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Twitter, Facebook and Reddit have become the new RSS readers for the masses. I get it, having an open distributed web would be a great thing but that ship has

Twitter, Facebook and Reddit have become the new RSS readers for the masses. I get it, having an open distributed web would be a great thing but that ship has sailed, walled gardens are the new web for 99% of internet users. If your blog post is interesting enough to get picked up and shared via social networks, people will see it in their feed and hop over to view your post. After someone has finished scrolling down their Facebook, Twitter and reddit feeds, they’re ready to start that loop all over again. There isn’t a place in most peoples mental bandwidth for adding an RSS reader to that mix. And I was a heavy consumer of RSS via Google Reader and then Feedly when GR was axed. This post just reminded me that when I got a new phone I never even bothered to install Feedly again. Totally off my radar at this point, and if that’s the case, there’s no way someone less geeky than me is going to start picking it up.

netsensei 7y ago
Hypothesis: most users on social media wouldn't publish or share content, let alone leverage RSS, if those platforms didn't exist. Social media emerged alongside existing technologies. And they attracted a whole new audience. Of course, there's been a migration from former self hosted users towards those social media. An apt comparison is IRC. It existed for decades now, but the concept of an office group chat never quite got successfully poured into a business model until Slack came around. Organisations using Slack didn't necessarily shift away from IRC or other options. They simply didn't use chat until they jumped on the Slack bandwagon. I do recall criticisms when GR was unveiled: why use a centralised online service in order to consume a distributed network of content? At that point, GR did overtake the market of RSS clients. Axing GR was the exact turning point for RSS as that happened exactly during the meteoric rise of social media, leaving many with little alternative to turn towards social media. Remember that at that point, Big Tech was perceived as the "Good Guys" and many touted that this was just the natural state of affairs. I used to be a heavy RSS user, but when GR got axed, that pretty much fell away overnight. I never quite got back to using RSS via an alternative.

netsensei 7y ago

Hypothesis: most users on social media wouldn't publish or share content, let alone leverage RSS, if those platforms didn't exist. Social media emerged alongside existing technologies. And they attracted a whole new audience. Of course, there's been a migration from former self hosted users towards those social media. An apt comparison is IRC. It existed for decades now, but the concept of an office group chat never quite got successfully poured into a business model until Slack came around. Organisations using Slack didn't necessarily shift away from IRC or other options. They simply didn't use chat until they jumped on the Slack bandwagon. I do recall criticisms when GR was unveiled: why use a centralised online service in order to consume a distributed network of content? At that point, GR did overtake the market of RSS clients. Axing GR was the exact turning point for RSS as that happened exactly during the meteoric rise of social media, leaving many with little alternative to turn towards social media. Remember that at that point, Big Tech was perceived as the "Good Guys" and many touted that this was just the natural state of affairs. I used to be a heavy RSS user, but when GR got axed, that pretty much fell away overnight. I never quite got back to using RSS via an alternative.