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Comment by zdunn

But RSS did become mainstream; podcasts are a normal part of media now and non-techies seem to have no problem finding and consuming them. They don't have to know about RSS.

There's no reason similar UIs can't exist for text based content. Google Reader, and then G+, had a path to becoming "mainstream outside of techie circles"

There's nothing special about TikTok's user experience. It uses an algorithm that isn't interested in providing a chronological feed, but I don't see why RSS couldn't be used to build something similar. Again, podcasts use it and it works well for that. The discovery aspect happens outside of the scope of RSS, but once you find things you like, RSS works well for tracking them.

The tiktok (or any corporate social media, really) comparison is also a bit odd because they don't need RSS, even if they wanted to provide a chronological feed. The platform hosts the content so it knows when there's new stuff and how to access it to provide to followers. RSS is useful in a decentralized environment where the content could be hosted anywhere and you want to aggregate it

parent zdunn 3 months ago

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