Hacker News Reader

Comment by ducuboy | Hacker News Reader

What about RSS? That offered good performance, was widely adopted and was a real standard working for both publishers and consumers.

Remember who actually killed it? Yeah, that was also Google.. by discontinuing their Reader - a very good tool with lots of users but no revenue. That's how much open standards matter. Too bad @aaronsw is not around anymore, he would have said something about AMP.

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>Remember who actually killed it? Yeah, that was also Google.. by discontinuing their Reader - a very good tool with lots of users but no revenue.

If a single company killing a sigle product could kill RSS, then it wasn't that alive in the first place.

The fact is, after 10 years of RSS being available in blogs, news sites and elsewhere, Reader still had an insignificant number of users in the web scale of things. A few tens of millions (all estimates put it in the low tens, like 20 to 40 millions).

Ok but that still shows how much Google cares about open standards.

And did you just say "few tens of millions" of users is insignificant? How many users are we here on Hacker News again?

>And did you just say "few tens of millions" of users is insignificant?

Yes.

>How many users are we here on Hacker News again?

I'd say well under a million (or around that at most). What does that have to do with anything? Did anybody say that HN has a significant amount of users web-wise?

Slashdot and then Digg, which were both something like 100 times HN in size fell off the side and nobody much cared.

I would say that Hacker News' few hundred thousand users are extremely significant both for YC and web-wise. I really hope we'll not end up with a Facebook-only Internet because that's the only service big enough to keep running.

It's, ironically, a case of the "embrace and extinguish" philosophy that Microsoft was reviled for.

I remember reading posts by several people which said they weren't going to build a RSS reader because they didn't want to compete with Google Reader.. and then they went ahead and killed it.

RSS didn't really "take off" with mainstream users (I guess today's equivalent is Twitter), but it filled an interesting niche.

RSS -> Twitter

Usenet -> many proprietary platforms

IRC -> Slack

XMPP never took off

Many open, interoperable services died off or never took off, but companies built similar services and are enjoying success.

"Some of these parallels are obvious, and even more or less literal: Gmail is IMAP and SMTP, and Google Talk is (or was) XMPP, all on port 80 in the same browser window. Others are more metaphorical. Twitter is IRC on port 80, although one primarily listens to users instead of channels — but listening to channels is still possible, if one uses a client that can follow hashtags, and the syntax is even the same. Dropbox is FTP on port 80. Reddit is Usenet on port 80." https://medium.com/@maradydd/on-port-80-d8d6d3443d9a

Good article, it makes the point I was trying to make better than I did.

As a distributed platform, the internet has failed. The solution is to rebuild the OS and network from the ground up: http//www.urbit.org

Urbit looks cool, but it will not magically make things distributed. What causes centralization are business factors. It's just a lot easier to build a great product if you have a revenue source, which is most easily acquired if you can lock people into paying for your proprietary thing.

Also, it's a lot easier to make good protocol decisions if you don't have to get them published into a standard and deal with the beauracracy etc. If you look at the level of polish in slack vs one of the many previous open source irc clients, the difference is clear. It helps to have money.

I cackled and spat on my screen when I read the /s, well played.

>Reader still had an insignificant number of users in the web scale of things. A few tens of millions

an order of magnitude more than G+

Never really got used to Reader.

G+ I have used a bit. I guess I'm not alone.

Just a data point since it seems to be unreasonably many G+ haters around here.

I was as annoyed as the next person when Google killed Reader but, to be honest, RSS was killed off for typical users way before that when browser manufacturers dropped/hid support for it. I still use RSS every day, as do many of our customers.

Not just browsers, but Facebook and Twitter both killed their RSS feed at some point.

That's much worse than Google killing Reader, because reader is just a reader, you can still switch to a different one. If the source doesn't provide an RSS feed, there's not much you can do.

Indeed, also Google Chrome.

Chrome never had support. RSS support was always (and still is) from extensions.

RSS never was an open standard like you would expect from a real standards organisation, e.g. IETF or W3C.

Because of dominance posturing and fights between the multiple parties involved in the development of RSS, it is a train wreck of ad-hoccery and incompatibilities, and serves as a prime example of how not to do things. https://web.archive.org/web/2004/http://diveintomark.org/arc...

> Remember who actually killed it?

Atom.

This is kind of orthogonal to RSS. AMP and RSS work great together. Your feed reader can detect that the feed item URL has an AMP alternate and chose to display that instead.

How? Multiple <link>-Element as in Atom with special rel-values? Or a link in the already linked HTML page?

There's nothing on that in the Github Wiki and neither on the project page. The superset of HTML is specced, yes, but information on the containing ecosystem is spare.

Yep, we're not done. Being careful with defining this finally because it can basically never be changed. Follow the project for details.

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