These specifications are really stable, with RSS last being updated in 2009 and Atom syndication last being updated in 2005.
- No location available
-

(highlight:: If you're a content publisher, it's usually pretty simple to get RSS set up on your website. There are surely some RSS plugins for popular authoring platforms like Wordpress. For this site, I use the 11ty static site generator and it also has an RSS feed generation plugin.
If you need to generate your own feed, there are plenty of open source options. For example, python-feedgen will let you get up and running with a feed in just a few lines:)
- No location available
-

The biggest pro of RSS is choice: I decide what blogs or sites to include in my RSS aggreator feed. There is no algorithm engineered to milk the maximum amount of interaction out of me. If I start disliking what an author is publishing, I simple unsubscribe from their feed. I am in total control of the content I consume.
- No location available
-

RSS feeds bias towards long-term content. This is usually content published to some person or organization's blog and the author has put in a good amount of time and effort into the post. They've had time to think, "Should I really write this on the Internet?" (a thought pattern I've found is sorely missing from social media).
- No location available
-

RSS reduces low-value content. It tends to greatly reduce the amount of content that exists sole for the sake of advertising. Often, when you're googling something and find a promising site, you'll visit it and be dismayed that the content is exceedingly shallow but there are plenty of ads to be found on the site. This doesn't really happen on RSS feeds because a lot of ads (especially the obnoxious ones) won't render in RSS feed aggregators.
- No location available
-

There are no flame wars and no internet points on RSS. Social media has its value, but I really can't stand the flame wars, trolling, and people generally performing for Internet points. If there's an author I like, I just want to read what they wrote without having to wade through a sea of contrarian comments.
- No location available
-

RSS is that it's just-in-time: I can get to my content when I need it. I totally understand it's convenient for some to receive an email in their inbox with a website's latest article, but I don't love it. I'm almost never ready to ready the article when it hits my inbox, so now I have to decide what to do with the email. For me, it's a much better workflow to just browse to Feedly when I have the time and read.
- No location available
-

RSS makes it hard to advertise and therefore publishers looking to make ad revenue off their content may be unwilling to use it. I don't think it's entirely wrong to want to monetize content, but I do see it as a big motivator for a lot of the bad content out there. When you make it hard to monetize, you reduce the number of "get rich quick" schemes involved.
- No location available
-

Another criticism is that RSS isn't social and doesn't innately enable interaction. You know what else isn't social or interactive? Books. But they're still great. Sometimes you just want to read something without telling the world your opinion on it, or without some random stranger telling you why your opinion is wrong.
- No location available
-

First, aggregators don't render content perfectly. It does for the type of content I write, but if you publish content with interesting visuals (e.g., svg animation, canvas, page scroll interaction) I don't think any RSS aggregator will display it correctly. This means there's potentially a whole class of interesting content that's not RSS-friendly. One approach here is to use RSS as a "preview" of sorts and then visit the actual content if you're interested in the associated visuals.
- No location available
-

Another fair criticism is lack of discoverability. No matter how great RSS is for reading blogs I know about, it has no inherent capability to discover content that you don't know about. Some feed aggregators may have this kind of functionality as an add-on, but it's simply something that's not possible with how underlying RSS technology works.
- No location available
-

Given that you just publish your feed and allow aggregators to interpret that feed, you also give up a bit of control about the publishing process. For example, there is really no way to tell aggregators that you changed an article's path. I did this a couple times on this blog, and you can see the duplicates in Feedly here.
- No location available
-
- [note::Note: RSS & Atom actually support an "entry ID" field - this is only an issue when RSS publishers use the article URL as the entry ID.]

Finally, and one of the biggest issues with RSS, is that it's not very intuitive to non-tech savvy individuals. If someone non-technical clicks the RSS link on the bottom of my website, their eyes might glaze over at the sight of a bunch of XML. Their best chance of subscribing to my RSS feed may be to go to an aggregator and use the search feature in its UI to find this blog.
- No location available
-

These specifications are really stable, with RSS last being updated in 2009 and Atom syndication last being updated in 2005.
- No location available
-

(highlight:: If you're a content publisher, it's usually pretty simple to get RSS set up on your website. There are surely some RSS plugins for popular authoring platforms like Wordpress. For this site, I use the 11ty static site generator and it also has an RSS feed generation plugin.
If you need to generate your own feed, there are plenty of open source options. For example, python-feedgen will let you get up and running with a feed in just a few lines:)
- No location available
-

The biggest pro of RSS is choice: I decide what blogs or sites to include in my RSS aggreator feed. There is no algorithm engineered to milk the maximum amount of interaction out of me. If I start disliking what an author is publishing, I simple unsubscribe from their feed. I am in total control of the content I consume.
- No location available
-

RSS feeds bias towards long-term content. This is usually content published to some person or organization's blog and the author has put in a good amount of time and effort into the post. They've had time to think, "Should I really write this on the Internet?" (a thought pattern I've found is sorely missing from social media).
- No location available
-

RSS reduces low-value content. It tends to greatly reduce the amount of content that exists sole for the sake of advertising. Often, when you're googling something and find a promising site, you'll visit it and be dismayed that the content is exceedingly shallow but there are plenty of ads to be found on the site. This doesn't really happen on RSS feeds because a lot of ads (especially the obnoxious ones) won't render in RSS feed aggregators.
- No location available
-

There are no flame wars and no internet points on RSS. Social media has its value, but I really can't stand the flame wars, trolling, and people generally performing for Internet points. If there's an author I like, I just want to read what they wrote without having to wade through a sea of contrarian comments.
- No location available
-

RSS is that it's just-in-time: I can get to my content when I need it. I totally understand it's convenient for some to receive an email in their inbox with a website's latest article, but I don't love it. I'm almost never ready to ready the article when it hits my inbox, so now I have to decide what to do with the email. For me, it's a much better workflow to just browse to Feedly when I have the time and read.
- No location available
-

RSS makes it hard to advertise and therefore publishers looking to make ad revenue off their content may be unwilling to use it. I don't think it's entirely wrong to want to monetize content, but I do see it as a big motivator for a lot of the bad content out there. When you make it hard to monetize, you reduce the number of "get rich quick" schemes involved.
- No location available
-

Another criticism is that RSS isn't social and doesn't innately enable interaction. You know what else isn't social or interactive? Books. But they're still great. Sometimes you just want to read something without telling the world your opinion on it, or without some random stranger telling you why your opinion is wrong.
- No location available
-

First, aggregators don't render content perfectly. It does for the type of content I write, but if you publish content with interesting visuals (e.g., svg animation, canvas, page scroll interaction) I don't think any RSS aggregator will display it correctly. This means there's potentially a whole class of interesting content that's not RSS-friendly. One approach here is to use RSS as a "preview" of sorts and then visit the actual content if you're interested in the associated visuals.
- No location available
-

Another fair criticism is lack of discoverability. No matter how great RSS is for reading blogs I know about, it has no inherent capability to discover content that you don't know about. Some feed aggregators may have this kind of functionality as an add-on, but it's simply something that's not possible with how underlying RSS technology works.
- No location available
-

Given that you just publish your feed and allow aggregators to interpret that feed, you also give up a bit of control about the publishing process. For example, there is really no way to tell aggregators that you changed an article's path. I did this a couple times on this blog, and you can see the duplicates in Feedly here.
- No location available
-
- [note::Note: RSS & Atom actually support an "entry ID" field - this is only an issue when RSS publishers use the article URL as the entry ID.]

Finally, and one of the biggest issues with RSS, is that it's not very intuitive to non-tech savvy individuals. If someone non-technical clicks the RSS link on the bottom of my website, their eyes might glaze over at the sight of a bunch of XML. Their best chance of subscribing to my RSS feed may be to go to an aggregator and use the search feature in its UI to find this blog.
- No location available
-