I’m surprised nobody burned me for this comment, HN usually frowns on snark ;)
But I would like to add a constructive note: I’ve been dabbling around the RSS space for a long time, including a ten-year-old feed service and web client. In my opinion, RSS has failed where centralized social media succeeded largely because of discoverability.
I’ve put RSS clients in front of plenty of users, and the response is invariably, “okay, now what?” Using a bookmarklet to subscribe to feeds is confusing and unnatural to them. They want getting The Atlantic RSS feed to be as easy as following The Atlantic on Twitter. And they do want to see the “liked” articles of their friends who are fellow readers.
To anyone who is trying to make RSS fetch again, I beg them to take the take the social and discoverability issues seriously.
Incidentally, I think the Overcast podcast app (remember, podcasts are also RSS) is an ideal model of an in-app directory.
But I would like to add a constructive note: I’ve been dabbling around the RSS space for a long time, including a ten-year-old feed service and web client. In my opinion, RSS has failed where centralized social media succeeded largely because of discoverability.
I’ve put RSS clients in front of plenty of users, and the response is invariably, “okay, now what?” Using a bookmarklet to subscribe to feeds is confusing and unnatural to them. They want getting The Atlantic RSS feed to be as easy as following The Atlantic on Twitter. And they do want to see the “liked” articles of their friends who are fellow readers.
To anyone who is trying to make RSS fetch again, I beg them to take the take the social and discoverability issues seriously.
Incidentally, I think the Overcast podcast app (remember, podcasts are also RSS) is an ideal model of an in-app directory.