I used Google Reader and I still use Feedly on a daily basis and I have no trouble saying unequivocally that this is a trash article not worth posting.
It’s just bringing up a bunch of unrelated decisions, mostly made over 10 years ago, strung together to try and make it seem like Google is EEEing RSS, when the reality is that the various people who have made decisions across the different divisions of Google are all just unintentionally deprioeitizimg RSS because the alternatives have more sticking power.
“deprioritizing” does not explain all of the mentioned decisions. Plus there are still many cases for which there are no alternatives that work similarly. The article is factual and google has plenty of incentive to kill open standards like rss
“deprioritizing” does not explain all of the mentioned decisions.
Which ones doesn’t it?
Plus there are still many cases for which there are no alternatives that work similarly.
Yeah, they’re not making decisions on what best suits the end user, they’re making decisions based on what makes them the most money.
The article is factual
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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Feedly picked up where reader left off and is now way better than reader ever was.
Yeah google didnt help of course, but the internet as a whole pivoted from RSS. It still very much exists today and you have user friendly easy ones like feedly still out there in spite of the pivot, but the inability of RSS to go mainstream is more the result of how social media and apps dominate the modern web
not to sound like a boomer but everytime I have tried to use rss, my searches are always a dead end. It’s one technological impairment i haven’t been able to overcome.
Let’s be honest RSS wouldn’t live anyway… Like the only pages that would provide it would be the ones that don’t have or have barely any ad and that’s a minority that let’s be honest doesn’t stop them from providing it now.
The rest of pages would either not do it, do a very basic thing with only the title and small description so you have to click it to see the article or just find a way to add ads and tracking to it. Because they want/need you to watch ads, sell your data with tracking and all that.
even if it was only title and brief description, I say it’s still a vastly better user experience to have a personally curated list of updates to websites you want to follow than manually going to a dozen homepages and dealing with the awful layouts and disorganization they inevitably have (in addition to ads), many of which don’t even have the option of chronological view.
Personally as an RSS user I dont even want or need it to send me the article. I almost always just click the link and go to the website directly. I think RSS could still exit as just a link aggregate with a preview. The thing that lead to the decline of RSS is that it was competing with social media and news aggregates like google news.
Setting up your RSS reader takes work. Even the super user friendly ones like feedly still require you to search for different sources that you want to add. In the old school and more pure RSS programs you have to manually find the rss link on a website and add it to your feed.
In a more open optimistic future of the internet this would be the way we get content. Exploring the web and adding it to our list if we want updates o demand. In the actual modern internet addictive monopolistic social media has to cater to algorithms instead or social media engagement(that often doesnt actually read the source).
Google not encouraging and getting rid of its rss content certainly didnt help matters but I think RSS is just a living fossil of a potential evolutionary branch that the internet count grown into but didnt.
So, I in no way want to argue that algorithms are better, as they are often used to manipulate and their design to drive engagement at any cost leads to plenty of their own problems.
That said, I was raised in a pretty strong echo chamber (that a good portion of my family is still firmly in). If I had been solely responsible for curating what content I got via RSS (which I did for a short period in the early 2010s). I never would have been exposed to content that challenged the worldview I was given. Ironically, it ended up being the YouTube algorithm that while it was simultaneously feeding people down the gamergate conspiracy tunnel was opening my eyes to the realities of climate change, making me less bigoted towards LGBTQ people, and helping me find the empathy that I had hidden to fit in with the world around me.
I don’t know what the answer is. On the one hand, I know how bad echo chambers can be, on the other hand, corporations and algorithms manipulate people all the time and shouldn’t be trusted either. I do think RSS had potential to be better than what we have now (where social media sites like Twitter and Digg/Reddit/Lemmy essentially act as everyone’s shared feed reader and end up putting people into new echo chambers), but I think having the chance of seeing content that challenges our worldviews has also been a good thing, that I’m not sure would happen as often if we all only read our personally-curated RSS feeds.
That said algorithms are getting more manipulative, and I may just be a lucky outlier that an algorithm happened to push in a positive direction.
RIP Aaron Swartz
