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Comment by time_to_smile | Hacker News Reader

I love and miss RSS as much as the next hacker, but it's weird to see an increasing trend of technological nostalgia starting to emerge.

To be clear, I also think the web has gone wrong and miss coherent and useful web search, exploring interesting user created content (people have mentioned the return of web rings) and curating my own news feed via RSS.

But it's strange to me that when I started everything was about what we were going to do in the future, and increasingly the conversation is about going back to the past.

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This is a feature of HN which seems to be increasingly populated by an older crowd that enjoys pining for an imagined golden age of technology. I’m in the same boat: I love plain text, RSS, and Vim as much as the next guy, but the trend of reminiscing about the superiority of ancient tech rather than musing on the future and how people actually use computers these days is woefully out of touch.

I also like mechanical calculators, horse drawn plows, and fine tinsmithing all for the skills and craftsmanship that go into each. And yet I wouldn’t think to start campaigning to bring back animal powered plowing. The new generation of technologists and programmers entering the workforce doesn’t give a damn about your ugly RSS feeds or your plain text productivity workflow or your finely tuned EMacs config and I think that mindset shift is going to be irksome to a lot of established old heads.

I don't think it's "nostalgia" or "going back to the past". I think it's people in their thirties and older that somehow start to realize the promise of 'social media' was there all the time. This whole RSS thing... it's never pushed to it's potential, I think. Thanks to walled gardens and other kinds of closed jails. Surrounded by a lot of buzz, hype and money to be made.

Besides, I could say the same thing about electric cars. Your neighbor's new Tesla? Why is he going back 100 years in time? Nostalgia? Or new potential?

Pretty close. To be fair, the RSS-as-social-media was a thought I had a decade ago (more than a thought, there was a working prototype), but that doesn't mean it's not in my mind now.

I just saw your website with the Pipes software. Very cool! I'm going to subscribe to your feed.

Thanks :)

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