[HN Gopher] Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
___________________________________________________________________
Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
Author : stareatgoats
Score : 668 points
Date : 2024-02-24 18:16 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (openrss.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (openrss.org)
| chrisjj wrote:
| > Oops! Something went wrong... > We seem to be having some
| technical difficulties. Hang tight.
| garciasn wrote:
| https://archive.is/LzFN0
| ooterness wrote:
| I've never forgiven them for shutting down Google Reader. Never
| again. Self-hosted open source software for life.
| sharperguy wrote:
| It was the perfect execution of Microsoft's "embrace, extend
| and destroy" tactic. Another example was ditching XMPP support
| in google chat / hangouts.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| As well as disabling Usenet groups readership.
| medstrom wrote:
| 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/ and hook up a NNTP
| client.
| doubled112 wrote:
| Google Reader triggered my self-hosting, limited Google usage
| habits, so I owe them one!
| theturtletalks wrote:
| Honestly, HN triggered my self-hosting from all the stories
| of people getting fucked over by proprietary software over
| the years.
| ewoijfawoifj wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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
| haunter wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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
| rakoo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| A GOOG free existence is good for the soul.
| kyrra wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I wonder how many people maintain Gmail...
| lbhdc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| harles wrote:
| I was at Google during the reader shutdown. It was absolutely
| a top down decision and not a lack of support due to
| incentives. The execs tried to frame it as an infra
| problem/cost of migration, but neither myself nor any of my
| coworkers believed that at the time.
|
| It was very telling during TGIF that week when Larry and
| Sergey skipped literal pages worth of top questions about it
| and refused to give direct answers as to why it was shut
| down.
|
| The Reader shutdown coupled with Google+ reaching its
| tendrils into every product ("hey, real identities are great
| for YouTube users!") at the time convinced me "don't be evil"
| may have been a goal, but "don't miss out on profit" was a
| requirement.
| kyrra wrote:
| Can we blame Vic still? (He obviously convinced Larry and
| Sergey)
| from-nibly wrote:
| That's the problem though isn't it. Google doesn't want to
| maintain stuff otherwise they would incentivize it. Classic
| "The purpose of the system is what it does"
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| This raises questions (that you probably can't answer, but
| still) about why Google doesn't have a "maintenance
| subsidiary" playbook, where instead of killing a project off,
| they _spin_ it off, with a bucket of cash to last that
| project 3 years, after which they 'll have to have figured
| out their own monetization plan (or open source transition)
| while still having access to everything Google because it'd
| just be another Alphabet-owned company.
|
| Not every engineer wants to live the fast-paced "create and
| move on" life, there are _so_ many skilled engineers who
| would happily take the lower salary, but also lower-pressure,
| maintenance jobs.
|
| If a project makes a million bucks under Google, that doesn't
| even remotely push the needle and it gets shut down. If a 5
| man subsidiary makes a million bucks, that's a million bucks.
| Foster that?
| titanomachy wrote:
| It's not necessarily straightforward or cheap to migrate a
| living product to open-source land. Backend services at
| Google are built using proprietary frameworks and
| infrastructure for which no equivalent exists out in the
| real world. They could help people out a bit by open-
| sourcing the web front-end, but that's substantial work and
| you're still a long way from having a working clone of the
| product.
|
| EDIT: I see I misread your comment and you're talking about
| keeping it on Google infra but separating it for accounting
| purposes. It's an interesting idea but I don't see why it
| would fundamentally change the viability of the product.
| Also, there's an ongoing maintenance cost to having more
| products on shared infra. If you're the team that runs the
| global distributed relational db (for example), or
| maintains the C++ discrete optimization library, it's much
| simpler to support two products that make a billion each
| rather than 2,000 subtly different use-cases each making a
| million each. Not to mention costs incurred by non-
| engineering departments (marketing, accounting, legal).
| ashvardanian wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| the pendulum of choice
| RexM wrote:
| I want an easy way to find these quality sources.
| arromatic wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure every site on this directory has RSS:
|
| http://ooh.directory/
|
| Not the complete answer, but a part of it.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Seems like this would be a good feature for Kagi search if
| it isn't there already?
| lonk11 wrote:
| 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 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/
|
| Those are:
|
| - https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/ - the original
| blog
|
| - 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 - HN links
| that got more than 1000 points
|
| - https://lobste.rs/rss - submissions to Lobste.rs
|
| - 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), 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/ then new
| posts from Simon Willison will be shown above other links
| from, say, 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.
| jseliger wrote:
| There are people like me, who write blogs that routinely
| include links posts. Subscribe to those blogs, check out
| the stories that interest you, and subscribe to those sites
| in turn. I have a couple hundred sites in NetNewsWire.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| There's no "easy way to find quality sources", that's
| mutually exclusive nowadays. Whatever is mainstream and easy
| to find gets automatically gamed through SEO junk,
| advertising, astroturfing, and becomes poor quality again in
| no time. Like how much do you trust CNET and Linus Tech Tips?
|
| The best quality sources are always involving thorough human
| vetting of trusted and impartial people on platforms which
| have higher bar to entry and require some friction to find,
| aka word of mouth.
|
| Which is why curated and moderated user platforms like HN,
| some sub-Reddit, blogs, mailing lists, community forums, are
| so important and also why Google search is just so useless
| nowadays for finding anything other than model number
| datasheets and product online shopping.
| tbatchelli wrote:
| > There's no "easy way to find quality sources", that's
| mutually exclusive nowadays. Whatever is mainstream and
| easy to find gets automatically gamed through SEO junk,
| advertising and astroturfing, and becomes poor quality
| again in no time.
|
| So true, a what unsolvable problem. SEO in particular, and
| greed in general, kills the ability of knowledge networks
| to organically grow, at least past the niche state.
|
| Putting time in building your own network of trusted
| sources pays off handsomely. But it takes time.
| bsdice wrote:
| There is no easy way, because you have to be able to identify
| the greats of a field to find relentless quality. You have to
| become a nerd of greatness, armed with an RSS reader.
| Example: You can probably tell what Jeff Beck, Stefan Hauk,
| Jacob Deraps have in common. Sreten of M539 Restaurations?
| Marco Reps or Shariar of The Signal Path? Igor Bogdanov.
| Chips and Cheese. The Orbital Mechanics Podcast. The War
| Zone. Some post once a year or even less.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Back in '05 when I started self-hosting tt-rss I thought it'd
| be cool to add some "social" features to it. Specifically,
| I'd like to see new feed suggestions from people for whom I
| have followed feeds in-common.
|
| My idea was dismissed by the tt-rss author (and at the time
| and I still had aspirations to submit patches). I gave up on
| submitting patches, forked the code for my personal use, and
| never got around to the "social" idea.
|
| I don't know if mainstream feed readers still do OPML[0]
| exports or not. I'd enjoy seeing OPML files from people whose
| blogs I read.
|
| Actually, I'd like it if people on HN published OPML files.
| Maybe I should. Hmmm...
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPML
| stareatgoats wrote:
| > I don't know if mainstream feed readers still do OPML[0]
| exports or not
|
| Most of the feed readers (at least the open source ones) I
| have seen lately have offered OPML exports.
| t-3 wrote:
| One of the many things I love about seamonkey is that it has
| built-in RSS support and will pop up an icon at the end of
| the URL bar when an RSS feed is defined on a site. Combined
| with the built in RSS/Email/NNTP reader, it makes it very
| convenient to find feeds just by clicking links on sites like
| this one.
| TheCowboy wrote:
| I'd love for RSS to make a comeback but one problem is a lot of
| niche data sources can be on platforms that don't provide a
| public feed, so you have the inclination of companies to put up
| walls in an attempt to capture user attention as a counter
| force.
| crtasm wrote:
| Plus we used to be able to use tools that scraped and turned
| sites into feeds, but now most of the sites I'd like to do
| that on are "protected" by javascript challenges etc.
|
| I will visit your site _more_ if you let me get updates in my
| preferred fashion!
| hot_gril wrote:
| I tried making an app where you repost interesting news onto
| your own sorta-RSS feed, which your followers could then re-
| repost and so on. No global "trending" or visible follower
| counts, just peers, imo the exact right about of social
| networking. But nobody used it.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Try it again
| hot_gril wrote:
| Oh I will at some point. It's been 4 times already.
| from-nibly wrote:
| Sounds like distributed tumblr. I think the world needs that
| really bad right now. Tumblr is going to fail soon it's
| totally zombified as far as the software goes.
|
| But this is basically how Tumblr operates except it's
| centralized.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Erm, it's not distributed though, but it could be. I've
| been told about Tumblr before, but it has popularity
| contests (trending topics, high-profile accounts), which I
| intentionally avoided because it changes the whole thing.
| You follow your IRL friends and that's it.
| noirbot wrote:
| That seems like it presumes that your IRL friends have
| good taste/similar interests though. The reason people
| follow big accounts is because the big accounts often
| have some specific niche of thing they post in that's
| curated in a way that resonates with people. Most of my
| IRL friends maybe only share 1-2 major interests with me.
| My friend who may repost interesting board game news
| would also share things about kayaking or crypto
| investing that I don't care about.
|
| If my IRL friends run into something they think I'd be
| interested in, they'll just send it to me directly.
| What's the value in getting the combined firehose of all
| their reading?
| prox wrote:
| I think there should be two tiers in any account, the
| private space (private spaces where you talk to
| friendgroups) and a public space where you have a rather
| anonymous nickname and which isn't directly connected to
| your private space.
|
| Usually it's one or the other and you need multiple
| accounts (say on Instagram for example)
|
| It feels like businesses figured out accounts and then
| moved on, while I think there is still room for so much
| growth and customization.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Nobody used it? That is indeed the exact right amount of
| social networking.
| eastbound wrote:
| > But nobody used it.
|
| Stats are addictive. They are also the first step towards
| justifying spending time on it.
|
| Have some stats.
| asciimov wrote:
| > I believe the internet has gone full-circle...
|
| One of the most annoying things about the internet is avoiding
| the great enshittification cycle. I want things to be popular
| enough that there is traction but not popular enough that the
| Ad people are salivating to squeeze another dollar out of it.
| AJ007 wrote:
| I think you are right. My usage of RSS was nearly non-existent
| for many years. Now it is daily. I was shocked to find even
| local news sites publishing full articles in their RSS feed.
| Most sites still have feeds.
|
| There is now infinite content available in traditional
| commercial feeds. You just have to accept it is non-
| chronological, non-subscribed noise pollution: Facebook,
| Instagram, Youtube, Twitter, etc. That suddenly makes RSS
| extraordinarily attractive -- perhaps even more so than it was
| 15 years ago.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| RSS was already dead long before Chrome was the market
| leader.
|
| And even if the feed was rendered properly, it's essentially
| useless without an associated extension or website to
| aggregate those feeds.
| geraldyo wrote:
| This is such a good point that I hadn't even realized til just
| now. I'm a pretty tech-savvy user and was never able to really
| figure out how it worked, or at least how to make it work for
| me. Can't imagine the average user's experience!
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Opera (12ish) had a built-in email client where you read the
| RSS feeds.
|
| Oh, and Opera mini had a built-in RSS client too.
| layer8 wrote:
| Microsoft Outlook still has RSS support:
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/subscribe-to-
| an-r... Basically, an RSS feed is represented as an auto-
| populating mail folder. As still mentioned on the page linked
| above, Internet Explorer provided an easy way to subscribe.
| almostnormal wrote:
| Support has been removed from Firefox, but it still exists
| in Thunderbird.
|
| It's not surprising. It seems that many understand RSS more
| as a form of news (like a newsgroup or mailing list) than
| as a form of discovery for web content.
| aulin wrote:
| That's not even remotely what happened. UX was bad because RSS
| was barely tolerated in the ad-driven web that was being
| established. No one had any interest in evolving the UI.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Apple tried. RSS was shoved into every part of OS X at the
| time, and users were still confused about what it even is.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| That would be a compelling argument if the RSS button had
| never been added to websites in the first place.
|
| The UI and UX was left entirely to the website administrator,
| not big tech, and even websites that did not have any
| monetization did not improve the experience for users.
|
| And of course adtech could have invested in RSS to make it
| financially attractive. But they didn't, cause nobody uses
| it.
| xnx wrote:
| Agree. Text on buttons should be verbs. "Subscribe" or "Follow"
| would've been 1000x better than "RSS". Of all the sidequests
| Firefox has put itself on, better supporting RSS would be a
| good one. Mozilla already owns Pocket, so it would be a very
| small jump.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| "RSS" wasn't very common to put on feed buttons. The standard
| RSS icon was normal, including in Firefox (where it would
| display on the URL bar when detected on a site). And commonly
| web pages linking directly to their feed would say something
| along the lines of "subscribe via RSS" or just "subscribe"
| with the icon.
|
| People are definitely used to poking cryptic pictograms on
| contemporary UIs, and RSS clearly gives off an impression of
| something being broadcast.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#/media/File%3AFeed-
| icon.sv...
| hot_gril wrote:
| Being the nerdy little kid I was in the 2000s, I tried getting
| into RSS and even made a presentation in school computer class
| about it... but actually I never really used it. It just wasn't
| fun. So who used it if not me?
| styxfrix wrote:
| me
| crtasm wrote:
| Me, every day for ... a lot of years!
| Zak wrote:
| I had hoped that as more people grew up with computers, the
| share of sophisticated users who would adopt technologies with
| higher inherent complexity would increase. I'm disappointed the
| opposite has happened.
|
| If popular browsers had embraced RSS enthusiastically, it might
| have taken off with mainstream users. There's nothing about the
| protocol that makes it difficult to provide a well-integrated
| experience. Firefox even had a crude built-in reader around the
| time it was the most popular browser, but did not put in the
| effort to create a good UX around it.
| metalrain wrote:
| People reading articles from RSS are not using Google search or
| Google browser, not being monetized by Google Ads. There is a
| reason.
| pdimitar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 20 years ago they launched Google Reader to do exactly that.
| ~10 years ago they killed that, too.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Embrace, extend, extinguish. Not a new thing. If somebody
| still trusts corporations in 2024 then that's on them.
| idatum wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Agreed on all accounts, though it is difficult to argue
| that YouTube is an indispensable service for many goals
| (education included).
| waveBidder wrote:
| the person hosting the RSS can put a preview rather than the
| full content if they want ad revenue
| nordsieck wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Title-only RSS is _so_ much better than email notification.
| troupe wrote:
| I thought the idea behind Google Reader was that they would be
| able to show you ads. They bought Feedburner which was supposed
| to offer an easy way to put Adsense in your feeds, but it never
| really took off.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Same goes for podcasts, which are RSS too, and those are still
| a thing.
| petepete wrote:
| But the ads are baked into the content.
| charcircuit wrote:
| That was also the case for blogs and youtube videos. RSS
| just brought you to the content and the content had ads.
| crtasm wrote:
| If you can bake ads into audio, you can bake them into
| text.
| zilti wrote:
| Barely hanging on by nature of being an open format and Apple
| generously hosting the feed index publicly. But even that
| gets challenged now that most people switch to Spotify to
| listen to "podcasts" there - and those are completely siloed.
| popcalc wrote:
| You'll be happy to hear that Spotify recently got rid of
| that paywall and you can now find all of their original
| podcasts including J Rogan on Apple Podcasts etc. Must have
| been a tax write-off?
| endisneigh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Typically, when a page refers to the feed in an appropriate
| way, you can add it to your reader directly, without needing
| to extract the URL by hand.
| zilti wrote:
| Unfortunately, many pages supporting RSS don't advertise it
| via meta tags anymore
| nolist_policy wrote:
| And yet RSS works perfectly fine on Youtube.
| mh- wrote:
| Until it doesn't.
| almostnormal wrote:
| Access to feeds is not considered in the number of
| subscribers for the content creator, isn't it?
| 23B1 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| crtasm wrote:
| OpenRSS has a bug(?) which results in empty feeds if you send the
| useragent of https://pypi.org/project/feedparser/
|
| If they're reading, please just offer normal RSS URLs without
| trying to do any detection or cleverness.
| bhickey wrote:
| Vic Gundotra killed Reader because he thought it was a competitor
| to Google+.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Reader competed with G+ like television competes with AM
| radio. Sure, people have a finite amount of attention, but
| these aren't replacements.
| nerdjon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Feedbin is so great. Easy filtering, can process newsletters,
| etc etc. Very reasonably price. Highly recommended.
| salamanderman wrote:
| My recollection when trying to find a Google Reader alternative
| was that there was no free alternative. Everything at the time
| that I found had been a premium alternative to Reader before it
| shut down.
| markx2 wrote:
| Newsblur was offering a decent alternative free layer.
|
| https://blog.newsblur.com/2013/03/17/three-months-to-
| scale-n...
|
| https://blog.newsblur.com/2014/03/13/google-reader-
| announced...
| gitonup wrote:
| I haven't used it in a while but https://theoldreader.com/
| seemed like a fairly drop-in replacement for Google Reader.
| nerdjon wrote:
| Feedly is free depending on how many feeds you need.
|
| But that is likely part of why reader shut down. Depending on
| how often it's pulling and how often you are reading, that
| isn't free to run.
|
| Especially if you don't even use their app to read your
| feeds, you may never be able to see an ad.
|
| Would rather pay for it personally so I know it's there.
| vdaea wrote:
| Paying does not guarantee anything. It does not guarantee a
| more reliable service, it does not guarantee that they will
| hear you out when they change a feature or the design,
| ruining it, and it does not guarantee it won't shut down
| tomorrow. They will refund you, and you will have your
| money back, but you will have no service, and you will be
| back in square one.
| nerdjon wrote:
| I mean... sure. Even paid services eventually shut down.
|
| But I have far more confidence in something at least
| making sense for the company to keep running if it is
| something I pay for vs something that is just given away
| for free.
|
| If I am relying on an online service, while paying for it
| doesn't guarantee it being up it's a safer bet than a
| free one.
| crtasm wrote:
| Netvibes was/is free, Google Reader didn't work nearly as
| well for me when I tried it.
| TheKarateKid wrote:
| Your mentality of expecting everything to be free is why
| there are no alternatives, and also why Google Reader shut
| down. Building and maintaining these services isn't free, so
| when people don't want to pay for it there's no incentive to
| actually make or maintain such service.
| puttycat wrote:
| Feedly is indeed great, I just wish they'd stop trying to add
| AI and automated topic highlighting which clearly doesn't work.
| jseliger wrote:
| _I just wish they 'd stop trying to add AI and automated
| topic highlighting which clearly doesn't work._
|
| A bunch of companies are also doing or attempting to do AI
| and automated trial finding for clinical trials, and that's
| not working either:
| https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/please-be-dying-but-
| not-.... Fortunately, the stakes are low, since patients who
| don't find the right clinical trial for cancers will only
| die.
| orzig wrote:
| Do you think the solution is better software, or is real
| blocker on the business/policy/cultural/incentives side?
| Inspired by that series I looked into building a better
| front end for clinical trials.gov but after seeing a few
| organizations try similar approaches without (yet) nailing
| it, I became convinced that I'd become one more classic
| naive-technologist story.
|
| But have the existing approaches really missed a low
| hanging solution, even if it's partial and maybe impossible
| to monetize?
| stanislavb wrote:
| Have you tried Lenna.io? I'd guess no, but it could regard
| some of the pains. (Disclosure - a product I work on)
| smsm42 wrote:
| Yeah their AI efforts are weird. It's like they are ashamed
| of "just" making an excellent product for rss, and want to do
| something special but nothing useful, at least for me, came
| out of it do far. TBH, I'm ok with them just being an
| excellent rss reader and will keep paying for it.
| nirav72 wrote:
| I think they're adding lot of these features as incentives
| to entice users to switch to their subscription service.
| Not sure what percentage of their users pay for the
| subscription.
| smsm42 wrote:
| I actually signed up for AI enabled plan out of curiosity
| (I had non AI subscription for years prior). Had to
| downgrade back because it was too annoying and I couldn't
| figure out how to make it stop completely. Whoever inside
| the company is pushing this is not doing them a service.
| nerdjon wrote:
| Feedly seems like a company that is trying anything that will
| stick to get people to subscribe without getting rid of their
| free offering.
|
| Their free plan is likely enough for most people. I know for
| me none of those features matter.
|
| Especially since I just never log into Feedly themselves. I
| just use the Reeder app as my frontend and have gone a couple
| years without logging in. I also just don't change my actual
| feeds much.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| This is a great example of a business built on what should
| not really be a business. There are certain types of things
| that are fundamental to the internet, and trying to sell a
| premium version of that is always an uphill battle.
|
| Imagine that in 2024 I tried to sell you a web browser. One
| that maybe has a slightly cleaner UI or some fancy plugin
| system but ultimately is just a plain old browser. Maybe
| some very small percentage of people would pay for it, but
| most are entirely happy with the free and FOSS choices
| available since the core features of a browser are
| standard.
|
| RSS by all means should be similar: just like ping, cat,
| sh, browsers, email clients, video players, etc. the core
| features are well defined and an open source project should
| be the default choice. If you want something fancy or
| proprietary then sure you should be free to pay for it. But
| I can't imagine wanting to build a company that pays
| salaries around any of this.
|
| There are situations where a person or a team of 2-3 can
| make a lifestyle business out of selling something that I
| have seen referred to as "legacy software" (this doesn't
| mean old, but rather fundamental and "boring", aka the
| Linux kernel). But Feedly competes with its own free
| product and cannot see the forest for the trees.
| smsm42 wrote:
| Not only Feedly. When greader was shut down, there was at least
| half dozen other apps, some of which were pretty good. I liked
| feedly the most so I never checked the rest but I know they
| weren't unique.
| sinanisler wrote:
| thanks to WordPress
| blihp wrote:
| Yes, there were 2-3 other (mostly web-based) services that
| stepped in with Feedly being the main one. However, by that
| time the popular client-side tools had been pretty much been
| wiped out due to years of Google's free offering. For some of
| us, that's what killed the user-facing RSS market. (I was so
| fed up I ended up cobbling together my own solution... far from
| anything polished but I'm happier with it than I was with any
| of the offerings available at the time)
| nerdjon wrote:
| I never looked at clients other than the Reeder app (not
| google reader), but that is iOS and Mac only.
|
| Even supports local pulling (not sure if it always did
| though, never thought to check until now).
|
| I imagine that didn't help Google's situation either. Here I
| was using their servers and never going to the website except
| to do the occasional subscription modification.
| dsaravel wrote:
| I went years without consuming RSS until I discovered Fraidy
| Cat[1] here at Hacker News.
|
| 1. https://fraidyc.at
| vdaea wrote:
| >I may be misremembering but didn't Feedly step up very
| quickly? Even offering the ability to easily migrate everything
| over.
|
| Other rss readers were either much different (think cards
| design, or too much whitespace everywhere, or whatever), or
| they had premium plans they were telling you about all the
| time, or they had premium plans and a low limit of rss feeds
| you could add, or they had no mobile apps, or the mobile apps
| required premium, or whatever.
|
| Nothing was like google reader: free, information-dense, and
| reliable. When google reader was killed, rss died for me.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I use FreshRSS and it has pretty powerful tools to scrape
| content from sites without an RSS feed using XPath. Highly
| recommend for self-hosters.
| treflop wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| RSS feeds do not need to provide the full article text. On
| commercial sites, they usually only provide a summary.
| davidcbc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You just manually go through a long list of sites
| daily/monthly/yearly?
| davidcbc wrote:
| Not everyone is you and you're ignoring the fact that some
| people do subscribe to those feeds and will drive traffic
| to your site for a completely negligible effort even if you
| personally wouldn't.
|
| Your original post was about why you, as a website owner,
| would provide an RSS feed. Not why you personally would use
| an RSS feed
| ghaff wrote:
| RSS wasn't about monetization. While there were ways you could
| game it, it really wasn't for content providers who wanted to
| make money. There were and are some/many of them but you
| basically weren't the audience.
| treflop wrote:
| Well I don't think there is any audience because very few
| sites had/have any decent RSS feeds.
|
| Well except maybe tech sites, but most people are not into
| tech sites.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _Why would I provide a feed that earned me no money?_
|
| Because (unless you have infinite greed?) at some point in your
| life you will have enough money, and then you might wish to
| provide a feed for other reasons?
| treflop wrote:
| Ah yes, most people running sites are rolling in dough,
| especially journalism...
| asim wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| There are people who say JSON is better:
| https://www.jsonfeed.org/
|
| I'm not sure I agree.
| zilti wrote:
| Oh no...
| zilti wrote:
| ActivityPub is a pretty terrible standard really
| janmarsal wrote:
| Any good RSS feed for RSS feeds?
| crtasm wrote:
| 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
| josefresco wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Google is the only one that spams me, actually. Funny how
| they are "good" at filtering incoming spam but don't care
| about egress.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| My biggest GOOG RSS surprise is that they've not killed youtu.be
| RSS feeds for channels.
| javajosh wrote:
| 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.)
| mogoh wrote:
| Could ActivityPub replace RSS even though it is not intended to
| do so?
| kevincox wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| ActivityStreams is the closest counterpart to RSS, whereas
| ActivityPub is the "push" standard that's ultimately built on
| ActivityStreams.
| hkt wrote:
| 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.
| BeetleB wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| WA wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ttymck wrote:
| > Would I think positively about a service trying to monetize
| email?
|
| I think quite positively about my experience with fastmail
| downut wrote:
| 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.
| zilti wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| expazl wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| That's different to Google serving ads
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Then once they had everyone onboard reader and there
| weren't really anyone competing
|
| There may not have been profit driven companies competing and
| that detail is mostly irrelevant. There was no shortage of
| alternatives like software running on your computer and self
| hosting options.
|
| RSS wasn't designed to help companies make money. The demise
| of Google's competitors is irrelevant to the long term health
| of RSS. It was thriving before such companies tried to make
| money off of it.
|
| People who didn't use Google Reader were not at all impacted
| by its demise. The RSS experience remained the same. It's
| silly to claim Google played a role in killing it.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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. ;)
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| What really killed RSS was Facebook and MySpace.
| 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.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| (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 wrote:
| I'm still bitter about this
| meindnoch wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I think that the removal of the plus operator had a much
| greater negative effect on Google.
| jijijijij wrote:
| Yes. Google Reader shut down, three years later Harambe is
| dead. The rest is history.
|
| It all started there.
| phailhaus wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| suddenclarity wrote:
| iOS and OS X had Reeder back then, which used Google Reader
| as an engine and then released a new version that stored
| the data locally. That's how I primarily used Google Reader
| back then because the user experience was so good. For
| other platforms, five-year-old Feedly was very mature and
| the platform I'm using today since I left Apple (Feedly
| Classic to be specific since they made their "new" app
| awful).
|
| To summarize, yes. There were plenty of mature alternatives
| and a migration was easily done by exporting and importing
| a file. Feedly supposedly got 3 million new users in the
| two weeks that followed Google's shutdown.
|
| A far bigger issue than Google shutting down was the fact
| that people had moved on to Facebook and Twitter while
| newspapers created closed ecosystems with their own apps.
| Jason Kottke, then one of the world's most popular blogs,
| declared blogs to be dead.
| tandav wrote:
| Imagine Google removes RSS for YouTube channels
| dctoedt wrote:
| 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/
| charcircuit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| ...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 wrote:
| > 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.
| geor9e wrote:
| 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
| scarface_74 wrote:
| NetNewsWire is great and it's free and open source for iOS.
| gpspake wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Genocidal tendencies, if you ask me.
| IronWolve wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >Even youtube had rss feeds for channels.
|
| It still does!
| 77pt77 wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?{kind}_id={id}
|
| where kind can either be channel or playlist (possibly more).
| smsm42 wrote:
| 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.
| ddmma wrote:
| Feedburner was an amazing way to qualify websites popularity then
| became followers and likes trapped into social media.
| tmaly wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Good thing they're failing at it :)
| mmaunder wrote:
| 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.
| ElonsNightmare wrote:
| shocked pikachu face
| jedberg wrote:
| 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.
| joehx2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| An evolution of RSS should have been the end game of social
| networks.
| steren wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| delduca wrote:
| 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/
| James_K wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| newsblur has a mobile app.
| freediver wrote:
| RSS powers the entire Kagi Small Web initiative. [1]
|
| And we are bringing back the RSS feed indicator in the Orion
| browser. [2]
|
| RSS is not going anywhere!
|
| [1] https://kagi.com/smallweb
|
| [2] https://kagi.com/orion
| jll29 wrote:
| 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).
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