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How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

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Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#221

Post by Grombobulous »

zdunn wrote: post #212
Grombobulous wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that may be true, I just don’t believe for a second that RSS had any chance of becoming mainstream outside of techie circles. “Solving the problem” is only one aspect of the reason something becomes popular in the mainstream. I also don’t think the user experience offered by products like TikTok is possible with RSS.

But RSS did become mainstream; podcasts are a normal part of media now and non-techies seem to have no problem finding and consuming them. They don't have to know about RSS. There's no reason similar UIs can't exist for text based content. Google Reader, and then G+, had a path to becoming "mainstream outside of techie circles" There's nothing special about TikTok's user experience. It uses an algorithm that isn't in…

I think this is a lot like saying that SQLite is super popular with my grandma.

Technically, that’s true. But RSS isn’t the reason why podcasts are popular just like SQLite isn’t the reason why XYZ app is popular.

Some of the most popular podcast platforms like YouTube and Spotify are completely detached from RSS.

My whole point about TikTok as a comparison is that the centralization is part of the convenience and feature set of TikTok for the layperson. The interactivity provided by having a centralized platform is above and beyond RSS. Namely, commenting, posting your own content, etc. Decentralizing that type of interactivity has only recently been achieved by ActivityPub.

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#222

Post by yaksha »

jerojero wrote: post #205
drnick1 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everything about the web is fine tuned to deliver ads to our eyeballs, browsers, operating systems and even protocols are being designed with ad delivery in mind. I use Firefox with uBlock Origin on Linux, and haven't seen an ad in years. It's not like ads weren't a thing 20 years ago. Pop-up windows were particularly bad. Javascript, in particular, has been constantly abused against the user ever since it was crea…

There's more to ads than banners and unskippable videos. I bet if you open YouTube, even with Adblock and sponsorblock, you'll see ads. "Tech" channels are nothing but ads because all they do is present products for people to buy. Even channels that do legos are ad channels. YouTube itself has become a platform for serving videos that are advertisement at their core. These videos are popular, get good engagement, pay…

Watching Youtube through Brave browser and I can't remember the last time I saw ads (ads by youtube, not by the content creator within the video). Twitch is different story, platform ads certainly play there.

Prior to Brave, ublock origin on Firefox provided a similar ad-free Youtube experience.

I don't consider ad content like the tech channels you mention to be a negative. Informing people about new products is a useful service. The ads that are negative are those that impose themselves over other content or mess with normal internet browsing experience.

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#223

Post by smeej »

jeffbee wrote: post #139
smeej wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but if the songs in your Google Music library weren't on YouTube Music, you just lost them forever. End of story. It was the betrayal that turned me off Google.

This isn't true. I have tons of stuff that I uploaded that they've never heard of

I lost my entire local indie music collection. I'm glad your interests were apparently more mainstream, but I can't listen to my high school classmates' songs ever again.

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#224

Post by smeej »

jeffbee wrote: post #141
smeej wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that pissed me off was that I had uploaded so many indie local bands' CDs, none of which were ever on YouTube, so I lost more than half of my music library when they forced that change and there was nothing I could do about it, having long since gotten rid of the disks because I believed them that they would never delete my stuff. (Degoogled not long after that, actually. Fool me twice...)

I am not sure what you mean here. I just checked my uploads and all my live music stuff is still there, as well as obscure published records.

I had CDs from all my high school friends' dumb little bands. All gone.

I don't care that nobody else on YouTube would ever have wanted to hear them. I don't even really care that the band members themselves would probably be embarrassed that I still had a copy. The point of buying the disk (and uploading it in the first place) was so that I word continue to have access to it.

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#227

Post by port11 »

Funes- wrote: post #209
throwaway63467 wrote: post #48

The Internet in the early 2000s felt a little more special as compared to today, when 99.999 % of content is locked in a handful of walled gardens. I mean sure everything we had then is still possible but let’s be honest everything about the web is fine tuned to deliver ads to our eyeballs, browsers, operating systems and even protocols are being designed with ad delivery in mind. Even the privacy friendly browsers j…

Ads have destroyed our culture. Just look at the fundamental change YouTube underwent in 2012 when they made all users eligible for monetization. It turned it into junk/infomercial TV.

I don’t disagree with you at all, but it’s not like we didn’t have alternatives. We could’ve just paid for the content, directly subsidising the creators we like.

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#228

Post by zdunn »

Grombobulous wrote: post #221
zdunn wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But RSS did become mainstream; podcasts are a normal part of media now and non-techies seem to have no problem finding and consuming them. They don't have to know about RSS. There's no reason similar UIs can't exist for text based content. Google Reader, and then G+, had a path to becoming "mainstream outside of techie circles" There's nothing special about TikTok's user experience. It uses an algorithm that isn't in…

I think this is a lot like saying that SQLite is super popular with my grandma. Technically, that’s true. But RSS isn’t the reason why podcasts are popular just like SQLite isn’t the reason why XYZ app is popular. Some of the most popular podcast platforms like YouTube and Spotify are completely detached from RSS. My whole point about TikTok as a comparison is that the centralization is part of the convenience and fe…

> But RSS isn’t the reason why podcasts are popular

I don't understand the relevance of this point. RSS is infrastructure so why would end users need to know about it? They don't know about IP addresses when they type a domain name into a browser, but you wouldn't argue that it isn't mainstream tech.

> Some of the most popular podcast platforms like YouTube and Spotify are completely detached from RSS.

This is a quibble and beside the point, but neither of these platforms have podcasts. I can't subscribe to their audio tracks in a podcast player.

But again, I don't see the releavnce. Some platforms not using RSS doesn't detract from the usage that RSS does have.

> Decentralizing that type of interactivity has only recently been achieved by ActivityPub.

This was not a recent occurence. ActivityPub is descended from a long line of work (Ostatus, pump.io, etc) some of which used Atom. Dave Winer (one of the developers of RSS) is experimenting with building a full social network on top of RSS. Podcasting 2.0 (https://podcasting2.org) is working on adding chat/commenting to podcasts. Your original assertion was that RSS can't be used to build something like TikTok, but there have been multiple projects built with either RSS or a close enough analog that show it can be done

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#229

Post by adolph »

gkoberger wrote: post #98
adolph wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lose the ability to control the feel of the post. Agreed, rss was popular with people who wanted to decrease noise. > RSS also kills monetization, since you can't have ads This was the killer and the dumb part, because it could, but monetization sofar means integration with all the bad parts of the Internet that desire to track people.

For what it's worth, and there's lots of reasons this hasn't and won't happen, I think micropayments are the solution here. But until that happens, ads fill a middle ground: users don't want to pay and creators want to be paid.

The upper level of YouTube creators use direct product placement in their videos. This is direct content and ad integration that could be part of the content delivered via RSS as opposed to tracking systems and generic ad placement that cannot.

The recent @patio11 Complex Systems podcast lays out how it works:

https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/justin-kuiper...

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#230

Post by gkoberger »

adolph wrote: post #229
gkoberger wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, and there's lots of reasons this hasn't and won't happen, I think micropayments are the solution here. But until that happens, ads fill a middle ground: users don't want to pay and creators want to be paid.

The upper level of YouTube creators use direct product placement in their videos. This is direct content and ad integration that could be part of the content delivered via RSS as opposed to tracking systems and generic ad placement that cannot. The recent @patio11 Complex Systems podcast lays out how it works: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/justin-kuiper...

I agree (although I do find ad breaks in text to undermine the content more than visual mediums, for whatever reason).

But RSS made tracking very hard. And while I know that's your point (not wanting to be tracked), one reason it works in YouTube videos is there's a lot of analytics that can be used to advocate for rates (and track what's skipped, what's watched, etc).

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