>All RSS had to do to weather ICE, Twitter, AI, and whatever comes next
RSS did not weather Twitter. Social media is huge compared to RSS. It turned out that singular recommendation feeds are able to push URLs around better than needing every site to build in feeds themselves and then still requiring someone to turn those feeds into a singular feed for the user.
Interesting, I’d never heard of that ICE. Seems that it could be considered a very very early idea in line with ActivityPub, which I also don’t really know much about.
I think, as someone that has a RSS feed on my blog, that RSS is a total mess and Atom was probably the better choice.
Maybe even some modern JSON based format would be OK, but maybe that’s what ActivityPub is?
Anyway, after dealing with the mess of images and inline HTML with CDATA in RSS, I have complete fatigue of the whole endeavour.
I still think there is a future for web publishing - from indie to corporate - if people stop feeding the algorithm machine with both sides of the supply and demand market, and move it elsewhere.
People found the web more boring, because it became more boring.
They found the algorithm more interesting, because it allowed them to see what was going on with people they barely knew (from former school mates they'd lost touch with to celebrities without press filtering), and that was compelling.
But there's a next phase available to us, which is to make the web more interesting, entertaining and compelling again.
I love that b3ta.com still exists. I love that metafilter.com is moving on. I think it's great that web comics I love still publish to RSS.
I just think more of us need to provide more demand, and more people will wake up to supply, and the flywheel will start to turn.
RSS beat ICE, and it can beat Meta and X if people want it too, albeit for different reasons.
Let me blow your mind: Betamax was not better quality than VHS. There are many things that can explain why people believed that one was better than the other.
People confused Betamax with Betacam, Sony’s professional grade recording medium, which is absolutely better quality.
People conflated VHS’ ability to slow the tape for even longer play at the expense of quality. That of course made the recording terrible. Betamax did not initially have this capability.
People listened to Sony’s own marketing. When they couldn’t compete on features, they banked on their reputation.
Betamax's "Standard" playback was better than VHS's "standard" playback... the issue was VHS "standard" could get something like 2 hours to a typical tape and BetaMax was like half an hour. For actual content, BetaMax tapes were recorded in an extended play format, while most VHS tapes were in Standard. This dramatically reduced BetaMax quality to be comparable or worse.
We started with a Betamax player. I think one underappreciated reason for VHS's win was that you could put a movie on one VHS tape, whereas the Betamax required two (at least at the time it mattered). And in an era of movie rental stores, that made a difference. Both in terms of logistics, but also in terms of the consumer having to load a new tape halfway through a movie.
RSS has more of a commercial problem. You can’t put ads in it so sites are incentivized to force a site visit. Which in turn forces them to withhold the bulk of the value from the feed itself. Ie just include first sentence or two. Which kills the usefulness of the feed as anything more thank headlines and link. Headlines in turn are all clickbait these days so those don’t have much info density either.
I only put a summary of each item in my RSS feeds because I do not want to be redundantly sending the same body data over and over but I do want a complete history available easily in at least some versions of the feeds. And some of the primary content is audio (or video) so cannot be dumped into the RSS usably.
A lot of discussion around RSS revolves around the format for the data/metadata (e.g. the Atom feud) but the real problem with it is this:
To consume an RSS feed you poll it. There are two polling speeds: too fast and too slow, and it's possible to be both at the same time.
Note the struggles of this Karen to turn RSS from a simple stateful protocol to a complex stated protocol, and she'll ban you if you ever reset your cache and rerun your fetcher because your cache got corrupted or you suspect it might have been corrupted.
You really want to have a stream of feed items and to be able to: (1) replay the whole stream all the way from or to the beginning and (2) query "what got added after time t?" and just get that. ActivityPub accomplishes this but people don't really like it. For Dave Winer it is all blub but even if he doesn't believe in the Fedi, he's on it.
because it does all the polling for you and hits your webhook whenever a new feed item appears. My webhook is about 15 lines of Python running as a Lambda function that posts items to an SQS queue and my YOShInOn RSS reader just drains the queue at its convenience. The pricing at 10 cents/feed/month is a bargain for high volume feeds like MDPI, arXiv, and The Guardian [1] but unfortunately I can't really afford to subscribe to 2000 little blogs that post maybe once a week at that rate. I wish there were more Planets.
It’s a pity that this is the bottom-most comment and equally it’s a shame that the slur “Karen” made its way into the White lexicon spoiling an otherwise informative remark.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but is Winer’s somewhat recent effort with FeedLandⁱ any different from Planet?
The author seems to live in a bubble where people are aware of RSS feeds. This article is the first I'd even heard of ICE in the first place. While multiple companies are listed as being behind ICE, no examples are given of websites that actually provided a feed for it.
Meanwhile, RSS is barely relevant today. For decades (Youtube turned 20 this year), people have had access to feeds curated by "the algorithm" operated by a commercial interest (hoping to maximize the amount of ads you look at); and most people seem to prefer it that way, if they're even aware of alternatives.
RSS isn't a format that's super-helpful for publishers. There are a variety of reasons why. But it's an absolute dream for consumers. And that's what makes it so awesome, so powerful.
Case in point: I saw someone had unsubscribed from one of my email newsletters, and when I went to go read the "reason why" field, they'd filled out: "subscribed to the RSS feed instead."
That's right, my email newsletter has an RSS feed (thanks Buttondown!), and they prefer to receive the newsletter that way rather than via email. And can I blame them? Absolutely not! I love RSS. Is it better for my vanity to have their email address in my database instead, rather than some nebulous XML file going out to who-knows? Of course. But again, this format keeps on winning year after year because it's one of the best consumer-first features of the open web.
That's an extremely rare edge case that fails to justify your point spectacularly.
I thought the comment says "it was an absolute dream for consumers" but actually it says "it's". Sorry to burst your bubble, if you ask any normal person who does not spend 10 hours on HN per week, chances are that they have never heard of the term RSS in their life.
It's a bit sad that you get heavily downvoted but it shows that they have a completely distorted view of reality.
I still use RSS but I am completely with you on this. Most people, even those who work in tech related fields very rarely know what RSS is and when you explain it to them, they mostly don't care.
I have had a very nice example where I explained what RSS/Feedly was to an interested graphic artist/designer (pretty competent with computers, spends all day on it). Once she got it, she told ME it was basically the same as email newsletter or subscribing to a Facebook page, Twitter feed or things like that. Which of course it is.
So, she couldn't be bothered to try the thing and set it up. I completly get it. For those who are used to it, it makes sense. If you already have your subscription stuff managed elsewhere, it's just more work for little benefits for most people.
What's more RSS actually inverse the responsibility in the relation, and you become the one who has to manage long term changes. Some feeds change URLs and I don't even notice it and you need a specific software to read them, which might be paid and might change overtime. And unlike emails, you can't even archive it easily, you need another software or a reader that has the functionality.
It's just a hassle and the reason most people don't care is because they can get the same benefits without paying for anything or having to manage/learn new stuff.
RSS is just a technology that matches an idealism about the world, very prevalent in the optimist technophile sphere. But the reality is that people don't want to make that much effort for some dubious "advantage" and they are right.
The rise of email only newsletters has been irritating. Thankfully a lot of readers (I use inoreader) let you create mailboxes that just turn into entries in your reader
I'd like to see a "new" RSS standard based around newline delimited json, where the summary text is a minor extension to GFM (to support left/right/spread images, minimal formatting, basically match medium.com options). This can allow a common reader to do a display that renders to their own liking (colors, font, etc).
Beyond this, maybe a framework to show a single header ad on the reader giving the revenue credit and money to the original content site.
The reason for newline separated json, is simply that you can do a partial content download in the reader... the most recent 100kb or 2mb or whatever... you the most recent is on top, and allows a site to publish more than just the most recent, but you don't have to grab that. Or maybe just standardize a since=(iso-style-datetime) or last=## (number of articles).
I chatted with Dean Hachomovich at a blogging conference as he was copying our (Firefox) tabbed browsing and RSS implementations. Soon after, a MS lawyer reached out to me to ask what they needed to do to re-use our RSS icon in the upcoming IE 7 release. We gave them the okay. I still have the jacket he gave me with "Longhorn loves RSS" on it.
Then google killed it, they made a great product, Google Reader, then killed it, and then after that huge amounts of RSS feeds just faded away.
Ironically, my microsoft feeds are pretty active, and xkcd is still there, The Daily WTF is still going strong.... but a lot of my feeds are just dead.
I'm still hoping for AI agents to mature to a point where they can be universal scrapers for my RSS. Have a headless client, scraping, interpreting websites in the background... burn excess cpu cycles and dead dinosaurs to replicate universal RSS dream.
I, like many others on here, use RSS every day. In Thunderbird I have a whole bunch of feeds I subscribe to, one of which is this very website - Hacker News. I even made my own HackerNews extension in Thunderbird to make it even easier/quicker to open the links from the feed. RSS is great, I check them all throughout the day as I do my emails, all in the same app.
37 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 70.7 ms ] threadMany times this sort of meta information reveals much more than expected
RSS did not weather Twitter. Social media is huge compared to RSS. It turned out that singular recommendation feeds are able to push URLs around better than needing every site to build in feeds themselves and then still requiring someone to turn those feeds into a singular feed for the user.
I think, as someone that has a RSS feed on my blog, that RSS is a total mess and Atom was probably the better choice.
Maybe even some modern JSON based format would be OK, but maybe that’s what ActivityPub is?
Anyway, after dealing with the mess of images and inline HTML with CDATA in RSS, I have complete fatigue of the whole endeavour.
Well, RSS won the battle, but lost the war.
People found the web more boring, because it became more boring.
They found the algorithm more interesting, because it allowed them to see what was going on with people they barely knew (from former school mates they'd lost touch with to celebrities without press filtering), and that was compelling.
But there's a next phase available to us, which is to make the web more interesting, entertaining and compelling again.
I love that b3ta.com still exists. I love that metafilter.com is moving on. I think it's great that web comics I love still publish to RSS.
I just think more of us need to provide more demand, and more people will wake up to supply, and the flywheel will start to turn.
RSS beat ICE, and it can beat Meta and X if people want it too, albeit for different reasons.
People confused Betamax with Betacam, Sony’s professional grade recording medium, which is absolutely better quality.
People conflated VHS’ ability to slow the tape for even longer play at the expense of quality. That of course made the recording terrible. Betamax did not initially have this capability.
People listened to Sony’s own marketing. When they couldn’t compete on features, they banked on their reputation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyKRubB5N60
- Some major platform still provide RSS, which makes me use them (I do not use twitter, because it does not provide RSS
- If not for RSS I would not be using Reddit
- the moment platform drops RSS, I drop the platform
Links:
[0] https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive - my own RSS reader
https://github.com/huginn/huginn
To consume an RSS feed you poll it. There are two polling speeds: too fast and too slow, and it's possible to be both at the same time.
Note the struggles of this Karen to turn RSS from a simple stateful protocol to a complex stated protocol, and she'll ban you if you ever reset your cache and rerun your fetcher because your cache got corrupted or you suspect it might have been corrupted.
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/03/07/get/
You really want to have a stream of feed items and to be able to: (1) replay the whole stream all the way from or to the beginning and (2) query "what got added after time t?" and just get that. ActivityPub accomplishes this but people don't really like it. For Dave Winer it is all blub but even if he doesn't believe in the Fedi, he's on it.
I really like
https://superfeedr.com/
because it does all the polling for you and hits your webhook whenever a new feed item appears. My webhook is about 15 lines of Python running as a Lambda function that posts items to an SQS queue and my YOShInOn RSS reader just drains the queue at its convenience. The pricing at 10 cents/feed/month is a bargain for high volume feeds like MDPI, arXiv, and The Guardian [1] but unfortunately I can't really afford to subscribe to 2000 little blogs that post maybe once a week at that rate. I wish there were more Planets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)
[1] AWS costs would be trivial in comparison even if it got out of the free tier
Correct me if I’m wrong, but is Winer’s somewhat recent effort with FeedLandⁱ any different from Planet?
ⁱ: https://feedland.org/?username=scripting
Meanwhile, RSS is barely relevant today. For decades (Youtube turned 20 this year), people have had access to feeds curated by "the algorithm" operated by a commercial interest (hoping to maximize the amount of ads you look at); and most people seem to prefer it that way, if they're even aware of alternatives.
Case in point: I saw someone had unsubscribed from one of my email newsletters, and when I went to go read the "reason why" field, they'd filled out: "subscribed to the RSS feed instead."
That's right, my email newsletter has an RSS feed (thanks Buttondown!), and they prefer to receive the newsletter that way rather than via email. And can I blame them? Absolutely not! I love RSS. Is it better for my vanity to have their email address in my database instead, rather than some nebulous XML file going out to who-knows? Of course. But again, this format keeps on winning year after year because it's one of the best consumer-first features of the open web.
I thought the comment says "it was an absolute dream for consumers" but actually it says "it's". Sorry to burst your bubble, if you ask any normal person who does not spend 10 hours on HN per week, chances are that they have never heard of the term RSS in their life.
I still use RSS but I am completely with you on this. Most people, even those who work in tech related fields very rarely know what RSS is and when you explain it to them, they mostly don't care.
I have had a very nice example where I explained what RSS/Feedly was to an interested graphic artist/designer (pretty competent with computers, spends all day on it). Once she got it, she told ME it was basically the same as email newsletter or subscribing to a Facebook page, Twitter feed or things like that. Which of course it is.
So, she couldn't be bothered to try the thing and set it up. I completly get it. For those who are used to it, it makes sense. If you already have your subscription stuff managed elsewhere, it's just more work for little benefits for most people.
What's more RSS actually inverse the responsibility in the relation, and you become the one who has to manage long term changes. Some feeds change URLs and I don't even notice it and you need a specific software to read them, which might be paid and might change overtime. And unlike emails, you can't even archive it easily, you need another software or a reader that has the functionality.
It's just a hassle and the reason most people don't care is because they can get the same benefits without paying for anything or having to manage/learn new stuff.
RSS is just a technology that matches an idealism about the world, very prevalent in the optimist technophile sphere. But the reality is that people don't want to make that much effort for some dubious "advantage" and they are right.
As far as I can tell, it's become the "de-facto" for Anthropic related RSS feeds.
You'd think RSS was dead, but I release this earlier this year and it's at 100 start.
Beyond this, maybe a framework to show a single header ad on the reader giving the revenue credit and money to the original content site.
The reason for newline separated json, is simply that you can do a partial content download in the reader... the most recent 100kb or 2mb or whatever... you the most recent is on top, and allows a site to publish more than just the most recent, but you don't have to grab that. Or maybe just standardize a since=(iso-style-datetime) or last=## (number of articles).
Just a couple loose thoughts on this.
2 – It feels like RSS is one of those topics where the same old observations and opinions are raised, but nothing new is ever tread for or against it.
I’m not sure whether these works address my interest for the former, but I think they’re cool.
* https://matklad.github.io/2025/06/26/rssssr.html
* https://github.com/rsdoiel/antenna
Ironically, my microsoft feeds are pretty active, and xkcd is still there, The Daily WTF is still going strong.... but a lot of my feeds are just dead.