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Get Rid of RSS?
I’m thinking about getting rid of my RSS feed, unplugging it from FeedBurner(/Google) control, and disabling the syndication features altogether for it. I’m wondering if that would be readership suicide though, and if there would be any real derivable benefit from it. Thoughts?
{TOS
1. Constructive conversation only - ie, “I hate you and will never read this site again if you disable RSS” doesn’t help me whatsoever.}
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October 16th, 2007 at 10:04 am
Hi Tim
As a newcomer to your blog I find the RSS feed very useful when deciding whether I want to read some of the posts or not. I could well visit less often if the feed where disabled.
Aside I probably spend more time going through all the articles and posts. I see you have a limit of 8 or less on the history page.
October 16th, 2007 at 10:12 am
So you look at the RSS feed, and then you visit my actual website to read articles - or am I misreading that?
October 16th, 2007 at 10:53 am
I probably would never read again. If a site doesn’t have an RSS feed I’m not going out of my way to read it, even if I want to I’m too lazy.
October 16th, 2007 at 11:15 am
Hi Tim,
I’ve found your site when I was simply poking around Google Images, under the search of Gnosticism. I’ve since found a lot to enjoy here, and would like to visit again.
My own blog-browsing habits are now almost entirely under RSS. My personal preferance is to read the blog entirely from the RSS viewer, though in the case of embedded content (like a youtube clip) I’ll browse directly to the site.
Though it might not be reader suicide, THIS newcomer would probably read less often, simply because I’d be relying on my own memory to recall this new, though interesting, site, and not because I’d be getting a reminder (in the form of RSS syndication) to travel here and read it.
October 16th, 2007 at 11:48 am
Sounds like a personal problem!
I actually like the sound of that.
I guess, in a sense, this is a dumb question to ask, because the results of a user poll will be obvious: people who use the RSS feed won’t want to see it go away because they are used to interacting with the information in that way.
Maybe a more useful question would be: what benefits might I see, if any, by removing RSS and syndication abilities?
October 16th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
I have about 30 blogs I follow, and I read all of them as RSS in my feed reader. I don’t see myself logging on to your site to read it.
October 16th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
RSS is a useful reminder. Someone who’s not in the habit of visiting your site daily might see an eye-catching headline and decide to visit.
When I see a new blog that I like, I usually add its RSS feed to my aggregator. Sites without a feed aren’t as likely to be visited by me again, unless I make a special effort to do so.
I am curious as to what benefits you think you might see if you did not have an RSS feed.
October 16th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
Does RSS really save that much time? Since most blogs are already crunched down into headlines followed by a paragraph or two (at most), followed by a read more link, why not just go directly to the blog. Besides, what if the headline isn’t that interesting but the content is?
Am I missing something? Maybe I just haven’t found the right RSS reader.
I use a customized version of Firefox. I organize my websites and open them all in tabs, then cycle through them with three keys I have hotlinked to move between or close the tabs. I CTRL-click stories I find interesting and then cycle through them. If they are interesting, I save them in Scrapbook.
October 16th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
Why would you want to disable RSS in the first place?
It’s handy & drives readers to your site and I can think of no negatives from using it…????
If you turn it off, expect visitors to decrease greatly. You post too often & too widely to expect people to check your site & find your new posts.
I too will stop coming w/out RSS, for what it’s worth.
October 16th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
These are two potential reasons for disabling syndication:
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2007...09/14/parallel-baidu-google-searches/
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2007/09/19/is-rss-killing-pagerank/
The third would be to test whether scarcity really does increase demand. I have a feeling it might.
Yeah, I have never gotten into using RSS readers either. I have tried and never found it to be what I wanted out of it.
Most of the above comments seem to be proof that it does not in fact drive readers to my site. It seems instead to encourage people NOT to visit my site.
That would only be a logical consequence if RSS really drove traffic to my site - which it does not.
So what you’re saying is that I write too much for people to be bothered? I’ve been thinking about this same question as well. One potential solution I am considering is publishing a subscription-only weekly condensed email version of my website (an executive summary), so that you can catch up on key points in the on-going research and conversation without needing to read the whole thing. I certainly don’t expect anyone to have the time to fully read all of what I write at this point.
October 16th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
I guess I have to admit that I often find a perverse pleasure in pissing off my regular readers - so maybe all I am really doing is trying to be antagonistic…
But it’s more than that. There are major questions about information delivery, direction and control which need to be sorted out here which I don’t think RSS really solves effectively.
October 16th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
Perhaps a third way would be to make a partial feed available so that people can read the first paragraph or so in their RSS reader but then have to click through to the website if they want to read the full post.
I actually read your site through www.netvibes.com, however I don’t read your RSS feed. Netvibes allows you to view the actual web page within their system. That way I get to read all the comments as well, and also see your advertisements. Not that I really want to see the advertisements but I do recognise that’s how many bloggers make their income so it doesn’t bother me one bit.
October 16th, 2007 at 5:23 pm
Many of those advertisements I don’t get paid for.
And the truth is, I don’t so much care if people come to look at the actual site. I’m not really hung up on that, but I am having a hard time encapsulating what it is I’m really after here. I appreciate people’s responses as they are helping me to clarify my thoughts and communication in this area.
October 16th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
I have a message from the Stone Age for you. I’ve never used an RSS feed and I don’t intend to until I have to. I bookmark sites I like and when I have time I go to them to see what’s new. There are sites I don’t like but I like the links they have and I go from there and see where it takes me.
October 16th, 2007 at 6:42 pm
On thing you might achieve by disabling RSS is a more active community of people responding to posts? This would benefit me, because I use your posts as a platform to bounce my ideas off your user base and see if you have anything to say about them. This Pop Occulture “Think Tank” model actually seems like it has the potential to offer the most value to everybody involved, and it fits well with your normal style of blogging, where you integrate a lot of ideas from your readers, who in turn integrate a lot of ideas from you.
Still, I wonder if disabling RSS feeds is the most effective way. It seems like there is some way they could be used to seduce potential contributors to participate. I don’t know the technology well enough to say for sure…
October 16th, 2007 at 8:04 pm
I’ve got so many sites in my Bookmarks that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with them all if it weren’t for RSS. I honestly don’t have time to click on every single bookmark in my list to see if it’s been updated so RSS is a lifesaver for me when it comes to keeping up to date on my favourite writers’ thoughts (that includes you, Tim
). Please keep the RSS feed.
October 16th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
I find RSS feeds handy - including comments feeds. I don’t remember to check back on comment threads or blogs nearly as much, if at all, otherwise. Of course my absolute favorite blogs (like this one) I will, but still not as often).
From the blogger’s perspective you can look at it two different ways. On the one hand a lot of people don’t have to come visit your site directly if they read your posts in an RSS reader. But on the other hand, if they don’t have a feed for your blog at all, and they’re accustomed to using RSS to keep track of and check blogs for updates (as opposed to creating a “favorite blogs” bookmark folder in their browser, or a firefox tab setup like Mr. Mister has going), it’s just unrealistic to expect them to change their favorite system or make an exception just for you. Some will, but some won’t, and it seems like an unnecessary loss of readership for questionable gains.
I’d bet that, on balance, you get not only far more people reading your blog because of your RSS feed, but a lot more actual visits to your site because of it. I skim your posts in my RSS reader, but if I want to comment on one, I have to go to the post itself. Since you generate a lot of conversation, even when I don’t have something to add, I often want to read the comment thread (because anyone who reads your site regularly knows the comment(er)s are frequently awesome).
So I just don’t see a real disadvantage to providing an RSS feed. Wouldn’t it only screw with your Google page rank if it reduced hits to your site? If on balance it actually increases them (which is my strong suspicion based on the fact that it increases my visits to your site), then…why throw that away? The simple function an RSS feed serves as a reminder to people to check out your new posts (and actually, more likely, read all of them, because they can see at a glance which they’ve read and which they haven’t) is worth a lot more than it seems worth giving up.
By all means, if you can come up with something even better that serves those functions just as well minus whatever drawbacks you see, or plus whatever you feel is missing, cool! But until you do.. it would kind of suck for those of us who’s preferred blog-reading ritual-system happens to involve an RSS reader. Seems unnecessary is all.
October 16th, 2007 at 8:59 pm
I doubt that, Svenson. If less people are reading the posts less often (out of sight out of mind), the community could become less active.
In fact, adding a comments feed on top of the regular feed would probably be the way to increase commenting. It would certainly foster more of an ongoing back and forth dialog (at least among the RSS-ers), instead of good threads getting dropped after a day or two because people forget, and because Tim keeps plowing ahead with new posts. But I think Tim might actually prefer it that way, otherwise he wouldn’t close comments on posts after a certain number of days. I assume he wants to plow ahead and wants his readers to plow ahead with him. Am I right, Tim? Fair enough.
October 16th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
RSS is just a tool, and it’s getting more and more customizable by the day, it seems. Maybe there are ways you could be using it differently that would be more to your liking? win-win?
PS: I’m not a fan of email digests. I always end up deleting them in one of my bitchy “I don’t care” moments. And they’re so easy to delete, because you don’t see any of the headlines inside until/unless you open it. It’s seeing the headlines that draws me in. When it’s just a digest sitting in my inbox, it just looks like one more thing cluttering my inbox.
I like to have my google reader open in one tab specifically for when I want to / have time to read blogs/articles. I like my email open in another tab, specifically for when I want to / have time to read emails. I don’t like mixing them or having one interfere with the other. They require different mindsets.
people are idiosyncratic, a little bit.
or maybe it’s just me…
no, it’s people.
October 16th, 2007 at 10:08 pm
“Think tank” is a totally awesome thing to call this. I like what you’re saying about finding ways to encourage greater conversation on this site. I don’t want passive reading. I want active thinking and conversations which go far beyond anything I could do myself. That’s my main goal in all of this, I guess.
Uh, right, because I don’t EVER update my website, right?
They would be making an exception for themselves, not for me. It’s not really my problem so much as it would be theirs!
Let’s face it: there are really only half a dozen people who leave comments here on a regular basis.
October 16th, 2007 at 10:27 pm
All true enough. I still don’t understand the benefits though, to you, your readers, or the think tank commenting brigade, of removing your RSS feed. That’s all. Just sayin. Life will certainly go on, but RSS-y people are part of your shared value community. Why make things more of a hassle for them? Why not less?
October 16th, 2007 at 10:38 pm
Yeah, I’m not convinced either way yet. I don’t think I am framing the real issue yet, whatever that is.
Several things are happening right now: I have dropped a whole point in PageRank, which is lame. And I have also had my daily traffic halved. I don’t think RSS is fully to blame for that - it probably has to do with Google changing their algorithm and devaluing blogs as information sources: which it has been rumbling to do for quite a while.
One of the things I want to make sure of though: that some Chinese-ass censorship project run through Google or whoever is not going to be ripping my content out of the context of my original site and then excluding entire chunks of correlative data (which might actually be more important to people in a highly-restricted information landscape) and presenting it as though it originated on some foreign URL which has nothing to do with anything. That shit gets my goat because - essentially - it is not a violation of what RSS is for, but *is* the purpose of RSS.
Without RSS that stops happening - I think. Without RSS also, links that point to my site actually point to my site as well, instead of pointing to intermediary RSS directory sites which are skimming off my PageRank by slicing themselves in between my server and the user’s experience.
This issue for me goes way beyond user experience right this second. RSS is a transient technology anyway. It will go away eventually and be replaced by some other system. How much do I need to commit myself to chasing standards and adopting them simply because they are being offered and accepted uncritically by people?
Rethinking my RSS feed is only a small wedge in a much larger strategic adjustment to how I am presenting myself, my work and engaging people in creative conversations on and off line. The only way to solve most of it is simply going to be to try it out and see what the benefits are.
October 17th, 2007 at 2:21 am
Tim, you know RSS support is baked right into WordPress, right? You don’t *need* to use another site to make an RSS feed, you already have it. By default, it would be /journal/feed/ (from your domain here).
Not saying that another site couldn’t step in and put your feed out there, but _you_ don’t need to do that.
But really, what RSS is about is what it’s named - Really Simple Syndication. It’s just a different way to get your stuff out there. Really, I think it was basically made up to make it easy to put headlines and a paragraph or two out there so that people know there’s updated content, and if they like what (little) they’ve read, they’ll follow the link to the site. I don’t think there’s anything to it more than that. Of course, anything can be misused.
For my absent-minded self, I’d just need to remember to re-add your link to my book marks and then remind myself to actually click on it every now and then. Not a big deal, whatever way you wish to go there.
October 17th, 2007 at 2:26 am
Yeah, for whatever reason, you’re based with a really smart reader base and their comments add a lot of value; their feedback is (to me) a major feature of this site. But the thing is, one julia/speedbird posting really relevant links/ideas is worth 1,000 dumb kneejerk commentators, and this has to be taken into account. Is it really desirable to have EVERYBODY who reads you site commenting? I don’t know.
October 17th, 2007 at 2:29 am
oops. I meant to say “blessed” not “based”. I also hope I didn’t sound like a dick elitist there, its just that people who personally care about commenting enough to make the effort will generally be the ones with the wisest commentary I think…
October 17th, 2007 at 3:31 am
Woah missed a whole chunk there …
Why not try disabling the RSS for a short period and see?
I’d still be visiting with more curiousity as to whats going on… because the feed is not there to just randomly check.
October 17th, 2007 at 7:53 am
I don’t really know what RSS is. Well, I do now from reading this, but I don’t feel the need for it, as i know which blogs I want to visit how often, and I quite like learning the blogging rhythms of a poster - you can pretty much guarantee there will always be new content here on PO, but you are never quite sure about Ran, or RigInt, or Alchemical Braindamage. It’s more interesting to restrain yourself from checking everyday and being disappointed, and then having your self-discipline rewarded when you do check by finding more content than you expected.
I agree with the comments thing from Svenson. Not such an issue here, but if you look at RigInt or the Guardian website, it’s pretty clear two things need to happen: 1) All comments should be enabled to distinguish between comments on the main post, and sub-comments on the comments, either by the usual indenting convention, or by creating whole new hidden subthreads. 2) All Commentators Should Not Be Equal. Adding value should be rewarded by granting list priority to top commenters, so they go straight to the top of the page. Why should comment priority be decided by who got there first? Obviously, this can either go down the dictator route of the blogger deciding, or the Reddit route of readers themselves giving points to comments they value and the commenter in question building up a profile. All tweaked to provide the correct balance of hierarchy vs diversity, of course…
October 17th, 2007 at 8:57 am
I’d love to see threaded comments a la Reddit. Not necessarily here, but definitely someplace like RigInt that attracts 80+ comments per post.
I also *love* the up and down arrows on Reddit. I think they do a lot to improve the civility and overall quality of conversation.
October 17th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
Yeah, I don’t use the RSS. I just go to the site. Just putting my vote in: pull it if you want… you could also try to get the readership up different ways… i can’t think of any right now, but i’m sure someone who reads your site has some ideas.