11 ms·

The fact that RSS appears to be dying is the best proof I have ever seen that demonstrates a secret cabal of lizard-people who control the world. How did it go

by jms18 10y ago

The fact that RSS appears to be dying is the best proof I have ever seen that demonstrates a secret cabal of lizard-people who control the world. How did it go from being so pervasive and useful to dying in so short a time? It can't all be laid at the feet of Google Reader and Facebook news.

lewisl9029 10y ago
Because content providers want to lock users into their own proprietary content platforms, and providing an RSS feed is completely counter-productive towards that goal. RSS was way too open and user-friendly to survive contact with corporate greed.
- solipsism 10y ago
  It wasn't user-friendly for non-tech folks. It was confusing. There were no readers that appealed to regular folks. The open-source world dropped the ball here. This is why it died.
  - lewisl9029 10y ago
    I don't disagree. I didn't mean RSS was user-friendly in the UX sense, although the poor UX of RSS readers in general was also indirectly a result the lack of interest from profit-driven companies, but rather in the sense that it offered users freedom from lock-in and the ability to aggregate content they're interested in and decouple it from the often ad-ridden platforms it was served on.
  - greglindahl 10y ago
    Flipboard has a ton of users, many of whom are reading rss feeds without knowing it. I agree that overall, usability is still a huge problem for rss.
  - bsder 10y ago
    Has the open source world EVER produced a UX that was user friendly for non-tech folks? I'm really drawing a blank here.
    - Endy 10y ago
      As a mostly non-tech folk, nope.
    - taneq 10y ago
      The only intuitive user interface ever created was the nipple.
      - liw 10y ago
        Babies need to be taught how to use the nipple. Not intuitive.
        taneq 10y ago
        Only baby humans, but that's because even 'full-term' human babies are severely premature by the standards of most mammals.
    - idobai 10y ago
      Has the closed source world EVER produced a UX that wasn't just a visually appealing bloated disaster? I'm really drawing a blank here.
    - skrebbel 10y ago
      VLC Media Player. It's not pretty, but it has a play button and a scrollbar. Its 3629394 power user features are nicely stashed away where they belong: in a menu that most people never even bother to check out. But the core feature for a video player is that it plays the damn video. That's core UX, and most other players of the last 15 years have dropped plenty balls there. You can have so many skins and library features and preview screenshots but if the movie doesn't play without your nerd cousin first breaking your OS with sleazy half-broken codec packs, the UX is shit. The most difficult part for non-tech people using VLC is understanding Finder or Explorer to double-click the movie they just torrented.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      Firefox?
  - rvern 10y ago
    The free software world created Liferea, which looks good,[1] works very well, is easy to use, and was created 13 years ago. People just don't know about it, because they look for web services that they don't control instead of applications running on their own computers. RSS is not dead, it is still supported by everything on the web except the large social networks that have corporate interests in not supporting it. This is in large part because all the content management systems support it. [1]: See for yourself: https://clbin.com/B0v1yt.png https://clbin.com/B0v1yt.png.
    - mkohlmyr 10y ago
      He's talking about there not being any applications that appeal to normal non-tech users and your example is a linux desktop app that looks like a windows 95 application. I don't think you two agree on what "non-tech" and "appealing" mean. That being said I'm sure it is very usable in a utilitarian sense.
    - type0 10y ago
      Liferea is quite buggy on many systems, if you use GNOME and/or it's stable on your system then good for you. QuiteRSS is good, the only problem is that it comes with built in browser and I'm not sure if the browser code is updated properly.
  - arximboldi 10y ago
    I know a few relatives that used RSS integration in Firefox even though they do know nothing about tech. You just had to click the orange icon to subscribe and you would get the list of news on a dropdown in the bookmarks bar.
    - type0 10y ago
      That is one of the awesome features in Firefox, its too simple for power users but for the regular user its great. I only wish there was some better interface around it, even if something html based or what not, like Bamboo Feed Reader maybe.
- apatters 10y ago
  Not saying this is wrong, but I think a less cynical rephrasing which explains a superset of the problem is that RSS failed to win adoption from a critical mass of content producers. You can go to pretty much any website and assume there will be an index.html equivalent which spits more or less anything the site wants at your browser. You definitely cannot assume that any website you want to receive updates from has an RSS feed. You could never do this, even at its height commercial content producers regarded it with deep skepticism for totally valid commercial reasons. They would publish excerpts but not full articles, headlines but not excerpts, etc. Now had the RSS community offered more incentive to the content producers to get on board, it might have seen more adoption. The clearest example of this is that RSS never solved the advertising problem--someone could take your feed, strip out your ads, throw it on a website and introduce their own ads and make money off of your content. Boom there goes your support from anyone whose writing is ad-supported. Why would they embrace RSS when it will de-monetize their audience?
  - spriggan3 10y ago
    > someone could take your feed, strip out your ads, throw it on a website and introduce their own ads and make money off of your content. Someone can do that with web scraping too, don't blame RSS for this stuff.
    - seanp2k2 10y ago
      While I loved RSS and the ncurses readers it powered for me, the ad thing was real and many publishers just put a blurb or a headline on their feeds (basically worthless), content scraping requires effort and varies by site, whereas RSS / Atom would be standardized and stupid easy for any old talentless profiteering hack to install as a source for new WordPress articles to feed their content farm. Having the "barrier" of writing a content scraper for each site you want to scrape and figuring out a way to get that onto your crappy WP link farm blog is a high enough bar that many marketers just can't be bothered, so it "solves" the scraping problem for the majority case at the expense of the users. Now we have things like Feedly which AFAIK maintain their own scrapers and I can still basically read most articles without looking at ads for this one new trick to get rid of tonsillitis complete with a nasty gif.
- Animats 10y ago
  As I've pointed out before, RSS feeds are still widely available for hard news. Reuters, AP, and VOA have them. Even Al Jazeera [1] and China Daily[2] have RSS feeds. The New York Times has an RSS feed.[3] The Hill has RSS feeds with details of what's happening in Congress. The European Union has many RSS feeds.[4] The Hollywood Reporter has RSS feeds.[5] The Times of London has RSS feeds.[6] The South China Morning Post has RSS feeds.[7] The NASDAQ has an RSS feed for every ticker symbol.[8] Platts has RSS feeds for oil industry news.[9] Those who need to know what's going on choose RSS. [1] http://america.aljazeera.com/content/ajam/articles.rss http://america.aljazeera.com/content/ajam/articles.rss [2] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/rss/china_rss.xml http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/rss/china_rss.xml [3] http://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml http://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml [4] http://europa.eu/rapid/rss.htm http://europa.eu/rapid/rss.htm [5] http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/rss http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/rss [6] http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/feedindex/ http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/feedindex/ [7] http://www.scmp.com/rss http://www.scmp.com/rss [8] http://www.nasdaq.com/services/rss.aspx http://www.nasdaq.com/services/rss.aspx [9] http://www.platts.com/rss-feed http://www.platts.com/rss-feed
gfody 10y ago
It's because Javascript has rendered the whole current generation of web developers deathly allergic to anything XML. JSS will be huge though.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
smacktoward 10y ago
It's because the RSS community never figured out standard, easy ways for users to: 1) Find new feeds 2) Subscribe to feeds They got close on #2 with the addition of feed autodiscovery (http://www.petefreitag.com/item/384.cfm http://www.petefreitag.com/item/384.cfm) as a built-in feature of browsers, but the UX never got polished enough to make it a single-click thing, and eventually the browser vendors decided it wasn't being used enough and phased it back out again. #1 is a nut that nobody ever even came close to cracking. In retrospect, all the energy that went into the war that ended up splitting the community into RSS and Atom camps was energy that was diverted from solving existential problems at a critical moment. It'd be interesting to read a retrospective asking the various players in that war how they feel now about the decisions they made then.
- bsder 10y ago
  Am I hallucinating because I could have sworn that I remember "RSS" buttons on web pages that automatically did the right thing with your RSS reader via your browser?
  - ashitlerferad 10y ago
    Those still exist outside of the Web 2.0 world.
- rvern 10y ago
  The two problems are solved very well by Mozilla Firefox. You only need to customize the browser to drag the feed button to the toolbar. Whenever it is not grayed out, you know there is a RSS feed available for the current website or page, and you can click on it to view the feed and click "Subscribe Now" to subscribe to it in your default feed reader.
  - type0 10y ago
    It's a shame that they don't ship it by like that by default. Even if it's "easy" to customize it's still is frustrating trying to explain it to computer illiterate relatives.
fencepost 10y ago
A lot of the audience went away because of Google Reader - Reader drove out newsfeed competitors, then when it shut down people went to non-RSS alternatives that they were already using like Facebook. Basically Reader killed all momentum for RSS and Atom.
usrusr 10y ago
Or maybe the fact that RSS ever had any semblance of being alive demonstrates that journalism used to be terribly naive about business. Lizard people or careless journalists, maybe we will never know.

by jms18 10y ago

lewisl9029 10y ago

Because content providers want to lock users into their own proprietary content platforms, and providing an RSS feed is completely counter-productive towards that goal. RSS was way too open and user-friendly to survive contact with corporate greed.

solipsism 10y ago
It wasn't user-friendly for non-tech folks. It was confusing. There were no readers that appealed to regular folks. The open-source world dropped the ball here. This is why it died.
- lewisl9029 10y ago
  I don't disagree. I didn't mean RSS was user-friendly in the UX sense, although the poor UX of RSS readers in general was also indirectly a result the lack of interest from profit-driven companies, but rather in the sense that it offered users freedom from lock-in and the ability to aggregate content they're interested in and decouple it from the often ad-ridden platforms it was served on.
- greglindahl 10y ago
  Flipboard has a ton of users, many of whom are reading rss feeds without knowing it. I agree that overall, usability is still a huge problem for rss.
- bsder 10y ago
  Has the open source world EVER produced a UX that was user friendly for non-tech folks? I'm really drawing a blank here.
  - Endy 10y ago
    As a mostly non-tech folk, nope.
  - taneq 10y ago
    The only intuitive user interface ever created was the nipple.
    - liw 10y ago
      Babies need to be taught how to use the nipple. Not intuitive.
      - taneq 10y ago
        Only baby humans, but that's because even 'full-term' human babies are severely premature by the standards of most mammals.
  - idobai 10y ago
    Has the closed source world EVER produced a UX that wasn't just a visually appealing bloated disaster? I'm really drawing a blank here.
  - skrebbel 10y ago
    VLC Media Player. It's not pretty, but it has a play button and a scrollbar. Its 3629394 power user features are nicely stashed away where they belong: in a menu that most people never even bother to check out. But the core feature for a video player is that it plays the damn video. That's core UX, and most other players of the last 15 years have dropped plenty balls there. You can have so many skins and library features and preview screenshots but if the movie doesn't play without your nerd cousin first breaking your OS with sleazy half-broken codec packs, the UX is shit. The most difficult part for non-tech people using VLC is understanding Finder or Explorer to double-click the movie they just torrented.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    Firefox?
- rvern 10y ago
  The free software world created Liferea, which looks good,[1] works very well, is easy to use, and was created 13 years ago. People just don't know about it, because they look for web services that they don't control instead of applications running on their own computers. RSS is not dead, it is still supported by everything on the web except the large social networks that have corporate interests in not supporting it. This is in large part because all the content management systems support it. [1]: See for yourself: https://clbin.com/B0v1yt.png https://clbin.com/B0v1yt.png.
  - mkohlmyr 10y ago
    He's talking about there not being any applications that appeal to normal non-tech users and your example is a linux desktop app that looks like a windows 95 application. I don't think you two agree on what "non-tech" and "appealing" mean. That being said I'm sure it is very usable in a utilitarian sense.
  - type0 10y ago
    Liferea is quite buggy on many systems, if you use GNOME and/or it's stable on your system then good for you. QuiteRSS is good, the only problem is that it comes with built in browser and I'm not sure if the browser code is updated properly.
- arximboldi 10y ago
  I know a few relatives that used RSS integration in Firefox even though they do know nothing about tech. You just had to click the orange icon to subscribe and you would get the list of news on a dropdown in the bookmarks bar.
  - type0 10y ago
    That is one of the awesome features in Firefox, its too simple for power users but for the regular user its great. I only wish there was some better interface around it, even if something html based or what not, like Bamboo Feed Reader maybe.
apatters 10y ago
Not saying this is wrong, but I think a less cynical rephrasing which explains a superset of the problem is that RSS failed to win adoption from a critical mass of content producers. You can go to pretty much any website and assume there will be an index.html equivalent which spits more or less anything the site wants at your browser. You definitely cannot assume that any website you want to receive updates from has an RSS feed. You could never do this, even at its height commercial content producers regarded it with deep skepticism for totally valid commercial reasons. They would publish excerpts but not full articles, headlines but not excerpts, etc. Now had the RSS community offered more incentive to the content producers to get on board, it might have seen more adoption. The clearest example of this is that RSS never solved the advertising problem--someone could take your feed, strip out your ads, throw it on a website and introduce their own ads and make money off of your content. Boom there goes your support from anyone whose writing is ad-supported. Why would they embrace RSS when it will de-monetize their audience?
- spriggan3 10y ago
  > someone could take your feed, strip out your ads, throw it on a website and introduce their own ads and make money off of your content. Someone can do that with web scraping too, don't blame RSS for this stuff.
  - seanp2k2 10y ago
    While I loved RSS and the ncurses readers it powered for me, the ad thing was real and many publishers just put a blurb or a headline on their feeds (basically worthless), content scraping requires effort and varies by site, whereas RSS / Atom would be standardized and stupid easy for any old talentless profiteering hack to install as a source for new WordPress articles to feed their content farm. Having the "barrier" of writing a content scraper for each site you want to scrape and figuring out a way to get that onto your crappy WP link farm blog is a high enough bar that many marketers just can't be bothered, so it "solves" the scraping problem for the majority case at the expense of the users. Now we have things like Feedly which AFAIK maintain their own scrapers and I can still basically read most articles without looking at ads for this one new trick to get rid of tonsillitis complete with a nasty gif.
Animats 10y ago
As I've pointed out before, RSS feeds are still widely available for hard news. Reuters, AP, and VOA have them. Even Al Jazeera [1] and China Daily[2] have RSS feeds. The New York Times has an RSS feed.[3] The Hill has RSS feeds with details of what's happening in Congress. The European Union has many RSS feeds.[4] The Hollywood Reporter has RSS feeds.[5] The Times of London has RSS feeds.[6] The South China Morning Post has RSS feeds.[7] The NASDAQ has an RSS feed for every ticker symbol.[8] Platts has RSS feeds for oil industry news.[9] Those who need to know what's going on choose RSS. [1] http://america.aljazeera.com/content/ajam/articles.rss http://america.aljazeera.com/content/ajam/articles.rss [2] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/rss/china_rss.xml http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/rss/china_rss.xml [3] http://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml http://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml [4] http://europa.eu/rapid/rss.htm http://europa.eu/rapid/rss.htm [5] http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/rss http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/rss [6] http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/feedindex/ http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/feedindex/ [7] http://www.scmp.com/rss http://www.scmp.com/rss [8] http://www.nasdaq.com/services/rss.aspx http://www.nasdaq.com/services/rss.aspx [9] http://www.platts.com/rss-feed http://www.platts.com/rss-feed

gfody 10y ago

It's because Javascript has rendered the whole current generation of web developers deathly allergic to anything XML. JSS will be huge though.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

smacktoward 10y ago

It's because the RSS community never figured out standard, easy ways for users to: 1) Find new feeds 2) Subscribe to feeds They got close on #2 with the addition of feed autodiscovery (http://www.petefreitag.com/item/384.cfm http://www.petefreitag.com/item/384.cfm) as a built-in feature of browsers, but the UX never got polished enough to make it a single-click thing, and eventually the browser vendors decided it wasn't being used enough and phased it back out again. #1 is a nut that nobody ever even came close to cracking. In retrospect, all the energy that went into the war that ended up splitting the community into RSS and Atom camps was energy that was diverted from solving existential problems at a critical moment. It'd be interesting to read a retrospective asking the various players in that war how they feel now about the decisions they made then.

bsder 10y ago
Am I hallucinating because I could have sworn that I remember "RSS" buttons on web pages that automatically did the right thing with your RSS reader via your browser?
- ashitlerferad 10y ago
  Those still exist outside of the Web 2.0 world.
rvern 10y ago
The two problems are solved very well by Mozilla Firefox. You only need to customize the browser to drag the feed button to the toolbar. Whenever it is not grayed out, you know there is a RSS feed available for the current website or page, and you can click on it to view the feed and click "Subscribe Now" to subscribe to it in your default feed reader.
- type0 10y ago
  It's a shame that they don't ship it by like that by default. Even if it's "easy" to customize it's still is frustrating trying to explain it to computer illiterate relatives.

fencepost 10y ago

A lot of the audience went away because of Google Reader - Reader drove out newsfeed competitors, then when it shut down people went to non-RSS alternatives that they were already using like Facebook. Basically Reader killed all momentum for RSS and Atom.

usrusr 10y ago

Or maybe the fact that RSS ever had any semblance of being alive demonstrates that journalism used to be terribly naive about business. Lizard people or careless journalists, maybe we will never know.