RSS Sucks! Where's my discussion aggregator?

February 4, 2003

As I was writing the previous post about how sites without RSS feeds don't lend themselves to regular reading, I realized that RSS is only half of the equation. While RSS makes it easier to read many feeds, it needs an equivalent to let us manage discussions. If the Internet is about communication and conversation, RSS on its own isn't enough. RSS is one way, from writer to reader. It makes blogs, news sites and announcements more convenient and accessible than the web browser.

Online, people do communicate with others. One-on-one conversations happen over email and IM. Many-to-many conversation occurs on email listservs, usenet groups and in web forums (including blog comment systems and message boards.) What we need is the equivalent of RSS and the news aggregator for discussions. For this post, I'll make up an acronym and call it RSC (for Really Simply Conversations), just because I like making up acronyms. For all I know, there may be some acronym that serves this purpose already.

Web-based forums, e-mail listservs and usenet groups are all imperfect. Web-based forums, bulletin boards and blog comment systems have no passive notification system. They all require users to visit them actively to check for new posts. Listservs either clog up email inboxes, force subscribers to write filters to keep list messages separate from personal messages or require multiple email accounts. While Usenet is meant for discussions, I don't know if it would have grown and survived even if it hadn't been raped and pillaged by spam. Usenet worked well when the internet was smaller, but has largely been replaced by mailing lists and web boards.

An RSC client would allow one to subscribe to both entire sites and individual discussions. It will give users the option to thread discussions, ignore some users. In general, it will make it easy for people to participate in conversations with groups of people online and for users to manage a number of those conversations, just like RSS makes it easy to manage reading a number of web sites. Instead of just a news aggregator, I'd like to have a news & discussion aggregator.