6 ms·

This whole "RSS died" narrative illustrates a basic problem with how we understand the internet. Since there's no unified unbiased sort of "index", like GDP, to

by tw1010 9y ago

This whole "RSS died" narrative illustrates a basic problem with how we understand the internet. Since there's no unified unbiased sort of "index", like GDP, to tell us just what proportion of users on the internet uses RSS anymore, we're stuck having to rely on socially propogated ideas about the state. This leads to all the typical problems with socially defined truth, such as drift as a consequence of incentives (or just random mutations due to statistically insignificant data, amplified by mimetics). Just remember that fact-space is only correlated, but not bijective, to common-sense-space.

jeremyjh 9y ago
Surely Google Reader had numbers that influenced the decision to shut it down?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- simias 9y ago
  I'm sure they had, but what these numbers were and how they interpreted them is not known AFAIK. Google might have considered that RSS didn't fit with their long term plan for how the web would be consumed, I'm thinking in particular of AMP which has a certain overlap with RSS but gives Google a lot more control.
- ArekDymalski 9y ago
  I guess that the decision to shut the Reader down didn't appear due to lack of users, but rather ambitions to shape the internet-news-experience by more tightly controlled, proprietary apps like Google Currents/Newsstand or maybe even Plus.
  - jerf 9y ago
    I think that's pretty likely, because compare the continuing grousing about Reader having shut down to, umm... those other services that Google shut down, whatstheirnames... Of course anything Google shuts down gets an immediate scream of pain from some people, but most everything else they've shut down has died out since then. (The other one I still hear about is Wave. Though that one seems to have a lot of people lamenting what could have been, rather than what actually was. For Reader, the complaints are about what actually was.)
- lunchables 9y ago
  Or just as likely the inability to monetize those users. Was there any indication that RSS viewership was dropping? I've been using RSS uninterrupted, every day, since the early 2000s. First on Google Reader and then, and now, using Tiny Tiny RSS. I always find these articles about RSS being dead to be pretty funny, considering I'm usually reading them via RSS.
  - pythonaut_16 9y ago
    Is there an active site for that? https://tt-rss.org/ https://tt-rss.org/ seems to be gone/down.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - tlavoie 9y ago
      It's up now.
  - bastage 9y ago
    Thanks for saving me hassle of typing 100% of those same exact words. When Google Reader went away I looked at a few of the hosted alternatives but found tt-rss early on and never looked back.
- stryk 9y ago
  I see Google Reader mentioned a lot when virtually anything RSS-related comes up. I missed out on the whole RSS craze (prison will do that to you). But I have always wondered -- so many people lament the fact that Google killed it -- why hasn't anyone forked/cloned it's UI and feature-set? You don't want to just straight up copy it and wake the Google lawyers from their nests obviously, but why not make something that works the same way? Seems like that would be a popular project among the open source crowd.
  - naravara 9y ago
    > why hasn't anyone forked/cloned it's UI and feature-set? There are clients that kind of did, but one of the cool things about Google Reader that a lot of people miss is the social feed. You could share articles you found interesting and your shares would show up on the feeds of anyone who followed you as just another RSS source. It's just an extra folder of articles from your GChat friends that you can read at your leisure. And it's people selecting articles from their normal reading rotation, so it was refreshingly clear of clickbait. People usually shared stuff because they thought their friends would find it interesting rather than distributing content designed to "go viral." Once the ecosystem fragmented nobody has the critical mass to replicate the social features. It was nicer than what Twitter or Facebook do because it wasn't in your face.
    - stryk 9y ago
      That sounds like... a fantastic idea! Why would they kill that off?! No easy way to inject ads into I guess (at least that people would be willing to put up with).
      - naravara 9y ago
        >Why would they kill that off?! It happened back when "Social" was a big thing and Google was trying to push everyone onto its erstwhile Facebook competitor Google+ and it's erstwhile Twitter competitor Google Buzz. First they killed the social feed and made the button auto-post to your Google Buzz account, but Buzz being a version of Twitter, had a lot more noise to signal so nobody used it that way. They probably eventually killed it because they preferred having their development resources put towards more exotic social media efforts than maintaining a thing that didn't really make any money. This long article has more of the sordid details if you're interested: https://www.buzzfeed.com/robf4/googles-lost-social-network?utm_term=.xrob8Yrr6w#.jbDxz3228Z https://www.buzzfeed.com/robf4/googles-lost-social-network?u...
- pjmlp 9y ago
  I never understood why use a browser for doing something that should naturally be done in a native app. Shutting down Reader had zero effect on my RSS reading habits.
  - armandososa 9y ago
    Oh no, no, no, no. You're reading web things, you need it inside a browser. You middle click a link and it opens inside a new tab, just like that. Native clients and their embedded web views never work the way you expect them to be, and ugh, there's a link to something inside facebook and I'm not logged in... should I go back and right click -> "Open in browser", nah, forget it. That's why I'm happy to rediscover the old reader. It is not only not a native app, it doesn't try to act like one.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      I did not say anything about web views, I just stated using native apps. Webviews are unwelcome.
    - kqr 9y ago
      This issue must exist only in poorly made apps, no? At least Android is designed such that it should be natural to navigate views across different apps as though they belonged to one. Apps aren't really emphasised under the hood as much as specific views are.
      - armandososa 9y ago
        Maybe it is a desktop versus mobile thing? I prefer a web app in the desktop, but yeah, a native app makes more sense in web.
twic 9y ago
Did you just try to apply category theory to semiotics?
- tw1010 9y ago
  After I wrote it I read it again, trying to get some grasp of the space of possible interpretations and associations people might think my ideas are stemming from. (The truth is that I have just formed a habit out of using this terminology, and don't always have an underlying unified geometric picture in my mind as I write it.) But your response is an interesting meditation on how often we users of the web (1) always read everything totally out of context, and thus (2) are especially adapted to always trying to infer what the actual network of associations the author intended to point to, but that (3) sometimes we make an incorrect assessment to the precise region of the map, and in fact (4) sometimes there is no such intended association at all. I think that's what makes @dril so funny. He's incredibly skilled at walking the classification boundary of that mechanism.

by tw1010 9y ago

jeremyjh 9y ago

Surely Google Reader had numbers that influenced the decision to shut it down?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
simias 9y ago
I'm sure they had, but what these numbers were and how they interpreted them is not known AFAIK. Google might have considered that RSS didn't fit with their long term plan for how the web would be consumed, I'm thinking in particular of AMP which has a certain overlap with RSS but gives Google a lot more control.
ArekDymalski 9y ago
I guess that the decision to shut the Reader down didn't appear due to lack of users, but rather ambitions to shape the internet-news-experience by more tightly controlled, proprietary apps like Google Currents/Newsstand or maybe even Plus.
- jerf 9y ago
  I think that's pretty likely, because compare the continuing grousing about Reader having shut down to, umm... those other services that Google shut down, whatstheirnames... Of course anything Google shuts down gets an immediate scream of pain from some people, but most everything else they've shut down has died out since then. (The other one I still hear about is Wave. Though that one seems to have a lot of people lamenting what could have been, rather than what actually was. For Reader, the complaints are about what actually was.)
lunchables 9y ago
Or just as likely the inability to monetize those users. Was there any indication that RSS viewership was dropping? I've been using RSS uninterrupted, every day, since the early 2000s. First on Google Reader and then, and now, using Tiny Tiny RSS. I always find these articles about RSS being dead to be pretty funny, considering I'm usually reading them via RSS.
- pythonaut_16 9y ago
  Is there an active site for that? https://tt-rss.org/ https://tt-rss.org/ seems to be gone/down.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - tlavoie 9y ago
    It's up now.
- bastage 9y ago
  Thanks for saving me hassle of typing 100% of those same exact words. When Google Reader went away I looked at a few of the hosted alternatives but found tt-rss early on and never looked back.
stryk 9y ago
I see Google Reader mentioned a lot when virtually anything RSS-related comes up. I missed out on the whole RSS craze (prison will do that to you). But I have always wondered -- so many people lament the fact that Google killed it -- why hasn't anyone forked/cloned it's UI and feature-set? You don't want to just straight up copy it and wake the Google lawyers from their nests obviously, but why not make something that works the same way? Seems like that would be a popular project among the open source crowd.
- naravara 9y ago
  > why hasn't anyone forked/cloned it's UI and feature-set? There are clients that kind of did, but one of the cool things about Google Reader that a lot of people miss is the social feed. You could share articles you found interesting and your shares would show up on the feeds of anyone who followed you as just another RSS source. It's just an extra folder of articles from your GChat friends that you can read at your leisure. And it's people selecting articles from their normal reading rotation, so it was refreshingly clear of clickbait. People usually shared stuff because they thought their friends would find it interesting rather than distributing content designed to "go viral." Once the ecosystem fragmented nobody has the critical mass to replicate the social features. It was nicer than what Twitter or Facebook do because it wasn't in your face.
  - stryk 9y ago
    That sounds like... a fantastic idea! Why would they kill that off?! No easy way to inject ads into I guess (at least that people would be willing to put up with).
    - naravara 9y ago
      >Why would they kill that off?! It happened back when "Social" was a big thing and Google was trying to push everyone onto its erstwhile Facebook competitor Google+ and it's erstwhile Twitter competitor Google Buzz. First they killed the social feed and made the button auto-post to your Google Buzz account, but Buzz being a version of Twitter, had a lot more noise to signal so nobody used it that way. They probably eventually killed it because they preferred having their development resources put towards more exotic social media efforts than maintaining a thing that didn't really make any money. This long article has more of the sordid details if you're interested: https://www.buzzfeed.com/robf4/googles-lost-social-network?utm_term=.xrob8Yrr6w#.jbDxz3228Z https://www.buzzfeed.com/robf4/googles-lost-social-network?u...
pjmlp 9y ago
I never understood why use a browser for doing something that should naturally be done in a native app. Shutting down Reader had zero effect on my RSS reading habits.
- armandososa 9y ago
  Oh no, no, no, no. You're reading web things, you need it inside a browser. You middle click a link and it opens inside a new tab, just like that. Native clients and their embedded web views never work the way you expect them to be, and ugh, there's a link to something inside facebook and I'm not logged in... should I go back and right click -> "Open in browser", nah, forget it. That's why I'm happy to rediscover the old reader. It is not only not a native app, it doesn't try to act like one.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    I did not say anything about web views, I just stated using native apps. Webviews are unwelcome.
  - kqr 9y ago
    This issue must exist only in poorly made apps, no? At least Android is designed such that it should be natural to navigate views across different apps as though they belonged to one. Apps aren't really emphasised under the hood as much as specific views are.
    - armandososa 9y ago
      Maybe it is a desktop versus mobile thing? I prefer a web app in the desktop, but yeah, a native app makes more sense in web.

twic 9y ago

Did you just try to apply category theory to semiotics?

tw1010 9y ago
After I wrote it I read it again, trying to get some grasp of the space of possible interpretations and associations people might think my ideas are stemming from. (The truth is that I have just formed a habit out of using this terminology, and don't always have an underlying unified geometric picture in my mind as I write it.) But your response is an interesting meditation on how often we users of the web (1) always read everything totally out of context, and thus (2) are especially adapted to always trying to infer what the actual network of associations the author intended to point to, but that (3) sometimes we make an incorrect assessment to the precise region of the map, and in fact (4) sometimes there is no such intended association at all. I think that's what makes @dril so funny. He's incredibly skilled at walking the classification boundary of that mechanism.