HN Reader

- I still use RSS

- 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

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.

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.

> Massive tech companies tried to own syndication. They failed.

Well, RSS won the battle, but lost the war.

This is especially timely, as I'm currently building a service that let's you receive your RSS feed as a physical newspaper.

Many times this sort of meta information reveals much more than expected

RSS died so many times. But as my google traffic is steadily declining with AI overviews, my RSS readership has exploded.

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.

Small self-promotion: https://github.com/Olshansk/rss-feeds

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.

I’ve been using the internet since 1995 and I’ve never even heard of ICE. Crazy

1 – I had no idea that Buttondown had an active blog.

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

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, 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.

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.

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'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).

Just a couple loose thoughts on this.

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.

Then Microsoft took out revenge by adding the worst RSS integration ever to Windows/Outlook.

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.

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.

deleted

And then Google and Facebook killed RSS.

>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.

Whatever ICE was, I'm sure it wasn't thinking about RSS. RSS remains a trivial, unhierarchical link dump.

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.

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