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> They didn't kill RSS - they introduced people to it.

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.

>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.

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.

> Then once they had everyone onboard reader and there weren't really anyone competing

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.

Google Reader was the predominant offering, and they integrated RSS into practically everything. The RSS ecosystem had Google as its center of gravity due to Google's strategy of embracing it. Shutting it down did a unique damage that only Google would be capable of doing. There are indeed desktop alternatives, but I guess the critical question is whether you believe losing any one of them would have an equivalent impact on RSS that losing Google Reader did. I think the main point at stake is that Google had a disproportionate role, and so it's perfectly true that RSS lives on and I'm grateful for that, but I don't think any other software, or company, or website, has had such a disproportionate role both in elevating and in rolling back RSS.

Your analogy leaves out the fact that RSS doesn't work for serving ads, which is why all of this was in Google's interest.

> Your analogy leaves out the fact that RSS doesn't work for serving ads, which is why all of this was in Google's interest.

I'm skeptical.

There were/are plenty of people who did title-only feeds because they wanted to serve ads.

That’s different to Google serving ads

> That’s different to Google serving 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.

You could serve ads in RSS. Either has their own distinct items, or embedded in the content of the RSS feed. Although I suppose the point your making is that these forms of ads wouldn't be something that Google necessarily could control or monetize.

Agreed. The article is explicitly presenting it as if Google had some grand strategy to "embrace, extend, and extinguish".

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. ;)

I think the iPod played a critical role in normalizing podcasts as a globally accepted form of content consumption. And I actually don't think RSS was too far behind. There is more in the way of development and integration that could have continued to normalize RSS, And I suspect it wasn't a specific reaction to the benefits of RSS, so much as it was the company's mobilization behind Google Plus, that led to their strategic pivot.

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.

The article is a fanciful mixture of paranoid lego-duplo block imaginings, with a slab of boredom used for fuel.

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.

I keep repeating it. To me telegram is the best RSS reader app (guess on could also use any other chat like Matrix that supports bots). Manybot or other bots do the translation easily. You get instant preview and syncing between multiple reader devices for free. If you want you can add reactions and comments. News outlets have taken this path already officially. I believe that those interfaces are simply the future of feed syndication. IMHO it does not make too much sense to build dedicated apps or web services for syndication. Dynamic ranking like Reddit or HN might be different, but your normal feed perfectly fits your messenger app.

Telegram, Twitter, Mastodon, Matrix, IRC... anything that permits bots. The fun part is that when you write a new bot you'd tend to just look for the site's rss.xml or atom.xml. That file must exist.

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!

I used to use a rss2imap script that put it all in my mailbox, so I could read entries from everywhere. I stopped when I realized I don't want to be beholden to my computer being always on.

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.

> Would I think positively about a service trying to monetize email?

I think quite positively about my experience with fastmail

I ran my own postfix + [lots more brain tiring things here] for 15 years with very few hitches and felt quite satisfied with my successful caveman lifestyle. But then I got too busy and settled on migadu and my gosh what a fool I was. My wife and I use email like SMS these days and always force commercial conversations to email. signal for the truly trite things.

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.

What really killed RSS was Facebook and MySpace. https://utterlyboring.com/archives/2007/07/09/did_myspace_ki...

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.

Same here. Never heard of Google Reader before it was killed. I used an RSS reader in Firefox or something like that. And now, NetNewsWire on macOS and iOS.

Agree. I think marketing teams killed RSS, they wanted you to "subscribe to our newsletter" and send you what _they_ thought was useful. You wouldn't do that if you already had RSS, so that needed to go.

I'm confused why people can't also send anything they want over RSS. Unless you are directly scraping their website for updates, I thought they could publish anything to a feed.

I can only speak for myself. I had moved from other RSS to rely on Googles' RSS and then stopped using RSS until last year. It used to be my main news source for many years.

> Ditto with browser support. Even Firefox dropped it - and they're the browser that introduced the feature!

Didn't help that they went with the worst possible implementation.

Was it bad? I recall thinking it was good in the version 1, 2, and 3 days. A drop-down menu from the bookmark with a list of headlines that would be refreshed every 15 minutes or so. Clicking on one would take you to the site/url to read the full contents.

I think most rss users (or conscious rss users; I wouldn’t count podcast listeners) _were_ using it, either directly or via its api, weren’t they?

The point I'm making is most users of RSS wouldn't have used RSS had Reader not been around. The fact that many stopped using RSS after the demise of Reader is simply a reflection of how many people Google introduced to RSS.

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.

>The fact that many stopped using RSS after the demise of Reader is simply a reflection of how many people Google introduced to RSS.

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.