"X is obsolete" for any X which is not literally marked "obsolete" in the relevant reference is just a convenient lie. The real reason is going to be either "I don't like X" or "I don't understand X".
“We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”
181–190 of 249 posts
Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”
#182As much as I pine for the days when RSS was ubiquitous, I trust them to have the access logs to conclude that nobody is using their RSS feed.
I wouldn't say I trust them, but I would say it's the most likely explanation.
It could be that they've failed to understand how RSS could help their organization achieve its goals. But it's probably just that RSS isn't worth it to them.
Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”
#183... in another news item brought to me by RSS, RSS is declared to be an obsolete technology.
Yawn.
Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”
#184I always thought Twitter's goal was to Embrace, Extend and Extinguish RSS.
The alternative to RSS is Twitter (which is preferable to many orgs as you can "unsend" or manage engagement).
Sucks for freedom of access though.
Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Maybe I'm splitting hairs Not enough split, not really hair ;) The rewinder became obsolete, replaced by random access. Your need to seek remained. Your need to watch videos remained, relevant technologies got replaced etc. One's need for "informational pull" remains - there is no dead end.
> One's need for "informational pull" remains It clearly doesn't - since so few people are using RSS.
What people "need", in the sense I used the term, and what people /want/, are not the same thing, Chris. And what people /do/ is a third thing, because it takes knowledge and notion of an option to take it.
Product optimality and market offer, "efficient" and "available", "need" and "want", do not overlap. People do not "need" palm assistants that work as mirrors (glossy displays): they buy them. One can eat mud for ignorance or for lack of alternatives.
Average Joe, Median Jack, Typical Maude and Random Randall are frequently laymen (layconsumers).
Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”
#186I still maintain an Atom feed on my website and any website I operat, and still curate my offline feed list and reader. I also urge you to do so. It's a remnant of the good old Internet. Moreover, I enjoyed writing an XSL stylesheet for my Atom feed. It has amazing results, and I wonder why people don't do that.
It's also a great way to back up bulk content from feed sites I create into intuitive files for migration ETC... It's far more readable than JSon by bare eyes as well. Retiring RSS was a scheme, just like removing headphone jacks on modern cell phones, which was really a ply to make new insecure bluetooth and wireless headphone sales more money. I get weary of how many unreasonable and dreadful turns tech makes to re…
> Retiring RSS was a scheme, just like removing headphone jacks on modern cell phones, which was really a ply to make new insecure bluetooth and wireless headphone sales more money.
Not only that, a headphone jack does not support DRM and therefore is a loophole in a closed system fully controlled by manufacturer.
Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”
#187This hurts. RSS is the only way I know, without having to scrap things by hand, to get an aggregate of "news/articles" from the sites and blogs I follow, and I consider to be of good quality. I prefer to filter my information like this, instead of having to rely on some algorithm, or endlessly scrolling in a "social medial wall" full or clickbait articles, immortal/vintage memes or exuberant rants. If RSS dies, what…
> If RSS dies, what is the alternative then? I understand that technically speaking it's not a good solution, but let's have something else before killing this. Instead of focusing on a technology, let's focus on a problem. This is where users and potential users of RSS have a communication problem with publishers of content. It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds. So, you could have metrics on that. But, t…
> It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds
Uh, really? When I was younger I came across RSS a few times but could never figure what it was or how it worked. When I clicked RSS links, big walls of XML appeared. And when I looked for what it was, all I could find was something along the lines of « it’s to syndicate content ». Or in French: « c’est de la syndication de contenus ». I don’t know if the term « syndication » is widely used in English but in French it didn’t (and still doesn’t) mean anything to me. Also in French the term happens to be close to our word for worker unions (syndicats) so it confused me even more. All this to say RSS didn’t make sense to me and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one. Still today almost no one I know uses or used RSS one day.
I like RSS now that I understand what it is and that I have a proper reader but it’s still been perverted with ads, feeds without any content, etc.
Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”
#188I'm a very happy daily RSS user, but we ought to be upfront about its ginormous deficiencies: - every day I deal with broken links and broken images because my feed reader doesn't know from which URL it should resolve relative links - there's no pagination mechanism, or way for a client to ask for "all posts since last Friday". If you want your feed to always have all posts available, you need to include the entirety…
I'll add another - Chronological ordering within the day isn't very useful. I'm more interested in what other readers (of my type) have found "important/interesting/insightful/etc", so I care about the likes/upvotes/etc... I don't want everything every day. I want to read the X most important articles that day, with X being different each day depending upon how much time I have. RSS cannot really provide that priorit…
Before the big social media companies slurped up most of the traffic, there used to be a lot of experimentation with this kind of filtering/aggregation. Nowadays with much better ML libraries, I see no reason why you couldn't train a classifier on your own preferences. Unfortunately most of the devs that are interested in RSS type stuff tend to not know much about machine learning so there's not much of it going on.
Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If RSS dies, what is the alternative then? I understand that technically speaking it's not a good solution, but let's have something else before killing this. Instead of focusing on a technology, let's focus on a problem. This is where users and potential users of RSS have a communication problem with publishers of content. It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds. So, you could have metrics on that. But, t…
RSS is very much alive in the podcast world.
With podcasts the ads are naturally served as part of the audio content. That model doesn't work with text feeds, and there may even be parents on including ads in line with text.
Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”
#190I'm a very happy daily RSS user, but we ought to be upfront about its ginormous deficiencies: - every day I deal with broken links and broken images because my feed reader doesn't know from which URL it should resolve relative links - there's no pagination mechanism, or way for a client to ask for "all posts since last Friday". If you want your feed to always have all posts available, you need to include the entirety…
I'll add another - Chronological ordering within the day isn't very useful. I'm more interested in what other readers (of my type) have found "important/interesting/insightful/etc", so I care about the likes/upvotes/etc... I don't want everything every day. I want to read the X most important articles that day, with X being different each day depending upon how much time I have. RSS cannot really provide that priorit…
> I don't want everything every day
Exists: mynews.com/rss ; mynews.com/world/rss ; mynews.com/economy/financial_commentaries/rss ...
> I'm more interested in what other readers (of my type) have found
Could be done: mynews.com/rss?u=q1w2 (upon cookie authentication)
But does a service properly clusterizing users exist? I do not know any... (I know about extremely badly implemented, clumsy attempts to automatically corner registered users into some sketchy profile.)