A friend of mine develops in Swift, we're doing a project together involving audio processing... there are a lot of audio and Swift related questions. You have no idea how much people talk about Taylor Swift on the internet.

To be fair, Swift 2.0 really did mark the obsolescence of Taylor Swift.

Is anyone really going to be confusing a text editor and an outdated rss format

Yes it is confusing when the HN title is "Atom 1.0".

For further confusion possibilities, try any of these sentences.

  - "Hey, Atom 1.0 is out."
  - "For my next project I'm using Atom."
  - "I can't believe Atom took this long to get to 1.0 and it's already obsolete."

How is it outdated? Atom is absolutely everywhere and there's no replacement, or a need for it.

I suppose I meant the concept of RSS or whatever is itself outdated/unused to most people

That might be true for the classic case of following blogposts, but it's used under the hood all over the place. I'd call it one of the few absolute wins in standards on the web. It's ubiquitous for its use-case.

Even for following blogposts, what better alternatives exist? Genuinely curious here -- I read about how RSS/Atom is obsolete all the time but I still use them with feedly to follow blogs and news sites and don't see a better alternative.

Twitter and Facebook tend to produce too much noise in my experience to work as an alternative. I have an aversion to reading email newsletters, and they also get lost under noise.

Sure, most people don't use feeds, but even after the demise of Google Reader I reckon they still work just as well as they ever have and are the best way to keep up to date with blogs and provide yourself with a constant source of interesting reading.

Yes indeed, please folks, when you're about to embark on some grand new project give it a name which can be searched and considered nearly unique. There is a vast ocean of untapped letter groups, pronounceable by most, which don't already have a dozen other usages. (woe upon those which need a quick find for something involving "R" or "blender")

Do you mean that syndication is on the verge of becoming obsolete, or that Atom specifically is on the verge of becoming obsolete?

(And: Is either of them actually true? There are still plenty of blogs around, and I thought quite a lot of them had Atom feeds.)

Well, this is kind ot but the trend is to include less and less content in the feed to drive views and clicks, they are not dead per se but I find them less and less useful. Yahoo pipes did work for a time, but maintenance time and effort is just too much and I just stopped caring about most blogs fighting back.

Just doctor mc ninja I follow because it's awesome, but these days if there is not a third party maintained pipe and there is no content in the feed I just skip town.

Personally, I really miss the "heyday" of the RSS reader. That was a great way to consume content.

It's not really a big deal on this case.

But either case, there are so many things, unless you are competing or there is a big player with such name, I think it's fine. Also, in these cases you usually say Atom editor or Atom feed.

I don't see the problem, they aren't even in the same domain.

Why would we name a text editor after a particle?!!?! I THOUGHT I WAS INSTALLING A HYDROGEN MOLECULE.

Yet when you see a Hacker News headline that is just "Atom 1.0" it is close enough in the same category (tech news) where it can be confusing.

I guess you'll have to use that cognitive decision machine on top of your neck to distinguish the two. I know that's 1 second of compute time but unfortunately it's the only known method.