The problem is that the majority of people who used to visit websites just ask LLMs nowadays. They don't visit the site itself, where the work origins from, so they also can't give back / support the source.
It's similar to the viewership of coding tutorials having sunk incredibly low these, creators, especially the ones creating high quality content, can't finance such work / content anymore.
> The problem is that the majority of people who used to visit websites just ask LLMs nowadays.
I truly do not believe this is the same type of topic. People visit websites and RSS feeds and writers they care about, and don't ask LLMs for this content. They ask LLMs for content that they don't care about those elements for.
If I want to know what Gruber thinks about iPhone whatever, I'm just going to check Daring Fireball. I'm not going to ask Claude what Gruber thinks.
Then charge for it. I happily pay for high quality services. I pay for Jetbrains editors, I pay for my email, I pay for LLM tokens, and I pay for Patreon subscriptions. Stop supporting content with advertising.
shameless plug: I just created a minimalist CLI RSS reader inspired by Taskwarrior for this exact reason: https://github.com/kantord/blogtato
The design philosophy I took is: account/subscription detox + zero distractions. You do not need to create a user account, you can just sync your data between different devices using git. And the user interface is minimal and designed to just get out of the way.
Can't wait to try some of the readers in this thread. I landed on inoreader not long after the Google reader died. The old reader wasn't doing what I needed back then. I've probably been using this a little too long without checking for what else is out there.
I came here via NetNewsWire. iCloud sync is flakey but that's the only quibble. Oh, and you can't yet export starred articles unless you fiddle with SQL.
Just make valid robots.txt and sitemap.xml, please, so I can crawl and update mirrors of the sites I am interested in with least amount of impact on the site.
when google reader died, I jumped to TheOldReader. it was great for a long time but has been having challenges lately and I jumped to the Vienna app on macos.
Actually I would have agreed with you 2 years ago. But now working with AI so much, maybe RSS "is" just the thing we need for some of the distrobution.
I'd be happy if AI would disappear, but I quite agree with the prior comment - AI is awful but RSS isn't too terribly useful for many of us either. It depends on the individual of course, some people love using RSS feeds. I don't use them. I find RSS not useful.
RSS is dead because it’s backwards. It requires everyone you want to follow to implement it since that is the best we could do a decade ago.
We can do better than that: an LLM can ingest unstructured data and turn it into a feed. You shouldn’t need someone else to comply with a protocol just to ingest their data.
I don’t get why people keep fantasizing about a system that gave consumers no control. Scrape the website directly. You decide what’s in the feed, not them.
> an LLM can ingest unstructured data and turn it into a feed.
An LLM can try to do that, yes. But LLMs are lossy compression. RSS feeds are accurate, predictable, and follow a pre-defined structure. Using LLMs to ingest data which can easily be turned into an parseable data structure seems strange: use the LLM to do the "next part" of the formula (comprehension, decision making, etc)
I imagine a reasonably intelligent coding agent would notice that an RSS feed already exists and use it. Possibly transformed if it's not quite the format you want?
I don't quite use "social media" per se, unless of course hackernews is part of it (which, kind of, is ... anything we can use other people can read or relate to, is kind of social, by definition. I think Facebook etc... tried to claim ownership over the term "social media", and I disagree with this notion). Having said that, I don't use or need RSS, so I don't think there will be a renaissance for RSS for most people.
I do agree that AI is killing tons of things right now. This monster must be stopped; it is worse than Skynet in that it really, really sucks. Things started to decay before AI took over, though - for instance, Google search has been garbage since years. It was useful before that.
I used to compare the decay of google search with how youtube search works. You search for, say, "ninja cats". You get some results about cats. Perhaps also ninjas. After like 10 or 20 results, you suddenly get other videos that are totally unrelated, but you may click on it. That's addictive design. People click on it suddenly when it is interesting to them - but this also takes them away from their original search. Something similar happened to google search. The UI is total crap, it shows semi-related videos (I don't want to watch videos when I search for a specific term), some ads for companies (Google is milking it here) and then also useless entries such as "other people searched for sick grannies instead, do you want to search for this as well" and similar UI-ruining components. Without ublock origin I'd be quite lost already - lo and behold, Google killed ublock origin because it threatened their business model (another reason to use ublock origin; we really need to get rid of Google. It is no longer a useful corporation - just greedy).
Every article that I’ve read in the last 5 years about the RSS revival has a big section explaining what is RSS.
And that’s the answer about RSS renaissance. If you have to explain it, there is zero chance of massive adoption.
I still mourn the loss of Google Reader.
There are plenty of RSS reader apps, but there are very few with good cross-device sync - let alone self-hosted cross-device sync.
I don't think you could self-host Google Reader, so it sort of feels like these two sentences don't hang together.
It's more linked to there not being any / many high quality RSS reader applications, so the comment is talking about a feature, so it does make sense.
The problem is that the majority of people who used to visit websites just ask LLMs nowadays. They don't visit the site itself, where the work origins from, so they also can't give back / support the source.
It's similar to the viewership of coding tutorials having sunk incredibly low these, creators, especially the ones creating high quality content, can't finance such work / content anymore.
> The problem is that the majority of people who used to visit websites just ask LLMs nowadays.
I truly do not believe this is the same type of topic. People visit websites and RSS feeds and writers they care about, and don't ask LLMs for this content. They ask LLMs for content that they don't care about those elements for.
If I want to know what Gruber thinks about iPhone whatever, I'm just going to check Daring Fireball. I'm not going to ask Claude what Gruber thinks.
Then charge for it. I happily pay for high quality services. I pay for Jetbrains editors, I pay for my email, I pay for LLM tokens, and I pay for Patreon subscriptions. Stop supporting content with advertising.
shameless plug: I just created a minimalist CLI RSS reader inspired by Taskwarrior for this exact reason: https://github.com/kantord/blogtato
The design philosophy I took is: account/subscription detox + zero distractions. You do not need to create a user account, you can just sync your data between different devices using git. And the user interface is minimal and designed to just get out of the way.
there was a discussion about it yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47297091
Can't wait to try some of the readers in this thread. I landed on inoreader not long after the Google reader died. The old reader wasn't doing what I needed back then. I've probably been using this a little too long without checking for what else is out there.
Boy I hope so. I miss my RSS reader. I'd love to see one made with the modern UX that makes the doomscrolling apps so engaging. (Or maybe I wouldn't.)
I'm reading this on Feeder, which a free RSS app I found on F-Droid. Works for me
The Reeder family of RSS apps goes for engaging scrolling on iOS.
I'm reading this on my RSS reader right now :)
I am pretty happy with Readwise’s Reader
I came here via NetNewsWire. iCloud sync is flakey but that's the only quibble. Oh, and you can't yet export starred articles unless you fiddle with SQL.
Plug for feeeed: https://feeeed.nateparrott.com
It’s my primary hn reader now.
A good RSS extension for firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/feedbroreader...
Just make valid robots.txt and sitemap.xml, please, so I can crawl and update mirrors of the sites I am interested in with least amount of impact on the site.
when google reader died, I jumped to TheOldReader. it was great for a long time but has been having challenges lately and I jumped to the Vienna app on macos.
Stop trying to make RSS happen again. It's not going to happen again.
I set it up a year or two ago. Now i ready 90 of articles and news through it.
It’s still happening.
Actually I would have agreed with you 2 years ago. But now working with AI so much, maybe RSS "is" just the thing we need for some of the distrobution.
I'd be happy if AI would disappear, but I quite agree with the prior comment - AI is awful but RSS isn't too terribly useful for many of us either. It depends on the individual of course, some people love using RSS feeds. I don't use them. I find RSS not useful.
RSS is dead because it’s backwards. It requires everyone you want to follow to implement it since that is the best we could do a decade ago.
We can do better than that: an LLM can ingest unstructured data and turn it into a feed. You shouldn’t need someone else to comply with a protocol just to ingest their data.
I don’t get why people keep fantasizing about a system that gave consumers no control. Scrape the website directly. You decide what’s in the feed, not them.
> an LLM can ingest unstructured data and turn it into a feed.
An LLM can try to do that, yes. But LLMs are lossy compression. RSS feeds are accurate, predictable, and follow a pre-defined structure. Using LLMs to ingest data which can easily be turned into an parseable data structure seems strange: use the LLM to do the "next part" of the formula (comprehension, decision making, etc)
There is also LLMs.txt https://llmstxt.org/ eg https://joshua.hu/llms.txt / https://joshua.hu/llms-full.txt
I imagine a reasonably intelligent coding agent would notice that an RSS feed already exists and use it. Possibly transformed if it's not quite the format you want?
LLMs use up tons of energy and water.
That is the use case for predicting that RSS will dominate tomorrow?
I was never an RSS user until half a year ago. Now that’s my only way of browsing my choice of (tech) news sources and blogs.
I've been using RSS daily since 2008 (on feedly since 2013)
Nah it’s just that the content consumers are now LLMs
Big if true
I don't quite use "social media" per se, unless of course hackernews is part of it (which, kind of, is ... anything we can use other people can read or relate to, is kind of social, by definition. I think Facebook etc... tried to claim ownership over the term "social media", and I disagree with this notion). Having said that, I don't use or need RSS, so I don't think there will be a renaissance for RSS for most people.
I do agree that AI is killing tons of things right now. This monster must be stopped; it is worse than Skynet in that it really, really sucks. Things started to decay before AI took over, though - for instance, Google search has been garbage since years. It was useful before that.
I used to compare the decay of google search with how youtube search works. You search for, say, "ninja cats". You get some results about cats. Perhaps also ninjas. After like 10 or 20 results, you suddenly get other videos that are totally unrelated, but you may click on it. That's addictive design. People click on it suddenly when it is interesting to them - but this also takes them away from their original search. Something similar happened to google search. The UI is total crap, it shows semi-related videos (I don't want to watch videos when I search for a specific term), some ads for companies (Google is milking it here) and then also useless entries such as "other people searched for sick grannies instead, do you want to search for this as well" and similar UI-ruining components. Without ublock origin I'd be quite lost already - lo and behold, Google killed ublock origin because it threatened their business model (another reason to use ublock origin; we really need to get rid of Google. It is no longer a useful corporation - just greedy).
RSS only serves as a backbone of a product. There’s no commenting, summaries a sparse, i don’t even think there’s consistent posting dates.
These evangelists want to make it sound like all we need to do is get everyone on board with RSS and we’ll all just hold hands and share the web.
People don’t browse the web, there’s like 10 websites, that’s the whole internet.
Everything else is just asteroids and abandoned space stations.
except that it only allows summaries behind paywalls. in many cases you never get the full article
Are you talking about sites that actively support RSS?
Then pay for the content to get access?