This is probably more rhetorical than anything, but why does it need to be interactive?

if it’s not interactive and not littered with “likes”, how will i know to care about it or not?

You are presently commenting on a platform that has upvotes and replies. Even you apparently want to use a platform that has interactivity.

Why does a police department need a feed to be interactive? Actually, doesn't it being interactive invite improper interactions from citizens that should have used official channels?

It is an official channel.

By "official" channel I was thinking of making a police report, or writing something in a complaints book. Tweeting at a PD's account is comparatively as official as scribbling something on the wall of the station bathroom.

No, it's more like dropping a note card in a "Tips" drop box in the station lobby. It's literally an officially monitored communication channel that is explicitly authorized.

If anything, the transparency of a social media post is much better than, say, private emails that can be buried and ignored.

Well in practice, if the police department doesn't care about your "tips" (not every station has a "tips" drop box, right?), there is no reason why they should care about your comments.

I have seen plenty of toxic comments on "official" announcements that allow comments that the official entity doesn't actually read. I'm happier with no comment than with toxic comments.

I don't find it particularly interesting to argue about which analogy is more appropriate. My point is that it doesn't have the same degree of officialness as a report or some other public record, and it existing just invites to confusion on that matter.

I challenge you again - wht is this any less official than any other officially controlled, officially monitored communication channel. You have offered absolutely no argument to that, yet you continue to say it.

That's a rather silly thing for an adult to ask. There's multiple reasons why a police report is more official than a tweet.

* A police report is a legal document.

* A tweet can be removed by either its poster or by the platform's operator after it's been posted, while only the police can make a report disappear.

* You can tweet at someone anything you want and they don't have to accept it to receive it, while the police can refuse to accept an unfounded report. An insurance company might require a police report be filed before accepting a claim, but it would not accept a tweet as a substitute.

This is a platform for discussion, but if it was the example of a police department, why do they necessarily want to turn a feed of updates into a space they have to moderate (or if they can't moderate it, having to put up with most responses being along the lines of "ACAB"?). Communities can have value, but sometimes you wouldn't lose much by having your feed be read only.

The problem is that departments want to put the news in front of people, and people want interactivity.

Right now RSS is, for the vast majority of the public, a tree falling in a forest with nobody there to hear it.

> The problem is that departments want to put the news in front of people, and people want interactivity.

Views exceed interactions by orders of magnitude.

But people don't bother looking on non-interactive platforms. This is a problem for outreach that aims to hit 100% of the public, ideally.

Interactions draw views. If someone asked the same question you had, and had it answered by the original poster, that's more valuable to you than a simple feed.

My experience with comments on announcements from public entities (like a police department) is that they are more toxic than informative.

I sure am! Just because I'm commenting on this platform doesn't mean that I actually care about upvotes and such (spoiler alert: I don't give a shit what my score is). I interact, but I never feel the need to and I don't find the interactions to be the important aspect of the site, rather the kinds of articles I find submitted here are what I appreciate the most. The commentary is secondary, "extra" if you will - take it away and I wouldn't care. Hell, I have an RSS-based news reader that I utilize on a daily basis that provides no interactivity and I find it a more pleasant experience than on this site, and you know why that is?

Because there isn't a comments section filled with people tossing nuance aside, taking a very shallow, disingenuous interpretation of someone's comment and then going at them in a sort of "gotcha" moment, rather than asking clarifying questions to better understand someone's thoughts first. ;)

No, it only appears as a gotcha. It's actually providing an insight. There are read-only sites and there are sites that people use, and for the most part that splits the universe of sites. For better or for worse, even read-only users primarily go to sites that others interact with.

What information gain is there in most of the "interactivity" that is afforded by social media?

Credentialing. I frequently find myself reading Tweets from people I’ve never heard of because someone who I know to be an expert in a particular topic has liked or retweeted them. This kind of signaling helps surface more obscure content and make it available to people who wouldn’t have found it on their own. This is a huge deal.

There used to be RSS readers that allowed you to create and share feeds with your friends, actually.

Now we just need a site where we can browse a bunch of people’s feeds and find interesting ones. Sounds like Twitter.

Except that RSS is an open standard.

One important one is reposting that shows post to your followers who might not see the original. It is important way to see other content.

Also, liking it signal that other people were interested in the post. I don't global likes are useful for likes from people you follow are important.

Finally, replies mean can see interaction from people you follow. If you follow interesting people, you see interesting discussion.

With social media, it isn't possible to read everything, I know I used to try to read my whole Twitter feed. There needs to be some way to filter than just time when you looked. I think the current algorithmic feed is bad because it tries to show other stuff instead of ordering things that want to see.

But all those features allow for optimization and create competition.

If you want likes, or views, or reposts, then you will have to "engineer" your post in such a way that it gets more attention. Not sure if that's always beneficial.

There is not much point in attention when post is only seen by followers and reposts. It is indication that wrote a good post. The only currency is followers. It was hard to get those without outside fame.

The problem is with Twitter and others is that they now have algorithmic feed. That means posts get seen globally and clout metrics are valuable for reach. Comments also get clout so get lots of drive-by ones and less discussion.

"social" means people interacting - replies, likes, etc.

If someone has an RSS reader with feeds from some news sources, official channels issuing announcements, etc - that's great, but does anyone consider that "social media"?

(Of course, you can believe that social media is bad and you don't want it, but that's a different question)

For things like a missing person alert, it provides an instant feedback mechanism and the ability to share things with people you might know in the affected area.

Otherwise, there’s absolutely utility to interacting over social media. We’re doing it right now!

People seem to like it?

Why is information gain the correct metric?

We're talking about marketing here. Shouldn't it be conversions or awareness or something?

filter out unimportant stuff

Likes could just be part of the RSS feed

I know RSS is basically old tech by now, but I'm a bit surprised how many seem to misunderstand how this works.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's goal is not to be "the" hub. It is a middleman that takes you to other websites that implement it. Be it twitter (on shakey ground), Your own website, or a game server (in theory). Anything that implements it and sends out messages can be caught by any number of clients made on top of RSS.

Asking for interactivity from an RSS Feed is like asking for interactivity from an email. The goal is to point you towards other content that may or may not be interactable. The RSS is simply there to consolidate all your feeds into one view.

I'm not misunderstanding anything. The original discussion was about why wouldn't RSS itself be a good backbone for replacing current types of social media. And my answer is because it's not interactive.

Regular users don't care if the service is decentralized or distributed. And they don't want the experience of dozens of personal blogs they navigate through by RSS, and needing an account on each one.

>And my answer is because it's not interactive.

And I explained why that response is a bit nonsensical. Rss doesn't take interactivity away from you. It delegates it to Wherre ever you choose to visit.

>they don't want the experience of dozens of personal blogs they navigate through by RSS, and needing an account on each one.

1. Thars overly presumptuous. Social media didn't give them a real choice.

2. You don't need an account for every blog. Not even for interacting. I guess people forgot that anonymous commenting is indeed a thing. If you really want to like stuff sure. But that's not anything different from today.

>Regular users don't care if the service is decentralized or distributed.

Sure, Bluesky shows they don't have to but the service can still be successful. As the article discussed, part of the ATS stack used Rss.

How's thst different from using something like Feedly? It's juet a different app view.

> Rss doesn't take interactivity away from you. It delegates it to Wherre ever you choose to visit.

It does take it away. The current status quo has (1) a feed of content and (2) two-way interaction between poster and commenter in the same place. Switching to just RSS inherently takes away (2)

> Social media didn't give them a real choice.

Social media did give them a choice. RSS and blogging is older than social media and people chose to stop visiting individual blogs in favour of social media.

> I guess people forgot that anonymous commenting is indeed a thing.

People didn't but I doubt most people running blogs want to deal with anonymous comments. You already get so much spam and unhinged content when you require a signup.

> As the article discussed, part of the ATS stack used Rss.

Part of it sure, but it also involved other layers to compensate for the parts that are lacking in RSS that users have come to expect.

> Social media did give them a choice. RSS and blogging is older than social media and people chose to stop visiting individual blogs in favour of social media.

Can we say that people choose to get addicted to addictive stuff?

How is one extra click taking away Twitter? This is like saying older apps (taken down because centralized services didn't like this) took away interactivity because they werre managing multiple feeds for you. That's all RSS is. Did Reddit/HN or any other link aggregator take away news sites? That's all RSS is.

And using other non RSS parts is fine again, RSS isn't a social media. It's a way to help aggregate content. You keep claiming to know how RSS works but demonstrate that you feel it's some competitor instead of a commodity.

And yes, the powers that be "won" becsuse they were at war with the idea of people not having all their time dedicated to their feed. Users "chose". to be manipulated becsuse their choices were taken down, weakened, or taken hostage. Similar to how users "chose" to use the official reddit app when they removed 90% of third party ones.

> Did Reddit/HN or any other link aggregator take away news sites? That's all RSS is.

Both of those have thriving comment sections and would be completely irreverent without them. Further, it's a known problem for both of those sites that people will not read the article and instead riff of the title. I'd wager the final 50% of every article could be removed and it wouldn't significantly change the comment sections here.

> Similar to how users "chose" to use the official reddit app when they removed 90% of third party ones.

Yes they did, they chose to use those apps and chose to continue using Reddit in general despite its shitty behaviour. The alternatives just aren't good enough.

>Both of those have thriving comment sections and would be completely irreverent without them.

Yes. And you can use RSS feed to do the same thing, either liking to a reddit comment section or actually reading the article and not bothering. Same structure except you're not limited to Reddit's servers.

>they chose to use those apps and chose to continue using Reddit in general despite its shitty behaviour

They lost choice and decided using the worst choice was better than moving off of Reddit. I guess if enshiftification is "choice", They did indeed choose. I chose to walk away.

And it's why I hate centralizafion. Because it reduces you down to two choices per owner. Their way or the highway. If you instead managed an RSS feed of a dozen websites and Reddit removed its API, your daily feed may be smaller but your browsing habits would not change. I can still interact with the other 11 sites as much as I want and not need extra time trying to figure out what's out there.

I’m not disagreeing with you about the issues of centralization. I too walked away from Reddit and paid that cost.

My point is that (a) many people have not despite the cess pit Reddit and other sites have become, and (b) RSS is inherently incapable of replacing the experience because it’s a pull only mechanism.

Mastadon based itself on ActivityPub, not RSS.

We’ll see if the long term forces that consolidated and entities Twitter and it’s ilk will do the same to Mastadon instances. Cause I’m still not convinced that the general public is willing to or ready to run their own servers