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Comment by mdp2021 | Hacker News Reader

mdp2021

Obsolete?! Replaced by what?!?!?!? I think obsolescence implies replacement!

I'm not so sure. Take vhs rewinders for example. VHS cassettes and players were obsoleted by DVDs and DVD players respectively but there is no analogous new tech to the rewinder. It was a dead end. Maybe I'm splitting hairs.

> 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.

Sadly, I think today's analog would be mobile push notifications from specific applications.

> One's need for "informational pull" remains

It clearly doesn't - since so few people are using RSS.

I don't think that follows. People need proper nutrition, but they can get by for an unreasonable time on sugar cereal and microwavable Salisbury steaks. The prevalence of cheap, nutrient poor meals is not an indication that people's need for nutrition doesn't remain. It's only an indication that suppliers would rather make a cheap, highly profitable good with marketing to convince people it fills a need than to go the less profitable route of actually providing for that need.

If there was such limited market demand for RSS when it was available that almost everyone's dropped it, then maybe it's not a solution that people actually need or want.

I get that people think it's a great idea, but in practice it seems not to be.

That's a big if.

I'm not convinced suppliers genuinely attempted to provide useful RSS feeds. Even during the hay day of RSS, many feeds were simply stubs meant to get me to their website—even for websites to which I was already paying for the content.

Regardless, demand for a particular solution is much different than demand to meet a particular need. To suggest RSS is 'obsolete' suggests its been obviated by a technology which meets the same need. I don't see that as being the case. It is far more likely to me that RSS doesn't meet the needs of the supply side.

Solutions can also be dropped for lack of profitability or other supply side concerns even where demand for that particular solution is high.

You can see this in action today. Ask yourself why Spotify doesn't support RSS for its podcasts despite it being extremely popular for fetching podcasts.

Well, what it really comes down to is that there are 24 hours in a day and you can only look at one thing at a time.

If you're reading or watching video, you're either using RSS, or using Facebook or using twitter or tiktok or YouTube or whatever. If your screen time is already dedicated to doomscrolling your Facebook feed, it's not that there was a limited market for RSS, its that there's a limited market for content in general, and people moved to where the dopamine pathways get stimulated the most.

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).

The belt drive of the laser in an optical reader, and to some extent the servo motors actuating hard drive heads, were the direct successors that obsoleted the VHS rewinder. The wide data bus providing random access to persistent solid state memory has already obsoleted one and is nearly done with the other.

I'm guessing they think that social media and a subscription email newsletter are adequate replacements. But they are not.

We can't really know looking in from the outside. Presumably they know how often their newsletters are sent out and how many social media followers they have and how often the RSS feed is pulled.

I do believe that online feed readers will only pull the feed once per x minutes for all their subscribers, instead of pulling the feed n times per x minutes.

For example, all of Feedly's subscribers will only count for one pull.

I was thinking accidental denial of service attack by badly scripted bot crawling their site every 15 minutes was an adequate replacement, but they didn't agree with that.

RSS is replaced by personalized feeds that people see by logging into specific platforms and participate through the intended user engagement. That is how those companies earn money.

...Getting information through the lens of a virtual secretary which has a sub-animal intellectual size. Apart from all the social and intellectual implications, that is still not a replacement for information update pull.

Of course. Yet, that is what is happening.

That isn't usually how NGOs raise money.

Yes, but I have seen a pattern in many websites for clubs, non-profits, student projects and other non-commercial places. They follow trends that they see in popular services. The idea that RSS is dead is unlikely to have originated from the NGO.

If the NGO tells you that RSS is rarely used compared to other methods, I would probably believe them. There really isn't any reason for them to lie about it.

But they might not realise that by repeating the claim that it's dead, they're contributing to killing it.

That's not a replacement, much like lobotomy is not a replacement for anything.

ActivityStreams (the foundation of ActivityPub and other fediverse tech) is pretty much RSS on steroids. I wouldn't call the latter 'obsolete' though.