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Comment by anonygler | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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

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.

> 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".

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.

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.

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.

> 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).

«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.

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!!

> 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.

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

This you?

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

Nope, not the same Google, sorry.

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.

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

Wow.

Seems outside GoOgLe it's fine.

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