Why Everyone Should Use an RSS Reader in 2024
It’s 2024 and I’m here to extol the benefits of using an RSS reader. In case you missed the best era of news and other online content consumption, RSS stands for either RDF (Resource Description Framework) Site Summary or Really Simple Syndicate, depending on who you ask—even Wikipedia includes both extensions of the initialism.
Whatever the linguistic details, one of the main roles of RSS is to provide you directly with a constant stream of updates from a website. Each new article published on this site is displayed as a list that can be interpreted by an RSS reader.
In earlier, simpler times of the Internet, RSS was a way to keep up with what was happening on all your favorite sites. You’ll open your RSS reader and scroll through your recently published articles one by one in chronological order, just like you check your email. It was an easy way to keep track of what was new and interesting.
Unfortunately, RSS is no longer the way most of us consume “content.” (Google famously killed off its beloved Google Reader over a decade ago.) It has now become the norm to check social media or the front pages of many different sites to see what’s new. But I think RSS still has a place in your life: especially for those who don’t want to miss anything or have algorithms that select what they read, it remains one of the best ways to navigate the Internet. Here’s a quick overview of what RSS can (still!) do for you and how to get started with it, even in this late Internet age.
How RSS works
RSS is essentially a standard for serving text and images in a feed-like format and is not that different from HTML. Typically the feed includes the title of the article, some text (often just an introduction), and perhaps a main image. The RSS data is not actually readable in a browser tab, but it is in an application designed to interpret the RSS correctly.
RSS remains the de facto default way to distribute podcasts, with each new episode—along with the episode title, cover art, and descriptive blurb—appearing as a new entry in the feed of your podcast app of choice . When you subscribe to a new show through Pocket Casts or Apple Podcasts, you essentially tell the app the RSS feed of the podcast you want to listen to, and it takes care of showing you each new episode.
In the past, websites would place links to RSS feeds prominently somewhere on the front page. It’s less common now, but you can often find these feeds if you dig deeper or search for them online (by the way, Lifehacker’s RSS feed can be found here ). Some sites offer multiple RSS feeds covering different content categories, such as technology or sports.
Even if a site doesn’t explicitly offer RSS feeds, the best RSS readers can now create their own rough versions by tracking new activity on the site, so you can point the app to the site you want to follow. For example, in Chrome for Android and iOS, you can tap the three dots to open the app’s settings menu and then select Follow to receive updates from the site you’re currently viewing; this is a rough approximation of using a basic RSS reader. (But you have much better alternatives, which I’ll cover shortly.)
Benefits of Using an RSS Reader
We’re all different when it comes to how we consume news online: some of us scroll through social media feeds, some of us load the same sites every morning, and some of us get updates through push notifications on our website . telephones. The benefits of RSS will vary depending on how you want to stay up to date.
However, RSS is clearly useful if you have a selection of favorite websites and want to see everything they post (or everything they post in a particular category if the site has multiple feeds). No one but you chooses what you see: you have more control over your news diet and are free from any choices made by the algorithm.
Using RSS means you can learn everything, methodically and chronologically, even if you’ve been offline for a week (of course, you don’t have to learn everything, but you can if you want as your feed). will work on infinite scrolling). It’s also a cleaner and less cluttered way to use the Internet, since you only have to click on the articles you want to read.
Some other benefits of RSS will depend on the reader application you use. For example, you can sort your feeds differently, or search the archives for specific types of stories, or add notes and bookmarks to links that particularly interest you. If you’ve never tried RSS, it’s worth a try.
Best RSS Reader Apps in 2024
RSS readers aren’t as common as they used to be, but you can still find quite a few if you look around.
Feeding
The best RSS feed is perhaps Feedly , which offers a lot of features in both free and paid plans: it has a clean and clear interface, it can create RSS feeds for sites that don’t have them, it can sort feeds by in a variety of ways, it can include email newsletters and more.
Feeder
Feeder is a good place for those new to RSS because it helps you get started quickly and offers a simple, streamlined interface. It works seamlessly on all major platforms, and if you want more bells and whistles, including a real-time dashboard and complex filters for your channels, then paid plans are available that also increase the number of channels you can monitor at once.
Foreigner
Another RSS reader that has a lot of fans is Inoreader . It has all the tools and features you need to carefully manage your own news feed, and also stores an extensive archive of everything you’ve ever viewed, which is handy if for some reason you need to retrace your steps. Pay for the premium plan and you’ll get rid of ads and also get access to even more features, like support for email newsletters.
NewsBlur
Finally, there’s NewsBlur , which is bursting at the seams with a ton of features, from tagging in stories to full-text search and third-party app integration. It is also one of the best RSS readers, allowing you to control the appearance of the application and the presentation of your feeds. As with the other RSS readers I’ve mentioned here, you can pay for some additional features, but many of them are available to you for free.