RSS didn't fail. Blogs still emit RSS. You can follow people on Twitter using RSS. Podcasting depends on RSS. However, there are two major issues: Publishers often refuse to support RSS because it...
RSS didn't fail. Blogs still emit RSS. You can follow people on Twitter using RSS. Podcasting depends on RSS. However, there are two major issues:
Publishers often refuse to support RSS because it isn't conducive to branding, algorithmic sorting, advertising, or surveillance.
Consumers tend not to use RSS because you need to be somewhat of a techie to do so. Feeds aren't necessarily easy to find, and feed reader software tends to be clunky.
If it’s not easy to find the feed for most sites (for the ones that do have feeds), and most new sites don’t have feeds, then that is functionally a failure. What would constitute failure to you?...
If it’s not easy to find the feed for most sites (for the ones that do have feeds), and most new sites don’t have feeds, then that is functionally a failure. What would constitute failure to you?
Personally I blame Facebook and other aggregators for pushing RSS and Atom out of the mindshare. If you publish through Facebook or other platforms then that’s how consumers will consume content on those platforms, obviously. But, that is not how the web is supposed to work. I hope that as aggregators come and go, eventually people will realize that RSS/Atom/some other decentralized protocol for syndication is the right way to go.
I can follow almost all the websites I want to follow using RSS or Atom, which amount to more than a hundred. I use a great feed catcher called Elfeed. It's not a huge success, but it's not a...
I can follow almost all the websites I want to follow using RSS or Atom, which amount to more than a hundred. I use a great feed catcher called Elfeed. It's not a huge success, but it's not a failure either.
Mosts sites depends on which sites. Yes, most big content silos that feed on users' data either don't provide RSS (Twitter, Academia.edu,...) or bury them deep down (some news sites) or only let you guess the links (Soundcloud, YouTube), but if you want to follow news and blogs and other anouncements, you're almost never left in the cold. RSS is my main news source; I follow multiple major websites worldwide (Evrensel & Diken in Turkey, DW Turkish, Guardian, Publico.pt, Internazionale.it), and all of these have their feeds---both for all news and for categories---exposed, quite acessibly. Almost all blogs, and definitely all of the worthy ones have RSS feeds. Youtube allows you to export OPML of your subscriptions, but once you know the RSS URL and channel ID, you can add channels and playlists w/o subscribing to them.
I am a heavy RSS consumer as well, but I’m not blind to the fact that RSS has not been a major success (or not as major as I believe it warranted). The one domain where it has been very successful...
I am a heavy RSS consumer as well, but I’m not blind to the fact that RSS has not been a major success (or not as major as I believe it warranted). The one domain where it has been very successful is podcasts. I just don’t quite get why the podcasting community has been successful whereas the web hasn’t. Maybe it’s because the podcasting community’s advertising models are overall better, whereas the web at large has been plagued by bad advertising/sponsoring/subsidizing models?
Podcasting has far more limited scope for data collection and analytics, so the "downside" (from the perspective of content providers) of RSS isn't as pronounced for them. RSS was perfectly...
I just don’t quite get why the podcasting community has been successful whereas the web hasn’t.
Podcasting has far more limited scope for data collection and analytics, so the "downside" (from the perspective of content providers) of RSS isn't as pronounced for them. RSS was perfectly successful on the web too when Google Reader was around. Google basically killed the market when they pulled out of it. Without decent social functions and feeds, one of the main avenues for acquiring new users and incentives for learning how it worked were gone.
Also, Apple podcasts has nearly monopolistic market power in the podcasting market, and they've shown little interest in monetizing it so sticking to an open standard works for them just fine since it's less work to maintain.
Apple News is also just a glorified RSS reader with some site analytics built in. It's kind of disappointing Apple didn't just go with creating a web site/service for it and stuck with only having an app. They could do partnerships with content partners, like the major media, to do the limited analytics they ask for while also letting anyone add in a regular RSS feed to it.
Also Podcasts have "networks" where they plug each other a lot and guest host on each others' pods. This is analogous to the way bloggers used to feature a "blogroll" and webcomic authors used to have guest artists to cross promote each other. Once the base of old-school blogging and independently hosted content died, a lot of the route for discoverability through RSS died with it. The focus for growth transitioning from SEO, self-promotion, and connection to a network of writers/artists/whatever switched to a focus on virality and feed-hacking.
This was very frustrating, but I moved to https://feedbin.com and have been very satisfied with them as a paid service. I have to agree there. I tried Apple news and while it seemed OK, it doesn’t...
Google basically killed the market when they pulled out of it.
This was very frustrating, but I moved to https://feedbin.com and have been very satisfied with them as a paid service.
Apple News is also just a glorified RSS reader with some site analytics built in. It's kind of disappointing Apple didn't just go with creating a web site/service for it and stuck with only having an app.
I have to agree there. I tried Apple news and while it seemed OK, it doesn’t expose the same level of control as with curating my own list of feeds. Apple has also gone in and mucked with the offerings, which users have no control over, which is the real problem: it’s centralized and under Apple’s control.
The focus for growth transitioning from SEO, self-promotion, and connection to a network of writers/artists/whatever switched to a focus on virality and feed-hacking.
I guess this is why we can’t have nice things. Nobody wants to invest in sustainable business models on the web.
The "web at large" equivalent of podcasting is vlogging on YouTube and Twitch (?, not a platform I know, only hearsay). I guess podcasting has been successful just like RSS has been so: a good,...
The "web at large" equivalent of podcasting is vlogging on YouTube and Twitch (?, not a platform I know, only hearsay). I guess podcasting has been successful just like RSS has been so: a good, popular citizen of an unpopular niche.
But those are video media, not textual. I guess I wasn’t explicit in what I was saying, so the misunderstanding is understandable. Isn’t it strange that audiovisual media have found some decent,...
YouTube and Twitch
But those are video media, not textual. I guess I wasn’t explicit in what I was saying, so the misunderstanding is understandable. Isn’t it strange that audiovisual media have found some decent, non-exploitative monetization strategies, but text on the web has not?
Way more people watch and listen quite a bit more than they read. I'm an avid reader, but when I want to find a recipe, or learn about a workout routine, I go to YouTube. We also don't have the...
Isn’t it strange that audiovisual media have found some decent, non-exploitative monetization strategies, but text on the web has not?
Way more people watch and listen quite a bit more than they read. I'm an avid reader, but when I want to find a recipe, or learn about a workout routine, I go to YouTube.
We also don't have the Spotify for news and/or books. Say you pay $10/month and can read almost all major and minor newspapers like you listen to music on Spotify. And maybe also as many books as you want. That'd be a great entreprise.
How do we do the payments to the publishers tho? That's what Spotify solves: you pay a small amount of a subscription fee to one company, and never need to pay for individual albums,...
How do we do the payments to the publishers tho? That's what Spotify solves: you pay a small amount of a subscription fee to one company, and never need to pay for individual albums, subscriptions, songs, whatnot. With news, you need to subscribe to many places, and if you seldom read most of the resources, it's not worth your money to subscribe. Also, you need to maintain many subscriptions. A Spotify for publishing would address that.
Micropayments could be integrated to RSS, but that'd be rather clumsy and the public that'd use both RSS and micropayments would be so small that it wouldn't be worth to the publishers and intermediaries.
I think this mostly comes down to a misunderstanding. Most feed readers let you just copy the page's URL over and it'll scan it for any RSS feeds. You don't need to find a little RSS link in the...
Feeds aren't necessarily easy to find
I think this mostly comes down to a misunderstanding. Most feed readers let you just copy the page's URL over and it'll scan it for any RSS feeds. You don't need to find a little RSS link in the footer anymore. RSS-supporting pages will offer this:
I also follow youtube channels and one or two facebook pages through rss. theoldreader.com is still my 'inbox for the web'. But yeah, it's usually a hassle to find the feed for a page, and to find...
I also follow youtube channels and one or two facebook pages through rss.
theoldreader.com is still my 'inbox for the web'.
But yeah, it's usually a hassle to find the feed for a page, and to find out whether there is one in the first place.
I think that's been a major downfall; most RSS readers were very generic and did not have pre-filled subscriptions. There was also no intermediary service that would make the RSS feeds better...
Consumers tend not to use RSS because you need to be somewhat of a techie to do so
I think that's been a major downfall; most RSS readers were very generic and did not have pre-filled subscriptions. There was also no intermediary service that would make the RSS feeds better (there are far too many feeds that are formatted very badly).
Podcasts use RSS, but somehow the Podcast players deliver a fantastic directory and discovery mechanism that makes RSS hidden and less technie and more approachable. RSS readers for news and images never seemed to manage that.
RSS has a few big issues that are basically impossible to overcome. The main one is discovery, the user is expected to provide urls to feeds before the feed reader becomes useful where as most...
RSS has a few big issues that are basically impossible to overcome. The main one is discovery, the user is expected to provide urls to feeds before the feed reader becomes useful where as most modern websites simply ask you which topics you are interested in. Another issue is it means small players are left out. If I start up a new blog and write some interesting posts, no one will see them because they haven't subscribed to my website feed. As well as the lack of commenting there is just really very little reason for me and many others to pick RSS over something like tildes or lobste.rs.
Technically, RSS is a protocol or a file format, so from that perspective your question is a little like asking if html shows comments. The answer is yes, but only if the author of the document...
Technically, RSS is a protocol or a file format, so from that perspective your question is a little like asking if html shows comments. The answer is yes, but only if the author of the document included them.
Technicalities aside, in practice most article feeds do not include comments, or at most just a number indicating how many comments the article has. But similarly, the majority of RSS feeds out there don't deliver the full article, only a summary and a link. So if you are interested in the article, you go to the website anyway.
Once you have read the article and the comments, you may want to be notified about new comments. The way that you do that with RSS is you simply subscribe to the article's comments feed. No need to check back, as notifications about new comments will come to your feed reader. Just like with articles. Everything comes to you. And you are in control.
I just spent the whole morning today setting up some new RSS feeds for websites that don't offer them but used to. Every year, it becomes a little more difficult to follow the world through RSS feeds. But I'm so used to interacting with the web that way that I bone-headedly refuse to accept that the vision that we had of the Internet back in the 90s got hijacked by commercial interests and its walled garden mentalities.
And besides, I haven't found a better way to be in control of what content I consume and how it is delivered to me.
So RSS is mainly used to list articles and short summaries. I thought it could be used as a lightweight, unified, bloat free replacemet of news and blog websites which you need to load otherwise....
So RSS is mainly used to list articles and short summaries. I thought it could be used as a lightweight, unified, bloat free replacemet of news and blog websites which you need to load otherwise. Such an RSS implementation would take ad money away though
Hence why (for practical purposes) it doesn't exist. I know of one news website that offers a first-three-paragraphs-style RSS feed to the general public, and a full-article feed if you buy a...
Such an RSS implementation would take ad money away though
Hence why (for practical purposes) it doesn't exist.
I know of one news website that offers a first-three-paragraphs-style RSS feed to the general public, and a full-article feed if you buy a subscription, but even then I think you have to get the most expensive subscription, which is way more than I can justify spending on a single news source which I can almost as easily read for free.
It could certainly be used for that. Some websites publish full articles through their RSS feeds. As for monetization, there have been ad providers that offer solutions for in-feed advertising.
It could certainly be used for that. Some websites publish full articles through their RSS feeds. As for monetization, there have been ad providers that offer solutions for in-feed advertising.
RSS can show anything the publisher wants it to show. All it is is an XML file that is updated when new content is added to the site. RSS readers routinely check for updates to RSS feeds they are...
RSS can show anything the publisher wants it to show. All it is is an XML file that is updated when new content is added to the site. RSS readers routinely check for updates to RSS feeds they are subscribed to.
RSS didn't fail. Blogs still emit RSS. You can follow people on Twitter using RSS. Podcasting depends on RSS. However, there are two major issues:
If it’s not easy to find the feed for most sites (for the ones that do have feeds), and most new sites don’t have feeds, then that is functionally a failure. What would constitute failure to you?
Personally I blame Facebook and other aggregators for pushing RSS and Atom out of the mindshare. If you publish through Facebook or other platforms then that’s how consumers will consume content on those platforms, obviously. But, that is not how the web is supposed to work. I hope that as aggregators come and go, eventually people will realize that RSS/Atom/some other decentralized protocol for syndication is the right way to go.
I can follow almost all the websites I want to follow using RSS or Atom, which amount to more than a hundred. I use a great feed catcher called Elfeed. It's not a huge success, but it's not a failure either.
Mosts sites depends on which sites. Yes, most big content silos that feed on users' data either don't provide RSS (Twitter, Academia.edu,...) or bury them deep down (some news sites) or only let you guess the links (Soundcloud, YouTube), but if you want to follow news and blogs and other anouncements, you're almost never left in the cold. RSS is my main news source; I follow multiple major websites worldwide (Evrensel & Diken in Turkey, DW Turkish, Guardian, Publico.pt, Internazionale.it), and all of these have their feeds---both for all news and for categories---exposed, quite acessibly. Almost all blogs, and definitely all of the worthy ones have RSS feeds. Youtube allows you to export OPML of your subscriptions, but once you know the RSS URL and channel ID, you can add channels and playlists w/o subscribing to them.
That's enough success for me.
I am a heavy RSS consumer as well, but I’m not blind to the fact that RSS has not been a major success (or not as major as I believe it warranted). The one domain where it has been very successful is podcasts. I just don’t quite get why the podcasting community has been successful whereas the web hasn’t. Maybe it’s because the podcasting community’s advertising models are overall better, whereas the web at large has been plagued by bad advertising/sponsoring/subsidizing models?
Podcasting has far more limited scope for data collection and analytics, so the "downside" (from the perspective of content providers) of RSS isn't as pronounced for them. RSS was perfectly successful on the web too when Google Reader was around. Google basically killed the market when they pulled out of it. Without decent social functions and feeds, one of the main avenues for acquiring new users and incentives for learning how it worked were gone.
Also, Apple podcasts has nearly monopolistic market power in the podcasting market, and they've shown little interest in monetizing it so sticking to an open standard works for them just fine since it's less work to maintain.
Apple News is also just a glorified RSS reader with some site analytics built in. It's kind of disappointing Apple didn't just go with creating a web site/service for it and stuck with only having an app. They could do partnerships with content partners, like the major media, to do the limited analytics they ask for while also letting anyone add in a regular RSS feed to it.
Also Podcasts have "networks" where they plug each other a lot and guest host on each others' pods. This is analogous to the way bloggers used to feature a "blogroll" and webcomic authors used to have guest artists to cross promote each other. Once the base of old-school blogging and independently hosted content died, a lot of the route for discoverability through RSS died with it. The focus for growth transitioning from SEO, self-promotion, and connection to a network of writers/artists/whatever switched to a focus on virality and feed-hacking.
This was very frustrating, but I moved to https://feedbin.com and have been very satisfied with them as a paid service.
I have to agree there. I tried Apple news and while it seemed OK, it doesn’t expose the same level of control as with curating my own list of feeds. Apple has also gone in and mucked with the offerings, which users have no control over, which is the real problem: it’s centralized and under Apple’s control.
I guess this is why we can’t have nice things. Nobody wants to invest in sustainable business models on the web.
The "web at large" equivalent of podcasting is vlogging on YouTube and Twitch (?, not a platform I know, only hearsay). I guess podcasting has been successful just like RSS has been so: a good, popular citizen of an unpopular niche.
But those are video media, not textual. I guess I wasn’t explicit in what I was saying, so the misunderstanding is understandable. Isn’t it strange that audiovisual media have found some decent, non-exploitative monetization strategies, but text on the web has not?
Way more people watch and listen quite a bit more than they read. I'm an avid reader, but when I want to find a recipe, or learn about a workout routine, I go to YouTube.
We also don't have the Spotify for news and/or books. Say you pay $10/month and can read almost all major and minor newspapers like you listen to music on Spotify. And maybe also as many books as you want. That'd be a great entreprise.
That’s exactly what the promise of RSS was! If only textual content publishers would use RSS more!
How do we do the payments to the publishers tho? That's what Spotify solves: you pay a small amount of a subscription fee to one company, and never need to pay for individual albums, subscriptions, songs, whatnot. With news, you need to subscribe to many places, and if you seldom read most of the resources, it's not worth your money to subscribe. Also, you need to maintain many subscriptions. A Spotify for publishing would address that.
Micropayments could be integrated to RSS, but that'd be rather clumsy and the public that'd use both RSS and micropayments would be so small that it wouldn't be worth to the publishers and intermediaries.
I use Inoreader, myself.
I think this mostly comes down to a misunderstanding. Most feed readers let you just copy the page's URL over and it'll scan it for any RSS feeds. You don't need to find a little RSS link in the footer anymore. RSS-supporting pages will offer this:
That's enough for your RSS reader to find and subscribe to any feeds.
Blogs have rss only because wordpress and other software has it by default. Most blog owners don't even know they have rss.
I also follow youtube channels and one or two facebook pages through rss.
theoldreader.com is still my 'inbox for the web'.
But yeah, it's usually a hassle to find the feed for a page, and to find out whether there is one in the first place.
What is the value of this for you?
I don't mind having every youtube channel as a separate feed. In fact, I prefer it.
I think that's been a major downfall; most RSS readers were very generic and did not have pre-filled subscriptions. There was also no intermediary service that would make the RSS feeds better (there are far too many feeds that are formatted very badly).
Podcasts use RSS, but somehow the Podcast players deliver a fantastic directory and discovery mechanism that makes RSS hidden and less technie and more approachable. RSS readers for news and images never seemed to manage that.
This is a re-publication of the post from twobithistory.org, previously posted and discussed a little here and here.
RSS has a few big issues that are basically impossible to overcome. The main one is discovery, the user is expected to provide urls to feeds before the feed reader becomes useful where as most modern websites simply ask you which topics you are interested in. Another issue is it means small players are left out. If I start up a new blog and write some interesting posts, no one will see them because they haven't subscribed to my website feed. As well as the lack of commenting there is just really very little reason for me and many others to pick RSS over something like tildes or lobste.rs.
Did RSS somehow show comments? Often they are part of the value of the article itself. If usually not, then that's one of the cons
Technically, RSS is a protocol or a file format, so from that perspective your question is a little like asking if html shows comments. The answer is yes, but only if the author of the document included them.
Technicalities aside, in practice most article feeds do not include comments, or at most just a number indicating how many comments the article has. But similarly, the majority of RSS feeds out there don't deliver the full article, only a summary and a link. So if you are interested in the article, you go to the website anyway.
Once you have read the article and the comments, you may want to be notified about new comments. The way that you do that with RSS is you simply subscribe to the article's comments feed. No need to check back, as notifications about new comments will come to your feed reader. Just like with articles. Everything comes to you. And you are in control.
I just spent the whole morning today setting up some new RSS feeds for websites that don't offer them but used to. Every year, it becomes a little more difficult to follow the world through RSS feeds. But I'm so used to interacting with the web that way that I bone-headedly refuse to accept that the vision that we had of the Internet back in the 90s got hijacked by commercial interests and its walled garden mentalities.
And besides, I haven't found a better way to be in control of what content I consume and how it is delivered to me.
So RSS is mainly used to list articles and short summaries. I thought it could be used as a lightweight, unified, bloat free replacemet of news and blog websites which you need to load otherwise. Such an RSS implementation would take ad money away though
Hence why (for practical purposes) it doesn't exist.
I know of one news website that offers a first-three-paragraphs-style RSS feed to the general public, and a full-article feed if you buy a subscription, but even then I think you have to get the most expensive subscription, which is way more than I can justify spending on a single news source which I can almost as easily read for free.
It could certainly be used for that. Some websites publish full articles through their RSS feeds. As for monetization, there have been ad providers that offer solutions for in-feed advertising.
RSS can show anything the publisher wants it to show. All it is is an XML file that is updated when new content is added to the site. RSS readers routinely check for updates to RSS feeds they are subscribed to.