It's only dead insofar as most blogs don't have a decent RSS feed to begin with. I've scoured the web looking for high quality RSS feeds that are updated regularly, and have even shared an OPML file with close friends who happen to really like RSS too. The amount of effort was astonishing gathering those RSS feeds, but it was worth it.
No, but if you look around Hackernews there are plenty of blogs that have a high quality RSS feed. I'm not sharing my own personal preferences on here with others for privacy reasons. By high quality, I mean the content is exceptional and not blogspam and the content is updated regularly. Bonus points if the RSS feed is not a list of 'summaries' and includes the full content of each post. Even more bonus points if the feed doesn't have ADs and 'share this on Facebook' links :)
The USGS offers a feed of earthquake activity, if you're in to that sort of thing. It can be quite chatty if you set the threshold too low but I'm only interested in 5+ and there are far fewer of those.
Yes but not many of those are not updated regularly, and the content is sometimes very thin and not written well and doesn't have sources for various claims.
The industry's seeming loss of interest in RSS as a technology does have me wondering, is there a replacement for podcasts? Are podcasts migrating away from RSS as their primary distribution concern? If there is a replacement, is it platform-independent like RSS or does it hinge on a single company like Apple?
I think podcasters generally only care about RSS because it's how to get into the Apple Podcasts app.
There are many hosting companies that will create friction and pain if a consumption platform attempts to vertically integrate and eliminate the idea that you can publish a podcast on any web server, but we're already in a world where some of the consumption platforms have distinct flavors of RSS published especially for them.
Not hard to imagine one of them offering better support if you use a more custom integration, which it's not impossible to imagine major hosting providers building.
Unless you are using a not-podcast player like Spotify or whatever Google has that hosts podcasts themselves instead of just using RSS and letting the player download from the content providers server.
No way! I use The Old Reader and it's a great way to kinda deal with FOMO; having feeds in one place from various outlets. It's only annoying when some news sites don't have RSS/Atom feeds.. meh
RSS/Atom still has its place and for many is still the favorite way to subscribe to content on the internet. I built my own feed reader just a few months ago. On top of it I added a simple recommendation algorithm based on statistics of my reading behavior and article topics.
I prefer the simplicity and accessibility of RSS. The standard itself plays more or less a secondary role nowadays. The various feed readers building on top it are still innovating and still attract new users.
RSS the protocol, or RSS the experience?
The Protocol is alive and kicking, as far as being available, but it's been more or less killed by publishers not promoting it out of the box. AFAIK ad revenue is basically the reason.
The replacement set of broadcast tools is still Facebook, Twitter, Direct, and Newsletters. Newsletters are really the new feed.
Inoreader just rolled out a new feature that allows you to subscribe to newsletters directly in their reader and have them available with the rest of your feeds.
Recently switched to FreshRSS (from tt-rss), running on my own system. I very much prefer sites that provide an RSS feed, or that can be made to have one with something like RSS-Bridge.
Every morning at 6am a script wakes up on my PC gets HN's RSS feed (plus a few others), bundles them all up as a nice html list and sends it as a single email to my inbox.
By asking the question using the word "dead"[0] which has such offensive connotations, it will spur some to say "it's not dead" -- which isn't really going to be productive for what I think you're really asking.
First, in one sense (but doesn't really answer your question) ... the old protocols like RSS (feeds), NNTP (news), IRC (chat), etc are never going to be "dead" because somebody somewhere will always be providing it and somebody somewhere will always be consuming it. Just like horse & buggies are not truly "dead" because a few are being run for tourists and the Amish communities, there are some old dialup BBS's serving callers with old modems even though the internet+web has supplanted it.
I think the longer form of your question for productive discussion is this: Is RSS usage decline possible to reverse with new clients on the web & mobile?
The answer is no. RSS/NNTP/IRC don't have the incentives (both economic and social) that allow them to experience a renaissance. E.g. StackOverflow may someday be supplanted by another Q&A site but it won't be supplanted by NNTP news forums. Same with RSS. Typical mass consumers use Facebook as their "rss" reader. It won't matter what kind of new RSS reader you develop, the typical web surfers don't want to manage RSS feeds.
[0] to the replies below about why "dead" often triggers unproductive arguments:
In observing decades of debates on USENET,BBSs,web, etc... the word "dead" has 2 very different meanings which needlessly causes participants to talk right past each other.
meaning #1: "dead" is harmless synonym for "decline", "losing popularity", "no longer supported", "no longer in mainstream use", etc.
meaning #2: "dead" is provocative synonym for "no longer worth learning", "useless", "stopped working forever", "nobody intelligent is using it", etc.
The amazing phenomenon that happens with asking "Is X Dead?" is that the question asker is almost always innocently using meaning #1 but the most enthusiastic answerers are using meaning #2. This is why "dead" triggers unproductive threads because both sides are talking past each other with different semantics of "dead".
While I agree with everything you wrote, I think it is fair to add that an eventual demise does not mean it is quite dead yet, especially among the HN audience. I use RSS to follow a number of blogs and I know that a lot of other nerds follow some of my stuff using the RSS feed. It works just fine and until it gets replaced, a new client might receive a warm welcome by this large-in-absolute-numbers audience.
"Unproductive for discussion", then. Calling RSS "dead" will offend people who are partial to it, because there are fanboys everywhere, and that's not going to lead to a particularly useful discussion.
No it won’t, the title asked a question, it didn’t make a matter-of-fact statement.
If you aren’t personally offended by the term, i would argue that it’s unproductive to claim that someone somewhere else under different conditions would get offended.
And besides - we’re talking about a technological standard, not someone’s grandmother. On my give-a-fuck scale, a person being offended by their favourite technology standard being called “dead” is somewhere between a rat’s ass and Donald trump’s morning dump.
Normally, I'd agree with you - however, my org just had some minor drama over someone attempting to classify a certain piece of tech as "dead". The people who were invested in that tech were riled up.
It's difficult to know with certainty the motivations and emotional attachments people on either side of a debate will have, so it's sometimes easier to avoid some of the more "loaded" words.
Asking if something is "dead" generally offends people passionate about that thing, as to them it's obviously not dead, which makes them passionately defend that it's NOT "dead".
I don't think the word itself is what's offensive; rather it's connecting it to a particular thing which some people cherish. If I'm a fan of ska music and active in that scene, I'm obviously going to take umbrage with "ska is dead", even if it's vastly less popular than its apex. And "dead" is clearly an exaggerated euphemism in the vast majority of cases: even "Latin is a dead language" isn't strictly true.
"Dead" may not be intrinsically offensive, but in practice "X is dead" is at least triggering (by the casual/mild definition of the term). :)
RSS does play a growing role in a few places: podcasts [1] and virtual assistant apps (e.g. Alexa [2], Google Home[3], etc.) Although in both cases consumers do not tend to have direct access to it.
If some site chirps 'listen to our podcast', I'll have a look for acceptable (e.g. no password) feed URLs. If they don't make one obvious, they've lost their chance. Generally, IME those worth downloading offer RSS.
I'm not sure its role is growing. I fret a bit about Spotify and Stitcher becoming the defacto place to discover and consume podcasts, because podcasts seem to be the last bastion of steady RSS usage.
> meaning #1: "dead" is harmless synonym for "decline", "losing popularity", "no longer supported", "no longer in mainstream use", etc.
> meaning #2: "dead" is provocative synonym for "no longer worth learning", "useless", "stopped working forever", "nobody intelligent is using it", etc.
IMO if you can identify two major audiences who will have two different interpretations for your statements, then both interpretations are simultaneously "live" for your context. It is for that reason that Group #2 should always rise to the defense of a technology they don't want derided as terribly useless. It doesn't matter if Group #1 meant something else, because they weren't in full control of their meaning as they spoke into a larger audience.
This is a really great answer and analysis. By my rough estimate 90% of internet arguments boil down to people using different definitions of the same word and talking past each other.
I think what's really prevented RSS from recovering after the death of Google Reader is the cultural shift toward content farms. Most news sites have started to publish as many articles as possible to drive as much ad revenue as possible; unfortunately, most RSS platforms still treat every entry in a feed as equally important as another. IOW, if you add something like Engadget to your feed reader, be prepared to be flooded by nothing but their content.
This is what Facebook and Twitter are good at and why people are choosing it for consuming news: they recommend relevant content. If feed readers are to take off today, I think figuring out a way to promote posts from my feeds that I'd find relevant is key; this sounds like something Fever[1] was good at, although I was never interested in self-hosting it.
Sidenote: it seems like an obvious play for Facebook/Twitter to add a toggle to filter their algorithmic feeds to just news to become a hub for personalized information.
In a certain sense Google Reader killed a lot of RSS feeds and users because it was an excellent passive content distribution platform which hurts the ad revenue stream f Google. Google requires maximal active engagement of people. If people start getting stuff news etc passively why would people go to the default search engine?
I don't think you can meaningfully talk about this without distinguishing between user facing applications and server to server aggregation.
RSS/Atom serves a purpose in federation of content that is not necessarily visible to people so much any more.
We spoke about RSS and Atom more before in part because it wasn't ubiquitous, but today it's almost hard to find a blogging platform or CMS that is post oriented that doesn't expose feed endpoints by default - I have a hobby project that relies on feeds to aggregate content, and the proportion of sites I've wanted to add that has lacked feed is miniscule. It's become boring plumbing.
At the same time we have gotten more ways of consuming aggregated content. Some uses feeds, some rely on social aggregation. Combined that may have reduced the number proportion of users that run apps that hit feeds direction rather than seeing the content elsewhere. That's fine. But at the same time my impression at least is that a large proportion of clients accessing feeds are doing it on behalf of services rather than end users.
The fact that 2/3rd of the answers - so far - to your post seems to completely miss the point and some are even back to arguing about the definition of `dead` or RSS's relevance as a tech running thing in the background is... depressing.
For my part I'm currently building and updating a feedreader / feedparser kit that lets you build a newsfeed in minutes [1] or use a ready-made client such as rubynews [2]
Have you heard of podcasts? They're booming and they rely on RSS. The way they're subscribed to and the way they're submitted to large platforms is via their RSS feeds.
They're funding podcasts on the condition they are Spotify-exclusive. It's not about if you enjoy it or not, but just that you need to use Spotify to listen to a particular podcaast.
I'm in the strong belief if your podcast doesn't have a public feed (even if it's paywalled) and it's only on spotify then it's not a podcast, it's a very long unmelodic song. The feed is essential.
iTunes hasn't tried to "fix" it. iTunes runs a podcast directory for discovering podcasts, but it still uses the podcaster's feeds to actually deliver episodes. The API for the directory is public, so any podcatcher can use it for their search functionality.
The podcast industry might be booming, but the days of nearly every podcast being freely available with an RSS feed is certainly over. Granted this is mostly a business decision rather than a technical decision. Companies like Spotify want you to listen to their podcasts on their platform. This allows them to better track ad statistics and push other revenue streams compared to podcasts served over traditional RSS feeds.
> This allows them to better track ad statistics and push other revenue streams compared to podcasts served over traditional RSS feeds.
It's not just better ad statistics -- with apps like Stitcher/Spotify, the app contains both discovery and download, and also the player. When you listen to podcasts on their apps, they're able to report useful, interesting metrics to podcast producers like skip rate, bounce rate, etc. They're valuable metrics.
As far as I know, podcasts that are distributed by RSS and consumed by the apple podcasts app / any other app don't gather these metrics. There's no reason they couldn't though, because RSS / Atom have plenty of flexibility to add a field for a metric reporting callback/webhook. We could have an open convention for what goes over that webhook, maybe even some competition in providing podcast playback metrics as a service.
(... does this all exist already and I'm just behind the times?)
You are correct and that data certainly has other uses that can benefit content creators. However let's be honest, the primary reason for gathering those statistics is to leverage them for ads.
There are plenty of 'open' standards[0] for webhooking and reporting ads, however there isn't much client support. As far as listening metrics go, Apple has implemented non intrusive podcast analytics already[1].
Podcasts work really well as is. They don't need fixing. Barrier to entries are low, and like the early days of youtube, you can have a successful podcast with a relatively low production value. They are published openly, monetizing gets easier with some traction. There is so much cross promotion that discoverability isn't a challenge either. I just hope the 'open podcast ecosystem' can resist attempts to be destroyed by Spotify/Luminary etc. This happy medium doesn't need personalized targeted advertising.
I have quite a few websites in my RSS Reader (I love TinyTinyRSS) and over the last 2-3 years I've seen probably ~10 sites get "makeovers" and every time, the RSS feed I was using for those sites has gone away/broken.
Each time I've emailed them to ask "Oh hey are you going to bring back RSS" and of the ~4 that replied, 1 bought it back ~3 months later, the other 3 said "Nope, no one uses it" and the others didn't even reply.
So yes, it's on a steep decline I'd say. I love the "But Podcasts use it" argument! There's what, ~100 major podcast sites people use? Yes, RSS is the backend workhorse that makes it work, but the podcast(content) producers aren't using RSS, they'll be uploading their content to a website. RSS is just the backend magic that makes the podcast clients work.
RSS at most sites seems to suffer bitrot. Sometimes the RSS URL is still http when the site has moved to https etc etc.
It's sad to see the decline of it, because an RSS Reader really is a beautiful thing. But yes, RSS as a way to exposing content to people is dying and used by only a very few hardcore "oldschool" people these days I'd suggest.
I am currently using Feedly with their recent "Leo" feature and it is really interesting how well it works.
It requires some setup and imho is a bit expensive (Pro+ plan required) but this announcement should give a good overview of its capabilities: https://blog.feedly.com/leo/
Innovation in the RSS space is still happening and therefore I wouldn't call it 'dead'.
It takes like 20 seconds to add an Rss feed to whatever feed generator software you've been writing. For the love of God please take those 20 seconds to help people like us！
To the average consumer: yes. Why? Almost all news sites, blogs, journalists, etc. use Facebook pages and other social media as "RSS feeds" for their own websites. When people "like" a Facebook page or "follow" a Twitter account, they are basically adding that outlet to their RSS feed. And when they scroll through Facebook or Twitter, they are consuming that feed.
Social media has replaced RSS feeds for the vast majority of people. They tailor their feed by choosing who to follow and which pages to like, and the writers / media producers ensure that new content is automatically cross posted to their social media accounts so that it appears in people's feeds.
For tech people / people that read more niche sites, RSS is useful, but RSS will never become mainstream or widely adopted given the already widespread adoption of other Internet feeds such as social media platforms.
My feed reader app is my go to app when I'm bored. I will say its becoming less prominent. Half the time I want to add a site I have to guess where rss feed is generated since its less common to link to it. Apple makes the experience worse on iOS since rss link open in the News app but it doesn't support rss.
Some new sites don't have it at all, when https://www.thefarside.com/ came to life I didn't have a way to follow it until someone made feed based on scraping.
Most sites seem to have a sitemap for search, I wish my reader app could fall back to that.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] thread(Kottke, DF, etc)
There are many hosting companies that will create friction and pain if a consumption platform attempts to vertically integrate and eliminate the idea that you can publish a podcast on any web server, but we're already in a world where some of the consumption platforms have distinct flavors of RSS published especially for them.
Not hard to imagine one of them offering better support if you use a more custom integration, which it's not impossible to imagine major hosting providers building.
The replacement set of broadcast tools is still Facebook, Twitter, Direct, and Newsletters. Newsletters are really the new feed.
I've noticed this as well, and it boggles my mind. If ever there was a use case for RSS, this would be it.
Hence the demand for MailChump, Constant Spammer, and SpamBlast.
Nearly every newsletter I follow also provides an RSS feed though.
I wonder if it’s because they hardened their paywall.
That’s disappointing. For a while they were the most forward Canadian paper, digitally.
Recently switched to FreshRSS (from tt-rss), running on my own system. I very much prefer sites that provide an RSS feed, or that can be made to have one with something like RSS-Bridge.
So for me, RSS is very much alive.
First, in one sense (but doesn't really answer your question) ... the old protocols like RSS (feeds), NNTP (news), IRC (chat), etc are never going to be "dead" because somebody somewhere will always be providing it and somebody somewhere will always be consuming it. Just like horse & buggies are not truly "dead" because a few are being run for tourists and the Amish communities, there are some old dialup BBS's serving callers with old modems even though the internet+web has supplanted it.
I think the longer form of your question for productive discussion is this: Is RSS usage decline possible to reverse with new clients on the web & mobile?
The answer is no. RSS/NNTP/IRC don't have the incentives (both economic and social) that allow them to experience a renaissance. E.g. StackOverflow may someday be supplanted by another Q&A site but it won't be supplanted by NNTP news forums. Same with RSS. Typical mass consumers use Facebook as their "rss" reader. It won't matter what kind of new RSS reader you develop, the typical web surfers don't want to manage RSS feeds.
[0] to the replies below about why "dead" often triggers unproductive arguments:
In observing decades of debates on USENET,BBSs,web, etc... the word "dead" has 2 very different meanings which needlessly causes participants to talk right past each other.
meaning #1: "dead" is harmless synonym for "decline", "losing popularity", "no longer supported", "no longer in mainstream use", etc.
meaning #2: "dead" is provocative synonym for "no longer worth learning", "useless", "stopped working forever", "nobody intelligent is using it", etc.
The amazing phenomenon that happens with asking "Is X Dead?" is that the question asker is almost always innocently using meaning #1 but the most enthusiastic answerers are using meaning #2. This is why "dead" triggers unproductive threads because both sides are talking past each other with different semantics of "dead".
If you aren’t personally offended by the term, i would argue that it’s unproductive to claim that someone somewhere else under different conditions would get offended.
And besides - we’re talking about a technological standard, not someone’s grandmother. On my give-a-fuck scale, a person being offended by their favourite technology standard being called “dead” is somewhere between a rat’s ass and Donald trump’s morning dump.
It's difficult to know with certainty the motivations and emotional attachments people on either side of a debate will have, so it's sometimes easier to avoid some of the more "loaded" words.
"Dead" may not be intrinsically offensive, but in practice "X is dead" is at least triggering (by the casual/mild definition of the term). :)
1. https://itunespartner.apple.com/podcasts/articles/creating-y...
2. https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/flashbriefing/...
3. https://developers.google.com/news/assistant/newsbriefings/t...
Now, for the past 6 years, I use RSS as my primary method of downloading podcast episodes and webcomic issues. I'm currently subscribed to about 60.
Dead? No. Declining? I can't say that for myself let alone writ large.
> meaning #2: "dead" is provocative synonym for "no longer worth learning", "useless", "stopped working forever", "nobody intelligent is using it", etc.
IMO if you can identify two major audiences who will have two different interpretations for your statements, then both interpretations are simultaneously "live" for your context. It is for that reason that Group #2 should always rise to the defense of a technology they don't want derided as terribly useless. It doesn't matter if Group #1 meant something else, because they weren't in full control of their meaning as they spoke into a larger audience.
This is what Facebook and Twitter are good at and why people are choosing it for consuming news: they recommend relevant content. If feed readers are to take off today, I think figuring out a way to promote posts from my feeds that I'd find relevant is key; this sounds like something Fever[1] was good at, although I was never interested in self-hosting it.
Sidenote: it seems like an obvious play for Facebook/Twitter to add a toggle to filter their algorithmic feeds to just news to become a hub for personalized information.
[1]: https://feedafever.com/
RSS/Atom serves a purpose in federation of content that is not necessarily visible to people so much any more.
We spoke about RSS and Atom more before in part because it wasn't ubiquitous, but today it's almost hard to find a blogging platform or CMS that is post oriented that doesn't expose feed endpoints by default - I have a hobby project that relies on feeds to aggregate content, and the proportion of sites I've wanted to add that has lacked feed is miniscule. It's become boring plumbing.
At the same time we have gotten more ways of consuming aggregated content. Some uses feeds, some rely on social aggregation. Combined that may have reduced the number proportion of users that run apps that hit feeds direction rather than seeing the content elsewhere. That's fine. But at the same time my impression at least is that a large proportion of clients accessing feeds are doing it on behalf of services rather than end users.
The fact that 2/3rd of the answers - so far - to your post seems to completely miss the point and some are even back to arguing about the definition of `dead` or RSS's relevance as a tech running thing in the background is... depressing.
For my part I'm currently building and updating a feedreader / feedparser kit that lets you build a newsfeed in minutes [1] or use a ready-made client such as rubynews [2]
[1]: https://github.com/feedreader/news.rb [2]: https://github.com/planetruby/planet/tree/master/rubynews
PS: The stats on Planet Ruby for RSS vs ATOM are:
Q: What feed formats are in use? Formats (n=51)
Have you heard of podcasts? They're booming and they rely on RSS. The way they're subscribed to and the way they're submitted to large platforms is via their RSS feeds.
* Is Spotify trying to "fix" that now like iTunes tried to "fix" that 20 years ago?
* Why should I "enjoy" Spotify as much as I "enjoyed" iTunes? [I didn't, not even a little bit]
It's not just better ad statistics -- with apps like Stitcher/Spotify, the app contains both discovery and download, and also the player. When you listen to podcasts on their apps, they're able to report useful, interesting metrics to podcast producers like skip rate, bounce rate, etc. They're valuable metrics.
As far as I know, podcasts that are distributed by RSS and consumed by the apple podcasts app / any other app don't gather these metrics. There's no reason they couldn't though, because RSS / Atom have plenty of flexibility to add a field for a metric reporting callback/webhook. We could have an open convention for what goes over that webhook, maybe even some competition in providing podcast playback metrics as a service.
(... does this all exist already and I'm just behind the times?)
Podcasts work really well as is. They don't need fixing. Barrier to entries are low, and like the early days of youtube, you can have a successful podcast with a relatively low production value. They are published openly, monetizing gets easier with some traction. There is so much cross promotion that discoverability isn't a challenge either. I just hope the 'open podcast ecosystem' can resist attempts to be destroyed by Spotify/Luminary etc. This happy medium doesn't need personalized targeted advertising.
[0]: https://rad.npr.org/dotorg/about-rad/ [1]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/501/
I have quite a few websites in my RSS Reader (I love TinyTinyRSS) and over the last 2-3 years I've seen probably ~10 sites get "makeovers" and every time, the RSS feed I was using for those sites has gone away/broken. Each time I've emailed them to ask "Oh hey are you going to bring back RSS" and of the ~4 that replied, 1 bought it back ~3 months later, the other 3 said "Nope, no one uses it" and the others didn't even reply.
So yes, it's on a steep decline I'd say. I love the "But Podcasts use it" argument! There's what, ~100 major podcast sites people use? Yes, RSS is the backend workhorse that makes it work, but the podcast(content) producers aren't using RSS, they'll be uploading their content to a website. RSS is just the backend magic that makes the podcast clients work.
RSS at most sites seems to suffer bitrot. Sometimes the RSS URL is still http when the site has moved to https etc etc.
It's sad to see the decline of it, because an RSS Reader really is a beautiful thing. But yes, RSS as a way to exposing content to people is dying and used by only a very few hardcore "oldschool" people these days I'd suggest.
It requires some setup and imho is a bit expensive (Pro+ plan required) but this announcement should give a good overview of its capabilities: https://blog.feedly.com/leo/
Innovation in the RSS space is still happening and therefore I wouldn't call it 'dead'.
Pretty lively dead standard!
Social media has replaced RSS feeds for the vast majority of people. They tailor their feed by choosing who to follow and which pages to like, and the writers / media producers ensure that new content is automatically cross posted to their social media accounts so that it appears in people's feeds.
For tech people / people that read more niche sites, RSS is useful, but RSS will never become mainstream or widely adopted given the already widespread adoption of other Internet feeds such as social media platforms.
Some new sites don't have it at all, when https://www.thefarside.com/ came to life I didn't have a way to follow it until someone made feed based on scraping.
Most sites seem to have a sitemap for search, I wish my reader app could fall back to that.