There Is No Cat

RSS levels community

Jeneane Sessum writes about something that’s been on my mind since my posts a few weeks ago about community or the lack thereof in Blogistan. At that time, some were saying that RSS was the great leveler, the development that would make Blogistan the same kind of community that Usenet was back in the day.

Jeneane disagrees.

Feed aggregators reduce every site to a dull grey lowest common denominator. Allied is Burningbird is Emergency Weblog is the New York Times; they all look the same in a feed reader. Most feeds don’t include the associated comments from a post; if they did, the same item would come up as new over and over and over as comments were added, which would break the model on which feed readers are built. Some CMSes attempt to work around this by providing a separate comments feed for each post. Subscribe to all the comment feeds on all posts you read and see how your aggregator likes dealing with 10,000 feeds, most of which will be effectively dead after a week or three.

Feeds may make it possible to discover threads in conversation across weblogs; I’m unconvinced, but concede that there’s a possibility. But at what cost? The feed aggregator model reduces readers to that horrible word that anti-marketers so despise, "consumers". It’s hard enough to build a sense of community in this medium that I’ve argued doesn’t lend itself to the task. In the process of potentially discovering links between weblogs, feeds make it less likely that we participate in conversations on a single weblog. The last thing we need to be doing is placing another barrier in the way of the conversations we so want to encourage.

I resisted using a feed aggregator for a long time. I tried and abandoned them a number of times. Only in the past month or so did I give in. I find it makes it easier to keep up with a wider variety of weblogs. Right now, I think that’s important for me to do. I used my blogroll as my primary means of keeping up for a very long time, and enjoyed taking a leisurely stroll among my neighbors in Blogistan, but lately find I need the time I used to spend doing so for other pursuits. Aggregators make that possible. But I have to remind myself to leave comments, and even to read the ones others have read, because they don’t show up in most feeds.

I don’t think there’s a solution for this. One reasonable band-aid I’ve seen in a few feeds is to list how many comments there are for a given post in a feed. I may try implementing this to see if it’s not too disruptive to the aggregation process. But to my mind, the whole system is another way in which the structure of Blogistan and the web actively fight against the human desire to create community in a way that other tools on the net don’t.

Tags: RSS Atom feeds community Jeneane Sessum

Posted at 9:32 AM