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Pals! Confidants! A new Never Post for you, today! What luck.

In this episode, contributing producer Toby Martin explores how social media algorithms perceive and prescribe gender. Then in our second ever Terms & Conditions segment, Mike goes deep on the ins-and-outs of RSS with Transistor co-founder Justin Jackson. Also: Internet Instruments! 🎹

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• Call us at 651 615 5007 to leave a voicemail
• Drop us a voice memo via airtable
• Or email us at theneverpost at gmail dot com

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Intro Links

• Reddit will block the Internet Archive
• OpenAI strikes Reddit deal to train its AI on your posts
• Google cut a deal with Reddit for AI training data
• OpenAI may pay Reddit $70M for licensing deal
• Wikipedia loses Online Safety Act legal challenge
• Never Post: F*cking Around, and Finding Out
• Volunteers fight to keep ‘AI slop’ off Wikipedia
• Illinois is the first state to ban AI therapists
• Twenty-two states enacted K-12 cellphone bans so far in 2025
• Tasteland 51: Never Post ft. Mike Rugnetta
• twitch.tv/theneverpost 

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Internet Instruments

• 10k Drum Machines
• Nest
• 303-gen

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Gender By Algorithm

• Find Toby
  • @astroacespace on Tumblr
• Find Adam Aleksic
  • The Etymology Nerd
  • Algospeak
• Thank you to Lily, Adam, and George for offering their voices for this segment

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Terms & Conditions: RSS

• Developing feeds with RSS and Atom
• The Rise and Demise of RSS
• If You Love Podcasts, Dump Spotify
• Why I Still Love and Use RSS Feeds in 2025
• Curate your own newspaper with RSS
• Reading newsletters via an RSS reader is still great
• The Best RSS Feed Readers for Streamlining the Internet
• RSS 2.0 at Harvard Law
• Google product director explains why it’s shutting down Google Reader

Find Justin:

• Bsky
• Transistor.fm

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our contributing producer for this episode is Toby Martin. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

Not verb, but vertigo. Does not indicate action. Does not mean to go meet but rather to lie there because someone doesn’t arrive. 

To Search, by Alejandra Pizarnik

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia.

This episode of Never Post is CC-BY-SA licensed.

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta. This intro was written on Tuesday, 08/12/2025 at 09:10AM eastern, and we have an harmonious show for you today. Contributing producer Toby Martin takes a deeper look at why and how his online ads have changed throughout his transition. Then in our second ever edition of terms and conditions, I talk in detail about RSS, what it is, how it works, and why it's having a moment.

For that, I chat with Justin Jackson, cofounder of podcast host transistor.fm and member of the podcast standards project about the future of RSS and also Internet instruments. But right now, we're gonna take a quick break. You're gonna listen to some ads unless you're on the member feed. And when we return, we're gonna talk about a few of the things that have happened since the last time you heard from us. Johnny's in the basement mixing up the five stories for you this week.

Reddit will block the Internet Archive's wayback machine from scraping a majority of the site. This, the social media platform states, is because they've caught AI companies scraping the archive to build datasets for training. Speaking to The Verge, Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt says, until they're able to defend their site and comply with platform policies, e g respecting user privacy regarding deleting removed content, we're limiting some of their access to Reddit data to protect Redditors, end quote. Notably, in the last year, Reddit has partnered with both OpenAI and Google. The Google partnership brought in $60,000,000 for Reddit and The Verge reports that it was explicitly to quote, give Google more efficient ways to train models.

No dollar amount was made public concerning the OpenAI partnership with both companies touting AI powered features on-site for Reddit and no explicit mention of training data was made at the time either. Some speculate that deal brought in $70,000,000 for Reddit. Wikipedia or more specifically the Wikimedia Foundation has lost its suit in a UK high court wherein it claimed that the identity verification required by the UK government would be both unnecessary and damaging to the site where a large portion of editors desire anonymity for reasons we discussed with Stephen Harrison in Neverpost episode 29 fucking around and finding out. The UK's new online safety act was passed to address the proliferation of harmful content online, but has faced much criticism for being both harsh and draconian. At question here is if Wikipedia should be classified as a category one site, a determination based upon its user base size and features.

Wikimedia foundation says no, but The UK's office of communication may say yes, now that a judge has ruled Wikipedia is not de facto exempt. All this while Wikipedia also fights slop. The Washington Post reports that editors are battling an on onslaught of AI generated nonsense. Daniel Wu writes quote, suspicious edits and even entirely new articles with errors, made up citations and other hallmarks of AI generated writing keep popping up on the free online encyclopedia. Deep in Wikipedia's message boards and edit logs, the site's stewards are toiling for long hours to find them and stamp them out, end quote.

A study last October, Wu continues, estimates some 5% of entries contain AI generated text. Illinois becomes the first state in The US to ban AI therapists. Governor Pritzker signed the bill into law on August 5, which says that only licensed therapists can provide counseling and that chatbots are not to assume the role of mental health professionals in any way. The eight page law reads in part quote, an individual corporation or entity may not provide advertise or otherwise offer therapy or psychotherapy services including through the use of internet based artificial intelligence to the public in this state unless the therapy or psychotherapy services are conducted by an individual who is a licensed professional, end quote. The law also puts limits on a licensed professional's use of AI as a supplementary tool in treatment.

And finally, this year alone, 22 states have enacted mobile phone bans in all or part of the k through 12 range of their public schools. The laws range in severity from suggestions that schools do something about access to devices to outright bans in states like New York, Vermont, Texas, and Florida. Ballotpedia points out there's a variance amongst states concerning if phones are allowed during medical emergencies, break periods, and so on. Ballotpedia also reports that quote, of the 26 total states with laws banning or limiting cell phone use, 17 have republican trifectas, six have divided governments, and three have democratic trifectas. A trifecta here meaning a party that controls all three branches of state government.

One, two, three. In show news, I was on episode 51 of the Tasteland podcast talking about the Internet, making never post hentai, the attention economy, and the Internet media environment as I've seen it over the last couple decades and more. I had a really great time chatting with Francis and Daisy, so please go check that out. Tasteland wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll also throw a link in the description. And we, in case you haven't heard, are in the midst of a member drive.

That's right, folks. We are driving members crazy, reminding them that now is the time to support Neverpost to help us get financially sustainable by the start of next year, which is a little bit away. But you know what's very soon? The member drive stream week, which is next week, August. If you missed it in George's newsletter, which lots of updates go in there, so please make sure you're subscribed.

There is a whole schedule waiting for you with a Monday morning eastern kickoff. I hope you'll join us then and then at various points throughout the week for chitchats, q and a's, game streams, a tour of Georgia's closet, special guests, giveaways, and more. Please check the newsletter or go to neverpoe.st for the schedule next week. Member drive stream week. Okay.

Next, Toby on the Internet doing gender at you, then RSS. But first, in our interstitials this week, three Internet instruments, two of which are entrants in the twenty twenty five tiny awards, which are amazing and we've put a link to that in the description. Please go check it out. In our interstitials, we have Maximo Neely Cohen's 10,000 Drum Machines, Rafael Bastides Nest, and ErrorZero's Three zero three Gen. Links to all of these in the show notes.

Okay. Here we go. 10kdrummachines.com. 10kdrummachines.com. Oh, list of drum machines.

Here we go. Here we go. What do I want? Let's do Nights Tour Drum Sequencer. Number nine.

It's a chess board. It's a chess board. Okay. Knight two is snare. How I play?

It's playing chess. Okay. Let's start with White Album Noise Machine. Cool. Cool.

Cool. So we got four tracks to let's just click some random patterns here. Let's do a random sequence, and let's do the bpm at a 190. Just for just a 180. 180 is as high as it goes.

Alright. Here we go. Alright. Let's refresh the sounds. Alright.

Let's break it down a little bit slower. Let's do let's do it in half. Let's do 90.

Hello, everybody. It's producer Georgia. I'm just jumping in here because I am so stoked about the segment that you are about to listen to. Eagle eared listeners might remember this pitch from our April mailbag, where listener of the show Toby Martin sent in a voicemail about this strange experience he's had online. I'm not giving anything away.

Since then, Toby and I, along with additional support from Hans, have been working together to shape that pitch into what you're about to listen to. I am so so excited for you to hear this. I'll let Toby take it from here.

I wanna paint a picture for you. I'm 22 years old. It's been three weeks since my top surgery, and all I can bring myself to do is lay in bed on my laptop. I'm on the subreddit r slash what is this rock looking at an impressive sedimentary rock comprised of a bunch of crinoid fossils from Lake Michigan. When I see this jarring ad in the middle of my screen.

Most men don't need more testosterone. They need more h g h.

I am no stranger to ads on the internet, but as a trans man, it felt weirdly timely to be getting served alpha male ads on Reddit after my top surgery. This wasn't gender euphoria. It was more like a type of gender euphoria, spelled with an e w. This ad represented a type of macho man that icked me out, the type of guy I would steer clear from at a bar. I couldn't figure out why I got this ad in the first place, so I started to obsess over my targeted content to see if I might be able to get more of the same.

And I did. A majority of my content was geared at cis straight men. I was being advertised shitty supplements, hair loss treatments, and my personal favorite, erectile dysfunction cure alls. These guys were everywhere. When did my ads become this hyper masculine, and what did I change to make that happen?

In pursuit to answer these questions and the many more that would come up along the way, I started talking to my fellow trans folks. I wrote out a message saying, has anyone noticed a change in their targeted ads or content as they transitioned? I am mainly trying to vibe check if I'm an isolated experience or not because for me, it's a night and day difference on some platforms. I pressed send and waited anxiously for a response. Turns out, yes.

A lot of folks had things to say. I got permission to share these messages, but to protect everyone's privacy, you'll be hearing from some fantastic trans writers and artists to read these messages on their behalf.

Yes. My ads shifted over time. And it was pretty clear what kind of sites integrate with Facebook because my ads would change almost immediately after visiting certain sites, like for clothing or post op care, etcetera. Facebook also likes to show me transition before and afters, which are really annoying, and I always hide those to try to get it to stop. And it also likes to show me a lot of lesbian content.

This made total sense to me because, I mean, I had a very similar experience through my transition. After I bought some fleece lined sweatpants and a body pillow for my top surgery recovery, my ads responded very quickly. Suddenly, I got a ton more ads trying to sell me scar tape or wedge pillows. But stuff like recovery kits and transition before and after ads wasn't really my focus for the segment. I was especially interested in how much of my own targeted content was advertising a certain kind of gender.

More specifically, your prototypical manosphere cis het man. Where did he come from? And I think I remember. It was my freshman year of college. At the time, I still presented as a very femme version of myself.

I sold my hair in wet set curlers. I dressed in skirts and wore a full face of makeup. A lot of my ads reflected this. I got ads for Benefit Cosmetics, Unique Vintage, and a lot of women's skincare brands. These ads were hyper feminine, presenting me with a version of womanhood that was smooth and perfectly made up with foundation and eyeshadow.

I was used to seeing ads like this, of the hyperfem variety. But one day in my engineering class, I got fed something very, very different. I remember I was working on this three d model with some YouTube videos playing in the background. I wasn't really paying much attention to the video until this ad for the US army started playing. I'd never been delivered a military ad before.

It was the exact opposite of what I was used to seeing. No more soft focus. No more makeup. Instead, I saw a buff soldier piloting a drone with the caption

Join the team that makes a difference.

I felt conflicted. I didn't care about the US military or drones, but it made me feel like something had shifted. Remember, I saw this ad when I was in my engineering class where I was one of two girls in the 23 person class. And something about being in this very masked place changed the way my ads saw me. I wanted to talk to someone who could help me understand this.

Hi. My name is Adam Aleksek. I'm a linguist and content creator posting videos as the etymology nerd to an audience of over 3,000,000, and I just finished writing the book, How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language, which is now available for order.

I wanted Adam's help in making sense of how algorithms target content to users, specifically when it comes to gender. He explained to me that in order to better understand the algorithms, we have to understand how we use them and how it makes a profile of us.

It comes out of everything you've ever liked, commented on, everything you've ever posted, the way your thumb rests on your screen, your basic demographic information, the the activity you have on other apps that they can track, whether your phone's on the same WiFi network as another phone that's recently engaged in the kind of content. So even if you're not you haven't looked up Coquette video in your life and you just had a conversation with the Kochette person, your phone's not actually listening to you, but they they might know that you were in the same room as this person because you're on the same WiFi network. So they they build through a lot of these things. Oftentimes, they yeah. Through cross app tracking, they can tell from your search history and all that's built into your user profile and ends up influencing what videos get recommended to you.

The idea that my real life interactions affect my targeted content can feel nice. When my friend sends me a TikTok I've already seen or sends me a post about a TV show I talked about, I feel more connected to them. Our algorithms overlap, which makes it feel like we have a mutual common language. When I started learning to play piano, my algorithm started sending me ads for sheet music. Soon, I was getting recommended videos about music theory or banner ads for free teaching apps and top 10 best keyboards for beginners.

Piano was just a hobby for me, but my algorithm was acting like piano was the only thing I cared about. For a month, all I saw was piano content. So sure, I didn't click on every keyboard ad I saw, but it did feel nice that my feed was reflecting something about me that was true, even if it was a little exaggerated. Getting that hyper masculine military ad wasn't exactly the kind of masculinity I identified with, but it also felt kind of affirming. I wasn't going to click on the ad.

I didn't want to join the army, but it did kind of make me feel like I was one of the guys. So all my data and my search history and what I buy gets compiled together, and then I've got my gender assigned at algorithm. But it's definitely not perfect.

I started getting targeted binder ads after I got top surgery. I get a lot of ads for like alternative women's underwear companies that target mostly gender nonconfirming queer women. I think the algo thinks I'm a tomboy. I'm a trans man.

The algorithm doesn't seem to be good at nuance when it comes to gender. Getting top surgery means you don't need binders anymore. And being a trans man could get garbled up by the algorithm and turned into some vague idea of being a tomboy. It feels less like my gender is what defines my algorithm and more like what I'm buying. Like, okay.

Fantastic. So I bought a suit, looked up hockey stats, and calculated my macros. Now the algorithm sees me as a man TM. But once I got stamped with the you're a dude label by my feed, I noticed that the algorithmic understanding of manhood was really specific. Maybe I'd start with getting ads for cargo shorts and boxer briefs, but it wouldn't take long before I'd start seeing sports betting ads, then an ad for Drew Peterson's new book, and suddenly I'm in a different world, down the rabbit hole of Red Pills and Mig Tau bros.

And I'm not alone in this experience.

I've been openly trans for six years now, and these are the main ads that get pushed to me now with me being more openly manly. Charlie Kirk, Turning Point USA, Super Sexy Gacha Games, Gambling, the occasional penis enlargement product. I cannot stress the uptick in right wing slash MAGA content that keeps being pushed regardless of me blocking or saying I don't want these specific ads.

The algorithm is optimizing for this one type of guy. A guy who would see military ads and think, that could be me. I could make a difference. But that wasn't me, and it's never going to be me. But for some reason, I couldn't escape this super bro who's haunting my ads.

I asked Adam about this, and he explained that a part of this has to do with the way that algorithms feed certain kinds of content out to different groups of people.

In the traditional model of communication and linguistics, I talk to you, I'm the encoder, you get my message, you decode it. Now if I'm talking to you as a social media influencer, I am encoding a message. The algorithm decodes the message, encodes a new message, and then sends it out, and then you decode it. So there's an extra layer there. And when I say the algorithm, like, encodes a new message, it may send it to an unintended audience.

I may want my video to reach a certain demographic of people, and the algorithm might reassign it.

So maybe someone like Jordan Peterson gets the attention of a certain kind of guy, like a huge community full of that one kind of dude. That content goes to the top of the list to advertise to men online just because it's really popular among men. But it's still a traditional version of masculinity, one I certainly don't ascribe to. And isn't my algorithm supposed to get to know me specifically? Why does it insist on pushing out this one version of hypermasculinity?

We can't avoid talking about algorithmic bias here, which naturally amplifies social bias. Algorithms tend to compound and amplify what natural human social behaviors are. Unfortunately, humans tend to trust more or want to view more videos from people who are in the gender binary, like, kind of stereotype, like, presentation. So algorithms reflexively are going to reinforce that, and more heteronormative kind of perspectives are gonna be pushed because that's what's going viral.

The manosphere just has a huge online presence. There's a lot of money to be made there. So from an algorithmic perspective, it's a no brainer. If you're a dude on the Internet, you're gonna get these kinds of ads. Look up cargo shorts one time and bam, here comes Jordan Peterson.

There is a really interesting sort of algorithmic performativity as well, where an influencer isn't just performing for their audience, they're performing for what they think is gonna go viral.

So in this case, ends up happening is this compounding situation where certain kinds of content go viral, get a lot of algorithmic attention, and then the people making that content see how popular their stuff is, and they make more of it. The cycle keeps going and going, and that hypermasculine content keeps getting pushed out to more and more people, even people like me who are very much not the intended audience for it. This version of manhood isn't something I want for myself. It feels like hearing a dissonant chord, an interpretation of gender that feels totally off the mark to what I actually feel about myself. But those super masculine ads also came to me at a time where I was in the middle of figuring myself out, where my own understanding of how I felt about manhood was developing.

And like I said before, at first, it felt kind of nice to be treated like a guy by the algorithm, even if it wasn't the right kind of guy. When I first got that macho military ad, I was still presenting as a woman in the real world. And as I began coming out to my friends and exploring my trans identity through online channels, that wasn't always true IRL. I was constantly bargaining with my own identity. Maybe I could chop my hair off into a more androgynous cut or wear more pants, less dresses, but it was a process.

And in a way, my ads reflected this period where I was changing myself constantly for myself and others. Online, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what being a man looked like for me. Maybe I'm a cargo shorts guy or an Overwatch guy, and its imperfect way, my algorithm served as another way to try stuff on. It was like it was asking me, do you want to become a Manosphere guy? Do you

wanna listen to Joe Rogan?

When I first got those kind of gendered ads, they really freaked me out because, no, I don't wanna be that kind of guy. I never have been that kind of guy. But in the process of working on this segment, I've started to look at it another way. The algorithm was performing with me as I started to unravel who I was.

Well, I mean, all identity is performance. Right? That's historically always been true. It depending on our audience, we are constantly embodying a role or an idea of, like, who we are supposed to be. And that's the thing.

Even without the algorithms even without the algorithms, if a label is out there, it'll always affect our identity because now we know once we know it's there, we're either going to perform toward it or we're gonna perform against it.

As I continue living as a man and learning what that looks like for me, the grip the ads have on me has loosened. I'm not performing for my ad profile. I don't need it anymore. The gendered algorithm is simple and uncomplicated. It has no depth, and it doesn't even know what a man is.

It only knows that a lot of guys click on ads for male growth hormone. I'm breaking up with my gender assigned algorithm because being transgender, or for God's sakes, human, can't be easily partitioned away. I'm a man, and I get to decide what that means for me. To me, manhood looks like wearing green cargo shorts and watching hockey. It looks like a lot of things, but I get to choose.

Thank you to Adam Alexic for sitting down to chat with me. Check out his book AlgoSpeak wherever you buy books. And thank you to my friends for offering their voices to read the quotes folks sent in, and everyone who submitted their experiences with the algorithm and gendered ads.

In this, our second ever terms and conditions segment, where we explain things that you, our dear listeners, maybe never got around to understanding and are now too afraid to ask or too busy to learn on your own, I'm gonna tackle your most requested topic by far, RSS. That's right. The very technology that you used to get this and probably every other podcast that you listen to. The technology that allowed the once mighty Google reader to thrive. The technology that launched and arguably sustained countless blogs in the early two thousands in which in the era of the platform internet is currently having a bit of a resurgence.

You have maybe read about RSS recently. For instance, in April 2024, Alex Sujon Laughlin published, if you love podcasts, dump Spotify on Defector, in which she pits the walled in audio platform giant against the open RSS standard. This February, it's FOSS News published, why I still love and use RSS feeds in 2025. Just last month, Molly White published a citation needed newsletter titled curate your own newspaper with RSS And the subtitle, escape newsletter inbox chaos and algorithmic surveillance by building your own and shitification proof newspaper from writers you already read. In January, Jason Snell at long running Apple news blog 6colors.com published the post reading newsletters via RSS reader is still great.

And in April 2024, Scott Gilbertson at Wired published the best RSS feed readers for streamlining the internet with the subtitle, the internet is a mess. Ignore the algorithm and distill the web down to the things you already care about. Reddit, blue sky, x are all awash with love posts to RSS, so we're gonna talk about it. What RSS is in hopefully not too excruciating technological detail, but some technological detail. How the conditions of its development made it what it is, a standard which has not really changed in twenty plus years, and will chart the aforementioned down and then upswing in interest, which would seem at first glance to be the inverse of an up and then downswing in public sentiment regarding the social internet.

Probably just a coincidence. So what is RSS? RSS is a standardized open format web feed based on XML. We're gonna go through each of those things. A web feed isn't normally something you interact with directly.

It's a document made by one service, say, a podcast host, and decoded by another service, say, your pod catcher. One service makes and maintains the feed based on the things that you publish, and then the other pulls information from it in order to serve it in a useful format, like, say, sound files to listen to and information about those sound files. This means that RSS is what is called machine readable, not human readable. I mean, you could read it, but no one would expect you to. And by simply reading it, you don't benefit from its existence because your brain can't download audio files or metadata.

And if it can, please call the show. Now there are a bunch of web feed formats. JSON feed, Atom, and RSS are the most common. Both RSS and Atom, which is, like, sort of based on RSS, kind of, are written in what's called XML. XML is a markup language, sort of similar to HTML, which is used to make web pages, but XML can make, kind of whatever you want.

It has many many uses. In fact, it stands for extensible markup language. So what is a markup language? A markup language generally, envelops or enrobes. It goes around other pieces of information.

Usually, though not always, plain text and media or links to media. So images, video, audio. It goes around those things and it helps to organize and sometimes display them, and that organization is done within a hierarchy of nodes. So we're gonna talk about this practically because I think it's gonna be a bit easier to understand than talking about it abstractly. So I know I just told you not to do this, but if you were to download and open and then read the RSS file for this podcast for Never Post, which you could do, in any, plain text reader.

So like, you know, notepad should do it, by going to neverpo.st and then in the middle of the page, you'll see the orange RSS icon that says listen via RSS. Click on that or right click on it and just save the file that pops up and then open it. Scroll down a little bit to see the entry for this episode. You'd see open angle bracket item, the word item I t e m, closed angle bracket, which for simplicity I'm just gonna call those brackets from now on. This marks the beginning of a node.

The word item is defined by the RSS standard and it means everything that follows until this node is closed describes one post in the feed. Then you'll see open bracket, title, close bracket. Title also defined by the RSS standard means everything in this node is the title of the post. Then it will say the title of this episode in plain text. I don't know what that title is at the time of recording, but let's say it's a feed me Seymour.

That would go right here followed by open bracket forward slash title closed bracket. The addition of the slash means that this is a closing tag. This node is done. Everything before this was the title. Everything after this is something else.

Next up is open bracket, pub date, close bracket. Everything in this node is the date and time that this item, this episode was published. So it's gonna be Wednesday, 08/13/2025 and then whatever time we end up publishing in UTC. Then open bracket forward slash pub date close bracket. This is a closing tag which means as we already know, this node is done.

Everything before this closing tag was the pub date. Everything after this is something else and so on and so forth for everything useful that you would want in a feed with many node names defined by the RSS standard. These are things like description and summary, enclosure which in a podcast RSS is the link to the actual audio file and more including a bunch of nodes that begin iTunes, which is maybe gonna seem kind of strange. This is because Apple as arguably the most powerful player in the podcast space has helped to establish a bunch of conventions, but they've added those conventions on top of the RSS standard using something that's called namespace. We're gonna talk more about that later.

That's a sort of deep technical detail that you don't really need to know yet or perhaps ever. All of these nodes are included inside each item node which is then closed with a open bracket forward slash item closed bracket tag. Meaning, at that point, we're done talking about this item, this episode and we're ready to move on either to the next or the end of the feed. The whole thing is kinda like a train. The engine at the front says, here comes an episode.

And then each car is filled with specific information about the episode loaded by the service that publishes it. So you get the description car, then you get the runtime car, then the post body text car. The Internet is the track that moves this information from publisher to reader or pod catcher where everything is then unloaded and organized according to that station's specific operations. Now in order to work right, an RSS feed, which remember is really just a document listing things that have been published elsewhere, has to adhere to two standards. Syntactically, an RSS feed has to contain parsable XML.

Tags need to be opened and closed correctly, nested properly, etcetera, etcetera. And it also has to follow the RSS standard. Use the right node names, contain the required nodes, and so on. This is what we mean when we say that RSS is standardized, but confusingly, there are a couple different RSS standards. The most common requires only three pieces of info.

A title for the feed, so for example, never post, a home page URL, so neverpoe.st, and a description, a podcast for and about the Internet hosted by Mike Rugnetta. That's it. An RSS feed doesn't need items to be valid. It can be empty. This is how you can subscribe to a newsletter, say, or a blog before it has any posts.

Podcasts work a little differently, but that's a convention, not a requirement. And all of this is incidentally what makes RSS open. You can just go to where the standard is kept and see in plain text, human readable, what's required. And then you can go and implement that yourself. You don't need to pay a fee.

You don't need to ask anyone permission, not the folks who publish the standard nor the folks who made it. But okay. Wait. This may make you wonder, who are those people? Who decided that this works this way?

Who standardized this standard? Well, that's something of a long story, but we're gonna cover the broad strokes of it because understanding how RSS was made can help us understand why it feels like something of an antidote to the impersonal algorithms heavy social internet. In the introduction of the 1995 O'Reilly book Developing Feeds with RSS and Adam, Ben Hammersley begins like this. It's an extended quote, but it's good, so I'm gonna read the whole thing. In the developers bars of the world, those dark sordid places filled with grizzled coders and their clans, a special corner is always reserved for the developers of content syndication standards.

There, weeping into their beer, you'll find the veterans of a long and difficult process. The standards you will read about in this book were not born fresh and innocent of a streamlined process overseen by the wise and good. Rather, the following chapters have been dragged into the world and tempered through brawls, knife fights, and the occasional riot. Incredible. I mean, obviously tongue in cheek, but all of this melodrama for making a piece of tech that collects posts in a feed so they can be syndicated elsewhere.

Why? Why so much torment and strife and conflict and pain? Well, I mean, are nerds that we're talking about, and development on what would become RSS began in 1995. So these are early Internet nerds, or I guess early modern Internet nerds. Maybe there was a lot of ego involved.

I mean, probably there was, but there was also a lot of principle at work. The developers of RSS were trying generally, I think, to follow the steps of Tim Berners Lee and the development of what is arguably the Internet's base technology, the hyperlink. The development of something so open and yet at the same time so narrow isn't easy, especially when you don't know exactly how it will be used yet. So that quote is pointing us even further back to Apple earlier in the mid nineties and a product called hot sauce developed by Ramanathan g Guha that was intended to allow users to browse documents like websites, for instance, in three d space. Yes.

Really. Steve Jobs mothballed that project in 1997 when he returned to Apple, and Guha went to Netscape. And what followed was a flurry of activity over about two or three years between Apple, Netscape, Microsoft, and independent developers who saw the promise of these nascent syndication technologies for bloggers. This would have been in the depths of the browser wars, if that's meaningful to anyone. Though if it's meaningful to you, you probably already know this history.

Dan Libby of Netscape authored what would become the first RSS standard based upon a string of technology leading all the way back to hot sauce. But even though this was a momentous occasion, some folks were frustrated, and they saw this implementation as lacking. It could syndicate headlines, a list of links, basically, but not site content. So Dan Weiner of the software development company Userland and later and currently scripting.com would follow this first implementation of RSS with an update to his own scripting news feed format. Dan Weiner took a bunch of the stuff that was implemented in this first RSS standard, and he added the ability to syndicate whole paragraphs of content.

This edition was really meaningful, and so then the next version of RSS 0.91 incorporated those features. This back and forth exemplifies a lot about what's great and messy about RSS specifically and open standards generally. We talked about this and all things RSS with Justin Jackson, cofounder of Transistor dot FM, the host we use for Never Post's member feed, but Justin is also a member of the Podcast Standards Project. This is what he had to say about the trade offs involved when building something that's open.

The benefit of having a centralized platform is you can just have a CEO decide, we're gonna do this, and that's what we're doing. And with anything in the open protocol world, you have to create alignment. You have to do all of this groundwork with human beings, all this coordination work.

A standard like RSS is not a piece of software that's made and then distributed. It's more just like a way of doing things that people can adopt or not. The standard is only really useful if the folks who use it, who bake it into their software, agree and coordinate with one another and align on when and where and how everything is implemented. And I don't know if you've noticed this, but getting people to agree to work together, especially in tech, is not easy. So this is where we get into the brawls and the knife fights and the riots.

After Dan and Dave agree on RSS 0.91, a rift develops over effectively how extensible RSS should be. Should it do a small number of very specific things or should it do whatever people want it to as long as it follows a broad standard? The second approach relies on something called namespace. Effectively saying, if you want to add new nodes beyond the standard assortment that's already there, that's fine, but you have to put your name in front of it. Like say, iTunes.

Hey, you already know how that works. Nice. One group says no to namespaces. It's gonna make things too complicated if you can stack whatever you want on top of the standard. And the other group says, yes.

It's basically needed to make RSS useful and to give it longevity so people can expand on it. For those of you that know portions of this history, this is also around the time that a 14 year old Aaron Swartz gets involved with RSS. The solution ends up being, as we've mentioned, two standards which in recent years really have drifted closer and closer to one another in their feature set. But RSS two point o, the copyright for which was assigned to Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet Law is by far the most implemented with over 70% of RSS feeds aligning to its standard which allows namespaces. This standard was finally solidified in 02/2003.

We asked Justin, why hasn't RSS changed since then? Aren't there technical limitations inherent to a standard as old as this one?

The original spec is probably not going to be changed much, because it doesn't really need to. Inside podcasting, we've continued to innovate on top of it. And that was one of the beautiful things about it. I would argue there's actually no technical limitations. I think you could anything that you want to build on top of RSS, you can.

Even things that people have traditionally said don't work with RSS. Things like people will say, well, it's a typically one way. Right? I publish a blog post, or I publish a podcast episode. You refresh your app, and it, you know, picks up the new episode, and you pull it down to your RSS feed reader or your podcast app.

But there's no reason we couldn't add two way communication to that. One one example of this is Transistor uses something called the social interact tag, which is this new podcasting two point o tag. And it allowed us to build on top of Blue Sky and the AT protocol. It allows people to add comments to podcast episodes. And these comments can be shared across networks.

They can work in some ways, they're agnostic. They don't need a particular social network or platform. And so, you know, that that was a fairly simple implementation on top of RSS. So it's all possible.

So then why isn't RSS constantly evolving? Adding video to podcast episodes or comments directly in the feed? Based upon what we've said already, you can probably guess the answer.

I think everything has just come down to coordination. You have to coordinate between three different groups, really. You have to coordinate between the podcast hosting companies, which are largely generating the RSS feeds and XML. You have to coordinate between the apps, and not just like independent apps, like Overcast or Podcast Guru, but bigger apps like Apple Podcasts. And then you have to coordinate between with creators.

And creating alignment between those three groups is a challenge. What do creators actually want? There's figuring out how are we going to coordinate on between all these groups? How can we create alignment when everyone's motivated by something different?

Now, as complicated and maybe as torporous as this process is, I do think it really is the beating heart of why RSS has persisted for as long as it has and is having something of a moment right now as we perhaps crest and then begin to descend the other side of the mountain that is the era of the social Internet. Ten to twelve years ago, RSS was considered outdated, if not dead. For Vice, in 2019, Sinclair Target writes of that era, people never felt comfortable using RSS. It hadn't really been designed as a consumer facing technology and involved too many hurdles. People jumped ship as soon as something better came along.

Target's not wrong. It's not easy for people to make RSS feeds from whatever they happen upon. The hoi polloi benefits from their existence as long as the folks doing the publishing, making the podcasts, the blogs, the news stories, the weather updates, photographs, videos, whatever else might reasonably be found in a feed, are willing to put the effort into syndicating those things via an RSS feed, which has its own set of technological requirements and restrictions. And also incidentally tends to keep people off of the publishing site and therefore not looking at ads. Google Reader, the storied RSS aggregator was shut down on 07/01/2013, citing a slow and steady dwindling of its user base.

The press release that announced the shuttering read, quote, while Google reader has a passionate user base, the product has not seen the growth or engagement that we had hoped for. We would like to refocus our efforts on more popular products that our users currently enjoy. The something better that Target hints at? Social media. Twitter, specifically.

The cynical amongst us may also think that Google killed Reader in the hopes of boosting adoption of Google plus. Remember Google plus? No one else does either. We might consider 2013 ish the nadir of RSS's history to date, after which it seems there's been a slow and similarly steady increase in interest around what the format provides. It's possible even that we've yet to see the zenith of RSS's popularity.

If there's gonna be a resurgence of RSS used for other things, like video, like articles, like social media posts, I think the problem to solve there is with app developers. How are we going to harness this fire hose and make it make it helpful, useful.

RSS is the way that it is and operates the way that it does and is supported in the ways that it is because disparate far flung groups of people decided actively that it should be that way, and that sort of agency is then passed on to the people who use it for better and worse. RSS isn't an algorithm. It does no curation. It doesn't collect information about you nor require a subscription fee. It allows you simply to know when your stories are on, which means to Justin's point, if you're not careful or if you want to, you can very easily overwhelm yourself with RSS.

But if implemented and used in a certain way, it can also be an antidote to the overwhelm that we experience elsewhere on the Internet.

I don't think it's mainstream, but there could be a world where Gen Z and maybe other generations as well just say, you know what? I'm kind of done with this centralized commercial ad driven Internet that's just designed to give me brain rot, and designed to addict me. And I want something that's more mindful. And I think we already saw this with email. You know, there's this resurgence of email newsletters.

So much of what made culture great in the sixties and seventies and eighties and nineties was that you had to work for it. There was friction. And I think maybe our culture is starting to wake up to this idea that we need a bit more friction. We need a little bit more mess. We need not everything to just be perfect, but, you know, maybe it's worth working to find a podcast you really like, even though it's not easy.

Maybe it's worth having an episode of Radiotopia show up in your feed and you're like, that sounds boring. But then it auto plays when you're on a long road trip, and you're like, actually, that was really great. I'm glad I'm glad I didn't just swipe away from that after listening. You know, I that is my hope is that if anything, I think we're just gonna go back to some of the old ways of doing things because we just realize we need it.

Thank you so much to Justin for chatting with us. You can find Justin on Blue Sky at Justin Jackson dot c a. And if you are so inclined, can host your podcast at transistor.fm. They did not pay us to say that we got Justin on this segment because he is an expert, but we also just happen to be big fans of transistor. I hope this terms and conditions was instructive.

Are there things about the Internet that you want us to explain to you because you're not going to go do the research yourself? Listen. I get it. Send us an email. Send us a voice memo or a voice mail.

Let us know what you wanna know about and who knows, maybe it will be the next terms and conditions segment. That is the show we have for you this week. We're gonna be back here on the main feed on Wednesday, August 27, but we will be on Twitch all next week. Join us at twitch.tv/the never post. Check the newsletter and the website for a schedule.

I got some notes recently that I should not joke about not knowing what it is we do on the show and that in addition to being not true, it's also just kind of an irritating millennial move to be like, oh, we're just a small bean. I don't know what we're doing show. So Here's the facts. Never post is a media and technology criticism in theory podcast which takes the position that for better and worse, one of the best ways to understand contemporary western society is through an understanding of the internet and how our interactions with it shape our outlooks, our relationships, our sense of what's happening, and what's possible. My friend George said the show is NPR for the terminally online.

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