The death of social media is the renaissance of RSS (2025)

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

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.

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.

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.)

Plug for feeeed: https://feeeed.nateparrott.com

It’s my primary hn reader now.

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.

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