make the product better.
I think you’d be surprised how powerful and how much control rss has. As far as social media integration, most of us RSS users just don’t care about that at all.
I have a blog. I post there one fairly long text once per month at most. I follow few other blogs. If I want to check updates I can open a browser and visit a specific blog once per week/month. Literally no effort.
I have all things I want to follow in one place - the Web. It works by typing domain names in my URL bar or by clicking bookmarks.
I integrate RSS into my daily email flow - I don't track too many different sites, so I just let emails build up in an "Automated.RSS" folder until I want to read them.
Having feeds send their output by email means I can use my existing way to keep state - if I've read an article it shows as read on any system I use for email (be it desktop, laptop, or phone). I can also easily search and filter feed items inside the mail-client if I want to.
I wrote/use rss2email, but there are no doubt a hundred different implementations of the idea, with the same name:
I have a good method for handling hundreds of RSS feeds in the Bazqux reader. Reading in gmail feels like a burden as I have yet to find a good flow to handle too much information.
I guess if you just follow a few blogs the tiny overhead isn't worth it. But I follow literally hundreds of blogs and vlogs, many that only post a few times a year. It would be a waste of time to not automate the aggregation.
To each according to his needs. I do not care about most of the content out there, and in my view very few people write things interesting, subversive or novel enough to justify following their activity.
You don’t have to read everything that comes up in your feed you know. You can even follow hn on rss and have aggregated content from multiple people on there.
> If I want to check updates I can open a browser and visit a specific blog once per week/month. Literally no effort.
That sounds like rather a lot of effort to me - remembering that a given blog exists, remembering its URL, remembering to check it every so often.
A buddy of mine just updated his blog after a 14 month hiatus. I forgot he even had a blog, and I would have definitely missed the update if it wasn't in my RSS reader.
Well, I tend to believe that I remember things worth remembering. If I would forget about any of the blogs I read from time to time, I wouldn't consider it a loss.
Someone else here mentioned they follow 700 YT channels. I follow maybe 4, so I think we are from different planets.
Come on, if checking a blog once a month is too much effort for you, maybe you're spending way too much time glued to your RSS reader and not enough time outside touching grass. Just saying.
For me, it's exactly the opposite problem. If I'm not checking something every day, I forget about it.
For example, I'm subscribed to over 700 YouTube channels, but most of them only post one a week to once a quarter. I force notifications on for these, and it's always a treat when one of my favorites pops up in the feed.
There are very few YouTube channels that I want to watch daily, unless it's a series... or Simon Whistler.
And here lies the difference. I do not care if I read the same post again, as I only follow those creators that create something worth getting back to. I do not care if I visit their blog and do not find any new content, for their old content is good and worth rereading. I do not care about syncing, as I have only laptop and a phone, and tend to use the first one. I do not need to navigate through incompatible interfaces, as they all consists of text and hyperlinks. And I have no issue with remembering all the names, since there is like 5 of them.
I do think we need something like RSS, but RSS as it is has several immense problems that hurt its adoption. I'll list the problems I found here.
1. RSS isn't HTML. I know how to write HTML, I don't know how to write RSS. It's probably not hard, but it's one extra thing to learn.
2. You don't know what your website's RSS looks like until you use it. This is like using a screen reader. When you check your website, your articles, posts, etc. you check in the web browser. You edit it to look good in a web browser. You won't catch that something looks wrong in RSS unless you open it in a RSS client. And honestly, there are just way too way too many modes to view a single article! Desktop, mobile, tablet, RSS, screen reader, how it looks when you share it in Facebook, Twitter, how it looks on Google, on AMP. Nobody is going to check every single one of these.
3. The default RSS CMS implementation doesn't align with most publishers' interests. By default, CMS's will just put all of the content of an article as a RSS item. Most websites that make money off writing content need you to go to their website to see ads or buy things to make money. This is why social media thrives where RSS doesn't. Social media users only get the headline, and they may have long, verbose arguments about that headline, but they won't read the rest of the article unless they actually go to the website.
4. It's non-trivial to change this RSS implementation. The only reason why so many Wordpress websites expose a RSS feed despite that going against their interests is because the owner doesn't know what RSS is! If they knew, they would disable it right away! But you might be thinking, why disable it when you can just change it to look like social media? Because it's simply not that simple. Changing the HTML output of CMS's is very easy because that's a common use-case. Lots of documentations, tutorials, etc. Changing RSS or even a sitemap.xml is arcane knowledge. Personally I don't even know what is the point of having RSS feeds per article for the comments. Who uses this?
5. RSS clients have an unique, subpar experience. One thing that is immediately obvious if you check a RSS client is that it's fundamentally different from a social media feed since there are no huge, irrelevant images on every post. Imagine you see an article about something remotely related to Amazon, without a photo of Jeff Bezos under it. How can people consume content like this? You can get feeds from Youtube without Youtubers making stupid faces on the thumbnails! That's bad for click rates! In all seriousness, because of how ignored RSS is, you can end up in a situation where an article's HTML exposes metadata such as the article image, but the RSS feed has no image on it, or the article has widgets that require JS, but the RSS client can't run javascript, or the RSS feed needs CSS to make its text colored or something, but the RSS feed didn't get that, etc.
6. No discovery. Chrome could literally just show me a RSS icon in the address bar to say it's available (like Vivaldi does) but it doesn't, which means nobody knows you have a RSS unless you tell them, and most website owners won't tell their users about their RSS because they don't even know they have RSS to begin with. Most places you can search for RSS feeds are online clients, and if I'm using an online client I may as well just use social media. Why is it so hard for people to just put add some keywords/tags field in their RSS and then make a link aggregator that is like subreddits but it just pulls articles from a thousand different feeds and sorts them according to their tags automatically? That would be a win-win-win for everybody!
Honestly, I think it would make WAY more sense if instead of RSS, which has its own markup, its own URLs, etc., we just had local "feed clients" that you gave a URL to, and it just searched all <article> elements or rel=bookmark or something like that, found their respective URLs, downloaded the HTML of every article, and showed the <title>, <meta> description and image in a feed just like a search engine would, with a favicon too. We could even use the dreaded <meta keywords>. But of course HTML dropped the ball by making the <article> mean things that aren't actual articles and even things that don't have their own URLs, titles, or descriptions, so this would need its own schema/microformat, which nobody would implement because nobody uses this client yet, which is why RSS is the best we got even though it's just not as good as social media for a number of reasons.
I even use a cli rss client and i have no issue with images. They get pulled out of the article and mapped to a number on the keyboard, hit that and the direct image link opens in a firefox window behind my little article window. Works for me. Beats looking at the website. Javascript I am glad I never see it. As far as no discovery, I have discovered these feeds I follow somehow haven’t I.
That's even worse. I'm talking about putting a large image under the article's headline, the way every social media feed does it. Although I hate irrelevant images, the human brain can recognize images faster than it can read text. If articles had a relevant images, you would be able to find interesting articles just by glancing at a masonry grid on the screen.
But in order to do this, the RSS code needs to include the images in first place, and there is no guarantee it will even though the HTML side will usually have it properly marked up.