4 ms·

Welllllllll back in the day Google Reader did have a social element. You could share articles / feeds with friends. I think The Old Reader tried to keep some o

Welllllllll back in the day Google Reader did have a social element. You could share articles / feeds with friends. I think The Old Reader tried to keep some of that social element but I do know how successful they were. Due to reasons that I now can’t recall, I preferred Digg Reader over TOReader. Even Digg, for whatever reason has tried to make their RSS offering more social with their Digg platform. I avoid social as much as humanly possible so again not sure how effective they are.

leejo 9y ago
My experience with RSS predates Google Reader by a couple of years, i think i started using it around 2003, ish? I didn't start using Google Reader until (IIRC) 2009 so my interest in the social element was absolutely zero. RSS was designed to be a consumption means only, which is my point. I'm fine with aggregators adding a social element, as it's not the aim and can easily ignored (Feedly even has this i think). I'm even fine with sources having only the title and the first paragraph as i can choose to ignore the content if it doesn't interest me. My point is more that, if there's going to be curation of content i want to do that myself because there isn't an algorithm that exists that can do it well for me[1]. And if your content is posted exclusively to the various social networks that try and fail to curate content for me (i.e. you don't have your own site outside of the walled gardens) then i probably have little interest in it. [1] This is part of a wider problem in that people want to follow hundreds (thousands?) of sources, and that quickly becomes a deluge. In the same vein, people favourite just about every image they see on Instagram - to paraphrase, "if you favourite everything, then nothing is your favourite". Self restraint is the best form of curation against a world in which everyone is screaming to be heard over everyone else.

leejo 9y ago

My experience with RSS predates Google Reader by a couple of years, i think i started using it around 2003, ish? I didn't start using Google Reader until (IIRC) 2009 so my interest in the social element was absolutely zero. RSS was designed to be a consumption means only, which is my point. I'm fine with aggregators adding a social element, as it's not the aim and can easily ignored (Feedly even has this i think). I'm even fine with sources having only the title and the first paragraph as i can choose to ignore the content if it doesn't interest me. My point is more that, if there's going to be curation of content i want to do that myself because there isn't an algorithm that exists that can do it well for me[1]. And if your content is posted exclusively to the various social networks that try and fail to curate content for me (i.e. you don't have your own site outside of the walled gardens) then i probably have little interest in it. [1] This is part of a wider problem in that people want to follow hundreds (thousands?) of sources, and that quickly becomes a deluge. In the same vein, people favourite just about every image they see on Instagram - to paraphrase, "if you favourite everything, then nothing is your favourite". Self restraint is the best form of curation against a world in which everyone is screaming to be heard over everyone else.