I'm working through Trust Me, I'm Lying ("blogs are the new yellow journalism! If it bleeds it leads!" Who knew?) and in amongst a lot of angry, bitter, "I was a dick to readers because blogs are bullshit" rhetoric, Ryan Holliday spends a few pages talking about the death of RSS. He makes the point that direct links to any website are usually a small fraction of that sites traffic, the majority of which comes from Google, Facebook and Twitter (in that order). He further argues that RSS never stood a chance because it puts the power to see or not see the content in the hands of the reader/subscriber, which is exactly the opposite of what SEO/traffichounds want. It's far more lucrative for any website to publish something sensational and have it linked across the universe for you to see it than for them to consistently put out articles you want to see. It's a good point - A thin site such as Hubski as a compiler of rarely-publishing blogs that aren't to be missed *CoughDerekBellCough* becomes a powerful tool for people smart enough to install adblock, install ghostery and bypass the noise.
Yup. The shift to the web as a service and advertisement platform over the years is completely at odds with RSS. The tidal wave is only going to get worse as ISPs increase the throttling of content of their choosing (speeding up yours or your partner's pipeline is throttling everybody else's even if you do not reduce their bandwidth) to support their business models. Applications and platforms that do nothing else well save letting users consume content with a large degree of control over the noise will always be fighting against the tide. They can totally exist, but they will always have trouble scaling as standalone services. A feature that mimics what almost universally mis-used RSS readers do best seems like a great feature to roll into another platform, like Hubski. But if it is a feature that reflects the value a platform is providing, I think it would be worth it to act like a big brother and control the implementation such that you can't misuse it like everybody does with RSS readers. If you like tech, subscribing to a bunch (or even one!) of RSS feeds from popular sites can be fairly useless. I'm not even talking about advertisements, -the content itself becomes noise. Social aggregators actually are one of the solutions to this, but even they run into problems. The feature seems like kind of a natural fit for a social aggregator though.
Well...I actually think people don't filter with RSS is the problem. They follow feeds that dump articles into their reader like a firehose, creating noise, esp when everyone sees those same articles on aggregators, twitter, Facebook etc. I think the value of a feature that lets you follow domains rests in only letting you follow domains that post sporadically, if that makes sense.
Hm. So I think we might be talking about two different things. I was imagining that adding domain-following would be akin to following a tag: if someone posts with that domain, it shows up in your feed. I didn't envision porting RSS into Hubski. I think that would be bad, unless as you said, it was from low-frequency sites.
An I was thinking that you'd have content from followed domains not posted by a human. If its just following a domain that people also post, that seems like it would be decent, although with enough users, it approximates the RSS "problem." A lot of users probably wouldn't even define it as a problem though...