4 ms·
Hard disagree. As Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram become increasingly ad-laden and non-chronological, the real value of RSS becomes more and more obvious. I ma
by vanilla_nut 5y ago
Hard disagree. As Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram become increasingly ad-laden and non-chronological, the real value of RSS becomes more and more obvious. I may exist on the fringe as someone who doesn't use any non-HN social media, but I know several businesses in my city that have cropped up in the last 2 or 3 years that basically only pushed out information on Facebook and Instagram. Since those services don't guarantee that your posts will ever make it to followers, much less in a timely fashion, those businesses have really struggled when they have to announce things day-of, or even the day before something happens (closing due to snow, or a party; changing their hours; removing something from the menu due to a supply chain problem; etc.). I've seen a lot of these businesses die, and I suspect Facebook and Instagram contribute. It's not that RSS would save these businesses. But it is true that if you build castles on the sand of another company, you have nobody to blame when your castle collapses.
- Jorengarenar 5y agoRSS isn't dying because it's useless. It's dying because it's not profitable for the big players (heck, you could say it's directly against their interest). And it also isn't good at providing statistics, so small players see it as miniscule (thus dropping too).
- woodruffw 5y agoI don't think we actually disagree: there's plenty of "real value" in RSS, real value that I extract both as a user (I use newsboat[1]) and a producer (I maintain an Atom feed for my blog). The problem isn't that RSS isn't good or useful, it's that it doesn't fit into the incentive structures that we've bought into. An Internet in which RSS thrives is not one in which John Q. Programmer makes 250k a year at Facebook or Google. [1]: https://newsboat.org/ https://newsboat.org/