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The death of RSS is the death of the federated web model where users view and consume the content they want to. Modern alternatives like Twitter, Facebook, and
by vvillena 6y ago
The death of RSS is the death of the federated web model where users view and consume the content they want to. Modern alternatives like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram do not serve users in the same way. Users happily consume the content the platform feeds to them, without much say in it. It's an eerie return to the pre-Internet days, where the only choices a consumer had were to change the TV channel / radio dial / newspaper. An illusion of choice in which users are disempowered.
- jimmaswell 6y ago> Users happily consume the content the platform feeds to them, without much say in it. You get posts from people/pages you subscribe to in your feeds. I don't see how this is true unless you're just talking about Facebook's non-chronological order. Twitter's nothing like that anyway.
- joecot 6y ago> I don't see how this is true unless you're just talking about Facebook's non-chronological order. It's more than just non-chronological. FB buries many link posts. Specific friends can disappear from your feed for months. FB still has the echo chamber issues it had pre 2016 election, just with fact checking notations sometimes. For many people, FB is where they get their world news at this point, and that's a very skewed way to get your news.
- Lammy 6y agoTwitter has defaulted to a non-chronological feed for a while now. Check your "Show best Tweets first" setting.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoI think this is only a short-term effect. In response to things becoming more locked down, more and more "info liberation" projects will take root, and in the end the information will just gradually all leak out and end up outside the prison wall, in compatible, accessible formats. Then, eventually, even the sources of the information will switch to publishing it in the libresphere, because at that point the best audiences will be there too.
- jxf 6y agoI hope you're right, but this is an extremely optimistic view that does not have much historical precedent.
- d883kd8 6y agoIt's how things went down with aol
- gagege 6y agoLooking at all of history, I'm very optimistic. Going way back to Cuneiform and the printing press, and the internet itself, they all point to a general principle of the breaking up of monolithic information sources over time. It might take a while, but it'll happen with the internet too.
- DSingularity 6y agoSad that the internet is now considered a “monolithic information source”. But yay for unicorns I guess.
- neverspecial 6y agoWhat you describe in the digital age will be an illusion of freedom. Delivery of the bits will still be locked down tighter than ever. Delivery allows filtering. The future is very bleak.
- golem14 6y agoIsn’t the Wikipedia current events portal just that?
- minikites 6y agoWho will do the work to make this so and what is their motivation?
- forgotmypw17 6y agoI think it will be hackers just like you and me, and our motivation will be making information accessible and the world a better place. It may seem optimistic, but I'm also optimistic about what our reality "optimizes" for.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sneak 6y agoWhat death of RSS? There are literally zero blogs I want to follow that don't support it.
- fmajid 6y agoJepsen.io doesn’t seem to have one.
- pforret 6y agoMost blog software have RSS built in, so that's not where you would see the death of RSS. These sites don't have RSS (anymore): News publications: Bloomberg, Economist, Forbes, TechRadar ... Communities: Indiehackers, dev.to They switch it off because it allows people to see their content without the advertising, or they forget to implement it. Source: I created https://nuuz.io/tech https://nuuz.io/tech and it depends on RSS feeds for news.
- diffctx99 6y agoHogwash Email works fine. I am in months long conversations with academics and thinkers around the world. Signal works fine. Same story as above. What’s dying is your historical connectivity to specific ideas. That’s hardly a sign fascism and censorship are settling in. And really you’re saying it was impossible for anyone to blindly get addicted to an RSS feed, just reading whatever is posted to it? Good grief. Your brain is experiencing chemical shock over one of thousands of epistemological inventions going away. That’s akin to the dark ages literally returning? Perhaps your connection to current events is coloring your thoughts here. RSS still exists. History wasn’t sucked into a black hole. This is what’s deflating about the tech scene. All these weird hills to die on, as if some favored bespoke language that is only 10-12 years old anyway losing popular favor means 1984 is upon us!
- random3 6y agoEmail is being replaced by Slack. Maybe RSS / Atom weren't good enough, but what they're being replaced with isn't better either. It's not just about RSS. It's about moving off open standards to closed properties. It's also more effort to integrate different sources as each one has a different API. Indeed, nor the world nor freedom of information will die here, but that doesn't mean it's a step forward.
- chooseaname 6y ago> Email is being replaced by Slack. Is it? I've never once used Slack. It's not on any of my devices. But email is and it works great.