How RSS beat Microsoft

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

State of RSS Today

  • Strong split in perceptions: some say Google/Facebook/Twitter “killed” RSS; others argue it’s quietly thriving as a protocol used daily by power users.
  • Many report active use for blogs, news, YouTube channels, webcomics, HN, subreddits, and especially podcasts (often described as “RSS by definition”).
  • Consensus that RSS is niche and largely unknown to mainstream users, even in tech-adjacent fields.

Impact of Google Reader and Social Platforms

  • Google Reader is seen as a pivotal moment: it centralized RSS usage, then its shutdown scattered users to smaller or paid clones and coincided with the rise of social feeds.
  • Some feel this “kneecapped” the Web 2.0 open-subscription model and pushed creators into closed platforms with algorithmic feeds.
  • Twitter and other social networks are widely acknowledged as much larger in reach and discovery than RSS, but RSS is viewed as having “weathered” them in a non–zero-sum way.

User Experience: Strengths and Weaknesses

  • Fans praise RSS as a “dream for consumers”: single inbox, no algorithms, no engagement tricks, separation from email, offline reading, and multi-device syncing.
  • Critics find it too manual: harder subscription flow, poor discoverability, feed management overhead, and users unwilling to learn new tools when social “follow” or email newsletters feel “good enough.”
  • Some highlight friction from browser vendors removing native RSS UI.

Monetization and Publisher Incentives

  • Frequent claim: RSS has a “commercial problem” because invasive, trackable ads are harder to integrate, so publishers truncate feeds to drive pageviews.
  • Others counter that ads can be inserted as regular items or in content (as in podcasts and some long-running blogs), but lack of tracking weakens advertiser interest.
  • Paid full-text RSS for subscribers is cited as a promising model.

Technical Debates: Formats and Protocol Limits

  • Complaints about RSS’s messy XML and HTML-in-CDATA; several argue Atom is cleaner, but splitting standards may have hurt.
  • Alternatives mentioned: JSON Feed (JSON-based), ActivityPub (stream-like, social-focused), and ideas for newline-delimited JSON feeds with better pagination.
  • Polling is seen as an inherent weakness: either too frequent (server load) or too slow (latency). Some advocate webhooks or aggregation services that poll once and push updates.
  • Others argue HTTP caching and Atom pagination are sufficient if implemented correctly; ActivityPub is viewed as over-complex and hard to host statically.

Tools, Clients, and Workarounds

  • Many recommend specific readers (web, mobile, desktop, self-hosted like FreshRSS/TT-RSS) and browser extensions that auto-detect or “RSSify” sites.
  • Workarounds exist for platforms with weak or hidden feeds (e.g., Reddit URLs with .rss, RSSHub, scraping tools, newsletter→RSS gateways).

Novel Uses: Printed RSS & AI Agents

  • A proposed service to turn RSS feeds into physical newspapers sparks interest and skepticism:
    • Enthusiasm for use cases like non-technical relatives, resort towns, or vending-machine “zines.”
    • Major concerns about volume (hundreds of items/day), curation, layout/typesetting, and environmental/energy costs.
    • AI is suggested for summarization, layout, and curation.
  • Some hope future AI agents will act as universal scrapers to “restore” RSS-like consumption over arbitrary websites.

ICE and Historical / Analogy Points

  • Most commenters had never heard of Microsoft’s ICE; it’s treated as an obscure, failed alternative compared to RSS’s quiet survival.
  • One thread argues that “RSS won the battle but lost the war” to walled gardens and messaging platforms; others reply that as an open standard it doesn’t need to “win,” only to exist and remain usable.
  • The Betamax vs. VHS analogy is debated: people revisit why technically “better” formats can lose to UX, licensing, and distribution advantages—implicitly paralleling RSS vs. social platforms.

Broader Reflections: Open Web vs Algorithms

  • Several participants see a possible “next phase” where people rebuild a more interesting indie web and use RSS to route around algorithms.
  • Others are pessimistic: most users appear to prefer algorithmic feeds and frictionless discovery, even at the cost of openness and control.