Medium's RSS Feed Sucks - Here's Why
4 Reasons why Medium's RSS feed is unreliable and useless in most cases
At first glance, Medium's RSS feed might seem like a good choice for getting notifications of newly published articles. For casual users, it may suffice as a basic notification tool. However, for businesses requiring robust, real-time updates and extensive metadata, Medium's RSS feed comes with significant limitations that make it less than ideal.
Let's explore these shortcomings in detail and in the end, we'll tell you about a far better alternative.
1. Limited Data Points
Medium's RSS feed provides only a handful of attributes, such as:
- Title
- Description
- Publication Date
- Thumbnail URL
- Article's URL
- Tags
While these data points may work for simple use cases, they fall short for businesses that need more details related to newly published articles. For example, Medium's RSS feed does not include metrics like word count, reading time, publication details, number of comments, language, etc...
Additionally, the description attribute often contains messy HTML and only
partial content, making it less usable for meaningful analytics or content curation.
In contrast, our service allows businesses to access
any publicly available metadata attribute, enabling a richer and more granular data experience.
2. Not Reat-Time
Medium's RSS feed is not truly real-time. There is often a significant delay between when a new article is published and when it appears in the RSS feed. This delay makes it unsuitable for time-sensitive updates where speed is critical.
For businesses that need to track trends, insights, and industry news in real-time, relying on Medium's RSS feed can result in missed opportunities and outdated information. Our service, on the other hand, provides real-time updates every minute, ensuring businesses stay ahead of the competition.
If you're a startup or a business that relies on timely insights for trading decisions, you can't afford to wait for 10 minutes for new articles to appear in the RSS feed.
3. Server Dependency and Maintenance
Using Medium's RSS feed requires businesses to maintain a dedicated RSS reader running on a server. This setup demands ongoing maintenance, monitoring, and scaling efforts, especially as data volumes grow. The cost and complexity of managing this infrastructure can be a burden for businesses, particularly startups or those with limited technical resources.
Our service eliminates this dependency by enabling a serverless architecture. Businesses can directly receive notifications by providing the webhook URL to their serverless function (such as AWS Lambda), without worrying about server management. This not only reduces operational overhead but also ensures scalability and reliability.
4. Lack of Customization Options
Medium's RSS feed is a one-size-fits-all solution with no room for customization. Businesses that require tailored data formats or specific filtering options are left with no choice but to accept the feed as is (or manually parse and re-constructu as per their requirements). For example, there's no way to filter articles by specific tags directly within the RSS feed, or have more article-related data points in the notifications.
Our service, on the other hand, offers extensive customization capabilities. Businesses can request tailored feeds or specific data points based on their unique requirements. Whether it's filtering by tags, adding or removing article-related metadata, or structuring data in a preferred format, our solution is built to adapt to their needs.
A Far Better Alternative to Medium's RSS Feed
If you're looking for a reliable, real-time, and customizable solution for tracking Medium articles, Real-time Medium Notifications Service is the answer.
With our custom notification service, businesses can receive real-time updates from Medium directly to their applications, Slack workspaces, Discord servers or whereever else they want.
This robust service is designed to provide businesses with the flexibility and control they need to stay ahead of the competition.