Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

Please don't kill RSS just yet. Since the death of Google Reader, I've been using selfoss[1] actively to subscribe to news sources (HN is one of them). I can't live without RSS.

[1] http://selfoss.aditu.de/

I do. Search HN to find out how many people were disappointed by Google shuttering Reader, and how many people migrated to other services (e.g. Newsblur, which I use).

RSS might not be as popular as it once was, but it certainly seems very popular in the our demographic :)

I'd say it depends on your audience. If it's a technology-oriented site, RSS (or better, Atom... it won't make you tear your hair out nearly as much as the umpteen different versions of RSS, and most readers support it just fine) is going to be a win.

Spitting out an Atom feed really isn't that hard.

Edit: since it sounds like you have an existing feed, you could try going to some of the big reader sites (e.g., feedly) that tell you how many subscribers you have. For individuals using their own reader app, your server logs should give you an idea.

I used feeds to subscribe to content, but I prefer Atom to RSS.

Oh hell yeah. I love RSS and would not even consider any kind of content oriented project that didn't support RSS/Atom. If you believe that a decentralized / distributed Web is better than a centralized / walled-garden model, then RSS / Atom is a must.

Disclaimer: One of our products is heavily rooted in consume large amounts of content from RSS feeds and providing tools to help users filter/sort/mine that content to find the really useful stuff, etc. So I do have something of a biased position here. But my position is truly as much ideological as anything.

I arrived at this Ask HN through RSS.

The "fall" of rss has been one of the worst things to happen to Internet tools. Many thought rss would be replaced by Twitter it doesn't provide the same utility. I recall tools like netvibes, google reader, and others where I could consume vast amounts of information. Even the old pulse on iOS was great and was soon replaced by inferior versions. As the fall of rss tools happened, less sites published rss and we ended up in a negative reinforcing spiral.

I use RSS or Atom to read content constantly.

I use Reeder/Feedly every day to keep up with a ton of different information sources. There's just too many interesting sources to manually check them all and aggregators like HN or Reddit can be hit-or-miss.

Edit: Something to consider is that the people who submit links to places like Reddit and HN are probably much more likely than the rest of your users to use some kind of feed reader. Even if feed subscription numbers are low, those few "power users" might have a disproportionate effect on how much your content gets shared.

It is very simple to implement and provides immense utility to many. Definitely worth doing.

RSS is still the best tool out there for aggregating and curating written content on a personal basis. (One of) The reason you don't hear much about it is that it works and isn't sexy and breaks down walled garden monetization schemes.

I prefer to use RSS and daily use a combination of Feedly and Reeder for iOS. I haven't found any better for keeping on-top of daily news.

I guess it depends on the content you're offering.

Either RSS itself is fading or RSS might be called something else these days according to Google Trends https://www.google.ca/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0n5tx. I personally don't use RSS.

RSS +1

Yes! I use theoldreader.com to follow around ~100 blogs/sites. RSS is particularly perfect for keeping track of sites that don't update often. I don´t use RSS to keep track of sites like HN/Reddit because their content is always changing rapidly.

I use an RSS reader (Vienna) and check it multiple times per day. I have, let's see, 28 active subscriptions in it. Most of them don't update often at all.

The best use case for RSS is if there's a source that occasionally puts out highly interesting content, on an unpredictable schedule. (This describes most of the feeds I'm subscribed to.) RSS (or something equivalent to it) enables you to not waste time checking it manually every day or whatever, while also being sure you won't miss anything when/if they do finally update. It's like switching from poll-driven to interrupt-driven I/O. I wish more things provided RSS feeds.

I use RSS heavily. Many people do. It is one of those things that is good as it is, so there's nothing to talk about.

I use inoreader.

I love RSS, I use it.

I would say it depends on your target market, but most of the time programming a RSS feed is pretty dang easy, so I would generally put it on my todo list for that type of site.

Aggregators like http://skimfeed.com use RSS/XML feeds to send you free traffic.

As a developer, you need to decide if it's worth your time to implement (it's a single database query and some layout code to build an RSS/XML feed, not difficult at all).

+1 for RSS; I use digg reader[1] multiple times per day

[1] https://digg.com/reader

(edit for spelling mistake)

oh hell yes.

Yes! I use liferea to keep up to date on many things. e.g.

- You can watch your Github feed: it'll give you notifications of all pushes on repos you watch + things that people you follow do.

- You can watch JIRA and Confluence: I haven't found a better way to catch up on what happened overnight with the team members on other side of the world

- I subscribe to LWN.net for linux security alerts

- I subscribe to ~30 blogs of developers I respect

- I watch various comic strips.

It's not dead! Without RSS I can't even use the internet properly. The hole that Google Reader left in my heart has since then been filled by newsblur.com.

I use The Old Reader to follow around 500 feeds. Basically all of them are blogs and sites that update less than once per week. I get a few new items per day into my reading list this way. I newer use feeds of news sites that have a lot of traffic, like HN. I visit those directly.

For me, RSS or Atom is the only usable way to keep up with rarely-updated sites. Twitter is too-fast moving, since it's very easy to miss interesting things in the noise. I don't like to use email because going through my inbox and acting on mail is very different from reading articles and blog posts and I like to keep them separate.