Why did RSS feeds die?
Because large corporates couldn't monetise them with enough ads. Once the large sites had dropped support for RSS, everyone then followed.
'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs
141–150 of 172 posts
Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs
#142One interesting aspect of Twitter is that the restriction on tweet length requires serialization of complex ideas. Faced with this, authors are forced to either simplify their ideas or spread them out across tweets. An emergent dynamic of the platform, as a result, is that ideas get misrepresented, nuance gets lost, and people get irritated. That irritation turns into argument and rebuttal. And since argument and con…
You see the brevity as a bad thing, I see it as a good thing. If you can’t get to the point in 280 characters you probably don’t know what you’re talking about.
Very very few things can be properly summed up in 280 characters, and most of them aren't important things. Don't forget that your brain cast its own prejudices and points of view over everything, it's very easy to misinterpret a 280 char long text, not so much when you read a 500 pages book in which the author describes every little bit of his thought process.
There is also a huge issue where people get tricked into thinking familiarity = knowledge. Reading tons of 280 char texts seemingly synthesising complex ideas in "single bite" portions is a problem, it makes you think you know something when in reality you just absorbed 280 characters of "facts" without any context or substance, it doesn't better you. Especially on twitter, which must be the most polarised and polarising medium out there. It is level 0 of knowledge acquisition.
> You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind. Everywhere means nowhere.- Seneca
Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs
#143The infinite scroll addiction pipeline has segmented the online world largely into two parts: Drooling scroll zombies on twitter/facebook/reddit/etc, and people who don't partake at all. The audience of people who might read your blog but who aren't stuck on a scroll treadmill is too small to bother, especially with the death of many popular rss readers.
Only google killed their reader, of course. feedly and inoreader are pretty popular RSS readers.
Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs
#144The infinite scroll addiction pipeline has segmented the online world largely into two parts: Drooling scroll zombies on twitter/facebook/reddit/etc, and people who don't partake at all. The audience of people who might read your blog but who aren't stuck on a scroll treadmill is too small to bother, especially with the death of many popular rss readers.
Why did RSS readers die? Was it social media?
They didn't, only google reader. inoreader is a great one, so is feedly.
Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs
#145I've been writing blog for almost 15 years. I think blog died because readers can not support blogs in some way. Many readers became silent subscribers and that's it. The RSS is only a publishing protocol. It's a good format to subscribe some notification, updates and such, but it's no match for the two-way relationship of modern social network. 1. The user can not directly comment with an RSS nor contact the author…
You'd think in the era of patreon this would be solved by now in a manner that is opt in by users who have shown they are willing to pay for online content, or some other way that doesn't require intrusive paywalls or advertisement.
Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs
#146The obstacle is not the format but the ease of sharing. Yes, I've had a blog since ~2000, I know there are some ways to share others' content on your own blog, but it never became as easy or readily consumable as a retweet. Ironically, I think the reason is recognizable from epidemiology. The network of twitter followers is just denser than the network of bloggers ever was or likely ever will be. Even the very best b…
Take notes from publishers, and use social networks to send out links back to your blog. Best of both worlds.
Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs
#147Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs
#148One interesting aspect of Twitter is that the restriction on tweet length requires serialization of complex ideas. Faced with this, authors are forced to either simplify their ideas or spread them out across tweets. An emergent dynamic of the platform, as a result, is that ideas get misrepresented, nuance gets lost, and people get irritated. That irritation turns into argument and rebuttal. And since argument and con…
True, but worse than that: it flattens everything. In another medium, we can kind of tell how much work you put into a thought. A well-written 500 word post is a different animal than a throwaway line. This isn't a good thing. Who's an expert vs an amateur just having fun? Who's just musing idly while sipping scotch versus gone through several drafts and really put a lot of work into this? Who's passionate, if wrong,…
Is it?
“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
― Mark Twain
Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs
#149Why did RSS feeds die?
It didn't, just people who use RSS aren't tweeting about using RSS. Grab a feed reader and subscribe, they haven't stopped.
Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter's competitor Weibo launched a feature called "Long Weibo" years ago. It's essentially a blog service, except that Weibo would display the first 140 characters of a long post as if it is a tweet, and a reader needs to click on an icon to expand the tweet into a full article. It's a really nice feature. Clean time line as before, users who hate changes won't get bothered, but those who crave for longer writings…
This would be so cool. I would still limit it somehow, tho, like at 5000 characters, to force everyone to brevity in line with twitter micromessaging branding. Honestly, also think of the amount of subtle, non invasive and highly targeted advertising space they’d just spawn out of thin air...
6.40 kB ought to be enough for anyone.