when google reader died, I jumped to TheOldReader. it was great for a long time but has been having challenges lately and I jumped to the Vienna app on macos.
I don't quite use "social media" per se, unless of course hackernews is part of it (which, kind of, is ... anything we can use other people can read or relate to, is kind of social, by definition. I think Facebook etc... tried to claim ownership over the term "social media", and I disagree with this notion). Having said that, I don't use or need RSS, so I don't think there will be a renaissance for RSS for most people.
I do agree that AI is killing tons of things right now. This monster must be stopped; it is worse than Skynet in that it really, really sucks. Things started to decay before AI took over, though - for instance, Google search has been garbage since years. It was useful before that.
I used to compare the decay of google search with how youtube search works. You search for, say, "ninja cats". You get some results about cats. Perhaps also ninjas. After like 10 or 20 results, you suddenly get other videos that are totally unrelated, but you may click on it. That's addictive design. People click on it suddenly when it is interesting to them - but this also takes them away from their original search. Something similar happened to google search. The UI is total crap, it shows semi-related videos (I don't want to watch videos when I search for a specific term), some ads for companies (Google is milking it here) and then also useless entries such as "other people searched for sick grannies instead, do you want to search for this as well" and similar UI-ruining components. Without ublock origin I'd be quite lost already - lo and behold, Google killed ublock origin because it threatened their business model (another reason to use ublock origin; we really need to get rid of Google. It is no longer a useful corporation - just greedy).
Just make valid robots.txt and sitemap.xml, please, so I can crawl and update mirrors of the sites I am interested in with least amount of impact on the site.
Can't wait to try some of the readers in this thread. I landed on inoreader not long after the Google reader died. The old reader wasn't doing what I needed back then. I've probably been using this a little too long without checking for what else is out there.
The problem is that the majority of people who used to visit websites just ask LLMs nowadays. They don't visit the site itself, where the work origins from, so they also can't give back / support the source.
It's similar to the viewership of coding tutorials having sunk incredibly low these, creators, especially the ones creating high quality content, can't finance such work / content anymore.
RSS support used to be built into the browser, with identifiable iconography.
You'd click a link on a website that says some iteration of "subscribe" or "feed" and the browser would handle it for you, putting the feed into your bookmarks or whatever.
Users never had to know what RSS is. They just clicked "subscribe" and it worked.
You'd have to do the same explaining of Bluetooth or WiFi, both things that non-technical people are familiar with today, if OSes, for some reason, removed support for them.
This just won’t work. If RSS becomes popular, there will be discovery platforms with “algorithm”s. It will be the same thing, just the discovery and content separated.
RSS appears good now only because it’s not popular enough for LLMs to meddle with. I don’t use RSS, so I don’t really mind, but those who use RSS are making disservice to its _purity_ by trying to popularize it.
Having a single platform own both the content and syndication is the model that got us in this sorry state.
RSS allows content and algorithms to remain independent. E.g. I fully take advantage of RSS for my blog recommendation platform that has no relationship with the recommended sites.
Someone said, “if you have to explain it, then you’ve already failed”. That’s basically the problem in a nutshell. It would be great to see someone build a service based on an open standard, but then you have no moat. Anyone else can come along and build the same service using the same format.
No one wants to make a bet like that, so they don’t. That’s why RSS doesn’t get pushed or used more often.
Very good article. I am not referring to the RSS part.
Interesting thing is, much of what AI is now regurgitating is human output, accumulated over the years. Model training dataset. Stuff like Reddit posts, even posts here?
If, say, AI output becomes THE 99% over the next few years, we will enter the era of incestuous inbreeding within AI -when it simply regurgitates its own output.
It's hard to say whether it's AI generated or just bad writing, but my eyes kept sliding off of it. The bolding for emphasis could be a sign it's LLM output though, whatever bot was popular to use for reddit posting a few months ago loved to randomly bold parts of its responses.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 68.2 ms ] threadThere are plenty of RSS reader apps, but there are very few with good cross-device sync - let alone self-hosted cross-device sync.
These evangelists want to make it sound like all we need to do is get everyone on board with RSS and we’ll all just hold hands and share the web.
People don’t browse the web, there’s like 10 websites, that’s the whole internet.
Everything else is just asteroids and abandoned space stations.
It’s my primary hn reader now.
I do agree that AI is killing tons of things right now. This monster must be stopped; it is worse than Skynet in that it really, really sucks. Things started to decay before AI took over, though - for instance, Google search has been garbage since years. It was useful before that.
I used to compare the decay of google search with how youtube search works. You search for, say, "ninja cats". You get some results about cats. Perhaps also ninjas. After like 10 or 20 results, you suddenly get other videos that are totally unrelated, but you may click on it. That's addictive design. People click on it suddenly when it is interesting to them - but this also takes them away from their original search. Something similar happened to google search. The UI is total crap, it shows semi-related videos (I don't want to watch videos when I search for a specific term), some ads for companies (Google is milking it here) and then also useless entries such as "other people searched for sick grannies instead, do you want to search for this as well" and similar UI-ruining components. Without ublock origin I'd be quite lost already - lo and behold, Google killed ublock origin because it threatened their business model (another reason to use ublock origin; we really need to get rid of Google. It is no longer a useful corporation - just greedy).
It's similar to the viewership of coding tutorials having sunk incredibly low these, creators, especially the ones creating high quality content, can't finance such work / content anymore.
And that’s the answer about RSS renaissance. If you have to explain it, there is zero chance of massive adoption.
You'd click a link on a website that says some iteration of "subscribe" or "feed" and the browser would handle it for you, putting the feed into your bookmarks or whatever.
Users never had to know what RSS is. They just clicked "subscribe" and it worked.
You'd have to do the same explaining of Bluetooth or WiFi, both things that non-technical people are familiar with today, if OSes, for some reason, removed support for them.
I believe human validation protocols might help, think captcha enabled ping backs, but RSS I believe may have very little impact on its own
RSS appears good now only because it’s not popular enough for LLMs to meddle with. I don’t use RSS, so I don’t really mind, but those who use RSS are making disservice to its _purity_ by trying to popularize it.
RSS allows content and algorithms to remain independent. E.g. I fully take advantage of RSS for my blog recommendation platform that has no relationship with the recommended sites.
No one wants to make a bet like that, so they don’t. That’s why RSS doesn’t get pushed or used more often.
Interesting thing is, much of what AI is now regurgitating is human output, accumulated over the years. Model training dataset. Stuff like Reddit posts, even posts here?
If, say, AI output becomes THE 99% over the next few years, we will enter the era of incestuous inbreeding within AI -when it simply regurgitates its own output.
Wonder what will be the result at that point!
Doesn't fix the problem of discovering sources that aren't "AI" slop.
Also wondering if the article is "AI" slop or not. Seems a bit too verbose for me.
But evaluating AI content, SEO content, or affiliate content isn't the problem RSS is meant to solve.