3 ms·

> It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds Uh, really? When I was younger I came across RSS a few times but could never figure what it was or how it wo

by thiht 5y ago

> It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds Uh, really? When I was younger I came across RSS a few times but could never figure what it was or how it worked. When I clicked RSS links, big walls of XML appeared. And when I looked for what it was, all I could find was something along the lines of « it’s to syndicate content ». Or in French: « c’est de la syndication de contenus ». I don’t know if the term « syndication » is widely used in English but in French it didn’t (and still doesn’t) mean anything to me. Also in French the term happens to be close to our word for worker unions (syndicats) so it confused me even more. All this to say RSS didn’t make sense to me and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one. Still today almost no one I know uses or used RSS one day. I like RSS now that I understand what it is and that I have a proper reader but it’s still been perverted with ads, feeds without any content, etc.

cyanydeez 5y ago
litterally my experience. it was some weird inside joke a very limited generation got. thats why its dead.
WorldMaker 5y ago
The masses may never have consumed RSS feeds directly, but there was a lot of stuff like "Portals" and "Home Pages" that consumed them indirectly that were pretty well consumed by the masses. Companies like Yahoo! relied on RSS feeds well before companies like Google turned news acquisition and scraping into its own business, closer to the search engine arm than not, and mostly divorced from RSS.
18pfsmt 5y ago
I use a desptop RSS reader to this day to keep of numerous podcasts. I wonder if people realize that podcast feeds are RSS. Even Spotify, and some other proprietary networks. Google still maintains Feedburner too, if a bit lazily.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
> When I clicked RSS links, big walls of XML appeared Putting a (small) tinfoil hat on, Google intentionally chose to botch the handling of rss links in Chrome because they couldn't collect ad revenue through text-only RSS feeds.
- culopatin 5y ago
  Look I don’t have sources but I remember Opera being the only browser back then that would handle RSS
  - callahad 5y ago
    Firefox also had native support for RSS: detecting feeds, rendering them reasonably, even subscription via "live bookmarks." Removed in 2018: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks

by thiht 5y ago

cyanydeez 5y ago

litterally my experience. it was some weird inside joke a very limited generation got. thats why its dead.

WorldMaker 5y ago

The masses may never have consumed RSS feeds directly, but there was a lot of stuff like "Portals" and "Home Pages" that consumed them indirectly that were pretty well consumed by the masses. Companies like Yahoo! relied on RSS feeds well before companies like Google turned news acquisition and scraping into its own business, closer to the search engine arm than not, and mostly divorced from RSS.

18pfsmt 5y ago

I use a desptop RSS reader to this day to keep of numerous podcasts. I wonder if people realize that podcast feeds are RSS. Even Spotify, and some other proprietary networks. Google still maintains Feedburner too, if a bit lazily.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago

> When I clicked RSS links, big walls of XML appeared Putting a (small) tinfoil hat on, Google intentionally chose to botch the handling of rss links in Chrome because they couldn't collect ad revenue through text-only RSS feeds.

culopatin 5y ago
Look I don’t have sources but I remember Opera being the only browser back then that would handle RSS
- callahad 5y ago
  Firefox also had native support for RSS: detecting feeds, rendering them reasonably, even subscription via "live bookmarks." Removed in 2018: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks