They love RSS

"Thank you for using RSS." "I love RSS." A badge in the footer. A little heart, a blogroll. Community. Belonging.

I love TCP/IP. I love HTTP 1.1. I love DNS resolution. Where is my badge. Where is my directory. Nobody forms a tribe around plumbing. You use it. You don't announce it. You don't put a sticker in your footer that says "I love packet switching."

RSS is plumbing. A transport format. XML with angle brackets and escaped HTML and a version attribute and the CDATA hack. You don't love it. Your software parses it for you, and you never open the file. You never see the escaping, and you never deal with one misplaced whitespace that breaks the whole document. HTML is forgiving. Browsers render garbage. XML is not. One character and the feed is dead. The person with the heart in their footer would not survive writing one item by hand. Their love is for the club, not the file. It's standard flag overlay. The announcement replaces the doing.

They call it RSS reader, RSS feed. Subscribe via RSS. Every guide, every website, every feed reader. The word was copied from a Reddit comment in 2010 and never questioned since.

10 euros for a feed reader. 7 euros monthly for another feed reader. Chained together. To sync a list of URLs. A text file. The peasant copies the file. The customer pays 17 euros.

The badge is not about the format. The badge is the belonging. The directory is the clubhouse. The blogroll is the member list. Nobody is reading anyone. Everyone is engraving a heart on a grave.