Article on Techcrunch: "RSS is undead". First line: "RSS died"
I've become a lot more jaded about tech takes by tech magazines after Mastodon. RSS never died it's just not trendy enough that you hear people talk about it. Every WordPress blog on the net has an RSS feed. Every webcomic. Every news site. Including Techcrunch.
@Gargron every academic journal I've come across too
@gargron The rest of the article's more specific here, however, and he made a few valid points. ;)
@Gargron tech journalism knows nothing about tech, nor does it want to.
@Gargron It works and it's simple to get a feed work server-side.
It's "dead" only people forgot they were a thing, nah?
@Gargron I saw that article in my RSS feed. 
@Gargron not to mention podcasts, which even through Apple's stuff use an RSS feed
@Gargron I found this article from RSS. RSS is not died, it is alive and useful.
@Gargron RSS was always a technical implementation, never a true content platform. Some people mistook it for the latter, especially in popular discourse.
It serves its purpose now just as it always has. @technewsbot uses RSS, for example.
@Gargron Even more hilariously, wordpress lets you set up a search through its RSS feeds.
So you can have an RSS feed of a wordpress site with just the content you want in it.
@Gargron I literally just read an article talking about how RSS has survived many RSS deaths in the mainstream (death of Google Reader being one of those)
@brandon The shutdown of Google Reader was super unforgiveable. Google Plus is dead af but Reader was an alive social network.
@Gargron I completely agree. I used it pretty much every day! Now I'm using IFTTT+Pocket
reader was the best thing google ever did, and they killed it because it defied their own monetization scheme. Can't adwords if people get everything they want served up without an ad-filled medium. Being able to share and comment and tag and collate feeds was technical perfection.
@sampo thanks shampoo
@Gargron wow, feeds are being discussed in tech publications again. Is it the RenaiSSance? 😎
@Gargron RSS is not what is was heading to be.
There used to be RSS buttons that would light up when visiting websites that had feeds. Now you need to "customise Firefox" to put it back, or on Chrom.e.ium you need to install a freaking plugin.
For many, RSS functionality is provided by social media, from Facebook to Reddit. (We've started to see the price of this.)
Maybe RSS will have a come back, I sure hope so. I mean, in end-user usage.
Cheers,
@manu Yeah, I don't understand why Firefox removed the icon from defaults. In Chrome, it almost becomes a strategy: Close down Google Reader, remove RSS icon from Chrome, start pushing publishers to use your proprietary AMP thing instead
@Gargron OMG, let's not even get in to AMP right now....That shit is scary.
Sorry if there was any misunderstanding, we weren't saying AMP replaces RSS. More like Google has a lot of influence, on one side trying to kill RSS, on the other, trying to make their own HTML spec.
I'm gonna be a total noob in here but... What's an AMP ? ^^'
@Qanno @Gargron @manu Accelerated Mobile Pages https://www.ampproject.org/
@Qanno @Gargron @manu @markshead In short, the death of the open web, via Google absorbing and serving all content directly from their servers. Oh, also, soon to be expanded to email as well.
@varx Nice. I will follow you... in both ways (clicking follow and adding an RSS button).
: ]
@Gargron Yup, it's a garbage take. RSS and atom are so quick to template that just about everything which can implement a feed does.
@Gargron Well not *every* WordPress blog, but disabling it is far more non-trivial than just letting it be. It's a feature which hasn't been removed, because removing it would end up breaking a good many things. I'm totally with you that a lot of "tech coverage" is more "trend coverage" these days. It's sad... I have to say that I am *really* appreciating that stuff that on other platforms I went "it's hard to fix that without several steps" in Mastodon, it's at most one step, and encouraged
@Gargron The most telling portion of this article is the fact that people can't track RSS. Since everything is so data-obsessed, RSS doesn't make sense because you can't act on any metrics you're missing.
RSS works fine - content is distributed just as well as ever. The difference is that it's opaque and publishers aren't interested anymore.
@Gargron Even worse, readers (since Google killed Reader) started to hijack the share options so _they_ could collect data. Feedly redirected share links so they appeared as Feedly items, not as items from the author.
It's an old post, and I'm not sure they still do the same thing, but it was detailed here: https://mashe.hawksey.info/2014/01/thieving-feedly-pulling-off-a-twitter-card-heist/
@Gargron I imagine there were similar articles in the mid 80's after the Macintosh's debut: "The command line is dead."
Meanwhile, a lot of us spend most of our days in one.
@Gargron Few big technologies actually seem to die -- they just lose market share. Core users stay and the total userbase might actually grow. A few other examples would be IRC, Usenet, Torrents, and literally every programming language ever.
@Gargron I love RSS. It works well, and I even implemented it for host monitoring.
"trendy"
That's the key word.
Tech that does its simple job well isn't trendy and regularly gets overlooked.
RSS isn't groundbreaking, but it serves its purpose just fine.
@Gargron "RSS is dead because nothing can succeed unless it lets publishers do horrible things to their readers".
Okay.
@Gargron This is fine.
@WeeMadHamish @gcupc @gargron Ah, I stand corrected
@gcupc Capitalism, comrade.
@gargron
Isn’t saying RSS died like saying webpages died. Or maybe html 🤔
@gargron
btw spaRSS (https://github.com/Etuldan/spaRSS) is a really good open source android app for RSS feeds
@Gargron Still using it, never stopped. Big fan of NewsBlur reader.
@Gargron And for every site without feeds, on a given subject, there are ten with them.
@Gargron I have a policy to never trust a tech mag. I'll trust, e.g., Phrack, 2600, and a few journalists such as @sarahjeong , but for the bulk of it, a well informed blog or comment on HN beats mags.
@pnathan @Gargron @sarahjeong Although, how many comments on HN are well informed?
@Gargron Isn't it also an SEO Thing?