@rottenwheel
I knew they did it at the time, but I couldn’t put my finger on any of the patterns. Now all too obvious
I get my news with Feeder on my phone. RSS is alive and well in this house.
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.
Firefox has also had issues in this regard.
“Firefox’s built-in support for web feeds and Live Bookmarks was removed with the release of Firefox version 64 in December 2018.”
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacements-firefox
They pushed “Pocket” over RSS.
Now they’re depreciating the Mac pocket app and it’s clearly not going to do well in the future.
5 years of moving people away from RSS to another service, to then start to depreciate that service.
5 years from the major redesign of google reader from 2008 to 2013 and closing it down.
My lesson. Expect to change your software for the web every 4 years or so. If it lasts longer it’s a bonus. But chances are if you make the effort to move to the best (and most recently developed) candidate every 4 years you’ll be in a good place.
You know when software gets stale, you know when there are better options, use them.
Sometimes your current choice gets a new round of development, sometimes it goes stale.
I switched over to Livemarks which has provided an almost drop-in replacement. Looking at the low number of users of this extension, it makes sense they would stop supporting it to reduce maintenance cost.
Absolutely. The reason these things don’t last is because it’s not worth the investment to redevelop and maintain.
I’m just pointing out that’s the reason to move to where there is investment and sustainability in the product.
Firefox cut funding for maintaining an option due to low usage. Speculative investment in a replacement fell flat.
Google cuts investment for the same reasons and that happens often. They speculate on a new product then cut it if it doesn’t work out for them.
Neither company doing this is a bad thing.
The problem most people have is they are late to move to a mature product, which then having reached maturity is assessed as either a success or failure. Then due to low usage it’s cut.
Then they’re looking for the next mature product. Again ignoring sustainability. Which is then also cut.
Google wants the internet simplified so they can get it under their control, what else is new? I started learning web design a few years back and this is the kind of shit that makes me suicidal. There’s almost no point when they have such a huge monopoly in the space.
