Google Groups kills RSS support without notice | Hacker News Reader

Google Groups kills RSS support without notice

theregister.com

319 pointssamizdis128 comments

The most used app on my Android phone is an RSS reader. It has feeds including: Hacker News, the BBC, Reddit, The Register, Computer Weekly, Wired and a couple of retro computer Google groups. The latter stopped updating on 26th July, but everything else gives me all the news and info I want in a single place without having to install numerous dedicated apps or trawl through multiple Web sites - it's just a great app and service.

According to the Play store, the app I use has "100,000+ downloads" which hardly points to a dead ecosystem.

Stupid Google.

i think we all know the usefulness of rss, however google cant monetize it so it must die.

There's no problem in principle to monetising RSS data by sticking ads into the stream. The real problem for Google is (I suspect) that it is a standard protocol, so enables anybody to play, and that means escape from Google's walled garden. In a fit of Apple-envy, and lacking any imagination, Google (and MS) seem to have opted for trying to enforce a walled-garden panopticon as their means to profit, and in that view of the world, RSS -- and, indeed, any other standard protocol -- must die.

RSS isn't easily surveilled. RSS apps download feeds but that doesn't mean an eyeball could have seen any particular item. You could do custom trackable links and charge for clicks, but charging for impressions would be much harder.

Are there other Google ad properties that work that way? (charge only for clicks, not impressions)

I mean if there is an image inside of an item I would assume the RSS reader would optimize for downloading images as needed.

Podcasts are largely distributed via RSS, and it’s a blossoming advertising market.

Some services offer to splice audio segments with “current” ads, so that even older content can bring in new ad revenue, if I remember correctly.

You can do ads with RSS, it’s just not as lucrative because the market is small and harder to sell than standard web properties.

It's not that it "must die", there's just no incentive for Google to keep it around. It's just a cost tagged on to maintenance of Google Groups which can be cost without any major downsides (from Googles perspective).

It's more surprising that they haven't killed Google Groups completely.

Heya would you mind sharing which app you use?

I'm only starting to get into RSS on my PC now after having recently seen the light.

Would be keen to sync this to my phone as well somehow.

Thanks.

I've been happily using (self hosted) ttrss for years. On PC the web interface works well. On my Android phone, I have the app installed (the paid version).

I second that. Very good solution for self-hosting.

I'm selfhosting miniflux (from a raspberry pi) and am just using the web interface. It has been working great from computer, phone and tablet.

+1 for miniflux. The only place where it doesn't work is on my Kindle, whose browser is pretty terrible.

Hmm, guess you found the one place it doesn't work.

Love the Miniflux!! Although I think I pulled something after this latest release lol.

Flym on Android.

> Stupid Google.

They’re not stupid, they just know they can kill RSS and steer people toward more monetizeable things without any repercussions. This is not “stupid”.

> This is not “stupid”

It is malevolent.

And "malevolent" becomes "stupid" if the long term consequences are inadequate to compensate (Carlo Cipolla).

Really hope you are right, that more normal non-tech user will start stop using google and all their services. Whenever a company monopolise product and services is not good for end users.

True. "Evil" might be more appropriate here.

Yeah evil. Definitely agree!!

Google owns youtube, which is by far the biggest website that supports RSS.

The YouTube RSS feeds have been down for extended periods a few times in the last few weeks.

Yes but it keeps going down, and having strange 404s randomly. If this keeps happening, they'll probably just give it the shuv one day.

Which app are you using?

I recommend Inoreader.

NetNewsWire is pretty good if you're in the Apple ecosystem and want something fast and simple.

Reeder + Feedly.

Flym on Android

> According to the Play store, the app I use has "100,000+ downloads" which hardly points to a dead ecosystem.

But that is far away from Google-Scale. Anything under 5-10 million is likely not in googles eye.

But I think the actual problem with google and rss is the isolation of users choice that google seems to dislike. Google is strong on AI-assisting the users. They seem to prefer giving the people tools which guide them and learn the choices of the user, instead of letting the user choose themself. And RSS is a big obstacle for this as it's outside their control.

groups.io still supports them. Yes Google is stupid!!!

Did they remove it due to low usage numbers? Turns out those "few users" are big aggregator scripts and proxies for hundreds, thousands users each :)

Example: https://twitter.com/intenttoship/

Good old data driven decision making.

And this is one of the many reasons why I'd never use Google for anything B2B, or that I have to rely on.

I do tend to automate things in corporate settings in ways which differ from personal use, and I have seen many similar features break or disappear.

Anyone who automated anything based on RSS now has something broken. I bet that's a lot of enterprise use.

    RSS, which stands for either RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, is an open content syndication protocol.

I've never heard of the former usage. Is that some modern re-arrangement of the acronym?

I've always heard the usage "Really Simple Syndication".

Also, mildly https://killedbygoogle.com/ — if this is intentional, it feels like Google has some vendetta against RSS support in their products.

Given that RSS eschewed XML & specifically XML namespaces for so long, the idea that RSS ever would have called itself RDF is hilarious to me.

Part of the whole reason Atom (RFC4287) was began was because embedding content inside RSS was a shit show, a disaster, because while it sort of looked like XML and said xml at the top (maybe), the lack of namespaces meant it wasn't safely extensible & putting rich content inside was a huge mixed bag. RDF on the other hand has always been about flexibility & namespaces, about rich data.

Killedbygoogle.com is a good reference, for sure, but this is kind of higher level anti-internet anti-protocols anti-standardization sabotage. This isn't just abandoned product, this is degrading & reducing what used to be a protocol-centric world of newsgroups to a captive, isolated product.

Oh! The plot thickens! TIL RSS 2.0.1 actually got explicit namespace support! Wikipedia:

> RSS 2.0.1 has the internal version number 2.0. RSS 2.0.1 was proclaimed to be "frozen", but still updated shortly after release without changing the version number. RSS now stood for Really Simple Syndication. The major change in this version is an explicit extension mechanism using XML namespaces

RDF was used early on by a lot of sites before moving to one of the later RSS specs. The Simple in RSS was a reaction to the perceived (and actual) complexity of RDF.

I think it's the other way around; Really Simple Syndication is a backronym - for every other historical explanation, I can't see an acronym like being created in the early days of the internet. Once it took hold/potential realised, it needed to be translated to less technical folks.

There was a schism in the RSS 0.x days. 2.0 is Really Simple Syndication and has a looser approach; RSS 1.0 is RDF Site Summary and tightens things up. Really, if you’re going to generate feeds, you should use Atom or JSON Feed these days. Too much baggage with RSS that makes it difficult to parse unambiguously.

And Atom feeds are the one of the two with widest support so if one is going to pick just one format, then pick that over JSON Feed.

RSS has a complicated history, but the versions you’re most likely most familiar with are maintained by the RSS Advisory Board and state definitively: “Its name is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication.”

That said, this is in fact a backronym created when Dave Winer rolled RSS 2.0 out. Check out this link[1] and ask yourself, what happened to RSS 1.0? You could start at the RSS Wikipedia page to investigate further if you’re interested.

[1] https://www.rssboard.org/rss-change-notes

Perhaps renaming it to something other than "Really Simple" is the first step toward the people paid from online ads and web commercialisation to start adding complexity.

Surprised I never saw anyone try to inject ads into RSS feeds. Or maybe they did and I never saw it.

Also, the idea of "syndication" seems counter to Google's survival. If we can discover the contents of web pages through automated means via RSS, then the need for people to manually submit "searches" to a single company who "crawls" the web and provides "search" seems less vital. How much data about users can be collected from RSS feed subscriptions. If it does not produce lots of data about users, then it's not worth much to many "tech" companies, including Google. Users can navigate from RSS feeds directly to website pages, bypassing these "tech" middleman companies.

People renamed RDF Site Summary to Really Simple Syndication actually. :)

In ads in RSS feeds is a thing; Google AdWords supports it, as do many others. https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/9189557?hl=en

Oops. Guess I should have checked that first. :)

Yours truly has a general distrust of web commercialisers renaming things ever since some such company tried to rename Shockwave Flash (.swf) to "Small Web File". Since then I remain continually on guard for further shenanigans.

> Surprised I never saw anyone try to inject ads into RSS feeds.

Of course people inject ads into RSS feeds. Daring Fireball is a well known example that sells the advertising spot in the open: https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/

If you’re talking about ads in the body of each entry, I’ve seen that too but can’t give an example off the top of my head. That said, it’s more common for publications to give you a small excerpt instead to lure you back into the ad-laden web page.

> Surprised I never saw anyone try to inject ads into RSS feeds. Or maybe they did and I never saw it.

The default list of articles most often already contains them - considering the rise of sponsored (and often unmarked) posts.

I've always heard it as "rich site summary," which was back in the early 2000s.

The RSS feed on YouTube also vanished for a several hours late last night.

When it happened I was afraid it was gone for good. The feeds showed back up, but it really feels any feature of a site like YouTube or whatever that lets me consume content without being guided by a website designed to keep me engaged for as long as possible is doomed these days.

Would you pay for a service that showed you an RSS-style feed of people you care to follow on various platforms (youtube, twitch, patreon, etc)? At this point it seems like the promise of an algo-free multi-channel feed from creators people care about could actually be a good startup, and maybe that thing could produce an RSS feed (incentives would be aligned to do so).

I'd pay if it converted YouTube videos into downloadable files for me.

Hmmmmmmnnn that's super interesting. So unfortunately that flirts with a ToS violation-ish (of course youtube-dl is allowed to exist but maybe questionable to build on, public information is allowed scrapable via the linkedin decision, etc), but this implies that:

- Youtube is a must-have platform for you (one of the big offenders for sure, I had them in my notes on this idea)

- Being able to download the content is ideal.

I've been thinking that maybe if the content creator has the option to manage their page and upload their own content that would be a nice way to handle it. Not that I want to play the video hosting game but having access to the original content would make it much easier to distribute.

The question of who pays is interesting though.

If you don't mind, email (see bio) me a way to contact you (something ephemeral if you'd like, twitter, whatever is most comfortable) and I'll see if I can whip something together for you to beta test.

Hopefully this is just a mistake and not a real deprecation.

That being said, a little while back when controversy popped up over Chrome's handling of `alert()`, there were multiple Google engineers I saw online in various settings talking about how the web developer community needed to take some responsibility to monitor upcoming changes and discussions. I do want to bring up that a good way to encourage that is to have an easy, standardized way to subscribe to these content feeds using any client, using a technology that can be aggregated and curated by 3rd parties, that is easily parseable so that it can be searched and transformed by other programs, and that doesn't require an account to access.

Just a thought for anyone on the Chrome/Google team that is actually interested in improving communication channels with web developers. Maybe don't break @intenttoship?

> Just a thought for anyone on the Chrome/Google team that is actually interested in improving communication channels with web developers.

No. They are not interested in that. The only communication they are interested in is telling what you should do (including their propaganda vehicle, web.dev). Any disagreement or discussion is forbidden.

The most recent example, on CSS modules: https://twitter.com/youyuxi/status/1427406150463537152 See replies by Justin Fagnani

Of course, no dissent is allowed: https://twitter.com/youyuxi/status/1427447695942299652

(Evan You is the author of Vue)

Google groups feels (UX & support wise) like one of those products that should have already been killed by Google. One of the reasons why Groups has survived so long must be Google's reluctance to give proper customer support for most of their products. Google groups is the only customer support you will get in many cases.

Likely the only reason Groups is still around is that if you want a mailing list on GSuite then this is your only option. If they kill it, many orgs will probably switch to Office 365 or another competitor the next day.

Google uses Groups internally and externally for all its mailing lists. It will never, ever die for that reason alone.

Honestly, this is the only proof I'm willing to accept for the survival of any low-revenue service that Google provides! But still, google code didn't live.

Google wasn't using Google Code.

Perhaps they meant Google Code Search?

Yeah, Code Search is a counterexample because Google was using it, but killed the public version to focus on internal use. Though it is still available to the public in limited form for Google's major open source projects as https://source.chromium.org/ and https://cs.android.com/

This.

I think part of it might be nostalgia as well. If they kill google groups then they are killing yet another part of the old internet they sought to embrace and improve upon but the bean counters have mostly taken over and only a few holdouts in upper management keep this sort of stuff alive.

Believe it or not, Groups is the main way to ACL resources in GSuite. It represents mailing lists, user groups, etc. it’s also heavily used in local communities on the consumer side.

News feeds (RSS/Atom) are a fabulous technology. They’re not dead but this is the most recent cut in the killing of the Open Web with “death by a thousand cuts”¹.

After the killing of Google Reader, the really big blow was when Mozilla (the closest we have to a “champion for the open web”) removed the built-in feed preview feature and subscription UI from Firefox 64²³. While this wasn’t a major problem for users like me who can install an add-on, it meant that the discoverability of news feeds was no longer there.

This followed the trend over the past decade for web publishers to hide or not make it obvious that news feeds are available, e.g., many WordPress blogs automatically make news feeds available but unless the reader knows (from experience) about news feeds, there’s no obvious way to discover that they’re available.

All these changes will mean that new users of the Web will never know that news feeds exist – other than the restricted feeds provided by the walled gardens of large corporations – and the number of news feed users will continue to shrink.

Twenty years ago, when Microsoft were the large corporation trying to kill open web protocols and protocols (and Google weren’t evil), influential web developers and designers such as Jeffrey Zeldman banded together to create the Web Standards Project⁴⁵ to promote the openness and accessibility of the Web. They were largely successful in this goal (and closed shop in 2010) but without the existence of some organisation that keeps up this sort of advocacy, it will be the large corporations who control the direction and pace of change of the Web. This will be in the interests of their own profits – not the users.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingchi

2. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/64.0/releasenotes/

3. https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-prod... feeds/

4. https://www.webstandards.org/

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Standards_Project

> Firefox 64²³

How long have I been asleep?!?

More seriously, i agree with most of your post but the removal of feed support in Firefox is imo no worse than the removal of ftp or gopher support. These things don't belong in a modern browser, were mostly unused, can be moved to a separate client, and the Firefox support sucked in the first place... The actual users were already using separate clients.

Wouldn't this naturally imply that the open web is unsustainable on its own?

It's tiring to argue with people who think RSS is dead so I just stopped. People who appreciate RSS still use it, those who provide it know their users/readers like it. Most Swedish news websites, TV, and radio still provide RSS. BBC provides RSS. Most blogs I follow provide RSS. If you really think about it there are only a few (but huge) companies that don't provide it, honestly, fuck'em.

The most beautiful thing about open standards is that they never ever die. There are gopher services (and revitalization attempts) all around.

If you think RSS is dead. Keep thinking that, it's your loss.

Google is down right hostile to their users. So glad, I haven't used any of their services in years besides maybe YouTube occasionally.

And the least hostile way to use YouTube, I find, is to plug the URL into the excellent youtube-dl CLI tool, and then watch the video locally.

Honestly didn't realize how bad it's gotten until I tried to watch a video in a browser without uBlock recently...

Um... who does that???

Mobile phone browser

Thus the reason why I never, ever brows the web on my phone. Unless it's necessary. Even the Youtube ads are annoying.

And I am downright hostile to them as a vendor. Just say no to GCP. Whatever feature you want to use, they will probably cancel it with 30 days notice anyway…

Let's just hope they don't remove the RSS feed for YouTube.

Right click and open in vlc/iina is my preferred way

Google tries to kill RSS for a long time, that's it.

TBH, I understand why - using RSS you don't need "help" from Google to decide what you want to see and what don't want.

As for myself, after I installed Miniflux I removed accounts on reddit and other "content sources", because I simply read 99% of content through RSS and as someone already mentioned here in comments, RSS reader is the most used app on my phone now.

I still use Reddit. I like to comment on things etc. I just keep a whole bunch of feeds, with a whole bunch of items in Miniflux. In other words, I have a nice archive going.

Side note: The best Google Reader alternative is Inoreader (http://inoreader.com/)

Not associated, just love the project.

I was getting 404s on some youtube RSS feeds last night. Figured it was a fluke but this makes me wonder.

Didnt see another comment mentioning this below, scary stuff though

Happens a lot these days, unfortunately.

Although the title is correct because it speaks of killing "support" for RSS, these kind of titles about tech giants 'killing' all kinds of stuff make me laugh. Saying that Google is killing RSS is like saying a gazelle running away from a lion is at the same time killing that lion. :') I don't think it works like that.

Embrace, extend, extinguish

For those looking for a good RSS reader for browsers, my favorite one on Firefox (and other browsers) is Feedbro. A necessary addon after Mozilla removed the built in support some time ago.

https://nodetics.com/feedbro/

See https://support.google.com/groups/thread/120495835/rss-does-...

I honestly don't understand google's attitude towards rss. Wouldn't it be in their interest to support it? The alternative is twitter, and if everyone uses twitter, you might as well search twitter to learn what's happening, rather then the web.

Hackers use Narkive instead, e.g.: https://comp.lang.ada.narkive.com/

Of course it has RSS feeds. Anything worthwhile does.

Google Groups is more than newsgroups. They also offer mailing lists. But looks like Narkive does not offer those?

It's been added recently, for example https://freebsd-ports.freebsd.narkive.com/

I subscribed to the golang-announce Google Group RSS feed in a Slack channel and was wondering why I didn't see the Go 1.17 announcement.

Seems to be another way to force users to use Google news Android feature instead of RSS.

Many, if not most links I get in GNews are sponsored and require an extra subscription.

Google news wil do RSS. It's kind of like an alert or a search, but it does it. For instance: https://news.google.com/rss/topics/CAAqKggKIiRDQkFTRlFvSUwyM... https://www.fivefilters.org/2021/google-news-rss-feeds/

“Google Groups kills…”

“In other news, the sky is blue and grass is green”

So the highlight of this article is speculating whether Google actively removed an unpopular technology from their service or that the technology was so unpopular that it broke without Google noticing.

Great read!

> unpopular technology

aka technology that is used by millions of people but I have no way of monetizing it.

Googler here: RSS is effectively dead. Most of the people working on software these days barely know what RSS is, so I bet they never even thought to document its deprecation. But RSS at every Google product is a redesign away from being dead.

> RSS is effectively dead

I assume you mean this in context of Google groups, because otherwise it seems RSS is doing OK. I mean, there's that whole podcasts thing and whatnot

Podcasts are one thing. Additionally, almost all blogs based on WordPress have RSS enabled, from what I gather. I would say that for a technology clearly not to the liking of services basing their operation on a walled garden principle it stands quite firmly.

[edit]: a missing -s

The vast majority of RSS support seems to be an accident or it just happens to work because of the software they use. That is a pretty fragile state to be in since they are a redesign or software switch away from breaking and removing support. And they will not put in any effort to fix it since it was never intentionally a feature of the site.

It was, 20 years ago.

I'm afraid they mean it in the sense of "popular use of the protocol". I'm on Firefox right now, navigate to my personal blog that offers RSS... And none of the buttons in the UI seems to refer to that. If I navigate directly to the RSS, it just shows me the XML. Back in the day, I'd have a button in the URL bar to do something with it.

So, when I work at Google, I don't see any mention of RSS anywhere. It just isn't a thing users would demand. There might be semi-forgotten API endpoints here and there. But I assure you - when the server inevitably gets hit by some deprecation or its team gets reorged enough, it will be rewritten. And the rewrite will almost surely not have such an endpoint, simply because nobody will ever think of it. No vendetta, just lifecycle.

> It just isn't a thing users would demand.

Hi, user here. RSS is absolutely something that I would demand, if I could.

Oh, me too. But unless we get a couple dozen million Americans to share the sentiment, we won't get what we want. And that doesn't seem like a battle worth fighting.

Yep, me too!! However I've already stopped with the Google stuff so my opinion doesn't matter much.

You want this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/rsspreview/

I use this with reasonable results: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/want-my-rss/

I recently installed the Feedbro addon on Firefox. It is a pretty decent RSS reader.

> users would demand

A world with policies based on the median is a dystopia.

But trivially so: "No, we only sell mid-sized shoes, aren't you supposed to be at the top of the bell curve"?

We are supposed to running towards the good extreme tail of the bell curve.

Median guy does not use the tools you use - it's another world completely, and it's not your world.

Dialogue with a village librarian: "You should acquire more journalism on AI" // "Disgust, usrs demand novels" // "Yeah, current concentration of importance is more towards AI".

> Most of the people working on software these days barely know what RSS is

Using my experience from a Polish university from a field of study focused on computer science: Most of my acquaintances know what RSS is. Several of them use it, and way more at least tried. Granted, it is not something nearly as popular as Facebook, Discord or other similar software, but to say no one know exactly what RSS is seems unlikely to me. Maybe it is simply a situation around your peers? Seeing that even Vivaldi browser added built-in RSS support lately, it seems that people that remember RSS are still common enough.

The podcast ecosystem pretty much runs off RSS (yes, bad actors like Spotify are doing their best to kill it, but the vast majority of podcasts use RSS).

Seems outside GoOgLe it's fine.

«Googler here: Yes, we are killing RSS and it is now effectively dead. I don’t even know anyone who knows what RSS is, so it’s safe for me.»

Yeah-yeah, that’s the attitude.

Googler here: RSS is effectively dead.

I find it slightly incredible that someone who works for Google feels that they can state "RSS is effectively dead." in the latest thread about the public outcry around Google killing RSS in one of their products.

Google killing off Reader was the single event that started the "Killed by Google" meme. Every time Google removes RSS from something there's stories and threads all over the tech press, HN, Reddit, etc. What is it about RSS in particular, but also tech in general, that makes Googlers incapable of listening to the what people are telling them?

Google's support for RSS is effectively dead, because Googlers actively want to kill it. Maybe you'll succeed. I wouldn't celebrate that if I worked for Google.

>What is it about RSS in particular, but also tech in general, that makes Googlers incapable of listening to the what people are telling them?

"Data driven decision making." The real death of any piece of proprietary or centrally maintained software is the addition of telemetry. The actual death comes much later.

It's probably more because Google has an almost pathological aversion to maintaining anything. You don't get the cool projects, raises and promotions by doing the journeyman work of maintaining, fixing bugs, listening to users and gradually improving an app or service.

This is a guess, but I reckon Alphabet has a little over 50,000 members of engineering staff (135,000 total, roughly 40% engineers). Suggesting that one or two of them wouldn't want to be involved in a core Google product that's been running for about 20 years is so strange to me.

Googler: RSS is effectively dead.

Translation: Google is killing RSS in its products so you have to either go to their ad/tracker infested sites, or download an app geared towards tracking and spying on you for the purpose of advertisement; and pretending this means RSS is dead.

Well either that, or never use Google again. You could also start using ad blockers and such things to avoid those web pages.

I follow posts on about a hundred sites and about 90% of them support RSS. If they didn't it would make following them almost impossible, so I dont see that happening.

Person here: Google is effectively dead. The only people still using Google services are the ones who aren't aware of the other choices.

Yep, true. Although it's taking way too long for it to die!!

What is it with people believing RSS is dead? It's not dead, it's stable. It works, it does its job, it doesn't need to be changed.

When something like this "just works" it's easy to fall victim to the belief that it's irrelevant, but that's just because it exists in the background.

I sincerely hope you will not remove RSS support because it's an easy way to monitor publicly visible updates from all kinds of sites without needing to implement their APIs. I've got a bot that monitors Youtube accounts via RSS and posts updates to a Discord. Writing the code took only about a half hour because parsing RSS feeds is literally a single call to a library.

To me, RSS/Atom is one of the original promises of the web: a freely accessible network of information from all over the world in a standardized open format that anyone can use. Takes practically zero time to implement because libraries will do the work for you. @intenttoship is already lamenting the fact they're going to have to write a screen scraper now.

Yeah maybe rss.app will make one too. I mean Thus continues the removal of Google from my life.

Wow.

> Googler here: RSS is effectively dead

This you?

https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/20/google_rss_chrome_and...

Nope, not the same Google, sorry.

Newsfeeds are not dead, they are just not in your sight.

Frankly spoken, it's really fascinating how ignorant this former inovator-company has become about the world.

> Googler here: RSS is effectively dead. Most of the people working on software these days barely know what RSS is

Most of the people working on software these days barely know what a memory allocator is. Memory allocators are dead.

WordPress supports RSS natively and it won't be long until it is running 50% of websites.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com