3 ms·

Seriously, why does this question keep coming up? What am I missing?

• zimmund 6y ago
  Because it was convenient and powerful. Ever since Google Reader shut down I lost track of technology news. Yes, I can read the same sites/blogs I read before one by one, or subscribe to their newsletter, or follow them on Twitter... but it's not the same. And the tools that were available to replace Reader were always short in some aspect. Google Reader was killed in favor of Google+ (which failed horribly). After that RSS went downhill. RSS readers were useful because you had all the news/posts in one place (instead of many browser tabs/newsletters/social accounts). You read, curated and shared from the same place, and you were able to easily choose what categories you wanted to read and when.
  • ballenf 6y ago
    Would RSS be in a better place now if Google Reader had never existed? Interesting to think that an attack vector against an open standard is creating the objectively best implementation and then shutting down after killing competition and consolidation.
    • nicholassmith 6y ago
      That's a great question! I think over time RSS would have ended up where it is anyway because of what it is, you're very intentionally opting out of spending time on site to consume the content elsewhere which for the web of today is exactly what they want to avoid.
  • JohnL4 6y ago
    How did RSS go downhill? Other commenters in here have mentioned their readers of choice; I can add mine: NewsBlur. Turns out RSS is still in pretty common use, as far as I can tell, unless you can point to a handful of sites that aren't using either RSS or Atom. Invariably, when the topic of RSS comes up, someone laments its "passing", which leads me to ask (again): where is this impression coming from? Is it the mere absence of Google Reader? Is there a social aspect I never knew about? I see you mentioned other tools being lacking, but I know NewsBlur, at least, provides all those capabilities. (Not sure about "curating", though; maybe you could define that a bit more? There is the "blurblog", which has its very own RSS feed, which lets you surface articles you like, and there's the "save" function.)
    • stef25 6y ago
      It was awesome having google.com/ig as a homepage. There hasn't been anything to replace it that I know of. I still subscribe to feeds in a different tool but it's not the same.
      • JohnL4 6y ago
        Where did /ig take you? Also, "not the same"... can you be more specific? (And which tool?)
        • helb 6y ago
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGoogle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGoogle
        • stef25 6y ago
          It was a page you could fill with "widgets", basically RSS feeds that made up a dashboard where you could see the headlines of whatever websites you liked to frequent. You could drag & drop the widgets around to arrange the page like you wanted and then expand each title to see the short text of each article. Inoreader is the only RSS reader I'm comfortable with, Thunderbird's also ok. They aren't "widget" pages though.