RSS isn't dead.

Smart bloggers will always expose an RSS feed, because readers following your RSS feed are more likely to read your blog than traffic from other sources. Having an RSS feed is the slightly weaker version of the mailing lists. Mail which is also going strong — and the easiest way to build a mailing list btw, is to connect your RSS feed to Mailchimp.

And RSS feeds are mandatory for podcasts too.

Some blogs choose not to expose RSS feeds of course, but they do so at their own loss. This is because some people are not interested in expanding their audience, they just want to publish some stuff from time to time. And that's totally fine.

> Plus it's difficult to monetize an RSS feed.

An RSS feed can include just summaries that redirect users to your website. And I actually prefer summaries because I don't want to mess with CSS stuff.

Of course you can monetize it, from where did you get the impression that you can't?

Re: monetizing: Probably means you cant execute random JavaScript in an rss reader? I might be wrong on that.

At least the Vienna RSS reader (open-source for Mac), which I use, carries a full-fledged browser, and I think it displays full HTML—images and such. I'm not sure if I see any entries that execute serious Javascript, but I imagine it would work.

And even if the RSS feeds are not used a lot by the majority of the audience, I wouldn't be surprised if it helped bring in other audiences. I feel like RSS users are more likely power users and may be more a bit more interested in the site than most users.

I personally know that a lot of the RSS feeds I am subscribed to I also end up sharing articles with friends. I see these articles early and quick and help create early discussion about them and comment early on them often first. I feel like overall RSS feed users may not directly look hugely beneficial to a site, but can have other impacts hard to track.

> And RSS feeds are mandatory for podcasts too.

Tell that to Stitcher. They have paid Stitcher Premium podcasts that you can only play in their (terrible) app. A third party developer ended up creating "Unofficial RSS Feeds" for them, but who knows how long that will last.

A summary of the article would be nice, but most of the time it is an information-less lead to get you to click.

RSS died when Google Reader died.

Not really. RSS is still on nearly every WordPress site. I simply switches from Google Reader to Feedly.

RSS switched from life-support to being alive when Reader died. Before there were a few apps and sites. With Reader’s death we got a resurgence and many new tools.

True, it is sad. What I don't understand is why Google didn't continue to push for RSS like they used to in ye olden times with Reader.

High quality blogs both produce content and link to other high quality content - both things that Google should be interested in to improve search. Instead they decided to capture that information (and eyeballs) with Google+, a calculated gamble that they lost.

If I was king of Google, I would be trying to foster a strong, open blogging community as a backstop against the Facebook's of the world swallowing content inside their non-indexable event horizons.

Google wants you to go through them, not direct to the source. The more you go through them the more data they can track and ads they can sell you.

In ye olden times, there wasn't Medium. Sites where everybody could write whatever they wanted. And so sites like Medium could run their own feed of sorts, and send me a digest email with what they think I want to read.

The King(s) of Google do have a strong blogging community in Blogger, but it was never supposed to be, nor never will be, a backstop against Facebook. It would be better for Google to work within Facebook on this, as bloggers in WordPRess, or MEdium, or whatever announce on social media, guess whose ads are running on the blogs? And I myself as a dev, I'm still searching for the best articles for development practices and more. They don't see that need for us to subscribe to RSS. It's the King(s) of Facebook, Twitter, etc., that need to listen. Giving us a way to watch our subscribed RSS feeds in their own ecosystem will give them the edge on content aggregation.

Back in the days there were several blog-search engines like Technorati which would use the RSS feeds from blogs to get updates quicker than Google did, because they indexed every 15 minutes and Google every couple of days.

I subscribe to a bunch of webcomics via RSS, and a few have changed over the years from embedding the comic into the feed to just having the feed be a link to the comic page so that they can still get some ad impressions.

I also subscribe to email newsletters that have sponsored links/blurbs in their content, and I'm sure that one could monetize RSS content similarly.

I was so annoyed at the fact that I couldn't see the web comic in my feed reader that I wrote plugins for TT-RSS which would on the fly replace them with the original size pictures: https://github.com/jeena/tt-rss-plugins/blob/master/jp_stutt...

I don't know where exactly xkcd lands on the web comic popularity scale, but let's be conservative and say Top 3. The xkcd RSS feed embeds the image (and alt text) into posts. That is very clearly a deliberate decision. The comics themselves are also CC-licensed.

I feel like Randall Munroe is doing well for himself. The math is probably different for smaller players.

I’m not aware of any news site or blog that doesn’t still support RSS.

As far as difficulty in monetizing, John Gruber has been making quite a bit of money for years selling one RSS entry at the beginning of the week and a thank you post at the end of the week.

> I’m not aware of any news site or blog that doesn’t still support RSS.

Bloomberg is one of the largest new sites; a top 1000 global site and top 200 US site by traffic. It has no RSS feeds.

Google: `bloomberg feed filetype:xml`

A little difficult to parse some of the results, but they're there.

they don't have full text, but I know I'm subscribed to several bloomberg feeds.

I just searched Feedly for Bloomberg and found multiple RSS feeds.

RSS is rarely shown to end-users any more, but I know a lot of people who use tools like ITTT to push their RSS feed to Twitter automatically, and services like iTunes use RSS to import podcasts into their walled gardens. RSS is not dead; it's just become invisible infrastructure.

There is no “walled garden” around Apple’s podcast. They crawl and index RSS feeds just like Google crawls web pages.

Once you subscribe to the podcast, the app itself polls the podcast’s feed and the audio is played directly from the host’s website.

You can also add a podcast directly if you know the feed url.

On top of all that, there has been a freely available API to the podcast directory for years that other podcast players use.

If you want to see a wall garden for podcasts, see Spotify, Google, etc.

I think you are currently right, but that's probably ending soon as Apple looks to fund their own exclusive podcasts too [1]. I hope podcasters and their cooperatives/companies can resist the siren call.

[1] https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/16/apple-will-reportedly-fun...

I would be okay with that if Apple introduced a standard in the RSS feed that allowed subscription, paid for podcasts that worked across apps. I’m all for a business model that lets me give companies money and they give me stuff as opposed to advertising.

FWIW, Giant Bomb (and I assume other sites) have premium podcasts that you can only access if you are a paid member[1], and you just subscribe using:

https://www.giantbomb.com/podcast-xml/premiumbombcast?api_ke... (you just copy it from the RSS button on their site)

(previously it was https://username:[email protected]/podcast-xml/prem...)

Seems to work across most apps. I don't see why it would be that hard to build a standard around something similar.

[1] primarily ad-free versions of their main podcasts, but they also have premium-exclusive podcasts

That's a weird feeling, reading about how RSS is dead via RSS reader. Initially I wanted to stop checking HN every 20 minutes, and solution was that simple https://hnrss.org/newest?comments=200&count=100

I agree definitely mostly dead and slowly dying off in exponential decay. Used to like my summaries but over time sites dropped it or only updated once in a blue moon. Mostly moved on to just bookmarking my favorite sites and making due.

The social networks weren't the ones who made RSS die off. The base of publishers and users just wasn't there. That said, RSS is not dead, just not as visible as it used to be.

Social networks did not decide to capture users. Users have decided that social networks are what they prefer and then the site publishers optimised for where most people are.