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If there was such limited market demand for RSS when it was available that almost everyone's dropped it, then maybe it's not a solution that people actually nee

If there was such limited market demand for RSS when it was available that almost everyone's dropped it, then maybe it's not a solution that people actually need or want. I get that people think it's a great idea, but in practice it seems not to be.

cgriswald 5y ago
That's a big if. I'm not convinced suppliers genuinely attempted to provide useful RSS feeds. Even during the hay day of RSS, many feeds were simply stubs meant to get me to their website—even for websites to which I was already paying for the content. Regardless, demand for a particular solution is much different than demand to meet a particular need. To suggest RSS is 'obsolete' suggests its been obviated by a technology which meets the same need. I don't see that as being the case. It is far more likely to me that RSS doesn't meet the needs of the supply side. Solutions can also be dropped for lack of profitability or other supply side concerns even where demand for that particular solution is high. You can see this in action today. Ask yourself why Spotify doesn't support RSS for its podcasts despite it being extremely popular for fetching podcasts.
betwixthewires 5y ago
Well, what it really comes down to is that there are 24 hours in a day and you can only look at one thing at a time. If you're reading or watching video, you're either using RSS, or using Facebook or using twitter or tiktok or YouTube or whatever. If your screen time is already dedicated to doomscrolling your Facebook feed, it's not that there was a limited market for RSS, its that there's a limited market for content in general, and people moved to where the dopamine pathways get stimulated the most.