If RSS "died" (and I don't think it did), then it was when the main browsers stopped showing the RSS icon next to the URL and started hiding RSS feeds and links.
From a user perspective, the thing about RSS is that most readers/clients were designed as if they were email clients, where you mark articles as read/unread. Who wants thousands of extra "emails" in their inbox to check every day ?
From a site perspective, most sites were stuffing the whole web page in each RSS article such that RSS was not a summary. Then they realised that people reading RSS weren't reading ads so they either killed RSS or made each article one line.
From a programmer perspective, writing an RSS client became a hello world of applications programming such that there were millions of very bad clients.
RSS is very much alive and very useful; but maybe RSS as we used to think of it is dead. It's a background thing that browsers and applications should make use of
I think the big challenge for RSS and the web in general is link rot.
"From a user perspective, the thing about RSS is that most readers/clients were designed as if they were email clients, where you mark articles as read/unread. Who wants thousands of extra "emails" in their inbox to check every day ?"
Me? And its more like dozens BTW not thousands?
There's a fundamental perception issue best described by analogy.
In many living rooms is a box that displays video. Some people insist that all humans only want to view streamed live content that someone else controls. Some people insist that all humans only want to view the output of a perfect DVR. Both extremist positions are of course wrong.
I have 104 relatively low traffic, yet VERY important to me, feeds in my newsblur rss reader. I'd be hyper pissed off almost beyond words if newsblur decided to only display the 10 most recent posts. I'd have to dump them and their attractive mobile client app and go back to self hosting a feedonfeeds installation, which doesn't really work on mobile, but at least it would display all the new news to me rather than a subset.
Most sites that screw up RSS don't have real content anyway. Just linkbait surrounded by ads. Not much of a loss.
> "Who wants thousands of extra "emails" in their inbox to check every day?"
My response to that is: Who wants thousands of Facebook Twitter Instagram Pinwhatevertube sites to check every day? Just have them all sent to one place, and check that.
I only want one inbox, total, ever, to check. All of my email, plus Twitter, Instabook, Whatevergram, plus all posts from any blog that I really want to follow, plus any Google Alerts of any topics that I follow — all of that, in one place. An RSS reader and some jumping through hoops lets me achieve two inboxes total, my email plus "everything else", and that's good enough for me at the moment.
> Who wants thousands of extra "emails" in their inbox to check every day ?
This. It's akin to joining a gym - 'hey, this blog is good. I should read this regularly to make myself better' and we subscribe to the feed.
But life happens and we start ignoring the new posts. It builds up and everytime we open the feed reader we see thousands of posts unread. This makes us feel guilty.
From a user perspective, the thing about RSS is that most readers/clients were designed as if they were email clients, where you mark articles as read/unread. Who wants thousands of extra "emails" in their inbox to check every day ?
From a site perspective, most sites were stuffing the whole web page in each RSS article such that RSS was not a summary. Then they realised that people reading RSS weren't reading ads so they either killed RSS or made each article one line.
From a programmer perspective, writing an RSS client became a hello world of applications programming such that there were millions of very bad clients.
RSS is very much alive and very useful; but maybe RSS as we used to think of it is dead. It's a background thing that browsers and applications should make use of
I think the big challenge for RSS and the web in general is link rot.