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by yessirwhatever 1379 days ago
Never ceases to amaze me how ignorant people continue to make such deranged and wide generations with little or no evidence.

Let me guess, email is dead? RSS is also dead right? Literally no one ever uses them anymore. You probably think that all businesses should just all switch to TikTok and communicate with memes and dance routines.
3 comments
bscphil 1379 days ago
I don't think this response is fair. RSS is dead as a widely used medium for distributing hypertext and media. A tiny number of people continue to use and promote it (myself very much included). Even for podcasts, where RSS represents the most obvious as well as original mode of distribution, a tiny number of people, probably < 5%, use RSS rather than a centralized platform.

The OP was not giving a take on whether that's a good thing or bad thing, let alone saying that everyone should "switch to TikTok" or "communicate with memes", but rather simply commenting on the above hard to dispute fact.

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yessirwhatever 1379 days ago
Don't fall into the same trap as the other dude. Those statements are patently WRONG. "Tiny number of people" is millions and millions. "<5%" is the definition of a bullshit statistic that is: a) a guess, b) very wrong with just a google search, and c) means nothing as it can't be proven.
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bscphil 1379 days ago
> b) very wrong with just a google search, and c) means nothing as it can't be proven

You contradicted yourself.

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yessirwhatever 1379 days ago
maybe, someone else saying it is not proof though, and either way you're still wrong.
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bscphil 1378 days ago
> someone else saying it is not proof though,

> and either way you're still wrong.

Ironic. I guess you want me to take your word for it.

Unfortunately for you, your mockery doesn't hold up to any kind of scrutiny. Libsyn, a podcast distributor which I associate with more nerdy podcasts and competent users compared to e.g. iHeart, released user-agent stats across their entire field quite recently, back in 2021: https://thefeed.libsyn.com/193-alexa-play-the-podcast

Mobile apps not named Spotify, Stitcher, or Apple claimed a total download count of 12.6%. That 12.6% is largely composed of:

* 2.3% Google Podcasts

* 1.8% Overcast

* 1.3% Podcast Addict

* 1.2% Castbox

* 1.0% PocketCast

To the best of my knowledge, all of the above are centralized and normally fetch the RSS feed on a server instead of the app functioning as the user agent.

And so we can infer that at maximum, mobile downloads originating directly from RSS-fetching user agents represent 5% of the market for Libsyn. Desktop as a whole represented <15% of all downloads, and a huge chunk of that is going to be (once again) Apple Podcasts.

Furthermore, there are a ton of extremely popular "podcasts" (though they barely deserve the name) that are entirely centralized, being available only on one platform. This is a large portion of the market which the above figures don't reflect at all.

And so, on the basis of the evidence that is actually available, I pronounce RSS dead.

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blfr 1379 days ago
> Let me guess, email is dead? RSS is also dead right?

Sadly, yes. Businesses, and even many hackers, moved their email to the oligopolists; ditched RSS readers in favor of Twitter; switched from IRC to Slack; many people in organizations can't even be called directly, they're on MS Teams.

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p-e-w 1379 days ago
> Let me guess, email is dead? RSS is also dead right?

Email is dead, RSS is stone cold dead and buried under 100 ft of permafrost.

All mainstream browsers have removed RSS support. Virtually no major website still offers RSS feeds. When you see an RSS/Atom icon on a page today, it's either an old Wordpress theme that noone bothered to update, or some stubborn ideologue who insists that RSS is still a thing because there is a document somewhere that specifies it.

The dream of open syndication is over. Wanting it to be otherwise doesn't make it so.

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Andrew_nenakhov 1379 days ago
> Email is dead, RSS is stone cold dead and buried under 100 ft of permafrost.

This claim is as bold, as it is baseless, as evidenced by dozens of emails I send and receive each day, and by the fact that I stumbled upon this thread via RSS, which I use daily to receive almost all my subscriptions.

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morsch 1379 days ago
I switched to an RSS reader recently and was shocked to find that every site I was interested in, large and small, had an RSS feed. I guess I was lucky.
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deng 1379 days ago
> Virtually no major website still offers RSS feeds.

Yeah, except tiny sites like The Guardian, NY Times, CNN, BBC News, Stackoverflow and pretty much every German major news paper...

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account42 1378 days ago
Even Reddit still has RSS. And for anything that doesn't you can probably find a third party offering RSS - either something generic or specific to a website - e.g. for HN: https://hnrss.org/.
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mgoetzke 1378 days ago
RSS is not dead per se, but it is not discoverable for normal people and not something that most typical mom'n'pop consumers or even teens would know about.

If you go around in a city asking people what a RSS feed is you will definitely will get more blanks than asking them about e-mail or facebook.

E-Mail is used a lot still, don't see that going away anytime soon either.

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yessirwhatever 1379 days ago
What you're saying is provably wrong. I can't tell if you're a bigot or just dumb.
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