
The RSS Apocalypse - billpg
http://macsparky.com/blog/2013/3/the-rss-apocalypse
======
api
"Free is so often bad..."

Very interesting point. I think free is good when it comes to code, apps,
etc... things that can be copied and distributed. It creates a good shared
base of stuff on which to build.

But when it comes to services, totally free can _sometimes_ be bad. That's
because there's no such thing as a service that's free to run, so the money
has to come from somewhere. Either the service is being monetized through some
backdoor method -- usually something involving privacy intrusion or data
mining -- or it's what economists call "dumping."

Dumping is when you flood a market with free or below-cost goods to kill
competitors, and then jack up the price or even kill the market when the
competitors are gone. The best example in software is Internet Explorer, which
(prematurely) killed the market for browsers and led to the horrible age of
total IE dominance of the web.

Google Reader may well have been -- whether intentionally or not -- dumping.
If it was intentional, it might be an effort to kill RSS entirely. The big
players -- Google, Facebook, etc. (are there more?) -- all have a vested
interest in killing independent less centralized ways of aggregating knowledge
in order to steer all traffic to them.

I still use a Mac reader called NewsFire. It hasn't been updated in a long
time though. I don't even remember if I paid for it, but if it's free I would
certainly be willing to pay. Maybe the authors of such apps can capitalize on
this.

~~~
gz5
if not there already, we should put up quick poll of top x Google Reader
alternatives that everyone can vote on (put it on Google Docs to add a bit of
irony) w/ a light column for use case (which OS, browsers, etc).

every blog publisher then points to the poll as addendum to each post going
fwds, informing readers to choose one in order to keep reading via rss.

can include some directions on exporting GR feeds for any of the GR subs that
don't already help the reader do so.

granted requires some work, and we still will lose some users, but overall
isn't something like this (or a better idea?) required to ensure blogs/rss
ecosystem don't lose readers that don't know there are good alternatives and
won't necessarily seek alternatives on their own?

~~~
mkr-hn
Already done: <http://www.replacereader.com/>

------
LinaLauneBaer
Maybe OT:

When RSS gained popularity I got myself a decent RSS reader and subscribed to
a lot of feeds. What happened was that after a short period of time I had
+1000 unread posts. At this point I stopped using RSS for a while because it
was just too much noise. A few months back I discovered RSS again for myself
but this time I did not subscribe to every site I found interesting. There are
a lot of news sites which I visit often and they also have a feed in most
cases. I do not subscribe to them because I visit them anyway and they are
most of the time high volume feeds. Instead I only subscribe to sites (almost
always interesting blogs from fellow developers) who write a new post maybe
three times a year or so and I only subscribe to blogs from developers/people
who only post if they have something very important to say. This made RSS
useful to me again because I would never every remember to visit all those
sites twice a year… If I see a unread item in my RSS reader I know that I have
to read this post soon because it will blow my mind again.

Who of you is doing it in a similar way?

~~~
gwern
FWIW, an acquaintance of mine worked on one of the early RSS readers
(Bloglines, I think). He mentioned that they had run some analytics on their
users and found that the typical user would join, add a bunch of feeds, then
slowly add more feeds over time until they had a ton of feeds and then would
either delete a bunch of feeds or quit using the reader entirely.

I found that kind of funny. They were clearly deriving value from the reader,
or they wouldn't've joined or kept adding feeds in the first place; but if
they were feeling burdened or oppressed by their reader, why didn't they just
stop adding feeds? Or if they had to keep finding new feeds, prune back the
old feeds a bit. Why load up on feeds until you need to do a burst of spring
cleaning or quit entirely?

~~~
bentcorner
There's probably a lesson in ensuring that high-value items show up, and
"noisy" feeds have lower visibility, or similar work to make it feel like the
user is not obligated to read everything (i.e., make it feel like work).

Even a "hide feeds with no posts" would help (I don't know if bloglines has
that).

~~~
gwern
> Even a "hide feeds with no posts" would help (I don't know if bloglines has
> that).

I dunno about Bloglines then or now (whoever bought it threw out all the old
code and started over), but at least in Google Reader, there is an option to,
in the sidebar, omit feeds with no updates. I checked that option. It saves a
lot of space for me.

------
mapgrep
Funny how when unsustainable startups threaten old line industries -
newspapers, taxis, hotels, music - with free or rock bottom pricing it's
innovation. But when internet companies do this _to one another_ it's the end
of the world (literally described as "the apocalypse").

How about we be consistent and say to the developers of paid RSS aggregators
-- who built their products on free content in the first place -- that if they
don't like innovation or hopeful investments driving prices to zero, they are
in the wrong business. Somehow I think if Google had offered any one of them a
ton of money to buy their reader and make it free they'd have jumped at the
chance. Instead Google built an excellent offering of their own and people are
whining.

~~~
mattmanser
He's saying that non-techies don't realise that Google Reader != RSS. So won't
seek an alternative rss product, hence blogs losing lots of readers. The
apocolypse refers to that. I suspect that won't happen as plenty of
'alternative to google reader' articles popping up.

~~~
mapgrep
He outright says Google ruined the market:

"I remember back when RSS was amazing and something you paid for. I also
remember when Google Reader showed up and very quickly started taking over. It
was free. It was Google (back before we were all scared of Google) and it
wrecked the market for all of the paid RSS services."

His last sentence:

"This whole mess is just another example of why free is so often bad."

I see what you're saying, that he thinks users are part of the mechanism, but
the bottom line is he thinks this apocalypse can be traced back to Google
Reader being free.

------
cs702
This is the evolution of "embrace, extend, and extinguish," a successful
tactic used by Microsoft for many years.[1]

I'm calling it "embrace, give away, and extinguish."

(For most non-techies, RSS is now history.)

\--

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish>

\--

Edit: added "(For most non-techies..."

~~~
7rurl
RSS was dead for non-techies before this too, which is why the audience for
Google Reader was so small: it was only techies. Non-techies have simply been
using Facebook and Twitter all this time, and now they will just continue to
use Facebook and Twitter.

Techies on the other hand will migrate to other products, and RSS will keep
chugging along as a techie-only protocol.

~~~
ANTSANTS
RSS and Google Reader itself has an awareness problem. These are just
anecdotes, but I introduced Google Reader to multiple profoundly nontechnical
friends and family members over the years. Literally every single one of them
immediately fell in love with it, and never stopped using it. My mother, who
completely lacks understanding of the idea that she can save a file to her
computer and get it back later, for whom the web IS the computer, uses Google
Reader daily to follow dozens of blogs.

It's not that Reader or RSS have no potential value to anyone who isn't "good
with computers." It's that Google never bothered to tell anyone it existed!
And why should they? Modern Google doesn't give a shit about the open web or
decentralized culture, they want to "own social" and keep everything contained
within their cancerous Facebook clone.

~~~
TheCowboy
People I know who ask me why this mattered and why I used it seem to
understand it when I explain it this way: Imagine being able to know when your
favorite websites are updated, what that update is, follow the blogs or
articles of your favorite writers, and not be limited to what some strangers
decided they thought was kewl and up or downvoted.

A lot of people just didn't know you could have a service like Google Reader.

Following any more than a couple sites without this type of service, where you
have to bookmark and visit the sites daily or periodically, makes it feel like
you're changing channels on a TV without a TV guide view. Which is one reason
why sites like this and reddit are so prominent.

------
zdw
RSS is having it's "Internet Explorer 6" moment.

A free product enters the paid marketspace, kills all 3rd party competition,
then became the defacto standard.

Then it languished for years, but in RSS's case, the product with overwhelming
market share gets killed rather than having 3rd parties slowly catch up.

Fortunately RSS aggregation is simpler to replace than an entire browser...

~~~
tomkarlo
If the web had been as unpopular as RSS readers, things might have been
different. In a health market, if the leader fails to innovate, competitors
come in and steal share.

In an unhealthy market that's not growing any more (like RSS), things get a
lot more stagnant because folks aren't actively making product choices any
more and there's not a lot of incentive for new entrants.

I'm betting there's not a ton of innovation in the Gopher market, either.

~~~
cmccabe
An "application layer protocol designed for distributing, searching, and
retrieving documents over the Internet." RSS? No. That's a description of
Gopher, from Wikipedia.

I just realized something... _RSS is the new Gopher._

~~~
tomkarlo
That description also describes HTTP, SPDY, and a bunch of other protocols.
Relatively speaking, RSS never achieved the kind of popularity. Back in about
1993, there were more Gopher sites than HTTP sites.

------
brazzy
> This whole mess is just another example of why free is so often bad.

No, it's not. Paid services are cancelled all the time.

~~~
eykanal
I think his argument is that "paid" beats "free" because paid can support,
whereas free is _by definition_ relying on other revenue (advertising, other
paid products) to support it.

When a paid product dies, it's (often) because the product wasn't doing well
in the market. When a free product dies, it's because the company couldn't
support it through their secondary revenue streams. The product may be the
Best Thing EVARRR, but it's a casualty of failures elsewhere. The "bad"
comment is likely because it's a lot easier to measure direct risks (i.e.,
risks associated with your product) than indirect ones (risks associated with
your secondary business model, which likely isn't your area of expertise; if
it was, you should be in business there).

Whether this applies to Google, I'm on the fence.

~~~
gwern
My problem with the countless thousands of people who are taking this
opportunity to gloat using that argument is that they basically are assuming
their conclusion, since their argument goes something like this: "Paid
services are less likely to shut down. Google Reader was not paid, therefore
Reader was not less likely to shut down. Google Reader shut down, providing
more evidence for this claim. We-told-you-so!"

But where does the original claim get its support? _Are_ paid services less
likely to shut down? We read on HN all the time about post-mortems of, yes,
paid services. If we don't know that, then it's just a misleading post hoc
argument (and in the counterfactual universe where Reader was a paid service,
all the naysayers are now chorusing 'It's a Google service! You can't trust
Google! We-told-you-so!').

~~~
jeremyjh
Can you give some examples of recent paid services that were popular and were
shut down? I think the reason people intuitively believe this is because a
free service has to do two things to be successful: provide a good quality,
useful service to people, and provide a way to make money tied to that user
base. A paid service really just has to provide a good quality, useful service
- since that is what the people are paying for.

~~~
gwern
> Can you give some examples of recent paid services that were popular and
> were shut down?

I find that hard, because I'm not a business person nor do I usually make the
money-for-time tradeoff; hence I mostly only use free services and am mostly
affected by free service shutdowns - in other words, selection bias makes my
personal experiences unrepresentative. (Is this similar to other techies -
like Hacker News users? I think it is.)

However, we can make the general observation that services only sometimes
survive the business running them, and businesses shut down all the time. To
give two personal examples of paid services I used that have stopped or will
be stopping in the near future: Intrade has halted all trading during an
investigation, and probably will wind up shutting down; Zeo Inc is shutting
down as it looks for buyers of its assets, and while the web interface I've
always used to export my data is not yet down, I don't give very high odds for
it staying up for more than the next year.

In both cases, I paid good money to use them; it didn't save them.

------
jkldotio
When I was building the source list for jkl.io noticed at lot of sites no
longer offering RSS and even sites like Wordpress seem to be not offering it
frequently (is this authors not turning it on, turning it off, or am I missing
something?).

Hand scraping all these sites would be an exercise in insanity so now building
an intelligent crawler is already something I have to do much earlier than I
wanted. RSS really matters for the open web.

~~~
pchristensen
Most sites still have a feed even if the UI doesn't surface it. Pull up the
source or Inspector and search for feed, atom, or rss. It's usually in the
<head>

~~~
Danieru
And even if the rss meta elemnets are missing wordpress will still generate
rss at /feed/. For example: <http://danieru.com/feed/>

This same method works for category specific feeds:
<http://danieru.com/category/life/feed/>

~~~
Turing_Machine
You can even get a specific flavor of feed, in some cases.

/feed gets you an RSS feed on WordPress.

/feed/atom gets you the Atom feed on WordPress.

/feeds/posts/default gets you the Atom feed on BlogSpot blogs (no RSS there,
AFAIK).

/rss gets RSS on Tumblr (no Atom there, AFAIK).

Edit: trying to fix broken formatting.

------
zaphar
An alternative Narrative might be that RSS has a renaissance. People who used
to think Reader was a magic way to read websites may now be forced to think
about RSS as the way that happened. The standard may get some press again as a
result. Already _is_ getting some press in fact.

------
p6v53as
> It would have been better for the Internet if Reader had never been at all.

If not for the Google Reader, I wouldn't use RSS at all.

------
yk
Can someone explain me, why Google shutting down their reader is such a big
deal? I use Thunderbird as my RSS reader, and after two days of everyone
panicking I feel like I missed something about RSS/Google Reader.

~~~
easyfrag
One of the biggest impacts are on those of us who use multiple devices to read
feeds, Google Reader synchronized the read/unread status of all the elements
so if you saw something on your phone you wouldn't see it again on your
desktop (unless you starred it which is like +1 but just for yourself).

------
neovive
RSS as a content discovery tool is very valuable, especially on mobile devices
where sifting through bookmarks and downloading entire pages is nearly
impossible. The Google Reader app for Android works so well that it earned a
spot on my phones home screen (one of the few apps besides email and
messaging). I hope the next iteration of readers really focuses on mobile,
where the greatest opportunity/need exists for RSS.

------
nekgrim
> There are thousands of RSS subscribers. How many will bother to sort out a
> new RSS system and subscribe again?

The ones whom really read your RSS? Or maybe you will gain 10000 twitter
followers on July 2? On maybe double your daily visitors?

Visitors who care will still be there. And it's the visitors who matters.

~~~
ScottWhigham
That's a bit silly IMO. If you've removed the way that those viewers like to
view your content, even if they like you, they might not find a suitable
replacement in their eyes to the tool they previously used. I have over 200
feeds in my RSS reader that I "consume". If that reader went away (which it
is), then I'd probably pay attention to 10ish. Does that mean that I only
"care" about those 10? Of course not. I like to monitor the others for
headlines or keywords. Just because I don't read every one every day does not
mean I don't care. And, when my reader goes away, I won't be back all b/c the
medium I use will have changed.

~~~
nekgrim
It depends. If you use GReader to read 10 RSS, you can move to FB/Twitter/Mail
newsletter.

If, like you or me, use GReader to read 200 feeds, you will find an
alternative that suits your needs. Or code it, be it a full RSS parser, or
just a greasemonkey addon to change feedly appearance.

Because you care about reading your news, one way or another.

Edit: one thing is special in this case: GReader users are more "power users"
than usual. So we are not talking about TMZ site going down. That's why I
think that people who really care will try to find an alternative.

~~~
zanny
I suspect any real competitor in the rss space will provide an instant import
via the zip of bookmarks / feeds / etc soon anyway.

I'm just worried about an Android app that can fill Readers roll. I use it for
reading webcomics since I can swipe left or right to move through my
subscriptions, which is much more efficient than any other means to browse
them on mobile.

------
teeja
I never found a Reader I liked until I began using KDE's <b>Akregator</b>
(works fine in Mint XFCE as well) a few months ago. Very easy to use and add
feeds to (nerdship not needed). I follow three-dozen podcasts and blogs daily
... impossible without it.

------
webwanderings
Well I hope RSS does not become the Lexis Nexis service where only the
privileged users with resources ($$) could access the information with ease.

