6 ms·

How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

644 points by pudgywalsh 3mo ago

LightBug1 3mo ago
Yeah, fuck Google for all of this. That's my intellectually considered response. Fuck Google.
- rpdillon 3mo ago
  Upvoted not for your particular phrasing, but because in a sense, this was my experience as well: I wanted to work at Google, and I thought Google was learning how to marry a great business with treating customers well. Killing GReader was the inflection point for me, when Google tipped from "Great!" to "Kinda evil". It's been a slide ever since.
  - LightBug1 3mo ago
    Exactly the same trajectory / story this side. Tragic ... but fond of those hopeful / naive days.
monksy 3mo ago
What did Google benefit from killing rss? Seems like that would help engagement on the web in general.
- tommek4077 3mo ago
  You couldnt put ads that easily in rss feeds.
- goldenarm 3mo ago
  They killed greader and RSS to push Google+, which was a brilliant decision.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- danesparza 3mo ago
  Ad revenue.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- InsideOutSanta 3mo ago
  It's a decentralized solution in a world where google wants everything to go through google.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    They could've added a Google-only feed type to Reader and encouraged authors to migrate to it using EEE. This is exactly what they tried to do with Usenet via Google Groups. (Google is now banned from Usenet)
- waqasx 3mo ago
  Subscribing to RSS creates a p2p web over http. It cuts out the middleman. Who is the biggest middleman of the internet?
betenoire 3mo ago
Google Reader going away felt like the beginning of the end the internet as I knew it. I miss websites
- danesparza 3mo ago
  I'm still bitter about Google Reader going away. I endorse this sentiment.
  - gertlex 3mo ago
    Me too, but there were some replacements that made me happy because they fixed some irk with google's version. (I think I used Commafeed?) I eventually got away from subscribing to like 50 webcomics (all I used RSS for... most other stuff was too high-volume, and I liked reading everything in my feed, iirc) though and stopped using an RSS feed altogether.
  - fsflover 3mo ago
    What prevents you from using RSS now? Outsourcing your RSS feed to a megacorp sounds like a horrible idea.
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      Who do you outsource yours to, or do you read with curl?
      - al_borland 3mo ago
        I use NetNewsWire. It’s free, open-source, and explicitly says not to send money. > First thing: don’t send money. This app is written for love, not money. :) https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/blob/main/Technotes/HowToSupportNetNewsWire.markdown https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/blob/main/T...
        fsflover 3mo ago
EtienneDeLyon 3mo ago
[dead]
bakemawaytoys 3mo ago
Google’s obviously fake excuse for killing their RSS reader (declining usage) was especially maddening at the time because they were pushing Google+ - which _nobody_ used.
- firefax 3mo ago
  It was a great example of being evil -- they reduced user choice while pushing an inferior product.
  - InsideOutSanta 3mo ago
    And then killed it too. They killed a tool people loved to promote a tool people didn't want to adopt, and in the end both ended up dead.
    - galaxyLogic 3mo ago
      And killing G+ killed a community. I lost many could be real-friends, whom I've never heard from since. That if anyting was Evil, killing a community.
      - firefax 3mo ago
        When I used it, it was popular among folks who would do photography as a hobby when attending academic conferences. Tom Anderson liked one of my landscape photos, which briefly made me popular with the crew who'd roll into gallery showings for the wine and cheese. (This was back before Instagram got acquired by Facebook and Obama let Putin take Crimea and Xi Jingping scoop up rare earth mineral rights in Africa.)
    - leoc 3mo ago
      The final irony is that if they'd just maintained G+ a bit better and kept it around after 2018 it's likely they'd eventually have had a decent chance to pick up a number of waves of unhappy people leaving Facebook or Twitter. But, ceterum censeo: while Vic Gundotra may have been the main force behind G+ it's important to emphasise that, as usual, the buck stops with Google's Class B overlords Page and Brin personally. If they were the decent people and responsible stewards they were originally promoted as then the Google+ debacle would not have happened, or certainly not in the way it did.
shevy-java 3mo ago
This is the Company of Pure Evil. Whatever it touches, it destroys - excluding adMoney. That's its only soul. What I have also noticed is that people are no longer happy to say "I worked at Google". It's now more a career killer (to some extent) than an accelerator. Anyone remember Google+? Nobody used it but Google tried to force-abuse people into using it.
AlexAplin 3mo ago
Feeds still have a lot of inertia, at least. Most blogs generate them out of the box, and Wordpress being as predominant as it still is means you can still find them even where you don't expect to. Even social media profiles can compress into feeds with a little help from solutions like Nitter (or in Bluesky's case, offered natively). What I think is really missed is the social component that Reader had, which you still can't really find even with the variety of great readers that came in its wake. I know I will probably just migrate them to RSSHub when the time calls, but YouTube's channel and playlist feeds have been such a great way to follow a large number of creators. I'm still holding my breath for the day they unceremoniously stop working.
mattsimpson 3mo ago
You never know what will be someone's straw-that-broke-the-camels-back moment, but this was it for me. Nothing in this post was new news, but despite that, seeing it written down in one place made me realize just the type of person, I mean company, that you are and what you really want, Google. For too long I've been holding on to the "do no evil" person, I mean company, that you once were. But now it's clear to me... you're a toxic friend. We've been drifting apart for years, but now it's official... we're breaking up. I'm sure there's a person, I mean company, out there for me. One that will treat me right, be good to me, and respect me as a person and I'm going to find it.
- glenstein 3mo ago
  Agree. It was the watershed moment that represented the break from "don't be evil", a cheeky slogan that was remarkably effective at conveying a sense of what they were about by talking about what they were trying not to be.
renegat0x0 3mo ago
i still use feeds often https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-feeds https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-feeds often using my crawling server because rss are often protected against bots https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy
GrayHerring 3mo ago
I think the core issue is that it is hard to sell why you need an RSS, especially for the average user. It would not be uncommon to meet an IT professional who has at best heard the term, but never really tried to delve further. Sadly by the time the average internet dweller hears of RSS, their mind is already so ingrained in the "usual" browsing experience that anything that is out of the ordinary feels instinctively wrong, even if it clearly has multiple merits.
- carlosjobim 3mo ago
  I don't think the average person has to be taken into account all the time. There are millions of companies providing products and services which the average person has no interest in. Most books and music has no appeal to the average person, neither do most sports or hobbies.
  - bartread 3mo ago
    > I don't think the average person has to be taken into account all the time. This needs to be said louder and more often whenever this "average person" argument is trotted out. Except for the very largest technology businesses, like the FAANGs of this world, relatively few technology companies are offering products and services aimed at the "average person". No business I've ever worked for has had the "average person" as their customer. They're all aiming for particular market segments and positioning their products and services to meet the needs of those market segments. I spent a lot of time working on software developer tools that were only of interest to software developers working on the Microsoft stack, for example. Java, C++, and Python developers wouldn't have known or cared about these tools and that was just fine. So, like you, I couldn't give two hoots what the "average person" thinks of RSS, whether they find it useful, whether they understand it, or whether they've even heard of it. Whereas there are in fact loads of people who aren't sat on the average (whatever that means) who do find RSS incredibly useful.
- frollogaston 3mo ago
  I remember in middle school we had to do a preso on a web technology. I chose RSS. Nobody had heard of it before. After seeing my preso, nobody cared. I stopped using it not long after. Think the problem is people don't care enough to put in the time curating a feed.
konsalexee 3mo ago
Just why bother relying on Google products for RSS? I use for the last many years NetNewsWire and have never had any problems reading the news I want to read. For ref: https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire
- carlosjobim 3mo ago
  And he includes a Safari plugin to get an RSS button back into the interface for easy subscribing (on Mac).
- glenstein 3mo ago
  I mean you're right, but also Google had one of the legitimately best options at the time and massive visibility and seemingly credible institutional commitment. And it was early to a scene of web based always online RSS readers when before that they were typically desktop-based. And on desktop portability was achievable but not as convenient. With reader it was nearly effortless. While it was definitely possible to use alternatives, it effectively became king of the mountain which gave it the power to deal a punishing blow to RSS once they pulled the plug. I will just say it was a very different time and at the time I didn't regard Google as a place that didn't make credible commitments to new products. But big picture I think you're right.
- venusenvy47 3mo ago
  No Android or Windows availability?
- richie_adler 3mo ago
  What's the Android option?
smusamashah 3mo ago
When chrome took the stage, it was the only popular browser that didn't display rss feeds XML in a readable way. It still does not to this day.
dabinat 3mo ago
I don’t understand why many sites with news updates / blogs don’t offer an RSS feed. Are they expecting me to keep visiting the site over and over to see if there is new content? They’re guaranteeing I’ll never visit their site again. Perhaps they’re expecting people to subscribe to social media accounts or via email, but those both cost money to reach users. RSS is free.
- basilikum 3mo ago
  RSS is a free way to reach almost no one.
  - fsflover 3mo ago
    RSS is a free way to reach content genuinely created for users, not for profit.
- tombert 3mo ago
  I've used it on every blog I've ever built (https://blog.tombert.com/index.xml https://blog.tombert.com/index.xml) because it's super easy to set up, but I really don't know anyone who uses RSS in any serious capacity. That said, stuff like BBC actually does maintain an RSS feed: https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml
- mococa 3mo ago
  Ironically HN don’t have feed…
  - orzi 3mo ago
    Not true. https://news.ycombinator.com/rss https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
  - tripleee 3mo ago
    hnrss.org
- mathieudombrock 3mo ago
grigio 3mo ago
RSS is still alive yarr is fantastic
- glaslong 3mo ago
  thanks for the rec, had not heard of yarr
amazingamazing 3mo ago
RSS was never going to work anyway due to lack of monetization. If this is not true you would still see them today. See everyone posting archive paywall bypassing links on every opportunity here, lol. There is no incentive for a news site to support RSS.
- 8organicbits 3mo ago
  I use RSS specifically because the people who publish via RSS are not trying to monetize their content.
  - amazingamazing 3mo ago
    Yup, and that’s why it would never be mainstream.
tim-projects 3mo ago
Facebook IMO was more culpable.
throwaway63467 3mo ago
The Internet in the early 2000s felt a little more special as compared to today, when 99.999 % of content is locked in a handful of walled gardens. I mean sure everything we had then is still possible but let’s be honest everything about the web is fine tuned to deliver ads to our eyeballs, browsers, operating systems and even protocols are being designed with ad delivery in mind. Even the privacy friendly browsers just exist to serve ads when I think about it. Kind of sad really, but I guess you could be happy as it’s so big now and there’s so much to do. Just makes you wonder what stuff would thrive if ads didn’t exist. As of now every niche thing that gets successful will be invariably pulled into the ad ecosystem as it’s very hard to say no to money. RSS wasn’t in the interest of the big platforms as it’s decentralized and there’s no good way to deliver ads through it, simple as that.
- user3939382 3mo ago
  > the privacy friendly browsers just exist to serve ads when I think about it Not LibreWolf. I’m also a fan of ungoogled-chromium, those are my two daily browsers.
- mathieudombrock 3mo ago
  What I don't understand about the "RSS can't support ads" argument is that most of my RSS feeds don't actually let me read the article. Just a headline and a snippet at most. So if I want to actually read the article I'm going to have to load their page.
  - dhosek 3mo ago
    I’ve encountered feeds that do this and I tend to not keep those subscriptions long. That said, some feeds often have content that doesn’t present well in my feed reader and I’ll end up clicking to view the web presentation What I miss is that back when Safari had RSS built in was I used to just open all the new articles in tabs from an RSS list in my bookmark bar. This is the experience I really would like to recover, being able to just get a set of tabs that represent new posts at sites that I want to follow. Maybe I’ll vibe code this for myself now that I’ve given in and turned to the dark side with Claude.
jll29 3mo ago
Let's make sure Ladybird will have good RSS and Atom feed support, then that'll settle things.
mococa 3mo ago
Not sure if true, but said thousands times on HN. The reason to kill google reader was some trouble upgrading dependencies on it (borg)
ralfd 3mo ago
That is stupid ranting. RSS (and Atom) were too nerdy and the mainstream did and does not care for it. Google did not „destroy“ it
firasd 3mo ago
I think the real issue is that the 'hobbyist web' is dead because there is no distribution Let's say you want to post about 'best way to clean your car windshield'. Why would you post it on a blog when nobody will read it when the TikTok algo will at least give you a pity test to a few hundred people So all that's left is Reddit and social media and the short form video apps (and Youtube) The other part of course is Google itself won't rank mypersonalblog .com/i-found-a-cool-way-to-clean-windshields So there's a doom loop... the supply of potential independent sites can't connect to audience demand, the audience is not being funneled to indie sites anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And now Reddit gets to make much dinero out of selling access for AI training cause that's the only place organic discussion happens at scale
- lylo 3mo ago
  I wouldn’t say it’s dead. Rather, niche. IndieWeb blogging products are alive and well. Google definitely scrapes and ranks (my blog gets good juice) and there are and increasing number of aggregators like Kagi small web, bubbles.town, ooh.directory.
salynchnew 3mo ago
I mean, Facebook acquiring FriendFeed felt at least as bad as Google shutting down Google Reader.
fiatpandas 3mo ago
It makes me think if YouTube’s subscription feed will meet the same fate as RSS. It’s basically RSS for YouTube, in the sense that it’s a chronological feed of channels you directly follow. It just seems too useful and un-derived to remain a Google-maintained feature for the long term.
- cft 3mo ago
  No, because it's not cross platform, it doesn't take you outside of a Google product
logn 3mo ago
And they shut down Google Podcasts, migrating it to YouTube Music. The podcast ecosystem is open and RSS-based. YouTube Music is closed.
- jillesvangurp 3mo ago
  Fun fact, youtube channels have proper Atom feeds that you can subscribe to from most feed readers out there. Here's @realcountbinface's feed: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UClAxTtZvmP5yyBTiWj-6vhw https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UClAxTtZ...
orzi 3mo ago
Don't forget Mozilla removing Live Bookmarks (RSS feeds showed up directly in your bookmarks menu) and RSS feed subscriptions in Firefox 64. https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-product-support-for-rss-atom-feeds/ https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-prod...
- culi 3mo ago
  Did any other browser ever have this?
  - orzi 3mo ago
    I do not think so. It was such a GOOD feature. Imagine opening your browser and you had all your news instantly in your bookmark under address bar. I loved Firefox for this. But, thankfully, you can have almost the same thing with Livemarks extension.
  - throwawsy7273 3mo ago
    Opera used to have a built in RSS reader that was better in my opinion. Some of the people behind Opera has built Vivaldi, which also contains an RSS reader. I haven't used it myself, but it looks promising.
    - culi 3mo ago
      Seems risky to rely on a browser as your RSS reader. I know you could always export your OPML file but not every reader seems to import/export that spec correctly
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- TiredOfLife 3mo ago
  Somebody used Live Bookmarks?
  - sunaookami 3mo ago
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gkoberger 3mo ago
Okay bear with me here. We blame the RSS aggregators for the death, which is very fair. But I don't know if blog writers ever supported RSS, either. With RSS, your words are read, which is great. But you lose the ability to control the feel of the post... the best blogs have a vibe where the medium is at least large portion of the message. A pg essay would feel wrong in a chunk serif font, and I've read blogs that have used interactivity to great effect. RSS also kills monetization, since you can't have ads or push users to sign up. I would love to see a platform (mobile would be great for this) that let the creator control the design and maybe even levels of monetization. (Some could argue I'm somewhat describing Medium or Substack, although I don't think they quite hit it for me.) I could never get into RSS. I theoretically loved it as a concept, but I missed "feeling" the vibe the author was going for.
- adolph 3mo ago
  > lose the ability to control the feel of the post. Agreed, rss was popular with people who wanted to decrease noise. > RSS also kills monetization, since you can't have ads This was the killer and the dumb part, because it could, but monetization sofar means integration with all the bad parts of the Internet that desire to track people.
  - colesantiago 3mo ago
    So what is the solution here other than ads? Most people who use RSS, use it because they don't want to go to a website (filled with ads) and they want content 100% for free.
    - throwawsy7273 3mo ago
      I have a feeling that it used to be much more valuable to send users to your site in the past, than today where a lot of traffic comes from search/ads/social media. Perhaps it is time to revisit a distribution model, where the full content of the article is available for paid users inside the reader itself. The RSS reader would require a subscription and pay RSS feed providers a share of the subscription price. A sort of distributed spotify model.
Xracke 3mo ago
With integration of AI , RSS feeds is the future
- jillesvangurp 3mo ago
  If you are already using agentic tools, making them crawl and summarize the news with some RSS feeds is super useful. If you use a vector database to store your feeds, you can do RAG against that content as well. Super useful for lots of things if you haven't tried this. This is one of those things that non technical users would be doing if only they knew how to do that. You don't need social networks with their AI filtering any more if you have that. That stuff just became obsolete. People just haven't figured that out yet. Including most people that actually do use RSS readers.
Kuyawa 3mo ago
Oh come on, what's next? How Microsoft helped destroy Visual FoxPro? Time goes on, things evolve, or are not monetizable so they're soon forgotten, or replaced, or improved, or... look a new shiny thing!
schappim 3mo ago
Google tried to kill RSS, but it is not dead, in fact it is still a huge part of the Open Web Initiative. There is no performance hit or real resource cost in supporting RSS. If big platforms like Shopify can do it, we can support RSS feeds (and more) too! I've recently added RSS and other alternative representations to our Rails based ecom store[1] and rails makes it super easy[1a]. If you're using Rails it is basically free to add RSS feeds w/ the 'feed' or 'rss' gems[2]. Because of this we provide RSS feeds for everything, including customer orders and their tracking. If you want to support the Open Web Initiative[3], I'd also encourage you to support alternative representations[4] of your content (markdown, CSVs, etc), add support for ActivityPub / Fediverse directly and webhooks to your site/app. Stay open! 1. https://littlebirdelectronics.com.au/help/atom-feeds https://littlebirdelectronics.com.au/help/atom-feeds 2. https://github.com/ruby/rss https://github.com/ruby/rss 3. https://littlebirdelectronics.com.au/open-web https://littlebirdelectronics.com.au/open-web 4. https://guides.rubyonrails.org/v5.0/layouts_and_rendering.html#:~:text=Builder%20(XML%20generator).-,2.2%20Using%20render,-In%20most%20cases https://guides.rubyonrails.org/v5.0/layouts_and_rendering.ht...
tripleee 3mo ago
I'm visiting this exact thread from an RSS feed.. it's there and great to use
- Icarusfoundyou 3mo ago
  Same, using newsboat as my reader.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
ashu1461 3mo ago
Was evolution of email newsletters also one major reason ? Email newsletters are more publisher friendly where they get your data (emails), understand how many people are opening your email, sell subscriptions as well.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  Compared to websites that is an incredible paucity of surveillance data. Just email address? That's all?
  - ashu1461 3mo ago
    Social Media / RSS feed / Email newsletters are things which are just entry points to bring people eventually to the website. Amongst these maybe Email newsletters are more friendly to publishers at least in terms of capturing first party data, so that you can be retargeted easily
deleted 3mo ago
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Animats 3mo ago
This is why Google's browser business needs to be separated from Google's search business, as illegal vertical integration under antitrust law.
topham 3mo ago
Have you seen the spec for RSS? I've vomited better things. The spec is a horrible mash up and seriously needed refinement. It made it easy to kill
ramijames 3mo ago
I'm still so angry about this. RSS was EVERYWHERE and then it just wasn't anymore. It was so useful and such a nice, advertising-free way, of using the internet.
- pmdr 3mo ago
  Nowadays you have to get past Cloudflare to even see headlines.
LIMEVINCE 3mo ago
Google had announced RSS support for Chrome back in 2021 and by the time this article was written in 2023 people were still waiting...
- Kalabasa 3mo ago
  It was actually implemented the same year as that announcement It was Chrome mobile only afaik. And yeah it was also silently killed. I guess the author didn't follow Google enough. https://paavandesign.com/blog/how-to-use-chrome-s-new-follow-button https://paavandesign.com/blog/how-to-use-chrome-s-new-follow...
pipeline_peak 3mo ago
It’s not Google’s responsibility to put RSS into their products. The only point the author made that fits the title is what they did to FeedBurner.
Telaneo 3mo ago
Never forget.
Alien1Being 3mo ago
I miss the days of intelligent discussions on comp.arch. John Mashey would pipe in with old_systems_guy@yahoo.com (John Mashey) "I repeat the old proverb:"Money can buy bandwidth, but latency is forever."" https://yarchive.net/comp/latency.html https://yarchive.net/comp/latency.html Terge Mathiesen with brilliant asides like<Terje.Mathisen "almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching" and with surprising insights into bisection bandwidth. Intelligent discussions now happen on closed forums. My people have moved to mailing lists like arch-general@lists.archlinux.org, or behind authentication firewalls in professional societies. The public internet is now populated by the sort of people I devotedly avoid in real life... These days most of the high quality material I read is on Anna's Archive.
0xDEAFBEAD 3mo ago
Interestingly I think Google's mishandling of RSS created an opening for Substack, which famously allows authors to export their mailing list at any time.
- lylo 3mo ago
  Substack provides RSS too which is nice
encrypted_bird 3mo ago
Fun Fact: Most, if not all, YouTube channels automatically have an RSS feed. That's what I use to follow channels I like. No Google account necessary.
arjie 3mo ago
I think centralized social networks were going to dominate in the end. There's just too much of an advantage to going to HN. There's a lot of content and a user-filter pushes the best stuff to the top in a way that you don't get from other feeds.
hecmmm 3mo ago
To be fair: youtube is one of the very few social media sites that still support RSS.
ChrisArchitect 3mo ago
Some previous discussion: 2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39493770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39493770
croes 3mo ago
Many of the reasons are either a Google service removed providing RSS or Google killed a program/extension consuming RSS. Seems RSS was on Google‘s life support all the time. For instance the Google killing its RSS extension should be such big problem
pss314 3mo ago
EFF recently pointed out to some RSS feed readers as part of below article: Hate “The Algorithm?” RSS Is One of the Tools You’ve Been Looking For https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/hate-algorithm-rss-one-tools-youve-been-looking https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/hate-algorithm-rss-one...
lylo 3mo ago
RSS is a wonder, but given that it removes any opportunity for ads and monetisation you can see why the powers that be at Google might want to kill it. Still, it lives on but only in our geek circles. I run my own RSS reader product (feedgrab.net) and one thing I’ve learned is that there are plenty of sites that serve RSS yet block bots from reading it (ie. RSS crawlers!!). Not sure what needs to happen to make RSS more popular again - there are loads of feed readers and most blog/news sites support it. Maybe it’s just too complicated for the masses? I tried to address this in Feedgrab with a “Discover” approach which I think could help, but I need to put more effort into the directory. Also, let’s not forget social media’s role in killing it.
sylware 3mo ago
Weird. I download RSS from gogol: youtube channel information. Why, because the real evil of gogol and its friends: the whatwg cartel. Their web engines are technical abominations they pushed down the throat of the whole planet, because they actually control all (including the SDK then the computer language). How? They break on purpose interop with small tech web engines, aka noscript/basic HTML. What's really annoying are major authorities unable to regulate that, namely force interop with small tech (network protocols/file formats)... like they know but are careful not to do anything with a significant impact. Well, In my EU country, this is decided at the top level: prime minister and president and that's it: this is a sorta proof that matter is actually really important. Everything started to go wrong from my EU country gov of 2015/2016 since they 'forgot'(ooopsie!) small tech web engines in the 'master document'. There is still hope, once small tech is added again to this 'master document' (web engines, currated subset of network protocols and file formats), interop with small tech web engines (most are EU) will have to be added, in 3 years.
casey2 3mo ago
RSS peaked in 2005 [1] so unless google has been killing it for that long the waning popularity is genuine. Or at least forced by a broader industry push for locked down feeds. [1] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=rss%2520reader&date=all&geo=Worldwide https://trends.google.com/explore?q=rss%2520reader&date=all&...
mvg777 3mo ago
Just use curl to read websites. Not so good for pictures..
blackqueeriroh 3mo ago
There are far, far more RSS feeds today than there were when Google Reader died. Google has not destroyed adoption of RSS feeds at all.
vee-kay 3mo ago
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vee-kay 3mo ago
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frollogaston 3mo ago
Cause and effect seem reversed here. The feed aggregator is the most easily replaceable part of RSS, so if RSS were actually popular, it shouldn't have even mattered that Google killed Reader or those Chrome features. The harder part is getting RSS content, and YouTube is one big hold-out supporting that.
mannycalavera42 3mo ago
Countless times I had a deep sight while thinking (missing!) Google Reader
vee-kay 3mo ago
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12asdasddsa12 3mo ago
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644 points by pudgywalsh 3mo ago

LightBug1 3mo ago

Yeah, fuck Google for all of this. That's my intellectually considered response. Fuck Google.

rpdillon 3mo ago
Upvoted not for your particular phrasing, but because in a sense, this was my experience as well: I wanted to work at Google, and I thought Google was learning how to marry a great business with treating customers well. Killing GReader was the inflection point for me, when Google tipped from "Great!" to "Kinda evil". It's been a slide ever since.
- LightBug1 3mo ago
  Exactly the same trajectory / story this side. Tragic ... but fond of those hopeful / naive days.

monksy 3mo ago

What did Google benefit from killing rss? Seems like that would help engagement on the web in general.

tommek4077 3mo ago
You couldnt put ads that easily in rss feeds.
goldenarm 3mo ago
They killed greader and RSS to push Google+, which was a brilliant decision.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
danesparza 3mo ago
Ad revenue.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
InsideOutSanta 3mo ago
It's a decentralized solution in a world where google wants everything to go through google.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  They could've added a Google-only feed type to Reader and encouraged authors to migrate to it using EEE. This is exactly what they tried to do with Usenet via Google Groups. (Google is now banned from Usenet)
waqasx 3mo ago
Subscribing to RSS creates a p2p web over http. It cuts out the middleman. Who is the biggest middleman of the internet?

betenoire 3mo ago

Google Reader going away felt like the beginning of the end the internet as I knew it. I miss websites

danesparza 3mo ago
I'm still bitter about Google Reader going away. I endorse this sentiment.
- gertlex 3mo ago
  Me too, but there were some replacements that made me happy because they fixed some irk with google's version. (I think I used Commafeed?) I eventually got away from subscribing to like 50 webcomics (all I used RSS for... most other stuff was too high-volume, and I liked reading everything in my feed, iirc) though and stopped using an RSS feed altogether.
- fsflover 3mo ago
  What prevents you from using RSS now? Outsourcing your RSS feed to a megacorp sounds like a horrible idea.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    Who do you outsource yours to, or do you read with curl?
    - al_borland 3mo ago
      I use NetNewsWire. It’s free, open-source, and explicitly says not to send money. > First thing: don’t send money. This app is written for love, not money. :) https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/blob/main/Technotes/HowToSupportNetNewsWire.markdown https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/blob/main/T...
      - fsflover 3mo ago

EtienneDeLyon 3mo ago

[dead]

bakemawaytoys 3mo ago

Google’s obviously fake excuse for killing their RSS reader (declining usage) was especially maddening at the time because they were pushing Google+ - which _nobody_ used.

firefax 3mo ago
It was a great example of being evil -- they reduced user choice while pushing an inferior product.
- InsideOutSanta 3mo ago
  And then killed it too. They killed a tool people loved to promote a tool people didn't want to adopt, and in the end both ended up dead.
  - galaxyLogic 3mo ago
    And killing G+ killed a community. I lost many could be real-friends, whom I've never heard from since. That if anyting was Evil, killing a community.
    - firefax 3mo ago
      When I used it, it was popular among folks who would do photography as a hobby when attending academic conferences. Tom Anderson liked one of my landscape photos, which briefly made me popular with the crew who'd roll into gallery showings for the wine and cheese. (This was back before Instagram got acquired by Facebook and Obama let Putin take Crimea and Xi Jingping scoop up rare earth mineral rights in Africa.)
  - leoc 3mo ago
    The final irony is that if they'd just maintained G+ a bit better and kept it around after 2018 it's likely they'd eventually have had a decent chance to pick up a number of waves of unhappy people leaving Facebook or Twitter. But, ceterum censeo: while Vic Gundotra may have been the main force behind G+ it's important to emphasise that, as usual, the buck stops with Google's Class B overlords Page and Brin personally. If they were the decent people and responsible stewards they were originally promoted as then the Google+ debacle would not have happened, or certainly not in the way it did.

shevy-java 3mo ago

This is the Company of Pure Evil. Whatever it touches, it destroys - excluding adMoney. That's its only soul. What I have also noticed is that people are no longer happy to say "I worked at Google". It's now more a career killer (to some extent) than an accelerator. Anyone remember Google+? Nobody used it but Google tried to force-abuse people into using it.

AlexAplin 3mo ago

Feeds still have a lot of inertia, at least. Most blogs generate them out of the box, and Wordpress being as predominant as it still is means you can still find them even where you don't expect to. Even social media profiles can compress into feeds with a little help from solutions like Nitter (or in Bluesky's case, offered natively). What I think is really missed is the social component that Reader had, which you still can't really find even with the variety of great readers that came in its wake. I know I will probably just migrate them to RSSHub when the time calls, but YouTube's channel and playlist feeds have been such a great way to follow a large number of creators. I'm still holding my breath for the day they unceremoniously stop working.

mattsimpson 3mo ago

You never know what will be someone's straw-that-broke-the-camels-back moment, but this was it for me. Nothing in this post was new news, but despite that, seeing it written down in one place made me realize just the type of person, I mean company, that you are and what you really want, Google. For too long I've been holding on to the "do no evil" person, I mean company, that you once were. But now it's clear to me... you're a toxic friend. We've been drifting apart for years, but now it's official... we're breaking up. I'm sure there's a person, I mean company, out there for me. One that will treat me right, be good to me, and respect me as a person and I'm going to find it.

glenstein 3mo ago
Agree. It was the watershed moment that represented the break from "don't be evil", a cheeky slogan that was remarkably effective at conveying a sense of what they were about by talking about what they were trying not to be.

renegat0x0 3mo ago

i still use feeds often https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-feeds https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-feeds often using my crawling server because rss are often protected against bots https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy

GrayHerring 3mo ago

I think the core issue is that it is hard to sell why you need an RSS, especially for the average user. It would not be uncommon to meet an IT professional who has at best heard the term, but never really tried to delve further. Sadly by the time the average internet dweller hears of RSS, their mind is already so ingrained in the "usual" browsing experience that anything that is out of the ordinary feels instinctively wrong, even if it clearly has multiple merits.

carlosjobim 3mo ago
I don't think the average person has to be taken into account all the time. There are millions of companies providing products and services which the average person has no interest in. Most books and music has no appeal to the average person, neither do most sports or hobbies.
- bartread 3mo ago
  > I don't think the average person has to be taken into account all the time. This needs to be said louder and more often whenever this "average person" argument is trotted out. Except for the very largest technology businesses, like the FAANGs of this world, relatively few technology companies are offering products and services aimed at the "average person". No business I've ever worked for has had the "average person" as their customer. They're all aiming for particular market segments and positioning their products and services to meet the needs of those market segments. I spent a lot of time working on software developer tools that were only of interest to software developers working on the Microsoft stack, for example. Java, C++, and Python developers wouldn't have known or cared about these tools and that was just fine. So, like you, I couldn't give two hoots what the "average person" thinks of RSS, whether they find it useful, whether they understand it, or whether they've even heard of it. Whereas there are in fact loads of people who aren't sat on the average (whatever that means) who do find RSS incredibly useful.
frollogaston 3mo ago
I remember in middle school we had to do a preso on a web technology. I chose RSS. Nobody had heard of it before. After seeing my preso, nobody cared. I stopped using it not long after. Think the problem is people don't care enough to put in the time curating a feed.

konsalexee 3mo ago

Just why bother relying on Google products for RSS? I use for the last many years NetNewsWire and have never had any problems reading the news I want to read. For ref: https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire

carlosjobim 3mo ago
And he includes a Safari plugin to get an RSS button back into the interface for easy subscribing (on Mac).
glenstein 3mo ago
I mean you're right, but also Google had one of the legitimately best options at the time and massive visibility and seemingly credible institutional commitment. And it was early to a scene of web based always online RSS readers when before that they were typically desktop-based. And on desktop portability was achievable but not as convenient. With reader it was nearly effortless. While it was definitely possible to use alternatives, it effectively became king of the mountain which gave it the power to deal a punishing blow to RSS once they pulled the plug. I will just say it was a very different time and at the time I didn't regard Google as a place that didn't make credible commitments to new products. But big picture I think you're right.
venusenvy47 3mo ago
No Android or Windows availability?
richie_adler 3mo ago
What's the Android option?

smusamashah 3mo ago

When chrome took the stage, it was the only popular browser that didn't display rss feeds XML in a readable way. It still does not to this day.

dabinat 3mo ago

I don’t understand why many sites with news updates / blogs don’t offer an RSS feed. Are they expecting me to keep visiting the site over and over to see if there is new content? They’re guaranteeing I’ll never visit their site again. Perhaps they’re expecting people to subscribe to social media accounts or via email, but those both cost money to reach users. RSS is free.

basilikum 3mo ago
RSS is a free way to reach almost no one.
- fsflover 3mo ago
  RSS is a free way to reach content genuinely created for users, not for profit.
tombert 3mo ago
I've used it on every blog I've ever built (https://blog.tombert.com/index.xml https://blog.tombert.com/index.xml) because it's super easy to set up, but I really don't know anyone who uses RSS in any serious capacity. That said, stuff like BBC actually does maintain an RSS feed: https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml
mococa 3mo ago
Ironically HN don’t have feed…
- orzi 3mo ago
  Not true. https://news.ycombinator.com/rss https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
- tripleee 3mo ago
  hnrss.org
mathieudombrock 3mo ago

grigio 3mo ago

RSS is still alive yarr is fantastic

glaslong 3mo ago
thanks for the rec, had not heard of yarr

amazingamazing 3mo ago

RSS was never going to work anyway due to lack of monetization. If this is not true you would still see them today. See everyone posting archive paywall bypassing links on every opportunity here, lol. There is no incentive for a news site to support RSS.

8organicbits 3mo ago
I use RSS specifically because the people who publish via RSS are not trying to monetize their content.
- amazingamazing 3mo ago
  Yup, and that’s why it would never be mainstream.

tim-projects 3mo ago

Facebook IMO was more culpable.

throwaway63467 3mo ago

The Internet in the early 2000s felt a little more special as compared to today, when 99.999 % of content is locked in a handful of walled gardens. I mean sure everything we had then is still possible but let’s be honest everything about the web is fine tuned to deliver ads to our eyeballs, browsers, operating systems and even protocols are being designed with ad delivery in mind. Even the privacy friendly browsers just exist to serve ads when I think about it. Kind of sad really, but I guess you could be happy as it’s so big now and there’s so much to do. Just makes you wonder what stuff would thrive if ads didn’t exist. As of now every niche thing that gets successful will be invariably pulled into the ad ecosystem as it’s very hard to say no to money. RSS wasn’t in the interest of the big platforms as it’s decentralized and there’s no good way to deliver ads through it, simple as that.

user3939382 3mo ago
> the privacy friendly browsers just exist to serve ads when I think about it Not LibreWolf. I’m also a fan of ungoogled-chromium, those are my two daily browsers.
mathieudombrock 3mo ago
What I don't understand about the "RSS can't support ads" argument is that most of my RSS feeds don't actually let me read the article. Just a headline and a snippet at most. So if I want to actually read the article I'm going to have to load their page.
- dhosek 3mo ago
  I’ve encountered feeds that do this and I tend to not keep those subscriptions long. That said, some feeds often have content that doesn’t present well in my feed reader and I’ll end up clicking to view the web presentation What I miss is that back when Safari had RSS built in was I used to just open all the new articles in tabs from an RSS list in my bookmark bar. This is the experience I really would like to recover, being able to just get a set of tabs that represent new posts at sites that I want to follow. Maybe I’ll vibe code this for myself now that I’ve given in and turned to the dark side with Claude.

jll29 3mo ago

Let's make sure Ladybird will have good RSS and Atom feed support, then that'll settle things.

mococa 3mo ago

Not sure if true, but said thousands times on HN. The reason to kill google reader was some trouble upgrading dependencies on it (borg)

ralfd 3mo ago

That is stupid ranting. RSS (and Atom) were too nerdy and the mainstream did and does not care for it. Google did not „destroy“ it

firasd 3mo ago

I think the real issue is that the 'hobbyist web' is dead because there is no distribution Let's say you want to post about 'best way to clean your car windshield'. Why would you post it on a blog when nobody will read it when the TikTok algo will at least give you a pity test to a few hundred people So all that's left is Reddit and social media and the short form video apps (and Youtube) The other part of course is Google itself won't rank mypersonalblog .com/i-found-a-cool-way-to-clean-windshields So there's a doom loop... the supply of potential independent sites can't connect to audience demand, the audience is not being funneled to indie sites anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And now Reddit gets to make much dinero out of selling access for AI training cause that's the only place organic discussion happens at scale

lylo 3mo ago
I wouldn’t say it’s dead. Rather, niche. IndieWeb blogging products are alive and well. Google definitely scrapes and ranks (my blog gets good juice) and there are and increasing number of aggregators like Kagi small web, bubbles.town, ooh.directory.

salynchnew 3mo ago

I mean, Facebook acquiring FriendFeed felt at least as bad as Google shutting down Google Reader.

fiatpandas 3mo ago

It makes me think if YouTube’s subscription feed will meet the same fate as RSS. It’s basically RSS for YouTube, in the sense that it’s a chronological feed of channels you directly follow. It just seems too useful and un-derived to remain a Google-maintained feature for the long term.

cft 3mo ago
No, because it's not cross platform, it doesn't take you outside of a Google product

logn 3mo ago

And they shut down Google Podcasts, migrating it to YouTube Music. The podcast ecosystem is open and RSS-based. YouTube Music is closed.

jillesvangurp 3mo ago
Fun fact, youtube channels have proper Atom feeds that you can subscribe to from most feed readers out there. Here's @realcountbinface's feed: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UClAxTtZvmP5yyBTiWj-6vhw https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UClAxTtZ...

orzi 3mo ago

Don't forget Mozilla removing Live Bookmarks (RSS feeds showed up directly in your bookmarks menu) and RSS feed subscriptions in Firefox 64. https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-product-support-for-rss-atom-feeds/ https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-prod...

culi 3mo ago
Did any other browser ever have this?
- orzi 3mo ago
  I do not think so. It was such a GOOD feature. Imagine opening your browser and you had all your news instantly in your bookmark under address bar. I loved Firefox for this. But, thankfully, you can have almost the same thing with Livemarks extension.
- throwawsy7273 3mo ago
  Opera used to have a built in RSS reader that was better in my opinion. Some of the people behind Opera has built Vivaldi, which also contains an RSS reader. I haven't used it myself, but it looks promising.
  - culi 3mo ago
    Seems risky to rely on a browser as your RSS reader. I know you could always export your OPML file but not every reader seems to import/export that spec correctly
- deleted 3mo ago
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TiredOfLife 3mo ago
Somebody used Live Bookmarks?
- sunaookami 3mo ago

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gkoberger 3mo ago

Okay bear with me here. We blame the RSS aggregators for the death, which is very fair. But I don't know if blog writers ever supported RSS, either. With RSS, your words are read, which is great. But you lose the ability to control the feel of the post... the best blogs have a vibe where the medium is at least large portion of the message. A pg essay would feel wrong in a chunk serif font, and I've read blogs that have used interactivity to great effect. RSS also kills monetization, since you can't have ads or push users to sign up. I would love to see a platform (mobile would be great for this) that let the creator control the design and maybe even levels of monetization. (Some could argue I'm somewhat describing Medium or Substack, although I don't think they quite hit it for me.) I could never get into RSS. I theoretically loved it as a concept, but I missed "feeling" the vibe the author was going for.

adolph 3mo ago
> lose the ability to control the feel of the post. Agreed, rss was popular with people who wanted to decrease noise. > RSS also kills monetization, since you can't have ads This was the killer and the dumb part, because it could, but monetization sofar means integration with all the bad parts of the Internet that desire to track people.
- colesantiago 3mo ago
  So what is the solution here other than ads? Most people who use RSS, use it because they don't want to go to a website (filled with ads) and they want content 100% for free.
  - throwawsy7273 3mo ago
    I have a feeling that it used to be much more valuable to send users to your site in the past, than today where a lot of traffic comes from search/ads/social media. Perhaps it is time to revisit a distribution model, where the full content of the article is available for paid users inside the reader itself. The RSS reader would require a subscription and pay RSS feed providers a share of the subscription price. A sort of distributed spotify model.

Xracke 3mo ago

With integration of AI , RSS feeds is the future

jillesvangurp 3mo ago
If you are already using agentic tools, making them crawl and summarize the news with some RSS feeds is super useful. If you use a vector database to store your feeds, you can do RAG against that content as well. Super useful for lots of things if you haven't tried this. This is one of those things that non technical users would be doing if only they knew how to do that. You don't need social networks with their AI filtering any more if you have that. That stuff just became obsolete. People just haven't figured that out yet. Including most people that actually do use RSS readers.

Kuyawa 3mo ago

Oh come on, what's next? How Microsoft helped destroy Visual FoxPro? Time goes on, things evolve, or are not monetizable so they're soon forgotten, or replaced, or improved, or... look a new shiny thing!

schappim 3mo ago

Google tried to kill RSS, but it is not dead, in fact it is still a huge part of the Open Web Initiative. There is no performance hit or real resource cost in supporting RSS. If big platforms like Shopify can do it, we can support RSS feeds (and more) too! I've recently added RSS and other alternative representations to our Rails based ecom store[1] and rails makes it super easy[1a]. If you're using Rails it is basically free to add RSS feeds w/ the 'feed' or 'rss' gems[2]. Because of this we provide RSS feeds for everything, including customer orders and their tracking. If you want to support the Open Web Initiative[3], I'd also encourage you to support alternative representations[4] of your content (markdown, CSVs, etc), add support for ActivityPub / Fediverse directly and webhooks to your site/app. Stay open! 1. https://littlebirdelectronics.com.au/help/atom-feeds https://littlebirdelectronics.com.au/help/atom-feeds 2. https://github.com/ruby/rss https://github.com/ruby/rss 3. https://littlebirdelectronics.com.au/open-web https://littlebirdelectronics.com.au/open-web 4. https://guides.rubyonrails.org/v5.0/layouts_and_rendering.html#:~:text=Builder%20(XML%20generator).-,2.2%20Using%20render,-In%20most%20cases https://guides.rubyonrails.org/v5.0/layouts_and_rendering.ht...

tripleee 3mo ago

I'm visiting this exact thread from an RSS feed.. it's there and great to use

Icarusfoundyou 3mo ago
Same, using newsboat as my reader.

deleted 3mo ago

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ashu1461 3mo ago

Was evolution of email newsletters also one major reason ? Email newsletters are more publisher friendly where they get your data (emails), understand how many people are opening your email, sell subscriptions as well.

inigyou 3mo ago
Compared to websites that is an incredible paucity of surveillance data. Just email address? That's all?
- ashu1461 3mo ago
  Social Media / RSS feed / Email newsletters are things which are just entry points to bring people eventually to the website. Amongst these maybe Email newsletters are more friendly to publishers at least in terms of capturing first party data, so that you can be retargeted easily

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Animats 3mo ago

This is why Google's browser business needs to be separated from Google's search business, as illegal vertical integration under antitrust law.

topham 3mo ago

Have you seen the spec for RSS? I've vomited better things. The spec is a horrible mash up and seriously needed refinement. It made it easy to kill

ramijames 3mo ago

I'm still so angry about this. RSS was EVERYWHERE and then it just wasn't anymore. It was so useful and such a nice, advertising-free way, of using the internet.

pmdr 3mo ago
Nowadays you have to get past Cloudflare to even see headlines.

LIMEVINCE 3mo ago

Google had announced RSS support for Chrome back in 2021 and by the time this article was written in 2023 people were still waiting...

Kalabasa 3mo ago
It was actually implemented the same year as that announcement It was Chrome mobile only afaik. And yeah it was also silently killed. I guess the author didn't follow Google enough. https://paavandesign.com/blog/how-to-use-chrome-s-new-follow-button https://paavandesign.com/blog/how-to-use-chrome-s-new-follow...

pipeline_peak 3mo ago

It’s not Google’s responsibility to put RSS into their products. The only point the author made that fits the title is what they did to FeedBurner.

Telaneo 3mo ago

Never forget.

Alien1Being 3mo ago

I miss the days of intelligent discussions on comp.arch. John Mashey would pipe in with old_systems_guy@yahoo.com (John Mashey) "I repeat the old proverb:"Money can buy bandwidth, but latency is forever."" https://yarchive.net/comp/latency.html https://yarchive.net/comp/latency.html Terge Mathiesen with brilliant asides like<Terje.Mathisen "almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching" and with surprising insights into bisection bandwidth. Intelligent discussions now happen on closed forums. My people have moved to mailing lists like arch-general@lists.archlinux.org, or behind authentication firewalls in professional societies. The public internet is now populated by the sort of people I devotedly avoid in real life... These days most of the high quality material I read is on Anna's Archive.

0xDEAFBEAD 3mo ago

Interestingly I think Google's mishandling of RSS created an opening for Substack, which famously allows authors to export their mailing list at any time.

lylo 3mo ago
Substack provides RSS too which is nice

encrypted_bird 3mo ago

Fun Fact: Most, if not all, YouTube channels automatically have an RSS feed. That's what I use to follow channels I like. No Google account necessary.

arjie 3mo ago

I think centralized social networks were going to dominate in the end. There's just too much of an advantage to going to HN. There's a lot of content and a user-filter pushes the best stuff to the top in a way that you don't get from other feeds.

hecmmm 3mo ago

To be fair: youtube is one of the very few social media sites that still support RSS.

ChrisArchitect 3mo ago

Some previous discussion: 2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39493770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39493770

croes 3mo ago

Many of the reasons are either a Google service removed providing RSS or Google killed a program/extension consuming RSS. Seems RSS was on Google‘s life support all the time. For instance the Google killing its RSS extension should be such big problem

pss314 3mo ago

EFF recently pointed out to some RSS feed readers as part of below article: Hate “The Algorithm?” RSS Is One of the Tools You’ve Been Looking For https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/hate-algorithm-rss-one-tools-youve-been-looking https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/hate-algorithm-rss-one...

lylo 3mo ago

RSS is a wonder, but given that it removes any opportunity for ads and monetisation you can see why the powers that be at Google might want to kill it. Still, it lives on but only in our geek circles. I run my own RSS reader product (feedgrab.net) and one thing I’ve learned is that there are plenty of sites that serve RSS yet block bots from reading it (ie. RSS crawlers!!). Not sure what needs to happen to make RSS more popular again - there are loads of feed readers and most blog/news sites support it. Maybe it’s just too complicated for the masses? I tried to address this in Feedgrab with a “Discover” approach which I think could help, but I need to put more effort into the directory. Also, let’s not forget social media’s role in killing it.

sylware 3mo ago

Weird. I download RSS from gogol: youtube channel information. Why, because the real evil of gogol and its friends: the whatwg cartel. Their web engines are technical abominations they pushed down the throat of the whole planet, because they actually control all (including the SDK then the computer language). How? They break on purpose interop with small tech web engines, aka noscript/basic HTML. What's really annoying are major authorities unable to regulate that, namely force interop with small tech (network protocols/file formats)... like they know but are careful not to do anything with a significant impact. Well, In my EU country, this is decided at the top level: prime minister and president and that's it: this is a sorta proof that matter is actually really important. Everything started to go wrong from my EU country gov of 2015/2016 since they 'forgot'(ooopsie!) small tech web engines in the 'master document'. There is still hope, once small tech is added again to this 'master document' (web engines, currated subset of network protocols and file formats), interop with small tech web engines (most are EU) will have to be added, in 3 years.

casey2 3mo ago

RSS peaked in 2005 [1] so unless google has been killing it for that long the waning popularity is genuine. Or at least forced by a broader industry push for locked down feeds. [1] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=rss%2520reader&date=all&geo=Worldwide https://trends.google.com/explore?q=rss%2520reader&date=all&...

mvg777 3mo ago

Just use curl to read websites. Not so good for pictures..

blackqueeriroh 3mo ago

There are far, far more RSS feeds today than there were when Google Reader died. Google has not destroyed adoption of RSS feeds at all.

vee-kay 3mo ago

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vee-kay 3mo ago

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frollogaston 3mo ago

Cause and effect seem reversed here. The feed aggregator is the most easily replaceable part of RSS, so if RSS were actually popular, it shouldn't have even mattered that Google killed Reader or those Chrome features. The harder part is getting RSS content, and YouTube is one big hold-out supporting that.

mannycalavera42 3mo ago

Countless times I had a deep sight while thinking (missing!) Google Reader

vee-kay 3mo ago

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12asdasddsa12 3mo ago

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