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As someone who has used RSS since NetNewsWire looked like this… https://ranchero.com/images/nnw2/nnwtoolbarhidden.png https://ranchero.com/images/nnw2/nnwtoolb
by perardi 4y ago
As someone who has used RSS since NetNewsWire looked like this…
https://ranchero.com/images/nnw2/nnwtoolbarhidden.png https://ranchero.com/images/nnw2/nnwtoolbarhidden.png
…get off my lawn, kids.
And then let grandpa here hitch up his britches even higher: people still lament the end of Google Reader for a reason.
In retrospect, it was the least toxic social network. You added your friends, their recommendations bubbled up in the interface, so you saw cool new stuff. Was that perfect? Of course not—you were still in a filter bubble, and what bleeds, leads. But, it surfaced interesting stories, it let you follow news sources you wanted to see, and it did so without the screaming madness of Twitter and Facebook.
- JKolios 4y agoGoogle killing of Reader was the symbolic point where the business plan of the internet moved from "Let's sell stuff to users!" to "Let's sell users to advertisers!".
- b33j0r 4y agoThank you for making my exact comment. I was too stressed out today and you nailed it ;)
- amadeuspagel 4y agoGoogle Reader was a free product, subsidized by google ads.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tomrod 4y agoGoogle Reader was a service that brought in good will, subsidized by people trusting Google to "not be evil" and provide useful services. This subsequently turned into people using Google's money-making products, like ads. At least to most I've spoken with on the subject (a few dozen, so informal straw poll), killing Google Reader turned people's opinion of Google from scrappy startup to untrustworthy behemoth.
- kcplate 4y ago> At least to most I've spoken with on the subject (a few dozen, so informal straw poll), killing Google Reader turned people's opinion of Google from scrappy startup to untrustworthy behemoth. You can add me to that informal poll. I moved to Feedly, but Google Reader was my go to for a whole lot of years. My opinion of Google changed the day they announced its demise. I am probably an outlier but the only way I want to consume content on the web is via RSS feeds. Allows me to curate what I see and if subscribed sites start delivering me poor content, I drop them from the feed list.
- tomrod 4y ago+1
- incanus77 4y agoRight, but it was an early step in Google’s now-classic playbook of undercutting existing paid solutions by subsidizing a free, shiny alternative, driving the paid versions out of business, then either turning their product into a surveillance nightmare or shutting it down.
- jdgoesmarching 4y agoSo is Mail, Maps, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Youtube, etc. What’s your point?
- college_physics 4y agoIndeed, spot on. And given the internet is the computer this is (as good as any) a representation of the fatal bifurcation that has essentially destroyed the potential of digitization for at least a generation (and maybe forever)
- enos_feedler 4y agoAgreed. And that while I am not claiming Apple as a savior here or anything, imagine how bad it could be if we didn’t have at least 1 company still in the business of selling computers. At least to SOME degree. Things could be a lot worse
- eternityforest 4y agoApple does some amazing things with network protocols, but they are a leading force in pushing walled gardens, locked down devices, and such. Other companies give you less privacy, but more functionality exposed to the user. Of course, without Apple's walled gardens, google might lock down their stuff too, no longer needing to have a bit of openness to differentiate themselves.
- mfer 4y agoI'm going to disagree with that. It was when business plans from moved from letting users control what they consume to being in control of what users consume.
- smeej 4y agoWhy did they want to do that, if not to be more effective, in the long run, for advertisers?
- mfer 4y agoThere are a variety of motivations. These include... The biggest is that they are trying to maximize revenue/profits. In controlling the flow of information to people they are in better control of that. A lot has been studied about this. I didn't realize there were other motivations until FB started to publish studies they carried out on people. Some of those (which they published awhile ago) were around the manipulation of users emotions and their ability to target voting groups (to increase people going to vote in target groups) around elections.
- hamburglar 4y agoYeah I can think of a few. That sort of influence is one, benefiting advertisers is another, positioning themselves to get a cut of all transactions is another. Is there an alternate universe where in order to get your content in front of users, it has to be AMP and in order to be AMP, it has to meet a new requirement that all payments must be done through a payment framework that lets google control the user experience (“purely for the end users’ benefit” of course)? Probably.
- smeej 4y agoI hear what you guys are saying, but "maximize revenue/profits" means "benefit advertisers so they come to us instead of anybody else." "Getting a cut of all transactions" means benefitting advertisers who sell anything through the site. It's all advertising all the time.
- numpad0 4y agoI don’t know, to me it feels like it was 10 years ago.
- webwanderings 4y agoBe humble grandpa! There were people who used to use Google Reader without any of its social network shenanigans. And of course, there were people who have been using RSS readers before Google Reader was even born. But, no RSS reader has ever reached the ceiling of common usage, which is not a bad deal.
- ghaff 4y agoIn my circles, which admittedly may not be representative, RSS is/was a tool for people whose job it was in part to proactively ferret out a wide range of information and insights from obscure corners of the internet--so journalists, analysts, and the like. Which just doesn't describe a mainstream audience. While it's satisfying to blame Google, the killing of Reader always seemed like a natural effect of RSS not being popular than its cause. It's not like there aren't other RSS alternatives. And, of course, social media does a pretty good job--for all its faults--of surfacing those various tidbits with or without RSS.
- skybrian 4y agoIt was successful enough that a much smaller business than Google would have tried to keep it going, probably as a subscription service. But for Google it was a rounding error, and the code base needed a rewrite. It seems hard to argue that it would have become more successful, given that its successors are pretty good but they’re small businesses.
- ghaff 4y agoRight. And the problem with rounding error businesses at large companies is that: 1. They're a distraction and 2. It's probably very career limiting to work on them. Someone at IBM told me years ago that if something wasn't going to be a billion dollar business they weren't interested. And Google walked away years ago from organizing the world's knowledge if advertising wasn't attached.
- fanso99 4y ago
- glenstein 4y agoThe light social layer on top of stories was super interesting. You could comment on articles with your friends. There was a lot of potential there.
- alfiedotwtf 4y agoThis! Instead, you create a link with a comment in Signal to a group of friends, copy that to a few other Signal groups who are mutually exclusive of those other groups, then paste into a few Discord groups... Literally a manual social network.
- toastal 4y agoIf you're wise enough to use Signal, why would you also be using Discord?
- chrisweekly 4y agoIt's the original FB problem all over again: if that's where all the people are, you don't really have much choice if you want to reach them.
- musictubes 4y agoNewsblur has this feature although I don't think it's used much.
- snapplebobapple 4y agoThis is where that gab project from a couple years ago was amazing (although the most generous thing I can say about the user content created by it was that it was not amazing lol). it had an extension you would install and it would overlay a comments section on any webpage on the internet.I would love to see something like that but with properly threaded comments and an easy way to subscribe to specific communities commenting, or ideally, federated but you could choose the communities you wanted to overlay moderation from. even better if it has support for easy account switching so you could bin your comment into the proper group for the level of moderation it would pass. activity pub almost does this but comment threading has been universally garbage on every instance I have tried (how hard is it to thread stuff like comments on hacker news are threaded????) but the method is wrong in that you scroll activity pub feeds instead of surfing the net and finding the rich and interesting comment sections for what you are seeing.
- zeckalpha 4y agoAnd NNTP before that...
- tracker1 4y agoStill a fan of NNTP... thinking of doing something similar with HTTP and Cloudflare workers (and adjacent service). Durable Objects for incrementing counters per group, and R2 for header/body storage. Not inherently distributed to separate servers, but an open enough API that it would be similar and allow for other implementations. Only thinking CF, in that I wouldn't have the issues of trying to self-scale in the same way something that could be simple if it gained wider usage.
- qw 4y agoWith "nntp//rss" you could get the best of both worlds. It contained both an NNTP server and an RSS aggregator, with a web interface for administration. It's no longer maintained, but it was a great concept
- jdfellow 4y agoGnus having NNTP and it's "nnrss" module means its my default newsreader.
- tomrod 4y agoI stopped appreciating RSS after "below the fold" content started being hidden by default. It was when the Internet died. We have been basking in the glory of a dead innovation ever since.
- toastal 4y agoI don't mind so long as there is a summary/abstract for me to assess if it's worth my time, and their site is accessible. Press a button from the feed reader and now elinks opens up for me to read it. Some site's this is better. But with malice or carelessness others don't cater to a TUI (no skip link, navigation is duplicated for mobile for no reason, etc.) well or on the GUI they'll pile in targeted ads/trackers (though blocked) but will also hide a bunch of useful stuff carelessly behind JavaScript, like image loading or the entire article (which if your primary site purpose is content, you should be obligated to make sure at least the noscript situation is covered as folks don't want to trust code execution for what is likely a one-off read).
- toastal 4y agoSome sites*
- hedora 4y agoThere are tools like five filters that follow the links, and download the whole story. O think RSS is unusable without them.
- rsynnott 4y agoThe bit I find fascinating about Reader, and its impact (I’m convinced that its death resulted in an immediate strong surge towards social media centralisation), is that it was entirely contingent; it didn’t have to happen. There are many parallel universes where Google (a) didn’t make an rss reader so dominant that it became The RSS Reader and then (b) kill it. In a healthier market with a bunch of widely used readers, things would have been very different. (Reader’s impact was particularly dramatic because a lot of ostensibly separate products like NNW started using it as a backend…) And, if, as seems at least plausible, over the next year or so Twitter crumbles and decentralised social media (whether in the form of Mastodon et al, blogs or something else) comes back, again, totally contingent! An idiot buying Twitter and breaking it wasn’t some sort of historical inevitability, just a weird high-impact thing that happened.
- the_duke 4y agoIt think you got things very mixed up here. Google Reader was shut down in 2013. At that time Facebook was THE hugely dominant social network, with Twitter solidly established, and Instagram rapidly becoming popular. Google Reader was well past it's prime, most "regular" users had already moved to those platform, outside of the more hardcore Tech circles. Google Plus was also really struggling,so they probably wanted to push the user base on to their "real" social network.
- rsynnott 4y agoYeah, the RSS ecosystem was never the leading ‘social network’ by number of users, but it used to be systemically important, in a way that it isn’t today. Keeping track of what was happening in many fields (particularly tech, but also others) used to be primarily via RSS, now Twitter (and in some cases moving to Mastodon, now).
- hinkley 4y agoI never used Reader but I did use another one that also folded, a year or two before Reader went away. Then it got bought and came back, changed, and that stutter interrupted my process and I never really recovered. I set up Feedly and then don’t use it. I think I’m from the generation(s) that expect to spend a lot of time in a browser window instead of hopping between applications triggered by notifications. So the moment I put something into an app, if it’s not situation dependent like Apple Fitness, or team chat for work, it’s just too much friction to make it a habit.
- yreg 4y agoFor me RSS worked very well at a time when mobile data connection/wifi was not ubiquitous yet. For a year or two, every morning when I came to school I went directly to that one place where there was the one Wi-Fi router. I downloaded all the new articles in my NetNewsWire feed and then read them over the day. The tech is nice, but I have no desire to use it anymore. I no longer follow specific blogs. Now I just open hacker news or reddit any time I want to read something.
- 4926394057 4y agoAh, it's hard to see those 15 unread items from Aaron Swartz. What an optimistic time that was for the internet.
- incanus77 4y agoSame here — first piece of Mac software that I ever paid for, in 2002. Still use it.
- manchmalscott 4y agoAkregator still looks exactly like that, I guess if it works, it works.
- hinkley 4y agoThe way I mitigated this problem was to periodically check places like Reddit or Slashdot, noting which sources were cropping up for things I found interesting, and then adding those to my feed reader, skipping the middle man. Once a week or when I ran out of feed I’d go hunting for more. The friends aspect diminished greatly but I had plenty to read.
- Kiro 4y ago1. You're a kid yourself if you were that late. 2. No-one used the social features.
- rpastuszak 4y agoAs someone who has used RSS since NetNewsWire looked like this… https://www.coolaboo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/cuneiform-writing-of-the-ancient-sumerian-or-assyrian.jpg https://www.coolaboo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/cuneifor... …get off my lawn, kids. In retrospect, the end of Google Reader was nothing compared to the neolithic revolution.