Effing RSS

It turns out I'm on this list, at number 89. It's a dubious honour. There is no benefit to me whatsoever from this. Essentially, feedspot is a third-party service that uses the justification of RSS to strip, repackage, rank, monetise and control the presentation of my work, while calling it "curation." This is essentially syndication without my permission, without any compensation, without recognition beyond my name — while sapping direct traffic to my sight of people who might want to support my patreon, make a comment here or otherwise interact with the actual author.

My only alternative is to turn off my RSS feed, which I have done before; effectively, by leaving it on, so that those who wish to follow me and come to my site to access my work, I "give my permission" to companies that effectively plagiarise my work for their benefit. And there's nothing I can do about this.

If I were to cut and paste the work of another blogger and post it on this site, without using an RSS feed, I would be rightly identified as a plagiarist. But so long as the feed copies me and repastes me on Feedspot's site, and other sites that also rip me off, it's not.

Just now, there are thousands of artists screaming blue murder because A.I. is reproducing like work to theirs, a practice that began about 40 months ago. But this RSS thing has been going on since 2004, going by Wired reportage of that at the time. Total amount of pushback? Virtually nil. Plagiarism isn't against the law. Doing it manually is.

My question for the company ripping off my work is this: what is the company doing to identify the source of the material for the reader, so that they may use a link to go to my site instead of their feed? What is the company offering in the way of supporting my patreon, or helping others support my patreon? What is the company offering in terms of advertising my work for my benefit, since I'm writing my work for theirs, without pay, without so much as a how-do-you-do? What is the company doing to allow me to strip my work from their site? Is the company copying the links from my blogposts, so that if those url links go to actual pages of my actual blog, that's even possible?

Feedspot inserts itself between the reader and the publisher, then pretends that because the reader can see my name somewhere in the wrapper, nothing has been stolen. But things have: access to me, access to my work, access to my support network, access to comments that might be made, access to ME, as there is no email appearing on the link above that lists me as a contributor to their business model.

This is the internet's oldest protection racket and no one seems to give a fuck.