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Another Hacker News thing is the middle-brow dismissal. It's not really a fair comparison between a centralized product optimized for engagement and a distribu

Another Hacker News thing is the middle-brow dismissal. It's not really a fair comparison between a centralized product optimized for engagement and a distributed protocol that can be used in lots of different ways. Sure, the world doesn't care about RSS, that's pretty much the easiest strawman to come up with. On the other side though, it's not a foregone conclusion that what the world wants is to be mindlessly entertained by the algorithm of a faceless corporation. At this point TikTok is the new hot, but there is a long history of youth culture rebelling against corporate tastemakers, so it doesn't seem outrageous to assume that the next big thing will involve some measure of curation.

imbnwa 4y ago
>it's not a foregone conclusion that what the world wants is to be mindlessly entertained by the algorithm of a faceless corporation Not foregone, but not likely to be supplated by high effort individual curation. Another plus of TikTok is that the only unitary identity is your content posts, rather than, e.g. your comment/post history. TikTok is the evolution of SnapChat, which fucked up precisely at playing coporate tastemaker with its ephermeral content model. TikTok solved that.
dado3212 4y ago
I don’t have anything against RSS, I think it’s a useful protocol that fills a niche. I do however think that it’s just that: a niche. If you read through the other comments on this and other historical posts it’s presented as a panacea to the “algorithm of a faceless corporation”, where the ills of social media could all be resolved if RSS was just more widely adopted. There’s a lot of trends you can bet on in tech and in tastes, but any action that requires active effort (including all forms of curation) will be outcompeted by something that automatically does it for you. For every German programmer reveling in fine grained control there’s a thousand people in India opening YouTube for the first time and just watching recommended.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > it’s just that: a niche. There's a paradox at play. Or maybe a distortion in our thinking. I like my niche. You like your niche. My family, colleagues and friends like their little niches. Ask around and you'll find that everybody, barring a small slice of 13 year old's who talk about "what everybody is doing", is quite happy in their niche. Indeed that's what social media is all about. If everybody was 13 and wanted to attend the universal party, and not be "left out", we'd switch back to broadcast technologies. It leads me to the conclusion that the mentality around social media is really that of an insecure teenager, and that it's caused society some degree of arrested development.

imbnwa 4y ago

>it's not a foregone conclusion that what the world wants is to be mindlessly entertained by the algorithm of a faceless corporation Not foregone, but not likely to be supplated by high effort individual curation. Another plus of TikTok is that the only unitary identity is your content posts, rather than, e.g. your comment/post history. TikTok is the evolution of SnapChat, which fucked up precisely at playing coporate tastemaker with its ephermeral content model. TikTok solved that.

dado3212 4y ago

I don’t have anything against RSS, I think it’s a useful protocol that fills a niche. I do however think that it’s just that: a niche. If you read through the other comments on this and other historical posts it’s presented as a panacea to the “algorithm of a faceless corporation”, where the ills of social media could all be resolved if RSS was just more widely adopted. There’s a lot of trends you can bet on in tech and in tastes, but any action that requires active effort (including all forms of curation) will be outcompeted by something that automatically does it for you. For every German programmer reveling in fine grained control there’s a thousand people in India opening YouTube for the first time and just watching recommended.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
> it’s just that: a niche. There's a paradox at play. Or maybe a distortion in our thinking. I like my niche. You like your niche. My family, colleagues and friends like their little niches. Ask around and you'll find that everybody, barring a small slice of 13 year old's who talk about "what everybody is doing", is quite happy in their niche. Indeed that's what social media is all about. If everybody was 13 and wanted to attend the universal party, and not be "left out", we'd switch back to broadcast technologies. It leads me to the conclusion that the mentality around social media is really that of an insecure teenager, and that it's caused society some degree of arrested development.