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Comment by kgran | Hacker News Reader

I got the same argument after I asked why there's no more RSS/Atom feed of the news section in my municipality's website. Some positive people tell me that RSS is not dead and it's still everywhere. Unfortunately, especially after modern redesigns, RSS gets dropped as "obsolete technology". The sad thing is that this doesn't only happen to optional websites which I could choose not to follow out of principle like blogs or niche websites on technology and such. Governmental, municipal, local news websites do this, after which I lose easy and convenient access to this relevant information.

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Y'all need to lean into the game a bit. Most of the time, things don't win or stay just because they are good. They win because of good marketing, etc. RSS, the brand, is a loser at this point. It is viewed as old, tired, and obsolete. It doesn't matter if it is the right tech. That's not a state you can grow from.

At this point the right answer (IMHO) is to create a new thing that is very similar, but has a new brand. Market the hell out of it and subsidize the hell out of it.

Trying to prevent the existing brand from dying is a fools errand.

I'm trying to figure out if this is serious or parody. You do know that RSS is a spec, not a brand, right? Right?

It's serious, the person you replied to is talking about how to revive a dying _thing_. Whether you want to call it a spec or a brand or a product does not really matter in this context, RSS has elements of all three. Their point is that trying to get people to change their minds on RSS is going to result in wasted effort, and that if you want RSS to live you need to market the hell out of a functionally equivalent replacement to the spec that appeals in some way to the relevant decision makers.

Exactly right.

All things you are trying to get others to use have a brand, whether implicit or not. Heck, it's usually even valued separately from the technology (good will, etc).

RSS, the spec may be fine. I've implemented RSS readers, heck, i use newsblur every day still.

RSS, the brand, is a goner.

The OP (and twitter post) is complaining that others consider the brand dead, and are arguing that the use case it covers are unmet by other things, and that the spec is still good stuff. Those are all very orthogonal things.

It's great that the spec is still the right thing! But the brand is dead, so you won't get anywhere without fixing that.

If we use the term brand to mean, "reputation," then yes, adoption is a function of reputation. Reputation can be justly granted (due to things like the functional value it provided) but it also can be disparaged regardless of the merit of the argument.

If enough people think that RSS sucks, is too old, died with GReader, has no user-base, or whatever other story, why would they invest their time and effort in supporting it? If the problem isn't technical, then it might need some kind of marketing solution to get over the historical baggage in the zeitgeist.

Okay, I get that "brand" means "reputation", but why should a highly useful technology be worried about it's "brand". Is the "car" brand out of vogue? What about HTML? I mean, that stuff was used in crickety old sites from the 90s! Should we throw away our hammers, because screws are all the rage?

This whole notion of RSS' "brand" being the problem just reeks of a used car salesman trying to convince me that spare tires are for chumps.

Being highly useful is simply not enough. It never has been. OS/2 did not win.

The world is littered with highly useful technologies that nobody adopts, or eventually die to less useful, arguably objectively worse technologies. Adoption and software life cycles are not a techo-meritocracy.

In short - you are completely and totally ignoring the social aspects of software adoption and use. But they are, in fact, often the most important part. I don't actually particularly like this any more than any other software engineer - it often feels wrong. That does not (and will not) make it any less of a reality.

(as an aside, yes, in fact, as joist hangers and ties and such became more and more required due to code or construction method, structural screws became all the rage - nailing joist hangers/etc with regular framing nail guns was hard and dangerous, but structural screws just require an impact driver or a screw gun to do safely. Now they actually have specialized metal connector nailers, so structural screws are getting ignored again outside of decks)

This is the realm of perception not reality. The perception is that RSS has been deprecated like java applets or activeX controls. I'm not convinced we need to "rebrand RSS," but we do need to have some activity demonstrating its modern relevance.

Usefulness isn't a high enough bar. When choosing a technology, I might also want an active community, for support, for ecosystem tooling and integration, and more.

> Okay, I get that "brand" means "reputation", but why should a highly useful technology be worried about it's "brand".

Things with a reputation of being dead gains lower interest and support.

This is probably the most on point comment in all of these RSS discussions.

Just publicly dropping the "old" XML-based version and introducing the "new" JSON-based version would probably bring a brand new flair and growing adoption to feeds. (Nevermind json feeds existed for years)

Now we just need someone to pull it off...

The reality is nobody is ever going to pull it off.

RSS was great. I mean, it is great, but it used to be too. It didn't die in the public eye by accident. It was killed by the big boys who realized they can't make money off of you if they can't decide what content you see in front of you, you don't run their software on your device, and/or you don't have to sign up for an account to get the content.

Try to pitch a new syndication spec to anyone that controls a large portion of the information availability online, they're not stupid, they'll shoot you down because "we tried that already, it wasn't profitable enough."

The era of standardized protocols, freedom of information, ease of communication, interoperability, tools that empower the user, that era is dead. And it was too short lived. The internet we have today looks like something designed by Dr Strangelove. If you want to have sensible tools that work for you you're going to be swimming in a very shallow information environment with almost exclusively other zealous enthusiasts of whatever tool you think is better.

>create a new thing that is very similar, but has a new brand

Use the blockchain and make it a part of web3

For «Governmental [and] municipal» information, you should be vocal as a community and/or individual community members. "Look you could visit n websites per day - and get lost in formatting, though already to visit all potential sources is impossible -, or there is this old simple thing that automatically lets one know that source S has these news..." It could be that already the representatives are unaware of the possibility and of the relevant simple solution.

Most local government websites are maintained by a handful of compliance specialists that provide hosted solutions; if your government even has an IT department (as a nearby city to me does) it is probably more a cause for concern than anything else (they seriously assign unchangeable passwords to people that follow a pattern based on your name so you can guess anyone else's password... it is crazy).

https://carcd.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Sloane-DellOrto...

But so like, if you want to lobby a local government to add some feature to their website, they aren't even effectively going to be able to do it; but if you can convince a company like Streamline to add it to their offering, then you'd suddenly experience like half the local governments in California all getting that feature at once.

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