Very good article. I am not referring to the RSS part.
Interesting thing is, much of what AI is now regurgitating is human output, accumulated over the years. Model training dataset. Stuff like Reddit posts, even posts here?
If, say, AI output becomes THE 99% over the next few years, we will enter the era of incestuous inbreeding within AI -when it simply regurgitates its own output.
Wonder what will be the result at that point!
mnls 56 minutes ago [-]
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.
gonzo41 25 minutes ago [-]
It just needs to be described in a more concrete way to people. Such as, You know how the podcasts you listen to keep getting updated on your phone? That's RSS. Imagine if other things you liked turned up when they were new and you had a lot of control over that process.
sirl1on 12 minutes ago [-]
Most non-tech people I know listen to podcasts through Spotify and some think Spotify invented them.
Looking how podcasts advertise themselves, those who do use RSS advertise "Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app" here.
ThoAppelsin 25 minutes ago [-]
This just won’t work. If RSS becomes popular, there will be discovery platforms with “algorithm”s. It will be the same thing, just the discovery and content separated.
RSS appears good now only because it’s not popular enough for LLMs to meddle with. I don’t use RSS, so I don’t really mind, but those who use RSS are making disservice to its _purity_ by trying to popularize it.
szszrk 5 minutes ago [-]
> If RSS becomes popular, there will be discovery platforms with “algorithm”s.
So? If plain RSS exists, then you can still consume it the way you want.
I'd like to remind that when RSS was really popular we had "planet" aggregators everywhere, where someone interested in particular topic bundled posts from multiple people.
crote 3 hours ago [-]
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.
bryanrasmussen 2 hours ago [-]
I don't think you could self-host Google Reader, so it sort of feels like these two sentences don't hang together.
bryanhogan 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Someone said, “if you have to explain it, then you’ve already failed”. That’s basically the problem in a nutshell. It would be great to see someone build a service based on an open standard, but then you have no moat. Anyone else can come along and build the same service using the same format.
No one wants to make a bet like that, so they don’t. That’s why RSS doesn’t get pushed or used more often.
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.
Shank 40 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
mulmen 1 hours ago [-]
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.
wmeredith 3 hours ago [-]
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.)
UtopiaPunk 2 hours ago [-]
I'm reading this on Feeder, which a free RSS app I found on F-Droid. Works for me
1123581321 3 hours ago [-]
The Reeder family of RSS apps goes for engaging scrolling on iOS.
beached_whale 3 hours ago [-]
I'm reading this on my RSS reader right now :)
dozerly 3 hours ago [-]
I am pretty happy with Readwise’s Reader
SanjayMehta 3 hours ago [-]
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.
carrychains 1 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
kantord 54 minutes ago [-]
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.
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.
MASNeo 37 minutes ago [-]
I fail to see how RSS helps filter out AI slop. Started a business based in RSS 20 years ago but that failed against Social Media slop.
I believe human validation protocols might help, think captcha enabled ping backs, but RSS I believe may have very little impact on its own
gandalfgreybeer 25 minutes ago [-]
> I fail to see how RSS helps filter out AI slop.
Not sure if I'm missing something, but for AI slop to get into your RSS feed, you have to be following something with slop which can easily be unfollowed; this is unlike algorithmically driven recommendations where there is no direct filter from your end.
justinator 3 hours ago [-]
Stop trying to make RSS happen again. It's not going to happen again.
Crowberry 2 hours ago [-]
I set it up a year or two ago. Now i ready 90 of articles and news through it.
evolve2k 2 hours ago [-]
It’s still happening.
XenophileJKO 2 hours ago [-]
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.
shevy-java 2 hours ago [-]
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.
2 hours ago [-]
hombre_fatal 2 hours ago [-]
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.
mmsc 2 hours ago [-]
> 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?
pipeline_peak 2 hours ago [-]
LLMs use up tons of energy and water.
shevy-java 2 hours ago [-]
That is the use case for predicting that RSS will dominate tomorrow?
waschl 1 hours ago [-]
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.
bananaflag 2 hours ago [-]
I've been using RSS daily since 2008 (on feedly since 2013)
whatever1 3 hours ago [-]
Nah it’s just that the content consumers are now LLMs
zeusdclxvi 3 hours ago [-]
Big if true
shevy-java 2 hours ago [-]
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).
pipeline_peak 2 hours ago [-]
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.
memonkey 3 hours ago [-]
except that it only allows summaries behind paywalls. in many cases you never get the full article
pipeline_peak 3 hours ago [-]
Are you talking about sites that actively support RSS?
colesantiago 2 hours ago [-]
Then pay for the content to get access?
3 hours ago [-]
Rendered at 07:49:44 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Interesting thing is, much of what AI is now regurgitating is human output, accumulated over the years. Model training dataset. Stuff like Reddit posts, even posts here?
If, say, AI output becomes THE 99% over the next few years, we will enter the era of incestuous inbreeding within AI -when it simply regurgitates its own output.
Wonder what will be the result at that point!
And that’s the answer about RSS renaissance. If you have to explain it, there is zero chance of massive adoption.
Looking how podcasts advertise themselves, those who do use RSS advertise "Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app" here.
RSS appears good now only because it’s not popular enough for LLMs to meddle with. I don’t use RSS, so I don’t really mind, but those who use RSS are making disservice to its _purity_ by trying to popularize it.
So? If plain RSS exists, then you can still consume it the way you want.
I'd like to remind that when RSS was really popular we had "planet" aggregators everywhere, where someone interested in particular topic bundled posts from multiple people.
There are plenty of RSS reader apps, but there are very few with good cross-device sync - let alone self-hosted cross-device sync.
No one wants to make a bet like that, so they don’t. That’s why RSS doesn’t get pushed or used more often.
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.
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.
It’s my primary hn reader now.
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/feedbroreader...
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
I believe human validation protocols might help, think captcha enabled ping backs, but RSS I believe may have very little impact on its own
Not sure if I'm missing something, but for AI slop to get into your RSS feed, you have to be following something with slop which can easily be unfollowed; this is unlike algorithmically driven recommendations where there is no direct filter from your end.
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 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 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).
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.