Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
openrss.org
openrss.org
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?
https://blog.newsblur.com/2013/03/17/three-months-to-scale-n...
https://blog.newsblur.com/2014/03/13/google-reader-announced...
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.
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.
The server itself isn't free. Sure if they are smart if multiple people are subscribed to the same feed it only fetches once, but just the constant fetching would eat up resources. Then storing that data, you retrieving it yourself, etc.
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.
But have the existing approaches really missed a low hanging solution, even if it’s partial and maybe impossible to monetize?
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.
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.
I must say that reading an RSS feed is as simple as this:
wget "myURL" -O - | python3 -c ' import sys import xml.etree.ElementTree as et tree = et.fromstring(sys.stdin.read()) for el in tree.findall("./channel/item"): print(el.find("title").text)'
But the other applications that you mention are not simple applications:
> browsers, email clients, video players, etc. the core features are well defined and an open source project should be the default choice.
[1] _ Sample URL: "https://www.tomshardware.com/feeds/all"
Feedly, like Google Reader, for me is nothing but a server. It's the same reason I pay for my email, iCloud, and similar services. I am paying for them to store data, run some service, or similar for me.
Even if I went the open source route I would still want a server that is doing the fetching for me. A central place to keep things in sync between multiple devices and to cut down on the data usage when on my phone. That server costs money to run. Either I am running that server myself (and taking on the Maintence of it) or I pay a service like Feedly.
While I agree that Feedly's way of monetization is likely wrong when they could have just run the route of $5 a month and that's it. Nothing fancy, it fetches and thats it. That could be a perfectly sustainable business model.
Edit:
Also I really think we should re-examine "open source should be the default" when the vast majority of open source projects are not at the polish of something like Chromium.
Most average (non technical) consumers are not really going to accept what a lot of open source's experience is. See gimp and open office compared to Photoshop and Microsoft Office.
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.
I love being able to read others' comments, leave my own, and receive replies from a community of folks who are all committed enough to RSS as a medium to keep at it. I find it provides a significant amount of value. It also aids in discovery of new blogs/sites that I've ended up following directly over the years.
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.
Those alternatives were definitely there, but there's an order of magnitude difference between them and Google in terms of what they did for the normalization of RSS as a way of consuming content.
Saying Google stopped supporting RSS but at least there's a boutique alternative, I think is kind of saying well Coca-Cola shut down but at least there's Soda Stream. Not wrong, but it misses the point that there's a global embeddedness that was left behind.
I remember the same thing as you, so I think that's correct. But I would say Feedly probably only recouped some single digit percentage of Google readers users. But then there were however many other users who had their relationship with RSS forever fractured from the shutdown of Google reader, and the absence of a smooth off-ramp certainly contributed.
I also think that having the credibility of Google behind RSS contributed to people being comfortable with them, not unlike iPods helping lead to the adoption of podcasts. I shudder to think whether podcasts would even have gotten off the ground without people being socialized into accepting them through the connection to an Apple product. And while I'm not an Apple fan I'm forever grateful for the long term impact on how we consume content.
So I would say the long and short of it is that Feedly helped, but I suspect it was perhaps an order of magnitude smaller in terms of its role as a positive force for RSS than Google.
Podcasts are named after the iPod, because that's who the audience was. They are radio shows that are recorded and then made available for download; other than the usual lack of melody, they are identical to other mp3 files.
Spoken-word musical albums and books on tape were already well-established phenomena before the iPod existed. What's the difference supposed to be?
There was no guarantee that it would turn out that way, and, as we see with RSS, or now with Activitypub, it's more than a small struggle to get anyone to care about open protocols for their own sake. It takes a moment that is ripe for it, a simple enough experience, and some sort of cultural signal that it's "for everyone" in a sense.
That was my point. I am perfectly aware that audio can be distributed in other forms.
> universe of media distribution that happens via an open protocol that is not controlled by any one company
What is this protocol that you speak of? Searching "podcast protocol" leads to absolutely no useful links on the subject. Podcasts in my experience are distributed in one of three ways:
* Download links on a web page
* Embedded streaming links on a web page
* An RSS feed
That last (RSS) could be considered a "protocol" of sorts, I suppose. At the very least it's what I would expect a podcast app to support. But you then go on to refer to RSS as a separate entity from your "podcast protocol", so I'm back to being confused as to what you might be talking about. What is this open protocol that is intrinsic to your definition of 'podcast'?
Podcast can refer both to individual episodes or to the series of episodes, neither usage is more correct than the other, it's your responsibility to interpret words in good faith in the context in which they're used. And again, nothing about this distinction is pertinent to the point I was making.
RSS is not the same thing as podcasts, because while generally all podcast feeds are distributed via RSS/Atom, they aren't necessarily, and moreover not all RSS feeds are podcasts.
And again, nothing about this distinction is pertinent to the point I was making. To reiterate, Apple, with the iPod, was instrumental in elevating podcasts to a mainstream medium of content distribution. It's by analogy to this that I make the point that Google could have played a similar role in facilitating the mass adoption of RSS.
I'm not interested in any further exploration of the conceptual differences between RSS and podcasts unless you believe it has an upshot that's relevant to the original point I was making.
Well, yeah. Not only is it not the same thing, the concepts aren't related in any way.
A podcast is an audio file. RSS is a format for publishing the information that you've updated your website.
>>> With podcasts, we now have an entire universe of media distribution that happens via an open protocol that is not controlled by any one company, which is a miracle.
We had that before podcasts. You go to a web page, and you download a file. The protocol is called "HTTP", the HyperText Transfer Protocol.
Where do podcasts come into this?
Traditional talk radio uploaded to a web page would meet that definition. And that's the stereotypical genre of podcast content but there are others, like narrative fiction (Welcome to Night Vale).
I think "a podcast" is less about the specific genre of the content and more about how it's experienced. It's a podcast if it's time-based media you can subscribe to and experience in a variety of players; otherwise, it's sparkling media.
If you have to use the Spotify app, it's not a podcast. I see "plus" subscription options in the iPhone Podcast app, if you had to use that app, they're not podcasts; if you can use different apps but only on Apple devices, I'd still consider them podcasts.
It's like people forgot that non-web-interface rss readers existed.
I still use some RSS reader apps to keep up with various sites I care about.
Also, remember that ever podcast is also an RSS feed.
I'd wager that a lot of people never even knew these existed. To a lot of people, the browser became (or simply always was) the only real interface to everything internet related (or for some people, just about everything period).
Now it's just a locally hosted Tiny Tiny RSS on my laptop.
Our design philosophy at the time, which was in reaction to the bloated I-need-engagement-for-my-team browser UIs of the time, was to only offer what people needed, and allow extensions to cover everything else.
I loved RSS. We all did. I still use Feedly every day and mourn the loss of Google Reader. But even back then, practically no-one else cared, even amongst our early adopter userbase. If we had lowered our usage bar to allow the RSS button, the bar would've been low enough that a thousand other features-you-don't-want-but-other-people-do would've been in there too (omg the arguments about having a "print" button).
Extensions was our "if you want it, you can add it" answer. It was imperfect, because it didn't allow ideas such as RSS to be advertised to the mainstream, but we had already clearly seen that that hadn't worked, and regardless, your daily tools should not be a place for pushing agendas unless you have total confidence that they will be valued.
I still think "following stuff" is an unsolved, undervalued problem and big opportunity space
In reality, Google search was good enough to find what you wanted 95% of the time, and most people would not bother discovering and learning a separate pathway to find the remaining 5% - especially when combined with our poor human memories and local search capabilities at the time.
That would still be a real innovation over the current 90 day retention maximum.
(And I think the real innovation would be showing the branching, not mangling everything into a linear history. But it's harder to show and use well, so it doesn't happen. Very much the same story as editor undo/redo.)
Edit: reread your comment. I guess it was because this could be done using an extension. I believe this to be the main reason for lowering adoption / use of RSS with rise of chrome. To this date chrome shows raw xml when you open RSS xml while other browsers give you something interesting and readable to look at and even let you subscribe to that interesting page.
Chrome was a no-crunch 50-person project, which sounds like a lot until you think about how we were porting webkit to windows, adding a sandbox, creating a new javascript engine, a new windows UI toolkit, etc and we were ruthless about prioritization - any engineer who could've spent on an RSS renderer would've been taken away from valuable webkit windows compatibility work (omg ACID tests), and weeks mattered.
Second, we had an extremely strong belief in letting developers own as much as they could - our impossible ideal was that the Chrome UI wouldn't exist and developers would just create content you could access emphemerally through your operating system. At the time, we had seen that it was possible for developers to use various trickery (XSLT or CSS?) to style RSS feeds so they would show up somewhat like how you described (IIRC Feedburner did this)
So if you take those two things together (and again I may be misremembering) you see it being a "developers can do it so if they care they can do it, we should not spend time making something that overrules them"
It's not possible for me to know whether that was the right idea in hindsight because I don't know what we would've sacrificed (I think I would've preferred using that time to make the standalone image renderer have better zooming/panning controls)
Sorry that you have to put up with speculative nonsense from the willfully misinformed.
This reminds me of chapter support in podcast players. For a very long time the every player dev was arguing that nobody cares. And it took years for the tune to become "nobody cares except germans". Then it was implemented for a "vocal ninority", and now everyone gets chapter support and I don't think any user is lamenting about the evolution.
This is one of the worst aspect of the "nobody I know cares about it" mindset (I don't think we can really work around it, but it should be acknowledged and kept in mind).
The other path is to push for many more places building their own tools and services, so they don;t even have to ask for these changes and do it themselves, with everyone else getting to enjoy the result.
Basically, while Google was the reason Chrome existed in the first place, I think it's also the main liability to have a product designed with a global audience in mind.
PS: the issue with chrome extensions for core behaviors is they'll always be second class citizens. I'm still happy there's an escape hatch though.
And also thank you for your work on the browser, I don't want the tone of this to be overly negative when it's really about side points.
Whether by nature, nurture, or some other force - user agency lives in the very long tail of any software usage.
In every category, agency drives the birth of tech but dies in the scoreboards.
Every product I’ve loved, every founder I’ve believed in, was about human possibility & creativity.
But the ones lucky enough to scale to species level adoption discover that the ethos of creation is lost in the swarm of consumption.
Perhaps I’ve arrived at a poor conclusion, but I’ve simply decided to accept that I am a fairly unusual person for wanting to craft, make choices, and discover the weird, wonderful, or just discover what I didn’t know there was to discover.
I’ve weened myself off of consumption over the years. Here’s to making all my future decisions in tech about putting my attention, energy, and thought into “what do I want to create? learn?”
I don’t think the product universe I live in will ever be dominant. But I do believe it can exist if we accept that we can either build it or trade it, but we cannot do both.
I do regret not finding ways to do more - for example, an unrealized goal of mine was to find a way to add a 'create' button to Chrome to nudge everyone to be a creator - my favorite simple+cheeky idea was to have a way to enable contentEditable on the current site, then save the resulting changes as an extension you could give to your friends, allowing you to graffiti the internet in private small groups.
Somebody I worked with at TomTom had the brilliant idea of gamifying the driving experience with internet connected TomTom PNDs, by publishing a real-time Leaderboard on every single road on the map, so you could see the top ten speeds, and compete with other drivers for the high score! No matter where you were driving in the world, you could instantly see the top ten speeds of other TomTom users who drove down that same stretch of road, and put the pedal to the metal to claim or defend your own spot on the leaderboard!
My TomTomagotchi idea didn't go over well with TomTom legal either: they didn't want their PNDs getting depressed and dying if you didn't give them food, attention, and drive them around everywhere they wanted. But I was sure there's a revenue model having drive through Burger Kings and car washes pay for placements.
You remind me of the writing of Antonio Garcia Martinez in the book Chaos Monkeys.
this is when businesses should make decisions based on vibes rather than data.
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.
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.
Right, but simultaneously, that statement is an affirmation of how much damage Google did to RSS, by eliminating their support for a protocol that they themselves had done so much to elevate.
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!
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.
I think quite positively about my experience with fastmail
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.
Didn't help that they went with the worst possible implementation.
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.
I'm skeptical.
There were/are plenty of people who did title-only feeds because they wanted to serve ads.
A title-only RSS feed means people have to go to their site to consume the content. Which, presumably, has google ads on it.
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.
Right, this is exactly my experience as well. I used all manner of desktop based RSS readers before Google reader appeared on the scene and became my mainstay.
I also think it's not wrong to note that Google Reader introduced a lot of people to RSS. But I don't think it follows that shutting down Google Reader was merely a net neutral impact on RSS. I guess I just don't follow the logic of, well Google elevated RSS, therefore there's no problem with shutting it down in the grand scheme of things. Shutting down Google Reader rolled back progress that had been achieved by Google Reader itself, but the fact that the RSS ecosystem had recentered itself around Google's offerings and integrations also made the shutdown uniquely damaging.
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. ;)
That core passionate user base that believed in and used the product, I believe was in fact the critical alchemy that was missing from Google+, which by comparison was soulless and pushed by strategic considerations rather than organic iteration on user feedback or response to user needs. Articles have been written about this before, but I absolutely believe in the right circumstances Google could have successfully built out a social network, but it was Google Reader in fact was becoming one. I think Google correctly assessed that there was redundancy between Google Reader and Google Plus, but they just chose the wrong path.
Podcasts seem to be a rather effective and continuing use of RSS, so perhaps rumors of its death are premature. There, we find ourselves back at the written vs spoken form debate.
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.
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.
Not the complete answer, but a part of it.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Most of the feed readers (at least the open source ones) I have seen lately have offered OPML exports.
I will visit your site more if you let me get updates in my preferred fashion!
But this is basically how Tumblr operates except it's centralized.
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?
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.
The only value this brings is that it's much easier to hit "repost" on things you like than it is to go send links to everyone. People do this already, it's just awkward, and friends get annoyed from chat notification spam.
Channels of info are only as valuable as the signal/noise ratio is. That's the whole point of RSS in some ways. You follow a lot of specific curated news sources that may be low-volume but high relevancy. "All the stuff my friends enjoy enough to repost" is likely below 50% relevant to me, just because I have a lot of friends who do a lot of stuff that I don't also care about, or don't care about that much.
My opinion is mostly based on the number of slack and discord channels in servers with my friends that I have to have muted because they have plenty of chatter about articles I don't care about. Filtering by topic is much more valuable than filtering by which human shared it most of the time.
Stats are addictive. They are also the first step towards justifying spending time on it.
Have some stats.
I read about how other companies overcame this, and even Tinder, which only requires users to be in the same area, had to be kick-started by hosting large college parties ($$$) and getting all the attendees to download it.
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.
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.
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.
Just think how bland a curated predigested net is, and use what you have, to individualize instead.
Seize the means of production!
I do think delicious could have normalized social bookmarking in different circumstances.
A search provider that had its users' interests at heart would reserve the top result spot for the best organic search result, not an ad. Even if ads are #2-5, the top result should be what the user searched for.
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.
I follow some personal blogs which have title-only feeds which I do think reduces my click through rate significantly.
I follow a few niche news sites which post essentially a long descriptive title, which is workable.
The best balance I've seen for non-full-post feeds was Guardian Australia which posted a fairly decent introductory paragraph to their feed, enough for me to gauge whether to click in. Annoyingly though news organisations seem to be bad at properly tagging their posts, so I stopped using RSS with large mainstream news sites as the firehouse was too much.
The primary benefit of RSS from my perspective was being able to fetch news while online and then read it offline. That implies being able to consume information without obtrusive tracking and popups and marketing gimmicks. Once RSS feeds just became their own marketing gimmick, a way to hook you back into the site's ad-driven ecosystem, they lost their utility.
Mailing lists are now the better alternative, although Substack is rapidly killing that medium too by consolidating every provider onto a single platform so they can correlate subscriptions, hijack img and href tags, and track every open and click.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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).
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.
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?
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).
A few fractions of a percent tech professionals pushing for what's right is nice but not nearly good enough.
But I wish generally they would stop hoovering up and monetizing my personal data. F'ckers.
Google and Facebook make most of its money off ads because the reality is that users don't like paying for stuff directly.
And to be fair, I don't regret it, because I have another consideration -- I can easily get some nice Xiaomi phone and root it and install various blockers and alternative YouTube frontends... BUT... my Google account is very valuable, a lot is tied to it and Google has become a bit trigger-happy banning and deleting accounts. So I am not willing to risk it. Hence I paid up.
They might use your viewing history to target ads in other places. And they definitely use aggregate/anonymized viewing patterns to suggest similar videos people might like, but I don't see an issue with that.
Title-only RSS is so much better than email notification.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
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).
I feel sure there were others but would have to look them up.
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.
The result of this was when reader shutdown the overwhelming majority of users simply stopped using rss, presumably even if they did export their subscriptions they've long since lost them, and built up habits around non-rss based mechanisms. Hence rss (for anything other than podcasts) ceased being relevant for the overwhelming majority of people.
I'm trying to make it clear here, the issue isn't that using RSS became impossible, it's that by making reader free google decimated the rss reader ecosystem such that when they killed reader there simply weren't practical alternatives for the majority of users of google reader. As a result reader being killed changed the general habits of those users to no longer use rss feeds for information, and given by that time things like twitter provided similar services (most blogging platforms have a "post updates to twitter") they had no real reason to go back to rss readers.
So the basic argument for reader making rss become irrelevant for general blogging, etc was:
1. RSS comes into existence
2. Apps start being made to subscribe to rss
3. People start using those apps
4. Google introduces Reader, which is free
5. Paid apps from <2> can't compete with free so either die or adopt in app ads (which at the time reader didn't have) so people move to reader
6. Non-google rss readers don't have syncing, so people move to reader
7. Non-google rss readers either require people pay, or use specific paid services, to get syncing, so people move to reader. Or they use google reader as their back end so their users can now trivially just start using reader anyway.
8. At this point there are no major alternatives to google reader, it makes up the overwhelming majority of all people using rss, as a result the few stand alone readers that still exist are for niche use cases or are unpolished hobby projects that come and go over time
9. Blogging platforms introduce tools to allow posts to blogs to automatically post updates to twitter, Facebook, etc
10. Google kills reader
11. The free rss readers that still exist all use reader for syncing, so lose syncing, and have to either charge money or require users adopt paid syncing tools, so people don't migrate to them. The projects that come into existence at this point are too rough for general users so they don't bother, and at this point they don't need to as the autoposting from <9> means that they don't need it.
I think that's a fairly fair assessment of what happened. But I think there's a big caveat to be addressed though. Google reader was far and away the most popular RSS reader, like overwhelmingly so, prior to it existing the market of RSS readers was something where a few people could earn some money, but it was not really a significant market. So my question is, absent google reader would RSS feeds ever have become as popular as they were during the period reader was available?
My _feeling_ is no.
That's exactly what I was referring to. There were options, I was using one (for years at that point in time).
However, the problem was a missing synchronisation of readed entries between your home and office PC. Mobile device was not a thing back then but slowly started main stream adoption. I mean, very few had smartphones.
Google reader was revolutionary, solving this exact problem for free and mobile app quickly followed. It caused almost all offline RSS readers to decay and starve to death.
And then few years passed by, and this is the moment they pull the rug, but the damage was done. Luckily, Feedly and others quickly emerged, and smartphones were a thing. Also, some self hosted RSS readers came to existence and get polished.
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).
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.
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.
And even if the feed was rendered properly, it's essentially useless without an associated extension or website to aggregate those feeds.
Oh, and Opera mini had a built-in RSS client too.
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.
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.
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...
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.
RSS powers the entire Kagi Small Web initiative. [1]
And Kagi is bringing back the RSS feed indicator in the Orion browser. [2]
Doing our share, one step at a time.
It all started there.
Some orgs still have a "complete" feed with full articles for subscribers, like Ars Technica.
I do think rss or another protocol would have been nice even for what you’re describing but such is life.
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".
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.)
Even youtube had rss feeds for channels. Freeing the data was a core concept before all the megacorps or startups wanted a monopoly.
It still does!
where kind can either be channel or playlist (possibly more).
Instead I just moved to Feedly, then Inoreader later on.
If they're reading, please just offer normal RSS URLs without trying to do any detection or cleverness.
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).
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?)
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.
Not a full replacement for RSS feeds but useful if you want social media curation/monitoring.
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.
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/google-...
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.
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.
Posting to a walled garden is certainly not in the best interests of all sites, but offering your readers a way to directly subscribe to feeds in the software of thsir choice as well as whatever social media stuff you're doing is a win all round.
You have a self imposed problem. There is an easy solution, but you are rejecting to use it.
>Posting to a walled garden is certainly not in the best interests of all sites
What's the downside of doing so then that would make it not in the sites interest.
It's a bit awkward to set up, but it works fine.
Oh that's for tools etc. not feeds themselves.
IMHO, we have a moral obligation to support open source as a function of freedom and democracy.
- Craiglist: disabling RSS dealt it a blow. I was a big user of RSS for Craiglist searches. Having one simple, inbox-like dashboard where items of interest drip, and where you can delete ones you're not interested in was great.
- Mastodon: doing RSS in an idiotic way. You subscribe to an RSS feed (e.g. for a hash tag) using your home instance ... but the links in the items take you to remote instances, where you have to jump through an annoying hoop to engage with them on your home instance.
- StackOverflow: ignoring a long-running bug whereby if you have an RSS reader in your browser pulling StackOverflow RSS feeds (that in and of themselves work great), you get logged out of StackOverflow. When you click on the items to navigate to them, you find you're logged out.
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?
It increases the number of people regularly visiting your site.
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.
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.
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
And guess what, RSS didn’t take off.
Well except maybe tech sites, but most people are not into tech sites.
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?
I understand that monetization is the goal for some people but it wasn't how the web historically worked and RSS probably isn't the right mechanism in a world where everything is about how much money you can make.
I'm not sure I agree.