17 ms·

Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

959 points by stareatgoats 3y ago

chrisjj 3y ago
> Oops! Something went wrong... > We seem to be having some technical difficulties. Hang tight.
garciasn 3y ago
https://archive.is/LzFN0 https://archive.is/LzFN0
ooterness 3y ago
I've never forgiven them for shutting down Google Reader. Never again. Self-hosted open source software for life.
- sharperguy 3y ago
  It was the perfect execution of Microsoft's "embrace, extend and destroy" tactic. Another example was ditching XMPP support in google chat / hangouts.
  - doublerabbit 3y ago
    As well as disabling Usenet groups readership.
    - medstrom 3y ago
      Ironically, Usenet seems to be growing more popular! For all the same reasons alternative social media are growing. Google Groups shut down for good three days ago, so their fingers are out of the pie, but humans haven't used that for a while, they just sign up on services like https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/ and hook up a NNTP client.
    - Andrex 3y ago
      I thought Usenet users wanted that due to spam from Groups?
- doubled112 3y ago
  Google Reader triggered my self-hosting, limited Google usage habits, so I owe them one!
  - theturtletalks 3y ago
    Honestly, HN triggered my self-hosting from all the stories of people getting fucked over by proprietary software over the years.
  - xk_id 3y ago
    Perhaps google’s long-term contribution to the internet was definitively proving the importance of self-hosted and free, open source software — by epitomising what can go horribly wrong with the alternative. Hopefully in a generation from now this will be just common sense.
- ewoijfawoifj 3y ago
  What's the self-hosted open source alternative that's actually good? I've been using Inoreader because the UI for any alternative is mediocre. I'd like it to work on web and Android, sync back and forth properly, and look nice (sidebar, keyboard shortcuts, etc) and nothing else appears to provide this. Plus, Inoreader allows you to assign a single feed to multiple folders (tag style) which many other readers don't allow.
  - aquova 3y ago
    I've been using FreshRSS for a while and I've been rather pleased with it. It's browser UI is pretty good and a good number of mobile RSS apps support it.
  - dade_ 3y ago
    I use Newsblur, it’s open source and you can self host, but for the price of the service, I am happy to pay. There are apps for most every platform. https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur
    - haunter 3y ago
      >you can self host You can but do you? I use the Newsblur too, paying for it too but reading around reddit self-hosting is incredibly complicated and then you also need to build and deploy your own mobile apps too
  - ericjmorey 3y ago
    Miniflux has good integrations and third party UIs that look great. But I'm fine with the default UI themes. Selfhost or pay $15/year to use the flagship hosted instance. https://miniflux.app/docs/index.html https://miniflux.app/docs/index.html
  - rakoo 3y ago
    FreshRSS, works well directly from the browser, desktop or mobile. What I like about it is that you can gradually work your unread list: if you're in a specific feed and mark it as read it switches to the next feed only with unread items. If you do it from a category it switches to the next category. I find it helps a lot going quickly through a mountain of new unread items. Not saying others don't do it, but this one does, so I'm keeping it.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  I’ve sort of gone halfway. I self host my blog but when Ghost1 was deprecated I failed to do the maintenance needed to move to Ghost2, and the site has kind of stagnated for me. It doesn’t take much effort but I have so many things, and administering servers is not really how I’d like to spend my time. The mastodon server I signed up to is getting slow and inconsistent. I’ve thought of self hosting, but it’s the same concern. I administer a digital ocean droplet with discourse for a work forum. One day, maybe after a normal apt software upgrade, it disappeared from the web. I could only access it via the web SSH panel. Something went horribly wrong on network config. I spent a long time trying to rectify it, and finally moved to a backup from the week before. Then software upgrade was fine. I believe in open source. I run Linux, use Kdenlive for video editing, Inkscape, Gimp, everything I can that is open. My whole life is committed to my own open source project. But managing servers, even as easy as digital ocean is, is never how I want to spend my time, sadly.
- kyrra 3y ago
  Googler, opinions are my own. I wasn't at Google during the reader shutdown, but after being here at 8 years, I now understand why things shut down so often. Google has a lot of shared infra and they are always doing forced migrations and various unfunded mandates. Depending on the stack, maintaining a project at Google takes 0.5-3 people (like if a UI toolkit is turned down, you have to migrate). Plus there are infra costs. On top of that, being on maintenance for a project like Reader, it's probably not very good for your career trajectory. The adverse effects of always going for launching/landing destroyed so much at Google. Many engineers would love to just help maintain software like that, it just doesn't tend to work out given the incentive structures. (Plus that headcount and infra has to be attributed to some team. A person maintaining Reader means some other thing that can't be built, so there isn't an incentive for VPs either)
  - wojciechpolak 3y ago
    I wonder how many people maintain Gmail...
    - lbhdc 3y ago
      Gmail is a huge data source for their ad business. They use it to fingerprint people all over the web (sign in with google). I imagine they see it as essential to their ad stack.
      - crazygringo 3y ago
        Forget about ads, Gmail is essential to paying Workspace customers. They don't need it to fingerprint people by forcing them to sign in -- Google has enough other priorities like Search, YouTube, Chrome, for that. Making Gmail available for free to consumers, along with Docs and Drive, isn't something to drive ad sales. It's to get everybody used to the products and liking them, so that businesses choose them instead of MS. Google has successfully turned themselves into the main alternative to MS Office with this strategy. When it comes to Gmail, Docs and Drive, Google's making their money "honestly" -- not through ads but through paid corporate subscriptions, and a smattering of consumer ones (like extra storage).
- sys_64738 3y ago
  A GOOG free existence is good for the soul.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ashvardanian 3y ago
I believe the internet has gone full-circle - from curated lists and RSS feeds, to automated ranking, and now going back. Almost all top-tier professionals I meet prefer very niche data-sources they trust (mostly individuals and personal blogs - not even organizations), occasionally augmenting them with automated crawls. There is a lot of space for hybrid approaches and we are going to see a new generation of browsers and search engines. I don't think Google can stop that.
- jsemrau 3y ago
  the pendulum of choice
- RexM 3y ago
  I want an easy way to find these quality sources.
  - arromatic 3y ago
    Same , wish there was a directory of rss . In past it was googles task to provide quality sources when searching and google excelled at this but somehow google is failing at this now.
    - hkt 3y ago
      I'm pretty sure every site on this directory has RSS: http://ooh.directory/ http://ooh.directory/ Not the complete answer, but a part of it.
    - lamontcg 3y ago
      Seems like this would be a good feature for Kagi search if it isn't there already?
    - lonk11 3y ago
      Just a directory of feeds could be of limited use. You don't know the signal-to-noise ratio of each feed for you. You subscribe to tens or hundreds of feeds and, boom, you have another problem - how do you prioritize which feed to read . With https://linklonk.com https://linklonk.com I'm trying to solve both problems: discovering feeds to follow and prioritizing content from all feeds. You start with content you liked - submit links you liked and you will get connected to all feeds that included this link. For example, there are a bunch of feeds that included this link https://simonwillison.net/2024/Feb/21/gemini-pro-video/ https://simonwillison.net/2024/Feb/21/gemini-pro-video/ Those are: - https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/ https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/ - the original blog - https://kagi.com/api/v1/smallweb/feed/ https://kagi.com/api/v1/smallweb/feed/ - a feed of "small web" links, I didn't know it existed, but one of the users must have submitted this feed. - https://hnrss.org/newest?points=1000&count=100 https://hnrss.org/newest?points=1000&count=100 - HN links that got more than 1000 points - https://lobste.rs/rss https://lobste.rs/rss - submissions to Lobste.rs - https://lobste.rs/t/ai.rss https://lobste.rs/t/ai.rss - submissions to Lobste.rs with "ai" tag. The point is, if you upvote this link on LinkLonk (https://linklonk.com/item/481037215144673280 https://linklonk.com/item/481037215144673280), you automatically get subscribed to all of these feeds. This is a way to discover new feeds through content you liked. Now, being connected to hundreds or thousands of feeds might seem crazy. But we have a solution to that which also relies on what content you "liked". LinkLonk knows how often you liked content from each feed you are connected to (which is essentially the signal-to-noise ratio). So it ranks new content based on that. If you like 50% of posts from https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/ https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/ then new posts from Simon Willison will be shown above other links from, say, https://lobste.rs/rss https://lobste.rs/rss. The more you like - the better the ranking of fresh content becomes. In this world you don't have to actively manage which feeds you are subscribed to or not. You only rate content.
iLoveOncall 3y ago
Bad UX and UI choices have destroyed the adoption of RSS feeds. RSS has always been a niche solution used only by technically knowledgeable people because of how it was always presented by RSS feed vendors. Instead of having a button saying "Install this browser extension and click here to get all new articles in your browser", the user is presented with an orange "RSS" button with no explanation of what it is and how to use it, that will show a weird XML file when clicked on by the average user. How are people supposed to use that feature when it's so obscure? Better UX would have helped adoption and would have led to Google keeping the RSS button (and Google Reader probably).
- vitno 3y ago
  > Better UX would have helped adoption and would have led to Google keeping the RSS button The most obvious people to have improved that UX is the browser... aka Google. The way that XML rendered was controlled by the browser. This all sounds like Google apologism.
  - redwall_hp 3y ago
    The funny thing is...non-Google browsers had even done that. Chrome was the odd one that didn't, and Firefox was still more popular at the time. Firefox had Live Bookmarks, which I used for a long time. You'd just drag the icon to your bookmarks toolbar and then it would appear as a folder containing all of the entries as clickable bookmarks to the relevant web pages. The browser alerted you to autodiscovered feeds as well. The orange RSS pictogram (not the initialization) would appear right there in the URL bar if the site was set up right. As early as OS X 10.4, desktop Safari had a built in RSS reader as well. You'd open the sidebar that's currently mostly used for the reading list and bookmarks, and there was some way to add the current page's discovered RSS feed with a button click or two. It also rendered feed XML in a particularly nice way that looked like a very clean looking blog, so landing on an XML page wouldn't intimidate less technical users. Chrome deliberately was dysfunctional, and it taking over probably had more to do with RSS not growing more mainstream (as well as the rise of social networks and over commercialization) than Google Reader shutting down.
  - 3y ago
metalrain 3y ago
People reading articles from RSS are not using Google search or Google browser, not being monetized by Google Ads. There is a reason.
- pdimitar 3y ago
  We knew that 20 years ago, yet the entire world slacked off on pushing a concrete solution. Hopefully that starts changing. A few fractions of a percent tech professionals pushing for what's right is nice but not nearly good enough.
  - Jenk 3y ago
    20 years ago they launched Google Reader to do exactly that. ~10 years ago they killed that, too.
    - pdimitar 3y ago
      Embrace, extend, extinguish. Not a new thing. If somebody still trusts corporations in 2024 then that's on them.
      - idatum 3y ago
        Once I fully embraced the fact that Google is an ad company -- not a software company -- their behavior doesn't pique my interest anymore. I don't rely on any of their software or services. But I wish generally they would stop hoovering up and monetizing my personal data. F'ckers.
        pdimitar 3y ago
        Agreed on all accounts, though it is difficult to argue that YouTube is an indispensable service for many goals (education included).
        e_y_ 3y ago
endisneigh 3y ago
There’s nothing stopping folks from using RSS feeds. Turns out people want to make money and rss feeds don’t do this easily. The end.
- geerlingguy 3y ago
  The answer to that has been the "teaser" posts in RSS, linking to the full post on the website. Some orgs still have a "complete" feed with full articles for subscribers, like Ars Technica.
  - corobo 3y ago
    and the answer to that is an RSS app that grabs the article and runs it through a reader mode of some sort (Unread and I believe Reeder have this feature on iOS)
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    Indeed - this is more or less what has been implemented with Google news, Facebook, Twitter etc. I do think rss or another protocol would have been nice even for what you’re describing but such is life.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  Users never caught on much to RSS either. Plenty of news sites still have RSS feeds, but hardly anybody bothers setting them up with a reader. And I don't think it's Google's fault that nobody else is making a popular RSS reader.
- fbdab103 3y ago
  Browsers dropping RSS support certainly did not help. Now instead of being in everyone's super-app, people need a dedicated service or application to handle it. Even sites which have a feed, typically do not advertise. My best option is to open the source and CTRL-F for "atom" or "feed".
  - andrewshadura 3y ago
nolist_policy 3y ago
And yet RSS works perfectly fine on Youtube.
- mh- 3y ago
  Until it doesn't.
  - almostnormal 3y ago
    Access to feeds is not considered in the number of subscribers for the content creator, isn't it?
23B1 3y ago
I'd like to thank Google for incentivizing everyone to get away from them and onto more distributed platforms. IMHO, we have a moral obligation to support open source as a function of freedom and democracy.
ecocentrik 3y ago
Limited monetization potential stopped the adoption of RSS. Competition from social media feeds included a social factor and eventually allowed for a monetization solution that did not infringe on the content creators.
- crtasm 3y ago
  Infringe? RSS is still available on a huge number of sites, it may be less visible on many of them but it hasn't gone away.
gamepsys 3y ago
RSS cuts out the middleman. I remember sometime around 2007 I noticed people around me started using Google to visit websites they knew the URL of. Websites they visited frequently and could have been bookmarks. I thought it was incredibly lazy at the time. Google took advantage of this phenomenon to show more ads and to continue to train users on using their products. Often the user clicks on the ad purchased by the website they wanted to visit! Google has become the defacto middleman for the web.
- a_gnostic 3y ago
  Bookmarks also cut out the middle man. Just think how bland a curated predigested net is, and use what you have, to individualize instead. Seize the means of production!
  - glenstein 3y ago
    It's fascinating to think of what alternative norms could have emerged. I think people forget how significant delicious was to its particular time on the internet. I think it was every bit as influential as Reddit during its heydey, but unfortunately was catastrophically mismanaged into the ground by Yahoo. I do think delicious could have normalized social bookmarking in different circumstances.
- crabmusket 3y ago
  This is also a big driver of needing to purchase ads for yourself on your own brand name. If your users are searching for your site on Google in order to log in (which is depressingly common), you don't want to cede the top search result to a competitor in case someone is feeling adventurous that day. It's a real racket. A search provider that had its users' interests at heart would reserve the top result spot for the best organic search result, not an ad. Even if ads are #2-5, the top result should be what the user searched for.
crtasm 3y ago
OpenRSS has a bug(?) which results in empty feeds if you send the useragent of https://pypi.org/project/feedparser/ https://pypi.org/project/feedparser/ If they're reading, please just offer normal RSS URLs without trying to do any detection or cleverness.
nerdjon 3y ago
I am glad at least that most sites continue to support rss feeds, whether or not they support it knowingly or if the software they use just happens to include it. But I am not looking forward to when that changes, I like getting my news in a timeline manner from exactly who I want. One part of the article bothers me a bit: > Users were left with no RSS reader application, no comparable alternative, and no education from Google on how to continue using their RSS feeds without Google Reader. This led users to not only discontinue using Google Reader, but abandon RSS feeds altogether. I may be misremembering but didn't Feedly step up very quickly? Even offering the ability to easily migrate everything over. I continue to use Feedly today and it has been great. Maybe I just didn't really notice since I have always used a third party app on iPhone (Reeder) so I just repointed the app from Google Reader to Feedly and it was basically as if nothing happened. Don't get me wrong them shutting it down was the start of me distancing myself from Google services. But I feel like there was very much an alternative that seemed to advertise fairly heavily on migration. Or am I misremembering the timeline a bit?
- cbovis 3y ago
  Feedbin filled the void for me and have been a subscriber ever since. Can't believe it's been ten years. Hoping that the developer made bank.
  - trauco 3y ago
    Feedbin is so great. Easy filtering, can process newsletters, etc etc. Very reasonably price. Highly recommended.
  - yellow_postit 3y ago
    For me it’s been NewsBlur — every time I get the itch to find a new reader I decide it’s not worth the hassle of learning a new UI.
    - stavros 3y ago
      NewsBlur user here too. I just want something that's as close to Google Reader as possible, and that's it.
bhickey 3y ago
Vic Gundotra killed Reader because he thought it was a competitor to Google+.
- m-p-3 3y ago
  He wasn't wrong, but he also was wrong in thinking most Google Reader users would migrate to Google+. Instead I just moved to Feedly, then Inoreader later on.
  - bhickey 3y ago
    Reader competed with G+ like television competes with AM radio. Sure, people have a finite amount of attention, but these aren't replacements.
treflop 3y ago
I don’t think RSS ever had a chance. I ran a site in high school and it was making bank from ads. Why would I provide a feed that earned me no money?
- Zak 3y ago
  RSS feeds do not need to provide the full article text. On commercial sites, they usually only provide a summary.
- sumeno 3y ago
  Because you can set up a feed that only provides a short intro and require a click through for the full article, which many websites do with their RSS feed. It increases the number of people regularly visiting your site.
  - kevincox 3y ago
    Also people share articles. If you have a feed there is roughly 0% chance of me sharing one of your articles. If I subscribe to your feed and like the article then I may share it with friends or post to Reddit or Hacker News. Of course while you may reach some users that you wouldn't have otherwise, you may also lose some ad views from people who would still check your site if there was no feed. So it is a balance.
  - treflop 3y ago
    OP here - I have a desktop RSS reader and I do not subscribe to feeds that only have abstracts. I much rather just go to the site personally. If every feed had just abstracts then I probably wouldn’t even bother with an RSS readers. I’m technical already and I can’t imagine any regular person bothering with RSS if it was just abstracts.
    - AJ007 3y ago
      You just manually go through a long list of sites daily/monthly/yearly?
asim 3y ago
You know the question is whether an XML based standard is going to be suitable moving forward. I'm not saying JSON or something else are better but I do think we're sort of seeing the decay, lack of support and slow removal of RSS across the web. Even still I found it to be really useful and my personal news reader news.mu.xyz is built using it but I do feel like for this stuff to progress we might end up seeing a new standard emerge. I won't say it's activity pub or something else. Just that the support is getting pulled from many places.
- skyfaller 3y ago
  There are people who say JSON is better: https://www.jsonfeed.org/ https://www.jsonfeed.org/ I'm not sure I agree.
  - zilti 3y ago
    Oh no...
- zilti 3y ago
  ActivityPub is a pretty terrible standard really
janmarsal 3y ago
Any good RSS feed for RSS feeds?
- crtasm 3y ago
  https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS/commits/master.atom https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS/commits/master.ato... perhaps? Oh that's for tools etc. not feeds themselves. Maybe https://github.com/plenaryapp/awesome-rss-feeds https://github.com/plenaryapp/awesome-rss-feeds
josefresco 3y ago
I’m doing my part: Building websites with WordPress and every single one of them has an RSS feed. Makes me happy to know WP powers a significant part of the open web. I loathe every aspect of doing business online with Google. Analytics, ads, search console, the search engine, Google businesss: ALL terrible. While I can avoid them personally, if you do business online you just can’t.
- a2800276 3y ago
  Gmail's spam and scam filtering is pretty good, but, come to think of it those guys are also encroaching on Google's turf. Google wants to be the only one to be able to spam you.
  - yazzku 3y ago
    Google is the only one that spams me, actually. Funny how they are "good" at filtering incoming spam but don't care about egress.
javajosh 3y ago
If you were burned by Google with RSS, get ready to be burned by Google with LLMs. Google (correctly) saw RSS as a challenge to the position it wants to be in, which is a replacement for URLs. It wants its search to intermediate all user interaction with the web, and RSS violates that in the steady-state. Google did the smart thing, which is to use it's vast capital to embrace, extend, extinguish viable RSS tech first with Reader and then with Feedburner. The interesting thing is that LLMs are another contender to intermediate users' relationships with URLs. An LLM that gives references-as-links within an answer is a much better usability story and I predict this usage alone will displace traditional search in the next couple of years. If past is prologue, I think we can expect Google to spend a great deal on LLMs, make internal projects, buy companies, and then shut them down. (Of course it may be that the Search team will pivot to an LLM UX, which would be remarkable but not entirely out-of-the-question since it's compatible with Google's bread-and-butter, search ads.)
sys_64738 3y ago
My biggest GOOG RSS surprise is that they've not killed youtu.be RSS feeds for channels.
mogoh 3y ago
Could ActivityPub replace RSS even though it is not intended to do so?
- kevincox 3y ago
  Sort of. You can just poll it like it is a feed. However annoyingly if you want push updates you need to subscribe which is a publicly visible action. There is no way to follow a feed without having some profile to appear as a "follower".
- zozbot234 3y ago
  ActivityStreams is the closest counterpart to RSS, whereas ActivityPub is the "push" standard that's ultimately built on ActivityStreams.
hkt 3y ago
One of the key things about attacks on RSS is that it shows the need to be a little more aggressive when writing FLOSS: specifically, relying on parsing the pages as they're presented to the end user, and RSS-ifying them. Twitter is a good example of where this happens. Youtube could be, too, if its RSS feeds get yanked.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
BeetleB 3y ago
As someone who never relied on Google for RSS, this article comes across as somewhat nonsensical. Most Google Reader users were not using RSS before and likely would never have used them if not for Reader. They didn't kill RSS - they introduced people to it. As someone who used a self hosted reader as well as a standalone desktop reader, the coming and going of Reader went completely unnoticed. Ditto with browser support. Even Firefox dropped it - and they're the browser that introduced the feature! Seems silly to blame Google for the general trend. Couldn't care less for Feedburner's attempt to monetize it. RSS is a protocol like email. Would I think positively about a service trying to monetize email? The rest of the article is about various Google services dropping support for it. If Google kills Gmail would we say Google killed email? It's a nonsensical thought process. Anecdotally I found it was Twitter that killed RSS. When it was new people were using it for the same purpose I was using RSS. To follow people and organizations.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  I think most rss users (or conscious rss users; I wouldn’t count podcast listeners) _were_ using it, either directly or via its api, weren’t they?
  - BeetleB 3y ago
    The point I'm making is most users of RSS wouldn't have used RSS had Reader not been around. The fact that many stopped using RSS after the demise of Reader is simply a reflection of how many people Google introduced to RSS. I clearly remember at the time many Reader users equating it with RSS and not knowing the difference. Just as many people I encounter equate Git with GitHub and don't realize GitHub doesn't develop or own Git.
    - glenstein 3y ago
      >The fact that many stopped using RSS after the demise of Reader is simply a reflection of how many people Google introduced to RSS. Right, but simultaneously, that statement is an affirmation of how much damage Google did to RSS, by eliminating their support for a protocol that they themselves had done so much to elevate.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
(2023) Yes, and...? One of the net's unsung/unseen killer apps that was slowly pushed down by 'social media'. Reader's been dead longer than it was alive. Many contributing factors to environment, shifts of the day when it happened. Endlessly bringing it up shows lack of awareness of surroundings/history. Also, other options/filled void/RSS not dead.
ndgold 3y ago
I’m still bitter about this
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
meindnoch 3y ago
Shutting down Google Reader was the peccatum originale of Google. The original sin. The phase transition from "don't be evil" to evil. The moment when the sign flipped from net positive to net negative.
- thatfatboy 3y ago
  I think that the removal of the plus operator had a much greater negative effect on Google.
  - wyclif 3y ago
    You mean in Gmail addresses or in search?
- jijijijij 3y ago
  Yes. Google Reader shut down, three years later Harambe is dead. The rest is history. It all started there.
phailhaus 3y ago
The irony of this is that RSS is an open decentralized protocol, and we're blaming Google for not hosting centralized infrastructure to make it accessible. I think this is evidence that RSS has fundamental usability issues that prevent it from going mainstream. Google realized this ages ago and ditched it.
- olliej 3y ago
  No, what we're saying is google made a free service that was accessible everywhere, which meant all the non-google options essentially died off (commercial paid apps were competing with free, non-commercial ones were competing with "synchronized everywhere" which means paying for some cloud system). Then once the rss ecosystem had been largely wiped out, google killed reader. Sure you could migrate your data out, but to where? It took time for replacements to get to maturity, and they lacked syncing or financial backing that made them free. It was _possible_ to get an alternative, but the overwhelming majority of people are not really able to deal with the immediately available alternatives, and by the time the RSS ecosystem had redeveloped usable software the majority of the people who had been using reader/RSS were no longer going to switch back because they'd migrated to other systems. The cheaper/free service to drive competitors out of business model is a tool monopolists use all the time because it is effective. In this case google did exactly the same thing, honestly I don't think out of malice, and then realized that they couldn't make a profit of it and so killed the service. But fundamentally their actions were the same as the monopolists, and had the same impact, so when they shut down reader they basically ended rss for the vast majority of users. For example, NetNewsWire was a good piece of paid commercial software which I used for years, that was essentially killed by reader because they simply couldn't afford to develop or support it when the major competitor was free. NNW is now free and OSS, but that was after the IP became functionally worthless and the company that had bought it simply returned it to Brent Simmons (the original author).
  - crtasm 3y ago
    I can name one mature alternative at that time: Netvibes. Still usable now for free. I feel sure there were others but would have to look them up.
xdfil 3y ago
[dead]
tandav 3y ago
Imagine Google removes RSS for YouTube channels
charcircuit 3y ago
I don't see a point to revive RSS now that we have social media platforms like X which do a better job at providing feeds to people.
- crtasm 3y ago
  ...are you serious? I can't browse timelines on X without an account, they've blocked all third party apps, and most sites I subscribe to via RSS don't tweet every new post anyway.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    > I can't browse timelines on X without an account It takes just a few seconds to create an account. >they've blocked all third party apps The first party app works fine for me. >most sites I subscribe to via RSS don't tweet every new post anyway It would be in the best interests of these sites to post about new content on social media themselves for extra visibility. Worst case someone else can repost it on social media for them.
    - crtasm 3y ago
      The speed of creating an account is immaterial when I don't want one, nor do I wish to use their clunky website to read news on. There's no official app for my OS even if I did wish to install one. Posting to a walled garden is certainly not in the best interests of all sites, but offering your readers a way to directly subscribe to feeds in the software of thsir choice as well as whatever social media stuff you're doing is a win all round.
      - charcircuit 3y ago
        >The speed of creating an account is immaterial when I don't want one You have a self imposed problem. There is an easy solution, but you are rejecting to use it. >Posting to a walled garden is certainly not in the best interests of all sites What's the downside of doing so then that would make it not in the sites interest.
dctoedt 3y ago
Adding a plug for Readwise.io - I was a longtime Feedly user but switched because Readwise is more capable. I'm a paying subscriber but otherwise have no connection to the company. https://readwise.io/ https://readwise.io/
geor9e 3y ago
RSS destroys their walled-garden feed ad model. I got sick of it, and went back to RSS. I use Feedbro personally. It also supports Twitter (via nitter) and Facebook friends (public posts) without the ads and algorithms. Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/J1IDql9.png https://i.imgur.com/J1IDql9.png
scarface_74 3y ago
NetNewsWire is great and it’s free and open source for iOS.
gpspake 3y ago
Kinda funny how this is currently sharing the top 2 on hn with "institutions try to preserve the problems to which they are the solution."
FiddlerClamp 3y ago
I use Blogtrottr to get RSS clips for feeds by email. It's great for sites that are updated very infrequently, and you can choose the frequency of emails for a feed, from a daily digest to as-it-happens. Yes, there are ads in the free plan.
YVoyiatzis 3y ago
Genocidal tendencies, if you ask me.
IronWolve 3y ago
RSS was to the Internet as CSV is to Data. The great way to move data between applications. IFTTT is a great way to export content data, convert to RSS, and put the data(posts/comments/stories) where you wanted. Even youtube had rss feeds for channels. Freeing the data was a core concept before all the megacorps or startups wanted a monopoly.
- whyoh 3y ago
  >Even youtube had rss feeds for channels. It still does!
  - 77pt77 3y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?{kind}_id={id} https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?{kind}_id={id} where kind can either be channel or playlist (possibly more).
ddmma 3y ago
Feedburner was an amazing way to qualify websites popularity then became followers and likes trapped into social media.
smsm42 3y ago
I think this article makes it to sound more of a conspiracy than it is. Yes, google does not pay much attention to rss and stopped meaningful investment in it a while ago. But I don't think laying such charge as them destroying the rss adoption is warranted. Especially on the proof so thin as buying a company and 10 years later shutting down some services. Google has little interest in RSS, and that's fine, it can do well enough without it.
tmaly 3y ago
I think someone could come along and create a great RSS reader in the same way Obsidian came along and built an amazing note taking app.
betimsl 3y ago
Good thing they're failing at it :)
mmaunder 3y ago
Google has destroyed the Web by directing traffic from its SEPRPs to pages filled with their own ads that are stuffed with useless content to encourage scrolling and optimize for ranking. Google any recipe for details. Not sure if it’s any consolation that AI will at the very least level the playing field and give us more direct answers.
thelandofrandom 3y ago
[dead]
ElonsNightmare 3y ago
shocked pikachu face
jedberg 3y ago
What killed RSS for me was when providers switched from putting the whole article into the feed to just putting one sentence or paragraph. Often the first paragraph of an article is the intro so I had no idea if the article would be interesting. It killed my ability to quickly skim a bunch of articles. I understand why the providers did it — they need the clicks to survive. So I’d say Google did kill RSS but it had nothing to do with Reader and everything to do with the click based ad model they made the de facto standard.
- crabmusket 3y ago
  It's frustrating that the balance of providing enough content to gauge interest of often not struck. I follow some personal blogs which have title-only feeds which I do think reduces my click through rate significantly. I follow a few niche news sites which post essentially a long descriptive title, which is workable. The best balance I've seen for non-full-post feeds was Guardian Australia which posted a fairly decent introductory paragraph to their feed, enough for me to gauge whether to click in. Annoyingly though news organisations seem to be bad at properly tagging their posts, so I stopped using RSS with large mainstream news sites as the firehouse was too much.
  - crabmusket 3y ago
    Update: 404media.co also has a great above-the-fold feed.
- alisonatwork 3y ago
  This is the answer. RSS without the full article is just Twitter. If you need to click through to an ad-ridden or paywalled website to read the content, then you might as well have just visited the website in the first place. The primary benefit of RSS from my perspective was being able to fetch news while online and then read it offline. That implies being able to consume information without obtrusive tracking and popups and marketing gimmicks. Once RSS feeds just became their own marketing gimmick, a way to hook you back into the site's ad-driven ecosystem, they lost their utility. Mailing lists are now the better alternative, although Substack is rapidly killing that medium too by consolidating every provider onto a single platform so they can correlate subscriptions, hijack img and href tags, and track every open and click.
joehx2 3y ago
Am I the only one who uses Outlook to read RSS feeds? It's a bit awkward to set up, but it works fine.
Separo 3y ago
An evolution of RSS should have been the end game of social networks.
steren 3y ago
> The most recent incident was in May 2021, where Google announced they're working on an update to Google Chrome that brings back RSS support. But there has been no word on an official launch since it was announced years ago. It's unclear of what the implications of this feature will be. The feature is launched. Base don my experience: Any site you "follow" will appear in the "Following" tab of the new tab page, and I have seen these sites also pop up in the feed of my Pixel phone (Google Now?)
Tomis02 3y ago
Blaming Google for going anti-RSS is like blaming the rack when stepping on it. What did people expect to happen? If you're looking someone to blame, blame the ones who evangelised Chrome and Google Reader when better alternatives existed. Back in the day we had Opera (the classic version) with amazing performance and built-in RSS reader. However, at the time, industry influencers promoted Chrome instead, a zero-feature browser with horrible performance (unless you had a relatively high-end PC with a multicore CPU, which was not the majority of users). Many people (devs in particular, who should know better) use Chrome to this day. Oh well, the browser market is as democratic as they come, people vote with their usage. The conclusion is that people just don't care.
bawolff 3y ago
I'm tired of everyone blaming google for their woes. If your ecosystem is so fragile it will break because a single player bailed out, you were bound for failure anyways.
mococa 3y ago
Google Reader was the only web-based solution I managed to use for reading feeds. I tried several others and ended up purchasing Reeder, which supports not only RSS and Atom but also other sources like Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit. https://reederapp.com/ https://reederapp.com/
James_K 3y ago
I can't help but wonder how much of this is intentional sabotage on the part of Google vs how much of it is just RSS itself dying because people don't really like it. The opinions on HN likely don't mirror those of the average person. I support RSS, but it seems a simple mailing list subscription is both technically and functionally superior. The article itself admits that Google benefits from RSS because it helps with indexing. I don't see why Google would be invested in "killing" RSS, how they would benefit from it dying, or how their actions have actually contributed to it's death. This all just seems very conspiratorial to me. The simplest explanation to this is that most people don't really get what RSS is and would rather not use it when email is available and all the content they want is on Facebook anyway.
MivLives 3y ago
What are people using for rss on mobile? I feel like that's the biggest change, at least for me. The way I consume news moved from something I did on my laptop to something I did on my phone.
- eichin 3y ago
  newsblur has a mobile app.
freediver 3y ago
I am great believer in RSS and think it is not going anywhere. RSS powers the entire Kagi Small Web initiative. [1] And Kagi is bringing back the RSS feed indicator in the Orion browser. [2] Doing our share, one step at a time. [1] https://kagi.com/smallweb https://kagi.com/smallweb [2] https://kagi.com/orion https://kagi.com/orion
jll29 3y ago
This could be an explanation, but the old rule says "Never ascribe to malice what you could attribute to incompetence or ignorance." Based on what I have heard from people who work at Google (and read on the personal blogs of Googlers & Xooglers), a perhaps equally plausible explanation is that Google management would be unable to pull something like that off because groups are too chaotic/independent, and what is described by the OP would require coordinated action, but there isn't an overall "strategy" (which is even true for companies much more organized than Google, sadly).
- crabmusket 3y ago
  On the flipside, incompetence and ignorance are choices that can be arrived at through malice.
7sidedmarble 3y ago
There are a lot of us keeping RSS alive. I've been working on a very minimalist RSS reader in Phoenix LiveView for like a year now if anyone is interested in trying out another reader: https://catnip.vip https://catnip.vip
gmurphy 3y ago
I designed Chrome, and was responsible for decisions around its UI, including the addition and removal of the RSS button. Our design philosophy at the time, which was in reaction to the bloated I-need-engagement-for-my-team browser UIs of the time, was to only offer what people needed, and allow extensions to cover everything else. I loved RSS. We all did. I still use Feedly every day and mourn the loss of Google Reader. But even back then, practically no-one else cared, even amongst our early adopter userbase. If we had lowered our usage bar to allow the RSS button, the bar would've been low enough that a thousand other features-you-don't-want-but-other-people-do would've been in there too (omg the arguments about having a "print" button). Extensions was our "if you want it, you can add it" answer. It was imperfect, because it didn't allow ideas such as RSS to be advertised to the mainstream, but we had already clearly seen that that hadn't worked, and regardless, your daily tools should not be a place for pushing agendas unless you have total confidence that they will be valued. I still think "following stuff" is an unsolved, undervalued problem and big opportunity space
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mattparmett 3y ago
  Your comment made me curious, were there any other features or ideas that you (& team) loved but didn’t have the user base or buy-in to include by default?
  - gmurphy 3y ago
    Thank you for taking me down memory lane with this great question. It's been almost twenty years, so I may misremember the internal popularity of many things, but one that stands out was browsing history - almost everyone that joined the team for the first ten years wanted to redesign history and felt it could've been a huge differentiator. We had mockups that looked like subway maps, implemented floating overlays showing your recent tasks, and we designed the history database to store everything forever. In reality, Google search was good enough to find what you wanted 95% of the time, and most people would not bother discovering and learning a separate pathway to find the remaining 5% - especially when combined with our poor human memories and local search capabilities at the time.
stasge 3y ago
Unfortunately Mozilla has greatly contributed to this. At the time when Firefox had a good user share Mozilla instead of promoting RSS has decided to remove RSS/Atom feed icon from the address bar because of their telemetry showing rare usage. While it is still possible to install the icon as well as live bookmarks as add-on to do that one needs to know of their existence.
neycoda 3y ago
Ah, this is true power in allowing companies to keep too much of their high-bracket profits... destroying that which allows competition.
kazinator 3y ago
RSS is the victim of thousands of paper cuts. Examples: - Craiglist: disabling RSS dealt it a blow. I was a big user of RSS for Craiglist searches. Having one simple, inbox-like dashboard where items of interest drip, and where you can delete ones you're not interested in was great. - Mastodon: doing RSS in an idiotic way. You subscribe to an RSS feed (e.g. for a hash tag) using your home instance ... but the links in the items take you to remote instances, where you have to jump through an annoying hoop to engage with them on your home instance. - StackOverflow: ignoring a long-running bug whereby if you have an RSS reader in your browser pulling StackOverflow RSS feeds (that in and of themselves work great), you get logged out of StackOverflow. When you click on the items to navigate to them, you find you're logged out.
npalli 3y ago
I wonder, if in retrospect, Google kept Google Reader if only to avoid the constant nagging they seem to receive about "killing RSS". Been on the internet for decades now, I don't think I ever missed or cared about this so-called assassination. Yet, every chance they get, there is some group of hardcore RSS enthusiasts who can't keep talking about it. Very strange to me.
socrateslee 3y ago
Anyway, just note that Google do encourage RSS with the Google Discover feature https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/google-discover https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/google-...
mundiff 3y ago
Article doesn't mention iGoogle personal homepage which they killed in 2014 I think. It was a way to show rss reeds on a Google homepage with a Google searchbar at the top. So very useful
0xterran 3y ago
I recently made an alternative to RSS feeds tailored towards walled gardens like Instagram & Twitter. It lets you set alerts when certain accounts/pages post content. It's called Alerts.boo Not a full replacement for RSS feeds but useful if you want social media curation/monitoring.

959 points by stareatgoats 3y ago

chrisjj 3y ago

> Oops! Something went wrong... > We seem to be having some technical difficulties. Hang tight.

garciasn 3y ago

https://archive.is/LzFN0 https://archive.is/LzFN0

ooterness 3y ago

I've never forgiven them for shutting down Google Reader. Never again. Self-hosted open source software for life.

sharperguy 3y ago
It was the perfect execution of Microsoft's "embrace, extend and destroy" tactic. Another example was ditching XMPP support in google chat / hangouts.
- doublerabbit 3y ago
  As well as disabling Usenet groups readership.
  - medstrom 3y ago
    Ironically, Usenet seems to be growing more popular! For all the same reasons alternative social media are growing. Google Groups shut down for good three days ago, so their fingers are out of the pie, but humans haven't used that for a while, they just sign up on services like https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/ and hook up a NNTP client.
  - Andrex 3y ago
    I thought Usenet users wanted that due to spam from Groups?
doubled112 3y ago
Google Reader triggered my self-hosting, limited Google usage habits, so I owe them one!
- theturtletalks 3y ago
  Honestly, HN triggered my self-hosting from all the stories of people getting fucked over by proprietary software over the years.
- xk_id 3y ago
  Perhaps google’s long-term contribution to the internet was definitively proving the importance of self-hosted and free, open source software — by epitomising what can go horribly wrong with the alternative. Hopefully in a generation from now this will be just common sense.
ewoijfawoifj 3y ago
What's the self-hosted open source alternative that's actually good? I've been using Inoreader because the UI for any alternative is mediocre. I'd like it to work on web and Android, sync back and forth properly, and look nice (sidebar, keyboard shortcuts, etc) and nothing else appears to provide this. Plus, Inoreader allows you to assign a single feed to multiple folders (tag style) which many other readers don't allow.
- aquova 3y ago
  I've been using FreshRSS for a while and I've been rather pleased with it. It's browser UI is pretty good and a good number of mobile RSS apps support it.
- dade_ 3y ago
  I use Newsblur, it’s open source and you can self host, but for the price of the service, I am happy to pay. There are apps for most every platform. https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur
  - haunter 3y ago
    >you can self host You can but do you? I use the Newsblur too, paying for it too but reading around reddit self-hosting is incredibly complicated and then you also need to build and deploy your own mobile apps too
- ericjmorey 3y ago
  Miniflux has good integrations and third party UIs that look great. But I'm fine with the default UI themes. Selfhost or pay $15/year to use the flagship hosted instance. https://miniflux.app/docs/index.html https://miniflux.app/docs/index.html
- rakoo 3y ago
  FreshRSS, works well directly from the browser, desktop or mobile. What I like about it is that you can gradually work your unread list: if you're in a specific feed and mark it as read it switches to the next feed only with unread items. If you do it from a category it switches to the next category. I find it helps a lot going quickly through a mountain of new unread items. Not saying others don't do it, but this one does, so I'm keeping it.
TaylorAlexander 3y ago
I’ve sort of gone halfway. I self host my blog but when Ghost1 was deprecated I failed to do the maintenance needed to move to Ghost2, and the site has kind of stagnated for me. It doesn’t take much effort but I have so many things, and administering servers is not really how I’d like to spend my time. The mastodon server I signed up to is getting slow and inconsistent. I’ve thought of self hosting, but it’s the same concern. I administer a digital ocean droplet with discourse for a work forum. One day, maybe after a normal apt software upgrade, it disappeared from the web. I could only access it via the web SSH panel. Something went horribly wrong on network config. I spent a long time trying to rectify it, and finally moved to a backup from the week before. Then software upgrade was fine. I believe in open source. I run Linux, use Kdenlive for video editing, Inkscape, Gimp, everything I can that is open. My whole life is committed to my own open source project. But managing servers, even as easy as digital ocean is, is never how I want to spend my time, sadly.
kyrra 3y ago
Googler, opinions are my own. I wasn't at Google during the reader shutdown, but after being here at 8 years, I now understand why things shut down so often. Google has a lot of shared infra and they are always doing forced migrations and various unfunded mandates. Depending on the stack, maintaining a project at Google takes 0.5-3 people (like if a UI toolkit is turned down, you have to migrate). Plus there are infra costs. On top of that, being on maintenance for a project like Reader, it's probably not very good for your career trajectory. The adverse effects of always going for launching/landing destroyed so much at Google. Many engineers would love to just help maintain software like that, it just doesn't tend to work out given the incentive structures. (Plus that headcount and infra has to be attributed to some team. A person maintaining Reader means some other thing that can't be built, so there isn't an incentive for VPs either)
- wojciechpolak 3y ago
  I wonder how many people maintain Gmail...
  - lbhdc 3y ago
    Gmail is a huge data source for their ad business. They use it to fingerprint people all over the web (sign in with google). I imagine they see it as essential to their ad stack.
    - crazygringo 3y ago
      Forget about ads, Gmail is essential to paying Workspace customers. They don't need it to fingerprint people by forcing them to sign in -- Google has enough other priorities like Search, YouTube, Chrome, for that. Making Gmail available for free to consumers, along with Docs and Drive, isn't something to drive ad sales. It's to get everybody used to the products and liking them, so that businesses choose them instead of MS. Google has successfully turned themselves into the main alternative to MS Office with this strategy. When it comes to Gmail, Docs and Drive, Google's making their money "honestly" -- not through ads but through paid corporate subscriptions, and a smattering of consumer ones (like extra storage).
sys_64738 3y ago
A GOOG free existence is good for the soul.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

ashvardanian 3y ago

I believe the internet has gone full-circle - from curated lists and RSS feeds, to automated ranking, and now going back. Almost all top-tier professionals I meet prefer very niche data-sources they trust (mostly individuals and personal blogs - not even organizations), occasionally augmenting them with automated crawls. There is a lot of space for hybrid approaches and we are going to see a new generation of browsers and search engines. I don't think Google can stop that.

jsemrau 3y ago
the pendulum of choice
RexM 3y ago
I want an easy way to find these quality sources.
- arromatic 3y ago
  Same , wish there was a directory of rss . In past it was googles task to provide quality sources when searching and google excelled at this but somehow google is failing at this now.
  - hkt 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure every site on this directory has RSS: http://ooh.directory/ http://ooh.directory/ Not the complete answer, but a part of it.
  - lamontcg 3y ago
    Seems like this would be a good feature for Kagi search if it isn't there already?
  - lonk11 3y ago
    Just a directory of feeds could be of limited use. You don't know the signal-to-noise ratio of each feed for you. You subscribe to tens or hundreds of feeds and, boom, you have another problem - how do you prioritize which feed to read . With https://linklonk.com https://linklonk.com I'm trying to solve both problems: discovering feeds to follow and prioritizing content from all feeds. You start with content you liked - submit links you liked and you will get connected to all feeds that included this link. For example, there are a bunch of feeds that included this link https://simonwillison.net/2024/Feb/21/gemini-pro-video/ https://simonwillison.net/2024/Feb/21/gemini-pro-video/ Those are: - https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/ https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/ - the original blog - https://kagi.com/api/v1/smallweb/feed/ https://kagi.com/api/v1/smallweb/feed/ - a feed of "small web" links, I didn't know it existed, but one of the users must have submitted this feed. - https://hnrss.org/newest?points=1000&count=100 https://hnrss.org/newest?points=1000&count=100 - HN links that got more than 1000 points - https://lobste.rs/rss https://lobste.rs/rss - submissions to Lobste.rs - https://lobste.rs/t/ai.rss https://lobste.rs/t/ai.rss - submissions to Lobste.rs with "ai" tag. The point is, if you upvote this link on LinkLonk (https://linklonk.com/item/481037215144673280 https://linklonk.com/item/481037215144673280), you automatically get subscribed to all of these feeds. This is a way to discover new feeds through content you liked. Now, being connected to hundreds or thousands of feeds might seem crazy. But we have a solution to that which also relies on what content you "liked". LinkLonk knows how often you liked content from each feed you are connected to (which is essentially the signal-to-noise ratio). So it ranks new content based on that. If you like 50% of posts from https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/ https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/ then new posts from Simon Willison will be shown above other links from, say, https://lobste.rs/rss https://lobste.rs/rss. The more you like - the better the ranking of fresh content becomes. In this world you don't have to actively manage which feeds you are subscribed to or not. You only rate content.

iLoveOncall 3y ago

Bad UX and UI choices have destroyed the adoption of RSS feeds. RSS has always been a niche solution used only by technically knowledgeable people because of how it was always presented by RSS feed vendors. Instead of having a button saying "Install this browser extension and click here to get all new articles in your browser", the user is presented with an orange "RSS" button with no explanation of what it is and how to use it, that will show a weird XML file when clicked on by the average user. How are people supposed to use that feature when it's so obscure? Better UX would have helped adoption and would have led to Google keeping the RSS button (and Google Reader probably).

vitno 3y ago
> Better UX would have helped adoption and would have led to Google keeping the RSS button The most obvious people to have improved that UX is the browser... aka Google. The way that XML rendered was controlled by the browser. This all sounds like Google apologism.
- redwall_hp 3y ago
  The funny thing is...non-Google browsers had even done that. Chrome was the odd one that didn't, and Firefox was still more popular at the time. Firefox had Live Bookmarks, which I used for a long time. You'd just drag the icon to your bookmarks toolbar and then it would appear as a folder containing all of the entries as clickable bookmarks to the relevant web pages. The browser alerted you to autodiscovered feeds as well. The orange RSS pictogram (not the initialization) would appear right there in the URL bar if the site was set up right. As early as OS X 10.4, desktop Safari had a built in RSS reader as well. You'd open the sidebar that's currently mostly used for the reading list and bookmarks, and there was some way to add the current page's discovered RSS feed with a button click or two. It also rendered feed XML in a particularly nice way that looked like a very clean looking blog, so landing on an XML page wouldn't intimidate less technical users. Chrome deliberately was dysfunctional, and it taking over probably had more to do with RSS not growing more mainstream (as well as the rise of social networks and over commercialization) than Google Reader shutting down.
- 3y ago

metalrain 3y ago

People reading articles from RSS are not using Google search or Google browser, not being monetized by Google Ads. There is a reason.

pdimitar 3y ago
We knew that 20 years ago, yet the entire world slacked off on pushing a concrete solution. Hopefully that starts changing. A few fractions of a percent tech professionals pushing for what's right is nice but not nearly good enough.
- Jenk 3y ago
  20 years ago they launched Google Reader to do exactly that. ~10 years ago they killed that, too.
  - pdimitar 3y ago
    Embrace, extend, extinguish. Not a new thing. If somebody still trusts corporations in 2024 then that's on them.
    - idatum 3y ago
      Once I fully embraced the fact that Google is an ad company -- not a software company -- their behavior doesn't pique my interest anymore. I don't rely on any of their software or services. But I wish generally they would stop hoovering up and monetizing my personal data. F'ckers.
      - pdimitar 3y ago
        Agreed on all accounts, though it is difficult to argue that YouTube is an indispensable service for many goals (education included).
        e_y_ 3y ago

endisneigh 3y ago

There’s nothing stopping folks from using RSS feeds. Turns out people want to make money and rss feeds don’t do this easily. The end.

geerlingguy 3y ago
The answer to that has been the "teaser" posts in RSS, linking to the full post on the website. Some orgs still have a "complete" feed with full articles for subscribers, like Ars Technica.
- corobo 3y ago
  and the answer to that is an RSS app that grabs the article and runs it through a reader mode of some sort (Unread and I believe Reeder have this feature on iOS)
- endisneigh 3y ago
  Indeed - this is more or less what has been implemented with Google news, Facebook, Twitter etc. I do think rss or another protocol would have been nice even for what you’re describing but such is life.
hot_gril 3y ago
Users never caught on much to RSS either. Plenty of news sites still have RSS feeds, but hardly anybody bothers setting them up with a reader. And I don't think it's Google's fault that nobody else is making a popular RSS reader.
fbdab103 3y ago
Browsers dropping RSS support certainly did not help. Now instead of being in everyone's super-app, people need a dedicated service or application to handle it. Even sites which have a feed, typically do not advertise. My best option is to open the source and CTRL-F for "atom" or "feed".
- andrewshadura 3y ago

nolist_policy 3y ago

And yet RSS works perfectly fine on Youtube.

mh- 3y ago
Until it doesn't.
- almostnormal 3y ago
  Access to feeds is not considered in the number of subscribers for the content creator, isn't it?

23B1 3y ago

I'd like to thank Google for incentivizing everyone to get away from them and onto more distributed platforms. IMHO, we have a moral obligation to support open source as a function of freedom and democracy.

ecocentrik 3y ago

Limited monetization potential stopped the adoption of RSS. Competition from social media feeds included a social factor and eventually allowed for a monetization solution that did not infringe on the content creators.

crtasm 3y ago
Infringe? RSS is still available on a huge number of sites, it may be less visible on many of them but it hasn't gone away.

gamepsys 3y ago

RSS cuts out the middleman. I remember sometime around 2007 I noticed people around me started using Google to visit websites they knew the URL of. Websites they visited frequently and could have been bookmarks. I thought it was incredibly lazy at the time. Google took advantage of this phenomenon to show more ads and to continue to train users on using their products. Often the user clicks on the ad purchased by the website they wanted to visit! Google has become the defacto middleman for the web.

a_gnostic 3y ago
Bookmarks also cut out the middle man. Just think how bland a curated predigested net is, and use what you have, to individualize instead. Seize the means of production!
- glenstein 3y ago
  It's fascinating to think of what alternative norms could have emerged. I think people forget how significant delicious was to its particular time on the internet. I think it was every bit as influential as Reddit during its heydey, but unfortunately was catastrophically mismanaged into the ground by Yahoo. I do think delicious could have normalized social bookmarking in different circumstances.
crabmusket 3y ago
This is also a big driver of needing to purchase ads for yourself on your own brand name. If your users are searching for your site on Google in order to log in (which is depressingly common), you don't want to cede the top search result to a competitor in case someone is feeling adventurous that day. It's a real racket. A search provider that had its users' interests at heart would reserve the top result spot for the best organic search result, not an ad. Even if ads are #2-5, the top result should be what the user searched for.

crtasm 3y ago

OpenRSS has a bug(?) which results in empty feeds if you send the useragent of https://pypi.org/project/feedparser/ https://pypi.org/project/feedparser/ If they're reading, please just offer normal RSS URLs without trying to do any detection or cleverness.

nerdjon 3y ago

I am glad at least that most sites continue to support rss feeds, whether or not they support it knowingly or if the software they use just happens to include it. But I am not looking forward to when that changes, I like getting my news in a timeline manner from exactly who I want. One part of the article bothers me a bit: > Users were left with no RSS reader application, no comparable alternative, and no education from Google on how to continue using their RSS feeds without Google Reader. This led users to not only discontinue using Google Reader, but abandon RSS feeds altogether. I may be misremembering but didn't Feedly step up very quickly? Even offering the ability to easily migrate everything over. I continue to use Feedly today and it has been great. Maybe I just didn't really notice since I have always used a third party app on iPhone (Reeder) so I just repointed the app from Google Reader to Feedly and it was basically as if nothing happened. Don't get me wrong them shutting it down was the start of me distancing myself from Google services. But I feel like there was very much an alternative that seemed to advertise fairly heavily on migration. Or am I misremembering the timeline a bit?

cbovis 3y ago
Feedbin filled the void for me and have been a subscriber ever since. Can't believe it's been ten years. Hoping that the developer made bank.
- trauco 3y ago
  Feedbin is so great. Easy filtering, can process newsletters, etc etc. Very reasonably price. Highly recommended.
- yellow_postit 3y ago
  For me it’s been NewsBlur — every time I get the itch to find a new reader I decide it’s not worth the hassle of learning a new UI.
  - stavros 3y ago
    NewsBlur user here too. I just want something that's as close to Google Reader as possible, and that's it.

bhickey 3y ago

Vic Gundotra killed Reader because he thought it was a competitor to Google+.

m-p-3 3y ago
He wasn't wrong, but he also was wrong in thinking most Google Reader users would migrate to Google+. Instead I just moved to Feedly, then Inoreader later on.
- bhickey 3y ago
  Reader competed with G+ like television competes with AM radio. Sure, people have a finite amount of attention, but these aren't replacements.

treflop 3y ago

I don’t think RSS ever had a chance. I ran a site in high school and it was making bank from ads. Why would I provide a feed that earned me no money?

Zak 3y ago
RSS feeds do not need to provide the full article text. On commercial sites, they usually only provide a summary.
sumeno 3y ago
Because you can set up a feed that only provides a short intro and require a click through for the full article, which many websites do with their RSS feed. It increases the number of people regularly visiting your site.
- kevincox 3y ago
  Also people share articles. If you have a feed there is roughly 0% chance of me sharing one of your articles. If I subscribe to your feed and like the article then I may share it with friends or post to Reddit or Hacker News. Of course while you may reach some users that you wouldn't have otherwise, you may also lose some ad views from people who would still check your site if there was no feed. So it is a balance.
- treflop 3y ago
  OP here - I have a desktop RSS reader and I do not subscribe to feeds that only have abstracts. I much rather just go to the site personally. If every feed had just abstracts then I probably wouldn’t even bother with an RSS readers. I’m technical already and I can’t imagine any regular person bothering with RSS if it was just abstracts.
  - AJ007 3y ago
    You just manually go through a long list of sites daily/monthly/yearly?

asim 3y ago

You know the question is whether an XML based standard is going to be suitable moving forward. I'm not saying JSON or something else are better but I do think we're sort of seeing the decay, lack of support and slow removal of RSS across the web. Even still I found it to be really useful and my personal news reader news.mu.xyz is built using it but I do feel like for this stuff to progress we might end up seeing a new standard emerge. I won't say it's activity pub or something else. Just that the support is getting pulled from many places.

skyfaller 3y ago
There are people who say JSON is better: https://www.jsonfeed.org/ https://www.jsonfeed.org/ I'm not sure I agree.
- zilti 3y ago
  Oh no...
zilti 3y ago
ActivityPub is a pretty terrible standard really

janmarsal 3y ago

Any good RSS feed for RSS feeds?

crtasm 3y ago
https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS/commits/master.atom https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS/commits/master.ato... perhaps? Oh that's for tools etc. not feeds themselves. Maybe https://github.com/plenaryapp/awesome-rss-feeds https://github.com/plenaryapp/awesome-rss-feeds

josefresco 3y ago

I’m doing my part: Building websites with WordPress and every single one of them has an RSS feed. Makes me happy to know WP powers a significant part of the open web. I loathe every aspect of doing business online with Google. Analytics, ads, search console, the search engine, Google businesss: ALL terrible. While I can avoid them personally, if you do business online you just can’t.

a2800276 3y ago
Gmail's spam and scam filtering is pretty good, but, come to think of it those guys are also encroaching on Google's turf. Google wants to be the only one to be able to spam you.
- yazzku 3y ago
  Google is the only one that spams me, actually. Funny how they are "good" at filtering incoming spam but don't care about egress.

javajosh 3y ago

If you were burned by Google with RSS, get ready to be burned by Google with LLMs. Google (correctly) saw RSS as a challenge to the position it wants to be in, which is a replacement for URLs. It wants its search to intermediate all user interaction with the web, and RSS violates that in the steady-state. Google did the smart thing, which is to use it's vast capital to embrace, extend, extinguish viable RSS tech first with Reader and then with Feedburner. The interesting thing is that LLMs are another contender to intermediate users' relationships with URLs. An LLM that gives references-as-links within an answer is a much better usability story and I predict this usage alone will displace traditional search in the next couple of years. If past is prologue, I think we can expect Google to spend a great deal on LLMs, make internal projects, buy companies, and then shut them down. (Of course it may be that the Search team will pivot to an LLM UX, which would be remarkable but not entirely out-of-the-question since it's compatible with Google's bread-and-butter, search ads.)

sys_64738 3y ago

My biggest GOOG RSS surprise is that they've not killed youtu.be RSS feeds for channels.

mogoh 3y ago

Could ActivityPub replace RSS even though it is not intended to do so?

kevincox 3y ago
Sort of. You can just poll it like it is a feed. However annoyingly if you want push updates you need to subscribe which is a publicly visible action. There is no way to follow a feed without having some profile to appear as a "follower".
zozbot234 3y ago
ActivityStreams is the closest counterpart to RSS, whereas ActivityPub is the "push" standard that's ultimately built on ActivityStreams.

hkt 3y ago

One of the key things about attacks on RSS is that it shows the need to be a little more aggressive when writing FLOSS: specifically, relying on parsing the pages as they're presented to the end user, and RSS-ifying them. Twitter is a good example of where this happens. Youtube could be, too, if its RSS feeds get yanked.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

BeetleB 3y ago

As someone who never relied on Google for RSS, this article comes across as somewhat nonsensical. Most Google Reader users were not using RSS before and likely would never have used them if not for Reader. They didn't kill RSS - they introduced people to it. As someone who used a self hosted reader as well as a standalone desktop reader, the coming and going of Reader went completely unnoticed. Ditto with browser support. Even Firefox dropped it - and they're the browser that introduced the feature! Seems silly to blame Google for the general trend. Couldn't care less for Feedburner's attempt to monetize it. RSS is a protocol like email. Would I think positively about a service trying to monetize email? The rest of the article is about various Google services dropping support for it. If Google kills Gmail would we say Google killed email? It's a nonsensical thought process. Anecdotally I found it was Twitter that killed RSS. When it was new people were using it for the same purpose I was using RSS. To follow people and organizations.

rsynnott 3y ago
I think most rss users (or conscious rss users; I wouldn’t count podcast listeners) _were_ using it, either directly or via its api, weren’t they?
- BeetleB 3y ago
  The point I'm making is most users of RSS wouldn't have used RSS had Reader not been around. The fact that many stopped using RSS after the demise of Reader is simply a reflection of how many people Google introduced to RSS. I clearly remember at the time many Reader users equating it with RSS and not knowing the difference. Just as many people I encounter equate Git with GitHub and don't realize GitHub doesn't develop or own Git.
  - glenstein 3y ago
    >The fact that many stopped using RSS after the demise of Reader is simply a reflection of how many people Google introduced to RSS. Right, but simultaneously, that statement is an affirmation of how much damage Google did to RSS, by eliminating their support for a protocol that they themselves had done so much to elevate.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

(2023) Yes, and...? One of the net's unsung/unseen killer apps that was slowly pushed down by 'social media'. Reader's been dead longer than it was alive. Many contributing factors to environment, shifts of the day when it happened. Endlessly bringing it up shows lack of awareness of surroundings/history. Also, other options/filled void/RSS not dead.

ndgold 3y ago

I’m still bitter about this

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

meindnoch 3y ago

Shutting down Google Reader was the peccatum originale of Google. The original sin. The phase transition from "don't be evil" to evil. The moment when the sign flipped from net positive to net negative.

thatfatboy 3y ago
I think that the removal of the plus operator had a much greater negative effect on Google.
- wyclif 3y ago
  You mean in Gmail addresses or in search?
jijijijij 3y ago
Yes. Google Reader shut down, three years later Harambe is dead. The rest is history. It all started there.

phailhaus 3y ago

The irony of this is that RSS is an open decentralized protocol, and we're blaming Google for not hosting centralized infrastructure to make it accessible. I think this is evidence that RSS has fundamental usability issues that prevent it from going mainstream. Google realized this ages ago and ditched it.

olliej 3y ago
No, what we're saying is google made a free service that was accessible everywhere, which meant all the non-google options essentially died off (commercial paid apps were competing with free, non-commercial ones were competing with "synchronized everywhere" which means paying for some cloud system). Then once the rss ecosystem had been largely wiped out, google killed reader. Sure you could migrate your data out, but to where? It took time for replacements to get to maturity, and they lacked syncing or financial backing that made them free. It was _possible_ to get an alternative, but the overwhelming majority of people are not really able to deal with the immediately available alternatives, and by the time the RSS ecosystem had redeveloped usable software the majority of the people who had been using reader/RSS were no longer going to switch back because they'd migrated to other systems. The cheaper/free service to drive competitors out of business model is a tool monopolists use all the time because it is effective. In this case google did exactly the same thing, honestly I don't think out of malice, and then realized that they couldn't make a profit of it and so killed the service. But fundamentally their actions were the same as the monopolists, and had the same impact, so when they shut down reader they basically ended rss for the vast majority of users. For example, NetNewsWire was a good piece of paid commercial software which I used for years, that was essentially killed by reader because they simply couldn't afford to develop or support it when the major competitor was free. NNW is now free and OSS, but that was after the IP became functionally worthless and the company that had bought it simply returned it to Brent Simmons (the original author).
- crtasm 3y ago
  I can name one mature alternative at that time: Netvibes. Still usable now for free. I feel sure there were others but would have to look them up.

xdfil 3y ago

[dead]

tandav 3y ago

Imagine Google removes RSS for YouTube channels

charcircuit 3y ago

I don't see a point to revive RSS now that we have social media platforms like X which do a better job at providing feeds to people.

crtasm 3y ago
...are you serious? I can't browse timelines on X without an account, they've blocked all third party apps, and most sites I subscribe to via RSS don't tweet every new post anyway.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  > I can't browse timelines on X without an account It takes just a few seconds to create an account. >they've blocked all third party apps The first party app works fine for me. >most sites I subscribe to via RSS don't tweet every new post anyway It would be in the best interests of these sites to post about new content on social media themselves for extra visibility. Worst case someone else can repost it on social media for them.
  - crtasm 3y ago
    The speed of creating an account is immaterial when I don't want one, nor do I wish to use their clunky website to read news on. There's no official app for my OS even if I did wish to install one. Posting to a walled garden is certainly not in the best interests of all sites, but offering your readers a way to directly subscribe to feeds in the software of thsir choice as well as whatever social media stuff you're doing is a win all round.
    - charcircuit 3y ago
      >The speed of creating an account is immaterial when I don't want one You have a self imposed problem. There is an easy solution, but you are rejecting to use it. >Posting to a walled garden is certainly not in the best interests of all sites What's the downside of doing so then that would make it not in the sites interest.

dctoedt 3y ago

Adding a plug for Readwise.io - I was a longtime Feedly user but switched because Readwise is more capable. I'm a paying subscriber but otherwise have no connection to the company. https://readwise.io/ https://readwise.io/

geor9e 3y ago

RSS destroys their walled-garden feed ad model. I got sick of it, and went back to RSS. I use Feedbro personally. It also supports Twitter (via nitter) and Facebook friends (public posts) without the ads and algorithms. Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/J1IDql9.png https://i.imgur.com/J1IDql9.png

scarface_74 3y ago

NetNewsWire is great and it’s free and open source for iOS.

gpspake 3y ago

Kinda funny how this is currently sharing the top 2 on hn with "institutions try to preserve the problems to which they are the solution."

FiddlerClamp 3y ago

I use Blogtrottr to get RSS clips for feeds by email. It's great for sites that are updated very infrequently, and you can choose the frequency of emails for a feed, from a daily digest to as-it-happens. Yes, there are ads in the free plan.

YVoyiatzis 3y ago

Genocidal tendencies, if you ask me.

IronWolve 3y ago

RSS was to the Internet as CSV is to Data. The great way to move data between applications. IFTTT is a great way to export content data, convert to RSS, and put the data(posts/comments/stories) where you wanted. Even youtube had rss feeds for channels. Freeing the data was a core concept before all the megacorps or startups wanted a monopoly.

whyoh 3y ago
>Even youtube had rss feeds for channels. It still does!
- 77pt77 3y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?{kind}_id={id} https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?{kind}_id={id} where kind can either be channel or playlist (possibly more).

ddmma 3y ago

Feedburner was an amazing way to qualify websites popularity then became followers and likes trapped into social media.

smsm42 3y ago

I think this article makes it to sound more of a conspiracy than it is. Yes, google does not pay much attention to rss and stopped meaningful investment in it a while ago. But I don't think laying such charge as them destroying the rss adoption is warranted. Especially on the proof so thin as buying a company and 10 years later shutting down some services. Google has little interest in RSS, and that's fine, it can do well enough without it.

tmaly 3y ago

I think someone could come along and create a great RSS reader in the same way Obsidian came along and built an amazing note taking app.

betimsl 3y ago

Good thing they're failing at it :)

mmaunder 3y ago

Google has destroyed the Web by directing traffic from its SEPRPs to pages filled with their own ads that are stuffed with useless content to encourage scrolling and optimize for ranking. Google any recipe for details. Not sure if it’s any consolation that AI will at the very least level the playing field and give us more direct answers.

thelandofrandom 3y ago

[dead]

ElonsNightmare 3y ago

shocked pikachu face

jedberg 3y ago

What killed RSS for me was when providers switched from putting the whole article into the feed to just putting one sentence or paragraph. Often the first paragraph of an article is the intro so I had no idea if the article would be interesting. It killed my ability to quickly skim a bunch of articles. I understand why the providers did it — they need the clicks to survive. So I’d say Google did kill RSS but it had nothing to do with Reader and everything to do with the click based ad model they made the de facto standard.

crabmusket 3y ago
It's frustrating that the balance of providing enough content to gauge interest of often not struck. I follow some personal blogs which have title-only feeds which I do think reduces my click through rate significantly. I follow a few niche news sites which post essentially a long descriptive title, which is workable. The best balance I've seen for non-full-post feeds was Guardian Australia which posted a fairly decent introductory paragraph to their feed, enough for me to gauge whether to click in. Annoyingly though news organisations seem to be bad at properly tagging their posts, so I stopped using RSS with large mainstream news sites as the firehouse was too much.
- crabmusket 3y ago
  Update: 404media.co also has a great above-the-fold feed.
alisonatwork 3y ago
This is the answer. RSS without the full article is just Twitter. If you need to click through to an ad-ridden or paywalled website to read the content, then you might as well have just visited the website in the first place. The primary benefit of RSS from my perspective was being able to fetch news while online and then read it offline. That implies being able to consume information without obtrusive tracking and popups and marketing gimmicks. Once RSS feeds just became their own marketing gimmick, a way to hook you back into the site's ad-driven ecosystem, they lost their utility. Mailing lists are now the better alternative, although Substack is rapidly killing that medium too by consolidating every provider onto a single platform so they can correlate subscriptions, hijack img and href tags, and track every open and click.

joehx2 3y ago

Am I the only one who uses Outlook to read RSS feeds? It's a bit awkward to set up, but it works fine.

Separo 3y ago

An evolution of RSS should have been the end game of social networks.

steren 3y ago

> The most recent incident was in May 2021, where Google announced they're working on an update to Google Chrome that brings back RSS support. But there has been no word on an official launch since it was announced years ago. It's unclear of what the implications of this feature will be. The feature is launched. Base don my experience: Any site you "follow" will appear in the "Following" tab of the new tab page, and I have seen these sites also pop up in the feed of my Pixel phone (Google Now?)

Tomis02 3y ago

Blaming Google for going anti-RSS is like blaming the rack when stepping on it. What did people expect to happen? If you're looking someone to blame, blame the ones who evangelised Chrome and Google Reader when better alternatives existed. Back in the day we had Opera (the classic version) with amazing performance and built-in RSS reader. However, at the time, industry influencers promoted Chrome instead, a zero-feature browser with horrible performance (unless you had a relatively high-end PC with a multicore CPU, which was not the majority of users). Many people (devs in particular, who should know better) use Chrome to this day. Oh well, the browser market is as democratic as they come, people vote with their usage. The conclusion is that people just don't care.

bawolff 3y ago

I'm tired of everyone blaming google for their woes. If your ecosystem is so fragile it will break because a single player bailed out, you were bound for failure anyways.

mococa 3y ago

Google Reader was the only web-based solution I managed to use for reading feeds. I tried several others and ended up purchasing Reeder, which supports not only RSS and Atom but also other sources like Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit. https://reederapp.com/ https://reederapp.com/

James_K 3y ago

I can't help but wonder how much of this is intentional sabotage on the part of Google vs how much of it is just RSS itself dying because people don't really like it. The opinions on HN likely don't mirror those of the average person. I support RSS, but it seems a simple mailing list subscription is both technically and functionally superior. The article itself admits that Google benefits from RSS because it helps with indexing. I don't see why Google would be invested in "killing" RSS, how they would benefit from it dying, or how their actions have actually contributed to it's death. This all just seems very conspiratorial to me. The simplest explanation to this is that most people don't really get what RSS is and would rather not use it when email is available and all the content they want is on Facebook anyway.

MivLives 3y ago

What are people using for rss on mobile? I feel like that's the biggest change, at least for me. The way I consume news moved from something I did on my laptop to something I did on my phone.

eichin 3y ago
newsblur has a mobile app.

freediver 3y ago

I am great believer in RSS and think it is not going anywhere. RSS powers the entire Kagi Small Web initiative. [1] And Kagi is bringing back the RSS feed indicator in the Orion browser. [2] Doing our share, one step at a time. [1] https://kagi.com/smallweb https://kagi.com/smallweb [2] https://kagi.com/orion https://kagi.com/orion

jll29 3y ago

This could be an explanation, but the old rule says "Never ascribe to malice what you could attribute to incompetence or ignorance." Based on what I have heard from people who work at Google (and read on the personal blogs of Googlers & Xooglers), a perhaps equally plausible explanation is that Google management would be unable to pull something like that off because groups are too chaotic/independent, and what is described by the OP would require coordinated action, but there isn't an overall "strategy" (which is even true for companies much more organized than Google, sadly).

crabmusket 3y ago
On the flipside, incompetence and ignorance are choices that can be arrived at through malice.

7sidedmarble 3y ago

There are a lot of us keeping RSS alive. I've been working on a very minimalist RSS reader in Phoenix LiveView for like a year now if anyone is interested in trying out another reader: https://catnip.vip https://catnip.vip

gmurphy 3y ago

I designed Chrome, and was responsible for decisions around its UI, including the addition and removal of the RSS button. Our design philosophy at the time, which was in reaction to the bloated I-need-engagement-for-my-team browser UIs of the time, was to only offer what people needed, and allow extensions to cover everything else. I loved RSS. We all did. I still use Feedly every day and mourn the loss of Google Reader. But even back then, practically no-one else cared, even amongst our early adopter userbase. If we had lowered our usage bar to allow the RSS button, the bar would've been low enough that a thousand other features-you-don't-want-but-other-people-do would've been in there too (omg the arguments about having a "print" button). Extensions was our "if you want it, you can add it" answer. It was imperfect, because it didn't allow ideas such as RSS to be advertised to the mainstream, but we had already clearly seen that that hadn't worked, and regardless, your daily tools should not be a place for pushing agendas unless you have total confidence that they will be valued. I still think "following stuff" is an unsolved, undervalued problem and big opportunity space

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mattparmett 3y ago
Your comment made me curious, were there any other features or ideas that you (& team) loved but didn’t have the user base or buy-in to include by default?
- gmurphy 3y ago
  Thank you for taking me down memory lane with this great question. It's been almost twenty years, so I may misremember the internal popularity of many things, but one that stands out was browsing history - almost everyone that joined the team for the first ten years wanted to redesign history and felt it could've been a huge differentiator. We had mockups that looked like subway maps, implemented floating overlays showing your recent tasks, and we designed the history database to store everything forever. In reality, Google search was good enough to find what you wanted 95% of the time, and most people would not bother discovering and learning a separate pathway to find the remaining 5% - especially when combined with our poor human memories and local search capabilities at the time.

stasge 3y ago

Unfortunately Mozilla has greatly contributed to this. At the time when Firefox had a good user share Mozilla instead of promoting RSS has decided to remove RSS/Atom feed icon from the address bar because of their telemetry showing rare usage. While it is still possible to install the icon as well as live bookmarks as add-on to do that one needs to know of their existence.

neycoda 3y ago

Ah, this is true power in allowing companies to keep too much of their high-bracket profits... destroying that which allows competition.

kazinator 3y ago

RSS is the victim of thousands of paper cuts. Examples: - Craiglist: disabling RSS dealt it a blow. I was a big user of RSS for Craiglist searches. Having one simple, inbox-like dashboard where items of interest drip, and where you can delete ones you're not interested in was great. - Mastodon: doing RSS in an idiotic way. You subscribe to an RSS feed (e.g. for a hash tag) using your home instance ... but the links in the items take you to remote instances, where you have to jump through an annoying hoop to engage with them on your home instance. - StackOverflow: ignoring a long-running bug whereby if you have an RSS reader in your browser pulling StackOverflow RSS feeds (that in and of themselves work great), you get logged out of StackOverflow. When you click on the items to navigate to them, you find you're logged out.

npalli 3y ago

I wonder, if in retrospect, Google kept Google Reader if only to avoid the constant nagging they seem to receive about "killing RSS". Been on the internet for decades now, I don't think I ever missed or cared about this so-called assassination. Yet, every chance they get, there is some group of hardcore RSS enthusiasts who can't keep talking about it. Very strange to me.

socrateslee 3y ago

Anyway, just note that Google do encourage RSS with the Google Discover feature https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/google-discover https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/google-...

mundiff 3y ago

Article doesn't mention iGoogle personal homepage which they killed in 2014 I think. It was a way to show rss reeds on a Google homepage with a Google searchbar at the top. So very useful

0xterran 3y ago

I recently made an alternative to RSS feeds tailored towards walled gardens like Instagram & Twitter. It lets you set alerts when certain accounts/pages post content. It's called Alerts.boo Not a full replacement for RSS feeds but useful if you want social media curation/monitoring.