But RSS did become mainstream; podcasts are a normal part of media now and non-techies seem to have no problem finding and consuming them. They don't have to know about RSS.
There's no reason similar UIs can't exist for text based content. Google Reader, and then G+, had a path to becoming "mainstream outside of techie circles"
There's nothing special about TikTok's user experience. It uses an algorithm that isn't interested in providing a chronological feed, but I don't see why RSS couldn't be used to build something similar. Again, podcasts use it and it works well for that. The discovery aspect happens outside of the scope of RSS, but once you find things you like, RSS works well for tracking them.
The tiktok (or any corporate social media, really) comparison is also a bit odd because they don't need RSS, even if they wanted to provide a chronological feed. The platform hosts the content so it knows when there's new stuff and how to access it to provide to followers. RSS is useful in a decentralized environment where the content could be hosted anywhere and you want to aggregate it
I think this is a lot like saying that SQLite is super popular with my grandma.
Technically, that’s true. But RSS isn’t the reason why podcasts are popular just like SQLite isn’t the reason why XYZ app is popular.
Some of the most popular podcast platforms like YouTube and Spotify are completely detached from RSS.
My whole point about TikTok as a comparison is that the centralization is part of the convenience and feature set of TikTok for the layperson. The interactivity provided by having a centralized platform is above and beyond RSS. Namely, commenting, posting your own content, etc. Decentralizing that type of interactivity has only recently been achieved by ActivityPub.
> But RSS isn’t the reason why podcasts are popular
I don't understand the relevance of this point. RSS is infrastructure so why would end users need to know about it? They don't know about IP addresses when they type a domain name into a browser, but you wouldn't argue that it isn't mainstream tech.
> Some of the most popular podcast platforms like YouTube and Spotify are completely detached from RSS.
This is a quibble and beside the point, but neither of these platforms have podcasts. I can't subscribe to their audio tracks in a podcast player.
But again, I don't see the releavnce. Some platforms not using RSS doesn't detract from the usage that RSS does have.
> Decentralizing that type of interactivity has only recently been achieved by ActivityPub.
This was not a recent occurence. ActivityPub is descended from a long line of work (Ostatus, pump.io, etc) some of which used Atom. Dave Winer (one of the developers of RSS) is experimenting with building a full social network on top of RSS. Podcasting 2.0 (https://podcasting2.org) is working on adding chat/commenting to podcasts. Your original assertion was that RSS can't be used to build something like TikTok, but there have been multiple projects built with either RSS or a close enough analog that show it can be done
Aren't the ads already on the webpage? If the RSS contains snippets of the pages and I have to navigate to the page to view the article, then I see your ads.
Also, can't the ads be a part of the feed just as nicely as the articles? What's stopping publishers from inserting ads as items in the feed?
Can't get the same metrics off the ads in an RSS feed. Companies, like people, are cheap so they don't want to spend money on advertising that doesn't work. RSS feed ads don't report back the same way browser advertising does.
That's only a problem for the engorged advertising industry that's been built up in the past couple decades. Putting ads in an RSS feed is no different than non-algorithmic ads on a webpage or classified sections in newspapers, which worked fine for everybody until targeted advertising was introduced.
Secondly, that just leads back to my first point. The ads (even targeted ads) are already on the final content.
I just can't view this as a failing of RSS. It wasn't intended to help publishers advertise, it was intended to help end users track the sites they wanted to track. I understand these are some of the reasons Google and other publishers disincentivized the usage of RSS but RSS works great for its intended purpose. I want more technology like RSS, not tech that helps publishers exploit us
There's no reason similar UIs can't exist for text based content. Google Reader, and then G+, had a path to becoming "mainstream outside of techie circles"
There's nothing special about TikTok's user experience. It uses an algorithm that isn't interested in providing a chronological feed, but I don't see why RSS couldn't be used to build something similar. Again, podcasts use it and it works well for that. The discovery aspect happens outside of the scope of RSS, but once you find things you like, RSS works well for tracking them.
The tiktok (or any corporate social media, really) comparison is also a bit odd because they don't need RSS, even if they wanted to provide a chronological feed. The platform hosts the content so it knows when there's new stuff and how to access it to provide to followers. RSS is useful in a decentralized environment where the content could be hosted anywhere and you want to aggregate it