Slashdot Asks: Do You Still Use RSS?

Real Site Syndication, or RSS has been around for over a decade but it never really managed to lure regular web users (though maybe it wasn't built to serve everyone). So much so that even Google cited declining usage of Google Reader, at one time the most popular RSS reader service, as one of the two reasons for shutting down the service. With an increasingly number of people looking at Facebook and Twitter for news, we thought it would be a good time to ask the following question: Do you use any RSS reader app? If yes, do you think it is still a good way to keep track of the "new stuff" that your favorite sites publish?

Comments

RTS?

[superdave80]

Real Time Syndication, or RSS

How does Real Time Syndication become RSS? Should be RTS?

Re:RTS?

[synaptik]

Because it's actually Rich Site Summary, or alternatively "Really Simple Syndication"

Re:RTS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the editor is a fucking idiot?

Looks like he corrected the mistake, too bad you don't get to edit your posts. Well to the class system that is /.

Re:RTS?

[dcooper_db9]

There are multiple standards sponsored by different stakeholders. I didn't care enough to try to parse out the details but I wouldn't call any of the names wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:RTS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha. They've "corrected" the article and it is still wrong.

Re:RTS?

[syntotic]

So many years? First time I find out what the abbreviation means. Just try googling it... It came about as a boring text site or tech or when graphics started exploding all over the place.

I mean I got this article through RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never understood why people have gone away from it. It's the most effective way to track a ton of websites in entirety. I think of my RSS feed as my morning newspaper. I follow literally hundreds of websites, journals, and blogs using it, and I can churn through it all in maybe twenty minutes at my keyboard each day on inoreader.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[hey!]

I think of my RSS feed as my morning newspaper.

Well, there's your problem. The idea of starting your day with a cup of coffee and a broad sample of current events has gone the way of the dodo.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[rdelsambuco]

bullshit

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Nutria]

I follow literally hundreds of websites ... using it, and I can churn through it all in maybe twenty minutes

Then you don't really follow hundreds of websites, journals, and blogs.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[rdorn]

Same, I saw this article through RSS... I use outlook as my RSS reader. Allows me to check on recent events when I catch up on my inbox.

Re: I mean I got this article through RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

I never used it.

I really like the idea of it for rarely updated websites, or monthly updated. But for popular stuff I will check out everyday there is no point.

I am not 100% sure how it works, but I am under the impression the website must offer the feed, so removes usage from rarely updated Websites because they don't update tech.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Oswald McWeany]

This was me, until this morning. I aggregated all my RSS feeds on an igHome page with multiple tabs- but they appear to have blanked out my account over the weekend- I'm just seeing generic crap now. Not my RSS feeds.

Now I need to start all over again finding my feeds.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the same as a newspaper. Skim headlines for pertinent articles. Read the articles that are relevant or interesting.

I doubt most people that follow the New York Times read every single article they publish every single day. But I feel a lot better seeing the headlines and the first paragraph and deciding whether it pertains to me or not. Either way, I'm aware that those events are happening and being discussed.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Oswald McWeany]

bullshit

He's actually quite right. Things like Facebook and Twitter and "following", even Google Now's page. It all tracks things you like and molds to an individuals viewpoint.

Most people ARE getting a very narrow view of the world now. Gone is the broad-spectrum news that people used to get. People tailormake their news to fit their specific world-view these days.

If news doesn't fit your ideology, you don't read it.

It has led to increased polarization in the political spectrum.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Gr8Apes]

I use outlook as my RSS reader

You admit that? on /.? Geek card please.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

That's... unnecessarily dismissive. You don't know how active the sites they follow are, how many of the results they dive in to past the description, how quickly they read etc. It's entirely possible they could follow hundreds of websites, and average 20 minutes to scroll through the daily results.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

This was me, until this morning. I aggregated all my RSS feeds on an igHome page with multiple tabs- but they appear to have blanked out my account over the weekend- I'm just seeing generic crap now. Not my RSS feeds.

Now I need to start all over again finding my feeds.

Same here

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[GunJah]

I got here by clicking a headline in Tickr. Always open, scrolling at the bottom of the screen.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Pentium100]

I use RSS to keep track of websites that change infrequently. I mean, I can just visit slashdot every day or when I feel like it, but I use RSS to get notified when some channel on youtube gets a new video or some blog gets a new article.

I dislike getting the notifications to my email - I check my email more frequently, but may not be able to read the new article etc. OTOH, when I have the time, I open my RSS reader and get the notifications for all the new articles/videos then. I used Google Reader, now I use Tiny Tiny RSS hosted on my own server. When Youtube broke support for RSS, I wrote a little php script to get the new videos using the API and format them in an RSS format that TTRSS can understand.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Luthair]

I think it went away because people (not me) just went to social media and use that as their aggregator.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[mpol]

People often complained that RSS was too difficult and only for techies. But with a simple explanation and an "Aha" moment people would enjoy it.

What I think the real reason is, is that it doesn't make the advertisers money. They want clicks and eyeballs, not RSS refreshes.
Google Chrome doesn't support RSS feeds anymore, not in the standard build. Google Reader is gone. So you can guess where the advertisers are not wanting to go...
My local newspaper just recently stopped providing RSS feeds. I quit reading it, but they probably won't care.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Anubis IV]

Likewise, I got here via RSS.

Before I say anything else, I'll shill by tossing in a glowing recommendation for Feedbin. I tested way too many clients after Google Reader went down, and it was far and away my favorite of the bunch. As a nice bonus, it's also open source and can be run on your own servers free of charge, but I've been a paid subscriber ever since Reader shut down. Well worth the $20/year I'm paying.

Speaking more generally, the problem we all have is with surfacing the content we want to see. The content we want to see is constantly being published all around the web, but we lack the ability to know when and where it's getting published, so we need help finding it.

As of today, we have a few options. We can rely on curated content (e.g. newspapers, BuzzFeed), which waste our time and attention with copious amounts of content that we have no interest in so that we can find the few nuggets that actually interest us. Alternatively, we can rely on content aggregators (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit), but content aggregation is rarely a money-maker, so each of those serves numerous other purposes (e.g. sharing jokes, posting cat pics, relaying personal messages), all of which add noise that detracts from simply consuming the news. Moreover, each of those sites interferes with the news in some ways (e.g. reordering or hiding content), making them unreliable if we want to have a holistic and accurate view of matters.

Or, as a third option, we can rely on RSS and not have to make any of those compromises.

With a newspaper or BuzzFeed, if I feel like I have to sift through too much cruft, I can either take it or leave it. But with RSS, I can effectively make my own newspaper by subscribing to exactly as many sites I want to, each of which narrowly covers a small subset of the topics I'm interested in. As a result, I have exactly as much new content as I want, and nearly each piece of new content is tailored specifically to my interests. Plus, I gain all the fine-grained controls (e.g. mark as unread, applying rules to filter news, being able to look through update statistics) that come with having technology that's dedicated to solving a specific problem, rather than being one part of a much larger, general-purpose platform like those other content aggregators.

In fact, I've become so averse to sites that waste my time that if a site that posts new content doesn't offer an RSS feed, I simply don't visit it unless someone else links me to it. Nor do I apparently miss them, as I just learned when I went through my feeds and found that about a dozen of them hadn't had any updates in years, only one of which I had noticed was missing.

And what do I do with all of that time I've saved? Waste it commenting on Slashdot, apparently.

*sigh*

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[thegarbz]

bullshit

Yes that is exactly what replaced getting broad and different views on a variety of topics.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[akgunkel]

I also got to this story from my RSS reader. Using an RSS reader is the only realistic way of keeping up with lots of sites. I never load the homepages of the sites I read every day.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[thebullshitpatrol]

>back in MY day, hurdy durdy doo

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[extra88]

I also switched to running TinyTinyRSS after Google Reader. I agree that RSS is very helpful for sites that update infrequently and/or at varied times. I also use it for frequently updated sites, it's so much faster to skim headlines and teasers with little to no ads in a feed reader; I tend to be a completist though so I have to fight the urge to skim everything.

When Twitter dropped their RSS feeds, I added a little code takes a Twitter handle as a parameter and returns their tweets as RSS (I already had the necessary API key).

Social media is so much worse for keeping track of the output of multiple sites. On one end, you have algorithms trying to decide what you want to see (or making businesses pay to be seen), on the other you have sites that send multiple tweets for the same story using different lines to "grab you."

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[unixisc]

I've never understood why people have gone away from it. It's the most effective way to track a ton of websites in entirety. I think of my RSS feed as my morning newspaper. I follow literally hundreds of websites, journals, and blogs using it, and I can churn through it all in maybe twenty minutes at my keyboard each day on inoreader.

Dunno why /. has to muck w/ the editor - they suffer from the same disease as Microsoft and GNOME

Anyway, when a page like this has an RSS feed, I just stage it from the bookmarks bar on Firefox, and read it that way. When I fire up the browser, I check the pull down menu to see what's up, and then select the one I'm interested in.

Never specifically bothered about RSS readers: don't see the point.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[bluelip]

I use RSS because I can see if an article is worth reading by the blurb. There are so many headlines, in IT alone, each day that it would be insane to try to keep up without RSS.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Pentium100]

I do not use Facebook, so I wouldn't know. Sites that update frequently (like slashdot or other news sites) I just visit when I remember or have the time (I also use adblock), I do not want my RSS reader to be cluttered with various articles that I most likely won't read (as then I would be more likely to miss the infrequent update among the others).

I also really dislike the clutter in my email, this is why I hate mailing lists. Sure, I can filter the mails to a specific directory, but I still get the clutter. A forum is much more convenient as I can keep track of specific threads or just visit the forum whenever.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[networkBoy]

*win* /thread

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Bastards crashed the site that I used 20+ times/day, and never backed it up... Bastards.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[slashrio]

I use Liferea.
It's very convenient to browse through a list of new topics on various websites and read the first paragraph(s) or summaries.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[hey!]

>back in MY day, hurdy durdy doo

Back in my day we had the pill and there were no STDs that couldn't be cured with a week or two of antibiotics, with predictable results. So yes, in some ways things were better.

It doesn't mean everything was better. Python is better than rolling my own control structures with Fortran IV's computed goto.

When you get older you'll realize "you win some, you lose some" is pretty much what life amounts to.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[steveg]

Yup, TT-RSS replaced Reader for me as well.

There are sites that I *intend* to go to directly, but I never remember. Having the RSS reader on my phone means that I can keep track of what's going on there when I have a free moment.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Darinbob]

It's how I get slashdot and BBC. Is there another way? It was there by default when I got Firefox for OSX so I just kept using it. Scan the headlines and get the articles you care about. I didn't know RSS could do more than that.

Re: I mean I got this article through RSS

[phyre917]

Following != reading. Don't correct him on a claim he doesn't make, it just makes you look like a troll.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

tru dat, using RSS is like taking back control of internet. I use firefox builtin RSS reader.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

This is my use case, also.

RSS for life!

Re: I mean I got this article through RSS

[TekPolitik]

Me too. If the site is a news site, and there is no RSS, I either construct my own RSS using wget, cron and shell scripts, or just don't read the site. If /. dropped RSS, well, it is not what it once was, I would just stop reading it.

Re: I mean I got this article through RSS

[RabidReindeer]

I don't want to spend the time it takes to trawl a dozen websites multiple times a day.

A good RSS reader gives me headlines and if they intrigue me, I drill down into them

I used to use Pulse until it stopped working on my hardware. I used the RSS features built into Firefox, until Firefox started hiding all its controls a la Microsoft. I liked Flipboard, except that apparently someone has to build special feeds for Flipload, and a lot of my favorite sites are ill-served. My latest favorite is Feedly, which has a simple way to mark things if the headlines interest me but I'm busy scanning for good stuff. I can mark the latest news as "seen" and pull the deferred articles out from the "saved" area at leisure.

RSS is automatically supported in many products these days. Wordpress, for example. It's also a a feature of some things very important to me, like the National Hurricane Center.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[E-Rock]

Are you sure he doesn't get bonus points for being able to make that work?

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[GNious]

This - so very much this

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[TheRealHocusLocus]

I got here by clicking a headline in Tickr.

Ducked in because it's raining. I'm standing in a bread line that goes around the block.

Re: I mean I got this article through RSS

[GargamelSpaceman]

I too am in this camp. There are a few sites I can check ( such as slashdot ) that end up aggregating all the news I care about. Instead of having a program aggregate feeds and reading through them myself, I can let others aggregate them and the look at what they have aggregated for me. All I need to do is find the communities that care about the things I do.

There are a few bloggers that I would like to keep abreast of, but I don't think they are big-time enough that they would have RSS feeds. And most of these bloggers end up having their blogs on bigtime social media platforms. Even if I don't use those platforms there are communities that will take that content and post it in their forums, where I will see most anything interesting.

Browsing communities seems more efficient than aggregating the news myself could be. And going through more than a very few of these communities for content is more content than I have time for anyway. With my ability limited to two or three, having a whole 'nother meta-aggregation layer like RSS doesn't seem worth my time/effort.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Caesar Tjalbo]

Yes, I love RSS. Akregator ftw

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[FatdogHaiku]

Right. When iGoogle went away I moved over to http://www.ighome.com/ and my top center feed is slashdot. I like having weather, headlines, slashdot, XKCD, and world headlines (i.e. not US media) all on one page along with top of page black bar links to network tools, gmail and other pages I load more than once a day.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Lenbok]

Absolutely, RSS is fantastic and it gives you the user control over which news you follow, and makes following sites with infrequent but informative updates easy to manage.

I've never used an RSS reader app -- instead I use rss2email to fire all the RSS feeds at my gmail account, where a swag of standard gmail filters categorize based on source or content into different labels. For more advanced aggregation and filtering I used to use yahoo pipes, but now that I has been shut down I do custom filtering with huginn.

Consuming the RSS via email means I only have to deal an email client for all my regular mail, mailing lists, and rss, with automatic syncing betwee desktop, mobile, etc. It also means you can easily search your archives for older RSS entries.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

I love RSS. It's simple, it's easy for any site to implement, and it's concise.

I never understood why it didn't take off, but after Google basically turned it into a product it kind of destroyed it.

Pure RSS is the fastest way to get a sense of what's going on in the world and you can pick and choose what sources you want to use.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[mathew7]

I wonder if facebook has anything to do with this. I've heard it gives you only news that you may like. I don't have an account.

I personally have found+installed selfoss because I learned about Google Reader during it's "it will be closed" news flood and liked the idea. To the best, since I use an incognito window for mail and youtube only, so my searches are not done directly under my google account (yes, I know the IP can be linked).

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[MoleStrangler]

I use RSS daily through FeedBin & Reeder. I was a Google reader refugee (like many), looked around and FeedBin showed the most promise for the future. And Ben has not let me down, excellent and well priced.

I rarely visit the websites I have feed from, some are smart and include ads others are not. I don't mind ads in feeds as its minimal and does not detract from the reading.

I have a real hate for sites with auto playing videos and the crap in the side-bars. These side-bars get wider over the years with the article ever being squeezed into a narrower column.

I quickly flick through articles that don't interest me and read the rest.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Agrajag27]

It's amazing to me that people really haven't caught onto the combination of RSS and e-mail. I guess that speaks a lot to the rumored decline of e-mail. I use Blogtrottr to manage dozens of feeds and control the tags to that Gmail can cleanly place them all into nice folders that make sense. I then blitz through the headers and delete posts I read or have no interest in. I'm OCD and the readers I never liked as 90% of them just marked things as read and kept the articles there cluttering up the interface until they expired. Doing it by e-mail gives me incredible control, especially in Gmail and even more so when I save the articles. I hate when I find nice news/content sites that don't have the option of RSS. It really makes me think twice (or more) about the site as I know I'm not going to visit it anywhere near as often without a feed. Just not going to happen. RSS must have had an identity crisis at some point. It has all the pieces we need, but just didn't catch on like it should have (and still could).

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a small clutch of RSS news feeds tagged as live bookmarks inside Firefox (not a Chrome fan as yet although I suspect it will get me eventually). I tend to just pull down the lists of entries several times a day and check for anything interesting in the top few. It clearly works, because my wife quite recently complained that she can "never surprise me" with news - if anything of interest happens in the world, I know about it hours before she does. (Even, sadly, if I don't want to - I enjoy following F1, and when races are happening in the early morning, my time, I regularly stumble over a race result hours before I get the chance to watch the delayed coverage on TV - very frustrating.)

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[jellomizer]

People love to comment on news articles and share them just reeding is boring.

Re: I mean I got this article through RSS

[cammoblammo]

You don't need to be big time to have an RSS feed. If you're using a blogging platform you'll have an RSS feed automatically. Even if you roll your own site an RSS feed is only going to be an extra line or two of whatever language you're using.

My blog isn't big --- I'm lucky to post once in six months, and average two hits a day, and those are usually bots --- yet I have an RSS feed.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[EmeraldBot]

I fail to recall a time period where HIV was a curable STD, and both Hepatitis A & B are incurable as well. In old times, the preventative measures (vaccines for the latter, PEP and PREP for the former) didn't exist at all, so... Yeah. An important thing to keep in mind is that back in your day is pretty susceptible to being romanticized.

Re: I mean I got this article through RSS

[justthinkit]

Here is an example of the virtue of RSS feeds: your local public library.

(1) They don't publish every book, CD, video, etc. that they add in any way but RSS.

(2) If new DVDs are your thing, then 10 notices for new DVDs is better than some exhaustive list or database (because there are ten times more books added per day than DVDs) -- in short, RSS can be used to sub-divide results/narrow the search. Without having to know how to advance search.

(3) RSS homogenizes stuff, making it easier/faster to parse it all. Newsletters differ. Web pages wildly differ. RSS...title+brief summary+link.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

I also got here through RSS feeds. I use Feedly as my RSS aggregator. What many don't know is that big companies like facebook and twitter had / have there items available through RSS at one time too. Its a outstanding technology that gets way overlooked. The day my RSS feeds die is the day all my productivity stops, since RSS is hands down the easiest way to get all of your information in one spot, and prevent you from looking at the same news article 10 times in the same day.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[q4Fry]

Likewise, I got here via RSS.

+1. Don't move my cheese.

Re: I mean I got this article through RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Good, generally reading news actually results in a net reduction in your knowledge of the world.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Reziac]

Same here, tho I just use SeaMonkey as my RSS client. Keeps the hundreds of site subs out of my mailboxes, easy to trawl for fresh content without needing to first sort them out, and the posts I don't get to right away will keep without getting lost in tomorrow's 200 emails. If RSS is available, I never do an email subscription.

Re: I mean I got this article through RSS

[Reziac]

Yep, very unusual for a blog site to NOT have an RSS feed... tho I imagine some people think that forces you to come tickle their hit counter. No, it means I forget they exist.

Sites that only rarely have posts are one of its good uses -- I don't have to think about or remember the odd site that updates once in a blue moon; it's right there in the New column as I scroll down the list.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

I also catch up on /. (and other sites') articles via RSS. I have a few different "accounts" set up in Thunderbird for different categories of news stories. Entertainment feeds, Tech feeds, News feeds (politics & stuff), etc.

Re:I mean I got this article through RSS

[fschmeisser]

That's how I got to this too. RSS let's me find headlines from both foreign and domestic sources in Firefox Live Bookmarks. It's efficient

Re: I mean I got this article through RSS

[schnook9]

Hit this from Feedly. I get my daily overall read from it and my categorized news is available in a concise format. To read all of these sites individually would be impossible. Sometimes I view all sources randomly and other times I pick a section. I visit the actual site to continue reading maybe 1/2 the time. I can't stand facebook news. I would rather take the headline words and pop them into Google than to click on a Facebook link

Re: I mean I got this article through RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Cure for HIV? Do you mean gay cancer in LA? Isn't it an urban legend?

Yes, I do.

[alexru]

I would not be reading this if there was not RSS. I don't have time to manually check dozens of sites for updates.

Re:Yes, I do.

[Anonymous Coward]

Me too! Only way to see what is worth reading.

Re:Yes, I do.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am in the exact same situation as the parent.

RSS also allows me check daily several scientific publications, including with a specific set of filters (through NASA ADS for example). With RSS, I have the control of what I see.

OTOH, Fesse-de-Bouc and Twitter have tendencies to hide what could interest me (or do experiments about my mood...)

Re:Yes, I do.

[Anonymous Coward]

Same boat here...I use RSS extensively as I do not have time to login to forums and scan headlines. The problem I am running into is finding a decent reader that is an actual Windows application and not some online website or phone app.

Re:Yes, I do.

[macxcool]

Mod this up ;-) I use The Old Reader daily to get updates for software, blogs, comics, news, etc. I couldn't function without RSS/Atom.

Re:Yes, I do.

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly how i got here.

Re:Yes, I do.

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here. I use my RSS reader every day. My podcast manager uses RSS feeds. Heck, a few years ago, I even threw together a simple utility to expose some data sources locally as an RSS feed, because none existed.

Re:Yes, I do.

[Anonymous Coward]

ditto

Re:Yes, I do.

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here.

Re:Yes, I do.

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here, i use RSS as my primary news source, and if a site doesn't have RSS the chance that I'll ever visit it more than once is pretty low.

I also have feeds and filters set up in my torrent software to automatically download certain things.

Re:Yes, I do.

[johnmcboston]

Same her. Turned to Feedly after Google shut down. Wouldn't read /. if it wasn't for RSS

Re: Yes, I do.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have Outlook, you can use that. Otherwise, RSSOwl is good though not recently updated. I used to use it but now I host my own TT-RSS. There's a couple Android apps for it, no desktop client but the web interface works well enough if it's just third party websites that bother you and not the we interface aspect. Or, you could use a desktop client like RSSOwl to connect to your TT-RSS instance.

Re:Yes, I do.

[Anonymous Coward]

FeedDemon works well enough for me.

Re:Yes, I do.

[Jahta]

I would not be reading this if there was not RSS. I don't have time to manually check dozens of sites for updates.

Same here. In addition to automating the checking, it allows me to efficiently find (and aggregate) new articles about topics I'm interested in across multiple sites; and allows me to control how the aggregation is done!

Of Course

[chrisautrey]

How else would I get my Slashdot article headers?

Re:Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

+1
I came here cause I saw the title in the RSS feed.

Re:Of Course

[Anonymous Coward]

How else would I get my Slashdot article headers?

By snail mail.

Re:Of Course

[Anonymous Coward]

there is another way to access /. content?

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Still using it for IRC Bots etc to grep feeds.
Also using feedly which uses RSS too

Re:Yes

[solios]

I tried RSS back in the late aughts - problem was, nearly everything I read at the time was a webcomic, and their RSS feeds amounted to little more than update notifications. Full syndication was rare then, I can't imagine how rare it is now.

Do I use RSS? No. But the feed on my webcomic has gotten over 8,000 hits since I added a redirect from the old feed location a few weeks ago, so it's definitely still in use.

Re:Yes

[sanf780]

Similar situation here. I do have less subscriptions to RSS feeds than OP, but I do still use them. Feedly is aggregating these feeds and synching what I do on mobile and what I do on the desktop. As reported, a few of these feeds are just a link to the website, a few others have the first two or three paragraphs without any image, and the few remaining have the whole article in there. Webcomics are a mixed bag. Dilbert RSS included the webcomic in the past, but it is now a link to the website. XKCD still shows the full strip on RSS, and - I am not sure if it is feedly or not - has a button on mobile to show the alt text to the img tag.

As a second source of aggregation, I try Google Kiosk. However, Kiosk is not available on the desktop. So I only use it as a way to explore new feeds when I am done with feedly and I am really really bored. Note that Google News is not available where I live.

Note that I did remove a lot of weblogs that were just aggregating articles from other websites. I really hate when I read "Digital Foundry is telling this", "Anandtech did that analysis", "Ars Technica complains about Mac", etc. I do not see the point on those websites if they are not adding any value at all.

Re:Yes

[mseeger]

I use Feedly too due to it's good cross platform support.

Also I appreciate how people like Randall Munroe handle the streams compared to someone like Scott Adams. I try to keep that in mind, when I put down money somewhere...

Re:Yes

[thegarbz]

Some feeds only deliver the teaser and a link to the article on the web site.

This is precisely why I stopped using it.

Re:Yes

[mseeger]

Agreed, it got worse. Still there is nothing better by a long way :-(.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll never give up RSS. It's wonderful to scan headlines to see what to spend time reading. Never understood why more people don't use it, preferring to passively have someone else to package their news sources.

Re:Yes

[RyoShin]

Yeah, a lot of webcomics just use as a notification system... but I'm fine with that. I only find it a very minor annoyance to open a new tab (and no more than opening a new tab for a Slashdot post so I can read the comments!) Better than nothing, and I've stopped reading some webcomics completely because they didn't offer an RSS feed at all and I didn't find it worth my time to make an extra effort to visit them regularly (even when they have a consistent update schedule.)

Actually, considering what a lot of RSS services seem to be doing, I think I'm in a minority that I'm using it to mostly skim headlines, instead of a summary dashboard like a Facebook or twitter timeline.

Re:Yes

[Verdatum]

I think summary became more and more common as people figured out that there was no monetization metrics when people stick to RSS. Without that proof that human eyes are looking at an ad, that check for a fraction of a penny doesn't get cashed.

Re:Yes

[findTheHurkle]

I use RSS for about 30 sites and maybe 150 articles a day. I use RSS to let me read the actual content of the web pages without having to view the clutter that most of them have. Also, my eyesight is not perfect and with my RSS reader (newsbeuter) I can choose the font and its size more readily than in a browser. I'm not surprised that feeds only deliver a teaser -- they want you to go to their web page and click on adverts.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a few services out there that will "explode" such teaser feeds into full content. A few I am familiar with:
- Inoreader (an RSS client) does it on mobile.
- fivefilters.org will rehost any RSS feed in full-text, with ads blocked as a bonus.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I use liferea to keep informed of new information posted to about 120 web logs. It's quick, simple, with an uncluttered interface -- and it lets me choose which sources of information I want to peruse.

Re:Yes

[xaosflux]

Same here, I use Feedly for backend and if I want to access my feed from a PC; use gReader Pro on my phone. My RSS collection is my primary source of news. I even have a couple of low volume Twitter feeds in there (via twitrss.me).

Re: Yes

[jgdnavy]

To be fair to Scott Adams, I think that was his syndicate's call. His personal blog has a full feed and his comic was the last of the universal feeds to go notification only as well as the only one still working at all.

Re:Yes

[solios]

I dimly recall seeing ads in RSS feeds back in the day but that may have only been on one or two sites. Fact is, while RSS is great for the consumers of information it's not nearly as useful for content creators, at least where monetization is involved.

Re:Yes

[solios]

I just shifted to following a handful of artists on social media - the general trend of webcomic update notifications integrates seamlessly into the rest of my twitter feed, and it seems to be easier to interface with some creators, at least casually.

Feedly

[Anonymous Coward]

Use it every day

Re:Feedly

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here. The default Feedly app settings are complete unusable garbage, but with a couple configuration changes you can make it work better than Google Reader ever did.

If a site doesn't offer an RSS feed, I stop following that site.

Re: Feedly

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup! Same here (+1)

Certainly...

[Anonymous Coward]

... how else can I easily watch 10-20+ sites that publish intermittently?

Yes I do

[Anonymous Coward]

Using Inoreader that's how I came here actually

Re:Yes I do

[nikkipolya]

I came here through feedly. I changed to feedly because Google killed Google Reader. Inoreader! Let me try that. Without RSS I wouldn't be browsing the Internets.

Re:Yes I do

[OrangeTide]

RSS is great for the end user, but there is no practical way to profit from advertisement with it so the big boys are going to kill it.
I have access to hundreds of podcasts through RSS, and they work out the advertisement revenue through the podcast content itself, much like a radio broadcast. RSS is light weight and allows a server to serve up many clients, so it is suitable for lots of different things, as long as none of those things need you to profit off page views.

Re:Yes I do

[Comboman]

I thought they killed it (along with iGoogle) to force people over to Google+? Whatever the reason, I moved over to Feedly and still use it daily. Unfortunately, Yahoo Pipes (which I used to automatically filter some of the more verbose feeds) is also gone with no viable replacement.

Re:Yes I do

[BlazeMiskulin]

Of course, you can profit through RSS.

A lot of the feeds I get show banner ads in the content. But more than that, it's not about profiting directly from RSS, it's about providing a very simple way to gently remind viewers to come read the full content--and see all the ads on the page.

Marketers use all sorts of methods to drive viewers to websites. An RSS feed will bring people to a site multiple times a day (more views) instead of coming once per day (e.g., over morning coffee). A good headline and an interesting excerpt--followed by a link to the full content on the website--is an excellent way to pull in eyeballs. Additionally, if the ads are tailored to the content, it helps to target the ads and increases the chances of clicks/conversions.

Re:Yes I do

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect they don't find it effective as a marketing tool, that might explain why RSS is offerred on fewer sites than before and why some big sites are even announcing dropping some aspects of the support for RSS.

Re:Yes I do

[andreas.hummelbrunne]

I'm still pissed that they killed iGoogle.

Nowadays, I use Thunderbird for RSS-Feeds and some filters for webcomic-sites that all use the same sender-address.

Re:Yes I do

[Hrdina]

I likewise switched to Feedly when Google abandoned Google Reader. I have a couple hundred feeds in my list. I won't go so far as to say I wouldn't be browsing the internets without RSS, but I certainly wouldn't have time to cast such a wide net of interests.

RSS is one of the best things on the net, which is why I would not be surprised to see it wither and die.

The Old Reader

[Anonymous Coward]

keeps me up to date with my webcomics and arXiv

Yes I do

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought the main reason Google shut down their RSS reader was that I could not figure out how to make money with it.

Tiny Tiny RSS has turned out to be a good replacement.

I follow Twitter using RSS. This used to be simple, but now I have to run my own RSS generator for the feeds I follow.

The same used to be true for my Facebook stuff, but Facebook killed the mechanism I was using to generate my RSS feed for it. Figuring it out again was a pain, so I make do with their Notification page.

That's how I got here...

[markhb]

I use the Sage Plus plugin for Firefox, and the Feedburner link was how I got to this story.

The real question is, will anyone get here via PointCast?

Feedly is a godsend

[bigdady92]

When the Google reader went away I scrambled to find a replacement. Feedly is by far the best replacement of the bunch and I have paid for all their services to support them.

RSS is far from dead.

Re:Feedly is a godsend

[robbadler]

They seem to be a little more ad-heavy lately, but there is active development in the site and has served me well since iGoogle went down.

Re:Feedly is a godsend

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. Feedly for me as well! Fantastic service! You don't even need to know the exact .rss URL but can just enter search terms instead and then add the feed.

Re:Feedly is a godsend

[brec]

I'm here after clicking on a Feedly link.

Re:Feedly is a godsend

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. Been using Feedly since the end of Google Reader. I will only use RSS. I don't want an app that constantly annoys me with notifications. When I'm good and ready to see if there's something I find interesting, I'll look for it myself.

Re:Feedly is a godsend

[jon3k]

I recommend Tiny Tiny RSS if you're willing to run something yourself. Works great, simple requirements (I think I'm actually using sqlite for it) and even supports Google Reader shortcut keys. There's a great iOS app as well as Android options.

If you don't have your own webserver somewhere or don't want to manage it, I totally get it, Feedly is great, too. Just wanted to offer up another option.

Re:Feedly is a godsend

[Anonymous Coward]

upvote

Re:Feedly is a godsend

[stinkyj]

I thought Feedly was a bit too graphic intensive for me. I am using g2reader.com, it's pretty plain like google reader was. theOldreader.com is also quite good.

Re:Feedly is a godsend

[houghi]

I use it for many sites. /. is one of them. I also use it to get torrents, but most I use it for the 200+ channels I have on YouTube. I see when a new thing is launched, can see if I am willing to actually see it and easily follow it. No need to log in and find my way through the YouTube interface.

I assume they will soon stop it when they realize that people spend less time on their site if they use RSS.

As reader I use liferea.

Re:Feedly is a godsend

[Anonymous Coward]

When the Google reader went away I scrambled to find a replacement. Feedly is by far the best replacement of the bunch and I have paid for all their services to support them.

RSS is far from dead.

Agreed. Consumed this article via RSS feed to Feedly. I am a fan and prefer Feedly as the best way to review more than 100 sites each day quickly and easily.

Re:Feedly is a godsend

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto on Feedly being tremendously useful. I pay for the Pro version too!

Re:Feedly is a godsend

[x_t0ken_407]

Wow thank you for the link to the iOS app! I didn't know it existed! Happy user of tt-rss for the past few years here :)

Not since Google Reader folded.

[Anonymous Coward]

RIP Google Reader.

Fuck you, Google.

Re:Not since Google Reader folded.

[Verdatum]

Exactly. I really really liked Google Reader and used it on a daily basis. When it left, I never got around to finding a replacement that I liked.

Re:Not since Google Reader folded.

[bluelip]

Google Reader was one of their best services. I tinkered with Feedly then ended up just hosting a small RSS ingesting system. If I was breaking a link with Google, I didn't want to sign up with another service that was going to end up tracking readership.

Re:Not since Google Reader folded.

[jon3k]

Check out tt-rss. It even looks like Google Reader and ships with a plugin to support Google Reader shortcut keys!

Re:Not since Google Reader folded.

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is actively trying to destroy RSS because it does not let them control what content to serve to whom. On youtube, new channels don't even have RSS anymore and old channels RSS feeds are crippled but still existent. This results in me not seeing newer channels and when Google finally destroys all RSS functionality, I will not be watching youtube.

Re:Not since Google Reader folded.

[JohnnyBGod]

I've switched to Inoreader ever since, and I'm happy with it, since it's pretty much the same thing.

The issue nowadays is finding where the damn RSS feed is, since browsers took the icon away.

Re:Not since Google Reader folded.

[oernii]

TT-RSS, host it yourself. works (mostly) great.

Re:Not since Google Reader folded.

[q4Fry]

I have no idea what inoreader is like because the only way to do so on their website is to sign up or watch a cartoon where a cheerful man tells you how busy you are. Give me a fucking feature list or at least a couple screenshots. Marketing arseholes.

Re:Not since Google Reader folded.

[JohnnyBGod]

The way I use it, it's basically Google Reader with a blue background, but I do agree their landing page says absolutely nothing about what their product is like.

Still use it

[Anonymous Coward]

It's my only way to keep track of stuff happening around the internet. I can't be on FB and twitter all the time and events happen so quickly and get buried deep on social media that RSS feeds are the only thing that makes sense.

Yes, and Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

After google ended Reader, I ended up setting up a TinyRSS install on a private server. I find it the best way to keep on top of several dozen feeds that I like to follow.

iGoogle

[markus]

When iGoogle went away, I whipped up a quick little Javascript that does essentially the same thing. My home page is a collection of RSS feeds. And yes, that's pretty much how I find all the news that I read.

Re:iGoogle

[Anonymous Coward]

I switched to Netvibes.

Re:iGoogle

[Scarred Intellect]

Same here. I loved iGoogle. Netvibes dashboard is my homepage; I found this article via RSS.

I also use Postbox for my E-mail and have XKCD and Penny Arcade subscriptions via RSS.

Re:iGoogle

[Anonymous Coward]

Netvibes!? That shit from Dassaault Systemes?! That thing is horrendously slow like all their shitty products.

Re:iGoogle

[Anonymous Coward]

You should put it on github and let the rest of the world use it. Would appreciate a link if you do.

Re:iGoogle

[beernutz]

I would love to see what you came up with if you don't mind sharing. Would like to be less dependent on other sites for my feeds.

Re:iGoogle

[PopeRatzo]

When iGoogle went away, I whipped up a quick little Javascript that does essentially the same thing.Man, I would pay for a good, functional iGoogle clone I haven't been completely happy with any of try-hard replacements.

I had such a nice setup in iGoogle. My Gmail account, several RSS feeds, weather, sports. I mean, it was sweet. I've tried every goddamn new "iGoogle-lite" that's come along. I was using Awesome New Tab Page, until they broke the RSS readers and never fixed them. Currently, I'm using something called. "Start - A better new tab", and it's OK, but it only allows me to have one RSS feed visible.

Re:iGoogle

[PopeRatzo]

See? I'm so upset about losing iGoogle that I forget to close my blockquotes.

I blame Google.

Re:iGoogle

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here. Was a devoted iGoogle user and now use protopage as my replacement. RSS feeds form the basis of my daily news and information intake. It's where I see news, Slashdot stuff, a variety of searches I follow in Craigslist, get my XKCD dose, and determine which technology blogs deserve my attention today.

Re:iGoogle

[MrLogic17]

I looked around for a while, and ended up using ProtoPage. I still miss iGoogle.

Re:iGoogle

[afidel]

I just couldn't get into Netvibes, I signed up for an account and tried it for a few months between the igoogle announcement and the the shuttering but even with it being my homepage for like 6 weeks I never felt it worked for me. I ended up replacing it with a bunch of Android widgets and an RSS reader. One of the biggest barriers for me was that I was used to checking live traffic in igoogle at the end of the work day to figure out which route I would take home and none of the online maps with live traffic would work within a netvibes container.

Re:iGoogle

[dhasenan]

Similarly, when Google Reader shut down, I started my own RSS reader: https://github.com/dhasenan/pi...

Oddly enough, I never actually used Google Reader. I didn't use any RSS reader before then. I just used the announcement as a reminder to take a look.

Re:iGoogle

[Anonymous Coward]

When iGoogle went away, I not only stopped using RSS, but I stopped reading slashdot and many other news sources regularly as well (not trying to start a giant discussion about my actions there, just stating the facts).

Yes

[31415926535897]

Yes Yes

Next.

God yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't properly navigate the web without it, at the speed I do. I use Inoreader and can't live without it, it's a tab always pinned in my browsers. Having all my 50 relevant "surfing" sites in just one place, that I can browse confortably, search, archive, star/favorite, without having the need to go to that specific website, is a blessing. RSS must be one of the most underrated webtools around.

Only LUDDITES use RSS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Modern app appers use AppSS!

Apps!

Yes

[mseeger]

I still use RSS for about 50 feeds with about 400 articles a day. The problem are the sources.

The quality is declining. Some feeds only deliver the teaser and a link to the article on the web site.

Even when I offer money, nearly no newspaper is able to deliver a full RSS stream :-(.

Yes, I do

[Anonymous Coward]

I use "The Old Reader" to consolidate my feeds on-cloud, and the gReader Android app to read the feeds from my cellphone.

Yes!

[dogrio]

Yes, using https://newsblur.com/. It's a very convenient way to keep up with sites of interest.

Liferea

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Liferea on linux at work to keep track of many things. I don't have the time to check each website's release/security/changelog news manually. I have about a hundred feeds. It makes things so much easier to keep on track of releases, vulnerabilities, and other updates.

Yes, to publish other content on my web sites

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

I have a couple of web sites that people visit to get industry news. I use RSS to collect the official posts from a lot of the companies in those industries so I can republish them on my site. Both readers and publishers (e.g., vendors) report this is nice.

That's pretty much what RSS was designed to do...right?

Re:Yes, to publish other content on my web sites

[OrangeTide]

Indeed. The web works best when it is well linked.

theoldreader.com is the "old" Google Reader

[Anonymous Coward]

I was a big Google Reader user. When it disappeared I found theoldreader.com, which is literally just a rebuild of the "old" Google Reader back before the Google+ integration. It is still my primary way to keep up with website posts.

Yup. The Old Reader

[kwerle]

http://theoldreader.com/

Fuck yeah I'm still using RSS.

[Anonymous Coward]

You think I'm refreshing Slashdot on the off chance something interesting is posted? Slashdot is the perfect use case for RSS, about one in 20 articles is quite interesting, which isn't enough to make me want to check the page every day but is interesting enough for me to watch the RSS feed.

Re: Fuck yeah I'm still using RSS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Precisely..
Thank you..

Re:Fuck yeah I'm still using RSS.

[Verdatum]

Yeah, when Google Reader closed shop, and I was too lazy to find something else I liked, there were a couple years where I didn't bother with slashdot anymore. I only finally drifted back to reading /. manually around the time Dice sold it.

Rainmeter got me here

[lanceness]

I have used Rainmeter for years with the preset New York Times, Wired and Slashdot news feeds, Wired seems to have shut theirs down or changed it as it does not work so I replaced it with NPR.

Since you asked...

[ngc5194]

Yes and yes. It fills a need for content aggregation/summary better than any other technology, especially for tracking low volume/high quality sources.

Apropos of nothing, the recent ad placements on /. really, really suck. They cover so much content and take up so much screen real estate. I don't begrudge any site the need for ads, but seriously, it makes me much less likely to visit the site.

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Inoreader user here - it's a lot like the old google reader

Bazqux is how I found this article

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly I get headaches looking at websites. Plus websites put "boring" news that I find interesting at the bottom of their sites, rarely to be found by the casual reader. RSS feeds let me see everything that was posted by that site, and it takes a fraction of the time to read through than it would by visiting the 25 or so news sources I scan.

Yes.

[schklerg]

All day, every day, w/ TT-RSS. I've got an RSS search engine bookmarked, and I even use a Twitter to RSS service so I can get a few relevant twitter feeds without the clutter of their horrific interface. With Facebook, news curates you!!! (hahahaha)

Hmm...

[Dogtanian]

Clicks live (RSS) bookmark for Slashdot on toolbar.

Notices story at top of list- "Slashdot Asks: Do You Still Use RSS?"- and clicks to find out more.

Thinks "I guess that's a yes, then".

Long Time User

[jacoby]

I have a number of RSS feeds in Feedly, but I rarely if ever check it, using the "Twitter will tell me if I need to know" method instead.

Yes, and your CDN's SSL cert is b0rken

[Anonymous Coward]

I do use Akregator (KDE app) to read RSS feeds. And it just notified me that the SSL certificate provided by a.fsdn.com only has CN=*.test.edgekey.net

Yes

[Burz]

I use Liferea to collect feeds. IMO, its a simple but enabling technology... a lot better than cramming everything into centralized locations like Facebook.

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Tiny Tiny RSS (https://tt-rss.org/) for everything from tracking youtube uploads to watching wiki/wikia pages for changes to staying on top of dozens of blogs and news sites (it appears I average about 800 articles/videos a day).

RSS gives me a single point to track all of those sites and a convenient way to save articles/videos for later consumption.

For lack of a decent RSS client

[DivineKnight]

Most (if not all) RSS clients suck. I'm receiving stuff that normally would be found in a newspaper, why is there no option for a newspaper display option (Columns, pictures, organized with the headlines and first several lines to paragraphs with a link to continue reading more on something that catches your eye?)? Then there's the other problem: there is no standard for what is published via RSS: if I want to put together a page filled only with the latest comics from the web, Dilbert might publish just the image of their latest comic, while TheLeastICouldDo might publish a blog post (and somewhere in there is the comic I am looking for)...meaning I have to bust out the RegEx toolkit just to begin cleaning things up.

Relevant information, more signal, less noise. This the code by which all communication methods prosper and die.

Re:For lack of a decent RSS client

[michiganbob]

For comics, you might want to check out piperka.net. It does most of what I used to do myself with custom scripts.

Yes

[Deth_Master]

Yep. I've been using TinyTiny RSS (https://tt-rss.org/) since the Original Google Reader went away. Syndicated webcomics is the way to go for those. Hosting my own, and paid for the Android APP. For news, I've not come up with a great solution.

Feedly

[Anonymous Coward]

All day, every day!

Using gReader on Android phone very day

[caseih]

I use gReader every day. I have RSS feeds from news sites, tech blogs, and some forums. I even manually browse to the RSS feed of a few forums I use, just to more conveniently see all the new posts. I find forums to be cumbersome and clumsy for discussions. I much prefer email lists or nntp. But RSS feeds make it a tiny bit more usable for me, at least for lower volume forums with lots of little subforums that I'd rather not visit individually.

Google has a long history of taking useful things and then just ending them. Any time I find a google service useful to me, I start planning what i'll do when they yank the rug out from under me. They've been slowly destroying Google Voice (the new web interface is slow and awful compared now)...not sure what to replace that with just yet.

Yes

[vistic]

I saw this article via RSS.

Everyday

[EvilSS]

I still use RSS feeds to get most of my headlines. After iGoogle bit the dust I moved over to ustart.org and it's been my homepage since. I have noticed that as sites go though upgrades RSS feeds are getting dropped more often than not these days. I've removed quite a few dead feeds for popular sites over the past 2 years due to this unfortunately. I imagine eventually it will disappear to the point it will become functionally extinct.

It's sad the about-face most big sites have taken over the past 15 years from open data to walled gardens. Killing RSS feeds, pulling back public APIs, etc.

I used to use RSS

[Ramze]

I used to use RSS back when it was integrated into Firefox. I could hover over the RSS link for Slashdot and several other sites and see the headlines for the newest articles which I could click to read. Somehow, somewhere along the way, that functionality went away, and I haven't used it since.

I thought it was awesome, and I didn't really care about these "RSS readers" out there b/c I had what I wanted built into my browser.

Not everyone uses tech the same way, and when this way disappeared, RSS became dead to me at least.

Re:I used to use RSS

[Verdatum]

Right, I used RSS on Opera back when that was my main browser. Then I switched to Google Reader because it was just really nice. When that closed, I stopped using RSS, and as a result, I stopped thinking to visit a lot of websites I used to frequent, including slashdot for a few years.

Re:I used to use RSS

[slimjim8094]

Er, I'm using RSS in Firefox right now (it's how I found this article). 52.0.2.

Re:I used to use RSS

[Ramze]

Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of posts saying it's working in Firefox now. I don't know how or when, but at some point, RSS live bookmarks was either removed, broken, or just not updating anymore. Firefox removed the RSS icon from the URL bar that auto-detected RSS way, way back in Firefox 4. So, sometime after that but before now, the live bookmarks feature just quit working.

Glad to see it's back... unfortunately I've moved on to Google Chrome for the most part for other reasons.

Only Slashdot.

[skogs]

I pretty much only read slashdot on it now. Even that is questionable....how does the S2 android app read the news feed? I am only assuming it uses RSS.

Yes

[alphaomega325]

I use RSS for all of my news consumption.

The Fundamental flaw in RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

I much prefer email lists or nntp.

Exactly. RSS is for people who have confused the web with a mailing list.

I still use it every day

[dslauson]

I like an online reader because I use it from multiple computers with multiple operating systems, and I never have to worry about syncing what articles I've already seen and/or starred. My current favorite is Inoreader, but I've used The Old Reader and Feedly before, and they get the job done as well.

My feeds are Associated Press, Denver Post, Ars, Slashdot, Boing Boing, Kottke, AV Club, and a handful of web comics that I like. I can skim the headlines, and if there are articles I want to read later, I use the "Send to Kindle" browser plugin to push them out to my Kindle. I would be sad to have to give up my leisure reading workflow if sites stopped supporting RSS.

Re:I still use it every day

[apoc.famine]

InoReader is awesome enough I shelled out the annual pro fee to support them. I don't want that one going away!

Sure do

[xdroop]

...in fact, I saw this news item in my RSS reader, Feedly.

I can't think of a web site that I use regularly that doesn't provide a RSS feed.

YES

[Anonymous Coward]

I am Inoreader uses after google reader switched off.
If there is no RSS I would not spend so much time surfing, searching googleing and going directly to several sites to search for the daily, weekly information which basicaly are news or interesting stuff but not life changing facts

Re:Yup. The Old Reader

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto

Actually...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was working on my own currently under development RSS reader app when this article popped up on my screen, so... yes.

Every day

[bschorr]

Yes, I still use RSS - I get it in Outlook 2016 and I use a search folder called "Today" that aggregates my RSS items & emails into a single view.

Craigslist

[0100010001010011]

Offers RSS feeds for any search you want to define. If you're looking to buy something it's easy to setup to get notifications when something comes up.

Heck yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, almost every day, using Feedly at the moment. The odds of me missing stuff going by in Twitter are reasonable, and are exceptionally high given Facebooks algorithmic "screw-the-content-providers-and-force-them-to-pay-for-each-post" approach. RSS ensures I definitely get to see and filter out articles on my own time scales.

RSS is far from dead (at least for me)

[dargndorp]

I just realized how much I depend on RSS:

- http://gpodder.org/ fetches 20+ podcast subscriptions
- Snarfer (defunct, no website) to follow various news outlets and alert me to fresh xkcd, smbc, etc.
- live bookmarks in Pale Moon to see if something pops up on the various youtube channels I like. No channel subscription with Google account necessary.
- http://showrss.info/ generates a nice rss feed of current tv show episodes which is directly pulled by qbittorrent.

My whole information and entertainment usage would collapse if rss went the way of the dodo.

YES!

[ObscureCoder]

Pisses me off when websites stop doing RSS. Guess they don't want me ever visiting their website again... (Forget you gocomics! I supported you for a long time but the last update mangled RSS feeds so badly it wasn't worth my money. Now I get all of those comics for free from other sites!) I have been using Liferea on Linux for years. Simple, but gets the job done. I just switched to the "News" app on my Nextcloud instance. This is quite nice because it updates all my devices. I can read and bookmark articles on my tablet during my commute, then when I get home the desktop only shows the feeds I haven't read + the ones I bookmarked. It works really well and all of it remains under my control (my Nextcloud server).

Firefox Live Bookmarks in the Bookmarks Toolbar

[m0gely]

This is probably the single reason why FF is still my primary browser, though I'm happy with it otherwise. It's the best way to peruse headlines because you never have to visit the site. It's probably saved my eyes from more distraction than any other feature I can think of.

Re:Firefox Live Bookmarks in the Bookmarks Toolbar

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox's Live Bookmarks is the best way to use RSS feeds I've seen. Simple, no extra fluff, no third party. Just your browser and your RSS feeds. Why the fuck would I need some complexe addon or subscription based web app to view what is basically a short xml file?

Re:Firefox Live Bookmarks in the Bookmarks Toolbar

[Anonymous Coward]

FF deals nicely the feeds which cause for example Thunderbird to emit very long filenames into the file system, which in turn cause some troubles for operating systems like Windows.

Re:Firefox Live Bookmarks in the Bookmarks Toolbar

[Anonymous Coward]

yeap

this and DownThemAll Add-on keeps me using it's browser :P

Yes, but I don't use it client-side

[Anonymous Coward]

It's important to remember that RSS is not necessarily a "client-side-exclusive" technology. People always think that's solely where it's used but that isn't the case. There are websites that allow for server-side integration of RSS feeds. One example is DSLReports/BroadbandReports. Members there can add multiple RSS feeds of their choosing to the DSLR/BBR home page on the right-hand side. I use said feature; my two RSS feeds are Slashdot and FreeBSD Security Notices.

I'll also point out that the RSS feeds at Slashdot are often botched by including HTML tags in article titles. You folks should really fix that. I saw one a week or two ago.

Feedly

[porges]

So, yes.

Podcasts

[bill_mcgonigle]

I think all of my podcasts come in on RSS feeds at this point. I run a video to audio conversion site for one TV program and the RSS feed is the only way anybody gets the audio (they could just play the video file if they were web-constrained).

Everybody I know who has tried serious podcatching for news has stopped listening to broadcast radio for it.

Re:Podcasts

[Anonymous Coward]

Either I'm confused or you are. Podcasts are just RSS feeds with media encapsulation. All of your podcasts are RSS because that's all they can be.

for everything

[ftobin]

I use a self-hosted Tiny Tiny RSS as my main source of news for:

* blogs
* slashdot
* YouTube channel uploads
* xkcd
* and so on....

Do people actually expect to go clicking on each site they visit each day to see updates?

Yup, since 2005

[Trikoloko]

I have been using RSS since 2005 it is is still provides 99,9% of all the online content I read. I am using Inoreader which is amazing. All other media delivery options are sub-optimal. I was impressed when I discovered that people use Facebook to get their news. They *deserve* to get fake news

Oh my god, yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Everyday. Honestly, if a site doesn't publish to RSS it basically ceases to exist for me and I'll never visit it again.

Re:Oh my god, yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Forgot to mention: I use Feedly.

Yes.

[omnichad]

I use it for casual reading of entertainment (Feedly client):
Not Always Right
xkcd
etc

And I use it in the form of Podcasts for personal and professional (BeyondPod for Android).

Reader is dead, long live RSS

[krisbrowne42]

Google killing Reader was the last straw in me building around their services... It was the one thing of theirs I went to every day, more than email (at least via the gmail web interface...

I use Feedly now, via an app on my iPhone and Mac, and RSS is still my go-to means for gathering the news of the day for filtering and eventually consuming news. If I had to go hit various sites to find content, I'd pretty much be down to one or two sites a day, and the breadth of my view would be diminished.

Keep it going

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. I want my feeds in one app and RSS does that. Just wish there were more tailored feeds on news sites (basically everything but sport).

Yes. Sage Plus & Firefox.

[Anonymous Coward]

...as Slashdot itself can find out when tracking rss url param utm_source...

I use it every day.

[kelemvor4]

I use it every day. Firefox treats an RSS feed as a live bookmark on the toolbar. It's the perfect way to access news sites. I use it to read Slashdot, Ars Technica and a handful of other news related websites.

I don't think I'd bother if I had to use something other than a web browser to effectively use RSS feeds.


screenshot

Yes, considering I read this article using RSS

[danberlyoung]

I use Feedly and Reeder on my Mac and iPhone to read news, rumor sites and hacker culture Every. Single. Day. With RSS I can skim through 27-odd pages full of news in a fraction of the time I would take otherwise. Indispensable.

Never.

[Anonymous Coward]

Never ever. I hate push updates. When I want to see news, then I reload the page, not before.

Stopped after Google Reader went away

[MobyDisk]

I stopped using RSS on July 2, 2013 when Google Reader was powered down.

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I use netvibes

Re: Even the correction is wrong! Holy shit!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not a big deal. Grow up.

Yes

[Chewbacon]

Everyday. Right now, even.

Yes a lot!

[grumpy-cowboy]

There is no real replacement for that.

It has its uses

[fiannaFailMan]

If you're a blogger who likes to get the latest news direct from multiple sources then it comes in handy. I know I use it for that purpose.

How else would I get my news?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I use gReader on my Galaxy Note every day. I also have a home page plugin for Chrome that is basically nothing but RSS feeds.

Yes, and CSS too...

[wonkey_monkey]

Yes, and I also use CSS.

But that seems to be screwed on Slashdot right now...

a.fsdn.com uses an invalid security certificate.

Related?

Work-related news, Slashdot, Security news, XKCD

[mwvdlee]

Yes. I have an RSS reader in Chrome that tracks about two dozen RSS feeds that I use multiple times each day.
I don't know anything that comes even close to RSS for uncluttered and highly targeted news delivery.
I love RSS for all the same reasons marketeers hate it.

119 rss feeds in commafeed, what do you think?

[Anonymous Coward]

How can you not still use RSS? There's so much information on the web in so many different place; you really want to spend 4 hours checking every site for an update every day?

I currently have 119 feeds on my commafeed install (self hosted web based rss feed reader) ranging from news (yes i found this article from the rss feed) to comics to a buttload of youtube channels.
I don't have time to check every single one of those 119 sites daily to check for something new, commafeed gets them all for me and i just check that when i get home from work, check the interesting looking titles and it's done.

Every site which has periodic updates should offer RSS, there is so much data out there that moves so fast you can so easily miss things. RSS feeds keeps that all to hand in an extremely quickly viewed way. A quick glance at the title and a 'marked as read' button click can save you so much time and effort when you've got hundreds of sources of data you are interested in.

Oh and in the time it's take me to type this 24 more new items have popped up in my commafeed. Only one of the articles is of interest to me (a youtube video) so i can simply open the youtube link in another window, click one button, 'mark all as read', and have saved myself having to check around a dozen different websites.

Before RSS i used to have my bookmarks with '(updates mon,wed,fri)' next to them; how i ever lived like that i will never know.

Yep.

[HaDAk]

I do, actually. And yes, it's a good way to get the news. It's so much faster to flip through articles than loading a page with blocking javascript and images...

Slashboxes

[crow]

Aren't the Slashboxes you can configure on the right column of Slashdot powered by RSS feeds? I use those daily. (Unfortunately, the "Sci-Fi News" box is stuck with data from over a year ago.)

Yes, reading and witing

[rnm4446]

Used the way others have already commented; also use as a simple way to publish alert-related things from my own projects to interested clients, both internally and for public consumption. I've tried more "modern" systems for the latter, but nothing is as universal. Simple, well-supported. What's not to like?

yes

[prefec2]

Besteht way to keep all news in one app.

RSS Feeds

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't be caught dead on either FB or twitter. It's RSS feeds and Usenet for me.

Re:RSS Feeds

[ArhcAngel]

Are you CRAZY? Usenet isn't secure at all. Gopher is where it's at!

Don't understand how anyone can do without it.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's how I follow most websites. Twitter and Facebook don't compare.

Keep RSS Free and Legal

[Backshelf]

I refuse to rely on Facebook or Twitter--especially Facebook--for my news. Some of my favorite sites have been censored or even banned, especially from FB.

Yes, via Feedly

[Anonymous Coward]

Feedly's what I moved to after Google Reader's (sad) demise. Way more convenient than visiting websites manually, and less chaotic then seeing something on Twitter and thinking, "Gee, I used to read that.."

Moving away from FeedBurner...

[__aaclcg7560]

All my websites RSS feeds are set up to use FeedBurner. Google no longer does AdSense for FeedBurner and has abandoned FeedBurner for several years. I'm looking at alternatives.

http://www.wpbeginner.com/opinion/stop-using-feedburner-move-to-feedburner-alternatives/

I read this on an RSS aggregator

[Anonymous Coward]

RSS is still super useful, and I wouldn't be able to keep track of all the sites I like without it.

Aggregator in question: Tiny Tiny RSS by Andrew Dolgov. It's awesome.

Yes, keeping up with software updates

[watermark]

I subscribe to several repos at GitHub. When a new release comes out, I know. It's really helpful to help keeping things up-to-date. I use Thunderbird to subscribe to the feeds. On the personal/fun side, I subscribe to a few Tumblrs.

RSS is useful to keep track of blog like sites that are update infrequently. I don't want to check the site everyday, but an RSS feed allows me to easily.

Re:Yes, keeping up with software updates

[walterhpdx]

Came here to cite Tumblr. I use it quite a lot for fandom-related stuff, but it's come in handy be it fandom or porn.

It's how I read this article

[pelirojatica]

Yep, I use RSS, every day. At this point, it's Feedly, because it syncs across desktop/tablet/phone, on separate systems.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

it's how I scan Slashdot and several other sites on a daily basis

Yes

[vanyel]

I use it to read slashdot, several websites and to get a number of tv shows.

yes

[prefec2]

Best way to keep all news in one app.

Yes, I use it, and It IS RSS

[CAOgdin]

Only a professional cares, but Aaron Swartz named his product RSS, and it's still RSS.

I live in RSS (Rssowl) every morning. I get all the news I need and can make selective choices about which ones I read (Google News, for instance, posts a lot of Sports crap I couldn't care less about, so I can see the title and know it's not worth my time to click.

I'm dismayed by the number of sites that no longer provide RSS feeds (I'm looking at you, Daily Kos), and I'm disappointed that RSS aficionados are letting the RSS clients slide by without improvement (Rssowl v2.2.1 was last released at the end of 2013).

We RSS BELIEVERS need to band together and tell the major sites they need to support RSS clients; the software's free, and they can still inject their ads!

Re:Yes, I use it, and It IS RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm dismayed by the number of sites that no longer provide RSS feeds (I'm looking at you, Daily Kos),

http://feeds.dailykos.com/dailykos/index.xml doesn't work for you?

Re:Yes, I use it, and It IS RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

DK still supports an RSS feed, but it can be abbreviated for click-through:

http://feeds.dailykos.com/dailykos/index.xml

Re: Yes, I use it, and It IS RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Dailykos?
You should be thankful...

Re:Yes, I use it, and It IS RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

and they can still inject their ads!

... but not their analytics, hence the decline.

Re: Yes, I use it, and It IS RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I read lots of tech blogs, and my RSS reader allows me to have my tailored morning news paper. It's key that it aggravates content from tens of hand picked sources and is not tied to a specific company, like a social network.

Re:Yes, I use it, and It IS RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Only a professional cares, but Aaron Swartz named his product RSS, and it's still RSS.

Do you mean an RSS reader perhaps? Because Aaron Swartz had nothing to do with developing RSS.

And you know, you might wanna leave off the smugly self-righteous opener next time you're going to say something really stupid.

Re:Yes, I use it, and It IS RSS

[Herve5]

+1.
Reading /. on Liferea here (because I, too, saw RSSOwl abandoned -but definitely Liferea is alive and well)
Chances are I'll just abandon a site who abandons RSS...
H.
P. S. and, BTW, Daily Kos RSS feed is http://feeds.dailykos.com/dail... -which at least Liferea handles perfectly ;-)

Re:Yes, I use it, and It IS RSS

[dinfinity]

RSS aficionados are letting the RSS clients slide by without improvement (Rssowl v2.2.1 was last released at the end of 2013).

QFT.
I really wanted a good (stable!) desktop RSS reader, but ended up using the webbased newsblur instead because its interface is actually closer to what I need than the available (Windows) desktop clients.

Re:Yes, I use it, and It IS RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a link to the Daily Kos RSS feed at the bottom of their front page.

Though if you read Daily Kos, it's no surprise you didn't see that as Liberals never get all the information before jumping to conclusions...

But I'm with you on RSS.

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm reading this from RSS feed. It's busy to reach news from each website at a time. And it came with GNOME.

Yes of course

[Anonymous Coward]

how else am I supposed to stay up-to-date with all the blogs I read? Checking dozens and dozens of blogs every week? You might as well ask if people still use Push-notifications, when they can just connect directly to the service anytime they're interest in an update.

Yes, still use it, even for Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

That's how I saw this article...

I saw this post via RSS, in Feedly.

[The Cisco Kid]

Its far more convenient to look at news from multiple sources in one interface.

There are also a bunch of sites I see articles from via RSS, in Feedly, that I would never bother visiting individually.

? No

[fulldecent]

Yes. I use Digg Reader. And the CTO of Digg replies when I Tweet that there is a problem with the service. And years after they opened it they still provide the service for free and without any visible attempt to monetize it.

Also, notably this is the first time I read a /\?$/ headline where the answer wasn't no. Actually when I read headlines with question marks my bicameral mind (the "reading voice"?) automatically reads a no at the end of headlines with a question mark. As in: "Can McDonald's finally make a premium burger work? No."

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Feedly since 2013 and Google Reader before that

yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes and yes.
Rss is still the quickest,easiest,most convenient way to keep up with what is be published on multiple sites.
I'm another one who starts the day with opening an rss reader,in my case an android app,rssdemon,it's quick,simple and does exactly what I want/need it to do.
Much quicker and easier than trying to open 30+ sites only to find that a fair percentage having nothing new since I last checked them...
Rss readers are essential if you do EVERYTHING through a mobile phone on mobile data..

Yes, TT-RSS for the win!

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading now via TT-RSS in Firefox.

Yes, and yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes to both to the questions.

The reason RSS is getting replaced is...

[Parker Lewis]

... because hipsters want you to use Twitter, because is "cool".

Newbie question!

[Kludge]

Is there a way to read multiple RSS feeds on a single page using my browser?
No, I do not want to make an account on somebody's web site which combines feeds for me, I just want an application or web browser plugin that does it for me.
Thanks for any help.

Re:Newbie question!

[Anonymous Coward]

There is rawdog, the RSS Aggregator Without Delusions of Grandeur. Set it up with a cron job or run it manually, and it generates an HTML page. You can modify the template used for the page.

Re:Newbie question!

[Anonymous Coward]

You are quite a noob. Google much? That is a basic skill before posting on /.

Browsers have these amazing things called addons or plugins. There are good RSS readers in those.
My email program supports RSS feeds too.

I use Nextcloud with an RSS addon called "News" to centralize my RSS feeds. Let's me control how often I'm updated to prevent reading all day when I have work to do. I prefer this so all my devices have the same view of what has and hasn't been read.

There are standalone RSS reader apps too.

None of these methods, except the nextcloud one, which is a self-hosted thing anyway, requires any user account.

Any site that doesn't provide RSS is quickly forgotten.

I use it every day

[Anonymous Coward]

I use RSS feeds for many sites (including /.) it is so much easier to quickly browse the topics and only opening pages/news that I am interested in reading.

Absolutely!

[Balthisar]

Every day. Multiple times per day. I run TT-RSS, and access it from any browser, or if I have to kill some time, from the mobile version on my phone.

I’m still not sure how people get “news” from Twitter or Facebook, unless they literally spend all day on Twitter or Facebook. And why wait for people to sometimes post a link to a good article (between sharing their meals, games, and personal activities) when I can get it right from the source?

Wrote my own RSS Reader and Feed Software

[blindcoder]

In short, yes.

In long, I follow practically no website that doesn't have a feed. If I'm really desperate to follow a site without a feed, I have written a small set of scripts to quickly generate feeds for the website that I then add to my RSS reader. Which I also wrote myself because tt-rss wasn't around back then and I wanted a server-side solution that didn't depend on a client running all the time.

So, yes, for me, RSS is alive and kicking. Oh, and I also wrote a RSS-to-Mastodon service. Yay for RSS!

90% of my internet consumption is via RSS

[FatRatBastard]

I'm an old fart, but the VAST majority of my internet consumption is via RSS. Loved Google Reader until they kneecapped it. Switched over to Feedly after Reader's untimely death.

I rarely have to leave Feedly, and thus never notice when sites like /. fubar their CSS file (like they apparently have today)

RSS on scrolling LED sign

[PW2]

I made a program back in 2006 which I still maintain and use. It displays RSS headlines on scrolling LED signs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.kitchi-rss.com/

YES! RSS , 100+ sources 1000+ articles a day

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Feedly as my RSS service
-Use feedlys website when on PC
-Use Newisfy when on Mobile/Tablet

Yes I do

[Anonymous Coward]

I read slashdot news via my dreamwidth.org reading page. Dreamwidth and livejournal allows to display feeds from other sites as well as posts of their users on such pages.

Of course

[twms2h]

It's still simply the most efficient way to stay on top of various news streams. Neither twitter nor facebook (or Google+) can compete with that. I'm using netvibes to collect them.

TT-RSS

[trampel]

I use Tiny Tiny RSS (http://tt-rss.org). Better than Google Reader, self hosted, keeps track of article status across multiple browser and app instances, allows to extract the message body from the web page using XPATH expressions.

Can't imagine life without it.

Re:TT-RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here. After google reader disappeared I setup a raspberri pi and pull my own news feeds. The most efficient way to keep with what is going on in the world.

Re:TT-RSS

[flacco]

I used tt-rss for a long time but recently discovered miniflux: https://miniflux.net/

I used them in parallel for about a day and then switched.

Weird question

[Krakadoom]

The question should really just be a poll. Since that's essentially what it is anyway. Yes, I use it daily - I was bummed when iGoogle was shut down, but use a similar alternative now, checking it several times a day and using it as my seach page occasionally. I haven't seen any better alternatives.

Every Day

[Anonymous Coward]

I use it everyday all day. There's no other way to browse the web for me

Hell yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

RSS is still amazing, like many others I use it daily through feedly and got to this article with it

More than ever

[wolruf]

Took me some time to digest Google Reader end of life. Initially tried some RSS reader before falling in love with Inoreader (web and app), it's my main source of news with the sites/blogs I follow.

Every day

[trawg]

I have a Feedly (Pro) tab opened any time my PC is open. The vast majority of content I consume comes through this. The two most notable exceptions are Facebook and Twitter, two things that I find it almost impossible to keep up with because of a) no RSS and b) algorithms constantly juggling how things appear in the timeline.

I literally have no idea how regular people consume content. I can only assume the vast majority of it comes through their social networks these days.

Yes, I still use RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't see this article if I didn't.

I have about 8 or 9 feeds I follow daily. I'd be lost if not for RSS.

I use QuiteRSS Portable. I used to use RSSOwl, but left it because of the Java dependency. It was the only reason I needed Java installed anymore.

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

TT-RSS

[pahles]

I can't imagine life without it!

Never did

[Anonymous Coward]

Not once since its inception.

Yes, I do.

[sombragris]

I use RSS and it's a lifesaver. I do not use for tracking news sites, but to track software updates in Slackware and other projects I follow. It's very useful and convenient.

Since I use KDE, I have a simple RSS Plasma Extension installed for that. Whenever there's an update which interests me, I get a notification. Before that I used the RSS plugin for Claws Mail.

Still?

[OneHundredAndTen]

I have managed to live through the past decade without even knowing what RSS is for. Well, to each his own.

Re:Yup. The Old Reader

[cloudkucooland]

ditto

of course!

[bickerdyke]

I fount this story in my rss reader. it's the only way to have my news synced on my phone when coverage becomes flaky. And besides that, now that everyone is building APIs to everything, this is one of the simples things to connect two services. Anyone remembers Yahoo pipes?

I still use them.

[eaddict]

I use feedly on my phone and BazQux on my PC. I prefer to skim the sites and read just the articles I want. I can cover a lot more ground with a reader. I also like that both remember where I left off on a site.

Saw this question in my RSS feed reader....

[a9db0]

...so yes, I do. And it continues to annoy me when I find websites that don't support RSS or Atom. It's not that hard.

yes

[Vairon]

Yes, that's how I got to this Slashdot article.

What is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

It has it's own icon. Therefore I stay away from it like all the other bullshit icons at the bottom of pages. I'm looking at you twittwer and facebook.

Yes, RSS is super useful

[thebryce]

Using feedly now that the original Google reader is gone. We need a slashdot poll asking this question

Yes, every day

[WildEye]

I just accessed this article from Feedly. Much easier to scan a list of one line headlines than wading through all the websites I track. Also, makes it easier to monitor niche sites with few updates or that I visit rarely. I find news via social media intrusive, blinkered, and stifling.

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Feedly and I use it several times a day. RSS is very important for me.

I still use RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using RSS for the last 10 years or so.

I have used Google Reader, Feedly, and now I am sticking with Feedpresso (https://read.feedpresso.com).

There were a few readers that I have tried, but for me, it was basically between Feedly and Feedpresso.

RSS FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

Use it every day, many times during the day. Couldn't do without it.

Yes - very useful

[YogicFlier]

Short answer - yes! I'm always disappointed when a blog I want to following doesn't provide an RSS feed. Thunderbird lets me very conveniently get email and RSS all in one place.

I still use it!

[SkOink]

I use http://www.inoreader.com/ for my RSS feeds, and I love it!

I don't use RSS for things like Slashdot as much as I used to, but I still read all of my webcomics through there. For me, RSS is ideal for websites that post one or two updates a day. For websites with more frequent updates, I usually just visit the front page.

Sure do.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. I track journal articles in my field using it. It's great.

Definitely

[Anonymous Coward]

It allows me to quickly browse through the articles of the many sites I follow and then go deeper whenever something catches attention. Each site decides what to publish with no filtering by third parties like Facebook. Feedly does quite a decent role as rss reader.

RSS or Bust

[The Raven]

If I can't get it through an RSS feed, I don't read it. When Google Reader went away I tried a few alternatives, and settled on InoReader. It's not perfect (ads, a bit too intrusive for me to leave off my ad blocker), but it is serviceable. Keyboard navigation of entries is laudable.

Very much so

[GotoGuy]

My BSc thesis project was a web-based RSS reader (with some bells and whistles that I dropped immediately after I got my degree), which I still use today. I'm usually not one for lofty ideologies, but even I think RSS is useful in helping the web stay decentralized (i.e. not revolve entirely around Facebook). (By the way, if anyone happens to be interested in said RSS reader, you can check it out here: http://readrover.net/ You can email me for an invite)

Why should RSS die?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Tickr 0.6.4 a fine little reader used for all my online news filtering. This tool makes deciding what to read easy and keeps me from going blind and wasting time. Of course you need to remember, IF you go to the websites, you see the ads! Don't forget, its all about money...

And yes, I'm proud to be an Anonymous Coward

Yes

[jfbriere]

On live bookmarks

Yes - NetNewsWire RSS reader (both MacOS and iOS)

[grl]

I haven't found anything that beats a quick RSS scan to keep up with both secure internal feeds (using basic auth) and public feeds.

NetNewsWire synchs read state across Mac, iPhone, iPad use. It's fast, simple, and quick to scan.

Too bad that some sites no longer offer RSS/Atom support.

Yes

[godel_56]

I certainly do use RSS, namely the simple Sage add-on for Firefox, and I came to this story from there.

Yes

[mu22le]

And I use IFTTT and other tools to create and filter RSS feeds of websites lacking one.

RSS FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

I absolutely swear by it to sort through every day's news items. I have no interest in seeing ads or loading unnecessary images when the story itself, in all of its text glory, is what I'm looking for.

Feedly erryday

[threeboy]

It's THE BEST way to follow a bunch of websites. Twitter/Facebook has too much noise to signal ratio. With RSS you can break the content into categories, browse and star interesting articles and "mark as read" entire folders. You can cover a ton of sites throughly whie attempting the same on social media websites is too fleeting. RSS really is like a modern newspaper.

Yes

[E-Rock]

In fact, the only reason I saw this article was because it came up in my RSS reader (feedly).

I consume media from a lot of sources and RSS is how I like to aggregate it. I'd hate to have to go to 30/40 sites to see what's new.

It's how I got to this post...

[phyre917]

And how I read a lot of news.

Yes, RSS is alive

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the post via RSS. Facebook, etc., is crap in trying to get legitimate news (I tried for months). RSS may be old school, but it works.

Feedly, multiple times a day

[nitzmahone]

Feedly aggregates the news sources I care about through RSS- it's just as great as it was years ago, and I'm happy to be a paying customer to ensure that it continues to work for years to come!

Almost exclusively for my media

[flacco]

Podcasts and RSS news feeds easily account for over 90% of my media consumption.

If a media site offers an RSS feed, I might subscribe to it for awhile to see if it offers the kind of content I'm interested in.

If a media site does not offer RSS, I will probably ignore it unless I know for certain that I want to read its articles etc.

RSS skips past headline censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

There's going to be a renaissance of 20-year-old internet tech because the mobile revolution was usurped by pigs and spooks.

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's how I ended up here on this page. I look at at least a dozen feeds pretty regularly.

Definitely

[thunderbee]

RSS is still the most elegant way to aggregate content. I works, it's simple, it's efficient.
I use TinyTiny RSS (https://tt-rss.org/) for the nifty web interface on my desktop and the app on my phone that share a common database (IMAP-like).
As someone already said, it's my morning paper. The quality went down, and I dropped some sources, but all in all, this is the most efficient way for me to follow all the media I am interested in.
No RSS feed, I won't bother to follow the source any other way.

RSS Reader in Terminal (Newsbeuter)

[Anonymous Coward]

I use RSS to read all my news in my terminal using the command line utility newsbeuter. Best apt install ever, my boss has no clue and you don't have to look at ads. It's forced me away from the corporate sites and now get most news from alternet/slashdot etc due to their RSS support. So i guess having RSS determines whether or not I read your publication.

Feedly

[Anonymous Coward]

Like other people have already said, I too came here through feedly. Changed to it after Pulse got bought by LinkedIn and they decided to completely ruin its function and interface.

Re:Yup. The Old Reader

[Anonymous Coward]

Been using this since just after Google Reader went kaput. Works fine!

Every single day

[Anonymous Coward]

I went off it for a while when Facebook looked like they would replace the functionality, but then they commercialised their algorithm and it meant that the authors of the blogs I was reading would basically have to pay to get something in my news feed. I tried twitter but then I just ended up with everyone's re-tweets and opinions when all I really want is their articles. RSS for the win. If it didn't exist, I'd just have to invent something to do it.

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I use it as well as other newer sources of information. It's like instant messaging hasn't replaced email, just provided another means. I use feedly after the demise of Google reader

RSS when casting a broad net on Craigslist

[Anonymous Coward]

When I'm looking to buy an unusual or "big-ticket" item on Craigslist, I need to cover broader than "local" geography. I use one of the online tools (they come and go) to set up a targeted list of regional Craig's RSS feeds, to follow relevant postings.

Yes GreatNews is the best RSS reader I have found.

[Anonymous Coward]

The GreatNews RSS reader shows the headlines and summaries and I can decide which articles to read. Can't find a good RSS reader for Android. Tried Feedly and Flipboard but they filter the feeds. GreatNews shows the full feeds.

YES! Shows what I want.

[Anonymous Coward]

I basically use RSS to filter which articles/stories I want to bother following up on.

Then I'll have Wallabag grab a copy so I can read it at my leisure, without all the extra crap.

Yes - using RSS

[Lodragandraoidh]

Yes I'm using RSS - I aggregate my feeds via netvibes.com .

If it didn't exist - would have to invent something like it to avoid the drudgery of sifting and sorting for viable news and information.

There isn't anything better

[Anonymous Coward]

Well it's so far the best way to stay ahead with multiple blogs and websites that don't post new stuff very often.
I've recently discovered a reader called Feedpresso. It's pretty simple and does automatic recommendations with a pretty good support for non-English sources

Self-tailored advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

I swear by RSS for 90% of my interaction with the Internet. You can curate your own experience, combining blogs and news pages and anything else you care about. Facebook et. al. attempt to do this algorithmically, but I think I know my own interests best.

So many news sites are just aggregators anyway, it's sort of like a mutual fund of information. I aggregate, into my feed, those who I believe do the best aggregation.

rss to email notifications via easy shell commands

[danda]

$ sudo apt-get install rss2email

$ r2e new your@yourdomain.com
$ r2e add feedname http://feed.url/somewhere.rss
$ r2e run

Add as many feeds as you wish. Only new articles will be sent to your email each run.

The last command should be put into your crontab, if you want things be sent you automatically. (and that's pretty much the whole point.)

Thanks Aaron Swartz! ( author of rss2email )

RSS and IFTTT

[TheStickBoy]

I consume about 8 RSS feeds everyday.

My favorite is using various RSS feeds to display instant notifications on my phones lock screen via IFTTT
weather warnings, currency exchange, local news etc.

I wish RSS was supported more. Sadness.

Yes

[jon3k]

n/t

Re: Even the correction is wrong! Holy shit!

[driblio]

You're right, it's not a big deal.

So why is it so hard for the editors to get right?

F*** yea I do.

[kalieaire]

And hundreds do where I work.  We're actually considering expanding usage onto an internally hosted instance to allow users add their own websites.  Looking at internet traffic we see that thousands of people are reading news all day long.  That eats into productivity.  So how do you recoup productivity without being a totalitarian environment by restricting internet usage and calling people out creating awkward work situations?

You give your people the tools to empower.

We expect people spend 20-30 minutes a day reading articles vs 4 hours across the entire day.  And while reading those articles, people will also get interspersed between, articles regarding cyber security that they should be reading.

Engaging your employee base/Encouraging active involvement should be the #1 priority of every IT org since we're the folks who actually meet everybody.  Our clients are important to us and as such, so is their cyber health.

Yes I use RSS.

[ruurd]

Yes. I do. A lot.

What does Slashdot see?

[jon3k]

I'd love to see the stats from Slashdot on RSS usage since it's been available. Are you seeing a drop off?

Do podcasts count?

[jwdb]

Most media entities publishing podcasts do so via an RSS feed, among other options. Not everyone's willing to go on iTunes or some other aggregator to download episodes.

For some things, almost exclusively

[Tomahawk]

I read Slashdot purely on RSS, along with some news sites, Dilbert, and a few other comics, plus some other stuff. I use Feedly (use to use Google Reader), and an app on my phone to sync with it.

Yes

[alexgieg]

I use Feedly.

Yup.

[XSportSeeker]

Using Feedly, but I'd still be using it regardless... it's just the one I got used to after Google Reader kicked the bucket.

I also don't consider neither Facebook nor Twitter as sources for information... they are social media, and basically the worst places to get information from, apart from photos and updates from family and friends.

RSS is not only a good way to keep track of stuff being published on favorite blogs and websites... it's the best current way, period. It's too bad Google was blind enough not to understand that, but it's their loss.

Amended Betteridge's Law for /.

[Just Some Guy]

"On Slashdot, questions in the form 'do you still use...?' will be answered with a vehement 'YES!'". Doesn't matter what the questions is - someone will be hanging on to it. "Does anyone here still use Banyan VINES?" "I sure as hell do, son! In fact, just last week I was uucp'ing the latest .zoo from kremvax when..."

Guaranteed. Every time. I like RSS, but this is the wrong forum to take a survey like this. Ask a random sample of the general population and maybe .1% will have the foggiest. Ask on Slashdot and you'll hear about the mountain man who reads it on his Amiga using Mosaic running on a Sun IPC via X tunneled over thicknet, "which is clearly better but these damned kids can't be bothered to set it up right."

Re:Amended Betteridge's Law for /.

[drinkypoo]

Aw man, now I'm all nostalgic for AmigaUUCP. I'm pretty sure mice pissed all over my A1200, though.

Yes

[theendlessnow]

We use it. Easiest way to do news aggregations on an Intranet or web portal.

yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Without RSS, I wouldn't had read this post.

I was in a dead zone. No wifi, no cell, down in the subway. Social networks couldn't track me down there. Social networks don't allow to pre-load content for offline browsing.

Plus, RSS doesn't know who I am. RSS doesn't chose for me what I should read based on a statistical model of my interests. I'm a grown-up, no body tells me what to read. I'm a grown-up, so I use RSS.

Another "yes, I still use RSS" here

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

Yes, I still use RSS!

Not just for news headlines, but also service status for a bunch of stuff. Honestly, it's the easiest thing for "providers" of any type to support given that it's just HTTP so even if a very small number of "users" actually use it, it's still prolly worth it.

Yes

[SwashbucklingCowboy]

All the time

Use rss

[Anonymous Coward]

Still use RSS... It still is effective and efficient

XSLT is dead

[zifn4b]

Never really caught on

Yes.

[saccade.com]

I use it with Inoreader. A great way to keep up with uncluttered information.

I use RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

I use RSS exclusively; Feedly is my preferred method.

Implemented my own aggregator

[Anonymous Coward]

yes... and while I used the Google feed service until it was deprecated, and then until it was officially killed off... then I implemented it myself.

The aggregation is hosted on my webpage, using AJAX calls to each feed, with AJAX DOM manipulation... the dozen-ish feeds load within a few seconds.

RSS should be critical infrastructure

[jbn-o]

I concur, and find your post to be all too typical of /. moderation -- your post deserves more points because it helps spur an important discussion people should have but probably aren't having: what happens when you choose to let few people or organizations determine what you're likely to encounter?

When people choose few sources for their information (Pat Reader gets all her information from Facebook, for instance) you'll find censorship, tracking, invasion of one's personal life via proprietary software, and many other things most people would find wholly undesirable if they knew even a little bit about how computers worked.

That's a big part of why RSS should be considered critical infrastructure: RSS lets us do the decentralization we need and still enjoy the conveniences offered by centralizing at the endpoint which can help preserve our privacy and our liberty.

Yes: News, Wecomics, Blogs, and my own scraper.

[Athanasius]

For one thing it's how I brows /. stories.

It's also how I follow many webcomics, some blogs, pre-announced downtime from my ISP (PlusNet), some gaming news sites, and many other things.

I use a local Tiny-Tiny RSS instance to do this (it's what I switched to when Google pulled the plug on Reader).

I also went to the trouble of writing a scraper for Frontier Developments' Forums developer accounts activity so I could have an RSS feed with just the developer posts in it. Many other people make use of that as well.

I hate finding a new site or blog that looks interesting only to find it has no, or only a broken, RSS feed.

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm reading this on Feedly now.

Tiny Tiny RSS

[imcdona]

Tiny Tiny RSS: https://tt-rss.org/fox/tt-rss/...

Only reason I'm here...

[Anonymous Coward]

I definitely still use RSS. I arrived here via RSS (Newsblur) and, frankly, probably wouldn't even make it to /. most days without RSS.

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't read this site without it.

Yes.

[david.emery]

I'm using Vienna, and I have probably 100 subscriptions that I monitor at least daily. I find RSS a good way to look for things of interest. And yes, I did see this post pop up on the Slashdot RSS feed and that's how I got here.

For those of you who accuse RSS users of being Luddites, bite me! It's one thing to say "That's not a tech I use," or even "That's a technology that is showing its age." It's another thing to insult people who don't happen to use your favorite tool/technique. That's particularly true for those of you who have less than 20 years experience with the Internet. (Says the guy who uses the same email address for the last 30+ years.)

You'll pry RSS from my cold dead J key

[carlocius]

I arrived here at this Slashdot article via Feedly. I was a Google Reader beta and have used a couple desktop clients but found them more cumbersome to keep in sync between multiple devices so web-based is how I roll. I blame/thank RSS for keeping my mind open to viewpoints different than mine. I've made good friends by following RSS feeds. The deeper significance of RSS is that it allows anyone to collect data from numerous sites and keep them organized and notated outside of keeping an insane amount of bookmarks.

yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Useful interface for publishing from some systems.

Daily use by myself.

[Anonymous Coward]

I use it daily, mostly for podcast-catching.

Yes!

[antdude]

In IRC, SeaMonkey's web browser, web sites like http://aqfl.net/ and http://slashdot.org/ etc.

Love RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

I still use RSS. I actually teach web design and show my students the power inherent in its use. One of which I showed an engineering company - they provide a unique feed to each customer that follows the contract from start to finish. Anyone at the company with the feed URL can see the updates versus taking up a lot of time sending email updates. Just create and post.
I use Outlook as my feed aggregator, which puts each feed into a unique folder for consumption as I have time, although I did like Google's reader too.
To me -- RSS is part of the move towards micro-services and HTML5 - understanding how and where our content is consumed, and make it easy to get.

What is the alternative, browsing?

[Anonymous Coward]

RSS is my primary internet tool. I scrape websites to generate RSS myself if the site doesn't offer it. I use RSS so heavily that I can go weeks without touching the world wide web.

Not really

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been trying to start. I've got a list of feeds I like, but still manually check two almost every day, to the exclusion of the rest.

That's because I can't find a reader I like. One that:

1) keeps an archive of everything it's seen for review (with timestamp info)
2) allows maintaining a reading list (tagged stuff I actually want to read)
3) allows tagging of what's read/unread from my read list
4) has a pleasant UI that doesn't permanently eat half the screen with feed listings
5) has nice internal browser, or makes browser integration seamless (don't want to wait for every page to load after clicking--pre-fetching a result while I'm reading headline would be nice). A browser-based extension would probably be best.
6) makes it easy to cut and paste links to articles that are good
7) supports most common feed formats

!diff

[redelm]

No really (not obLinux)
$ diff -h dumpold dumpnew | grep "^>"
where dump[old|new] are webpage flatfiles (links -dump ) catted together. Privacy.

Totally

[rewardian]

Someone recently laughed when I mentioned I still use RSS. Their loss.

Feedly, by the by.

Pretty much don't visit non-RSS sites

[real gumby]

Apart from FB I pretty much only use RSS. Most sites still support it.

And the fact that FB doesn't is annoying and discourages me from visiting the site.

Yes and it's great

[john.hmnn]

I use it to get news, web comics and blogs and stuff. It's also pretty easy on the my phone's data as it doesn't load all the other content on webpages. Also how I found this article

Reports on the death of RSS are greatly exagerated

[Anonymous Coward]

Been hearing about this for the last few years, even google decommissioned their RSS reader to enormous public outcry. It obviously wasn't for lack of users. I don't know anyone (who uses computers beyond smartphones & tablets) who doesn't use RSS.

Is there a newer 'competing alternative' that I haven't heard about? I really wonder who it is that is responsible for the FUD around the alleged demise of RSS. Where are these stories coming from? Where is the evidence supporting the claims? What are people using if they stop using RSS?

Re TFS: mark me in the 'Yes' column.

Re:Yup. The Old Reader

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL. Not even HTTPS.

Inoreader humilates your shitty app. https://www.inoreader.com/

Trick question?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's little chance I'd have found this post if I hadn't seen a link in a blog I follow on RSS. So yes.

Yep

[Anonymous Coward]

Just read this on Feedly :-).

Yes, including this one.

[Anonymous Coward]

If I didn't have RSS for slashdot/soylent, my web comics and some other sites, I would either have to painstakingly write something to scrape the websites or stop reading most of them due to the too much effort factor.

RSS is Mandatory

[Anonymous Coward]

Sites like Slashdot that have only gone downhill in terms of appearance (stunningly bad when I actually visit it now) are really only digestible via decent RSS readers.

Yes

[mihaic.ro]

Yes.

Yes I use RSS

[AaronGustafson]

Over the years I've gone back and forth, using RSS, then not using it, then using it again. I used to use the RSS reader in Trillian, but feed management was an issue, so I stopped. I returned again just after Reader was shuttered and used Feedly via Reeder for iOS. I couldn't get into it as much on the desktop. Now that I'm on Android, I use gReader, but it's all still Feedly under the hood. I do most of my RSS triage on my mobile in gReader, send articles related to work or that need further action to Instapaper, then pick them up on my desktop using that service. General news I just read on my mobile device.

Yes

[xrayspx]

And, FWIW, FreshRSS is great. I probably wouldn't read /. at all anymore if I wasn't getting it in RSS. There's probably one post per day that I don't just skim, and maybe one every 3 or 4 days that I click into to read the comments. I almost never comment anymore, because it's invariably not worth having clicked into them in the first place anymore, but here we are.

There are some sites which move kind of fast, and so I generally just keep them open, but for the 8 or 12 sites I want to keep up on, but not get flooded by, RSS works perfectly.

RSS = usenet

[Anonymous Coward]

RSS is like usenet; SHUT-UP!! If enough slashdotters respond to this story with the obvious answer(s), The Destroyer of Worlds (https://www.nawbo.org/) will SJW-ize RSS. Believe me, you DO NOT WANT THAT TO HAPPEN!!

Yes, I use RSS every day

[Anonymous Coward]

After Google Reader shut down, I used Feedly for a while, but a couple of years ago I installed Tiny Tiny RSS on my web server. Now I log in and read news feeds either from my desktop or the NewsJet App on my Android phone when I'm on-the-go.

Opera mail

[sgunhouse]

Ironically, I use RSS to read Sladhdot, Distrowatch and of course Opera Desktop Team news, Opera 12 and thus Opera Mail treat RSS as "messages", allowing you to read RSS in a mail reader. Who needs an "app"?

Of course.

[Pseudonym]

RSS is my portal to the Internet. I don't get any news from social media. What I get from social media isn't "news" in any meaningful sense. It's interaction with friends that I rarely see in person.

Re:Of course.

[Pseudonym]

Oh, and of course, all my podcasts (invaluable since I commute by mass transit) are delivered by RSS.

Sure!

[nospam007]

That's how I get all my TV-series on uTorrent. I'm not going to hunt them down individually by myself.

rss

[Anonymous Coward]

yes

Yes, yes and yes.

[frambris]

Best way to aggregate 100+ sites. I use Feedly.

Emphatic "yes"

[jani]

There is no way of keeping track of news without RSS/Atom.

Still?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, i use RSS. There is no need for "still", implying rss is dying

Twitter and other social site in the RSS reader

[Anonymous Coward]

There are solutions to follow Twitter, Instagram and even public Facebook pages with a feed reader using something like Tweeper: https://packagist.org/packages/ao2/tweeper

And youtube channels still provide an RSS feed (https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID), even if auto-discovery does not work anymore.

“Still”?

[atomlib]

What do you mean by the word “still”? Of course I use it, otherwise I would need to visit 100—200 websites daily. As for Facebook and Twitter: news don't happen on Facebook so it's irrelevant, Twitter still has RSS, it's just hidden.

Re:“Still”?

[So7t]

+1 !!I Can't live without it too!! Tracking almost 120 Websites for updates would be exhausting !!!

Re: RSS?

[Entrope]

Why, yes, I do still use Really Sloppy Slashdot. Isn't that obvious?

all the time!

[Anonymous Coward]

I am using the "News" Plugin for my own NextCloud Server, and an RSS App for the Smartphone to pull all of the news from Server to mobile.
The minute a newspaper, blog or whatnot switches RSS off, it is simply deleted from my RSS Feed and never looked at again. period.

Re:all the time!

[Anonymous Coward]

The same goes for newspapers that only offer previews through rss.

Well d'uh

[hagnat]

You have utm_medium=feed on the link, so i believe you know how many read news using some sort of rss feed.

Yes - rss2email and cron jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

I have cron jobs set up to fetch different sites at 3,6,24,and 48 hours. rss2email then emails me. I have filters setup to sort and tag. So, yes, I still use RSS.

Yes indeedy

[ThirdPrize]

So much so that I rolled my own aggregator.
https://www.redfivesoftware.co...
No point reading 10 different feeds on a subject when you can get them all in one listing and I quite like the "tag cloud" feature i created for it.

Re: Even the correction is wrong! Holy shit!

[DontBeAMoran]

We're technical people working in technical fields. If you think getting an acronym wrong is "Not a big deal" then you are either an epic fail at your current job or you don't belong here.

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

And you should too.

RSS is the best way to keep up.

[Gondola]

Yes, I still use RSS every day. I initially started using RSS as a way to manage my favorite webcomics. For this purpose, it is still a killer application.

Do you find yourself checking your favorite comic sites every day, or even multiple times a day? With RSS, I don't have to. I add the site feed to FeedDemon in my Comics folder, and I can easily see when a new comic is posted. The only problem is when the site changes their software around, the RSS URL can change and you just stop receiving updates until you fix it.

This works for a lot of things. I use it for low-traffic Reddit subs that I want to see 100% of the posts for without having to visit them individually. Obviously, I use it to monitor news posts for people, games, and projects I follow. I know when updates and patches to games roll out without having to visit the site every day. I have even subscribed to certain Twitter personalities that don't post very frequently.

Another killer application of RSS is deal feeds. I subscribe to a handful of sites like Hot Deals Club, BensBargains, Dealcatcher, etc. I don't read them directly -- I use a feature of FeedDemon called Watches. I can set up keyword triggers and be notified when I receive a feed update with that keyword(s).

Let's say I'm shopping for a new SSD. I create a new watch called "SSD" and I put "SSD" as the keyword. Every time I get a hit, it shows up in my watches under that heading. I basically get informed of any sales on SSDs anywhere. I can even limit the folder so I only get hits from my deal feeds. Otherwise, I just ignore the deal feeds folder and just mark them read every time I refresh my feeds.

FeedDemon literally saves me hours a day I used to spend just going through my bookmarks folder. It also saves me money when I'm shopping for something that I don't need right away.

There's too much going on these days to personally keep up with it all without wasting a significant amount of time browsing and skimming every day. I think Agents are going to be big once they really get going. Alexa and Siri and Cortana are the "rock on a stick" version of real Agents. Once they mature, we'll be better able to monitor the things we're interested in and get summaries of new topics instead of the same shit repeated over and over at every site.

Allot !

[matafagafo]

Off course, I use it allot, including for SlashDot !

Re:Allot !

[Lotharus]

How much time do you allot to reading a lot of RSS feeds?

Re:Allot !

[matafagafo]

D'oh ! :-)

Nope. But You Should Know Better

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't use RSS at all. I never really adopted it, though I always felt that it was a great tool/protocol that I should use. For me it just fell by the wayside not too long after its inception.

But, I really don't understand why Slashdot would ask about it. You've got the server logs, you should know exactly how many people are using it. Why is this even a question?

It seems like I provided this same answer to another Slashdot question, about a year ago. But, I don't remember what that question was.

P.S. For the record, I don't use Twitter or Faceboook either. Fuck both of those cyber-ghettos. The only thing worse, in my opinion, is Youtube comments and possibly 4Chan. Though that may be to harsh on 4Chan.

Yes.

[Lotharus]

Next?

Re: Even the correction is wrong! Holy shit!

[gregarican]

Exactly. Like a doctor telling his patient they have ALS...oops, no he meant to say IBS instead.

Feedly

[bdwoolman]

When Google shut down its RSS reader I noodled around and landed on Feedly. They try to upsell me all the time, but it is not a big annoyance. Their free service feels like RSS, and I think it still uses RSS. I have a broad range of periodicals covered in my feed. Maybe 50. From the Register to Variety to the NYT. With a couple of the periodicals I actually pay for e-subs sao I can read in. I can parse headlines nationally in about an hour. I never look at Facebook for news.. Or Google much either. It is creepafied by my past viewing. How can something be new if it is always based on my past habits. It produces a fallacy like Amazon's shopping tracker, which is a hoot with the crap it serves up. I do not want news tailored to my past interests by a bot. I want human editors in quality publications to tell me what is interesting TODAY. Same reason I don't like robot radio streams. I listen to Radio Paradise, a human-curated eclectic stream and I get informed and surprised by some people who know and love music. The expression gets used, but in reality it is sort of hard to actually surprise one's self. Much easier if somebody else does that job for you.

Yes and Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes and Yes
Yes

Yes... brought me here

[sshhhhhh]

Love it... please never stop. Use it on my phone and have that synced with all my different other devices. As I go about my day I look at a multitude of sites and the more interesting ones I share or push tabs to browsers to read later.

Do you subscribe to podcasts?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use RSS all the time for listening. I also use it for mashups on my sites pulling in weather, news etc. RSS is used everywhere. Just maybe not for dirct subscription reading. Alao google reader sucked ass.

What does bbc news app use underneath?

hell yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes , My browsers home pages are set GMAIL,Facebook and http://www.inoreader.com/ I dont understand how people dont use RSS.

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't be reading this postif it wasn't for RSS. When Google shut down reader I starter using feedly but now I use Inoreader. Both the mobile and web apps are pretty good.

God yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Having everything I want to read - news, blogs, forum posts, webcomics - all in one place where I can peruse it at my leisure, and no algorithms or bots to "help me" filter it?
Yes, please, and thank you.

Yes

[mlheur]

I had to click "open in browser" just to make this post. Just for Fark and /.

Problems with feeds

[ebvwfbw]

It was barely useful when it worked. Seems like I'd no sooner get it working and it would break. RSS no longer available or the reader simply refused to connect to it anymore. No need for up to the minute stories anyhow.

Feedly Is My Morning Routine

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't operate on a daily basis without RSS, social media is no match

yes, I use RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm using feed2imap to have my favourite feeds in the email available even offline. I only visit a couple of sites without RSS because of great content and easiness to read and follow, but the rest (around 100 sources like /.) come to me via RSS.

I do

[Anonymous Coward]

And even found this article in the RSS stream

RSS got me here

[m.hataj]

RSS got me here, and it's my personal news aggregator and podcast collector of choice. And I really like to read it on my phone in the subway and to listen to new audiobooks and sounds of friends in the evening. It's Owncloud News and Cloudnews here. And simply iTunes for podcast, as this is the only useful cast for it. https://github.com/owncloud/ne... https://itunes.apple.com/de/ap...

Every day!

[Fruchtenstein]

I read RSS every day using Feedly and I can't think of a better way to get updates from all those dozens of web-sites. Twitter can't convey anything much more than a URL. Facebook is a mess.

Disappointed when Google discontinued Reader

[Anonymous Coward]

Disappointed when Google discontinued Reader so trialed a number of alternatives which did not have comparable functionality. I started using Inoreader which I have been using since Google Reader shut up shop, and I am very happy with it. It is a time saver and allows me to quickly scan hundreds of articles on a daily basis to find a few interesting articles to repost on social media or help me keep abreast of developments in my industry, or other areas of interest.

I recently introduced my non-techie brother to it and he now uses it all the time. It is a very useful tool for keeping up to date with chosen topics and sites efficiently.

no

[Anonymous Coward]

No

BazQux Reader

[vshabanov]

Using and even developing my own feed reader called BazQux.

"News is an education for adults" -- heard this in one TED talk and really like the idea.

Social media is an awful source of news. Good if you just see funny cats and at least get some pleasure. But most of the time you'll see articles carefully designed to make money from your attention. Or you get to know something not really important about life of your friends or celebrities (not the real life, only the part that they want to show you and in a way they want to show you). In all cases you get lowest possible quality of information to time spent ratio.

And there is a gambling factor -- sometimes you'll get something really funny/interesting. And like a lab mouse you pull the lever (scroll the page) to get more. FOMO, comparing yourself to others all this adds up and you'll get social media anxiety, lost time and no knowledge.

What's good in blog is that it's usually has some theme. You don't see cats/selfies/celebrities in a programming blog. More than this -- most blogs are written by people who want to tell something, enthusiasts not SMM people. And blogs are personal -- authors don't tailor opinions to yours.

And RSS readers allow to read multiple different blogs. You could have folder for fun/comics stuff, folder for programming, for personal development, children, cooking, music, anything. And read what you like to read now. And don't re-read it again, don't visit many sites and look on the fluff around articles, bookmark what you like, search, filter. All in one place.

Besides RSS my reader allow you to subscribe to FB/Twitter/Instagram accounts, and some users read only social media but in RSS reader just to get all these features.

Unfortunately blogs are out of fame now. Everybody had a blog and posted their opinions a decade ago. Now people create FB/Instagram/Twitter/SnapChat/etc. account and post party pictures or jokes. So RSS usage declines. But I don't believe it will go away. It's just too convenient to get news this way and quality of news is usually much better here. If there will be a new platform where people will write interesting things RSS readers will just add support for this platform.

Hit count?

[knisa]

It occurs to me that /. could answer that question themselves by looking at the hits on their rss urls.

Yes, I use RSS! I have 1,200 feeds in my reader

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I use RSS! I have >1,200 feeds in my reader (Feedly). I use it on several desktops and a phone.

Yes: Newsblur.com

[adamsc]

I've been happy with Newsblur.com: the UI has a number of improvements over Google Reader — especially the trainer which allows you to prioritize keywords, domains, authors, tags, etc. up or down (great if you follow people who share things on multiple topics and you're just not interested in one of their hobbies) and the option to have it automatically load the remote article text, which is configurable per-site — perfect for sites which only publish a snippet of the full article. The social features are decent but definitely show the market fragmentation since the number of users is so much smaller than when almost everyone was on Google Reader.

Beyond the technical aspects, there are two things which I really like about Newsblur:
1. A non-bubble business model: it's a lean but reportedly profitable service, which means you're not looking to move as soon as the venture capital runs out
2. It's all open-source: https://github.com/samuelclay/... has the entire site and the official Android and iOS clients

RSS still exists?

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, haven't used that in ages. Time to bust out the parachute pants again too?

F-ck YEAH!

[rcharbon]

I still use RSS, and don't follow sites when they don't provide a feed. Why should I have to work for it? After a long search when Google Reader died, I decided on Inoreader: https://www.inoreader.com/ And I actually pay for it, which shocks both of us.

Re:F-ck YEAH!

[rcharbon]

...and a 'mee too" for all the "I wouldn't be reading Slashdot if they didn't have a RSS feed" posts.

Don't know. Never used it.

[RockDoctor]

Still no idea what, if anything, it does or did, or what anyone would use it for.