Please, expose your RSS

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

RSS feeds are praised as a simple, open way to follow blogs, news and podcasts without algorithmic timelines or ads, yet many sites either hide their feeds or implement them inconsistently. Commenters debate whether feeds should contain full content or just excerpts, how to expose them clearly (icons, `<link>` tags, predictable URLs), and how publishers can still gain analytics or revenue when readers stay inside feed apps. Several note that the decline of native browser support and the dominance of social platforms have marginalized RSS, but argue that good feeds remain a powerful tool for discovery, subscription, and building a healthier independent web.

Role and Value of RSS

  • Seen as a “beacon” for a saner web: structured updates, inbox-like reading, filtering, search, read/unread state.
  • Supports both discovery (e.g., HN feeds, YouTube channels/playlists) and reliable subscriptions to specific authors.
  • Some treat it mainly as notification (titles/blurbs only); others want to read full content entirely inside a reader.

Full-text vs Excerpt/Link Feeds

  • Major friction point: many feeds only provide a link or short blurb, forcing a browser visit.
  • Some argue this makes RSS pointless and stopped using it.
  • Others prefer blurbs so they can visit the original, enjoy the design, and show up in site analytics.
  • Counter-argument: full-text feeds give readers choice; excerpts force everyone to click through.

Discovery and Exposure of Feeds

  • Many sites already have feeds but hide them or omit obvious links/icons.
  • Autodiscovery via <link rel="alternate" …> is often missing or broken.
  • Readers and tools commonly guess at paths (/rss, /feed, atom.xml, etc.) because of this inconsistency.
  • Several people added visible RSS icons to their sites after reading the article.

RSS vs Social Platforms and Monetization

  • Some claim RSS “lost” to aggregators like Reddit/HN, arguing it “doesn’t move the needle.”
  • Others say aggregators are good for discovery but bad for guaranteed delivery of posts from favorite authors.
  • Ads and analytics are a core tension: full-text feeds can bypass ads; link-only feeds help preserve page views.
  • There’s anger at browsers and big platforms dropping RSS support, interpreted by some as ad-driven suppression; others blame low usage and maintenance costs.

Tooling, Clients, and Workarounds

  • Many self-hosted and hosted readers mentioned, plus browser extensions to restore feed icons and proper feed rendering.
  • Some readers fetch “full text” from the linked page even when feed is truncated, effectively scraping.
  • Emerging ideas: LLM-based summarization pipelines, print/booklet generators, text-to-audio converters, and custom readers with analytics hints (e.g., custom URL params, user-agent strings).

Standards, Best Practices, and Limits

  • Questions about “doing RSS correctly”: advice includes limiting feed length (e.g., latest N posts) to reduce bandwidth, with debate about caching behaviors.
  • Atom is suggested by some as more reliable, but usage is mixed.
  • Subscriber counts via reader-side aggregation are possible but inherently approximate and somewhat centralizing.