HN Explorer

Ask HN: RSS with Authentication and Monetization Support?

4 points by snird ↗ HN
This issue was raised here many times: RSS is convinient and versatile. It's mostly gone due to lack of authentication and monetization paths (ads/premium content for sign ups)

This lack of features led us back to email newsletters with businesses like Substack shining in it.

Yet, email is restrictive, unorganized, and its html support is cryptic at best. It also in the control of the sender (push) unlike RSS that is under the control of the receiver (pull).

Do we have an RSS alternative that adds authentication and other features to allow for the decentralization of email, with modern features enabled by smart RSS readers?

7 comments

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onion2k
The beauty of RSS is the fact it doesn't have those things.

But you can embed ads in RSS feeds if you want to annoy people.

snird
That's naive. To expect all content to be free forever. You need to have a way to gate premium content or monetize it through ads.

The idealism of not doing so led us directly back to centralized weird web where the New York Times force you to call them to cancel a subscription.

Juliate
It's not "all content to be free forever".

It's "some want to publish/syndicate their content free forever". RSS was built by/for these people.

Micro-monetization is definitely a thing in need for a correct implementation at the protocol level, but don't put the blame on those that don't want it / manage to do without it.

snird
Sure, I agree completely. There is a very important place for RSS.

But I think we will all be better off if we also had an RSS-like solution that does support monetization. It will be much better than having to rely on emails or big centralized companies.

Juliate
Actually, you may monetize RSS already, at some point, by subscription, the same way some monetize their email newsletter:

set a subscription-based one with premium references; once paid/subscribed, you have an authenticated access (with a HTTP auth or token) to a specific feed.

Question is, is the monetization worth it at the syndication level only or also with/at the source? and if it gathers from many different sources, how does it manage access to distributed contents?

And how do you manage further syndication down the road? Is the value in the act of curating contents you syndicate, or in the contents themselves? Or wouldn't the two go hand in hand?

onion2k
The idealism of not doing so led us directly back to centralized weird web where the New York Times force you to call them to cancel a subscription.

The problem with using the NYT as an example of why RSS feeds won't work for monetized content is that the NYT has RSS feeds[1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/rss