Now AI agents need what RSS does

alextillman

What's old is new again. The solution RSS offered was structure for an otherwise unstructured challenge (trying to figure out updates on a site). That value grew exponentially when connected to AI (providing the signals of when do I need to look at this site/podcast again). Smart marketing.

erelong

I kinda don't like RSS because I often want like a whole blog archive downloaded if I add a new feed and it usually has limits how far back of posts it will download (randomly configured by each site) Unless someone has a fix of whatever settings I've been using

0gs

i mean, i still read hacker news primarily via RSS in feedly. i kind of never stopped using it, and everybody is much more generous with their feeds nowadays than back in google reader times. bearblog, etc. RSS rules

b3ing

I guess if you want your content all slurped up and served as coming from AI with no backlinks.

phyzix5761

I have almost 40 feeds I subscribe to and they're my primary way of getting information I care about without being exposed to ads or other things I don't want to see.

h4kunamata

>RSS was declared dead in 2013 Where? Not within the homelab space.

PaulHoule

Re: Rate Limits, see https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/27/feed/ but coming from an aggressively anticommercial world view. She collects evidence that real world feed readers don't implement RSS correctly https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2026/02/23/readers/ Her problems are the problems of a polling-based protocol and really if she does not like the RSS protocol she should stop publishing it and stand up an ActivityPub or PubSubHubBub service instead. A big part of the value of Google Reader and the ecosystem around it was that Google could poll your RSS feed once and everyone could read it... A huge win for the Rachels!

rvz

You mean scraping instead of reading it? Reddit does not like the sound of that at all and are mulling to remove RSS support due to scrapers [0] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1tq9vxo/protecting...

dchuk

I built a site that's similar in concept to Hacker News, but is entirely fed by RSS feed content, that is then bullet-pointed summarized on the article page: https://engineered.at/ But I also extract topics automatically from the content too with LLMs, to allow for dynamic topic pages that users can separately subscribe to to tune their feeds. Haven't promoted it much, but it's pretty amazing what you can do for a couple bucks a month. And my main thesis with this site is that by locking the content to only rss feeds of known blogs, you dramatically reduce the spam submission risk (basically eliminate it). Doesn't handle the spam comment side of things, but that's a different problem. EDIT: I also open sourced a Rails engine I made to power this site if anyone is interested: https://github.com/dchuk/source_monitor

_pdp_

AI agents don't need RSS. What they need is some representation in text. The XML/RSS markup is completely unnecessary.

hparadiz

Never dropped it https://technex.us/.rss https://github.com/hparadiz/technexus/blob/release/src/Contr... I would enjoy a JSON based refresh of the format.

themafia

> The same logic will now extend to any written content that agents need to reliably consume. Get your rapacious hands away from my website please. > and actively degrades programmatic access. That's your problem. You choose these tools. If they can't function without ripping everyone else off then why do you persist in using them?

grobibi

I need what rss does. Can someone reccomend a way to create an rss feed from a site that has none?

daxfohl

Google should bring back Google Reader. But make it only for bots. And then drop it again once it gets popular.

sperandeo

we spent a decade killing structured feeds in favor of algorithmic timelines and now we're rebuilding them because the algorithms need structured feeds. the circle of life, but for protocols.

analogpixel

I have this idea, that instead of browsing completely random things on the internet pushed by what other people are interested in (or want to promote), create an llm that scans through your backlog of projects YOU want to do, and then search the internet for projects/articles about those things, and then create a feed from that. I'm not sure why I keep reading HN, 99% of the content is uninteresting, probably 99.9% now that every article is about AI. maybe I just like clicking on things.

hendler

...And Semantic Web.

notnullorvoid

I think now more than ever humans need RSS, so we can curate what enters our information feed as the social media experiment continues to degenerate.

nreece

I wouldn't limit it to RSS. They need any structured data (JSON, XML/RSS, CSV etc.). Systems and agents need to monitor and extract public web content into fresh structured data for their ingestion, intelligence workflows and analysis. * Shameless plug * Our data infrastructure layer for businesses and AI turns continuously updated websites into a stream of structured data. https://newsloth.com