Comment by mechanical_fish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mechanical_fish | Hacker News Reader

mechanical_fish

This post feels mistitled, but that itself is an interesting sign. If there is a "war" on RSS (or, more precisely, on certain manifestations of RSS), where is the army? Where is the manifesto? Who has pounded the table and declared that RSS is our enemy and must die?

Has anyone?

My impression is that we have the opposite of a "war" here. These RSS features are dying of natural causes. Unless someone can point me to the conference, blog post, or secret meeting where an evangelist convinced Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Mozilla, et cetera to simultaneously kill this feature in tandem, I'll continue to suspect that they're doing so because they're all subject to the same market pressure: There's a lot of new, popular, paying features that need building, from Twitter and Facebook integration, to mobile apps, to mobile-friendly APIs, to responsive and touch-friendly design, and as these things get added to the backlog other things get pushed down. Code is expensive to maintain and if it doesn't carry its weight it gets cut, even if it's vaguely likeable and nifty.

You are treating the term "war" too literally. This is not about some secret conspiracy, but the lack of incentives (or maybe even existence of disincentives) to support open protocols in the era of walled gardens.

To refute your last point, the article explicitly mentions that that Twitter has functional RSS support, which was deliberately removed from the user interface and metadata, so it's not a matter of development or maintenance cost.

Our experience teaches us that to have a war you need organized sides, no one can afford a war on drugs or a war on terrorism if the opponents can metamorphize into pleasure or the political will to self-determination.

Mechanical fish is right, RSS is unattractive to people, that is the problem. People don't hate it, it isn't a war.

War implies opposition. If there is no opposition, but rather "lack of incentives," then I agree with mechanical_fish that war is inappropriate.

Think of it as passive opposition, i.e. failure to do something about a cause.

Describing passive opposition as war just makes no sense at all.

It’s not a war. Not even using extremely liberal (and stupid) definitions of war.

English is a big toolbox. We don't need to repurpose words for completely different definitions. The suitably dramatic terms you're looking for are demise and downfall.

"The demise of RSS"

"The downfall of RSS"

Or if you want to get superdramatic: "The silent acquiescence of RSS to an untimely demise"

I actually agree thats dramatic, but its easy to see what they meant. And no, not a downfall. A downfall does not convey the idea that measures were taken by other parties to actually bring down the entity in question. A downfall can be self-inflicted. So not war, but not downfall either. :)

Just because one can puzzle out meaning doesn't mean that a piece is well written. It only means the reader was sufficiently clever, or lucky enough to stumble on the meaning.

You're implying that the user interface and metadata of a site like twitter has no development or maintenance cost?

That's right, keeping the following header

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="...">

pointing to a URL that already exists and works just fine doesn't cost anything. If the primary reason had been maintenance cost, they would have removed the feature itself.

The way to remove a feature gracefully is to first stop promoting it in any way, sometimes up to and including making the docs more obscure, because it's rude to urge people to use a feature on Day N and then rip it away from them on Day N+1. Particularly if some of those people are your business partners.

The next step, in many cases, is to send out sorrow-filled notices to the feature's users saying, in essence, that you're end-of-lifing the feature as of date X. Though often the bad news is artfully disguised. (e.g. "Look at all the glorious new stuff that we're rolling out to replace that tired old feature that will now be deprecated and slated for removal.")

Only in step three do you just shut it off. You might even shut it off gradually, as when Google shut off their old design for Gmail, a process which is still going on and appears to be taking literally years.

How much time elapses between the three steps depends on the details.

Twitter, Facebook, Apple, and Google are not conspiring to kill RSS, but each company wants to lock users into their walled garden. RSS lets users "eat the cheese" without getting caught in a proprietary mousetrap.

I'll buy that, but not without a chuckle about the fact that, based on my limited research, you can use any sync-enabled mobile RSS client you want, so long as it's Google Reader or a client of Google Reader.

(Please, please refute me: Tell me a good iOS feed-reader that syncs my read status between my iPhone and iPad, but doesn't require me to use Google Reader.)

Google may not technically own RSS, just as they don't technically own Android, but they own Google Reader and Feedburner. Maybe that's not a mousetrap, strictly speaking. But I still feel stuck.

> (Please, please refute me: Tell me a good iOS feed-reader that syncs my read status between my iPhone and iPad, but doesn't require me to use Google Reader.)

Have you tried Newsblur (http://www.newsblur.com/) - has a great web app and complementary iPhone app. Samuel Clay (the developer) is often on HN too, although his username escapes me right now.

It's clearly no conspiracy theory 'war' so to speak, I think that term was used simply to convey that RSS is dying.

On an individual level, Google Reader used to be like crack for me, I couldn't get away from it. Used it every day. Followed hundereds of websites. Then the tore the social out of it and clunklily put it into G+, which blows (no reader user liked this). Now I almost never use google reader. It's almost like they were trying to push people away from it. But that's just my two cents.

Was the social aspect of Google Reader that good? I never used the social features; I just used RSS for its express purpose, to avoid having to click fifty bookmarks every day.

I had several friends with whom I shared a dozen or so links each day in Google Reader. When Google dropped the sharing feature in Reader, I basically stopped sharing with them and haven't found a replacement. Google+ definitely was not a viable alternative. It was my mistake in relying on Google, in retrospect.

Some "sharebros" began to write a Google Reader clone, tapping into the "We are the 1000+" frustration:

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2011/10/sharebros-...

But progress has fizzled to nothing:

https://twitter.com/#!/hivemined

The social sharing was very valuable for content junkies, b/c the only people who shared stuff on reader were other folks who were heavy users of RSS. Comparing signal to noise from that community vs. my twitter feed is a total joke. When Google shut it down, people in my RSS sharing circle were really upset. It was sad.

Here's an old comment of mine with regards to google readers social aspect (and when they made the changed to G+):

"I'm also usually very open to change and what have you, but I despise the new reader. Exactly because I like to be in reader, and see what my friends posted from reader. I don't want it mixed with the rest of my social life, I don't want it mixed with FB like status updates, I just want to see what people are sharing in Reader. It's like I had my own "community" in reader, a small but special subset of people really in the "know". Yeahyeah, that's a circle, I know, but I went to reader to read what they shared, then I read my own, and shared. The 'dialog' was more circular, if that makes any sense. That, and my Reader slants heavily on the 'images' and artsy side of things, it was almost like a micro tumblr that only friends saw, but unlike tumblr, it's not recycled stuff, we are all pulling from different places, I followed a guy from finance, a dude that loved astronomy, and chick in advertising, a guy in tech, a girl into silly comics, and it was all right there, im my reader. It was perfect."

I don't know that "that good" is the metric against which people are measuring the old Google Reader. I think a more accurate metric would be "that adequate" or "that appropriate". As others replying to this have stated, the old social functionality of Google Reader dovetailed nicely into the RSS aggregator functionality, where you could build a small close-knit group of people who--while having their own areas of expertise--took care in paring down their own individual firehoses to well curated streams of interesting content. That's it: no more, no less. When Google trashed that feature set to shoehorn the 10 pound G+ monster into that 5 pound bag, it was over.

> If there is a "war" on RSS... Where is the manifesto?

Here: http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/05/rest-in-peace-rss/

Jon Stewart had a hilarious sketch earlier this week on this increasing tendency to throw around the term so lightly:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/mon-april-16-2012-...

around 7:00.

There's a war on non-linkbait blog post titles.

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