It's too much work and effort to maintain such complicated legacy technology for the incredibly busy brain of a Google engineer.
"Surely my user base will continue coming to the landing page of my website to check for updates every day."
So they have some stupid conversation like “patching the rss code will take 5 units of labor, but I want to cyberdize the whoozit that also takes 5 units. Does anyone even care about rss and use it? Oh the analytics show zero. Let’s de prioritize that.”
I think the bigger problem is people on the team not using rss and knowing this is super dumb. And PMs now knowing the world their metrics don’t track.
Seems to kind with google once being great and now full of fat rich peoples’ kids just riding the slow and gradual suck. (Based on the theory that smart people have weak, pampered kids; then weak kids get destroyed by jerk fascists; then jerk fascists get overturned by smart people and the cycle completes).
Of course the dumb kids think they are geniuses because their parents are part. And the parents want to pretend their kids are smart. Etc etc
No, I think it's a very deliberate choice. RSS is a means to escape the gaze of Big G. Can't let that happen
So I agree the real reason is that google doesnt want people using minimally tracked file downloads and thinks they can shovel people towards their more data rich analytics and content consumption.
$PM: Hey $ENGINEER, it looks like this "arr ess ess" thingy has very few users, do you know what it does?
$ENGINEER: Yeah, it's a web standard that publishes a feed of updates to our website. It's kind of neat actually, if you have an RSS read--
$PM (waving hands): okay skip the wikipedia article, that's fine; but does it generate revenue?
$ENGINEER (blinking): uh...no, it doesn't. Anyone can query our RSS feed and update their local cache of articles and read them later, it's actually really useful if you're ever somewhere without interne--
$PM: So we can't monetize this?
$ENGINEER: ...no, this is an RSS feed for a tech blog. We can't monetize this.
$PM: If you remove this and integrate $FEATURE on $PAID_SERVICE, I'll write you a better peer review this year. It's reducing tech debt right? This sounds like an old school thing anyway, I've never even heard of it!
$ENGINEER (heavy sigh): Yeah, whatever man.
All it would take is ?utm_source=rss, but betcha readers would start stripping that, because once you've started abusing everything, anything will look like abuse.
Both to respect the publishers preferences and it’s easier to cut and paste rather than edit the clipboard.
Facebook did that with emails - slowly remove all the content to turn them into traffic generators for the feed team.
Hilariously when they launched workplace, the corporate productive product, they did the same thing, viciously spamming you with emails that have the first 15 characters of the workplace post that triggered them (and 2 more for the notification and every comment).
zero respect for your time, everything must drive traffic.
I find that rss output is just part of good architecture so it’s sort of something I’m going to make even if no one uses it. Because I want to have some static form of syndication that processes can check.
Of course there is some nominal cost to exposing the uris or something, but anyone complaining about this would be weird to complain. Especially given all the other odd feature requests going on.
The static site generator I use (Pelican) can produce templated RSS feeds that are exactly to my liking. If I can use that off-the-shelf stuff for a small blog, then it's trivial to put together a template and plug in database data on relevant events. Could even just run a cronjob that tracks the site daily and forget about it, most people would not care.
Google killed Plus, so it's not like when they killed Reader. They just like killing things I guess?
In the real world, the options aren't just an RSS feed vs. "load the page daily". Readers also come from search engines, social media, link aggregators and non-RSS news feeds.
If it was the latter, it's almost certainly a cynical drive to get more 'page impressions' by making people visit the actual website to read the blog posts.
Google has two big strengths: (1) they build systems at huge scale and (2) they are wildly profitably.
(2) is also weakness because it means they can afford to have highly inefficient processes. It is the reason why Google keeps pushing trash software on the world like Kubernetes (takes that 30 minute project and multiples it by a lot all by itself) as well as cargo cult management processes like OKRs. (Ever see what happens to a startup that is just treading water when management stops everything and introduces a layer of meaningless paperwork?)