still kind of flabbergasted at how useful RSS is as a thing for like, most of the informational and event-type stuff that people need, but how hardly anyone uses it, presumably bc most other options favor businesses and there isn't a lot of public awareness of the tech outside of cranks and power users
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email is two-way, so businesses have the ability to spam you or sell your information for additional revenue; social media requires constant attention, which means you have to be constantly engaging with the business on some level
and obviously if you have to go to a website constantly that's ad engagement and revenue
i do suspect part of this is because the RSS paradigm for most people was formed by google reader, which as far as i can tell was sort of a proto-social network? so it makes sense that evolved into actual social networks.
but i think it makes a lot more sense as an adjunct to email which only works one-way! then you can use it as a sort of bulletin board
@emaytch I've had the thought that the reason I want RSS instead of email for so many things is because RSS is a pull-model, where if I stop pulling from a source they can't reach me any more, while in the push-model of email I can't stop somebody from sending me stuff I don't want. so RSS is kind of a continuous opt-in, an explicit consent that can be withdrawn at any time. and I think that's an underappreciated contributing factor to why publishers may hate it, as well
this is why im very skeptical of the idea that new technology will solve old problems, incidentally-- often we HAVE solutions that work, or could work well, but they're ignored or buried bc they conflict with the needs or desire of someone else. its not a technical problem, its a social or political one!
