@owen_s
First:
@8C whoa whoa this is a repackaged common sense fallacy isn’t it. alright, tomorrow it is!
no, it isn’t. A common sense fallacy is attempting to say that you shouldn’t have to prove something because it is obviously true. I generally don’t go around arguing that low usage rates of RSS among internet users are self-evident. That is why citing your fallacy-of-the-week amounts to irrelevant pedantry and a trademark argument from fallacy.
Still, I wasn’t even arguing that I shouldn’t have to prove it. I was expressing my irritation at the prospect that I would have to, because I’m lazy, and in small part hoping you’d take the hint and look the damn facts up yourself.
Second:
@8C like referring to a word’s definition in a dictionary to establish what you *really* meant? yeah, I get you, bro. totally do.
See
@8C assuming I don’t know what that means is one thing, assuming that this is specific to me is another but lol w/e
I could only infer from this that we weren’t on the same page as regards the definition of the word “idiosyncratic”. Thus the citation. Not at all irrelevant, and you’d have a hell of a time arguing that it was pedantic.
Third, for good measure:
@8C sorry, but no, I’m gonna have to call [citation needed] on this one here. GR use != feedreader use in general.
Third-a, again, I didn’t mean to offer my vague allusion to one article that made the rounds “the other day” as conclusive evidence for my point, I offered it in an attempt to give context to your own claim that my statement about RSS use was conjecture. Third-b, no, it isn’t =, but it most likely is fairly ≐.
Fourth, and I’m writing this before—and won’t be editing after—I start looking up RSS numbers to cite, just because I’m really, really weary of this conversation, whether I’m right or wrong on RSS’s status as “niche”, I don’t feel like debating it after this. I largely said that in the first place because I was already explaining why it wasn’t a repeat holocaust that Chrome didn’t meet every single one of your needs as user out of the box, a sort of conversation I tend to get drowsy over quickly. So if I was full of shit, you have my very deepest and most heartfelt apologies right here.
Now. Some sources:
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-the-death-of-the-rss-reader/
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/us-heather-hopkins/2010/02/facebook_largest_news_reader_1.html
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/rss_reader_market_in_disarray.php
From the third: “1) Google now dominates what’s left of the RSS Reader market.” The only numbers they have are their own feedburner statistics, but those statistics agree with just about every other site I checked (look them up yourself, I’m not doing a meta-study for this). So Google Reader represents not just a relevant portion, but a clear plurality, of RSS usage in the sense of users dealing directly with RSS feeds.
From the second: “Last week, Google Reader accounted for .01% of upstream visits to News and Media websites, about the same level as a year ago. Google News accounted for 1.39% of visits and Facebook 3.52%.” So our plurality of direct RSS use is less than one-ten thousandth of general news update usage. I’ll “admit” that it isn’t as neat a proof as I’d like, but I’d challenge you to find better, agreeing or contrary: this information doesn’t exactly grow on trees. You should at least be convinced that it wasn’t pure unsupported “conjecture” on my part that RSS use is relatively limited among internet users as a whole.
And, in fact, that’s all I really feel like going to the trouble to prove. I could go on and construct some interface design argument as to why it wasn’t a dumb decision on Google’s part to omit native xml handling in Chrome, but I don’t know that that’s a position I agree with anyway, and it’s one in an argument I’m quite sure that I am fucking tired of.
