Indeed, non-techies don't actually care that it is RSS under the hood, but I'm not sure techies really care either. It is the high level concept of what RSS embodies that is really being talked about. RSS merely gets suggested because it is an already defined standard that gets us there. No need for a 15th competing standard.
There’s a lot that goes into the success of social media over the last couple decades and figuring out the best ad revenue models was a big part of it.
That in turn led to other companies with the ability to set things at the time gradually deprecating and removing their build-in feed readers (thanks Mozilla, thanks Apple) and the result is that RSS "failed".
It didn't fail, it was murdered so Google could promote their failed social media network.
Instead of that, they removed the comments and replaced them with something worse that no one ended up using.
The former would be a more impersonal source of information and discussion, whereas the latter would have been where you put your personal connections.
Unfortunately Google wanted to do both in the same product, and thought that Circles would be sufficient to create the distinction, but the kind of stuff someone might want to expose to an impersonal connection is drastically different from the kind of stuff they want to expose to personal connections, to the point that they should arguably have completely different UIs.
Nevertheless it seems to me like the network effect was the main thing, and Reader could've been a huge step there.
To make money from Ads. So parent is right, RSS was killed because of the Internet Ads.
However, RSS was never very popular outside some small tech circles, and Mozilla and Apple saw that the same way that Google did.
Mozilla is nothing more than controlled opposition that Google can prop up and say "See, we're not a totally monopoly" while Apple at the time could see nothing beyond the piles of money that the iPhone was making them, to the point where even their desktop/laptop lines suffered.
I still have these exports, backed up to a CD somewhere.
Edit: actually I would say its more like an infinite closet but the more clothes you had the longer it takes to find something to wear the next day until things becoming unbearable and you just close the door to your closet, lock it and then rent clothing for the rest of your life.
It, of course, limits the medium to, well, social media proper, peers talking among themselves for the enjoyment, not making it a full-time job. It pushes for-profit stars elsewhere.
It of course does not solve the problem of hidden ads ("shilling"), product placement, etc, in more popular feeds.
There is certainly room for strictly non-commercial communication, where the value is in the human connection (talking to friends) or fame (being a local luminary). But certainly it's not going to be a medium fitting for everyone, and for al types of content.
I'm finding increasingly harder to follow some podcasts as well.
More and more are centering their distribution through Spotify. Reason: money. Either to fund the minimum needed or to give them some margin that Patreon or similar methods are not able to.
It's not a technology issue, in today's world, most content that would be on an RSS feed comes with ads built in.
There's really only two driving forces in online creative activities:
1) money
2) clout
RSS is a terrible medium for both.
It's not really a fair comparison between a centralized product optimized for engagement and a distributed protocol that can be used in lots of different ways. Sure, the world doesn't care about RSS, that's pretty much the easiest strawman to come up with. On the other side though, it's not a foregone conclusion that what the world wants is to be mindlessly entertained by the algorithm of a faceless corporation. At this point TikTok is the new hot, but there is a long history of youth culture rebelling against corporate tastemakers, so it doesn't seem outrageous to assume that the next big thing will involve some measure of curation.
There's a paradox at play. Or maybe a distortion in our thinking.
I like my niche. You like your niche. My family, colleagues and friends like their little niches. Ask around and you'll find that everybody, barring a small slice of 13 year old's who talk about "what everybody is doing", is quite happy in their niche. Indeed that's what social media is all about. If everybody was 13 and wanted to attend the universal party, and not be "left out", we'd switch back to broadcast technologies.
It leads me to the conclusion that the mentality around social media is really that of an insecure teenager, and that it's caused society some degree of arrested development.
Not foregone, but not likely to be supplated by high effort individual curation.
Another plus of TikTok is that the only unitary identity is your content posts, rather than, e.g. your comment/post history.
TikTok is the evolution of SnapChat, which fucked up precisely at playing coporate tastemaker with its ephermeral content model. TikTok solved that.
RSS seems like great tech but it doesn’t have great user facing apps (that is easy to find at least) to support it
I switched over to it ages ago after the death of google reader, and it's held up remarkably well for me, and now also includes welcome features for, e.g., intaking email newsletters, conducting automatic content-specific web searches, etc into the same RSS-reader UI.
It's one SW subscription I'm happy to pay for.
Something that uses RSS but doesn't go on about using RSS would go down well I imagine. It works like this for podcasts for example.
Same with mastodon and all the other decentralised stuff. Nobody cares about the nerd bit! Market to the mainstream and let hackers hack. The only thing you need to do differently to improve things is reject the desire to wall up your garden when you're succeeding.
I think this is the key point. Because saying "this is what you want" hides a part of the problem: who says it.
The implication is that when you chose what you want you are in control. You may miss stuff, but you are the one deciding. When, on the other hand, it is chosen for you, the algorithm may be the best ever but you're not in control.
For some people "being the decider" is more important than for some others.
Technological implementation details aside, the single biggest issue I have with Mastodon as a replacement for the Twitter-shaped hole in my media universe, is that it has no extant established functional scalable utilized replacement for the distillation of a single feed,
specifically one which has a meticulously crafted "algorithm" aka secrket sauce for comprising posts from sources I have chosen to follow, to universally trending events, with a strong attention to network and correlated interests within it.
This is hard work and is indeed a sekret sauce.
And despite how abused it was, e.g. to drive engagement-through-enragement, and, as with the pathological death-spiral cases of Facebook and Instagram, how corrupted by paid-for and otherwise placed content, it was effective at constantly exposing me to things RSS does not and AFAIK cannot:
things I want to see but don't know to ask for.
Whoever cracks this for Mastodon in a fashion that plays well with the established norms around control, is liable to make a small fortune.
Much smaller than in a non-federated, centralized universe, that captures a broad audience...
...but a much sparklier fortune.
Corporations, governments, etc, are most happy with passive bystanders. They encourage this behaviour, and train people to be this way (deferring to authority figures, etc) as it makes everyone more regular and easier to manage.
The self-directed individual however, rejects this sort of entrainment. They would prefer to receive various information directly and in an un-intermediated fashion, so that they are able to make up their own mind.
Of course, we have new modes of distribution and production, but whose to say Tik-Tok can ‘define’ what you want in order to give it? (A la. You can have any color you want so long as it’s black).
So there are people who watch broadcast TV or what’s “hot” or “trending”, or other well defined products (Star Trek, not Star Wars, parody fiction).
And then there are people whose entertainment involves choice, refinement of taste, and discernment. Plus a bit of the more plentiful Star Wars parody fiction.
Something like turning the radio om vs gathering and playing own records collection.
For the sake of discussion I opened the app again to see if anything had changed since I last used it. Still, I got the same kind of content that bored me away from the app last time. I'm not sure that's all that uncanny. Pretty much what you'd expect from a mediocre algorithm.
I don't really see RSS as being a curation channel as much as a notification channel, though. What RSS provides is a means to notify you when 'professional' curators have curated new content for you.