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by NeedMoreTea 2875 days ago
If they had promoted and made a feature of explaining RSS instead of downplaying and hiding it. They could have promoted it and put RSS feeds on new tabs instead of advertising and what's popular on Pocket.

Most users don't know what RSS is until it is explained to them. Most users don't know what pocket and a whole bunch of other things are either until some explanation is given.
2 comments
paulryanrogers 2875 days ago
Taken to the extreme this strategy means an ever increasing mountain of things to explain to people. Or things they are expected to learn to become 'literate'.

That said I do find open, broadly supported standards liberating, but I'm a developer. And at times even I give up in favor of simpler, inferior solutions.

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onli 2875 days ago
But it is not about taking it to an extreme. RSS is one old and popular technology (it is far from dead, see how many people use feedly and other feedreaders) that fits perfectly to the mission of Mozilla. To support it properly not much is needed:

1. Show an icon when the current site supports RSS feeds.

2. Make that icon a button that leads to the rendered RSS feed.

3. Have a way there to subscribe to the feed.

Live bookmarks were a strange feature, I'm not saying they are the perfect solution to handle point three. It could be something like the reader selection list of https://www.subtome.com/

> And at times even I give up in favor of simpler, inferior solutions.

RSS is already the most simple solution for its problem.

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paulryanrogers 2875 days ago
Personally I think browsers would be better if they made it easy to get subscriptions into feed-focused tools or services _in a standardized way_. Because browsers are originally intended for browsing and not consuming or producing feeds. (They could expand into such a role, but the reader Ff had didn't aggregate feeds well.)
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NeedMoreTea 2875 days ago
It's not complex enough to need extremes or great long explanations. A simple "show me" or offer to add first couple of encountered feeds to their new tabs, and perhaps a couple of popups "your XKCD feed updated! [Show]" should do it. Maybe add a notification icon to updated live bookmarks.

You know, rather less than the low level of effort put in to promoting the recently purchased Pocket.

If people can be enthusiastic about wanting auto-updating podcast apps or push notifications and auto-updating news then RSS "failed" for reasons other than capabilities or being too complex to grok.

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baybal2 2875 days ago
Reason: more PPM revenue. If people don't go to articles directly, but go through banner laden front pages, they get bigger cut.
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