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> Instead of focusing on a technology, let's focus on a problem. This would be good, but it seems most people are too focused on RSS and not much on the actual

> Instead of focusing on a technology, let's focus on a problem. This would be good, but it seems most people are too focused on RSS and not much on the actual usage. The point of RSS is to receive changes in a structured way. RSS is just a tool for this. But there are also other ways and other tools for this. > It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds. No, this was never the case. Newsfeeds were always a minority-feature. The mass of user used to be bigger, but not to the level where it could be called a mass medium. We don't need to communicate better to the publisher to force our will onto them. Instead, we should find ways to ease their work and help them satisfy our demands. For example, there was a movement for embedding semantic and structural data right into a document. Something came out of this, but maybe we should light up that flame again and move it more into a direction where it could be used for our feedreaders. Or just adapt the feedreader to better support the already existing structures? This could easily sold with support for accessibility, and everyone would win here. Thinking about, how is the state of accessibility-technologies today? Could it be used for easy and reliable parsing?

webmaven 5y ago
> > It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds. > No, this was never the case. Newsfeeds were always a minority-feature. The mass of user used to be bigger, but not to the level where it could be called a mass medium. True, but that minority included a very influential segment (journalists, podcasters, and bloggers). The turning point of when the blogosphere lost out to the centralized walled gardens of social media was probably around 2009 (though it wasn't obvious at the time); that was the year of the FriendFeed (an aggregator of your social accounts across multiple sites into one profile/timeline) acquisition by Facebook and of Farmville's explosive growth. After that point, Facebook and Twitter started being treated as infrastructure by startups and media organizations, a trend that accelerated during the 'Arab Spring' of the 2010s.

webmaven 5y ago

> > It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds. > No, this was never the case. Newsfeeds were always a minority-feature. The mass of user used to be bigger, but not to the level where it could be called a mass medium. True, but that minority included a very influential segment (journalists, podcasters, and bloggers). The turning point of when the blogosphere lost out to the centralized walled gardens of social media was probably around 2009 (though it wasn't obvious at the time); that was the year of the FriendFeed (an aggregator of your social accounts across multiple sites into one profile/timeline) acquisition by Facebook and of Farmville's explosive growth. After that point, Facebook and Twitter started being treated as infrastructure by startups and media organizations, a trend that accelerated during the 'Arab Spring' of the 2010s.