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
I think this is a lot like saying that SQLite is super popular with my grandma.
Technically, that’s true. But RSS isn’t the reason why podcasts are popular just like SQLite isn’t the reason why XYZ app is popular.
Some of the most popular podcast platforms like YouTube and Spotify are completely detached from RSS.
My whole point about TikTok as a comparison is that the centralization is part of the convenience and feature set of TikTok for the layperson. The interactivity provided by having a centralized platform is above and beyond RSS. Namely, commenting, posting your own content, etc. Decentralizing that type of interactivity has only recently been achieved by ActivityPub.
> But RSS isn’t the reason why podcasts are popular
I don't understand the relevance of this point. RSS is infrastructure so why would end users need to know about it? They don't know about IP addresses when they type a domain name into a browser, but you wouldn't argue that it isn't mainstream tech.
> Some of the most popular podcast platforms like YouTube and Spotify are completely detached from RSS.
This is a quibble and beside the point, but neither of these platforms have podcasts. I can't subscribe to their audio tracks in a podcast player.
But again, I don't see the releavnce. Some platforms not using RSS doesn't detract from the usage that RSS does have.
> Decentralizing that type of interactivity has only recently been achieved by ActivityPub.
This was not a recent occurence. ActivityPub is descended from a long line of work (Ostatus, pump.io, etc) some of which used Atom. Dave Winer (one of the developers of RSS) is experimenting with building a full social network on top of RSS. Podcasting 2.0 (https://podcasting2.org) is working on adding chat/commenting to podcasts. Your original assertion was that RSS can't be used to build something like TikTok, but there have been multiple projects built with either RSS or a close enough analog that show it can be done
Aren't the ads already on the webpage? If the RSS contains snippets of the pages and I have to navigate to the page to view the article, then I see your ads.
Also, can't the ads be a part of the feed just as nicely as the articles? What's stopping publishers from inserting ads as items in the feed?
Can't get the same metrics off the ads in an RSS feed. Companies, like people, are cheap so they don't want to spend money on advertising that doesn't work. RSS feed ads don't report back the same way browser advertising does.
That's only a problem for the engorged advertising industry that's been built up in the past couple decades. Putting ads in an RSS feed is no different than non-algorithmic ads on a webpage or classified sections in newspapers, which worked fine for everybody until targeted advertising was introduced.
Secondly, that just leads back to my first point. The ads (even targeted ads) are already on the final content.
I just can't view this as a failing of RSS. It wasn't intended to help publishers advertise, it was intended to help end users track the sites they wanted to track. I understand these are some of the reasons Google and other publishers disincentivized the usage of RSS but RSS works great for its intended purpose. I want more technology like RSS, not tech that helps publishers exploit us
> "e'er" would sound slightly different as it's spoken almost like two syllables, though not quite.
I'm a native English speaker (US). Sometimes when I say "ever"/"never", the 'v' sound drops out. So I end up saying "e'er"/"ne'er" but it sounds like "air"/"nair".
> Further down the list, I've just spotted "taught, taut, tot" and "tot" doesn't belong there.
Right, you said you're from the UK so that's in line with what I would have expected. My unstated point was that multinyms are intrinsically tied to dialects so there is no absolute list of multinyms
> multinyms are intrinsically tied to dialects so there is no absolute list of multinyms
Definitely. I find it fascinating how pronunciations can change so much geographically and the UK certainly has some variety in that regard.
I remember being a kid on a German school exchange and being surprised that they couldn't distinguish between "salary" and "celery". I've also heard that Germans find it almost impossible to pronounce "squirrel".
I also had difficulty on a holiday to the U.S. and trying to ask someone in a shop where the "batteries" were. He just couldn't understand me until I described them and he said "Oh! Badderies". My wife also had a problem asking for "Winston's" cigarettes until the lady at the counter exclaimed "Wenston's"
I'm from South Carolina, USA and I pronounce 'greater' and 'grader' the same. There is a subtle difference and that difference can be more noticeable sometimes, but most of the time I'm saying them the same.
For everything in this list, its incredibly common for these groupings to have the same pronunciation where I live.
When a common word from another language is borrowed into English, it tends to take on a more specific meaning. Most native English speakers wouldn't use "salsa" to describe any other sauce. Horno oven sounds perfectly reasonable in English to specifically describe an earth oven in that style, not the common household appliance.
EDIT: Probably the reason this happens is that most English speakers wouldn't be familiar with the foreign word, so the speaker uses it as a modifier to the standard English word. The listener doesn't need to know anything specific about the foreign word in that case and can just assume it's a type of the common item.
I think the acronym thing is related but a separate phenomenon. My guess would be that speakers intuitively think the acronym isn't easily understandable so they add an extra word to clarify it, intentionally or unintentionally duplicating one of the actual words in the acronym.
"pont bridge" sounds like the exact phenomenon though. Does it have a more specific meaning that "bridge"?
My argument is that it's not a mistranslation. In Spanish, "horno" means any kind of oven. In English, it means specifically an earth oven because when English speakers started using the word, they always used it to mean that kind of oven.
A sibling comment mentioned chai tea. It's the same phenomenon. Chai means any tea in its original language, but in English it means a specific variety and preparation of tea.
English is a bastardized language and has a lot of words borrowed from other languages. But once they're borrowed, they're English words and have their own meaning separate from their original loanword.
> just make transit more attractive, not make driving less attractive
If ppl drive more than use transit, they won't support improvements to transit. This is the first step to improving transit. Make driving less attractive, more ppl use transit, complain about its shortcomings, and then fixes get implemented.
I also don't see why we shouldn't make driving less attractive. As the grandparent comment said, drivers should be the ones paying for the problems caused by drivers, not residents.
> The basic thing I am saying is that if you call it a web browser and use the same core protocols etc., you have a practically infinite (for an individual) set of requirements to implement and will never be truly compatible
But what the parent is saying is you don't have to be compatible with 100% of websites. If you build a browser with good HTML/CSS/Javascript handling, you'll be compatible with the large majority of the web. Yes, there are other specs that are in use by a tiny portion of the web. But your browser can still exist if it doesn't support them. Users of that website will know or find out that they can't use your browser for that, but for every other user that browser could be exactly what they need.
> without having to worry about a fuzzy and ever-expanding definition of what you have to support.
It's only ever-expanding if you're trying to keep up with the Jones's. You can define a subset of the web you want to support and build a clean, small browser that supports that.
Aren't you the developer of Smithereen (a fediverse server)? Nearly every other fediverse software has a web interface that can act as a PWA. I launch lemmy.ml and kbin.social as standalone PWAs from my homescreen. My pleroma instance also has some PWA features (though not standalone display mode). I don't use Mastodon, but @nolan@toot.cafe did some amazing work years ago to make it a really fast and responsive PWA (which has since been undone ).
It's ok if you don't like to use PWAs but that doesn't mean nobody does or that they're worthless.
> Aren't you the developer of Smithereen (a fediverse server)?
I am. But I'm biased because I'm primarily an Android developer who turned into a web and backend developer for some projects (I still do Android as well). So naturally, web app (not web site) development feels cumbersome to me. It's like trying to build a proper app UI with a souped up version of Word macros and layout engine. I much prefer native apps. Smithereen will have a client API eventually, when all features I deem necessary for version 1.0 will have been implemented. The large remaining ones are photo albums and discussion boards in groups. The yet-unreleased direct messages need some finishing touches as well.
> It's ok if you don't like to use PWAs but that doesn't mean nobody does or that they're worthless.
Well, that's my point — Chrome and Firefox and Safari, being "mainstream" browsers, try their best to satisfy everyone. They support PWAs, they have extensive accessibility support (that's scarily complex as well!), they implement all those APIs and standards that are complex but mostly unused, etc.
If I were to build my own web browser from scratch, it'd have a warning in the readme along the lines of "if you require accessibility and/or PWA functionality, this is not for you, use one of the more advanced browsers".
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