As most of you know, I’m a big fan of RSS and use it as my main way of discovering and reading content. It has plenty of detractors but the majority of those are people who are upset that RSS makes it hard to monetize and track content. RSS is perfect for those who just want access to quality content without a bunch of sketchy ads and tracking cookies.
Over at pcloadletter there’s a nice post that says RSS is still pretty great. It’s a spirited defense of RSS but takes an even handed look at the protocol’s good and bad points.
One of the criticisms of RSS that he considers fair is that it doesn’t allow content discovery. That hasn’t been my experience. I discover new content by subscribing to, for example, Hacker News and various subreddits covering areas I’m interested in. To be sure, there’s a bunch of noise but it’s easily ignored and I find new blogs and other resources that are worth following.
Another fair criticism is that RSS can’t render all types of content faithfully. That’s definitely not an issue for me because I use elfeed-webkit to automatically follow RSS entries to their source. Even if you’re using an inferior RSS reader, the point of RSS is to give you a summary of new content and provide a link to the source if you find it interesting.
The pcloadletter post also does a good job of covering what makes RSS a great protocol. Despite what Google and others with an axe to grind tell you, it’s an excellent—for some of us, the best—way of following and reading high value content.