Ask HN: Why did RSS die from the mainstream? - romes
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jones1618
For mainstream users, the function of blogs and feeds were subsumed by
Facebook. For techies, self-curated feeds were dropped in favor of canned
feeds from Reddit and Hacker News, sadly.

The result is that as content consumers, we mostly abdicated our discovery of
content and people to follow to big content sites and their algorithms. You
get just enough "good enough" content that way that people don't bother to be
their own algorithm, discovering and curating their feed themselves.

I also blame Google because they essentially killed Google Reader (their
excellent RSS feed app) because they had Zuckerberg envy and built Google Plus
to be the serious person's Facebook. If instead of trying to create their own
walled garden of content and social network, they should have cultivated the
wild garden of RSS and made it friendlier for the masses. Now both Google Plus
and Reader are dead. What a shame.

Still, RSS as a protocol for publishing and pulling information is not dead
but its promise as the Operating System of All Connected Things didn't become
as widespread and mainstream as its hype in the early days where every coffee
pot and your apartment's laundry room were expected to have RSS feeds you
could subscribe to.

I personally think something like RSS is ripe for a comeback (based on JSON
instead of clunky XML). Tim Berners Lee is advocating for that very thing,
bringing back a decentralized, self-owned web of content curated by curious
minds and not by commercially-driven ad robots.

------
mortivore
Was it ever mainstream in the sense of non-techy people using it?

~~~
jones1618
Yes. When blogs were at their peak, non-techy people could hop from blog to
blog through each blog's "logroll" which were headlines pulled automatically
from other blogs selected by the author of the one you were viewing. They
appeared next to the blog's own content.

Even if the blog you were reading wasn't that great its logroll would often
lead you to exciting new content and people that you could subscribe to. It
became a huge status thing and blog "rockstars" made their reputations based
on how many big name people had them in their logroll and how many people were
following their feed.

Overall, this rich web of connections was a very powerful, organic way to
discover new content and people to follow. It benefited everybody and was
controlled by nobody.

