
Google Reader Killed RSS - mcfunley
https://mcfunley.com/google-reader-killed-rss
======
mmanfrin
There's so little here, Reader was bad because it was good and it killed other
people's attempts at making an RSS reader, but it was also bad because it
didn't have social features? Hard, hard disagree. I wanted an RSS reader, not
a social stream, and Google Reader filled that role spectacularly. I read more
independent sources those days than I do now thanks to it.

~~~
tantalor
Reader did have social features which differentiated it from other feed
aggregators. The power was in the network effect; if your friends used Reader
then you would use it too. Without the social features it was not that great;
just another aggregator.

To some extent Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. have replaced this need, but
with a lot of other noise.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Without the social features it was great, because it aggregated your feeds
without needing to run on your machine. (It also stored the entire history of
the feed without taking up storage on your machine.)

I used to use Thunderbird for RSS feeds. That failed one day while I was on
vacation -- the PC shut down for whatever reason -- losing track of what had
happened while I was away. Not a huge deal, sure, but Reader was a huge
improvement because it couldn't fail like that. It tracked everything and knew
what was new and what was old with no chance of slipping.

(It also let you read blogs that were blocked by the Great Firewall, back
before google itself was blocked.)

Lacking a free online RSS reader, I use Thunderbird again now, but Reader was
better.

~~~
wyclif
_Lacking a free online RSS reader, I use Thunderbird again now_

Feedly's free tier works quite nicely if you miss Google Reader.

~~~
pinkano
Glad to hear that :)

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irongeek
Ah the 3 month article rotation that RSS is dead. Yet I use RSS and Atom feeds
as much as I did in the Google Reader days and the IndieWeb is starting to get
hot as people finally realize publishing just in silos is a bad idea. Do not
bother clicking on this regurgitated nonsense.

Social media tried to kill RSS because they wanted you on their site. Feeds
are very much alive and the best content is far from Facebook or Twitter.

~~~
8bitsrule
Completely agreed. I don't understand the word "killed". I subscribe to 15-20
podcast feeds with RSS. I've noticed it getting harder to find RSS feeds, but
put that down to sites that want to be visited more often.

OK, I can live without their product. It will probably be stuffed with ads
anyways ... ads never 'personalized' despite that being a favorite excuse for
all the tracking.

------
kgwxd
RSS is fine. I got this link via RSS. The web-hosted RSS readers wrapped in
proprietary sharing and discussion features died. I'm ok with that.

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hprotagonist
I read this because this post came up on Feedly.

I have 168 subscriptions.

I don't feel especially "killed".

~~~
Eric_WVGG
He means in the sense that the automobile killed the horse.

And I agree, and was tweeting about exactly this yesterday.
[https://twitter.com/eric_wvgg/status/1207374861955469317](https://twitter.com/eric_wvgg/status/1207374861955469317)

The problem isn’t that Google killed Reader, it’s that Reader got such
traction to begin with. There were always better alternatives, and they’re
still around and better than ever, but they aren’t doing anything to make RSS
more accessible, user-friendly, or prevalent.

~~~
timw4mail
What Google Reader also had was a good API, which let you sync what you read.
I used Google Reader more through the API than in the web interface.

With TinyTinyRSS and a plugin, I have similar functionality, but it still
isn't quite as good as what Google had. That said, TinyTinyRSS has a better
web interface than Google ever did.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
My experience with TTRSS's web interface isn't super positive (though I'm not
using the latest version, in fairness), so that says something about Reader's
interface.

------
drdeadringer
I remember a life before RSS. You would literally subscribe to online news
emails delivered to your email inbox on a daily basis. And for me it was a
Hotmail email inbox with a USA TODAY email delivery.

Every morning, a USA TODAY news email delivery in my Hotmail inbox.

Then came RSS. I didn't understand or pay attention.

Time passed. People died. People claimed RSS died. Podcasts rose into
popularity.

I began paying attention to podcasts. And began subscribing to them via RSS
via an Android App. I am doing this still, now, today.

For me RSS is not dead. I actively look out for RSS feeds on podcasts, online
web comics, and similar.

I understand that Google Reader had a "bull in china shop" influence against
RSS, but for people like me there is still RSS.

~~~
PretzelFisch
The way I remember life before rss was adding a site to my favorite list then
visiting them all on friday night and saturday morning to see what was new.

------
gramakri
I am subscribed to 100s of feeds via RSS. It is well and truly alive and most
sites support RSS feeds.

FWIW, I self host TinyTinyRSS which works great and has an excellent mobile
app as well.

~~~
ldiracdelta
TinyTinyRSS is how I got to this page just now. Not google reader, but pretty
reasonable.

~~~
gramakri
Ha ha, me too :)

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OrderlyTiamat
Just to add my voice to the choir, I too got to see this article from rss. I
do however think that rss could have been a lot bigger than it is now: it
hasn't gone mainstream, though it has had enough advantages to have dome so.

It has reached mainstream in one regard: as a carrier for podcasts. Given the
wealth of user friendly tools to consume podcasts, this is perhaps not such a
big surprise.

------
briffle
You know.. RSS killed pointcast. Pointcast was actually much more like google
reader, it was an app that would grab news from your favorite sites, and show
you in the application, or as your screensaver. it was so popular, many
companies banned it outright, because it had the effect of killing the
bandwidth on very expensive at the time T1 lines when half the employee's
computers tried to download tons of news sites at the start of every hour.

RSS came out later, if I remember right, as a way to do this without killing
internet connections. you could grab the feeds, but only download the content
when you were ready to read it.

pointcast was actually really nice. Now get off my lawn, you damn kids

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast_%28dotcom%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast_%28dotcom%29)

------
jawns
Whether Google Reader hastened the decline in popularity of RSS, or whether
Google accurately predicted the decline in popularity of RSS and killed Google
Reader at just the right time is hard to say.

But it is weird that I was regularly consuming content from 50ish sources via
Google Reader, and then, when Google Reader ceased, I just ... didn't really
notice that I wasn't using an RSS reader anymore. I bookmarked about a half-
dozen sources and now browse their content directly, but the rest were just
stuff I casually read, and that's largely been replaced by stuff that surfaces
on social media.

------
Grumbledour
I would say browser makers are more at blame here. They never really
implemented features to discover feeds so it was always up to the webmaster to
include some "what are feeds and how to subscribe" pages. Those are mostly
gone now, though the feeds often are still there, just hard to find.

If we want them to become more popular, we just need to tell people about
them. But then again, I always struggled to make many of my friends and family
- even many other techies - understand what they were and why they are great.

Still, they are around and indispensable or many power users.

------
PeterStuer
I loved RSS for a while, and my client of choice was Google Reader. It solved
aggregation of the articles, feeds implicitly have inherent notification, and
the standardization of presentation elements bring calm to the consumer
experience.

RSS has its flaws, some like the non uniformity of discovery were starting to
standardize through customs, others, like the scaling and maintaining being
left up to the individual while arguably a strength were at the time poorly
supported.

When Google Reader disappeared there were few other quality readers polished
enough to take over. Many offers tried to rush into the vacuum, some by
revigorating their development, others by rushing out a Google Reader clone,
but for the most part people did not follow because (a) alternatives were less
slick and (b) for many the required housekeeping they had neglected for too
long meant their overall feed file had accumulated so much cruft that they
didn't want to reboot the effort.

I still do not know exactly why Reader which was extremely successful at the
time was given the boot. I can imagine less add engagement, and also we were
supposed to transition to Wave or G+ or was it still Orkut at the time?

Anyway, for the internet masses server side aggregation won, client side
aggregation lost. The demise of Google Reader most certainly accelerated the
transition, but longer term I do not know whether if it had been left to
evolve it wouldn't have morphed it into another one of the server side
aggregated/curated walled gardens years ago.

------
arkanciscan
All you nerds want to brag about how you still use RSS (probably from emacs or
something) so much that you totally miss the point:

> You’re having a funeral for the tame old fox that was mysteriously living in
> your henhouse.

Google cornered a market then handed it to Facebook and Twitter. You don't use
those? Good for you! I can't wait to hear how you don't have a TV either. Many
people do. The author is suggesting that if Google hadn't used their clout to
take over the space then a more worthy competitor (ostensibly their own
project) could have prevented the takeover by centralized publishing silos.
Disagree with that if you like but spare us the rss-brags.

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npx13
No it didn't. I never stopped using RSS. Today I use Netnewswire and Feedbin.

------
amanzi
I subscribe to hundreds of sites through an RSS reader, and I got a link to
this post through RSS too. The author's own site even supports RSS, so I could
subscribe to his content too. But I won't because I can't stand it when
randoms on the internet claim something has been killed when it is very much
alive and well. That's the kind of inflammatory banter I expect to see on
Twitter.

------
Grue3
Nah, Google Reader was better than alternatives when it existed, and is _still
better_ than every single alternative existing now. I just can't get used to
Feedly's interface even though it's the best one I've found (don't bother
listing the others, I've tried them all). As a result, I barely use RSS feeds
at all.

------
sys_64738
Google Reader was a simple RSS facility free of ads and free of yet another
login facility. It might also have been one of the few web based readers that
required no client. Others came along afterwards using GOOG authentication and
were web based. We've survived in the post-Google apocalyptic world.

------
popup21
RSS will never die. After Reader detonated I moved to Thunderbird and have
been using it ever since.

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senectus1
HN is becoming a tad repetitive...

Claims: RSS is dead

Reality: no, its not

Claims: Climate change claim "X" is bullshit after all

Reality: no its not

Claims: Diet "x" is actually good/bad for you

Reality: Everything in moderation people...

Etc...

we seem to be going through the same old cycle over and over.

~~~
PeterStuer
Are you suggesting we should give each position on any topic as much praise
and support as any other, regardless of its merit?

Or are you suggesting we should implement a sort of stack-exchange canonical
topic/response regime where a group of 'community managers' rigorously
partition the subjects into an imposed clustered domain by fast closing and
marking as 'duplicates'?

Sure, this site has it's typical positions, and topics do tend to be revisited
often, but isn't that the nature of a more conversational social space?

------
stevenicr
Well google helped in a few ways, and fbook dealt the mortal blows imho.

Fbook got real open.. open APIs.. (as a busniess, publisher, etc), add your
stuff, get into everyone's feed..

people starting using fbook as their rss reader.. you started seeing the like
button everywhere and less of the rss button on sites.

google helped with this as word got out that they were penalizing sites for
blogrolls and such.. a lot of people depended on third party rss parsers
(presenters?) - and the juice was not worth the squeeze to have a convenient
feed if it killed your google rank and all your traffic.

While google traffic was going down, facebook engagement was going up and
things looked okay that way.

It wasn't until a while, (couple? / few(?)) years later that businesses
started to realize fbook was manipulating the feeds.. a few started to say hey
this isn't right!

But that message has not gotten to most of the users. Most still assume that
they are getting the latest posts from the people / places they have 'liked'
\- and they do not know.

More and more businesses have started to notice the less and less traffic, and
some have even been shaken down by fbook, offering to put them back into the
chronological feed if they pay a price..

Users are now swamped with other things in their feed and they don't really
notice.

I chuckled hearing Kim Kamando go off about this on her radio show a while
back.. after hearing her tell so many people for a couple years about fbook
this, and use fbook for that.. of course, many of her listeners never heard
that show, as they had gotten use to getting updates for her shows through the
fbk feed.

there's been a few other things over the years. The my.yahoo, pageflakes,
startpages and similar never updated with modern graphics and thumbnails.. no
one thought to give them a scroll feed or algorithms to push certain rss feeds
to the forefront.. and the masses got use to the UI of the fbook non stop
scroll..

I think to bring rss back we need more rss apps, ones with fbook like scroll,
ones with sidescroll graphically like taptu had.. options for chronological
only, add certain feeds to 'show first' \- tap a feed info to explore more /
similar..

I don't know which ones have these options as I only test ones that are ad
free or premium.. and it's hard to suggest people use the ones I like.

but also a service that will send rss links to whichever app you want... (and
keep an opml for you, with current and previous versions of your subscribed
lists); i have not moved my reader and feeds to my new phone as it's a chore
one by one.

like a send-this-rss button on a page.. you click it (tap it) - it sends a url
to a portal like about.me - which then pops up a list of choices to send that
link to your app, to your fbk, to your whatever -

Love to have a segway screen that gives options when you subscribe to rss to
choose 'all entries' 'certain category(s)', etc

I use to have many rss feeds for certain categories or keywords parsed into
different places.. then they changes, I could never find most of them like
there use to - even using search engines to find the feed for various places'
category like yahoo news, bloomb and such..

Something similar to what you see on some music videos links on youtube - when
you click them you get a list of places to do what you want , amazon, spotify,
applemusic, beatport, etc

If we add a new spec to pull with sent data, like ask for rss and send a few
kb of data to get an enhanced feed *while giving some creds for stats, and ugh
possible ad targeting, maybe data showing i'm-premium-subscriber give me all
the patreon perks) - they will get more resources on the other end.. and
graphapi handles this well today and was not a thing when rss 2 came out
right?

/some thoughts.. not complete

------
LoSboccacc
RSS died because clients made easy to cut ads and hard to track engagement

RSS now are most often than not just links to the articles, cutting away all
the original convenience of the format

~~~
Hamuko
> _RSS now are most often than not just links to the articles, cutting away
> all the original convenience of the format_

Which is why there's a billion* services that generate RSS feeds for websites
with their full content.

