Maybe 'invisibility' will kill RSS

2021-05-19 07:32  invisiblerss      [permalink]

How can we make RSS 'more visible'? Among the news-sites I've added the RSS feed to my RSS reader, I see a common thing happen a few times now: They build a new website that looks better, and — bam — the feed URL responds with a 404, or worse a 500, HTTP response. I guess what happens is that by selecting a new platform, the main core feature(s) is provided — listing new articles — in a new design that looks better, and these designers don't know about the feed because they can't see it. Perhaps in most cases it doesn't even show in the page view statistics...

In a better world, they would soon notice a viewership drop especially by the people that would previously follow a link from a feed, but I know full well that us feed-readers are a minority group that's easily left out of the numbers, and that news feeds themselves are a sensitive subject because we're using their content and can't directly generate income.

The least I can do is send an e-mail to a support address if I can find one, notifying I'm getting less service than before. I don't expect them to really do anything about it. Or even respond. I guess we shoud get the message and accept we're not wanted in their slice of the public. Some do restore the feed, or build a feed on the new platform, though. So even I don't get a response, from time to time I check to see if they still love us. (Or if there's a way to get what we want directly from the new platform...)

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