> RSS is one-way publishing; there is no way for content creators and their audience to interact<p>I consider this as the main strength of RSS; respecting the privacy of the audience. If the audience want to interact they can still choose to do so. The small amount of friction actually helps to beat down the noises.
There are several questionable claims and viewpoints in this post. This is one I felt worthy of addressing because information to the contrary is not widely known:<p>> RSS is one-way publishing; there is no way for content creators and their audience to interact<p>Not true. Feeds support a byline for each post item. This typically contains the author's name. You <i>can</i>, though, also include an email address there. For readers that are also mail clients, those readers* can allow the user to "reply to" a given feed item (in the same way that your mail client lets you reply to a message sitting in your mailbox). I know of very few feeds, however, where people actually include a reply-to address. It's a network/ecosystem problem.<p>* or any other reader that wishes to allow invoking the user's default mail client
RSS is not dead because it covers an use case for which there is no replacement. The attempt to kill RSS didn't consist in creating a better RSS, it consisted in walled gardens. The use case of providing structured updates for a web site has no better replacement than RSS right now. Some walled gardens like twitter feeds are the closest replacement and they are not nearly the same.<p>But the article gets it wrong IMO (except for the last point). The main people to blame about this situation is not the incentives, nor the companies who tried to created the walled gardens. Even if there were incentives, RSS would not improve. As long as web makers don't treat it as a first class citizen, RSS will keep being an "optional" thing that requires separate extensions, programs, etc, it is just not going to be massively used if using it isn't super obvious. It's the browser makers' fault (Mozilla, I'm looking at you). RSS was treated almost like an annoyance. Firefox only provided an icon and "live bookmarks" thing with a really poor UX and then removed it because not many people used it (meanwhile we have Pocket shipped by default...). Google, they never had interest in competing with their own walled garden.<p>And that's how we ended with the current horrible state of the web, where every website asks you to subscribe via email to their wonderful newsletter. If we only had a technology that would allow websites to provide content that users can read asynchronously and doesn't involve filling their mailboxes...something like a newsletter RSS...maybe then we would not need to place a stupid JS popup in every fucking website in the world and we would let people easily subscribe to a newsletter RSS.<p>Unfortunately, browser makers are too busy with things like webassembly, because making the JS popups faster is way more important than fixing the basic interaction with the web.
>Walled garden content aggregation is significantly more profitable than free syndication (e.g., Reddit, Facebook)<p>Reddit is a poor example(at least for now), considering you can still to this day add ".rss" to just about any search or url and get a feed. Their co-founder Aaron Swartz developed RSS. Before they destroyed modmail, you could use your rss reader to keep track of those as well.<p>Considering the corporate direction they are going, I'm sure the rss feature's days are numbered, as everything else, principles, morals, and ethics infused into reddit from Aaron Swartz are systematically replaced or removed.
> <i>RSS readers act like email clients in how they render content via HTML. Unfortunately, email content isn't as rich as the JavaScript-powered web today. Maybe that's OK for email (and podcasts), but not for generic blog content.</i><p>It's not clear if this is meant to address the needs of publishers or readers.<p>For consumption, I consider refusing to run scripts or render sophisticated layouts a plus. Many browsers include reader modes to produce a similar effect because readers do not usually want auto-playing videos or email subscription overlays.<p>Of course, if I was publishing something and trying to make money from it, I might want to play a video with ads in it regardless of the reader's preference, and I definitely want their email address even though they're already subscribed by RSS so that I have another means of competing for their attention.
> <i>RSS readers act like email clients in how they render content via HTML. Unfortunately, email content isn't as rich as the JavaScript-powered web today</i><p>Can somebody expand on-behalf on this ludicrous idea and its unspecified details; it seems like somebody has found something better than hypertext¹ - but left the specs inexplicit. If anybody has an idea if that positively meant something...<p>(¹codable text? It reminds me of the self-modifying code we used in the 8-bit times. Surely not the way I want text - which has to be complete and assessable.)<p>By the way, RSS informs you that something exists; what it points to may even include rockets and theatrical performance in the end.<p>And all along the way, if I intend to receive hypertext I want it certain that code will run only in containers I decided.
In my case, that I don't think is extraordinary, I scan the titles in the RSS reader and click on them to go their fully rendered pages more often than not. That tacks some of the noted downsides. Content discoverability is no problem either. Content for me is web-first, but if provider exposes RSS, It gets more recurrence from me. User unfriendliness can be fought with browser extensions.
I utterly and etirely fail to see how javascript is evenly remotely required to render a blog.. If your blog requires javascript to simply show content, you're building a browser inside the browser and need to stop.
Hm. I am an active RSS user, used it since it came to be, and not once did I want my RSS feed to have more complex text formatting than it already has.
RSS is excellent at organizing chaotic websites into readable form. You can glance down the list quickly like reading email subject headers. There's limited opportunity to be distracted by flashy graphics or other time wasters. To try to explain RSS to somebody else who isn't familiar I usually don't bother.
RSS was, to make a slightly cliche paraphrase, a more elegant web for a more civilized age. It was user controlled content consumption. It declined because it conflicts with the "addict them and stuff their eyeballs with intrusive personalized ads" monetization model of the post 2010 internet.
I’ve had ideas on making a Reddit like RSS reader. Every user would have their own feed list that others can see by clicking on that user and add to their own.<p>The main feed would be ranked by most followed sites in an HN like layout with comments. And of course there would be another section for personal feed.<p>I just don’t know how much server fees would cost, a lot of feeds don’t have pubDates, polling or archive retrieval are expensive. I thought about making a fat client setup so the users machine does that work, whatever it takes to make something clean and simple without an ugly premium package with 100 things no one wants.
RSS feeds are in my eyes the best way to follow cross-platform content in a single place without worrying about privacy.<p>It allows you to follow your favorite artists / content creators on instagram (via bibliogram), twitter (via nitter), youtube (via invidious), tiktok (via proxitok) etc. without having an actual account to these services or using obscure apps. You can also follow your favorite news site, subscribe to ebay search terms (if your looking for one specific thing), hacker news, blog posts and much more all following one standard on one platform.
For some reason this misses out a point that I personally find deeply annoying. I’d like the ability to share an image for the RSS feed for my site. This is usually some horrific mix of nested html or xml cdata and no one can agree on how to put an image in a RSS feed item. Different readers and platforms seem to just make it up on a whim.<p>Podcast RSS has the fortune of being pretty consistent and contains an image for the podcast.