RSS mainly failed because the predominant model for funding content creation is ads. Sadly, RSS is a poor medium for ads—to get more revenue, content creators were incentivized to bring users to their own sites rather than syndicating rich or useful feeds.
There’s a lot that goes into the success of social media over the last couple decades and figuring out the best ad revenue models was a big part of it.
Nah it's much simpler. The reason RSS failed is because Google killed Reader so they could push content creators to Google+.
That in turn led to other companies with the ability to set things at the time gradually deprecating and removing their build-in feed readers (thanks Mozilla, thanks Apple) and the result is that RSS "failed".
It didn't fail, it was murdered so Google could promote their failed social media network.
I wonder if Google+ could've succeeded if Google had evolved it from Reader somehow. Start with the product people are actually using, develop it until it's the product you want people to use?
At the time, several of us were telling our friends working at Google to start from Reader comments. It was already a functional and somewhat popular social network.
Instead of that, they removed the comments and replaced them with something worse that no one ended up using.
Google should have built out Reader as its Twitter competitors, and Google+ as a separate Facebook competitor.
The former would be a more impersonal source of information and discussion, whereas the latter would have been where you put your personal connections.
Unfortunately Google wanted to do both in the same product, and thought that Circles would be sufficient to create the distinction, but the kind of stuff someone might want to expose to an impersonal connection is drastically different from the kind of stuff they want to expose to personal connections, to the point that they should arguably have completely different UIs.
Circles seems like the sort of feature that would appeal to power users (and indeed I remember a bunch of academic type people using Google+?) But most users are not power users and don't want to do a bunch of thinking about what circle each contact belongs to.
Nevertheless it seems to me like the network effect was the main thing, and Reader could've been a huge step there.
If RSS really were popular, you would expect Google closing Reader to spur Mozilla and Apple to put even more work in maintaining their RSS readers, to attract people to them.
However, RSS was never very popular outside some small tech circles, and Mozilla and Apple saw that the same way that Google did.
That assumes that Mozilla and Apple were capable of doing those things in that time period.
Mozilla is nothing more than controlled opposition that Google can prop up and say "See, we're not a totally monopoly" while Apple at the time could see nothing beyond the piles of money that the iPhone was making them, to the point where even their desktop/laptop lines suffered.
Are you sure this is true? RSS failed because people stopped using feed readers. I stopped using a feed reader because there was an explosion of content and managing with a reader just didn't scale. I was happy to outsource curation. It was a "hair on fire" problem
This was my experience as well. Opera 12 was my browser of choice because of the built-in feed reader. There were several times where I exported my feeds to an .opml file and started over, because I was inundated with updates and following way too many blogs.
I still have these exports, backed up to a CD somewhere.
Yes. After my comment I started thinking more about the experience at the time. It was always fun adding new feeds until you have too many. The hard word comes at deciding what to prune. It isn't even just about time, it's about not being able to figure out what to get rid of. Like a closet filling up with clothes and you wear them all. You know you just can't add more but figuring out what to unload is painful. Maybe this is a good case for clothing rental services.
Edit: actually I would say its more like an infinite closet but the more clothes you had the longer it takes to find something to wear the next day until things becoming unbearable and you just close the door to your closet, lock it and then rent clothing for the rest of your life.
This is true, but there was no reason that RSS readers themselves could not present you with a curated feed built both out of your subscriptions as well as global feeds, imitating what Twitter already does.
I dunno, I fetch roughly 10 per second which isn't a lot. It takes less than an hour to fetch 30 000. If one would do a bit of logic based on pubDate intervals and slow the process to 24 hours you could "hammer" a sub set more aggressively and still be fine on a modest desktop.
Cutting off the obvious revenue source may be a feature: some people want personal connection, explicitly devoid of commercial interest.
It, of course, limits the medium to, well, social media proper, peers talking among themselves for the enjoyment, not making it a full-time job. It pushes for-profit stars elsewhere.
It of course does not solve the problem of hidden ads ("shilling"), product placement, etc, in more popular feeds.
There is certainly room for strictly non-commercial communication, where the value is in the human connection (talking to friends) or fame (being a local luminary). But certainly it's not going to be a medium fitting for everyone, and for al types of content.
Daring Fireball has ads in the RSS feed[1]. If RSS was more successful, we could imagine services, marketplaces for that model. Of course the same personalization you have on the web wouldn't be possible, but maybe in some ways it would be better, because you would know that everyone else sees the same ad, creating common ground[2].
I'm finding increasingly harder to follow some podcasts as well.
More and more are centering their distribution through Spotify. Reason: money. Either to fund the minimum needed or to give them some margin that Patreon or similar methods are not able to.
There’s a lot that goes into the success of social media over the last couple decades and figuring out the best ad revenue models was a big part of it.