Some reflections on the Australian experience and what they might mean for Canada.
After Google’s move on Thursday, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez sent a written statement calling the companies’ moves “deeply irresponsible and out of touch … especially when they make billions of dollars off of Canadian users” with advertising.
Australia’s regulatory experiment – the first of its kind in the world – also got off to a rocky start, but it has since seen tech companies, news publishers and the government reach a middle ground.
If the Canadian government were smart, they’d start a massive campaign to encourage Canadians to move to using RSS readers for all their news – Google and Meta would lose their freaking minds, as it would let people read headlines and news summaries without even visiting their landing pages (less ad impressions) … hit 'em where it hurts!
Edit: Clarifying my thinking … maybe the Canadian government could propose to let Google et al. serve Canadian media outlet’s stories through their search sites… but only if they committed to supporting RSS/Atom feeds of the same articles. This would force them to open up their data a bit and make alternatives to visiting their sites more viable.
There is no way the general public would adopt RSS. The barrier to entry is just too high right now. Technology that delivers news needs to be idiot-proof and require basically 1-2 steps
Eg:
Or:
Don’t get me wrong, RSS is great, but it’s also used exclusively by the computer-literate and it has been that way for basically 25 years.
RSS does not necessarily mean clunky UI and difficult to use. There are some pretty beautiful podcast apps with great content discovery features out there :)
No reason a news app that reads RSS needs to be more complicated than opening Facebook.
“Pocket casts for blogs and written news” would be killer
I use Feedly on iOS to follow all my favourite sites and it’s great! I combine it with Pocket to read stuff offline too and it’s a killer combo. Never liked social media’s “push” content and preferred having the freedom to “pull” what I want.
You just click on an RSS link and it opens in your reader where you can subscribe or just consume directly. How hard is it to work a hyperlink?!
The government should be providing basic communication services. It’s criminal that private companies like Twitter are the de facto alert and information system for life saving government services. That kind of infrastructure needs to be socialized. Likewise we should have channels for publishing journalism that are not controlled by private capital.
I 100% agree with you.
It’s crazy that our gov is even using Facebook or Twitter for advertising their message. Why not use the fediverse instead ?!
Or just RSS and a blessed set of clients for consuming it
Especially now that I can’t even click on a twitter link without being asked to create an account and log in. It’ll be chaos if some big situation is going on and people without twitter accounts are scrambling to find critical information from other sources.
This is what I did on Friday. Took 20 minutes and set up a feedly account. It’s just like I did with Reddit a few weeks ago. Set up a Lemmy account, and moved on with my life. We can easily adapt.
Interesting, this is the first I heard of feedly. I did the same thing. Lemmy and I used some RSS reader from fdroid. Feedly app has pretty bad ratings… How are you liking it?
So far I have no complaints. It’s only been a week or so though.