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by fulldecent 2995 days ago
A visitor that comes to your site via social is MUCH more valuable than someone that comes via RSS. The economics of this reality are what removed RSS from the limelight.

Dear publishers, let's fix this. Whenever you publish a blog post, etc. please syndicate it on social and then go back to your site to add "DISCUSS THIS ON TWITTER/whatever AT https://t.co/aesou02". Make sure that this also syndicates to RSS.

Dear pubsubbers, let's fix this. In your reader software, please lint these special links and show the discussion below the news. We know you want to get into the content discovery business -- this is the first step.

See the Slashdot RSS feed as a good example, they inline the discussion right in the feed.
3 comments
dingaling 2995 days ago
I am struggling to understand. Why is a social-origin visitor more valuable?

Honest question. I would have expected an RSS-origin to be a more tech-savvy reader and more likely to engage.

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freehunter 2995 days ago
Engage where? Engage how? Tech savvy may not be what you're looking for, and is not always a good thing.

I think what fulldecent is saying is that people reading on RSS have a barrier to sharing and a barrier to commenting that doesn't exist on social media. On Twitter or Facebook, the "share" action is intrinsically linked to the article in its native format. Not so on RSS.

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DrScump 2995 days ago 

  "DISCUSS THIS ON TWITTER/whatever AT https://t.co/aesou02"
But some of us refuse to use Twitter for such purposes and won't click on shortened/anonymized URLs from strangers in any case.
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danShumway 2995 days ago
I've been wanting to set something like this up with Hacker News. The problem is that you have to do it two-stage; your website needs to go live, then you need to post it (so you can get the post url), then you need to update the website.

It's not insurmountable, it's just a bit harder than it should be to automate, especially if you're running a static site or something that takes a minute or two to go live. I'd love if social sites had some kind of API for settting up a draft post or deterministic urls, so you could pre-include the link during your build step.

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