(1) I was working for a small town web design shop in a town dominated by two higher ed institutions circa 2005 where I was finishing up a system which handled applications for an internship program run by the NSF. (e.g. complex forms, scanners to stop people from uploading CVs in Word that are full of malware, etc.) I was talking w/ the principal about how bad the usability was of applications in higher ed and that I was surprised that there hadn't been a lawsuit to the effect that "I tried to apply to organization X and couldn't because their website was screwed up" and he said that he thought they'd probably been settled out of court.

I work at the Uni now and circa 2015 we had a lawsuit against us because we made people use terrible quality applications that weren't accessible. I'd make the case that that sort of organization which has a rigid social hierarchy (e.g. grad student, postdoc, assistant professor, associate professor, full professor, department head, provost, ...) finds it close to impossible to confront quality problems that it finds invisible. (e.g. if you submitted a bad paper to a journal or had sex with an undergraduate it could understand that but a web site could set your computer on fire and they wouldn't see a problem with that.)

Since then all higher ed organizations feel a lot of need to offer accessible applications. My unit sells a subscription service to a data product and in sales talks and other conversations with our customers we find accessibility is a priority so it is a priority for me as a web dev.

(2) Don't get me started about RSS. I think it is great, kinda. Fir $10 a month I can pay Superfeedr to scrape 110 news sites and send them to my web hook which queues them in SQS and lets my RSS reader YOShInOn ingest them at its own convenience. I'd like to subscribe to 2000 or so independent blogs but don't want to pay a $100+ month scraping bill.

Could I write my own crawler? Sure! But polling is for the birds. You really want to get a ping just when the event happens (ActivityPub? PubSubHubbub? AT Protocol? XMPP?) but instead you have to poll. There are two kinds of polling: (a) too fast, (b) too slow. Should I run it at home over my slow ADSL connection (is my wife having trouble using the internet because my crawler is having a bad day?) or should I run it the cloud where trying to save $5 a month on my bill could cause EBS volumes to go swap crazy costing me $500 a month? It's awful for people who run feeds, see

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/27/feed/

although she should (a) just get a CDN and get over it or (b) give up on RSS. Sorry, people write stupid stateless crawlers with curl and making your crawler stateful enough to respect her silly 429 protocol makes RSS no longer a simple protocol.

On top of that people keep failing with the same failing user interfaces for RSS readers that have been failing with 1999 with no insight that "people tried that in 2001 and it failed". People like Dave Weiner have no insight why the world couldn't care less about RSS because they just won't recotnize there are problems.)

(e.g. if you gotta know, YOShInOn works like TikTok... I never "mark as read", it doesn't show me little windows that show me the top N from 20 different sites, none of that.)

(3) If it's your electric bill it really is an essential service that there is no competition for. Frequently markets work, but not in that case, even if Enron was able to fool some legislators that they would work in that case for a while.