14 ms·

Google Groups kills RSS support without notice

319 points by samizdis 5y ago

geerlingguy 5y ago
RSS, which stands for either RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, is an open content syndication protocol. I've never heard of the former usage. Is that some modern re-arrangement of the acronym? I've always heard the usage "Really Simple Syndication". Also, mildly https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ — if this is intentional, it feels like Google has some vendetta against RSS support in their products.
- rektide 5y ago
  Given that RSS eschewed XML & specifically XML namespaces for so long, the idea that RSS ever would have called itself RDF is hilarious to me. Part of the whole reason Atom (RFC4287) was began was because embedding content inside RSS was a shit show, a disaster, because while it sort of looked like XML and said xml at the top (maybe), the lack of namespaces meant it wasn't safely extensible & putting rich content inside was a huge mixed bag. RDF on the other hand has always been about flexibility & namespaces, about rich data. Killedbygoogle.com is a good reference, for sure, but this is kind of higher level anti-internet anti-protocols anti-standardization sabotage. This isn't just abandoned product, this is degrading & reducing what used to be a protocol-centric world of newsgroups to a captive, isolated product. Oh! The plot thickens! TIL RSS 2.0.1 actually got explicit namespace support! Wikipedia: > RSS 2.0.1 has the internal version number 2.0. RSS 2.0.1 was proclaimed to be "frozen", but still updated shortly after release without changing the version number. RSS now stood for Really Simple Syndication. The major change in this version is an explicit extension mechanism using XML namespaces
  - giantrobot 5y ago
    RDF was used early on by a lot of sites before moving to one of the later RSS specs. The Simple in RSS was a reaction to the perceived (and actual) complexity of RDF.
- askvictor 5y ago
  I think it's the other way around; Really Simple Syndication is a backronym - for every other historical explanation, I can't see an acronym like being created in the early days of the internet. Once it took hold/potential realised, it needed to be translated to less technical folks.
- JimDabell 5y ago
  There was a schism in the RSS 0.x days. 2.0 is Really Simple Syndication and has a looser approach; RSS 1.0 is RDF Site Summary and tightens things up. Really, if you’re going to generate feeds, you should use Atom or JSON Feed these days. Too much baggage with RSS that makes it difficult to parse unambiguously.
  - VoxPelli 5y ago
    And Atom feeds are the one of the two with widest support so if one is going to pick just one format, then pick that over JSON Feed.
- SllX 5y ago
  RSS has a complicated history, but the versions you’re most likely most familiar with are maintained by the RSS Advisory Board and state definitively: “Its name is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication.” That said, this is in fact a backronym created when Dave Winer rolled RSS 2.0 out. Check out this link[1] and ask yourself, what happened to RSS 1.0? You could start at the RSS Wikipedia page to investigate further if you’re interested. [1] https://www.rssboard.org/rss-change-notes https://www.rssboard.org/rss-change-notes
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  Perhaps renaming it to something other than "Really Simple" is the first step toward the people paid from online ads and web commercialisation to start adding complexity. Surprised I never saw anyone try to inject ads into RSS feeds. Or maybe they did and I never saw it. Also, the idea of "syndication" seems counter to Google's survival. If we can discover the contents of web pages through automated means via RSS, then the need for people to manually submit "searches" to a single company who "crawls" the web and provides "search" seems less vital. How much data about users can be collected from RSS feed subscriptions. If it does not produce lots of data about users, then it's not worth much to many "tech" companies, including Google. Users can navigate from RSS feeds directly to website pages, bypassing these "tech" middleman companies.
  - Lazare 5y ago
    People renamed RDF Site Summary to Really Simple Syndication actually. :) In ads in RSS feeds is a thing; Google AdWords supports it, as do many others. https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/9189557?hl=en https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/9189557?hl=en
    - 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
      Oops. Guess I should have checked that first. :) Yours truly has a general distrust of web commercialisers renaming things ever since some such company tried to rename Shockwave Flash (.swf) to "Small Web File". Since then I remain continually on guard for further shenanigans.
  - oefrha 5y ago
    > Surprised I never saw anyone try to inject ads into RSS feeds. Of course people inject ads into RSS feeds. Daring Fireball is a well known example that sells the advertising spot in the open: https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/ https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/ If you’re talking about ads in the body of each entry, I’ve seen that too but can’t give an example off the top of my head. That said, it’s more common for publications to give you a small excerpt instead to lure you back into the ad-laden web page.
  - 5y ago
- hopesthoughts 5y ago
  I've always heard it as "rich site summary," which was back in the early 2000s.
niyazpk 5y ago
Google groups feels (UX & support wise) like one of those products that should have already been killed by Google. One of the reasons why Groups has survived so long must be Google's reluctance to give proper customer support for most of their products. Google groups is the only customer support you will get in many cases.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  I think part of it might be nostalgia as well. If they kill google groups then they are killing yet another part of the old internet they sought to embrace and improve upon but the bean counters have mostly taken over and only a few holdouts in upper management keep this sort of stuff alive.
- tn1 5y ago
  Likely the only reason Groups is still around is that if you want a mailing list on GSuite then this is your only option. If they kill it, many orgs will probably switch to Office 365 or another competitor the next day.
  - modeless 5y ago
    Google uses Groups internally and externally for all its mailing lists. It will never, ever die for that reason alone.
    - panda88888 5y ago
      This.
    - wumpus 5y ago
      Honestly, this is the only proof I'm willing to accept for the survival of any low-revenue service that Google provides! But still, google code didn't live.
      - steren 5y ago
        Google wasn't using Google Code.
banana_giraffe 5y ago
The RSS feed on YouTube also vanished for a several hours late last night. When it happened I was afraid it was gone for good. The feeds showed back up, but it really feels any feature of a site like YouTube or whatever that lets me consume content without being guided by a website designed to keep me engaged for as long as possible is doomed these days.
- hardwaresofton 5y ago
  Would you pay for a service that showed you an RSS-style feed of people you care to follow on various platforms (youtube, twitch, patreon, etc)? At this point it seems like the promise of an algo-free multi-channel feed from creators people care about could actually be a good startup, and maybe that thing could produce an RSS feed (incentives would be aligned to do so).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - p2t2p 5y ago
    I'd pay if it converted YouTube videos into downloadable files for me.
    - hardwaresofton 5y ago
      Hmmmmmmnnn that's super interesting. So unfortunately that flirts with a ToS violation-ish (of course youtube-dl is allowed to exist but maybe questionable to build on, public information is allowed scrapable via the linkedin decision, etc), but this implies that: - Youtube is a must-have platform for you (one of the big offenders for sure, I had them in my notes on this idea) - Being able to download the content is ideal. I've been thinking that maybe if the content creator has the option to manage their page and upload their own content that would be a nice way to handle it. Not that I want to play the video hosting game but having access to the original content would make it much easier to distribute. The question of who pays is interesting though. If you don't mind, email (see bio) me a way to contact you (something ephemeral if you'd like, twitter, whatever is most comfortable) and I'll see if I can whip something together for you to beta test.
bugmen0t 5y ago
Did they remove it due to low usage numbers? Turns out those "few users" are big aggregator scripts and proxies for hundreds, thousands users each :) Example: https://twitter.com/intenttoship/ https://twitter.com/intenttoship/
- swiley 5y ago
  Good old data driven decision making.
- gibba999 5y ago
  And this is one of the many reasons why I'd never use Google for anything B2B, or that I have to rely on. I do tend to automate things in corporate settings in ways which differ from personal use, and I have seen many similar features break or disappear. Anyone who automated anything based on RSS now has something broken. I bet that's a lot of enterprise use.
gregf 5y ago
Google is down right hostile to their users. So glad, I haven't used any of their services in years besides maybe YouTube occasionally.
- FabHK 5y ago
  And the least hostile way to use YouTube, I find, is to plug the URL into the excellent youtube-dl CLI tool, and then watch the video locally.
- nijave 5y ago
  Honestly didn't realize how bad it's gotten until I tried to watch a video in a browser without uBlock recently...
  - hopesthoughts 5y ago
    Um... who does that???
    - nijave 5y ago
      Mobile phone browser
      - hopesthoughts 5y ago
        Thus the reason why I never, ever brows the web on my phone. Unless it's necessary. Even the Youtube ads are annoying.
- dade_ 5y ago
  And I am downright hostile to them as a vendor. Just say no to GCP. Whatever feature you want to use, they will probably cancel it with 30 days notice anyway…
- _-david-_ 5y ago
  Let's just hope they don't remove the RSS feed for YouTube.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Embrace, extend, extinguish
mastrsushi 5y ago
So the highlight of this article is speculating whether Google actively removed an unpopular technology from their service or that the technology was so unpopular that it broke without Google noticing. Great read!
- DoingIsLearning 5y ago
  > unpopular technology aka technology that is used by millions of people but I have no way of monetizing it.
anonygler 5y ago
Googler here: RSS is effectively dead. Most of the people working on software these days barely know what RSS is, so I bet they never even thought to document its deprecation. But RSS at every Google product is a redesign away from being dead.
- akvadrako 5y ago
  I follow posts on about a hundred sites and about 90% of them support RSS. If they didn't it would make following them almost impossible, so I dont see that happening.
- yokoprime 5y ago
  > RSS is effectively dead I assume you mean this in context of Google groups, because otherwise it seems RSS is doing OK. I mean, there's that whole podcasts thing and whatnot
  - mkotowski 5y ago
    Podcasts are one thing. Additionally, almost all blogs based on WordPress have RSS enabled, from what I gather. I would say that for a technology clearly not to the liking of services basing their operation on a walled garden principle it stands quite firmly. [edit]: a missing -s
    - SilverRed 5y ago
      The vast majority of RSS support seems to be an accident or it just happens to work because of the software they use. That is a pretty fragile state to be in since they are a redesign or software switch away from breaking and removing support. And they will not put in any effort to fix it since it was never intentionally a feature of the site.
      - hopesthoughts 5y ago
        It was, 20 years ago.
  - 5y ago
Shorel 5y ago
Seems to be another way to force users to use Google news Android feature instead of RSS. Many, if not most links I get in GNews are sponsored and require an extra subscription.
- hopesthoughts 5y ago
  Google news wil do RSS. It's kind of like an alert or a search, but it does it. For instance: https://news.google.com/rss/topics/CAAqKggKIiRDQkFTRlFvSUwyMHZNRGRqTVhZU0JXVnVMVlZUR2dKVlV5Z0FQAQ?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en https://news.google.com/rss/topics/CAAqKggKIiRDQkFTRlFvSUwyM... https://www.fivefilters.org/2021/google-news-rss-feeds/ https://www.fivefilters.org/2021/google-news-rss-feeds/
danShumway 5y ago
Hopefully this is just a mistake and not a real deprecation. That being said, a little while back when controversy popped up over Chrome's handling of `alert()`, there were multiple Google engineers I saw online in various settings talking about how the web developer community needed to take some responsibility to monitor upcoming changes and discussions. I do want to bring up that a good way to encourage that is to have an easy, standardized way to subscribe to these content feeds using any client, using a technology that can be aggregated and curated by 3rd parties, that is easily parseable so that it can be searched and transformed by other programs, and that doesn't require an account to access. Just a thought for anyone on the Chrome/Google team that is actually interested in improving communication channels with web developers. Maybe don't break @intenttoship?
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > Just a thought for anyone on the Chrome/Google team that is actually interested in improving communication channels with web developers. No. They are not interested in that. The only communication they are interested in is telling what you should do (including their propaganda vehicle, web.dev). Any disagreement or discussion is forbidden. The most recent example, on CSS modules: https://twitter.com/youyuxi/status/1427406150463537152 https://twitter.com/youyuxi/status/1427406150463537152 See replies by Justin Fagnani Of course, no dissent is allowed: https://twitter.com/youyuxi/status/1427447695942299652 https://twitter.com/youyuxi/status/1427447695942299652 (Evan You is the author of Vue)
neosloth 5y ago
I was getting 404s on some youtube RSS feeds last night. Figured it was a fluke but this makes me wonder. Didnt see another comment mentioning this below, scary stuff though
- hopesthoughts 5y ago
  Happens a lot these days, unfortunately.
linker3000 5y ago
The most used app on my Android phone is an RSS reader. It has feeds including: Hacker News, the BBC, Reddit, The Register, Computer Weekly, Wired and a couple of retro computer Google groups. The latter stopped updating on 26th July, but everything else gives me all the news and info I want in a single place without having to install numerous dedicated apps or trawl through multiple Web sites - it's just a great app and service. According to the Play store, the app I use has "100,000+ downloads" which hardly points to a dead ecosystem. Stupid Google.
- dustymcp 5y ago
  i think we all know the usefulness of rss, however google cant monetize it so it must die.
  - mikro2nd 5y ago
    There's no problem in principle to monetising RSS data by sticking ads into the stream. The real problem for Google is (I suspect) that it is a standard protocol, so enables anybody to play, and that means escape from Google's walled garden. In a fit of Apple-envy, and lacking any imagination, Google (and MS) seem to have opted for trying to enforce a walled-garden panopticon as their means to profit, and in that view of the world, RSS -- and, indeed, any other standard protocol -- must die.
    - ballenf 5y ago
      RSS isn't easily surveilled. RSS apps download feeds but that doesn't mean an eyeball could have seen any particular item. You could do custom trackable links and charge for clicks, but charging for impressions would be much harder. Are there other Google ad properties that work that way? (charge only for clicks, not impressions)
      - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
        I mean if there is an image inside of an item I would assume the RSS reader would optimize for downloading images as needed.
rambambram 5y ago
Although the title is correct because it speaks of killing "support" for RSS, these kind of titles about tech giants 'killing' all kinds of stuff make me laugh. Saying that Google is killing RSS is like saying a gazelle running away from a lion is at the same time killing that lion. :') I don't think it works like that.
someperson 5y ago
Side note: The best Google Reader alternative is Inoreader (http://inoreader.com/ http://inoreader.com/) Not associated, just love the project.
cruttq 5y ago
See https://support.google.com/groups/thread/120495835/rss-does-not-work-anymore-what-s-the-new-url-is-there-some-announcement-about-rss-stopping https://support.google.com/groups/thread/120495835/rss-does-...
sdfjkl 5y ago
Hackers use Narkive instead, e.g.: https://comp.lang.ada.narkive.com/ https://comp.lang.ada.narkive.com/ Of course it has RSS feeds. Anything worthwhile does.
- slightwinder 5y ago
  Google Groups is more than newsgroups. They also offer mailing lists. But looks like Narkive does not offer those?
  - sdfjkl 5y ago
    It's been added recently, for example https://freebsd-ports.freebsd.narkive.com/ https://freebsd-ports.freebsd.narkive.com/
Anthony-G 5y ago
News feeds (RSS/Atom) are a fabulous technology. They’re not dead but this is the most recent cut in the killing of the Open Web with “death by a thousand cuts”¹. After the killing of Google Reader, the really big blow was when Mozilla (the closest we have to a “champion for the open web”) removed the built-in feed preview feature and subscription UI from Firefox 64²³. While this wasn’t a major problem for users like me who can install an add-on, it meant that the discoverability of news feeds was no longer there. This followed the trend over the past decade for web publishers to hide or not make it obvious that news feeds are available, e.g., many WordPress blogs automatically make news feeds available but unless the reader knows (from experience) about news feeds, there’s no obvious way to discover that they’re available. All these changes will mean that new users of the Web will never know that news feeds exist – other than the restricted feeds provided by the walled gardens of large corporations – and the number of news feed users will continue to shrink. Twenty years ago, when Microsoft were the large corporation trying to kill open web protocols and protocols (and Google weren’t evil), influential web developers and designers such as Jeffrey Zeldman banded together to create the Web Standards Project⁴⁵ to promote the openness and accessibility of the Web. They were largely successful in this goal (and closed shop in 2010) but without the existence of some organisation that keeps up this sort of advocacy, it will be the large corporations who control the direction and pace of change of the Web. This will be in the interests of their own profits – not the users. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingchi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingchi 2. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/64.0/releasenotes/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/64.0/releasenotes/ 3. https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-product-support-for-rss-atom https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-prod... feeds/ 4. https://www.webstandards.org/ https://www.webstandards.org/ 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Standards_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Standards_Project
- scrollaway 5y ago
  > Firefox 64²³ How long have I been asleep?!? More seriously, i agree with most of your post but the removal of feed support in Firefox is imo no worse than the removal of ftp or gopher support. These things don't belong in a modern browser, were mostly unused, can be moved to a separate client, and the Firefox support sucked in the first place... The actual users were already using separate clients.
imwillofficial 5y ago
“Google Groups kills…” “In other news, the sky is blue and grass is green”
squarefoot 5y ago
For those looking for a good RSS reader for browsers, my favorite one on Firefox (and other browsers) is Feedbro. A necessary addon after Mozilla removed the built in support some time ago. https://nodetics.com/feedbro/ https://nodetics.com/feedbro/
shawnps 5y ago
I subscribed to the golang-announce Google Group RSS feed in a Slack channel and was wondering why I didn't see the Go 1.17 announcement.
throwawayswede 5y ago
It's tiring to argue with people who think RSS is dead so I just stopped. People who appreciate RSS still use it, those who provide it know their users/readers like it. Most Swedish news websites, TV, and radio still provide RSS. BBC provides RSS. Most blogs I follow provide RSS. If you really think about it there are only a few (but huge) companies that don't provide it, honestly, fuck'em. The most beautiful thing about open standards is that they never ever die. There are gopher services (and revitalization attempts) all around. If you think RSS is dead. Keep thinking that, it's your loss.
amadeuspagel 5y ago
I honestly don't understand google's attitude towards rss. Wouldn't it be in their interest to support it? The alternative is twitter, and if everyone uses twitter, you might as well search twitter to learn what's happening, rather then the web.
rakshazi 5y ago
Google tries to kill RSS for a long time, that's it. TBH, I understand why - using RSS you don't need "help" from Google to decide what you want to see and what don't want. As for myself, after I installed Miniflux I removed accounts on reddit and other "content sources", because I simply read 99% of content through RSS and as someone already mentioned here in comments, RSS reader is the most used app on my phone now.
- hopesthoughts 5y ago
  I still use Reddit. I like to comment on things etc. I just keep a whole bunch of feeds, with a whole bunch of items in Miniflux. In other words, I have a nice archive going.

319 points by samizdis 5y ago

RSS, which stands for either RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, is an open content syndication protocol. I've never heard of the former usage. Is that some modern re-arrangement of the acronym? I've always heard the usage "Really Simple Syndication". Also, mildly https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ — if this is intentional, it feels like Google has some vendetta against RSS support in their products.

rektide 5y ago
Given that RSS eschewed XML & specifically XML namespaces for so long, the idea that RSS ever would have called itself RDF is hilarious to me. Part of the whole reason Atom (RFC4287) was began was because embedding content inside RSS was a shit show, a disaster, because while it sort of looked like XML and said xml at the top (maybe), the lack of namespaces meant it wasn't safely extensible & putting rich content inside was a huge mixed bag. RDF on the other hand has always been about flexibility & namespaces, about rich data. Killedbygoogle.com is a good reference, for sure, but this is kind of higher level anti-internet anti-protocols anti-standardization sabotage. This isn't just abandoned product, this is degrading & reducing what used to be a protocol-centric world of newsgroups to a captive, isolated product. Oh! The plot thickens! TIL RSS 2.0.1 actually got explicit namespace support! Wikipedia: > RSS 2.0.1 has the internal version number 2.0. RSS 2.0.1 was proclaimed to be "frozen", but still updated shortly after release without changing the version number. RSS now stood for Really Simple Syndication. The major change in this version is an explicit extension mechanism using XML namespaces
- giantrobot 5y ago
  RDF was used early on by a lot of sites before moving to one of the later RSS specs. The Simple in RSS was a reaction to the perceived (and actual) complexity of RDF.
askvictor 5y ago
I think it's the other way around; Really Simple Syndication is a backronym - for every other historical explanation, I can't see an acronym like being created in the early days of the internet. Once it took hold/potential realised, it needed to be translated to less technical folks.
JimDabell 5y ago
There was a schism in the RSS 0.x days. 2.0 is Really Simple Syndication and has a looser approach; RSS 1.0 is RDF Site Summary and tightens things up. Really, if you’re going to generate feeds, you should use Atom or JSON Feed these days. Too much baggage with RSS that makes it difficult to parse unambiguously.
- VoxPelli 5y ago
  And Atom feeds are the one of the two with widest support so if one is going to pick just one format, then pick that over JSON Feed.
SllX 5y ago
RSS has a complicated history, but the versions you’re most likely most familiar with are maintained by the RSS Advisory Board and state definitively: “Its name is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication.” That said, this is in fact a backronym created when Dave Winer rolled RSS 2.0 out. Check out this link[1] and ask yourself, what happened to RSS 1.0? You could start at the RSS Wikipedia page to investigate further if you’re interested. [1] https://www.rssboard.org/rss-change-notes https://www.rssboard.org/rss-change-notes
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Perhaps renaming it to something other than "Really Simple" is the first step toward the people paid from online ads and web commercialisation to start adding complexity. Surprised I never saw anyone try to inject ads into RSS feeds. Or maybe they did and I never saw it. Also, the idea of "syndication" seems counter to Google's survival. If we can discover the contents of web pages through automated means via RSS, then the need for people to manually submit "searches" to a single company who "crawls" the web and provides "search" seems less vital. How much data about users can be collected from RSS feed subscriptions. If it does not produce lots of data about users, then it's not worth much to many "tech" companies, including Google. Users can navigate from RSS feeds directly to website pages, bypassing these "tech" middleman companies.
- Lazare 5y ago
  People renamed RDF Site Summary to Really Simple Syndication actually. :) In ads in RSS feeds is a thing; Google AdWords supports it, as do many others. https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/9189557?hl=en https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/9189557?hl=en
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
    Oops. Guess I should have checked that first. :) Yours truly has a general distrust of web commercialisers renaming things ever since some such company tried to rename Shockwave Flash (.swf) to "Small Web File". Since then I remain continually on guard for further shenanigans.
- oefrha 5y ago
  > Surprised I never saw anyone try to inject ads into RSS feeds. Of course people inject ads into RSS feeds. Daring Fireball is a well known example that sells the advertising spot in the open: https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/ https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/ If you’re talking about ads in the body of each entry, I’ve seen that too but can’t give an example off the top of my head. That said, it’s more common for publications to give you a small excerpt instead to lure you back into the ad-laden web page.
- 5y ago
hopesthoughts 5y ago
I've always heard it as "rich site summary," which was back in the early 2000s.

niyazpk 5y ago

Google groups feels (UX & support wise) like one of those products that should have already been killed by Google. One of the reasons why Groups has survived so long must be Google's reluctance to give proper customer support for most of their products. Google groups is the only customer support you will get in many cases.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
I think part of it might be nostalgia as well. If they kill google groups then they are killing yet another part of the old internet they sought to embrace and improve upon but the bean counters have mostly taken over and only a few holdouts in upper management keep this sort of stuff alive.
tn1 5y ago
Likely the only reason Groups is still around is that if you want a mailing list on GSuite then this is your only option. If they kill it, many orgs will probably switch to Office 365 or another competitor the next day.
- modeless 5y ago
  Google uses Groups internally and externally for all its mailing lists. It will never, ever die for that reason alone.
  - panda88888 5y ago
    This.
  - wumpus 5y ago
    Honestly, this is the only proof I'm willing to accept for the survival of any low-revenue service that Google provides! But still, google code didn't live.
    - steren 5y ago
      Google wasn't using Google Code.

banana_giraffe 5y ago

The RSS feed on YouTube also vanished for a several hours late last night. When it happened I was afraid it was gone for good. The feeds showed back up, but it really feels any feature of a site like YouTube or whatever that lets me consume content without being guided by a website designed to keep me engaged for as long as possible is doomed these days.

hardwaresofton 5y ago
Would you pay for a service that showed you an RSS-style feed of people you care to follow on various platforms (youtube, twitch, patreon, etc)? At this point it seems like the promise of an algo-free multi-channel feed from creators people care about could actually be a good startup, and maybe that thing could produce an RSS feed (incentives would be aligned to do so).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- p2t2p 5y ago
  I'd pay if it converted YouTube videos into downloadable files for me.
  - hardwaresofton 5y ago
    Hmmmmmmnnn that's super interesting. So unfortunately that flirts with a ToS violation-ish (of course youtube-dl is allowed to exist but maybe questionable to build on, public information is allowed scrapable via the linkedin decision, etc), but this implies that: - Youtube is a must-have platform for you (one of the big offenders for sure, I had them in my notes on this idea) - Being able to download the content is ideal. I've been thinking that maybe if the content creator has the option to manage their page and upload their own content that would be a nice way to handle it. Not that I want to play the video hosting game but having access to the original content would make it much easier to distribute. The question of who pays is interesting though. If you don't mind, email (see bio) me a way to contact you (something ephemeral if you'd like, twitter, whatever is most comfortable) and I'll see if I can whip something together for you to beta test.

bugmen0t 5y ago

Did they remove it due to low usage numbers? Turns out those "few users" are big aggregator scripts and proxies for hundreds, thousands users each :) Example: https://twitter.com/intenttoship/ https://twitter.com/intenttoship/

swiley 5y ago
Good old data driven decision making.
gibba999 5y ago
And this is one of the many reasons why I'd never use Google for anything B2B, or that I have to rely on. I do tend to automate things in corporate settings in ways which differ from personal use, and I have seen many similar features break or disappear. Anyone who automated anything based on RSS now has something broken. I bet that's a lot of enterprise use.

gregf 5y ago

Google is down right hostile to their users. So glad, I haven't used any of their services in years besides maybe YouTube occasionally.

FabHK 5y ago
And the least hostile way to use YouTube, I find, is to plug the URL into the excellent youtube-dl CLI tool, and then watch the video locally.
nijave 5y ago
Honestly didn't realize how bad it's gotten until I tried to watch a video in a browser without uBlock recently...
- hopesthoughts 5y ago
  Um... who does that???
  - nijave 5y ago
    Mobile phone browser
    - hopesthoughts 5y ago
      Thus the reason why I never, ever brows the web on my phone. Unless it's necessary. Even the Youtube ads are annoying.
dade_ 5y ago
And I am downright hostile to them as a vendor. Just say no to GCP. Whatever feature you want to use, they will probably cancel it with 30 days notice anyway…
_-david-_ 5y ago
Let's just hope they don't remove the RSS feed for YouTube.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Embrace, extend, extinguish

mastrsushi 5y ago

So the highlight of this article is speculating whether Google actively removed an unpopular technology from their service or that the technology was so unpopular that it broke without Google noticing. Great read!

DoingIsLearning 5y ago
> unpopular technology aka technology that is used by millions of people but I have no way of monetizing it.

anonygler 5y ago

Googler here: RSS is effectively dead. Most of the people working on software these days barely know what RSS is, so I bet they never even thought to document its deprecation. But RSS at every Google product is a redesign away from being dead.

akvadrako 5y ago
I follow posts on about a hundred sites and about 90% of them support RSS. If they didn't it would make following them almost impossible, so I dont see that happening.
yokoprime 5y ago
> RSS is effectively dead I assume you mean this in context of Google groups, because otherwise it seems RSS is doing OK. I mean, there's that whole podcasts thing and whatnot
- mkotowski 5y ago
  Podcasts are one thing. Additionally, almost all blogs based on WordPress have RSS enabled, from what I gather. I would say that for a technology clearly not to the liking of services basing their operation on a walled garden principle it stands quite firmly. [edit]: a missing -s
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    The vast majority of RSS support seems to be an accident or it just happens to work because of the software they use. That is a pretty fragile state to be in since they are a redesign or software switch away from breaking and removing support. And they will not put in any effort to fix it since it was never intentionally a feature of the site.
    - hopesthoughts 5y ago
      It was, 20 years ago.
- 5y ago

Shorel 5y ago

Seems to be another way to force users to use Google news Android feature instead of RSS. Many, if not most links I get in GNews are sponsored and require an extra subscription.

hopesthoughts 5y ago
Google news wil do RSS. It's kind of like an alert or a search, but it does it. For instance: https://news.google.com/rss/topics/CAAqKggKIiRDQkFTRlFvSUwyMHZNRGRqTVhZU0JXVnVMVlZUR2dKVlV5Z0FQAQ?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en https://news.google.com/rss/topics/CAAqKggKIiRDQkFTRlFvSUwyM... https://www.fivefilters.org/2021/google-news-rss-feeds/ https://www.fivefilters.org/2021/google-news-rss-feeds/

danShumway 5y ago

Hopefully this is just a mistake and not a real deprecation. That being said, a little while back when controversy popped up over Chrome's handling of `alert()`, there were multiple Google engineers I saw online in various settings talking about how the web developer community needed to take some responsibility to monitor upcoming changes and discussions. I do want to bring up that a good way to encourage that is to have an easy, standardized way to subscribe to these content feeds using any client, using a technology that can be aggregated and curated by 3rd parties, that is easily parseable so that it can be searched and transformed by other programs, and that doesn't require an account to access. Just a thought for anyone on the Chrome/Google team that is actually interested in improving communication channels with web developers. Maybe don't break @intenttoship?

dmitriid 5y ago
> Just a thought for anyone on the Chrome/Google team that is actually interested in improving communication channels with web developers. No. They are not interested in that. The only communication they are interested in is telling what you should do (including their propaganda vehicle, web.dev). Any disagreement or discussion is forbidden. The most recent example, on CSS modules: https://twitter.com/youyuxi/status/1427406150463537152 https://twitter.com/youyuxi/status/1427406150463537152 See replies by Justin Fagnani Of course, no dissent is allowed: https://twitter.com/youyuxi/status/1427447695942299652 https://twitter.com/youyuxi/status/1427447695942299652 (Evan You is the author of Vue)

neosloth 5y ago

I was getting 404s on some youtube RSS feeds last night. Figured it was a fluke but this makes me wonder. Didnt see another comment mentioning this below, scary stuff though

hopesthoughts 5y ago
Happens a lot these days, unfortunately.

linker3000 5y ago

The most used app on my Android phone is an RSS reader. It has feeds including: Hacker News, the BBC, Reddit, The Register, Computer Weekly, Wired and a couple of retro computer Google groups. The latter stopped updating on 26th July, but everything else gives me all the news and info I want in a single place without having to install numerous dedicated apps or trawl through multiple Web sites - it's just a great app and service. According to the Play store, the app I use has "100,000+ downloads" which hardly points to a dead ecosystem. Stupid Google.

dustymcp 5y ago
i think we all know the usefulness of rss, however google cant monetize it so it must die.
- mikro2nd 5y ago
  There's no problem in principle to monetising RSS data by sticking ads into the stream. The real problem for Google is (I suspect) that it is a standard protocol, so enables anybody to play, and that means escape from Google's walled garden. In a fit of Apple-envy, and lacking any imagination, Google (and MS) seem to have opted for trying to enforce a walled-garden panopticon as their means to profit, and in that view of the world, RSS -- and, indeed, any other standard protocol -- must die.
  - ballenf 5y ago
    RSS isn't easily surveilled. RSS apps download feeds but that doesn't mean an eyeball could have seen any particular item. You could do custom trackable links and charge for clicks, but charging for impressions would be much harder. Are there other Google ad properties that work that way? (charge only for clicks, not impressions)
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      I mean if there is an image inside of an item I would assume the RSS reader would optimize for downloading images as needed.

rambambram 5y ago

Although the title is correct because it speaks of killing "support" for RSS, these kind of titles about tech giants 'killing' all kinds of stuff make me laugh. Saying that Google is killing RSS is like saying a gazelle running away from a lion is at the same time killing that lion. :') I don't think it works like that.

someperson 5y ago

Side note: The best Google Reader alternative is Inoreader (http://inoreader.com/ http://inoreader.com/) Not associated, just love the project.

cruttq 5y ago

See https://support.google.com/groups/thread/120495835/rss-does-not-work-anymore-what-s-the-new-url-is-there-some-announcement-about-rss-stopping https://support.google.com/groups/thread/120495835/rss-does-...

sdfjkl 5y ago

Hackers use Narkive instead, e.g.: https://comp.lang.ada.narkive.com/ https://comp.lang.ada.narkive.com/ Of course it has RSS feeds. Anything worthwhile does.

slightwinder 5y ago
Google Groups is more than newsgroups. They also offer mailing lists. But looks like Narkive does not offer those?
- sdfjkl 5y ago
  It's been added recently, for example https://freebsd-ports.freebsd.narkive.com/ https://freebsd-ports.freebsd.narkive.com/

Anthony-G 5y ago

News feeds (RSS/Atom) are a fabulous technology. They’re not dead but this is the most recent cut in the killing of the Open Web with “death by a thousand cuts”¹. After the killing of Google Reader, the really big blow was when Mozilla (the closest we have to a “champion for the open web”) removed the built-in feed preview feature and subscription UI from Firefox 64²³. While this wasn’t a major problem for users like me who can install an add-on, it meant that the discoverability of news feeds was no longer there. This followed the trend over the past decade for web publishers to hide or not make it obvious that news feeds are available, e.g., many WordPress blogs automatically make news feeds available but unless the reader knows (from experience) about news feeds, there’s no obvious way to discover that they’re available. All these changes will mean that new users of the Web will never know that news feeds exist – other than the restricted feeds provided by the walled gardens of large corporations – and the number of news feed users will continue to shrink. Twenty years ago, when Microsoft were the large corporation trying to kill open web protocols and protocols (and Google weren’t evil), influential web developers and designers such as Jeffrey Zeldman banded together to create the Web Standards Project⁴⁵ to promote the openness and accessibility of the Web. They were largely successful in this goal (and closed shop in 2010) but without the existence of some organisation that keeps up this sort of advocacy, it will be the large corporations who control the direction and pace of change of the Web. This will be in the interests of their own profits – not the users. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingchi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingchi 2. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/64.0/releasenotes/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/64.0/releasenotes/ 3. https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-product-support-for-rss-atom https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-prod... feeds/ 4. https://www.webstandards.org/ https://www.webstandards.org/ 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Standards_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Standards_Project

scrollaway 5y ago
> Firefox 64²³ How long have I been asleep?!? More seriously, i agree with most of your post but the removal of feed support in Firefox is imo no worse than the removal of ftp or gopher support. These things don't belong in a modern browser, were mostly unused, can be moved to a separate client, and the Firefox support sucked in the first place... The actual users were already using separate clients.

imwillofficial 5y ago

“Google Groups kills…” “In other news, the sky is blue and grass is green”

squarefoot 5y ago

For those looking for a good RSS reader for browsers, my favorite one on Firefox (and other browsers) is Feedbro. A necessary addon after Mozilla removed the built in support some time ago. https://nodetics.com/feedbro/ https://nodetics.com/feedbro/

shawnps 5y ago

I subscribed to the golang-announce Google Group RSS feed in a Slack channel and was wondering why I didn't see the Go 1.17 announcement.

throwawayswede 5y ago

It's tiring to argue with people who think RSS is dead so I just stopped. People who appreciate RSS still use it, those who provide it know their users/readers like it. Most Swedish news websites, TV, and radio still provide RSS. BBC provides RSS. Most blogs I follow provide RSS. If you really think about it there are only a few (but huge) companies that don't provide it, honestly, fuck'em. The most beautiful thing about open standards is that they never ever die. There are gopher services (and revitalization attempts) all around. If you think RSS is dead. Keep thinking that, it's your loss.

amadeuspagel 5y ago

I honestly don't understand google's attitude towards rss. Wouldn't it be in their interest to support it? The alternative is twitter, and if everyone uses twitter, you might as well search twitter to learn what's happening, rather then the web.

rakshazi 5y ago

Google tries to kill RSS for a long time, that's it. TBH, I understand why - using RSS you don't need "help" from Google to decide what you want to see and what don't want. As for myself, after I installed Miniflux I removed accounts on reddit and other "content sources", because I simply read 99% of content through RSS and as someone already mentioned here in comments, RSS reader is the most used app on my phone now.

hopesthoughts 5y ago
I still use Reddit. I like to comment on things etc. I just keep a whole bunch of feeds, with a whole bunch of items in Miniflux. In other words, I have a nice archive going.