Comment by TimothyFitz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TimothyFitz | Hacker News Reader

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I think this exactly illustrates my point... (sorry for calling you out twice moe, I very much appreciate you expressing your opinions even though I disagree with them)

You say "all lessons unlearned" implying that RSS is worse than previous incarnations of solving the same use case. This is a common opinion I really am railing against. RSS is EXTREMELY popular. Usenet is a dying architecture. It's a case where being worse in the "obvious" technical architecture allows you to be better in things that actually matter: ease of access, simplicity of use, lack of installing things and wide support. These are just some of the reasons RSS took off. Easier means more viral, because easier means a shorter viral loop.

Of course, I think RSS is better for syndication than notification, and would prefer more sites like twitter use Webhooks in addition to RSS.

It's a case where being worse in the "obvious" technical architecture allows you to be better in things that actually matter: ease of access, simplicity of use, lack of installing things and wide support.

Well, ubiquity != adequacy. I understood the original author's article as a technical recommendation. He basically suggests to use HTTP for everything because he thinks "it's technically good for everything".

He made broad claims about how any HTTP based protocol will magically scale by leveraging proxies, loadbalancers and other existing infrastructure, completely ignoring the fact that many applications just don't fit into the request/response paradigm in first place.

RSS is a great example for the power of the internet that enables us to "build on what we have" without waiting for some standards body or greater authority to get moving. But it is also a text-book counterexample to his scalability and "one size fits all" claims. Polling just doesn't scale for these things and technically it's a step back from Usenet, that had these problems sorted out already. We went back to square 1 with RSS and are now locked up there until we get a true WebSocket and worthwhile persistent storage in browsers.

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