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Reddit, Hacker News, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Flipboard, and any other service that aggregates good content or allows people to easily share content with
by marknutter 14y ago
Reddit, Hacker News, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Flipboard, and any other service that aggregates good content or allows people to easily share content with one another. Have you not been paying attention?
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoRSS isn't about aggregating or sharing content it's about following content.
- mkr-hn 14y agoHow do I avoid missing each post from a handful of people who publish rarely in an endless stream of chatty publishers? RSS is how I sidestep the stream and catch the important things.
- roldie 14y agoThose allow you to follow people and what they think are important. RSS readers allow me to follow what I think is important.
- rpedroso 14y agoThe only viable alternative you named was Flipboard. Reddit, HN, Facebook, Twitter and G+ are all user-sponsored aggregators. If I see content there, it must have come from somewhere. Where did I find the articles i share on Facebook? On my RSS feed. One alternative is to follow your websites you like on a social service like Facebook. That's not as helpful as RSS. - No read/unread tracking - Depends on news feed algorithms - Lots of noise RSS mean I never miss an update. Your alternatives don't.
- marknutter 14y agoThese days, I see more "follow me on twitter" links than I do "subscribe to my RSS feed" links. I have no issue with RSS as a technology, but it clearly did not resonate with the non-technical user. Twitter and Facebook did. Geeks can lament this until they're blue in the face, but they're in denial if they believed RSS was ever going to be a viable mainstream solution.
- 6cxs2hd6 14y agoMaybe more of us should use the phrase, "Follow my feed". [1. Follow instead of subscribe. 2. Feed instead of RSS, because (a) there's also Atom, and (b) neither "RSS" nor "Atom" are quite as friendly as "feed".]
- marknutter 14y agoStill, most people are not going to know what the heck a "feed" is. They know what Twitter and Facebook are, but they don't understand finding an RSS reader and using it to follow somebody's "feed".
- Evbn 14y agoIt is a pretty easy word to learn. Heck, even FB already has a "news feed"
- Dylan16807 14y agoA twitter feed is almost always going to be full of noise updates. An RSS feed from a real blogging platform, especially if you filter to a tag, is going to be far more focused on useful information.
- jaibot 14y agoI don't care whether or not it's "mainstream", so long as I can use it.
- ballooney 14y agoThese things share what is fashionable, not what is important. If I find an interesting, low volume blog, I can subscribe to its feed and I will get an update when content is added. With your scenario, I might get an update if content is added, if I can find it between guff about conference scandals. It's simply not comparable, unless you're forcing worthy content (in my judgement) to have the same value as transitory celebrity gossip. These services give me a good chance of discovering things, RSS lets me follow them. As a case in point, there are a lot of things in my RSS feed that I have discovered from HN because one single post from them made it to the front page, but no subsequent one has. But I get to see the updates because I subscribed to their feeds. That subsequent ones haven;t made it to the HN front page is absolutely not a value judgement on their worthiness - unless, as I say, you think 5 same-but-different articles on who said what and to whom at a conference is more important than the infrequent technical article by a researcher. In short, I want to follow the stuff on the right of the bell curve, not in the middle. The stuff that mostly floats to the top of what you're advocating (HN, fb, twitter) is firmly in the middle. A lot of the people posting the content I find interesting don't have twitter feeds announcing their posts - that kind of thing is often the preserve of this week's preferred javascript framework project. My RSS feeds allowed me a much higher SNR than any of these things. So please don't compare them, as if they can serve the same purpose. That's nonsense.
- marknutter 14y ago> that kind of thing is often the preserve of this week's preferred javascript framework project Careful, you're bias is showing.
- gnaritas 14y agoYou clearly haven't been, or don't know what RSS is for as none of those solve the same problem as RSS. Social news != my news.
- sergiosgc 14y agoDifferent needs. You are clearly a pure consumer of information, whereas GReader users are curators of information. You are the 90 in the 90-9-1 rule and GReader appealed to the 9. For curators, there are (yet) no good alternatives.