It's not about features. It's about defaults. Google Reader was linked right there on the top bar of the world's largest search engine. No one could credibly claim RSS was dead or neglect/remove support for it in the next revision.
I don't understand why that matters? If 3 other people or a billion other people are using a RSS reading service, surely my own experience is the same.
RSS is still very much around though. Most websites that aren't silos offer them. In fact, big problem is that many websites offer too many RSS feeds, and websites that don't need them offer them; makes algorithmic curation much harder.
More used to offer them than currently do. And the trend has been for sites that have RSS to remove it. So you're correct that RSS has not become extinct due to Google, it has merely contributed to lower adoption.
Google reader was the alpha and Omega of RSS feed reading, and it set a standard norm followed by the rest of the internet, and Google's decision to move on from RSS similarly was followed by much of the rest of the internet. If, in the heyday of Google Reader, you asked me what one thing could drive the stake through the heart of RSS, it would be Google making some choice to drive norms and standards of the web in a different direction.
I would say it's not rare at all. I collect a long list of RSS feeds too, and a lot of the time to figure out if there's an RSS feed, I have to install on an external plug-in, leave the site that I'm on and do a Google search to see if that same site has RSS, only to find it from an old tweet from 7 years ago, or an outdated web page that has links to RSS that amazingly still work. Or sometimes I view source and search for.rss or.xml. So the emphasis, visibility and discoverability has cratered. And the trend has been towards removing rather than adding.
It used to be a standard to have the RSS icon side by side with the Twitter and Facebook icons, but in the present day that tends not to happen.
Twitter itself used to have RSS feeds, Google News used to have RSS feeds, Craigslist used to, those are all gone to my knowledge. RSS tools used to be native to browsers, and now there are numerous RSS tools out there to manually build feeds to make up for the lack of feeds on sites where people want them. Magazines in particular sometimes don't have them, such as Vogue magazine. And you can look at the prevalence of searches for RSS feeds by users and see in trends over time that people are searching for RSS less frequently.
You run a search engine and don't understand why defaults matter? Google pays billions to be the default. I don't understand what you don't understand. RSS was the default. Then it "died" (became non-default) and we got the Facebook feed and Twitter's toxic impression-pumping algorithms, and it's so much worse.
Journalists depended on Reader the way they came to depend on Twitter. They didn't move to another reader.
RSS feeds are still very much around regardless of Google's actions. I'm looking at it from a user's perspective, not the operator's perspective, at what service is being offered? My question was why google reader was good, not why it was popular.
As for my search engine, I genuinely don't track my users, so I really don't have the fainest how many users I have. 4 people or a million people use my search engine, and I make the same amount of money from it. If I want the search engine to do well, I have to use my own eyes to assess how well it performs.
> My question was why google reader was good, not why it was popular.
Once you learn about Venn diagrams it's going to completely blow your mind. One easy first pass at making inferences as to best services is to use popularity as an imperfect first proxy. So if someone says that a service became a de facto standard used by all of the internet, it's one of the ways to helpfully frame the conversation about whether the service proved to be useful. Of course there will be exceptions, but it's one of those functional literacy things where everyone can understand the significance of why people would bring that up in the context of a conversation that ultimately was closing in on making assessments about the value of the user experience.
Google's RSS reader was simple, ad free, fast, had an elegant design, didn't attempt to push superfluous services or subscriptions, set a standard for accessible anywhere at a time when many popular RSS readers were used on the desktop, and, in contrast to most of the best services now around, was free. I would go so far as to say it was almost unimproveable because it had one job and it did it correctly and didn't try to do other things, which used to be one of the things Google did best.
And I feel like none of this information is new, hard to discover, controversial, but is instead part of the generally accepted canon of internet history. So it's a bizarre question to me, if I'm being honest.
Edit: regarding the prevalence of RSS adoption in the present day, it may be true that as a numeric total there are more sites using it, but that as a percentage it is down. The same way that a winning candidate for president from the 1940s will have fewer votes then a losing candidate from the present day. Numbers will grow over time just due to population growth. Or in the case of the internet, The growth in the number of sites. But to understand whether RSS enjoys the same status as a de facto standard it's necessary to look at more than just the numbers, but at the proportion of adoption today compared to the proportion as an existed in the past.
> Once you learn about Venn diagrams it's going to completely blow your mind. One easy first pass at making inferences as to best services is to use popularity as an imperfect first proxy. So if someone says that a service became a de facto standard used by all of the internet, it's one of the ways to helpfully frame the conversation about whether the service proved to be useful. Of course there will be exceptions, but it's one of those functional literacy things where everyone can understand the significance of why people would bring that up in the context of a conversation that ultimately was closing in on making assessments about the value of the user experience.
I completely reject this analysis, as there are numerous counterexamples of things that are popular but not good, or good but not popular. One does not inform the other, especially in this case where it appears to have derived much of its popularity from Google shoving it onto users by featuring it in their other services.
> Google's RSS reader was simple, ad free, fast, had an elegant design, didn't attempt to push superfluous services or subscriptions, set a standard for accessible anywhere at a time when many popular RSS readers were used on the desktop, and, in contrast to most of the best services now around, was free. I would go so far as to say it was almost unimproveable because it had one job and it did it correctly and didn't try to do other things, which used to be one of the things Google did best.
Now that actually answers my question, but not the question of why someone couldn't just copy this design and carry on when Reader was shut down, which seems like it would have been a recipe for success given the outcry and hunger for Readeer.
> And I feel like none of this information is new, hard to discover, controversial, but is instead part of the generally accepted canon of internet history. So it's a bizarre question to me, if I'm being honest.
Well as I stated in the original question, I never used reader.
> Edit: regarding the prevalence of RSS adoption in the present day, it may be true that as a numeric total there are more sites using it, but that as a percentage it is down. The same way that a winning candidate for president from the 1940s will have fewer votes then a losing candidate from the present day. Numbers will grow over time just due to population growth. Or in the case of the internet, The growth in the number of sites. But to understand whether RSS enjoys the same status as a de facto standard it's necessary to look at more than just the numbers, but at the proportion of adoption today compared to the proportion as an existed in the past.
Even looking at the proportion, it's more than likely still higher today, at least in terms of websites-with-RSS. The websites that tend to not have RSS are very large silo-like websites with enough gravity well to retain users regardless, but these website are by definition few in number and will not affect the statistics in any way.
In the past, it was more common with hand rolled HTML websites, that did not have RSS. These have almost all been supplanted by CMS:es and blog platforms that universally do support RSS.
>I completely reject this analysis, as there are numerous counterexamples of things that are popular but not good,
Yikes, did you miss the part where I explicitly acknowledged that there are counterexamples? And since you missed it the first time, I guess I'm going to repeat it again here for emphasis. Yes, there are indeed counterexamples. Broad brush inferences always have counterexamples, and nevertheless are useful indicators. I spent a whole paragraph talking about the functional literacy of understanding why it's a good first approximation. People drive Priuses, people use iPhones, people listen to Taylor Swift. And each of those cases there's a a Venn diagram overlap between popularity and positive user experience where the former can be a proxy for the latter. If you genuinely don't understand how that argument works there's a functional literacy issue here. Moreover, there are counterexamples but this isn't one of them! This specific case, is one of those cases where popularity and positive user experience coincide, which was the whole point to begin with. Being obtuse about how those are connected is just a waste of everybody's time.
>Now that actually answers my question,
Well the crux of this conversation has been that this is an obtuse question in the first place, and that your preferred framing of the question in terms of user experience to the exclusion of popularity was an obtuse refusal to understand the significance of how those things meaningfully overlap, and it was obtuse in the sense of ignoring a broader conversation about mainstream adoption of RSS. The conversation was about that but you wanted to specifically turn it into an end user question.
>which seems like it would have been a recipe for success given the outcry and hunger for Readeer.
Copies of it do exist, often with features paywalled. Part of the downward spiral from de facto standard to boutique experience.
>Even looking at the proportion, it's more than likely still higher today, at least in terms of websites-with-RSS.
However you measure it, it is no longer the de facto standard that it once was. You don't see the RSS icon next to the social media icons on websites. Google News, Twitter, and craigslist removed their RSS functionality, mainstream browsers have removed their built-in RSS functionality, and, again I have to raise the functional literacy thing, because look at what you're saying. The best justifications of RSS are this combination of scaffolding and duct tape about how if you squint and think about it you can still find it, it's just an entirely different universe than it being a de facto standard.
I'd say more websites have RSS or Atom feeds than not, based on looking at the data coming out of my crawler. Google's devblogs just aren't really particularly important.
I never used Reader so I'm not genuinely curious, what about it makes it difficult for someone to just create a copy of the service?