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On RSS Reader's Purported Demise

Let's talk about RSS and Readers for a second, huh? I'll say up front that any discussion about this requires forgetting the normal melodrama that accompanies articles claiming that "RSS READERS ARE DEAD!", which is almost always based on the narrow fact that the author has stopped using one.

RSS Readers are nothing but notification services for new content. Period. So I'm not sure why there's so many people treating them as though they're a specific social media service. Those notifications can take any number of forms, from actual readers to automatic Twitter updates to other notifications, so why pick on "RSS Readers"? Everything that reader-haters suggest as alternatives are really just different kinds of RSS readers.

Ultimately, I'm amazed how many people--tech people--completely forget that RSS is only a way to get content into different places and not just a way to feed it into readers. Now, I know that these blog posts tend to be written solely for their use as absolute statements to snare more visits (which, I hate to say, works), but these posts are ridiculous. RSS Readers need to improve and become something more than just an ever-growing list of things you haven't read, but dead? Hardly.
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