4 ms·

Ask HN: Why did RSS die from the mainstream?

7 points by romes 6y ago

mortivore 6y ago
Was it ever mainstream in the sense of non-techy people using it?
- jones1618 6y ago
  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.
jones1618 6y ago
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.

7 points by romes 6y ago

mortivore 6y ago

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

jones1618 6y ago
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.

jones1618 6y ago

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.