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How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds
(openrss.org)
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this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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Thankfully all the sites I follow still publish their RSS feeds. I fear the day when they start dropping off.
Many popular sites have dropped it. New sites often don't support it in the first place. In cases they do, it's a truncated version. Only a snippet/topic is visible and rest relinks to a browser. It is still better than nothing but the halcyon days of RSS are gone, IMO.
The truncated versions are annoying, but honestly I understand why. These websites live entirely off ad sales, without them they go bankrupt. So letting RSS readers scrape an ad-free version of an article makes no sense to them.
I've been using RSS for literally 18 years and that has always been the case. News sites make money by advertising, they get no advertising if you just read the RSS feed, so they give you a snippet.
It would be nice if every site was like Arstechnica and gave you a full text ad free RSS feed when you pay to subscribe.
The difficulties in monetisation is what had been slowly killing RSS support on websites. There have been services that have tried to solve this problem, one is mentioned in the article, but they don’t seem to have had wide adoption.
It’s not just inserting ads either, today it’s also the pervasive tracking that makes money.
RSS was great for things like personal blogs, but commercial sites came to see little value in it, and have been dropping it as a result.
Why not? That's based on the current system of websites loading in third party ad providers. If you include the ads in the article/have sponsors etc. they will come through the rss.
It's not perfect, but newsletters are making do it with just fine. I read a couple newsletters with them but make no effort to remove them like I do with web articles, because they are not disruptive, inappropriate, heavy or privacy invasive.
For me, that already happened.
I had planned a train trip that started to seem pretty unlikely when the relevant union started talking about a strike. I needed to check the union’s site every day to see how the negotiations were going. Doing that through RSS would have been nice, but the site didn’t support it and none of the apps I tried were able to help me either. Do I need to craft my own webscraping code and make a cron job to run it every hour?
i miss reading quality cracked articles on rss. there isn't really any article-length comedy anymore anywhere is there. it's all dry stuff or deranged opinions