RSS is dying (or dead) because it was incompatible with the dominant business model on the internet -- advertising. This is why Google killed it. This is why lots of professional publishers hated it. With HTTP you'd be able to earn money via embedded ads but you'd earn exactly $0 via RSS since the feed was stripped of ads, just content. This forced publishers to put useless blurbs, redirecting to the HTTP version, which was a bad user experience and just sucked.
I'd like to see new innovation around protocols and client 'browsers' that were made with monetization built-in as a first-tier specification.
1) client sends request for content with some header with payment information attached.
2) server verifies payment transferred.
3) server responds to client with content after payment verification.
If this existed, RSS would be alive and well. Internet publishers would be alive and well. The internet would be a more beautiful place with a viable first-party alternative to ads.
Challenges here would be:
- Sufficiently low transaction costs to make micropayments viable. (Bundle payments?)
- Verifying proof of payment extremely fast
Someone(s) should create a new protocol.
FTP was invented in 1971.
SMTP was invented in 1982.
HTTP was invented in 1989.
RSS was invented in 1999.
Bitcoin was invented in 2008.
The amount of innovation around protocol has been abysmal relative to the explosion in creativity around applications on top of these protocols. And SMTP/HTTP are the only ones with any real mass adoption today.
I keep hearing how RSS is dead for many years. My favorite blogs seem to be doing fine, its not like my newsblur stream of posts has decreased over the years.
Many people are unhappy about non-monetized readers and authors just being happy off by themselves. The people most able to "fix" that are the happy readers and authors, and the readers are not very motivated to spam and tax themselves, and the authors obviously don't mind not monetizing or they wouldn't be blogging to begin with.
There doesn't seem to be an obvious disruptive force or angle to apply force to "improve" the stable situation of a distributed decentralized happy unmonetized ecosystem.
For the blogs and writers you follow that use RSS, are they really choosing to forgo a meaningful monetization opportunity?
Unless a blog really has ~50,000+ daily uniques, or a lucractive audience niche, I suspect there’s not much opportunity to monetize even if they wanted to.
I often ponder about the current push towards federation in tech such as Mastodon, and wonder if the issue isn't more around the issue of finding the sites in the first place, rather than being able to access sites via RSS. RSS is usually a default in many web publishing tools (wordpress, hugo etc).
As someone getting into RSS more recently, I've definitely struggled to find decent sites to follow (though trawling hackernews totally helps:)).
Right now the top reply's first sentence is this:
> Maybe the world needs an unmonetizable space.
I have noticed that people in hackernews generally tend to look things from a, excuse me for saying so, narrow business "make money" perspective. Or maybe it's somewhat US related, I'm not sure.
There are thousands of sites that don't live from advertising. Government, universities, and every public or even private institute has a site to provide information, news, announcements etc. There are also hobbyists' sites who are never going to make money from adverts.
Not everything should be reduced to a Facebook page.
Not everything should be about money.
First and foremost I think there is a need to recalibrate what matters and what actions that requires.
I do a lot of things for free because I have the luxury of a job that pays well. Not everyone has that kind of freedom and if someone wants to put food on the table, then money has to be a factor. Otherwise you'd lock a lot of things to only people who have extra time to take risks on activities that won't get them anything in return. Saying not everything should be about money is a pretty privileged position.
I agree, I think good thing to point out is that incentivizing and monetizing is not the same thing. If you would excuse a tangential argument, I notice that in Eastern culture 'social cache' is much stronger contender to monetary benefit than west; and in Western incentivization = monetization is more stronger. (my theory is that with more individualistic society with less strict societal norm money is one thing most can agreed upon)
> This forced publishers to put useless blurbs, redirecting to the HTTP version, which was a bad user experience and just sucked.
Is this that bad? I personally don't mind this at all, I subscribe to RSS feeds so I can easily tell at a glance who has an update in one place. If they then want to redirect me for the full content, then so be it, especially if the alternative is me loading every single one of those sites every day to check anyway.
I do mind such RSS feeds that just try to force people to load the webpage. With the vast majority of my RSS feeds, I never have to leave Emacs’ Elfeed RSS reader to consume daily news. If a feed won't let me see the full content in RSS, then I am more likely to delete the feed than become a pair of eyeballs for the website’s advertisers.
Absolutely agree. I just can't get why in every discussion about RSS somebody mentions that y it's dead because publishers had to give away content for free. Feed could contain full article, but don't have to.
Agreed. The RSS can easily be equivalent to a Tweet with a link attached. I like Thunderbird on desktops including RasPi, have yet to explore cross platform + floss mobile or web readers, but have built my own little youtube-like stack with RSS that is similar to YT’s feed format and can aggregate them, in the iSpooge Live project in Clojure + ClojureScript.
Thing is, RSS didn’t “die”. It only ever filled a couple of niches, and arguably it is more popular than it ever was because not only are people still continuing to use RSS readers, podcasts are arguably more popular than they’ve ever been (this period of time with the coronavirus possibly excepted).
I get that when people think of “RSS”, they’re thinking of tech that downloads text and maybe some images into a reader, but it’s just another means of syndicating media. The same places that disseminate the full text continue to do so because they’re not invested in making money directly off the writing, and the same places that have an investment in you going directly to the site continue to operate their feeds in that manner. If you have a browser extension that can discover it, or are willing to do a bit of guesswork, it’s amazing how many new sites launched in the last year that might not expose it on the website (because the webmaster didn’t think it was important to expose even when the CMS has it) actually have a feed you can pass off to a reader.
I don’t think RSS is ever going be competitive with a service like Instagram or Reddit for what they do, but the full value of these services doesn’t lie entirely within a feed and wouldn’t be neatly exposed within the constraints of the RSS or Atom specs to begin with. It’s different, and therefore have other, albeit less popular than social media, uses.
If someone prefers a stream of photographs to a stream of blogs and news sites, and that’s a lot of people, then RSS isn’t going to be competitive for their attention. If somebody prefers the discussions on Reddit and the semi-randomness of sources, RSS isn’t going to be competitive for their attention either. If you don’t care about an image stream (with comments, reactions, stories and whatever else Instagram has), and you can do without the Reddit commentary, well, you may very well have a use for RSS. Or maybe not. If it hasn’t gone away yet (and it really hasn’t), I have a hard time believing it is going anywhere in the near future.
> podcasts are arguably more popular than they’ve ever been (this period of time with the coronavirus possibly excepted).
There's been a worrying trend of some podcasts shifting to a "get our app" mode of delivery. I've been boycotting each one, and been encouraging the podcasts I donate to to explicitly keep the RSS delivery.
While RSS doesn't replace a site like Reddit, it's great that Reddit has RSS support built-in.
Much of my browsing of the site at least starts off in a feed reader, to make it quick to find what I'm interested in. From there, I'll open links to the site proper, with all the comments and such that make the experience what it is.
Micropayments have been tried. They all failed. The fair market price for content is $0. What is happening is that the only publishers that will exist shall be only those who create it for free. There is simply a glut of content out there because the barrier to creating content is completely gone.
That's a gross oversimplification. Lots of content isn't worth anything but some is. If you're a stock trader, for example, certain timely information is well-worth paying for. And there's a market for that served by Bloomberg, Thomson-Reuters, and so on.
The term "content" obscures the differences by suggesting its all interchangeable. That's certainly in the interest of the Googles and Facebooks of the world: When all content is equal, no content creator has any negotiating power.
But there's a distinction between a multi-month investigative report and hastily paraphrased rewrite at some fly-by-night website intent on capturing algorithmic ad dollars.
Pricing news content is hard because it has a different value to different people and often the value is only apparent after it has been consumed.
It's worth asking how much we will pay for reports on political corruption, civic injustice, and so on. If the price for content is $0, the signal to noise ratio will disappear.
I would have agree with this two years ago but things have changed. I'm just worn down with the huge volume of free dross that doesn't tell you anything. This year I've started subscribing to a bunch of resources and stopped with google news/fb noise.
> Micropayments have been tried. They all failed. The fair market price for content is $0.
To be fair, most were aweful and never reached critical mass. And many were to early and badly placed. Today situation is different. Patreon, twitch, youtube, netflix, spotify and all the other paid services proof that people are willing to pay something for content, to their conditions.
I think a well implemented micro-payment could work out today well enough to be viable. Something build into the browsers and aggregator-sites (reddit, hackernews, google news, facebook...) first. Most users don't wanna waste their time with micromanaging their bills, so make it optional, and automate it for the rest of the time.
Most places use content to get you to look at ads, but some places write content as a sort of ad itself - we said something thoughtful to build brand recognition, consumer confidence.
What about games? People pay tons of money for them, and they are content too. When Cyberpunk 2077 comes out later this year, try telling people it's worth $0. I think the difference is social norms. The internet having no real built-in payment mechanism has obliterated the norm of paying for most content. Games have held the line, but things like Google Stadia and Apple Arcade are working to change that.
Would be interesting to read about that — you happen to have any links?
I websearched for "failed micropayments" and found: "One type of micropayment that does work — one you might not even think of as a micropayment — is in-app-purchases (IAP). IAP are a huge source of revenue [...]"
And: "One reason users don’t like micropayments for content [to read] is it requires a decision ... waste the users’ mental effort ... costs so little that its implied worth is almost nothing" (here: https://blog.applovin.com/why-micropayments-fail-and-one-not... )
Is this true? It certainly doesn't feel like it. Reader was a first party branded reader. Google could put ads on Reader relevant to your interests (which they'd have been more keenly aware of than if you weren't using Reader), and they didn't have to pay out the publishers.
Google killed Reader, I think, for the second reason you mentioned: publishers were neutering their feeds. Reader had gone from a tool for consuming content to a tool for being notified about content.
Google says they killed Reader because of declining usage[1], and there was little reason to doubt that at the time. It's very true that people were switching to mobile consumption and no longer reading lots of news all at once.
I was a heavy user of Reader (and did huge amounts of work on RSS/Atom/etc), and I agreed with this assessment at the time.
More and more publishers were just putting headlines in RSS, so you had to click through anyway, and commercial blog sites were publishing a much larger volume of content, most of which I ignored. But I didn't want to unsubscribe, because occasionally there was something good.
Given that, I was finding much better content through aggregators like HN or via Twitter/FB.
Maybe they could have iterated and built something different, but what they had really wasn't useful.
Google never made an public attempt to show ads in their Reader, unlike GMail. Publisher feeds were also still prospering and widely used when Google killed the reader. It all started to die fast in years after.
Also, IIRC they specifically killed it because of Google Plus, which according to their plans should replace Google Reader and the demand for RSS.
>1) client sends request for content with some header with payment information attached. 2) server verifies payment transferred
What you describe looks like authentication and authorization rather than payment processing. Which may be a good thing. Adding support for authentication to the RSS protocol (OAuth for RSS anyone?) and RSS clients can potentially make it more interesting for publishers and solve the problem with monetization.
RSS is very much alive and aggregators like Feedly are way more powerful than Google Reader. All media website still use them, and even some major ones post full-text, The Verge does that, for example.
Monetization is rather simple, people visit a website if they want to read more about the news. In exchange you get guaranteed access to their attention not intermediated by Facebook, Google or Twitter.
Someone explain to me why the following combination of steps wouldn't solve all problems - for both content publishers, and RSS app creators.
Content publishers: Update the RSS feed generator to include the ads associated with the post. Write tools for dynamic ad insertion that actually updates the syndicated feed.
RSS App creators: Build ad networks that work with both ad buyers and content creators to match content-relevant ads, and either replace the dynamic in-post ads (and share revenue), or add additional intra-post ads.
Someone explain to me why this couldn't work with the existing technology stack - no new protocol, or client-side changes required.
It wouldn't work because it doesn't support the intrusive tracking (including "telemetry" and "analytics"), giant slide-over windows that obscure the content, repeated pop-ups demanding your email address, announcements that "you have 1 free article remaining unless you pay for a subscription," social media integration buttons, solicitations to "download our mobile app," CAPTCHA loops, "DDoS protection" delays and redirects, ad-blocker-blockers and autoplaying videos that are integral to web sites in 2020.
Also it is too lightweight in terms of cpu, memory, network and power usage, so it wouldn't push users to upgrade to the latest and greatest hardware (and data plans) every year just to maintain the same performance they had last year.
But the thing is, it’s not dead nor dying. I don’t think very many major websites have stopped their rss feeds. Maybe it’s just you that isn’t using it. There is rarely a webpage that I find that can’t be followed via rss, either natively which is most always the case, but there are also services that an rss-ize content.
How is it any harder for a publisher to embed a display ad than do what John Gruber does and have a weekly sponsor in his RSS feed? It's easy to insert ads into any RSS feed. The publisher/advertising argument for the death of RSS doesn't hold water. Folks prefer Twitter and Facebook to get a feed of news. The majority of people don't want to do the work of manually curating their feed. RSS just didn't win on the merits as a feature. I still love RSS and use it every day, but it wasn't "killed by publishers."
> 1) client sends request for content with some header with payment information attached. 2) server verifies payment transferred. 3) server responds to client with content after payment verification.
This is exactly the recently-proposed LSAT protocol[0]. It uses the HTTP402 response code to prompt for payment over the Lightning Network in exchange for a cryptographic bearer credential that may be used in future requests to the server.
I am building my business fully based on RSS. It is a news API. I got all my data solely form RSS. And I can confirm that the vast majority of news outlets still have it.
While I agree with this take on UBI. There are middle grounds to explore.
The streaming and game services seems to point at monthly subscription fee from an aggregator as a working model. Not sure how they distribute royalties though, I suspect there are many models I won’t agree with based on what they incentivize.
Then there are the Kickstarter/patreon. Where money is given more in support than for a specific product. This is more like the UBI approach.
I think there is room for a hybrid approach here, merging the two.
> RSS is dying (or dead) because it was incompatible with the dominant business model on the internet -- advertising. This is why Google killed it. This is why lots of professional publishers hated it.
> I'd like to see new innovation around protocols and client 'browsers' that were made with monetization built-in as a first-tier specification.
I don't think the solution should be to cater to what big platforms want.
If we did that, then the logical conclusion of that is that we would have to download some bloated locked down app for each platform we wanted to visit, and we would have a plethora of walled gardens. Copying and pasting text would be very limited, and we certainly could not "view source". The best we could do to save content was take screen shots, we certainly could not click on an image and save it. Basically what they are doing now.
Platforms would like nothing better than to completely deprecate access by web browsers all together. (Didn't Instagram do that recently?) Perhaps in the near future, websites will require that you use an "Apple approved" web browser, if they let you access them outside of the app at all.
But, they fact that they present any of their content at all is because of the ubiquity of web browsers. They could probably make more money if they had complete control of their platform, and could do things like prevent ad-blocking.
So, we should have pushed more for RSS to be de-facto requirement of serving content. Firefox, and other browsers, should have advertised when RSS was available, and make it highly discoverable for users.
> The amount of innovation around protocol has been abysmal relative to the explosion in creativity around applications on top of these protocols. And SMTP/HTTP are the only ones with any real mass adoption today.
I don't personally care that much about the protocol itself, I care about the content that the protocol makes available. If reading an RSS story required unpacking a bloated js runtime and fetching even more content, then why not just use a browser?
Publishers also hate SMTP and IMAP, and would love to force users to log into their platform and view ads, just to send an email to someone. And Google is certainly doing their part to eventually kill off these protocols.
AOL and many 90s ISPs did not support these protocols either (even though they used them internally) because they wanted to make users log into their platform instead of using their own mail client.
But the reason that SMTP still exists today is because of its ubiquity. The more RSS is adopted, the more popular it becomes, and the more platforms had to support it, even if they did not want to.
Being able to programmatically send emails is incredibly useful and helpful. I'm sure that when the last SMTP server shuts down, they will tell you that it is ok, because you can still use the mutually incompatible GMail or Outlook.com APIs. Pending approval.
Re: rss being dead, many US govt sites still have RSS feeds for data updates and even your saved searches:
- PubMed
- Dailymed
- clinicaltrials.gov
Slack has a slash command for ‘/feed subscribe https://foo.bar/baz.rss’ so we use that plus the above sites RSS feed for real time notices on when new data is added.
I've seen a number of news RSS feeds that only give you the first paragraph or a summary in RSS, and to get the rest, you need to log into the site (paywall). I think this is quite an OK RSS business model - it's like a preview, and you pay to get the rest.
The single worst offense against the usability of Atom/RSS right now comes from Apple and iOS.
If you click a link to an Atom feed in Mobile Safari, iOS will launch the Apple News app. Which will then show you an error message saying the content is unavailable.
As far as I can tell there is no way for an installed reader app to take over handling of feed URLs. It just makes the entire feed ecosystem look broken for anyone using an iPhone or iPad.
i don't know about you how you use your iOS device if you do but after installing an RSS reader (NetNewsWire is an excellent open source app) you can share the webpage/website/blog using the share menu and it will be added to your RSS reader
I used bazqux for a while and paid for the annual subscription. It just ended and I was looking around for free alternatives, and found CommaFeed, which reminds me a lot of Google Reader.
Inoreader (at least their paid version) supports private rss feeds--that is feeds with HTTP Basic Auth headers for non-public content. Private blogs and private RSS are a space where monetizing your content just isn't important. This is where people can write personal, vulnerable things to share with friends and family without creating a burden of "now I need to visit 50 different friends' websites"
> Stop developing for Apple products. Stop treating Apple like they matter.
The market, as it actually exists, disagrees (especially in terms of profit, as opposed to number of devices). I understand hating Apple, but if I write software for profit, I care about where the customers/money are and Apple absolutely qualifies. Should you also support other platforms? Absolutely. But removing support for a platform like you're suggesting is at best prioritizing ideology over profit, and even the ideology argument is... not one-sided.
This is why I was so heartbroken when Mozilla removed first party RSS support from Firefox, for what seemed like an extremely flimsy justification.[1]
RSS should be ubiquitous, and seen as an essential part of any service that serves structured incremental content. People should be emailing webmasters asking why there is no little orange icon.
It also serves as a back door form of accessibility. But I strongly suspect that RSS goes against the interests of big tech who don't like RSS, because companies like Facebook go through so much trouble to make it difficult to scrape or modify their content.
I just wish that Mozilla would stand up more to their corporate underwriters. Now RSS is relegated to add-ons, and is on the same tier gopher (no offense to gopher).
Smart Bookmarks were fantastic. Add your favorite sites' RSS feeds to your bookmark toolbar and you'd have all the recent headlines from all your favorite sites at one click. Fortunately I wasn't the only one that appreciated this long neglected feature so someone created Livemarks (https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/) that mostly replicated its functionality. I highly recommend it as I've been on the web a long time and have yet to come across a faster way to check all my favorite sites at once.
Thank you so much for that, I am/was a HUGE fan of that feature in Firefox, and it was actually one of the main features that got me to switch to Firefox in the first place. I was gutted when they removed it, and while I still swear by Firefox over Chrome, I'm finding they're making more and more questionable decisions lately when it comes to their supposed love for a free/open Internet.
Innoreader can make a virtual feed from changes that appear in any site -- a new feature I haven't tried yet. Used to use Google Reader, but now I pay for Inno, which I'm happy to do.
But unfortunately that is not really a solution. It is like saying that it is ok that a website removed screen-reader support, because you have a screen reader that can still parse the website anyway. The problem is RSS not being made available at all.
RSS being made available less and less, and they have less of an incentive to do so. And I am saddened that a lot of the good work Mozilla did was abandoned by them and that the web is regressing.
Additionally, having to make your own scraper is really not a solution to RSS not being available. Scrapers are very high maintenance, and can easily break with updates.
I used to be a big fan of RSS feeds but with their demise I started using Feedly.
It let's me curate sources into different customizable feeds like news or science. I pay for the pro happily since they let me add specific twitter accounts too. Really saves me time!
Mozilla have been very clear that they don’t have the resources to win every battle. They’re slipping in the browser wars. I too would love them to fight every battle, but I understand the importance of them managing their limited resources and fighting those battles that can help them towards ‘winning the bigger war’ and staying alive.
RSS and bookmarks bypass Google, meaning less money for the browser. Yes Firefox is funded by ads (Google ads).
It seems to me that Mozilla executives has no fortitude. They prefer revenue rather then invention and what's best for the user. KaiOS is becoming the third biggest mobile OS, guess what it's FirefoxOS, but Mozilla was too afraid to give it a shot. Then there's the Rust programming language that is taking the world with storm. It seems there are great talent, and if they would be allowed to work in the user's best interest people would switch over from Chrome - and Firefox would become big enough to matter.
As for revenue, a lot of purchases are initiated from the web, but they leave the browser for a short while and takes a 3-5% cut. Browsers could work with banks and offer a secure wallet. And micro-transactions could become a thing. Publishers are crying for a solution! The web have been funded by ads for over 20 years now, with diminishing returns. And users hate it! The web is ripe for invention!
Google - and any search engine - cannot help you find an exact web-page you found after hours of researching while web-surfing earlier.
And RSS feeds are for when you’re already interested in a content source. Google searches help you find something new: they won’t help you automatically be informed of new posts. They just save you the time of having to manually sort-out new content from the old when you visit an article website.
Google isn’t to blame for the drop in popularity of RSS (Google Reader’s closing was a symptom, not a cause), it’s the content websites’ webmasters who saw that by allowing machine-readable access to their content index means that users wanting to get to their new content can bypass the advertising on their home-page, effectively halving the pageviews and thus halving their revenue - or if they included their whole article content in the RSS feed then they’re missing out on potentially all of the advertising revenue - that’s why some content authors, like Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, as an example, only provide their full RSS feed to paying subscribers.
RSS still works for podcasts though - as podcasts wouldn’t be popular at all if people had to navigate through a webpage to download each audio file each time a new release is made - so the halving of web banner ad revenue is compensated-for by having a much larger audience for the in-audio advertising baked into the podcast content.
Twitter - and centralised content platforms like Facebook also was/is a major part for the reasons I described above: allowing direct access to content means less pageviews. Somewhat concerningly, we’re seeing people use Twitter to do things that RSS was originally designed for: such as posting links to new articles posted to a blog or for things like live service uptime status updates.
Finally, there’s the usability issue: it’s difficult to describe what RSS is or why it’s good to a layperson. Ssure, today we can just say “an RSS feed is just like a podcast, but for normal web content, or anything at all” - but back in the early 2000s when RSS awareness (or hype...) peaked, I had difficulty understanding what a “syndication feed” was - the terminology “feed” implied to me it was a unidirectional continuous push-style connection (like a HTML/HTTP EventSource) - not a pull-style index file. Don’t forget the format-war with Atom too.
I don't understand why they removed support for it. Isn't RSS a "solved issue" - what possible updates can be made to it? Why couldn't they just keep it available and forget about it.
The functionality was never polished, and there were some fairly serious technical problems with the implementation due to lack of maintenance, seen often in apparently minor things like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=337897.
I can readily understand why they removed it—it was implemented in what had become the wrong way for such a feature, and fixing it would have taken more effort than they wanted to expend on such a niche feature, and it was starting to hold back other improvements. (Similar deal to why they broke old extensions: they were holding the browser back technically, and a couple of years later I think it was fairly clearly the right decision, painful though it was.)
This article is completely wrong. Slashdot, Digg and Reddit were already at 100% of full-power way before Google Reader ever shut down. And him citing that the causes are unknown is so completely naive. It's obvious. And it was obvious at the time to many who used RSS in 2012. Google is in the ad business, and RSS doesn't do adds. Not really, and not then. They realized they were competing with themselves and closed it; it's that simple. God, I feel like I got baited to reading that post because there was no new or insightful information whatsoever other than the title line. We should bring back RSS, and make the web more about conversations and communicating, than listicles and click-bait. 5-10MB of Javascript per page load, 1px tracking images, endless stupid ads, and now every single site that I go to has a pop-over that I should sign up for something, which gets in the way of the content that I am only going to spend 30 seconds reading anyway and then never return to that site ever again. The web has very quickly become a cesspool of non-information. It's like a bad shopping mall.
> listicles and click-bait. 5-10MB of Javascript per page load, 1px tracking images, endless stupid ads, and now every single site that I go to has a pop-over that I should sign up for something, which gets in the way of the content that I am only going to spend 30 seconds reading anyway and then never return to that site ever again
This exactly describes my experience on this website.
RSS seems to me to have use cases far beyond website updates, if it was extended a little.
Event syndication. Say that I'd collect the event feeds from a load of cinemas, music venues I like around the world, why not, plus those of musicians. I want my RSS-based events reader to narrow down the date field to be this weekend, location to be my town, and ticket field to be available, and why not price to something I can afford, while I'm at it? Bam, everything I could dream of doing this weekend, no Facebook and using a slightly modified version of a two-decade-old tech.
Similar functionality for shopping.
Why couldn't RSS be extended to something like this?
It's really not that RSS couldn't handle (/be extended to handle) this use case, it's that the parties publishing this information do not want you to have that much control over the feed.
See how much effort Netflix puts into making their catalog hard to browse, to obfuscate the actual size of the catalog and promote specific things they need to show a large return on, or all the sponsorships/ad-deals/promotions that inevitably begin to clutter almost any commercial news feed.
We have the technology, but publishers will fight tooth and nail to keep control over the platform away from the end user.
Remember the heady days when Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, et all had almost open access to their 'social graphs', allowing people to grab content from one place, post to another, build connections using tools like Yahoo Pipes? I sometimes long for simpler days when companies were more open with their data. Didn't Netflix even have a more open api back in the day that you could rank and sort, and see new release dates, etc?
But Netflix is different from a gigging band, venue and cinema, whose financial models are based on actual ticket sales not whatever the hell Netflix's is. It takes so much labour and money for them to get eyeballs filtered through social media and paper ads and to attract customers to their sites. So for them this would simply be almost a free extra way to drive traffic.
I think you're making a valid point about Netflix, but not seeing how it applies to more traditional financial models?
The parties in that case would be the venues, cinemas, concert halls, etc. They don't to control any platform, they want that information to be freely available. They want lots of sites to show case them (remember, comoditize your complements).
From one direction 99% of the world's VCR clocks blinked "12:00" for the entire lifespan of that media format. The proposal is a lot of interactivity and cognitive load to demand from most of humanity. Only a very small segment of society, mostly engineers, can utilize parametric search. Even engineers are lazy or in a hurry sometimes, in theory investing time in a parametric search would benefit me, in practice I needed a USB cable and going to amazon for a generic search of "amazonbasics usb type-c cable" works well enough.
From the other direction there's not much middle ground between the proposal and a REST API. You're asking for developer.ebay.com, I've fooled around with that a little and its fun. Sometimes I think the business people don't understand how much the devs are exposing in their APIs, which makes me worry about the staying power of public APIs. There are businesses where their business model and front-end UI could all be replaced by a very small shell script and I don't think the business people understand that weakness. Of course an API can be shut off with the flick of a switch once it eats into profits.
Yes, yes, yes! This is such a good idea. Working at a University, I’ve often thought this would be the ideal way of advertising seminars. I suspect the problem is chicken and egg, the technological barrier is just a little too high for this to be implemented when RSS readers are not widely used.
As one that loves and RSS and hated that many websites don't offer them anymore, I created a middleware that transforms the static HTML of most websites to an RSS/Atom feed. Its just a proof-of-concept, but maybe you like it :)
This looks interesting, thanks for sharing the link! I work on a project that's somewhat similar but users have to be explicit (using CSS selectors) about the elements that will be used to create the feed.[1] I like that yours appears to try to pick out the best elements without user input.
Readit News
I'd like to see new innovation around protocols and client 'browsers' that were made with monetization built-in as a first-tier specification.
1) client sends request for content with some header with payment information attached. 2) server verifies payment transferred. 3) server responds to client with content after payment verification.
If this existed, RSS would be alive and well. Internet publishers would be alive and well. The internet would be a more beautiful place with a viable first-party alternative to ads.
Challenges here would be:
- Sufficiently low transaction costs to make micropayments viable. (Bundle payments?) - Verifying proof of payment extremely fast
Someone(s) should create a new protocol.
FTP was invented in 1971. SMTP was invented in 1982. HTTP was invented in 1989. RSS was invented in 1999. Bitcoin was invented in 2008.
The amount of innovation around protocol has been abysmal relative to the explosion in creativity around applications on top of these protocols. And SMTP/HTTP are the only ones with any real mass adoption today.
I keep hearing how RSS is dead for many years. My favorite blogs seem to be doing fine, its not like my newsblur stream of posts has decreased over the years.
Many people are unhappy about non-monetized readers and authors just being happy off by themselves. The people most able to "fix" that are the happy readers and authors, and the readers are not very motivated to spam and tax themselves, and the authors obviously don't mind not monetizing or they wouldn't be blogging to begin with.
There doesn't seem to be an obvious disruptive force or angle to apply force to "improve" the stable situation of a distributed decentralized happy unmonetized ecosystem.
Unless a blog really has ~50,000+ daily uniques, or a lucractive audience niche, I suspect there’s not much opportunity to monetize even if they wanted to.
As someone getting into RSS more recently, I've definitely struggled to find decent sites to follow (though trawling hackernews totally helps:)).
I have noticed that people in hackernews generally tend to look things from a, excuse me for saying so, narrow business "make money" perspective. Or maybe it's somewhat US related, I'm not sure.
There are thousands of sites that don't live from advertising. Government, universities, and every public or even private institute has a site to provide information, news, announcements etc. There are also hobbyists' sites who are never going to make money from adverts.
Not everything should be reduced to a Facebook page.
Not everything should be about money.
First and foremost I think there is a need to recalibrate what matters and what actions that requires.
Is this that bad? I personally don't mind this at all, I subscribe to RSS feeds so I can easily tell at a glance who has an update in one place. If they then want to redirect me for the full content, then so be it, especially if the alternative is me loading every single one of those sites every day to check anyway.
I get that when people think of “RSS”, they’re thinking of tech that downloads text and maybe some images into a reader, but it’s just another means of syndicating media. The same places that disseminate the full text continue to do so because they’re not invested in making money directly off the writing, and the same places that have an investment in you going directly to the site continue to operate their feeds in that manner. If you have a browser extension that can discover it, or are willing to do a bit of guesswork, it’s amazing how many new sites launched in the last year that might not expose it on the website (because the webmaster didn’t think it was important to expose even when the CMS has it) actually have a feed you can pass off to a reader.
I don’t think RSS is ever going be competitive with a service like Instagram or Reddit for what they do, but the full value of these services doesn’t lie entirely within a feed and wouldn’t be neatly exposed within the constraints of the RSS or Atom specs to begin with. It’s different, and therefore have other, albeit less popular than social media, uses.
If someone prefers a stream of photographs to a stream of blogs and news sites, and that’s a lot of people, then RSS isn’t going to be competitive for their attention. If somebody prefers the discussions on Reddit and the semi-randomness of sources, RSS isn’t going to be competitive for their attention either. If you don’t care about an image stream (with comments, reactions, stories and whatever else Instagram has), and you can do without the Reddit commentary, well, you may very well have a use for RSS. Or maybe not. If it hasn’t gone away yet (and it really hasn’t), I have a hard time believing it is going anywhere in the near future.
There's been a worrying trend of some podcasts shifting to a "get our app" mode of delivery. I've been boycotting each one, and been encouraging the podcasts I donate to to explicitly keep the RSS delivery.
Much of my browsing of the site at least starts off in a feed reader, to make it quick to find what I'm interested in. From there, I'll open links to the site proper, with all the comments and such that make the experience what it is.
That's a gross oversimplification. Lots of content isn't worth anything but some is. If you're a stock trader, for example, certain timely information is well-worth paying for. And there's a market for that served by Bloomberg, Thomson-Reuters, and so on.
The term "content" obscures the differences by suggesting its all interchangeable. That's certainly in the interest of the Googles and Facebooks of the world: When all content is equal, no content creator has any negotiating power.
But there's a distinction between a multi-month investigative report and hastily paraphrased rewrite at some fly-by-night website intent on capturing algorithmic ad dollars.
Pricing news content is hard because it has a different value to different people and often the value is only apparent after it has been consumed.
It's worth asking how much we will pay for reports on political corruption, civic injustice, and so on. If the price for content is $0, the signal to noise ratio will disappear.
I would have agree with this two years ago but things have changed. I'm just worn down with the huge volume of free dross that doesn't tell you anything. This year I've started subscribing to a bunch of resources and stopped with google news/fb noise.
To be fair, most were aweful and never reached critical mass. And many were to early and badly placed. Today situation is different. Patreon, twitch, youtube, netflix, spotify and all the other paid services proof that people are willing to pay something for content, to their conditions.
I think a well implemented micro-payment could work out today well enough to be viable. Something build into the browsers and aggregator-sites (reddit, hackernews, google news, facebook...) first. Most users don't wanna waste their time with micromanaging their bills, so make it optional, and automate it for the rest of the time.
Most places use content to get you to look at ads, but some places write content as a sort of ad itself - we said something thoughtful to build brand recognition, consumer confidence.
Would be interesting to read about that — you happen to have any links?
I websearched for "failed micropayments" and found: "One type of micropayment that does work — one you might not even think of as a micropayment — is in-app-purchases (IAP). IAP are a huge source of revenue [...]"
And: "One reason users don’t like micropayments for content [to read] is it requires a decision ... waste the users’ mental effort ... costs so little that its implied worth is almost nothing" (here: https://blog.applovin.com/why-micropayments-fail-and-one-not... )
Is this true? It certainly doesn't feel like it. Reader was a first party branded reader. Google could put ads on Reader relevant to your interests (which they'd have been more keenly aware of than if you weren't using Reader), and they didn't have to pay out the publishers.
Google killed Reader, I think, for the second reason you mentioned: publishers were neutering their feeds. Reader had gone from a tool for consuming content to a tool for being notified about content.
I was a heavy user of Reader (and did huge amounts of work on RSS/Atom/etc), and I agreed with this assessment at the time.
More and more publishers were just putting headlines in RSS, so you had to click through anyway, and commercial blog sites were publishing a much larger volume of content, most of which I ignored. But I didn't want to unsubscribe, because occasionally there was something good.
Given that, I was finding much better content through aggregators like HN or via Twitter/FB.
Maybe they could have iterated and built something different, but what they had really wasn't useful.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2013/06/why-google-reader-got-the-ax/
Also, IIRC they specifically killed it because of Google Plus, which according to their plans should replace Google Reader and the demand for RSS.
What you describe looks like authentication and authorization rather than payment processing. Which may be a good thing. Adding support for authentication to the RSS protocol (OAuth for RSS anyone?) and RSS clients can potentially make it more interesting for publishers and solve the problem with monetization.
Monetization is rather simple, people visit a website if they want to read more about the news. In exchange you get guaranteed access to their attention not intermediated by Facebook, Google or Twitter.
Content publishers: Update the RSS feed generator to include the ads associated with the post. Write tools for dynamic ad insertion that actually updates the syndicated feed.
RSS App creators: Build ad networks that work with both ad buyers and content creators to match content-relevant ads, and either replace the dynamic in-post ads (and share revenue), or add additional intra-post ads.
Someone explain to me why this couldn't work with the existing technology stack - no new protocol, or client-side changes required.
Also it is too lightweight in terms of cpu, memory, network and power usage, so it wouldn't push users to upgrade to the latest and greatest hardware (and data plans) every year just to maintain the same performance they had last year.
I think what you mentioned could be accomplished using existing protocols. There isn't a need for a new protocol for this specific purpose.
For this specific purpose, what if we just had personalized/signed RSS feeds per payer?
This is exactly the recently-proposed LSAT protocol[0]. It uses the HTTP402 response code to prompt for payment over the Lightning Network in exchange for a cryptographic bearer credential that may be used in future requests to the server.
[0] https://lsat.tech/
https://newscatcherapi.com/
I probably should write a post with exact numbers: * how frequently it is updated * how many websites still support it * etc
The streaming and game services seems to point at monthly subscription fee from an aggregator as a working model. Not sure how they distribute royalties though, I suspect there are many models I won’t agree with based on what they incentivize.
Then there are the Kickstarter/patreon. Where money is given more in support than for a specific product. This is more like the UBI approach.
I think there is room for a hybrid approach here, merging the two.
> I'd like to see new innovation around protocols and client 'browsers' that were made with monetization built-in as a first-tier specification.
I don't think the solution should be to cater to what big platforms want.
If we did that, then the logical conclusion of that is that we would have to download some bloated locked down app for each platform we wanted to visit, and we would have a plethora of walled gardens. Copying and pasting text would be very limited, and we certainly could not "view source". The best we could do to save content was take screen shots, we certainly could not click on an image and save it. Basically what they are doing now.
Platforms would like nothing better than to completely deprecate access by web browsers all together. (Didn't Instagram do that recently?) Perhaps in the near future, websites will require that you use an "Apple approved" web browser, if they let you access them outside of the app at all.
But, they fact that they present any of their content at all is because of the ubiquity of web browsers. They could probably make more money if they had complete control of their platform, and could do things like prevent ad-blocking.
So, we should have pushed more for RSS to be de-facto requirement of serving content. Firefox, and other browsers, should have advertised when RSS was available, and make it highly discoverable for users.
> The amount of innovation around protocol has been abysmal relative to the explosion in creativity around applications on top of these protocols. And SMTP/HTTP are the only ones with any real mass adoption today.
I don't personally care that much about the protocol itself, I care about the content that the protocol makes available. If reading an RSS story required unpacking a bloated js runtime and fetching even more content, then why not just use a browser?
Publishers also hate SMTP and IMAP, and would love to force users to log into their platform and view ads, just to send an email to someone. And Google is certainly doing their part to eventually kill off these protocols.
AOL and many 90s ISPs did not support these protocols either (even though they used them internally) because they wanted to make users log into their platform instead of using their own mail client.
But the reason that SMTP still exists today is because of its ubiquity. The more RSS is adopted, the more popular it becomes, and the more platforms had to support it, even if they did not want to.
Being able to programmatically send emails is incredibly useful and helpful. I'm sure that when the last SMTP server shuts down, they will tell you that it is ok, because you can still use the mutually incompatible GMail or Outlook.com APIs. Pending approval.
Firefox did, with a subscribe button in the address bar. https://mariolurig.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/firefox-rs...
- PubMed
- Dailymed
- clinicaltrials.gov
Slack has a slash command for ‘/feed subscribe https://foo.bar/baz.rss’ so we use that plus the above sites RSS feed for real time notices on when new data is added.
If you click a link to an Atom feed in Mobile Safari, iOS will launch the Apple News app. Which will then show you an error message saying the content is unavailable.
As far as I can tell there is no way for an installed reader app to take over handling of feed URLs. It just makes the entire feed ecosystem look broken for anyone using an iPhone or iPad.
Apple is basically monopolizing the whole market for rss readers.
You can't be a monopoly with such a small userbase.
Not sure why though.
Sure.
> Stop developing for Apple products. Stop treating Apple like they matter.
The market, as it actually exists, disagrees (especially in terms of profit, as opposed to number of devices). I understand hating Apple, but if I write software for profit, I care about where the customers/money are and Apple absolutely qualifies. Should you also support other platforms? Absolutely. But removing support for a platform like you're suggesting is at best prioritizing ideology over profit, and even the ideology argument is... not one-sided.
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RSS should be ubiquitous, and seen as an essential part of any service that serves structured incremental content. People should be emailing webmasters asking why there is no little orange icon.
It also serves as a back door form of accessibility. But I strongly suspect that RSS goes against the interests of big tech who don't like RSS, because companies like Facebook go through so much trouble to make it difficult to scrape or modify their content.
I just wish that Mozilla would stand up more to their corporate underwriters. Now RSS is relegated to add-ons, and is on the same tier gopher (no offense to gopher).
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17613051
But unfortunately that is not really a solution. It is like saying that it is ok that a website removed screen-reader support, because you have a screen reader that can still parse the website anyway. The problem is RSS not being made available at all.
RSS being made available less and less, and they have less of an incentive to do so. And I am saddened that a lot of the good work Mozilla did was abandoned by them and that the web is regressing.
Additionally, having to make your own scraper is really not a solution to RSS not being available. Scrapers are very high maintenance, and can easily break with updates.
It let's me curate sources into different customizable feeds like news or science. I pay for the pro happily since they let me add specific twitter accounts too. Really saves me time!
The data services which provided content-without-markup were abandoned, and the fluff and garbage were embraced.
It was supposed to be that Mozilla would be a beacon of light in a murky web, but it has lost itself in the void.
It seems to me that Mozilla executives has no fortitude. They prefer revenue rather then invention and what's best for the user. KaiOS is becoming the third biggest mobile OS, guess what it's FirefoxOS, but Mozilla was too afraid to give it a shot. Then there's the Rust programming language that is taking the world with storm. It seems there are great talent, and if they would be allowed to work in the user's best interest people would switch over from Chrome - and Firefox would become big enough to matter. As for revenue, a lot of purchases are initiated from the web, but they leave the browser for a short while and takes a 3-5% cut. Browsers could work with banks and offer a secure wallet. And micro-transactions could become a thing. Publishers are crying for a solution! The web have been funded by ads for over 20 years now, with diminishing returns. And users hate it! The web is ripe for invention!
Bollocks!
Google - and any search engine - cannot help you find an exact web-page you found after hours of researching while web-surfing earlier.
And RSS feeds are for when you’re already interested in a content source. Google searches help you find something new: they won’t help you automatically be informed of new posts. They just save you the time of having to manually sort-out new content from the old when you visit an article website.
Google isn’t to blame for the drop in popularity of RSS (Google Reader’s closing was a symptom, not a cause), it’s the content websites’ webmasters who saw that by allowing machine-readable access to their content index means that users wanting to get to their new content can bypass the advertising on their home-page, effectively halving the pageviews and thus halving their revenue - or if they included their whole article content in the RSS feed then they’re missing out on potentially all of the advertising revenue - that’s why some content authors, like Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, as an example, only provide their full RSS feed to paying subscribers.
RSS still works for podcasts though - as podcasts wouldn’t be popular at all if people had to navigate through a webpage to download each audio file each time a new release is made - so the halving of web banner ad revenue is compensated-for by having a much larger audience for the in-audio advertising baked into the podcast content.
Twitter - and centralised content platforms like Facebook also was/is a major part for the reasons I described above: allowing direct access to content means less pageviews. Somewhat concerningly, we’re seeing people use Twitter to do things that RSS was originally designed for: such as posting links to new articles posted to a blog or for things like live service uptime status updates.
Finally, there’s the usability issue: it’s difficult to describe what RSS is or why it’s good to a layperson. Ssure, today we can just say “an RSS feed is just like a podcast, but for normal web content, or anything at all” - but back in the early 2000s when RSS awareness (or hype...) peaked, I had difficulty understanding what a “syndication feed” was - the terminology “feed” implied to me it was a unidirectional continuous push-style connection (like a HTML/HTTP EventSource) - not a pull-style index file. Don’t forget the format-war with Atom too.
I can readily understand why they removed it—it was implemented in what had become the wrong way for such a feature, and fixing it would have taken more effort than they wanted to expend on such a niche feature, and it was starting to hold back other improvements. (Similar deal to why they broke old extensions: they were holding the browser back technically, and a couple of years later I think it was fairly clearly the right decision, painful though it was.)
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This exactly describes my experience on this website.
Event syndication. Say that I'd collect the event feeds from a load of cinemas, music venues I like around the world, why not, plus those of musicians. I want my RSS-based events reader to narrow down the date field to be this weekend, location to be my town, and ticket field to be available, and why not price to something I can afford, while I'm at it? Bam, everything I could dream of doing this weekend, no Facebook and using a slightly modified version of a two-decade-old tech.
Similar functionality for shopping.
Why couldn't RSS be extended to something like this?
See how much effort Netflix puts into making their catalog hard to browse, to obfuscate the actual size of the catalog and promote specific things they need to show a large return on, or all the sponsorships/ad-deals/promotions that inevitably begin to clutter almost any commercial news feed.
We have the technology, but publishers will fight tooth and nail to keep control over the platform away from the end user.
I think you're making a valid point about Netflix, but not seeing how it applies to more traditional financial models?
From the other direction there's not much middle ground between the proposal and a REST API. You're asking for developer.ebay.com, I've fooled around with that a little and its fun. Sometimes I think the business people don't understand how much the devs are exposing in their APIs, which makes me worry about the staying power of public APIs. There are businesses where their business model and front-end UI could all be replaced by a very small shell script and I don't think the business people understand that weakness. Of course an API can be shut off with the flick of a switch once it eats into profits.
You can put a future date in RSS for events.
To lazy to search for examples sorry.
It's really easy to get posts on the frontpage only if they have more than x points:
https://hnrss.org/frontpage?points=x
Or contain certain keywords:
https://hnrss.org/newest?q=git+OR+linux
https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy/
[1] http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/