 haven't used RSS frequently outside of distributing a podcast in many years. It's not something that I have ever really felt the need to do after like 2010-ish. Back then, RSS was a huge way of getting news. You had RSS feed readers all over the place, a lot of news organizations got a lot of the traffic from RSS and focused a lot on being able to distribute through RSS. These days, not so much. Outside of podcasts, RSS seems to be fairly abandoned. Most places still have a feed, but the things you get in the feed are basically useless. They're just headlines for the most part. In order to get anything more out of them, you kind of have to click on the link. And I completely understand why this has become the way it is because if you want to make money online, you have to be able to serve advertising. And in order to serve advertising, you have to have people to actually come to your site. And you can't do that through RSS, at least not easily. So I understand why RSS has kind of gone by the wayside and has become what it is in terms of serving news, but what surprised me is how many people actually still use RSS readers. I talked about a little bit about this on my personal Twitter account and I DMed a few friends and they all use RSS readers. Now I do believe that a lot of people who still use RSS feed readers are very much entrenched in the tech sphere. You've got to be a little bit of a nerd in order to use one of these. You're not going to find many normies out there who you still use RSS. I don't have any real evidence or data to back that up. It's just a feeling that I have. That being said, I wanted to ask the question, what is the place of RSS on today's internet? And I don't really have a really good answer that because RSS is still widely used to distribute podcasts. It's definitely a needed technology and it works very well to distribute podcasts even though it doesn't have a ton of modern features like collecting download information and statistics for location and all that stuff that advertisers really kind of want. They want to know how many people have downloaded your your podcast. They want to know where that those people are, other metrics and stuff that will help them target advertising towards podcasts and RSS really doesn't do that. But even though that's the case, many people who do a podcast including yours truly use RSS to distribute their podcasts to the masses. So RSS is definitely still a needed technology but outside of podcasts it seems to have been mostly abandoned. So originally this video was going to be talking about a feed reader called News Flash and News Flash looks like this. This is what News Flash looks like. It's really good looking. It really works really well when it's not crashing. But basically this is what a feed reader looks like. They all look pretty much the same. You click on an article here and you get a little bit of a blurb of the article and then if you want to read the rest of it, you have to click on the link which will then open up in a browser which it did for me just to open up on another tag. And that's what RSS has become. You don't get a ton of information and this one here that I'm looking at now actually has more information than what you normally get. Some of them are much smaller than that. Now the Verge seems to always do about two paragraphs or so. But if we go to the Linux one that I have here, some of these are one paragraph. This is just one paragraph and this is a Linux blog. So it's not as if they're, I don't even think 9 to 5 Linux runs advertising. I don't even know if they do. They may. But whatever reason, they only give you one paragraph of their article and then in order to see anything else, you have to go through and click the link. And that's just the norm when it comes to distributing news through RSS. And you understand why because these blogs and publications need to make money and you can't do that through RSS. So I have the question, why does RSS still exist? Or even better, why has an RSS become better? And the answer to that question is unknown. It's a sad fact, several apps or whatever have tried to make RSS feeds better, something like Flipboard has tried to make a publication network where they can serve advertising through an RSS feed like thing and still make publishers money. And it's so it's somewhat work. A lot of people still use something like Flipboard. But for people who just use straight up RSS, monetizing that is kind of hard. And because the technology is so old, it doesn't have a ton of metrics in terms of like, this right here, they make the 9 to 5 Linux people may know that I have subscribed to their feed. I'm not sure how far that goes, but they don't know which one, which of these articles I've gone through in red, you know, red, in terms of if I click on this and mark this as unread, and read this paragraph, they don't get any information back from the RSS feed that I've seen this article or the portion of this article that it gives me. And that's one of the reasons why there's just a small blurb, they want you to give they want to give you just enough, you know, content to get you to click on the link. But the functionality of RSS for people who to make money just isn't there yet, or never has been there, I guess is the way to say it because RSS still isn't still being developed as far as I know. So the functionality of RSS has gone down in proportion to the number of blogs out there that want to make money, because which is all of them basically, right? And honestly, it's kind of a shame. If there was a good technology out there that allowed you to get your news through an application like News Flash, that also allowed these blogs to make money, that'd be great, because honestly, and a lot of my Linux YouTuber friends agree with this, the internet sucks. The internet is kind of terrible in terms of presenting you web pages, because all of them have these a ton of JavaScript and infusion engines and all this kind of nonsense that, you know, to track you and slow down the page and all this stuff. And it's just a bad experience. If you don't use an ad blocker to go to site like the verge, it takes like almost a minute for the page to load. I mean, it's not that bad, but it feels that bad. And that's because it has to load up all this nonsense in the background in order to serve you advertisements in order to make them money. And we want them to make money. But the experience of them making money, it makes the, you know, their website experience bad. See if I could say experience there one more time in the sentence. So I really wish there was an like a RSS 2.0 or whatever, that allowed us to bypass that whole crappy website experience and still get our news served like this, because this is an awesome experience. But the way it is now, it's basically useless. It would be so cool to go to this feed for nine to five Linux, and just be able to scroll through using the Vim keys, no less, each of these articles. And I read them and it marks them that I've read them. And if I want to go through and save one of them, I can, you know, I can start for later. And that'd be a great way to choose topics for the channel. And you know, I probably would use it like that. But the way it is now, it's not a great experience because all we get is this little bitty, you know, blurb. And then if I want more, I have to click on the link, go over to, you know, a web browser and view the content on the web. And that's not the as good of an experience as it is in this little feed reader. So just a short video today, more of a nostalgic kind of thing where I wish RSS was better. I wish RSS was more modern and allowed publishers to make money because then they would actually use it. And we could have these feed readers that are really good actually surf content that is useful because right now all we get is headlines. And for the most part, that's not really what I want. If I still have to visit the website, I might as well just have visited the website to begin with. That's the way I look at it. So in the comments below, let me know if you still use RSS for things other than podcasts. I'd really like to know if you have a cool feed reader that you use and would like to share it. Leave that in the comments section below. If you'd like to follow me on Twitter, you can do so at the Linuxcast. You can also follow me on Facebook at the Linuxcast. And you can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast. Before I go, I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons, Devon Chris, East Coast Web, Gentooisfund2, Marcus, Megalyn Sven, Jackson Knife and Tool, Mitchell, Mr. Fox, Arch Center, American Camp. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.