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I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

defrost

As a general PSA, youtube channels have an RSS feed to alert you when a favourite creator releases a new video.

The form is

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC2wdo5v...

where channel_id is the channel hash code which is buried in the source for the "nicely named" channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@CuttingEdgeEngineering

and can be found without source diving via (say) FeedBro (RSS browser extension) "Find Feeds in Current Tab" function.

https://nodetics.com/feedbro/

EvanAnderson

I worry about YouTube RSS feeds getting popular and Google killing them. Every time I see them discussed publicly I have this "Ssshh! Keep it on the down low!" reaction.

I browse YouTube anonymously, have an ad blocker setup that pretty much eliminates all ads, and track my "subscriptions" with RSS. It's highly usable. I use a fork of tt-rss and actually embed the YouTube videos in the reader pane so I never see any of YouTube's algorithmic recommendation schlock (beyond recommendations at the end of videos, which I ignore). Browsing YouTube, the site, is a jarring nightmare.

I am considering having my podcatcher use a YouTube downloader to just pull down all the videos in the feeds I watch. I believe Google is throttling yt-dlp to realtime speeds, but I figure if my podcatcher is doing it behind the scenes that shouldn't matter. I maintain curated collections of podcasts I like (in case they ever disappear), and since I just added 40TB if storage to my home system I figure it's time to do that with YouTube too.

donatj

That's good to know. The number of times I have subscribed to someone on YouTube only to not see anything from them in years, and then find tens of their videos YouTube never offered is just insane.

So many times I can't find anything to watch on YouTube and it just isn't showing me any of my subscriptions, it's ridiculous.

soulofmischief

The first three menu items in the navbar of the authenticated YouTube homepage are 'Home', 'Shorts', and 'Subscriptions'. 'Subscriptions' shows exactly what's on the tin, a timeline of videos from your subscribed channels.

0xEF

A lot of people might not realize this exists because of the way apps for smart tv's and game systems present the content and menus. I'm not sure if that's intentional or just misguided design, but the only reason I knew to see it out on my PS4's YouTube app is because I'd seen it on desktop.

oneeyedpigeon

The opposite problem is also bad: subscribe to a channel, then get frequent notifications of years-old videos.

almostnormal

By "subscription" do you only mean subscription? Don't notifications need to be enabled in addition (bell button)?

I'm using the RSS feeds, so I'm not sure...

guilamu

Just use Freetube.

trollied

Reddit also has feeds that they don't publicise. eg: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/.rss

Adding /.rss on to the end of lots of URLs works all over the place on the site.

elpocko

There is a "Copy channel ID" link on each channel's page, but it's well hidden. Click "...more" in the channel description, then click "Share channel" to open a popup menu that has the "Copy channel ID" link. It does what it says.

entuno

It also provides feeds for individual playlists, where `playlist_id` is the `list` URL parameter when you view the full playlist.

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=

It's a really nice way to be able to follow creators/playlists without needing to register an account. I'm surprised that YouTube still allow it, but I hope it stays.

WithinReason

I highly recommend Feedbro as an RSS reader.

gudzpoz

Speaking of advocating RSS, I was trying out Nikola [0] for static site generation and found that they have a really nice-looking RSS end-point [1] that is viewable both from the browser and an RSS reader. Looking into the XML, it turns out it's called xml-stylesheet:

    <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="assets/xml/rss.xsl" media="all"?>
And I would argue that this is an excellent way to introduce new readers to RSS: instead of the browser popping up a download prompt, you can make your RSS feeds themselves a dedicated page for advocating RSS, in case an interested reader is browsing through the links on your site.

[0] https://getnikola.com/

[1] https://getnikola.com/rss.xml (Open it in your browser!)

[2] https://github.com/getnikola/nikola/blob/master/nikola/data/...

PeterStuer

My suggestion for best practice would be to have a feed endpoint that is as minimal and clean as possible, and provide a separate endpoint (can be the same base url but with a parameter) for human consumption. This ensures maximal compatibility and ease of consumption for both machine and human.

christkv

Man what a blast from the past. There was a moment in time where xml and xlst was considered the bright future of webapps

picafrost

This is a great initiative. Large tech companies, through hijacking our web experience and pursuing maximum scale, have normalized not being able to talk to a human being on the other side of a website/app/business.

In many situations you _can_ just send an email. Most often someone will read it and be very happy to help out if they can. Not always, but how much of a time and effort investment is an email really?

The best part is that a few kind words can absolutely make someone’s week.

oneeyedpigeon

> Please advocate for more RSS support - especially with orgs you want to stay up-to-date with.

Also advocate for support with browser manufacturers. It used to be good, then one of them dropped it and the others blindly followed. People clearly want the RSS button, why on earth not provide it?

rplnt

Most people also decided it's a good idea to use browser from an advertising company. RSS is not good for business and it won't be provided.

beretguy

> Most people also decide

Most people didn't decide. Most people were tricked into using chrome. Most people are not computer literate.

rplnt

That's fair. Though if I replaced "people" with "HN users" it would still hold true, and I would consider this group to be very computer literate.

_Algernon_

Adults have agency and being uninformed is a choice.

Im sick of this paternalism for tech illiterate people. Its a choice.

dist-epoch

When Chrome appeared HN was full of comments like "I switched all my family to Chrome, I recommend you do too".

akvadrako

I use RSS heavily and I don't want an RSS button - what would that even do? RSS is best when integrated with a stateful server-side reader.

Whatever comes with the browser will not be as good as an extension from a company focused on that feature. For example I use https://www.inoreader.com/

oneeyedpigeon

> what would that even do?

Open the current page's RSS feed in my configured client. Failing that, copy its URL. Absolute minimum, it's a shortcut for having to view source, cmd-f, "RSS", cmd-c

alexchamberlain

I thought RSS readers were able to extract the URL themselves?

kevincox

Firefox had this and it was great.

- It rendered the feed in a pretty way.

- If provided a little widget to open the feed in your feed reader (in practice it substituted the feed url into a URL template with popular readers by default and the option to add your own). This basically made it a one-click subscribe option.

PeterStuer

Easy notification that a feed is present and an option.

sirolimus

RSS is GOAT

uzyn

RSS was a key protocol in syndication a widely free and open web before the domination of big tech/social media. We now have new internet generation that has never known RSS, relying largely on "the algorithm" of the big tech in content syndication.

Thank you for your effort in advocating RSS support. I hope RSS makes a major come back especially with the recent events.

brisky

Recently I have posted about RSDS (really simple decentralized syndication) - a protocol that tries to solve RSS content global discovery problem. Here is the link if you are interested to read more about it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42654891

palata

I have been doing that for plaintext emails. Whenever I receive an HTML-only email (that my email reader cannot open), I send a kind email to the company, asking if they could consider adding a plaintext version next to it. I clearly explain that they can keep the HTML version as a default, and that some people need plaintext for accessibility and security reasons.

I often receive answers, that surprised me! People saying "thank you for your suggestion, we will think about what we can do". None of them has every changed anything (I've been doing that for years). I don't even know if they did anything more than answering to the email.

n_plus_1_acc

Thus is a pet peeve of mine. Some companies send an multi-part E-Mail, just for the plain text part to be an empty string. Why bother? Pretty often the plain text is just the same html, so you get to read raw ugly html. Do people not test this?

rednafi

Interesting. I didn’t even know you could do it. I wonder how to do that in a mainstream email client like Gmail on the web.

molticrystal

Openrss.org is a non-profit that advocates for RSS adoption in addition to providing RSS feeds for websites that have none and cleainup/improving existing rss feeds.

Consider helping them out if this interests you, you might even be using a feed already as they have some custom feeds for github like for discussions and issues.

https://openrss.org/about/contributing

palata

RSS is great. Most blog engines support RSS by default. Podcasts typically use RSS (even if the app goes to great length to hide it).

I sometimes wonder why there is so much push for "federation" and so few for... well just simple interoperable solutions that just require a client to connect to whatever server it wants with a well-known protocol.

entuno

Where I have RSS feeds from news sites, I usually skim down the list of titles, read an article (in my feed) if it's interesting, and then move on. I never visit their website, I don't see their adverts, their tracking scripts can't run, and I don't see or interact with their comments.

Which is great for me as the end user - but makes it much harder for them to monetise.

oneeyedpigeon

> makes it much harder for them to monetise.

On the other hand, RSS definitely provides extra opportunities to monitise. Imagine your business provides a customisable "offers" feed so you can tell interested parties when a sale occurs, etc. Businesses should be falling over themselves to get that kind of engagement.

entuno

That just sounds like a mailing list, but without the ability to easily identify and track the individuals you're sending to.

saint_yossarian

Nobody's forcing them to put the full text into the feed, for me the main benefit is not having to check the site manually.

entuno

As the consumer, that's a big benefit, and the main reason I use RSS.

But for the company running the website, the fact that you're no longer browsing to their site, being served adverts and tracking code, and seeing what's on their homepage is not a benefit

sourcecodeplz

Because RSS is "too old"...

mongol

> Podcasts typically use RSS

I would even say that a podcast that does not support RSS is not a podcast, it is something else.

octochamp

I'd say that the only thing that reliably differentiates a _podcast_ from a _radio show_ is just that the podcast's method of delivery is RSS.

mongol

I don't think it is the only thing, but I agree that if the delivery method is not RSS, then it is something else.

frde_me

I would be curious why you think the idea of a podcast is coupled to a specific distribution technology

mongol

Similar to why radio relates to electromagnetical transmissions in the radio spectrum. When it happens over internet, we don't call it radio, but possibly internet radio. RSS was the origin of podcasts, and if it does not involve RSS, it is not podcasts

rglullis

Because the original idea of what we call "podcasting" is rooted on RSS.

oneeyedpigeon

It goes much further than that: as the name suggests, it's coupled to a specific, obsolete brand of device.

rook1e_dev

RSS is my main source of information. And I've built some RSS-related projects:

1. https://github.com/0x2E/fusion - A lightweight, self-hosted friendly RSS aggregator and reader

2. https://rawweb.org/ - A search engine for indie websites (the crawler collects data from RSS feeds)

3. https://github.com/0x2E/rss-finder - A tool for finding the RSS link of a website

emporas

Nice list. I tried at some point to analyze html using a tree-sitter grammar and generate a list of articles, index them, and be on alert every so often for new entries.

RSS feed could be generated automatically with some AI code generator (or tree-sitter query generator), and just parsing the elements of the page.

Eventually i failed, but also i didn't try hard enough.

freetonik

Rawweb is very cool! Curious, have you implemented your own crawler, RSS parser and search engine?

rook1e_dev

Crawler is a simple HTTP requester + RSS parser. Full-text searching uses Elasticsearch.

medhir

I recently had a popular post on HN and several people reached out asking if I had an RSS feed implemented.

Was surprised that anyone would be interested in keeping up with my writing, but was happy to oblige the request as it had been on my to-do list for a while. Happy I did do as it seems many people are hitting the RSS endpoint now. Cool to see that RSS is relevant in 2025, and will definitely advocate for its usage more moving forward :-)

rambambram

I might have been one of these people, because I was following your site as a bookmark in my RSS reader already. I didn't see any content in your feed so I checked again for a feed endpoint. I found it eventually on your site, but you might consider making it auto-discoverable (see https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery). People only have to enter your domain name into their RSS reader then.

medhir

Ah nice, thanks for the heads up! I’ll look into adding this soon.

oneeyedpigeon

That might be a useful site, but why on earth is it stuffed full of privacy-abusing, invasive advertising? I'm sure there are better sources for the RSS standard.

rambambram

Oh, really? My bad. I don't see ads over there.

Auto-discovery for RSS is simple enough to explain here: just put the following code in your head element (at least on the homepage).

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="/feed.xml" title="RSS Feed">

rednafi

The Hacker News folks do love their RSS. I also added support for RSS[1] to my site when one of my posts hit the front page, and a few people reached out for an RSS link.

I came to the industry way later than the Web 2.0 inception and didn’t even know about it until a while back.

[1]: https://rednafi.com/index.xml

6510

How long did it take you to implement?

I never bothered to make a list of the mails I send but now I see it is quite useful to show how well it works. Maybe some data on implementation time would be as useful.

medhir

Took me a few hours. I use MDX for formatting so most of the time was spent figuring out how to convert the MDX to plain HTML. Not a very heavy lift overall :)