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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

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.
WA 3y ago
Same here. Never heard of Google Reader before it was killed. I used an RSS reader in Firefox or something like that. And now, NetNewsWire on macOS and iOS.
riedel 3y ago
I keep repeating it. To me telegram is the best RSS reader app (guess on could also use any other chat like Matrix that supports bots). Manybot or other bots do the translation easily. You get instant preview and syncing between multiple reader devices for free. If you want you can add reactions and comments. News outlets have taken this path already officially. I believe that those interfaces are simply the future of feed syndication. IMHO it does not make too much sense to build dedicated apps or web services for syndication. Dynamic ranking like Reddit or HN might be different, but your normal feed perfectly fits your messenger app.
- medstrom 3y ago
  Telegram, Twitter, Mastodon, Matrix, IRC... anything that permits bots. The fun part is that when you write a new bot you'd tend to just look for the site's rss.xml or atom.xml. That file must exist. And since that file still exists on most of the web, some people gonna make dedicated clients as well that intermix the feeds in the way they want... that seems clunky to do on a messaging app. But two roads in the forest!
  - rakoo 3y ago
    I used to use a rss2imap script that put it all in my mailbox, so I could read entries from everywhere. I stopped when I realized I don't want to be beholden to my computer being always on. Now I have a server doing this + a good UX that doesn't exist anywhere, so there's no point in me doing this again. But I could replicate this UX for microblogging because the "context" are the same: lots of entries, little that I will actually read.
shaan7 3y ago
Agree. I think marketing teams killed RSS, they wanted you to "subscribe to our newsletter" and send you what _they_ thought was useful. You wouldn't do that if you already had RSS, so that needed to go.
- James_K 3y ago
  I'm confused why people can't also send anything they want over RSS. Unless you are directly scraping their website for updates, I thought they could publish anything to a feed.
zilti 3y ago
> Ditto with browser support. Even Firefox dropped it - and they're the browser that introduced the feature! Didn't help that they went with the worst possible implementation.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
  Was it bad? I recall thinking it was good in the version 1, 2, and 3 days. A drop-down menu from the bookmark with a list of headlines that would be refreshed every 15 minutes or so. Clicking on one would take you to the site/url to read the full contents.
ttymck 3y ago
> Would I think positively about a service trying to monetize email? I think quite positively about my experience with fastmail
- downut 3y ago
  I ran my own postfix + [lots more brain tiring things here] for 15 years with very few hitches and felt quite satisfied with my successful caveman lifestyle. But then I got too busy and settled on migadu and my gosh what a fool I was. My wife and I use email like SMS these days and always force commercial conversations to email. signal for the truly trite things. I don't remember what I pay, not going to look it up, but the money for monetizing email is truly well spent: happiness base level permanently raised. The only stupidity left in my email setup is Thunderbird killing off the ability to use emacs as the editor. Enshitification without revenue... genius.
expazl 3y ago
> They didn't kill RSS - they introduced people to it. For myself and most people i knew that knew of RSS feeds, we weren't introduced by google reader, we migrated to it because it was a great reader. Then once they had everyone onboard reader and there weren't really anyone competing becuause reader was great and universilly liked, they killed it, striking a gigantic blow to RSS in general. It really just is not a case of google just "bringing people in then letting them go". They did the equivalent of offering free hamburgers at the corner between Burger King and McDonalds and then shutting it down after the two chains had gone bankrupt. And you might say "Sure, but people still enjoy fast food!" and that's true, but after that it's not burgers people are buying, it's burritos, because the burger market becomes a wasteland when someone does something like that.
- earthwalker99 3y ago
  Your analogy leaves out the fact that RSS doesn't work for serving ads, which is why all of this was in Google's interest.
  - nordsieck 3y ago
    > Your analogy leaves out the fact that RSS doesn't work for serving ads, which is why all of this was in Google's interest. I'm skeptical. There were/are plenty of people who did title-only feeds because they wanted to serve ads.
    - bamboozled 3y ago
      That’s different to Google serving ads
      - nordsieck 3y ago
        > That’s different to Google serving ads A title-only RSS feed means people have to go to their site to consume the content. Which, presumably, has google ads on it.
  - glenstein 3y ago
crazygringo 3y ago
Agreed. The article is explicitly presenting it as if Google had some grand strategy to "embrace, extend, and extinguish". But the far simpler and more plausible interpretation is that it just wasn't popular enough to support. Outside of some hard-core tech people and some journalists, almost nobody used RSS. And so it's equally plausible to write this story as: Google believed in RSS -- they brought it into Chrome, they launched Reader, they acquired FeedBurner, but the user numbers just never materialized. So they shut them down because Google mostly only maintains projects and features with large numbers of users. I think you're right that, more than anything, Twitter killed RSS. But maybe it's more accurate to say algorithmic feeds in general -- including the Facebook news feed, Google News, and Reddit as well. I simply don't see a world where RSS would have become broadly successful if Google had made different choices. Especially with such a super-open standard as RSS, Google is simply not responsible for the death of RSS. Even if you still haven't forgiven them for killing Reader. ;)
- glenstein 3y ago
  I think the iPod played a critical role in normalizing podcasts as a globally accepted form of content consumption. And I actually don't think RSS was too far behind. There is more in the way of development and integration that could have continued to normalize RSS, And I suspect it wasn't a specific reaction to the benefits of RSS, so much as it was the company's mobilization behind Google Plus, that led to their strategic pivot. That core passionate user base that believed in and used the product, I believe was in fact the critical alchemy that was missing from Google+, which by comparison was soulless and pushed by strategic considerations rather than organic iteration on user feedback or response to user needs. Articles have been written about this before, but I absolutely believe in the right circumstances Google could have successfully built out a social network, but it was Google Reader in fact was becoming one. I think Google correctly assessed that there was redundancy between Google Reader and Google Plus, but they just chose the wrong path.
- rossjudson 3y ago
  The article is a fanciful mixture of paranoid lego-duplo block imaginings, with a slab of boredom used for fuel. Podcasts seem to be a rather effective and continuing use of RSS, so perhaps rumors of its death are premature. There, we find ourselves back at the written vs spoken form debate.
lern_too_spel 3y ago
What really killed RSS was Facebook and MySpace. https://utterlyboring.com/archives/2007/07/09/did_myspace_kil.php https://utterlyboring.com/archives/2007/07/09/did_myspace_ki... Before people started posting their thoughts on walled garden social media websites, you could follow your friends' blogs using RSS in your preferred reader. When your friends started posting on services that didn't publish RSS feeds, there was less reason to use an RSS reader and correspondingly fewer users of RSS readers.
tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago
I can only speak for myself. I had moved from other RSS to rely on Googles' RSS and then stopped using RSS until last year. It used to be my main news source for many years.

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.

WA 3y ago

Same here. Never heard of Google Reader before it was killed. I used an RSS reader in Firefox or something like that. And now, NetNewsWire on macOS and iOS.

riedel 3y ago

I keep repeating it. To me telegram is the best RSS reader app (guess on could also use any other chat like Matrix that supports bots). Manybot or other bots do the translation easily. You get instant preview and syncing between multiple reader devices for free. If you want you can add reactions and comments. News outlets have taken this path already officially. I believe that those interfaces are simply the future of feed syndication. IMHO it does not make too much sense to build dedicated apps or web services for syndication. Dynamic ranking like Reddit or HN might be different, but your normal feed perfectly fits your messenger app.

medstrom 3y ago
Telegram, Twitter, Mastodon, Matrix, IRC... anything that permits bots. The fun part is that when you write a new bot you'd tend to just look for the site's rss.xml or atom.xml. That file must exist. And since that file still exists on most of the web, some people gonna make dedicated clients as well that intermix the feeds in the way they want... that seems clunky to do on a messaging app. But two roads in the forest!
- rakoo 3y ago
  I used to use a rss2imap script that put it all in my mailbox, so I could read entries from everywhere. I stopped when I realized I don't want to be beholden to my computer being always on. Now I have a server doing this + a good UX that doesn't exist anywhere, so there's no point in me doing this again. But I could replicate this UX for microblogging because the "context" are the same: lots of entries, little that I will actually read.

shaan7 3y ago

Agree. I think marketing teams killed RSS, they wanted you to "subscribe to our newsletter" and send you what _they_ thought was useful. You wouldn't do that if you already had RSS, so that needed to go.

James_K 3y ago
I'm confused why people can't also send anything they want over RSS. Unless you are directly scraping their website for updates, I thought they could publish anything to a feed.

zilti 3y ago

> Ditto with browser support. Even Firefox dropped it - and they're the browser that introduced the feature! Didn't help that they went with the worst possible implementation.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
Was it bad? I recall thinking it was good in the version 1, 2, and 3 days. A drop-down menu from the bookmark with a list of headlines that would be refreshed every 15 minutes or so. Clicking on one would take you to the site/url to read the full contents.

ttymck 3y ago

> Would I think positively about a service trying to monetize email? I think quite positively about my experience with fastmail

downut 3y ago
I ran my own postfix + [lots more brain tiring things here] for 15 years with very few hitches and felt quite satisfied with my successful caveman lifestyle. But then I got too busy and settled on migadu and my gosh what a fool I was. My wife and I use email like SMS these days and always force commercial conversations to email. signal for the truly trite things. I don't remember what I pay, not going to look it up, but the money for monetizing email is truly well spent: happiness base level permanently raised. The only stupidity left in my email setup is Thunderbird killing off the ability to use emacs as the editor. Enshitification without revenue... genius.

expazl 3y ago

> They didn't kill RSS - they introduced people to it. For myself and most people i knew that knew of RSS feeds, we weren't introduced by google reader, we migrated to it because it was a great reader. Then once they had everyone onboard reader and there weren't really anyone competing becuause reader was great and universilly liked, they killed it, striking a gigantic blow to RSS in general. It really just is not a case of google just "bringing people in then letting them go". They did the equivalent of offering free hamburgers at the corner between Burger King and McDonalds and then shutting it down after the two chains had gone bankrupt. And you might say "Sure, but people still enjoy fast food!" and that's true, but after that it's not burgers people are buying, it's burritos, because the burger market becomes a wasteland when someone does something like that.

earthwalker99 3y ago
Your analogy leaves out the fact that RSS doesn't work for serving ads, which is why all of this was in Google's interest.
- nordsieck 3y ago
  > Your analogy leaves out the fact that RSS doesn't work for serving ads, which is why all of this was in Google's interest. I'm skeptical. There were/are plenty of people who did title-only feeds because they wanted to serve ads.
  - bamboozled 3y ago
    That’s different to Google serving ads
    - nordsieck 3y ago
      > That’s different to Google serving ads A title-only RSS feed means people have to go to their site to consume the content. Which, presumably, has google ads on it.
- glenstein 3y ago

crazygringo 3y ago

Agreed. The article is explicitly presenting it as if Google had some grand strategy to "embrace, extend, and extinguish". But the far simpler and more plausible interpretation is that it just wasn't popular enough to support. Outside of some hard-core tech people and some journalists, almost nobody used RSS. And so it's equally plausible to write this story as: Google believed in RSS -- they brought it into Chrome, they launched Reader, they acquired FeedBurner, but the user numbers just never materialized. So they shut them down because Google mostly only maintains projects and features with large numbers of users. I think you're right that, more than anything, Twitter killed RSS. But maybe it's more accurate to say algorithmic feeds in general -- including the Facebook news feed, Google News, and Reddit as well. I simply don't see a world where RSS would have become broadly successful if Google had made different choices. Especially with such a super-open standard as RSS, Google is simply not responsible for the death of RSS. Even if you still haven't forgiven them for killing Reader. ;)

glenstein 3y ago
I think the iPod played a critical role in normalizing podcasts as a globally accepted form of content consumption. And I actually don't think RSS was too far behind. There is more in the way of development and integration that could have continued to normalize RSS, And I suspect it wasn't a specific reaction to the benefits of RSS, so much as it was the company's mobilization behind Google Plus, that led to their strategic pivot. That core passionate user base that believed in and used the product, I believe was in fact the critical alchemy that was missing from Google+, which by comparison was soulless and pushed by strategic considerations rather than organic iteration on user feedback or response to user needs. Articles have been written about this before, but I absolutely believe in the right circumstances Google could have successfully built out a social network, but it was Google Reader in fact was becoming one. I think Google correctly assessed that there was redundancy between Google Reader and Google Plus, but they just chose the wrong path.
rossjudson 3y ago
The article is a fanciful mixture of paranoid lego-duplo block imaginings, with a slab of boredom used for fuel. Podcasts seem to be a rather effective and continuing use of RSS, so perhaps rumors of its death are premature. There, we find ourselves back at the written vs spoken form debate.

lern_too_spel 3y ago

What really killed RSS was Facebook and MySpace. https://utterlyboring.com/archives/2007/07/09/did_myspace_kil.php https://utterlyboring.com/archives/2007/07/09/did_myspace_ki... Before people started posting their thoughts on walled garden social media websites, you could follow your friends' blogs using RSS in your preferred reader. When your friends started posting on services that didn't publish RSS feeds, there was less reason to use an RSS reader and correspondingly fewer users of RSS readers.

tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago

I can only speak for myself. I had moved from other RSS to rely on Googles' RSS and then stopped using RSS until last year. It used to be my main news source for many years.