RSS has got to be the thing that Hacker News loves the most that every non-tech person on Earth doesn't care about. So many techies love this model of designing their feed and collating what content they consume, while the quickest growing social network's entire pitch (TikTok) is "we'll deliver you what you want without you having to follow anyone".
Podcasts seem quite popular among non-tech people. The national over-the-air radio station in this country even has an entire weekly show dedicated to helping people find new podcasts to subscribe to. It appears non-tech folk do actually enjoy this model of designing their feed as much as anyone else.
Indeed, non-techies don't actually care that it is RSS under the hood, but I'm not sure techies really care either. It is the high level concept of what RSS embodies that is really being talked about. RSS merely gets suggested because it is an already defined standard that gets us there. No need for a 15th competing standard.
RSS mainly failed because the predominant model for funding content creation is ads. Sadly, RSS is a poor medium for ads—to get more revenue, content creators were incentivized to bring users to their own sites rather than syndicating rich or useful feeds.
There’s a lot that goes into the success of social media over the last couple decades and figuring out the best ad revenue models was a big part of it.
Nah it's much simpler. The reason RSS failed is because Google killed Reader so they could push content creators to Google+.
That in turn led to other companies with the ability to set things at the time gradually deprecating and removing their build-in feed readers (thanks Mozilla, thanks Apple) and the result is that RSS "failed".
It didn't fail, it was murdered so Google could promote their failed social media network.
I wonder if Google+ could've succeeded if Google had evolved it from Reader somehow. Start with the product people are actually using, develop it until it's the product you want people to use?
At the time, several of us were telling our friends working at Google to start from Reader comments. It was already a functional and somewhat popular social network.
Instead of that, they removed the comments and replaced them with something worse that no one ended up using.
Google should have built out Reader as its Twitter competitors, and Google+ as a separate Facebook competitor.
The former would be a more impersonal source of information and discussion, whereas the latter would have been where you put your personal connections.
Unfortunately Google wanted to do both in the same product, and thought that Circles would be sufficient to create the distinction, but the kind of stuff someone might want to expose to an impersonal connection is drastically different from the kind of stuff they want to expose to personal connections, to the point that they should arguably have completely different UIs.
Circles seems like the sort of feature that would appeal to power users (and indeed I remember a bunch of academic type people using Google+?) But most users are not power users and don't want to do a bunch of thinking about what circle each contact belongs to.
Nevertheless it seems to me like the network effect was the main thing, and Reader could've been a huge step there.
If RSS really were popular, you would expect Google closing Reader to spur Mozilla and Apple to put even more work in maintaining their RSS readers, to attract people to them.
However, RSS was never very popular outside some small tech circles, and Mozilla and Apple saw that the same way that Google did.
That assumes that Mozilla and Apple were capable of doing those things in that time period.
Mozilla is nothing more than controlled opposition that Google can prop up and say "See, we're not a totally monopoly" while Apple at the time could see nothing beyond the piles of money that the iPhone was making them, to the point where even their desktop/laptop lines suffered.
Are you sure this is true? RSS failed because people stopped using feed readers. I stopped using a feed reader because there was an explosion of content and managing with a reader just didn't scale. I was happy to outsource curation. It was a "hair on fire" problem
This was my experience as well. Opera 12 was my browser of choice because of the built-in feed reader. There were several times where I exported my feeds to an .opml file and started over, because I was inundated with updates and following way too many blogs.
I still have these exports, backed up to a CD somewhere.
Yes. After my comment I started thinking more about the experience at the time. It was always fun adding new feeds until you have too many. The hard word comes at deciding what to prune. It isn't even just about time, it's about not being able to figure out what to get rid of. Like a closet filling up with clothes and you wear them all. You know you just can't add more but figuring out what to unload is painful. Maybe this is a good case for clothing rental services.
Edit: actually I would say its more like an infinite closet but the more clothes you had the longer it takes to find something to wear the next day until things becoming unbearable and you just close the door to your closet, lock it and then rent clothing for the rest of your life.
This is true, but there was no reason that RSS readers themselves could not present you with a curated feed built both out of your subscriptions as well as global feeds, imitating what Twitter already does.
I dunno, I fetch roughly 10 per second which isn't a lot. It takes less than an hour to fetch 30 000. If one would do a bit of logic based on pubDate intervals and slow the process to 24 hours you could "hammer" a sub set more aggressively and still be fine on a modest desktop.
Cutting off the obvious revenue source may be a feature: some people want personal connection, explicitly devoid of commercial interest.
It, of course, limits the medium to, well, social media proper, peers talking among themselves for the enjoyment, not making it a full-time job. It pushes for-profit stars elsewhere.
It of course does not solve the problem of hidden ads ("shilling"), product placement, etc, in more popular feeds.
There is certainly room for strictly non-commercial communication, where the value is in the human connection (talking to friends) or fame (being a local luminary). But certainly it's not going to be a medium fitting for everyone, and for al types of content.
Daring Fireball has ads in the RSS feed[1]. If RSS was more successful, we could imagine services, marketplaces for that model. Of course the same personalization you have on the web wouldn't be possible, but maybe in some ways it would be better, because you would know that everyone else sees the same ad, creating common ground[2].
I'm finding increasingly harder to follow some podcasts as well.
More and more are centering their distribution through Spotify. Reason: money. Either to fund the minimum needed or to give them some margin that Patreon or similar methods are not able to.
Another Hacker News thing is the middle-brow dismissal.
It's not really a fair comparison between a centralized product optimized for engagement and a distributed protocol that can be used in lots of different ways. Sure, the world doesn't care about RSS, that's pretty much the easiest strawman to come up with. On the other side though, it's not a foregone conclusion that what the world wants is to be mindlessly entertained by the algorithm of a faceless corporation. At this point TikTok is the new hot, but there is a long history of youth culture rebelling against corporate tastemakers, so it doesn't seem outrageous to assume that the next big thing will involve some measure of curation.
I don’t have anything against RSS, I think it’s a useful protocol that fills a niche. I do however think that it’s just that: a niche. If you read through the other comments on this and other historical posts it’s presented as a panacea to the “algorithm of a faceless corporation”, where the ills of social media could all be resolved if RSS was just more widely adopted. There’s a lot of trends you can bet on in tech and in tastes, but any action that requires active effort (including all forms of curation) will be outcompeted by something that automatically does it for you. For every German programmer reveling in fine grained control there’s a thousand people in India opening YouTube for the first time and just watching recommended.
There's a paradox at play. Or maybe a distortion in our thinking.
I like my niche. You like your niche. My family, colleagues and
friends like their little niches. Ask around and you'll find that
everybody, barring a small slice of 13 year old's who talk about "what
everybody is doing", is quite happy in their niche. Indeed that's what
social media is all about. If everybody was 13 and wanted to attend
the universal party, and not be "left out", we'd switch back to
broadcast technologies.
It leads me to the conclusion that the mentality around social media
is really that of an insecure teenager, and that it's caused society
some degree of arrested development.
The only rss feed reader I have used that hasn’t gone away or become sketchy is thunderbird, and it’s not a great ux (I haven’t used it in a while, maybe I’m wrong)
RSS seems like great tech but it doesn’t have great user facing apps (that is easy to find at least) to support it
At the risk of sounding like a shill, have you tried Feedly? (feedly.com)
I switched over to it ages ago after the death of google reader, and it's held up remarkably well for me, and now also includes welcome features for, e.g., intaking email newsletters, conducting automatic content-specific web searches, etc into the same RSS-reader UI.
I'm gonna have to give this a thumbs up for use too. I'm not a fan of it being propritary, or tied to a web service, but it works amazingly well for what it is.
I'm still hunting for a good self-hosted or offline alternative, but till then, Feedly really does cover that gap.
Feedbro is also a very good choice for reading RSS feeds. Best of all, you could configure it to get the full article from the web site itself and show it in the preview pane.
Agreed, hence the importance of treating RSS as an implementation detail rather than a user-facing feature. I'd also love to see more reading apps experiment with algorithmic recommendation too; that's been one of my own focuses for a while.
Email would fit that description too I think. I can talk SMTP over telnet manually, but most people just want to crack open Outlook or Gmail and fire off a quick reply.
Something that uses RSS but doesn't go on about using RSS would go down well I imagine. It works like this for podcasts for example.
Same with mastodon and all the other decentralised stuff. Nobody cares about the nerd bit! Market to the mainstream and let hackers hack. The only thing you need to do differently to improve things is reject the desire to wall up your garden when you're succeeding.
I think this is the key point. Because saying "this is what you want" hides a part of the problem: who says it.
The implication is that when you chose what you want you are in control. You may miss stuff, but you are the one deciding. When, on the other hand, it is chosen for you, the algorithm may be the best ever but you're not in control.
For some people "being the decider" is more important than for some others.
Technological implementation details aside, the single biggest issue I have with Mastodon as a replacement for the Twitter-shaped hole in my media universe, is that it has no extant established functional scalable utilized replacement for the distillation of a single feed,
specifically one which has a meticulously crafted "algorithm" aka secrket sauce for comprising posts from sources I have chosen to follow, to universally trending events, with a strong attention to network and correlated interests within it.
This is hard work and is indeed a sekret sauce.
And despite how abused it was, e.g. to drive engagement-through-enragement, and, as with the pathological death-spiral cases of Facebook and Instagram, how corrupted by paid-for and otherwise placed content, it was effective at constantly exposing me to things RSS does not and AFAIK cannot:
things I want to see but don't know to ask for.
Whoever cracks this for Mastodon in a fashion that plays well with the established norms around control, is liable to make a small fortune.
Much smaller than in a non-federated, centralized universe, that captures a broad audience...
Its a question of whether you are happy to be a passive bystander in your own life, or are self-directed.
Corporations, governments, etc, are most happy with passive bystanders. They encourage this behaviour, and train people to be this way (deferring to authority figures, etc) as it makes everyone more regular and easier to manage.
The self-directed individual however, rejects this sort of entrainment. They would prefer to receive various information directly and in an un-intermediated fashion, so that they are able to make up their own mind.
I like the comment, but how is this different pattern of information consumption than, say, buying your favorite zine, compared to reading a newspaper or whatever Condé Nast says is worth printing?
Of course, we have new modes of distribution and production, but whose to say Tik-Tok can ‘define’ what you want in order to give it? (A la. You can have any color you want so long as it’s black).
So there are people who watch broadcast TV or what’s “hot” or “trending”, or other well defined products (Star Trek, not Star Wars, parody fiction).
And then there are people whose entertainment involves choice, refinement of taste, and discernment. Plus a bit of the more plentiful Star Wars parody fiction.
It boils down to the distinction between people who:
1. want to get content precisely tailored to their interests (high signal to noise ratio), at the expense od time invested in finding and curating sources and limited chances od discovering news stuff.
2. want to get content quickly, without much of the hassle at the expense of potential spam/uninteresting stuff.
Something like turning the radio om vs gathering and playing own records collection.
This is interesting because TikTok has the uncanny ability to both do 1 and 2. It brings you content precisely tailored to your interests via the algorithm, and it does so in a fast way (some might say too fast). I guess the general audience wants the same two things except they place even less weight on manual curation.
Does it? I suppose TikTok did a good job of recognizing what I was interested in during the first day or two of using it, but now it keeps pushing that same content to me even though I've long moved on to new interests. You can only watch variations on the same video over and over so many times before it gets really old.
For the sake of discussion I opened the app again to see if anything had changed since I last used it. Still, I got the same kind of content that bored me away from the app last time. I'm not sure that's all that uncanny. Pretty much what you'd expect from a mediocre algorithm.
I don't really see RSS as being a curation channel as much as a notification channel, though. What RSS provides is a means to notify you when 'professional' curators have curated new content for you.
With tiktok, you have recommendation engine and following in one. With the open web, you can use HN as a recommendation engine and a feed reader to follow specific blogs.
TikTok used to be called musical.ly and was a platform for publishing short playback lip-sync and dance videos. If you're dead-set on naming an intellectual relative among 'western' apps/sites, Vine would be the closest fit (which was basically Twitter for videos and, appropriately, purchased by Twitter and later shut down).
There’s no money in an email list (in itself) and yet it can be valuable. I think it’s all about growing an audience. Maybe there’s a long tail of people who miss RSS.
and what's wrong with that? why can we have both RSS for people who like it, and TikTok for people who like TikTok? Are you saying everyone should dumb themselves down into the fastest growing fad of this year, or people can have different preferences?
