How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

494 pointsposted 13 hours ago
by pudgywalsh
(openrss.org)

170 Comments

throwaway63467

10 hours ago

The Internet in the early 2000s felt a little more special as compared to today, when 99.999 % of content is locked in a handful of walled gardens. I mean sure everything we had then is still possible but let’s be honest everything about the web is fine tuned to deliver ads to our eyeballs, browsers, operating systems and even protocols are being designed with ad delivery in mind. Even the privacy friendly browsers just exist to serve ads when I think about it. Kind of sad really, but I guess you could be happy as it’s so big now and there’s so much to do. Just makes you wonder what stuff would thrive if ads didn’t exist. As of now every niche thing that gets successful will be invariably pulled into the ad ecosystem as it’s very hard to say no to money.

RSS wasn’t in the interest of the big platforms as it’s decentralized and there’s no good way to deliver ads through it, simple as that.

drnick1

8 hours ago

> everything about the web is fine tuned to deliver ads to our eyeballs, browsers, operating systems and even protocols are being designed with ad delivery in mind.

I use Firefox with uBlock Origin on Linux, and haven't seen an ad in years. It's not like ads weren't a thing 20 years ago. Pop-up windows were particularly bad. Javascript, in particular, has been constantly abused against the user ever since it was created.

mschild

8 hours ago

> Firefox with uBlock Origin on Linux

Same setup and same experience. I've recently joined another company which only provided chrome with no extensions by default. I know the web is filled with ads but I'm shocked again and again when I get a glimpse into what it's like without an adblocker.

cwnyth

7 hours ago

There are dozens of us. Maybe one day people will realize how much better Firefox is now and how nicer the web can be with no ads.

anonymousiam

4 hours ago

It's not just a better user experience. It also addresses the security issues.

Blocking ads will also prevent malware scripts, unscrupulous information collection, and deceptive virus infection messages. I've got friends who've been infected because they believed the popup that told them their computer had a virus, and they needed to click the link to remove it.

endless_smash

41 minutes ago

Blocking ads is recommended by CISA. It should really be more mainstream.

Some demographics are heavy ad blockers, 90%+.

firatsarlar

37 minutes ago

So we have ad blockers, ad blocker detectors.... But apparently no ad blocker blocker. Should I continue? Block the blockers by blocking the blockage... ouch.

GaryBluto

an hour ago

Popup windows could be easily blocked if you knew how, whilst modern in-page popup modals are much more tedious to deal with.

paradox460

4 hours ago

Funny, I literally just saw an ad for Firefox

jfengel

8 hours ago

There was also .001% of the content there is now. The Internet of 2000 was microscopic.

Now everyone can create content, without any of the friction of hosting it. The vast majority of it is crap, but that was always the case.

The main difference between now and 30 years ago is that the Internet is vastly more diverse. It isn't just other CS majors any more. Now everyone gets to wade in the vast crap pool looking for the smidge of things that appeal to them. Meanwhile the CS majors still host their own stuff, because they can, and you find out about it via the same word of mouth.

inigyou

8 hours ago

The .001% was the top .001% of today's content. The other 99.999% we gained was spam aimed at getting money while providing minimal value and taking minimal effort.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r

6 hours ago

can’t wait to hear about how some 9/11 truther blog was the cream of the crop. I’m surprised you can see anything through those rose coloured glasses.

the most charitable interpretation is that the internet used to more exclusively cater to your interests specifically, which i’m sure is true.

try asking most women about the internet then vs now. there are still scumbags, and one could reasonably argue that they’ve gotten worse, but at least theres more to do now.

pwdisswordfishq

3 hours ago

> can’t wait to hear about how some 9/11 truther blog was the cream of the crop

Compared to the torrent of AI slop today, it was.

tombert

7 hours ago

> It isn't just other CS majors any more.

Hey, that's not fair! It also had nine year olds who bought a book about HTML and made shitty sites on Geocities!

modriano

7 hours ago

Those were just CS majors before they majored in CS.

KPGv2

5 hours ago

Jokes on you, I majored in pure mathematics.

fl4regun

5 hours ago

i don't think it's fair to say it was just CS majors, I'm a 90s baby and i was on the web in the 2000s when i was in middle school, I still remember reading web comics and forums, messaging people on MSN and playing MMOs with online friends, looking up gameFAQs to get past sticking points. This could just be me, but it felt more social and personal.

gmadsen

5 hours ago

The 90s were very different from the 2000s

fl4regun

5 hours ago

the commenter was talking about the internet in the 2000s, as am I. I was only born in the 90s.

JKCalhoun

4 hours ago

Yeah, that was fine. It meant I got out riding my bike more often.

docjay

4 hours ago

It sounds like you agreed with them from the other direction. “The internet of yesteryear felt more special.” - “Nah, there wasn’t as much slop back then and now it’s a crap pool that anyone can wade into and look for scraps.”

siren2026

6 hours ago

That's exactly why I used to love tech (and working in tech) 20 years ago and why I lost faith in tech completely.

We went from a bunch of open protocols and decentralized web to a full closed garden gatekeeped by a couple mega companies. It is a sad state of the world, but the MBAs and BigTech won.

antod

5 hours ago

yeah, when I first stumbled on to the internet it was all about the protocols and specific implementations didn't matter.

Then later IE dominated the web and hurt interoperability, but we fought back through the Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox era anxiously following IE6 slowly losing market share.

Only to find that the war had shifted beyond clients and standards support to the sites and the power of their business models.

And parallel battles for the old standards based DIY freedom lost to hyperscaler clouds and now AI.

All in all compared to that, losing Google Reader seems small, but it was kinda the nexus point at the centre of it all.

ethagnawl

5 hours ago

> ... when I first stumbled on to the internet ...

StumbleUpon used to be an endlessly entertaining way to find new content on the internet.

mathieudombrock

9 hours ago

What I don't understand about the "RSS can't support ads" argument is that most of my RSS feeds don't actually let me read the article. Just a headline and a snippet at most. So if I want to actually read the article I'm going to have to load their page.

dhosek

8 hours ago

I’ve encountered feeds that do this and I tend to not keep those subscriptions long. That said, some feeds often have content that doesn’t present well in my feed reader and I’ll end up clicking to view the web presentation

What I miss is that back when Safari had RSS built in was I used to just open all the new articles in tabs from an RSS list in my bookmark bar. This is the experience I really would like to recover, being able to just get a set of tabs that represent new posts at sites that I want to follow. Maybe I’ll vibe code this for myself now that I’ve given in and turned to the dark side with Claude.

inigyou

8 hours ago

Doesn't Firefox still have this? It's a special kind of bookmark folder populated by RSS.

defrost

7 hours ago

Moz Support says "Firefox's built-in support for web feeds and Live Bookmarks ended in December 2018 with version 64."

I checked as I use the Feedbro extension in Firefox and Chrome family browsers for holding and updating a tree of RSS feeds and thought I'd missed a built in FF feature :/

singpolyma3

6 hours ago

Also you can literally insert ads into the feed content

SanjayMehta

6 hours ago

There are some RSS feeds which let you read even their paywalled content completely, without ads. I'm guessing by accident, not design.

emzo

8 hours ago

Google felt a little more special. "Don't be evil" and all that. Those were the days.

user3939382

9 hours ago

> the privacy friendly browsers just exist to serve ads when I think about it

Not LibreWolf. I’m also a fan of ungoogled-chromium, those are my two daily browsers.

lylo

6 minutes ago

RSS is a wonder, but given that it removes any opportunity for ads and monetisation you can see why the powers that be at Google might want to kill it. Still, it lives on but only in our geek circles.

I run my own RSS reader product (feedgrab.net) and one thing I’ve learned is that there are plenty of sites that serve RSS yet block bots from reading it (ie. RSS crawlers!!).

Not sure what needs to happen to make RSS more popular again - there are loads of feed readers and most blog/news sites support it. Maybe it’s just too complicated for the masses? I tried to address this in Feedgrab with a “Discover” approach which I think could help, but I need to put more effort into the directory.

Also, let’s not forget social media’s role in killing it.

schappim

8 hours ago

Google tried to kill RSS, but it is not dead, in fact it is still a huge part of the Open Web Initiative. There is no performance hit or real resource cost in supporting RSS. If big platforms like Shopify can do it, we can support RSS feeds (and more) too! I've recently added RSS and other alternative representations to our Rails based ecom store[1] and rails makes it super easy[1a].

If you're using Rails it is basically free to add RSS feeds w/ the 'feed' or 'rss' gems[2]. Because of this we provide RSS feeds for everything, including customer orders and their tracking.

If you want to support the Open Web Initiative[3], I'd also encourage you to support alternative representations[4] of your content (markdown, CSVs, etc), add support for ActivityPub / Fediverse directly and webhooks to your site/app.

Stay open!

1. https://littlebirdelectronics.com.au/help/atom-feeds 2. https://github.com/ruby/rss 3. https://littlebirdelectronics.com.au/open-web 4. https://guides.rubyonrails.org/v5.0/layouts_and_rendering.ht...

bakemawaytoys

11 hours ago

Google’s obviously fake excuse for killing their RSS reader (declining usage) was especially maddening at the time because they were pushing Google+ - which _nobody_ used.

timmg

10 hours ago

As someone who was a big fan of Reader and worked at Google at the time (not on G+): I never understood why they didn’t try to put Reader into G+.

Like you could imagine getting your RSS feed in your G+ stream. If you didn’t want any social stuff you could just use it as a reader. But it would also give you an easy way to share stuff from your feed. And it might have been useful for those providing RSS feeds to interact more with their readers (if they chose to.)

I think it would have been an interesting way to bootstrap things.

glenstein

10 hours ago

Exactly. Reader was maturing into a proto social network in its own right (I started commenting on articles with friends in it in college right before it started getting deprecated) and finding the organic activity and rolling with it and thinking in terms of honoring the core users could have been a very good strategy.

Google Plus could have worked imo and the path to success would have involved smart stewardship of reader.

ksec

an hour ago

>As someone who was a big fan of Reader and worked at Google at the time (not on G+): I never understood why they didn’t try to put Reader into G+.

Oh there were many post on HN about the politics of G+ at the time, how meta ( Facebook ) are going to crush them with social graph etc. And G+ was effectively its own little organisation within Google. I remember there were something about RSS they didn't want. But I guess I have to dig up my bookmarks to find it.

fiddlerwoaroof

8 hours ago

Google Buzz also seemed like a better path for Google to have a "social network" than what they tried to do with G+: Post short twitter-like things from various Google properties and have your friends posts show up in the same place. Between Buzz, Reader and gmail chat, Google had a fairly solid lineup of social products that they killed one way or another to boost G+.

smeej

7 hours ago

I had a cohort of friends from grad school that used Buzz like crazy. We tried Google+, but it just wasn't as useful. This would have been 2008-2010.

We also really wanted to use Google Wave, but couldn't get enough invitations to go around. It was like nobody at Google figured out that the only reason invitations worked for Gmail was because Gmail was interoperable with email. Wave didn't interoperate with anything. Either your friends were on it and you could use it, or they weren't and you couldn't. 3-4 invitations after a couple months just wasn't enough of a social effect to make it useful like it had been for Gmail.

deepsun

10 hours ago

Same thing with Google Music, it was perfect. You could stream, or could buy and download mp3, or you could upload your library to it.

And the best feature: "I am feeling lucky" -- play a random song you ever liked and keep playing a generated playlist off it.

But they killed it due to internal wars with YouTube Music that sucks. There's still nothing like Google Music.

ianburrell

8 hours ago

The thing that sucks about Google Music is that they could have merged them but kept the good parts of both. Youtube Music is still missing features of Google Music. It would have been more than "just", but Google Music with Youtube backend and branding would have worked. It is the backend song licensing they wanted to merge.

The same happened with Google Podcasts. Merged into Youtube Music, not even separate Youtube Podcasts, and it sucks.

smeej

7 hours ago

The thing that pissed me off was that I had uploaded so many indie local bands' CDs, none of which were ever on YouTube, so I lost more than half of my music library when they forced that change and there was nothing I could do about it, having long since gotten rid of the disks because I believed them that they would never delete my stuff.

(Degoogled not long after that, actually. Fool me twice...)

jeffbee

7 hours ago

I am not sure what you mean here. I just checked my uploads and all my live music stuff is still there, as well as obscure published records.

wildzzz

9 hours ago

Google Music's song radio feature was really good. It would play similar songs obviously but it exposed you to actually new artists. Meanwhile, spotify basically encourages you to listen to the same stuff all the time, It's like listening to my old CD collection.

titzer

8 hours ago

Why anyone trusts any streaming music service is absolutely beyond me. It will always get enshittified. I have 65GiB of mp3s I've accumulated from ripping CDs over the years and it used to be a burden to transfer around between machines. Now it easily fits on a thumb drive or microsd and it's easy to copy it onto all of my machines.

deepsun

8 hours ago

Yes, because you did not need to copy it to all devices. You could stream your own library at any device.

Probably you could set up a homelab server and there are tools/apps for streaming it to your own devices, but I havent bothered yet.

AND discovery part -- I'm feeling lucky let me listen to new music. If I liked it I bought it. But it's hard to find new music, get out of your bubble.

smeej

7 hours ago

I trusted it in 2008 because none of these things had been around long enough to have a track record of enshittification.

abraham

8 hours ago

I liked Google Play Music a lot but like any Google product it had a lot of issues. Still way better than YouTube Music.

underlipton

8 hours ago

GPM was amazing for keeping my library accessible on a device with all of 16GB of storage space, but for recommendations, Grooveshark took the cake. Spotify, Pandora, Tidal, Youtube... None have ever gotten close to GS in terms of showing me songs completely outside my wheelhouse that I immediately loved. Also likewise cruelly cut down by cynical forces.

PunchyHamster

9 hours ago

They could have Spotify market and just decided not to.

jeffbee

7 hours ago

> "I am feeling lucky"

YouTube Music still has this feature and it even uses the die icon, just like always.

> you could upload your library to it.

You can also do this in YouTube Music.

> But they killed it

They rebranded the exact same code base with largely the same staff. I don't know why you perceive this to have been a break.

cmrdporcupine

4 hours ago

> They rebranded the exact same code base with largely the same staff. I don't know why you perceive this to have been a break.

This is actually completely false. (Source: I worked at Google at the time this transition was made, though not on GPM or YTM).

Two completely different codebases and teams and in fact YTM launched missing a boatload of features that Play Music had. Including annoyingly the ability to use our own Chromecast features on the desktop/browser version. (I worked on the Cast team). There were quite a few angry internal buganizer tickets.

smeej

7 hours ago

Yeah, but if the songs in your Google Music library weren't on YouTube Music, you just lost them forever. End of story.

It was the betrayal that turned me off Google.

jeffbee

7 hours ago

This isn't true. I have tons of stuff that I uploaded that they've never heard of

al_borland

8 hours ago

The mainstream ended up using social media to solve the problem RSS had already solved years earlier… it just had poor marketing.

A lot of people do use RSS without realizing it, via podcasts.

ksec

an hour ago

>A lot of people do use RSS without realizing it, via podcasts.

A lot of people were using Google Reader without ever knowing what RSS was all about. And when Google reader was gone, they stopped using it, Facebook then taken the newsfeed over.

Grombobulous

7 hours ago

While that may be true, I just don’t believe for a second that RSS had any chance of becoming mainstream outside of techie circles.

“Solving the problem” is only one aspect of the reason something becomes popular in the mainstream.

I also don’t think the user experience offered by products like TikTok is possible with RSS.

al_borland

7 hours ago

> I also don’t think the user experience offered by products like TikTok is possible with RSS.

I use an app called Feeeed on iOS that scrolls my RSS feeds like a social media feed.

If the TikTok reference is more about the never ending algorithmic feed… RSS not doing that is a feature. Of course, I think many among us have been guilty of overloading an RSS reader to the point where it feels like a never ending feed that’s impossible to catch up on.

firefax

11 hours ago

It was a great example of being evil -- they reduced user choice while pushing an inferior product.

InsideOutSanta

11 hours ago

And then killed it too. They killed a tool people loved to promote a tool people didn't want to adopt, and in the end both ended up dead.

rcxdude

10 hours ago

It seems like Google culturally can't deal with products that aren't overwhelming, gigantic successes, but they also really struggle to put in the effort to actually create those. Multiple times they have spent a lot of resources developing a product, then released to great fanfare, but then don't have the follow-through to keep supporting it into being a big success. Stadia seemed to be the most ridiculous example to me. The console market is famously difficult to break into and Microsoft only managed it by making a loss for a very long time, but Google just didn't put in anywhere near that amount of effort, and just gave up pretty much as soon as it launched.

ethbr1

10 hours ago

Google, culturally, seems very tone-deaf to market signals.

Granted: historically they have often been the smartest person in the room (collectively speaking)

But a consequence of this is that an organization (a) doesn't develop pre-release "listening to user needs" skills & (b) can't post-release pivot in response to user feedback. Microsoft and Apple do much better jobs at both.

This works as long as Google releases exactly what users need the first time (e.g. original Google search or Gmail), but flounders when opinionated, artistic product design with long-term vision is needed (Reader, YouTube, Stadia) or when people outside Google have better ideas (Chrome, GCP, messengers, Docs/Drive, AI dev harnesses).

At this point, I've decided it's less about revenue (the common finger point) and more about organizational prioritization and decision-making. It's just not in Google's DNA.

Nothing short of a Bezos-style API memo is going to change it... and Pichai doesn't seem like he's willing/able to rock the boat that much.

titzer

8 hours ago

Google's problem is that, fundamentally, they hate end users. They do not want to hear feedback from them, they don't want to fix their bugs. They don't want to hear your thoughts and they actually don't value feedback. They don't want to support devices or older versions. They have no idea what LTS even means.

Google pretends to be data driven. What that means is that Google would rather creepily spy on you using all kinds of underhanded means that they invented themselves, tell itself it cares about privacy because it doesn't "sell" that raw data to third parties, and then mine said data for the only signals that matter--how they are going to make more money off advertising to you.

And god forbid some machine-learning system goes wrong and classifies you as a scammer. If they think you're a scammer, you're dead to them, and they will ghost you without a second thought, with no recourse on your part.

Google thinks anything below a billion users is not worth even pursuing.

When I worked there it was always about 10X and moonshots and more magic moments. There was a mantra "focus on the user and all else will follow". The users who matter are advertisers. So they did that, and advertisers keep forking over their cash. End users do not fork over cash, so screw them. Leeches.

esafak

6 hours ago

I think Google's culture is to blame; launches are lauded, nurturing is not.

galaxyLogic

10 hours ago

And killing G+ killed a community. I lost many could be real-friends, whom I've never heard from since. That if anyting was Evil, killing a community.

firefax

8 hours ago

When I used it, it was popular among folks who would do photography as a hobby when attending academic conferences.

Tom Anderson liked one of my landscape photos, which briefly made me popular with the crew who'd roll into gallery showings for the wine and cheese.

(This was back before Instagram got acquired by Facebook and Obama let Putin take Crimea and Xi Jingping scoop up rare earth mineral rights in Africa.)

leoc

10 hours ago

The final irony is that if they'd just maintained G+ a bit better and kept it around after 2018 it's likely they'd eventually have had a decent chance to pick up a number of waves of unhappy people leaving Facebook or Twitter.

But, ceterum censeo: while Vic Gundotra may have been the main force behind G+ it's important to emphasise that, as usual, the buck stops with Google's Class B overlords Page and Brin personally. If they were the decent people and responsible stewards they were originally promoted as then the Google+ debacle would not have happened, or certainly not in the way it did.

ethagnawl

5 hours ago

Well, everybody _did_ use Google+ but nobody _wanted to_. I remember constantly finding myself redirected to it and them doing shady things like automatically connecting you with everyone in your gmail contact list. Also, if memory serves, they chose an avatar for me using Picasa or photos in my gmail or something and it was a photo of me without a shirt on.

pronik

10 hours ago

Probably Google's biggest failure ever was to recognize they've already had a social network: Gmail.

jonas21

10 hours ago

They tried to develop Gmail into a social network in 2010 with Google Buzz [1]. It received a lot of backlash from people who did not want their email to be a social network.

The social network they were not developing well was YouTube. Eventually, they figured it out, and it's estimated YouTube would be worth $550B as a standalone business today [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz

[2] https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/youtube-valuation-wort...

PunchyHamster

8 hours ago

They had so many chat services over time it' ridiculous

abraham

8 hours ago

> Google’s obviously fake excuse for killing their RSS reader (declining usage)

What's obviously fake about that?

asveikau

8 hours ago

It has the vibe of a corporate company doing post hoc justification for a decision they already made.

And then the commenter provides a parallel to how willing they were to put money into Google+, i.e. they appear willing to put money into a relatively low usage product when they feel like doing it.

dredmorbius

7 hours ago

G+ plausibly challenged an existential threat: Facebook.

Reader had no such strategic leverage, at least to Google execs' understanding.

alightsoul

10 hours ago

As a result many people in developing countries were driven towards social media like instagram and TikTok where they get their news. And now they're addicted to them.

dannyobrien

10 hours ago

At the time, I was working at the Committee to Protect Journalists with dissident bloggers working in Syria, Egypt, UAE, Turkey, etc. We had a group of them come to the US to talk to the big tech companies about the issues they were struggling with: fake takedowns, language support, local censorship, and so on. I remember distinctly as we worked on the agenda for the meeting with Google that Google Reader being shut down was the first complaint any of us mentioned. We laughed, but it was serious.

thataccount

10 hours ago

But they totally used Google wave. It was/is the future.

mapt

8 hours ago

You mean Google Wave? Or Google Metaverse?

charcircuit

10 hours ago

Do you not realize that Google+ was a newer product and was a strategic priority for Google. Trying to say they are the same so you should be able to apply the same exact criteria is a false equivalence.

betenoire

11 hours ago

Google Reader going away felt like the beginning of the end the internet as I knew it. I miss websites

adamm255

11 hours ago

"I miss websites". Damn that hit. I realise the only place pushing me to an actual website these days are my RSS feeds (self hosted FreshRSS), and HN. Maybe very occasional share on LinkedIn.

danesparza

11 hours ago

I'm still bitter about Google Reader going away. I endorse this sentiment.

gertlex

10 hours ago

Me too, but there were some replacements that made me happy because they fixed some irk with google's version. (I think I used Commafeed?)

I eventually got away from subscribing to like 50 webcomics (all I used RSS for... most other stuff was too high-volume, and I liked reading everything in my feed, iirc) though and stopped using an RSS feed altogether.

fsflover

9 hours ago

What prevents you from using RSS now? Outsourcing your RSS feed to a megacorp sounds like a horrible idea.

tombert

10 hours ago

Yeah. There honestly was a purity to the disconnected nature of shitty Geocities and Angelfires pages, where filled with amateurs writing shitty HTML just because they thought it would be cool to have their own web site.

That's not a dig, to be clear. I was one of those kids writing shitty HTML for Geocities.

I don't hate the modern internet, but I feel like there's roughly now about ~10 sites that I visit frequently, whereas when I was a teenager there were lots more. Maybe it's just my "old man yells at cloud" moment.

konsalexee

10 hours ago

Just why bother relying on Google products for RSS?

I use for the last many years NetNewsWire and have never had any problems reading the news I want to read.

For ref: https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire

glenstein

10 hours ago

I mean you're right, but also Google had one of the legitimately best options at the time and massive visibility and seemingly credible institutional commitment. And it was early to a scene of web based always online RSS readers when before that they were typically desktop-based. And on desktop portability was achievable but not as convenient. With reader it was nearly effortless.

While it was definitely possible to use alternatives, it effectively became king of the mountain which gave it the power to deal a punishing blow to RSS once they pulled the plug.

I will just say it was a very different time and at the time I didn't regard Google as a place that didn't make credible commitments to new products. But big picture I think you're right.

venusenvy47

9 hours ago

No Android or Windows availability?

carlosjobim

10 hours ago

And he includes a Safari plugin to get an RSS button back into the interface for easy subscribing (on Mac).

dabinat

10 hours ago

I don’t understand why many sites with news updates / blogs don’t offer an RSS feed. Are they expecting me to keep visiting the site over and over to see if there is new content? They’re guaranteeing I’ll never visit their site again.

Perhaps they’re expecting people to subscribe to social media accounts or via email, but those both cost money to reach users. RSS is free.

basilikum

10 hours ago

RSS is a free way to reach almost no one.

fsflover

28 minutes ago

RSS is a free way to reach content genuinely created for users, not for profit.

wildzzz

8 hours ago

Because you can't serve ads as nicely over RSS

mathieudombrock

9 hours ago

It seems to me like the common pattern these days is to ask for notification permissions instead.

ikiris

7 hours ago

Because RSS is a way to give your bait content away for free without getting your ad revenue for it. Its a complete misfeature from the perspective of a site.

orzi

9 hours ago

Don't forget Mozilla removing Live Bookmarks (RSS feeds showed up directly in your bookmarks menu) and RSS feed subscriptions in Firefox 64.

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

TiredOfLife

3 hours ago

Somebody used Live Bookmarks?

sunaookami

6 minutes ago

Yes, me. It was a good feature.

culi

8 hours ago

Did any other browser ever have this?

orzi

8 hours ago

I do not think so. It was such a GOOD feature. Imagine opening your browser and you had all your news instantly in your bookmark under address bar. I loved Firefox for this.

But, thankfully, you can have almost the same thing with Livemarks extension.

throwawsy7273

7 hours ago

Opera used to have a built in RSS reader that was better in my opinion.

Some of the people behind Opera has built Vivaldi, which also contains an RSS reader. I haven't used it myself, but it looks promising.

culi

6 hours ago

Seems risky to rely on a browser as your RSS reader. I know you could always export your OPML file but not every reader seems to import/export that spec correctly

GrayHerring

10 hours ago

I think the core issue is that it is hard to sell why you need an RSS, especially for the average user. It would not be uncommon to meet an IT professional who has at best heard the term, but never really tried to delve further. Sadly by the time the average internet dweller hears of RSS, their mind is already so ingrained in the "usual" browsing experience that anything that is out of the ordinary feels instinctively wrong, even if it clearly has multiple merits.

carlosjobim

10 hours ago

I don't think the average person has to be taken into account all the time. There are millions of companies providing products and services which the average person has no interest in. Most books and music has no appeal to the average person, neither do most sports or hobbies.

bartread

8 hours ago

> I don't think the average person has to be taken into account all the time.

This needs to be said louder and more often whenever this "average person" argument is trotted out.

Except for the very largest technology businesses, like the FAANGs of this world, relatively few technology companies are offering products and services aimed at the "average person".

No business I've ever worked for has had the "average person" as their customer. They're all aiming for particular market segments and positioning their products and services to meet the needs of those market segments. I spent a lot of time working on software developer tools that were only of interest to software developers working on the Microsoft stack, for example. Java, C++, and Python developers wouldn't have known or cared about these tools and that was just fine.

So, like you, I couldn't give two hoots what the "average person" thinks of RSS, whether they find it useful, whether they understand it, or whether they've even heard of it.

Whereas there are in fact loads of people who aren't sat on the average (whatever that means) who do find RSS incredibly useful.

hecmmm

5 hours ago

To be fair: youtube is one of the very few social media sites that still support RSS.

logn

9 hours ago

And they shut down Google Podcasts, migrating it to YouTube Music. The podcast ecosystem is open and RSS-based. YouTube Music is closed.

AlexAplin

10 hours ago

Feeds still have a lot of inertia, at least. Most blogs generate them out of the box, and Wordpress being as predominant as it still is means you can still find them even where you don't expect to. Even social media profiles can compress into feeds with a little help from solutions like Nitter (or in Bluesky's case, offered natively). What I think is really missed is the social component that Reader had, which you still can't really find even with the variety of great readers that came in its wake.

I know I will probably just migrate them to RSSHub when the time calls, but YouTube's channel and playlist feeds have been such a great way to follow a large number of creators. I'm still holding my breath for the day they unceremoniously stop working.

mattsimpson

10 hours ago

You never know what will be someone's straw-that-broke-the-camels-back moment, but this was it for me. Nothing in this post was new news, but despite that, seeing it written down in one place made me realize just the type of person, I mean company, that you are and what you really want, Google. For too long I've been holding on to the "do no evil" person, I mean company, that you once were. But now it's clear to me... you're a toxic friend. We've been drifting apart for years, but now it's official... we're breaking up. I'm sure there's a person, I mean company, out there for me. One that will treat me right, be good to me, and respect me as a person and I'm going to find it.

glenstein

10 hours ago

Agree. It was the watershed moment that represented the break from "don't be evil", a cheeky slogan that was remarkably effective at conveying a sense of what they were about by talking about what they were trying not to be.

gkoberger

8 hours ago

Okay bear with me here.

We blame the RSS aggregators for the death, which is very fair. But I don't know if blog writers ever supported RSS, either.

With RSS, your words are read, which is great. But you lose the ability to control the feel of the post... the best blogs have a vibe where the medium is at least large portion of the message. A pg essay would feel wrong in a chunk serif font, and I've read blogs that have used interactivity to great effect. RSS also kills monetization, since you can't have ads or push users to sign up.

I would love to see a platform (mobile would be great for this) that let the creator control the design and maybe even levels of monetization. (Some could argue I'm somewhat describing Medium or Substack, although I don't think they quite hit it for me.)

I could never get into RSS. I theoretically loved it as a concept, but I missed "feeling" the vibe the author was going for.

adolph

8 hours ago

> lose the ability to control the feel of the post.

Agreed, rss was popular with people who wanted to decrease noise.

> RSS also kills monetization, since you can't have ads

This was the killer and the dumb part, because it could, but monetization sofar means integration with all the bad parts of the Internet that desire to track people.

gkoberger

8 hours ago

For what it's worth, and there's lots of reasons this hasn't and won't happen, I think micropayments are the solution here.

But until that happens, ads fill a middle ground: users don't want to pay and creators want to be paid.

colesantiago

8 hours ago

So what is the solution here other than ads?

Most people who use RSS, use it because they don't want to go to a website (filled with ads) and they want content 100% for free.

throwawsy7273

7 hours ago

I have a feeling that it used to be much more valuable to send users to your site in the past, than today where a lot of traffic comes from search/ads/social media.

Perhaps it is time to revisit a distribution model, where the full content of the article is available for paid users inside the reader itself. The RSS reader would require a subscription and pay RSS feed providers a share of the subscription price. A sort of distributed spotify model.

encrypted_bird

6 hours ago

Fun Fact: Most, if not all, YouTube channels automatically have an RSS feed. That's what I use to follow channels I like. No Google account necessary.

jll29

10 hours ago

Let's make sure Ladybird will have good RSS and Atom feed support, then that'll settle things.

ramijames

8 hours ago

I'm still so angry about this. RSS was EVERYWHERE and then it just wasn't anymore. It was so useful and such a nice, advertising-free way, of using the internet.

monksy

11 hours ago

What did Google benefit from killing rss? Seems like that would help engagement on the web in general.

tommek4077

11 hours ago

You couldnt put ads that easily in rss feeds.

InsideOutSanta

10 hours ago

It's a decentralized solution in a world where google wants everything to go through google.

waqasx

7 hours ago

Subscribing to RSS creates a p2p web over http. It cuts out the middleman. Who is the biggest middleman of the internet?

goldenarm

11 hours ago

They killed greader and RSS to push Google+, which was a brilliant decision.

arjie

5 hours ago

I think centralized social networks were going to dominate in the end. There's just too much of an advantage to going to HN. There's a lot of content and a user-filter pushes the best stuff to the top in a way that you don't get from other feeds.

firasd

9 hours ago

I think the real issue is that the 'hobbyist web' is dead because there is no distribution

Let's say you want to post about 'best way to clean your car windshield'. Why would you post it on a blog when nobody will read it when the TikTok algo will at least give you a pity test to a few hundred people

So all that's left is Reddit and social media and the short form video apps (and Youtube)

The other part of course is Google itself won't rank mypersonalblog .com/i-found-a-cool-way-to-clean-windshields

So there's a doom loop... the supply of potential independent sites can't connect to audience demand, the audience is not being funneled to indie sites anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And now Reddit gets to make much dinero out of selling access for AI training cause that's the only place organic discussion happens at scale

delduca

9 hours ago

Not sure if true, but said thousands times on HN. The reason to kill google reader was some trouble upgrading dependencies on it (borg)

smusamashah

10 hours ago

When chrome took the stage, it was the only popular browser that didn't display rss feeds XML in a readable way. It still does not to this day.

0xDEAFBEAD

6 hours ago

Interestingly I think Google's mishandling of RSS created an opening for Substack, which famously allows authors to export their mailing list at any time.

fiatpandas

9 hours ago

It makes me think if YouTube’s subscription feed will meet the same fate as RSS. It’s basically RSS for YouTube, in the sense that it’s a chronological feed of channels you directly follow.

It just seems too useful and un-derived to remain a Google-maintained feature for the long term.

cft

9 hours ago

No, because it's not cross platform, it doesn't take you outside of a Google product

tripleee

8 hours ago

I'm visiting this exact thread from an RSS feed.. it's there and great to use

ashu1461

8 hours ago

Was evolution of email newsletters also one major reason ? Email newsletters are more publisher friendly where they get your data (emails), understand how many people are opening your email, sell subscriptions as well.

inigyou

8 hours ago

Compared to websites that is an incredible paucity of surveillance data. Just email address? That's all?

ashu1461

7 hours ago

Social Media / RSS feed / Email newsletters are things which are just entry points to bring people eventually to the website.

Amongst these maybe Email newsletters are more friendly to publishers at least in terms of capturing first party data, so that you can be retargeted easily

Animats

8 hours ago

This is why Google's browser business needs to be separated from Google's search business, as illegal vertical integration under antitrust law.

LIMEVINCE

7 hours ago

Google had announced RSS support for Chrome back in 2021 and by the time this article was written in 2023 people were still waiting...

Xracke

8 hours ago

With integration of AI , RSS feeds is the future

ralfd

9 hours ago

That is stupid ranting.

RSS (and Atom) were too nerdy and the mainstream did and does not care for it. Google did not „destroy“ it

Alien1Being

6 hours ago

I miss the days of intelligent discussions on comp.arch.

John Mashey would pipe in with old_systems_guy@yahoo.com (John Mashey) "I repeat the old proverb:"Money can buy bandwidth, but latency is forever.""

https://yarchive.net/comp/latency.html

Terge Mathiesen with brilliant asides like<Terje.Mathisen "almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching" and with surprising insights into bisection bandwidth.

Intelligent discussions now happen on closed forums. My people have moved to mailing lists like arch-general@lists.archlinux.org, or behind authentication firewalls in professional societies.

The public internet is now populated by the sort of people I devotedly avoid in real life...

These days most of the high quality material I read is on Anna's Archive.

grigio

10 hours ago

RSS is still alive yarr is fantastic

glaslong

7 hours ago

thanks for the rec, had not heard of yarr

croes

4 hours ago

Many of the reasons are either a Google service removed providing RSS or Google killed a program/extension consuming RSS.

Seems RSS was on Google‘s life support all the time.

For instance the Google killing its RSS extension should be such big problem

topham

8 hours ago

Have you seen the spec for RSS?

I've vomited better things.

The spec is a horrible mash up and seriously needed refinement. It made it easy to kill

salynchnew

9 hours ago

I mean, Facebook acquiring FriendFeed felt at least as bad as Google shutting down Google Reader.

pipeline_peak

7 hours ago

It’s not Google’s responsibility to put RSS into their products.

The only point the author made that fits the title is what they did to FeedBurner.

LightBug1

11 hours ago

Yeah, fuck Google for all of this.

That's my intellectually considered response.

Fuck Google.

rpdillon

11 hours ago

Upvoted not for your particular phrasing, but because in a sense, this was my experience as well: I wanted to work at Google, and I thought Google was learning how to marry a great business with treating customers well. Killing GReader was the inflection point for me, when Google tipped from "Great!" to "Kinda evil". It's been a slide ever since.

amazingamazing

10 hours ago

RSS was never going to work anyway due to lack of monetization. If this is not true you would still see them today. See everyone posting archive paywall bypassing links on every opportunity here, lol. There is no incentive for a news site to support RSS.

8organicbits

9 hours ago

I use RSS specifically because the people who publish via RSS are not trying to monetize their content.

amazingamazing

9 hours ago

Yup, and that’s why it would never be mainstream.

shevy-java

10 hours ago

This is the Company of Pure Evil.

Whatever it touches, it destroys - excluding adMoney. That's its only soul.

What I have also noticed is that people are no longer happy to say "I worked at Google". It's now more a career killer (to some extent) than an accelerator.

Anyone remember Google+? Nobody used it but Google tried to force-abuse people into using it.

Kuyawa

8 hours ago

Oh come on, what's next? How Microsoft helped destroy Visual FoxPro?

Time goes on, things evolve, or are not monetizable so they're soon forgotten, or replaced, or improved, or... look a new shiny thing!