I am glad at least that most sites continue to support rss feeds, whether or not they support it knowingly or if the software they use just happens to include it.
But I am not looking forward to when that changes, I like getting my news in a timeline manner from exactly who I want.
One part of the article bothers me a bit:
> Users were left with no RSS reader application, no comparable alternative, and no education from Google on how to continue using their RSS feeds without Google Reader. This led users to not only discontinue using Google Reader, but abandon RSS feeds altogether.
I may be misremembering but didn't Feedly step up very quickly? Even offering the ability to easily migrate everything over.
I continue to use Feedly today and it has been great. Maybe I just didn't really notice since I have always used a third party app on iPhone (Reeder) so I just repointed the app from Google Reader to Feedly and it was basically as if nothing happened.
Don't get me wrong them shutting it down was the start of me distancing myself from Google services. But I feel like there was very much an alternative that seemed to advertise fairly heavily on migration. Or am I misremembering the timeline a bit?
Yes, there were 2-3 other (mostly web-based) services that stepped in with Feedly being the main one. However, by that time the popular client-side tools had been pretty much been wiped out due to years of Google's free offering. For some of us, that's what killed the user-facing RSS market. (I was so fed up I ended up cobbling together my own solution... far from anything polished but I'm happier with it than I was with any of the offerings available at the time)
Yeah, I was a huge fan of FeedDemon at the time. Unfortunately, it was updated to be primarily a local Google Reader client and lost many users to Google Reader itself. Development stopped around the time Reader was canceled. I ended up switching to Newsblur and have been using it ever since through (mostly) the web interface. I've switched to Mac/iOS since then as well and have tried out NetNewsWire and Reeder. Both are excellent and sync with Newsblur, but neither support Newsblur's social features, which are important to me.
I love being able to read others' comments, leave my own, and receive replies from a community of folks who are all committed enough to RSS as a medium to keep at it. I find it provides a significant amount of value. It also aids in discovery of new blogs/sites that I've ended up following directly over the years.
I never looked at clients other than the Reeder app (not google reader), but that is iOS and Mac only.
Even supports local pulling (not sure if it always did though, never thought to check until now).
I imagine that didn't help Google's situation either. Here I was using their servers and never going to the website except to do the occasional subscription modification.
Feedly seems like a company that is trying anything that will stick to get people to subscribe without getting rid of their free offering.
Their free plan is likely enough for most people. I know for me none of those features matter.
Especially since I just never log into Feedly themselves. I just use the Reeder app as my frontend and have gone a couple years without logging in. I also just don't change my actual feeds much.
This is a great example of a business built on what should not really be a business. There are certain types of things that are fundamental to the internet, and trying to sell a premium version of that is always an uphill battle.
Imagine that in 2024 I tried to sell you a web browser. One that maybe has a slightly cleaner UI or some fancy plugin system but ultimately is just a plain old browser. Maybe some very small percentage of people would pay for it, but most are entirely happy with the free and FOSS choices available since the core features of a browser are standard.
RSS by all means should be similar: just like ping, cat, sh, browsers, email clients, video players, etc. the core features are well defined and an open source project should be the default choice. If you want something fancy or proprietary then sure you should be free to pay for it. But I can’t imagine wanting to build a company that pays salaries around any of this.
There are situations where a person or a team of 2-3 can make a lifestyle business out of selling something that I have seen referred to as “legacy software” (this doesn’t mean old, but rather fundamental and “boring”, aka the Linux kernel). But Feedly competes with its own free product and cannot see the forest for the trees.
While I get where you are going with open source project being the default choice, I don't think it fits the example here.
Feedly, like Google Reader, for me is nothing but a server. It's the same reason I pay for my email, iCloud, and similar services. I am paying for them to store data, run some service, or similar for me.
Even if I went the open source route I would still want a server that is doing the fetching for me. A central place to keep things in sync between multiple devices and to cut down on the data usage when on my phone. That server costs money to run. Either I am running that server myself (and taking on the Maintence of it) or I pay a service like Feedly.
While I agree that Feedly's way of monetization is likely wrong when they could have just run the route of $5 a month and that's it. Nothing fancy, it fetches and thats it. That could be a perfectly sustainable business model.
Edit:
Also I really think we should re-examine "open source should be the default" when the vast majority of open source projects are not at the polish of something like Chromium.
Most average (non technical) consumers are not really going to accept what a lot of open source's experience is. See gimp and open office compared to Photoshop and Microsoft Office.
> RSS by all means should be similar: just like ping, cat, sh,
I must say that reading an RSS feed is as simple as this:
wget "myURL" -O - | python3 -c '
import sys
import xml.etree.ElementTree as et
tree = et.fromstring(sys.stdin.read())
for el in tree.findall("./channel/item"): print(el.find("title").text)'
But the other applications that you mention are not simple applications:
> browsers, email clients, video players, etc. the core features are well defined and an open source project should be the default choice.
The wild thing is, that’s almost exactly what Netscape was doing back in mid and late 90s. I think the commercial versions (ie the one you bought in a box at Babbage’s or Electronic Boutique), had an HTML editor, and some more integrated file types. I don’t really remember. I never bought it, because the free beta version was enough.
Yeah their AI efforts are weird. It's like they are ashamed of "just" making an excellent product for rss, and want to do something special but nothing useful, at least for me, came out of it do far. TBH, I'm ok with them just being an excellent rss reader and will keep paying for it.
I think they're adding lot of these features as incentives to entice users to switch to their subscription service. Not sure what percentage of their users pay for the subscription.
I actually signed up for AI enabled plan out of curiosity (I had non AI subscription for years prior). Had to downgrade back because it was too annoying and I couldn't figure out how to make it stop completely. Whoever inside the company is pushing this is not doing them a service.
I just wish they'd stop trying to add AI and automated topic highlighting which clearly doesn't work.
A bunch of companies are also doing or attempting to do AI and automated trial finding for clinical trials, and that's not working either: https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/please-be-dying-but-not-.... Fortunately, the stakes are low, since patients who don't find the right clinical trial for cancers will only die.
Do you think the solution is better software, or is real blocker on the business/policy/cultural/incentives side? Inspired by that series I looked into building a better front end for clinical trials.gov but after seeing a few organizations try similar approaches without (yet) nailing it, I became convinced that I’d become one more classic naive-technologist story.
But have the existing approaches really missed a low hanging solution, even if it’s partial and maybe impossible to monetize?
It works alright, and TBH it's time RSS readers moved PAST google reader and add more useful features. Deduplciation, AI summarization etc. Stuff that helps manage RSS for those with lots of feeds, as one is likely to accumulate over time.
There were plenty of RSS readers. Many browsers had them built in: Mozilla called them "Live Bookmarks" and even Safari once had an RSS reader. I used apps like Reeder and ReadKit and loved them, but my favorite apps were probably newsboat and newsbeuter (CLI RSS readers; newsbeuter goes back to 2007).
It's like people forgot that non-web-interface rss readers existed.
I still use some RSS reader apps to keep up with various sites I care about.
Also, remember that ever podcast is also an RSS feed.
> It's like people forgot that non-web-interface rss readers existed.
I'd wager that a lot of people never even knew these existed. To a lot of people, the browser became (or simply always was) the only real interface to everything internet related (or for some people, just about everything period).
> may be misremembering but didn't Feedly step up very quickly? Even offering the ability to easily migrate everything over.
I remember the same thing as you, so I think that's correct. But I would say Feedly probably only recouped some single digit percentage of Google readers users. But then there were however many other users who had their relationship with RSS forever fractured from the shutdown of Google reader, and the absence of a smooth off-ramp certainly contributed.
I also think that having the credibility of Google behind RSS contributed to people being comfortable with them, not unlike iPods helping lead to the adoption of podcasts. I shudder to think whether podcasts would even have gotten off the ground without people being socialized into accepting them through the connection to an Apple product. And while I'm not an Apple fan I'm forever grateful for the long term impact on how we consume content.
So I would say the long and short of it is that Feedly helped, but I suspect it was perhaps an order of magnitude smaller in terms of its role as a positive force for RSS than Google.
> not unlike iPods helping lead to the adoption of podcasts.
Podcasts are named after the iPod, because that's who the audience was. They are radio shows that are recorded and then made available for download; other than the usual lack of melody, they are identical to other mp3 files.
Spoken-word musical albums and books on tape were already well-established phenomena before the iPod existed. What's the difference supposed to be?
The difference is in achieving the mass adoption of podcasting as a fully mainstream distribution medium. With podcasts, we now have an entire universe of media distribution that happens via an open protocol that is not controlled by any one company, which is a miracle.
There was no guarantee that it would turn out that way, and, as we see with RSS, or now with Activitypub, it's more than a small struggle to get anyone to care about open protocols for their own sake. It takes a moment that is ripe for it, a simple enough experience, and some sort of cultural signal that it's "for everyone" in a sense.
That was my point. I am perfectly aware that audio can be distributed in other forms.
Probably, they are like me, meaning we seem not to be on the same page as you regarding the term 'podcast'. To me, a podcast is just an audio talk session, mastered and distributed as a digital audio file. That's it. Distribution can take many forms, but the podcast is the file. 10 or so minutes of google-based research seems to offer support to this notion.
> universe of media distribution that happens via an open protocol that is not controlled by any one company
What is this protocol that you speak of? Searching "podcast protocol" leads to absolutely no useful links on the subject. Podcasts in my experience are distributed in one of three ways:
* Download links on a web page
* Embedded streaming links on a web page
* An RSS feed
That last (RSS) could be considered a "protocol" of sorts, I suppose. At the very least it's what I would expect a podcast app to support. But you then go on to refer to RSS as a separate entity from your "podcast protocol", so I'm back to being confused as to what you might be talking about. What is this open protocol that is intrinsic to your definition of 'podcast'?
RSS can be considered a syndication protocol, or a 'standard' if you want to be strict with the term protocol, but nothing about those distinctions is pertinent to the point I was making.
Podcast can refer both to individual episodes or to the series of episodes, neither usage is more correct than the other, it's your responsibility to interpret words in good faith in the context in which they're used. And again, nothing about this distinction is pertinent to the point I was making.
RSS is not the same thing as podcasts, because while generally all podcast feeds are distributed via RSS/Atom, they aren't necessarily, and moreover not all RSS feeds are podcasts.
And again, nothing about this distinction is pertinent to the point I was making. To reiterate, Apple, with the iPod, was instrumental in elevating podcasts to a mainstream medium of content distribution. It's by analogy to this that I make the point that Google could have played a similar role in facilitating the mass adoption of RSS.
I'm not interested in any further exploration of the conceptual differences between RSS and podcasts unless you believe it has an upshot that's relevant to the original point I was making.
Well, yeah. Not only is it not the same thing, the concepts aren't related in any way.
A podcast is an audio file. RSS is a format for publishing the information that you've updated your website.
>>> With podcasts, we now have an entire universe of media distribution that happens via an open protocol that is not controlled by any one company, which is a miracle.
We had that before podcasts. You go to a web page, and you download a file. The protocol is called "HTTP", the HyperText Transfer Protocol.
> a podcast is just an audio talk session, mastered and distributed as a digital audio file
Traditional talk radio uploaded to a web page would meet that definition. And that's the stereotypical genre of podcast content but there are others, like narrative fiction (Welcome to Night Vale).
I think "a podcast" is less about the specific genre of the content and more about how it's experienced. It's a podcast if it's time-based media you can subscribe to and experience in a variety of players; otherwise, it's sparkling media.
If you have to use the Spotify app, it's not a podcast. I see "plus" subscription options in the iPhone Podcast app, if you had to use that app, they're not podcasts; if you can use different apps but only on Apple devices, I'd still consider them podcasts.
There were definitely alternatives. I remember trying to import my Google Reader OPML into Feedly and getting a gateway timeout (the file was too big and the backend was still processing it - synchronously - when the front end nginx gave up). I eventually ended up using InoReader but stopped after the number of feeds exceeded their free limit.
Now it's just a locally hosted Tiny Tiny RSS on my laptop.
Not only Feedly. When greader was shut down, there was at least half dozen other apps, some of which were pretty good. I liked feedly the most so I never checked the rest but I know they weren't unique.
My recollection when trying to find a Google Reader alternative was that there was no free alternative. Everything at the time that I found had been a premium alternative to Reader before it shut down.
Paying does not guarantee anything. It does not guarantee a more reliable service, it does not guarantee that they will hear you out when they change a feature or the design, ruining it, and it does not guarantee it won't shut down tomorrow. They will refund you, and you will have your money back, but you will have no service, and you will be back in square one.
I mean... sure. Even paid services eventually shut down.
But I have far more confidence in something at least making sense for the company to keep running if it is something I pay for vs something that is just given away for free.
If I am relying on an online service, while paying for it doesn't guarantee it being up it's a safer bet than a free one.
Your mentality of expecting everything to be free is why there are no alternatives, and also why Google Reader shut down. Building and maintaining these services isn't free, so when people don't want to pay for it there's no incentive to actually make or maintain such service.
Right. Even if we want to say that it could take a one time deployment and it can just sit there forever (which, it can't. it needs security updates and similar).
The server itself isn't free. Sure if they are smart if multiple people are subscribed to the same feed it only fetches once, but just the constant fetching would eat up resources. Then storing that data, you retrieving it yourself, etc.
An RSS Reader is really a technical miracle, requiring lots of maintenance and development effort.
I guess a 10€/Month Subscription would be just the minimum for a such an cutting edge product, right?
>I may be misremembering but didn't Feedly step up very quickly? Even offering the ability to easily migrate everything over.
Other rss readers were either much different (think cards design, or too much whitespace everywhere, or whatever), or they had premium plans they were telling you about all the time, or they had premium plans and a low limit of rss feeds you could add, or they had no mobile apps, or the mobile apps required premium, or whatever.
Nothing was like google reader: free, information-dense, and reliable. When google reader was killed, rss died for me.
Right, I think you've hit the essence of the issue here.
Those alternatives were definitely there, but there's an order of magnitude difference between them and Google in terms of what they did for the normalization of RSS as a way of consuming content.
Saying Google stopped supporting RSS but at least there's a boutique alternative, I think is kind of saying well Coca-Cola shut down but at least there's Soda Stream. Not wrong, but it misses the point that there's a global embeddedness that was left behind.
I designed Chrome, and was responsible for decisions around its UI, including the addition and removal of the RSS button.
Our design philosophy at the time, which was in reaction to the bloated I-need-engagement-for-my-team browser UIs of the time, was to only offer what people needed, and allow extensions to cover everything else.
I loved RSS. We all did. I still use Feedly every day and mourn the loss of Google Reader. But even back then, practically no-one else cared, even amongst our early adopter userbase. If we had lowered our usage bar to allow the RSS button, the bar would've been low enough that a thousand other features-you-don't-want-but-other-people-do would've been in there too (omg the arguments about having a "print" button).
Extensions was our "if you want it, you can add it" answer. It was imperfect, because it didn't allow ideas such as RSS to be advertised to the mainstream, but we had already clearly seen that that hadn't worked, and regardless, your daily tools should not be a place for pushing agendas unless you have total confidence that they will be valued.
I still think "following stuff" is an unsolved, undervalued problem and big opportunity space
This is something those of us who grew up with the Internet don’t want to face.
Whether by nature, nurture, or some other force - user agency lives in the very long tail of any software usage.
In every category, agency drives the birth of tech but dies in the scoreboards.
Every product I’ve loved, every founder I’ve believed in, was about human possibility & creativity.
But the ones lucky enough to scale to species level adoption discover that the ethos of creation is lost in the swarm of consumption.
Perhaps I’ve arrived at a poor conclusion, but I’ve simply decided to accept that I am a fairly unusual person for wanting to craft, make choices, and discover the weird, wonderful, or just discover what I didn’t know there was to discover.
I’ve weened myself off of consumption over the years. Here’s to making all my future decisions in tech about putting my attention, energy, and thought into “what do I want to create? learn?”
I don’t think the product universe I live in will ever be dominant. But I do believe it can exist if we accept that we can either build it or trade it, but we cannot do both.
I don't think you are alone here - there's a reason Chrome invested so heavily in dev tools and made them (and things like view-source) accessible in the core distribution even though they were also perfect candidiates for being addons. Many of us owed our careers to the path that view source opened, and we wanted to pay it forward.
I do regret not finding ways to do more - for example, an unrealized goal of mine was to find a way to add a 'create' button to Chrome to nudge everyone to be a creator - my favorite simple+cheeky idea was to have a way to enable contentEditable on the current site, then save the resulting changes as an extension you could give to your friends, allowing you to graffiti the internet in private small groups.
A brilliant idea that would never make it through the legal department.
Somebody I worked with at TomTom had the brilliant idea of gamifying the driving experience with internet connected TomTom PNDs, by publishing a real-time Leaderboard on every single road on the map, so you could see the top ten speeds, and compete with other drivers for the high score! No matter where you were driving in the world, you could instantly see the top ten speeds of other TomTom users who drove down that same stretch of road, and put the pedal to the metal to claim or defend your own spot on the leaderboard!
My TomTomagotchi idea didn't go over well with TomTom legal either: they didn't want their PNDs getting depressed and dying if you didn't give them food, attention, and drive them around everywhere they wanted. But I was sure there's a revenue model having drive through Burger Kings and car washes pay for placements.
Unrelated but you are a great writer!
"user agency lives in the very long tail of any software usage"
"agency drives the birth of tech but dies in the scoreboards"
"scale to species level adoption discover that the ethos of creation is lost in the swarm of consumption"
You remind me of the writing of Antonio Garcia Martinez in the book Chaos Monkeys.
> If we had lowered our usage bar to allow the RSS button, the bar would've been low enough that a thousand other features-you-don't-want-but-other-people-do would've been in there too (omg the arguments about having a "print" button).
this is when businesses should make decisions based on vibes rather than data.
Unlike other browsers at the time, why was it decided not to even read RSS xml files and show them like a nice page like other browsers? Even now RSS shows up as raw xml.
Edit: reread your comment. I guess it was because this could be done using an extension. I believe this to be the main reason for lowering adoption / use of RSS with rise of chrome. To this date chrome shows raw xml when you open RSS xml while other browsers give you something interesting and readable to look at and even let you subscribe to that interesting page.
Unfortunately I don't remember the exact reason, but with some squinting at the past I believe it would've come down to two things - resources and how we thought about the role of developers:
Chrome was a no-crunch 50-person project, which sounds like a lot until you think about how we were porting webkit to windows, adding a sandbox, creating a new javascript engine, a new windows UI toolkit, etc and we were ruthless about prioritization - any engineer who could've spent on an RSS renderer would've been taken away from valuable webkit windows compatibility work (omg ACID tests), and weeks mattered.
Second, we had an extremely strong belief in letting developers own as much as they could - our impossible ideal was that the Chrome UI wouldn't exist and developers would just create content you could access emphemerally through your operating system. At the time, we had seen that it was possible for developers to use various trickery (XSLT or CSS?) to style RSS feeds so they would show up somewhat like how you described (IIRC Feedburner did this)
So if you take those two things together (and again I may be misremembering) you see it being a "developers can do it so if they care they can do it, we should not spend time making something that overrules them"
It's not possible for me to know whether that was the right idea in hindsight because I don't know what we would've sacrificed (I think I would've preferred using that time to make the standalone image renderer have better zooming/panning controls)
Your comment made me curious, were there any other features or ideas that you (& team) loved but didn’t have the user base or buy-in to include by default?
Thank you for taking me down memory lane with this great question. It's been almost twenty years, so I may misremember the internal popularity of many things, but one that stands out was browsing history - almost everyone that joined the team for the first ten years wanted to redesign history and felt it could've been a huge differentiator. We had mockups that looked like subway maps, implemented floating overlays showing your recent tasks, and we designed the history database to store everything forever.
In reality, Google search was good enough to find what you wanted 95% of the time, and most people would not bother discovering and learning a separate pathway to find the remaining 5% - especially when combined with our poor human memories and local search capabilities at the time.
> We had mockups that looked like subway maps, implemented floating overlays showing your recent tasks, and we designed the history database to store everything forever.
That would still be a real innovation over the current 90 day retention maximum.
Unfortunately, today's version of that is "Web & App Activity", sent to Google servers with the Terms of Service allowing it to be used for ad targeting and what not.
(And I think the real innovation would be showing the branching, not mangling everything into a linear history. But it's harder to show and use well, so it doesn't happen. Very much the same story as editor undo/redo.)
> But even back then, practically no-one else cared, even amongst our early adopter userbase
This reminds me of chapter support in podcast players. For a very long time the every player dev was arguing that nobody cares. And it took years for the tune to become "nobody cares except germans". Then it was implemented for a "vocal ninority", and now everyone gets chapter support and I don't think any user is lamenting about the evolution.
This is one of the worst aspect of the "nobody I know cares about it" mindset (I don't think we can really work around it, but it should be acknowledged and kept in mind).
The other path is to push for many more places building their own tools and services, so they don;t even have to ask for these changes and do it themselves, with everyone else getting to enjoy the result.
Basically, while Google was the reason Chrome existed in the first place, I think it's also the main liability to have a product designed with a global audience in mind.
PS: the issue with chrome extensions for core behaviors is they'll always be second class citizens. I'm still happy there's an escape hatch though.
And also thank you for your work on the browser, I don't want the tone of this to be overly negative when it's really about side points.
As someone who never relied on Google for RSS, this article comes across as somewhat nonsensical.
Most Google Reader users were not using RSS before and likely would never have used them if not for Reader. They didn't kill RSS - they introduced people to it.
As someone who used a self hosted reader as well as a standalone desktop reader, the coming and going of Reader went completely unnoticed.
Ditto with browser support. Even Firefox dropped it - and they're the browser that introduced the feature! Seems silly to blame Google for the general trend.
Couldn't care less for Feedburner's attempt to monetize it. RSS is a protocol like email. Would I think positively about a service trying to monetize email?
The rest of the article is about various Google services dropping support for it.
If Google kills Gmail would we say Google killed email? It's a nonsensical thought process.
Anecdotally I found it was Twitter that killed RSS. When it was new people were using it for the same purpose I was using RSS. To follow people and organizations.
> They didn't kill RSS - they introduced people to it.
For myself and most people i knew that knew of RSS feeds, we weren't introduced by google reader, we migrated to it because it was a great reader. Then once they had everyone onboard reader and there weren't really anyone competing becuause reader was great and universilly liked, they killed it, striking a gigantic blow to RSS in general.
It really just is not a case of google just "bringing people in then letting them go". They did the equivalent of offering free hamburgers at the corner between Burger King and McDonalds and then shutting it down after the two chains had gone bankrupt. And you might say "Sure, but people still enjoy fast food!" and that's true, but after that it's not burgers people are buying, it's burritos, because the burger market becomes a wasteland when someone does something like that.
>For myself and most people i knew that knew of RSS feeds, we weren't introduced by google reader, we migrated to it because it was a great reader.
Right, this is exactly my experience as well. I used all manner of desktop based RSS readers before Google reader appeared on the scene and became my mainstay.
I also think it's not wrong to note that Google Reader introduced a lot of people to RSS. But I don't think it follows that shutting down Google Reader was merely a net neutral impact on RSS. I guess I just don't follow the logic of, well Google elevated RSS, therefore there's no problem with shutting it down in the grand scheme of things. Shutting down Google Reader rolled back progress that had been achieved by Google Reader itself, but the fact that the RSS ecosystem had recentered itself around Google's offerings and integrations also made the shutdown uniquely damaging.
> Then once they had everyone onboard reader and there weren't really anyone competing
There may not have been profit driven companies competing and that detail is mostly irrelevant. There was no shortage of alternatives like software running on your computer and self hosting options.
RSS wasn't designed to help companies make money. The demise of Google's competitors is irrelevant to the long term health of RSS. It was thriving before such companies tried to make money off of it.
People who didn't use Google Reader were not at all impacted by its demise. The RSS experience remained the same. It's silly to claim Google played a role in killing it.
Google Reader was the predominant offering, and they integrated RSS into practically everything. The RSS ecosystem had Google as its center of gravity due to Google's strategy of embracing it. Shutting it down did a unique damage that only Google would be capable of doing. There are indeed desktop alternatives, but I guess the critical question is whether you believe losing any one of them would have an equivalent impact on RSS that losing Google Reader did. I think the main point at stake is that Google had a disproportionate role, and so it's perfectly true that RSS lives on and I'm grateful for that, but I don't think any other software, or company, or website, has had such a disproportionate role both in elevating and in rolling back RSS.
You could serve ads in RSS. Either has their own distinct items, or embedded in the content of the RSS feed. Although I suppose the point your making is that these forms of ads wouldn't be something that Google necessarily could control or monetize.
Agreed. The article is explicitly presenting it as if Google had some grand strategy to "embrace, extend, and extinguish".
But the far simpler and more plausible interpretation is that it just wasn't popular enough to support. Outside of some hard-core tech people and some journalists, almost nobody used RSS.
And so it's equally plausible to write this story as: Google believed in RSS -- they brought it into Chrome, they launched Reader, they acquired FeedBurner, but the user numbers just never materialized. So they shut them down because Google mostly only maintains projects and features with large numbers of users.
I think you're right that, more than anything, Twitter killed RSS. But maybe it's more accurate to say algorithmic feeds in general -- including the Facebook news feed, Google News, and Reddit as well.
I simply don't see a world where RSS would have become broadly successful if Google had made different choices. Especially with such a super-open standard as RSS, Google is simply not responsible for the death of RSS. Even if you still haven't forgiven them for killing Reader. ;)
I think the iPod played a critical role in normalizing podcasts as a globally accepted form of content consumption. And I actually don't think RSS was too far behind. There is more in the way of development and integration that could have continued to normalize RSS, And I suspect it wasn't a specific reaction to the benefits of RSS, so much as it was the company's mobilization behind Google Plus, that led to their strategic pivot.
That core passionate user base that believed in and used the product, I believe was in fact the critical alchemy that was missing from Google+, which by comparison was soulless and pushed by strategic considerations rather than organic iteration on user feedback or response to user needs. Articles have been written about this before, but I absolutely believe in the right circumstances Google could have successfully built out a social network, but it was Google Reader in fact was becoming one. I think Google correctly assessed that there was redundancy between Google Reader and Google Plus, but they just chose the wrong path.
The article is a fanciful mixture of paranoid lego-duplo block imaginings, with a slab of boredom used for fuel.
Podcasts seem to be a rather effective and continuing use of RSS, so perhaps rumors of its death are premature. There, we find ourselves back at the written vs spoken form debate.
I keep repeating it. To me telegram is the best RSS reader app (guess on could also use any other chat like Matrix that supports bots). Manybot or other bots do the translation easily. You get instant preview and syncing between multiple reader devices for free. If you want you can add reactions and comments. News outlets have taken this path already officially. I believe that those interfaces are simply the future of feed syndication. IMHO it does not make too much sense to build dedicated apps or web services for syndication. Dynamic ranking like Reddit or HN might be different, but your normal feed perfectly fits your messenger app.
Telegram, Twitter, Mastodon, Matrix, IRC... anything that permits bots. The fun part is that when you write a new bot you'd tend to just look for the site's rss.xml or atom.xml. That file must exist.
And since that file still exists on most of the web, some people gonna make dedicated clients as well that intermix the feeds in the way they want... that seems clunky to do on a messaging app. But two roads in the forest!
I used to use a rss2imap script that put it all in my mailbox, so I could read entries from everywhere. I stopped when I realized I don't want to be beholden to my computer being always on.
Now I have a server doing this + a good UX that doesn't exist anywhere, so there's no point in me doing this again. But I could replicate this UX for microblogging because the "context" are the same: lots of entries, little that I will actually read.
I ran my own postfix + [lots more brain tiring things here] for 15 years with very few hitches and felt quite satisfied with my successful caveman lifestyle. But then I got too busy and settled on migadu and my gosh what a fool I was. My wife and I use email like SMS these days and always force commercial conversations to email. signal for the truly trite things.
I don't remember what I pay, not going to look it up, but the money for monetizing email is truly well spent: happiness base level permanently raised.
The only stupidity left in my email setup is Thunderbird killing off the ability to use emacs as the editor. Enshitification without revenue... genius.
Before people started posting their thoughts on walled garden social media websites, you could follow your friends' blogs using RSS in your preferred reader. When your friends started posting on services that didn't publish RSS feeds, there was less reason to use an RSS reader and correspondingly fewer users of RSS readers.
Same here. Never heard of Google Reader before it was killed. I used an RSS reader in Firefox or something like that. And now, NetNewsWire on macOS and iOS.
Agree. I think marketing teams killed RSS, they wanted you to "subscribe to our newsletter" and send you what _they_ thought was useful. You wouldn't do that if you already had RSS, so that needed to go.
I'm confused why people can't also send anything they want over RSS. Unless you are directly scraping their website for updates, I thought they could publish anything to a feed.
I can only speak for myself. I had moved from other RSS to rely on Googles' RSS and then stopped using RSS until last year. It used to be my main news source for many years.
Was it bad? I recall thinking it was good in the version 1, 2, and 3 days. A drop-down menu from the bookmark with a list of headlines that would be refreshed every 15 minutes or so. Clicking on one would take you to the site/url to read the full contents.
The point I'm making is most users of RSS wouldn't have used RSS had Reader not been around. The fact that many stopped using RSS after the demise of Reader is simply a reflection of how many people Google introduced to RSS.
I clearly remember at the time many Reader users equating it with RSS and not knowing the difference. Just as many people I encounter equate Git with GitHub and don't realize GitHub doesn't develop or own Git.
>The fact that many stopped using RSS after the demise of Reader is simply a reflection of how many people Google introduced to RSS.
Right, but simultaneously, that statement is an affirmation of how much damage Google did to RSS, by eliminating their support for a protocol that they themselves had done so much to elevate.
I believe the internet has gone full-circle - from curated lists and RSS feeds, to automated ranking, and now going back.
Almost all top-tier professionals I meet prefer very niche data-sources they trust (mostly individuals and personal blogs - not even organizations), occasionally augmenting them with automated crawls.
There is a lot of space for hybrid approaches and we are going to see a new generation of browsers and search engines. I don't think Google can stop that.
I tried making an app where you repost interesting news onto your own sorta-RSS feed, which your followers could then re-repost and so on. No global "trending" or visible follower counts, just peers, imo the exact right about of social networking. But nobody used it.
Sounds like distributed tumblr. I think the world needs that really bad right now. Tumblr is going to fail soon it's totally zombified as far as the software goes.
But this is basically how Tumblr operates except it's centralized.
Erm, it's not distributed though, but it could be. I've been told about Tumblr before, but it has popularity contests (trending topics, high-profile accounts), which I intentionally avoided because it changes the whole thing. You follow your IRL friends and that's it.
That seems like it presumes that your IRL friends have good taste/similar interests though. The reason people follow big accounts is because the big accounts often have some specific niche of thing they post in that's curated in a way that resonates with people. Most of my IRL friends maybe only share 1-2 major interests with me. My friend who may repost interesting board game news would also share things about kayaking or crypto investing that I don't care about.
If my IRL friends run into something they think I'd be interested in, they'll just send it to me directly. What's the value in getting the combined firehose of all their reading?
It does mostly presume that you have things in common with your friends. At least it's not everything they read, only what they repost. Also, if something was reposted from 8 hops away by someone you don't know, you still see the OP's handle and can follow it.
The only value this brings is that it's much easier to hit "repost" on things you like than it is to go send links to everyone. People do this already, it's just awkward, and friends get annoyed from chat notification spam.
The question is what percentage of my friends have more than 50% of my interests? I read plenty of interesting stuff on HN that isn't interesting to a lot of my non-programmer friends. So I post it in the "software-dev" channel of my dev friends' Discord. I don't post it in the server I share with the folks I play video games with, or my friends I cook food with.
Channels of info are only as valuable as the signal/noise ratio is. That's the whole point of RSS in some ways. You follow a lot of specific curated news sources that may be low-volume but high relevancy. "All the stuff my friends enjoy enough to repost" is likely below 50% relevant to me, just because I have a lot of friends who do a lot of stuff that I don't also care about, or don't care about that much.
I kinda doubt my friends read enough good stuff to have 50% of their stuff be more than 1-2 things per day, which is pretty bad volume. What percentage of what you read would you re-share in an average day? You also have to remember that some of that overlap of stuff is stuff you also probably got from the same place they did. If my friend and I both read HN, me resharing something from the homepage of HN has a low chance of being something they haven't already seen too.
My opinion is mostly based on the number of slack and discord channels in servers with my friends that I have to have muted because they have plenty of chatter about articles I don't care about. Filtering by topic is much more valuable than filtering by which human shared it most of the time.
I think there should be two tiers in any account, the private space (private spaces where you talk to friendgroups) and a public space where you have a rather anonymous nickname and which isn’t directly connected to your private space.
Usually it’s one or the other and you need multiple accounts (say on Instagram for example)
It feels like businesses figured out accounts and then moved on, while I think there is still room for so much growth and customization.
Aren't those tiers just functionally accomplished by other technologies better suited? For instance, a Slack/Discord/Matrix with themed channels for people to talk and share relevant stuff about some hobby or topic for sharing among a group of friends, and then a public Twitter/Instagram/Tumblr that your friends may or may not follow and may be anonymous?
The one stat so far is how many times a thing has been reposted. Problem is, it's very hard to market an app that's only useful to a whole group of people. Someone random joins and knows nobody.
I read about how other companies overcame this, and even Tinder, which only requires users to be in the same area, had to be kick-started by hosting large college parties ($$$) and getting all the attendees to download it.
I think you are right. My usage of RSS was nearly non-existent for many years. Now it is daily. I was shocked to find even local news sites publishing full articles in their RSS feed. Most sites still have feeds.
There is now infinite content available in traditional commercial feeds. You just have to accept it is non-chronological, non-subscribed noise pollution: Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Twitter, etc. That suddenly makes RSS extraordinarily attractive -- perhaps even more so than it was 15 years ago.
I'd love for RSS to make a comeback but one problem is a lot of niche data sources can be on platforms that don't provide a public feed, so you have the inclination of companies to put up walls in an attempt to capture user attention as a counter force.
Plus we used to be able to use tools that scraped and turned sites into feeds, but now most of the sites I'd like to do that on are "protected" by javascript challenges etc.
I will visit your site more if you let me get updates in my preferred fashion!
There's no "easy way to find quality sources", that's mutually exclusive nowadays. Whatever is mainstream and easy to find gets automatically gamed through SEO junk, advertising, astroturfing, and becomes poor quality again in no time. Like how much do you trust CNET and Linus Tech Tips?
The best quality sources are always involving thorough human vetting of trusted and impartial people on platforms which have higher bar to entry and require some friction to find, aka word of mouth.
Which is why curated and moderated user platforms like HN, some sub-Reddit, blogs, mailing lists, community forums, are so important and also why Google search is just so useless nowadays for finding anything other than model number datasheets and product online shopping.
> There's no "easy way to find quality sources", that's mutually exclusive nowadays. Whatever is mainstream and easy to find gets automatically gamed through SEO junk, advertising and astroturfing, and becomes poor quality again in no time.
So true, a what unsolvable problem. SEO in particular, and greed in general, kills the ability of knowledge networks to organically grow, at least past the niche state.
Putting time in building your own network of trusted sources pays off handsomely. But it takes time.
Back in '05 when I started self-hosting tt-rss I thought it'd be cool to add some "social" features to it. Specifically, I'd like to see new feed suggestions from people for whom I have followed feeds in-common.
My idea was dismissed by the tt-rss author (and at the time and I still had aspirations to submit patches). I gave up on submitting patches, forked the code for my personal use, and never got around to the "social" idea.
I don't know if mainstream feed readers still do OPML[0] exports or not. I'd enjoy seeing OPML files from people whose blogs I read.
Actually, I'd like it if people on HN published OPML files. Maybe I should. Hmmm...
There is no easy way, because you have to be able to identify the greats of a field to find relentless quality. You have to become a nerd of greatness, armed with an RSS reader. Example: You can probably tell what Jeff Beck, Stefan Hauk, Jacob Deraps have in common. Sreten of M539 Restaurations? Marco Reps or Shariar of The Signal Path? Igor Bogdanov. Chips and Cheese. The Orbital Mechanics Podcast. The War Zone. Some post once a year or even less.
One of the many things I love about seamonkey is that it has built-in RSS support and will pop up an icon at the end of the URL bar when an RSS feed is defined on a site. Combined with the built in RSS/Email/NNTP reader, it makes it very convenient to find feeds just by clicking links on sites like this one.
Same , wish there was a directory of rss .
In past it was googles task to provide quality sources when searching and google excelled at this but somehow google is failing at this now.
There are people like me, who write blogs that routinely include links posts. Subscribe to those blogs, check out the stories that interest you, and subscribe to those sites in turn. I have a couple hundred sites in NetNewsWire.
The point is, if you upvote this link on LinkLonk (https://linklonk.com/item/481037215144673280), you automatically get subscribed to all of these feeds. This is a way to discover new feeds through content you liked.
Now, being connected to hundreds or thousands of feeds might seem crazy. But we have a solution to that which also relies on what content you "liked". LinkLonk knows how often you liked content from each feed you are connected to (which is essentially the signal-to-noise ratio). So it ranks new content based on that. If you like 50% of posts from https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/ then new posts from Simon Willison will be shown above other links from, say, https://lobste.rs/rss.
The more you like - the better the ranking of fresh content becomes.
In this world you don't have to actively manage which feeds you are subscribed to or not. You only rate content.
One of the most annoying things about the internet is avoiding the great enshittification cycle. I want things to be popular enough that there is traction but not popular enough that the Ad people are salivating to squeeze another dollar out of it.
I remember sometime around 2007 I noticed people around me started using Google to visit websites they knew the URL of. Websites they visited frequently and could have been bookmarks. I thought it was incredibly lazy at the time. Google took advantage of this phenomenon to show more ads and to continue to train users on using their products. Often the user clicks on the ad purchased by the website they wanted to visit! Google has become the defacto middleman for the web.
This is also a big driver of needing to purchase ads for yourself on your own brand name. If your users are searching for your site on Google in order to log in (which is depressingly common), you don't want to cede the top search result to a competitor in case someone is feeling adventurous that day. It's a real racket.
A search provider that had its users' interests at heart would reserve the top result spot for the best organic search result, not an ad. Even if ads are #2-5, the top result should be what the user searched for.
It's fascinating to think of what alternative norms could have emerged. I think people forget how significant delicious was to its particular time on the internet. I think it was every bit as influential as Reddit during its heydey, but unfortunately was catastrophically mismanaged into the ground by Yahoo.
I do think delicious could have normalized social bookmarking in different circumstances.
What killed RSS for me was when providers switched from putting the whole article into the feed to just putting one sentence or paragraph.
Often the first paragraph of an article is the intro so I had no idea if the article would be interesting. It killed my ability to quickly skim a bunch of articles.
I understand why the providers did it — they need the clicks to survive.
So I’d say Google did kill RSS but it had nothing to do with Reader and everything to do with the click based ad model they made the de facto standard.
It's frustrating that the balance of providing enough content to gauge interest of often not struck.
I follow some personal blogs which have title-only feeds which I do think reduces my click through rate significantly.
I follow a few niche news sites which post essentially a long descriptive title, which is workable.
The best balance I've seen for non-full-post feeds was Guardian Australia which posted a fairly decent introductory paragraph to their feed, enough for me to gauge whether to click in. Annoyingly though news organisations seem to be bad at properly tagging their posts, so I stopped using RSS with large mainstream news sites as the firehouse was too much.
This is the answer. RSS without the full article is just Twitter. If you need to click through to an ad-ridden or paywalled website to read the content, then you might as well have just visited the website in the first place.
The primary benefit of RSS from my perspective was being able to fetch news while online and then read it offline. That implies being able to consume information without obtrusive tracking and popups and marketing gimmicks. Once RSS feeds just became their own marketing gimmick, a way to hook you back into the site's ad-driven ecosystem, they lost their utility.
Mailing lists are now the better alternative, although Substack is rapidly killing that medium too by consolidating every provider onto a single platform so they can correlate subscriptions, hijack img and href tags, and track every open and click.
I wasn't at Google during the reader shutdown, but after being here at 8 years, I now understand why things shut down so often.
Google has a lot of shared infra and they are always doing forced migrations and various unfunded mandates. Depending on the stack, maintaining a project at Google takes 0.5-3 people (like if a UI toolkit is turned down, you have to migrate). Plus there are infra costs.
On top of that, being on maintenance for a project like Reader, it's probably not very good for your career trajectory. The adverse effects of always going for launching/landing destroyed so much at Google.
Many engineers would love to just help maintain software like that, it just doesn't tend to work out given the incentive structures. (Plus that headcount and infra has to be attributed to some team. A person maintaining Reader means some other thing that can't be built, so there isn't an incentive for VPs either)
I was at Google during the reader shutdown. It was absolutely a top down decision and not a lack of support due to incentives. The execs tried to frame it as an infra problem/cost of migration, but neither myself nor any of my coworkers believed that at the time.
It was very telling during TGIF that week when Larry and Sergey skipped literal pages worth of top questions about it and refused to give direct answers as to why it was shut down.
The Reader shutdown coupled with Google+ reaching its tendrils into every product (“hey, real identities are great for YouTube users!”) at the time convinced me “don’t be evil” may have been a goal, but “don’t miss out on profit” was a requirement.
IIRC there were volunteers, at least 3 or 4 engs who were content to work on maintaining it either as their 100% project or as their 120% project, but it just wasn't an option.
That's the problem though isn't it. Google doesn't want to maintain stuff otherwise they would incentivize it. Classic "The purpose of the system is what it does"
This raises questions (that you probably can't answer, but still) about why Google doesn't have a "maintenance subsidiary" playbook, where instead of killing a project off, they spin it off, with a bucket of cash to last that project 3 years, after which they'll have to have figured out their own monetization plan (or open source transition) while still having access to everything Google because it'd just be another Alphabet-owned company.
Not every engineer wants to live the fast-paced "create and move on" life, there are so many skilled engineers who would happily take the lower salary, but also lower-pressure, maintenance jobs.
If a project makes a million bucks under Google, that doesn't even remotely push the needle and it gets shut down. If a 5 man subsidiary makes a million bucks, that's a million bucks. Foster that?
It’s not necessarily straightforward or cheap to migrate a living product to open-source land. Backend services at Google are built using proprietary frameworks and infrastructure for which no equivalent exists out in the real world. They could help people out a bit by open-sourcing the web front-end, but that’s substantial work and you’re still a long way from having a working clone of the product.
EDIT: I see I misread your comment and you’re talking about keeping it on Google infra but separating it for accounting purposes. It’s an interesting idea but I don’t see why it would fundamentally change the viability of the product. Also, there’s an ongoing maintenance cost to having more products on shared infra. If you’re the team that runs the global distributed relational db (for example), or maintains the C++ discrete optimization library, it’s much simpler to support two products that make a billion each rather than 2,000 subtly different use-cases each making a million each. Not to mention costs incurred by non-engineering departments (marketing, accounting, legal).
Not just separated for accounting purposes: literally make it a new company under the Alphabet umbrella (spinning up an LLC is basically a Tuesday afternoon for Alphabet) and then seeing if, as its own entity with an Alphabet "series A" grant, it can keep the product alive or not. And then if that company fails: bonus, Google didn't kill it, the market did.
Gmail is a huge data source for their ad business. They use it to fingerprint people all over the web (sign in with google). I imagine they see it as essential to their ad stack.
Forget about ads, Gmail is essential to paying Workspace customers.
They don't need it to fingerprint people by forcing them to sign in -- Google has enough other priorities like Search, YouTube, Chrome, for that.
Making Gmail available for free to consumers, along with Docs and Drive, isn't something to drive ad sales. It's to get everybody used to the products and liking them, so that businesses choose them instead of MS. Google has successfully turned themselves into the main alternative to MS Office with this strategy.
When it comes to Gmail, Docs and Drive, Google's making their money "honestly" -- not through ads but through paid corporate subscriptions, and a smattering of consumer ones (like extra storage).
I’ve sort of gone halfway. I self host my blog but when Ghost1 was deprecated I failed to do the maintenance needed to move to Ghost2, and the site has kind of stagnated for me. It doesn’t take much effort but I have so many things, and administering servers is not really how I’d like to spend my time.
The mastodon server I signed up to is getting slow and inconsistent. I’ve thought of self hosting, but it’s the same concern.
I administer a digital ocean droplet with discourse for a work forum. One day, maybe after a normal apt software upgrade, it disappeared from the web. I could only access it via the web SSH panel. Something went horribly wrong on network config. I spent a long time trying to rectify it, and finally moved to a backup from the week before. Then software upgrade was fine.
I believe in open source. I run Linux, use Kdenlive for video editing, Inkscape, Gimp, everything I can that is open. My whole life is committed to my own open source project.
But managing servers, even as easy as digital ocean is, is never how I want to spend my time, sadly.
Ironically, Usenet seems to be growing more popular! For all the same reasons alternative social media are growing.
Google Groups shut down for good three days ago, so their fingers are out of the pie, but humans haven't used that for a while, they just sign up on services like https://www.eternal-september.org/ and hook up a NNTP client.
What's the self-hosted open source alternative that's actually good? I've been using Inoreader because the UI for any alternative is mediocre.
I'd like it to work on web and Android, sync back and forth properly, and look nice (sidebar, keyboard shortcuts, etc) and nothing else appears to provide this.
Plus, Inoreader allows you to assign a single feed to multiple folders (tag style) which many other readers don't allow.
I've been using FreshRSS for a while and I've been rather pleased with it. It's browser UI is pretty good and a good number of mobile RSS apps support it.
FreshRSS, works well directly from the browser, desktop or mobile.
What I like about it is that you can gradually work your unread list: if you're in a specific feed and mark it as read it switches to the next feed only with unread items. If you do it from a category it switches to the next category. I find it helps a lot going quickly through a mountain of new unread items.
Not saying others don't do it, but this one does, so I'm keeping it.
I use the Newsblur too, paying for it too but reading around reddit self-hosting is incredibly complicated and then you also need to build and deploy your own mobile apps too
I've been using commafeed for a few months now. The UI is closest thing to GReader I've seen. It's still a bit light on features compared to other more older and popular self-hosted RSS reader options. But it works well and gets frequent updates.
Miniflux has good integrations and third party UIs that look great. But I'm fine with the default UI themes. Selfhost or pay $15/year to use the flagship hosted instance.
Perhaps google’s long-term contribution to the internet was definitively proving the importance of self-hosted and free, open source software — by epitomising what can go horribly wrong with the alternative. Hopefully in a generation from now this will be just common sense.
I thought the idea behind Google Reader was that they would be able to show you ads. They bought Feedburner which was supposed to offer an easy way to put Adsense in your feeds, but it never really took off.
Once I fully embraced the fact that Google is an ad company -- not a software company -- their behavior doesn't pique my interest anymore. I don't rely on any of their software or services.
But I wish generally they would stop hoovering up and monetizing my personal data. F'ckers.
I think YouTube is an example of where Google would rather sell you a service (YouTube Premium) than an ever-increasing number of ads (including ads for YouTube Premium). Google makes more money from Premium users. Creators get paid more for Premium views. The experience is better for everyone but your wallet's a bit lighter.
Google and Facebook make most of its money off ads because the reality is that users don't like paying for stuff directly.
I am a bit skeptical that they don't try to monetize Premium users as well -- I mean invisibly, by selling our viewing history, timing of when we watch stuff etc. But I can't do anything about that and I openly admit all my efforts to block YouTube ads on an iPhone have failed so I eventually gave up and just bought Premium.
And to be fair, I don't regret it, because I have another consideration -- I can easily get some nice Xiaomi phone and root it and install various blockers and alternative YouTube frontends... BUT... my Google account is very valuable, a lot is tied to it and Google has become a bit trigger-happy banning and deleting accounts. So I am not willing to risk it. Hence I paid up.
My understanding is that Google does not sell user data to 3rd parties. It's much more profitable for Google to sell targeted ads that indirectly use that data (without giving the data away), and also avoids the potential legal and PR ramifications of selling user data, especially since users trust Google with a lot of their personal data.
They might use your viewing history to target ads in other places. And they definitely use aggregate/anonymized viewing patterns to suggest similar videos people might like, but I don't see an issue with that.
Barely hanging on by nature of being an open format and Apple generously hosting the feed index publicly. But even that gets challenged now that most people switch to Spotify to listen to "podcasts" there - and those are completely siloed.
You’ll be happy to hear that Spotify recently got rid of that paywall and you can now find all of their original podcasts including J Rogan on Apple Podcasts etc. Must have been a tax write-off?
The irony of this is that RSS is an open decentralized protocol, and we're blaming Google for not hosting centralized infrastructure to make it accessible. I think this is evidence that RSS has fundamental usability issues that prevent it from going mainstream. Google realized this ages ago and ditched it.
No, what we're saying is google made a free service that was accessible everywhere, which meant all the non-google options essentially died off (commercial paid apps were competing with free, non-commercial ones were competing with "synchronized everywhere" which means paying for some cloud system).
Then once the rss ecosystem had been largely wiped out, google killed reader. Sure you could migrate your data out, but to where? It took time for replacements to get to maturity, and they lacked syncing or financial backing that made them free. It was _possible_ to get an alternative, but the overwhelming majority of people are not really able to deal with the immediately available alternatives, and by the time the RSS ecosystem had redeveloped usable software the majority of the people who had been using reader/RSS were no longer going to switch back because they'd migrated to other systems.
The cheaper/free service to drive competitors out of business model is a tool monopolists use all the time because it is effective. In this case google did exactly the same thing, honestly I don't think out of malice, and then realized that they couldn't make a profit of it and so killed the service. But fundamentally their actions were the same as the monopolists, and had the same impact, so when they shut down reader they basically ended rss for the vast majority of users.
For example, NetNewsWire was a good piece of paid commercial software which I used for years, that was essentially killed by reader because they simply couldn't afford to develop or support it when the major competitor was free. NNW is now free and OSS, but that was after the IP became functionally worthless and the company that had bought it simply returned it to Brent Simmons (the original author).
To your point, Google acquired Blogger in 2003, Feedburner in 2007, created Google Reader and had a dedicated blog search that could let you follow search terms as RSS feeds when you posts were made that matched your terms.
So Google made a free service, and when it was gone, everyone realized they weren't willing to pay for it. Because it wasn't valuable to them. This is the real problem that RSS has.
It’s not dead and that’s a correct statement, though perhaps with one needed clarification. Google gave RSS a lot of mainstream visibility with Reader which it now lacks. I think that partially explains its lack of popularity and is the reason why people write articles like this saying that Google “killed” RSS.
iOS and OS X had Reeder back then, which used Google Reader as an engine and then released a new version that stored the data locally. That's how I primarily used Google Reader back then because the user experience was so good. For other platforms, five-year-old Feedly was very mature and the platform I'm using today since I left Apple (Feedly Classic to be specific since they made their "new" app awful).
To summarize, yes. There were plenty of mature alternatives and a migration was easily done by exporting and importing a file. Feedly supposedly got 3 million new users in the two weeks that followed Google's shutdown.
A far bigger issue than Google shutting down was the fact that people had moved on to Facebook and Twitter while newspapers created closed ecosystems with their own apps. Jason Kottke, then one of the world's most popular blogs, declared blogs to be dead.
The issue isn't "are the available now", it's were they practically available at the time reader was killed. At the time reader was killed there were a plethora of okay-ish options, but most were new, or lacked the usability polish, or lacked the perfect syncing of reader. As a result when it was killed for the majority of users there were no practical alternatives: new projects weren't an option for most users because they lacked the usability polish, and obviously a brand new project with few users doesn't instill a sense it won't go away shortly (especially given the context). Plenty of apps existed but many of them used reader for syncing (womp womp), and those that didn't required you pay or required you have some other paid service for syncing, and still because they were apps you couldn't just use them wherever you were (plenty of work computers limit software installation etc), browser based ones require you use the same browser everywhere (and required you to not use chrome because it doesn't have integrated rss, and so you run into the chrome monoculture of web devs forcing use of chrome, and corporate software installation limits preventing firefox), and plenty of the OSS ones required you literally run your own server (which is what I've been doing for years), or rely on random 3rd parties who may or may not be able to afford a free service indefinitely. (holy run on sentence batman)
The result of this was when reader shutdown the overwhelming majority of users simply stopped using rss, presumably even if they did export their subscriptions they've long since lost them, and built up habits around non-rss based mechanisms. Hence rss (for anything other than podcasts) ceased being relevant for the overwhelming majority of people.
I'm trying to make it clear here, the issue isn't that using RSS became impossible, it's that by making reader free google decimated the rss reader ecosystem such that when they killed reader there simply weren't practical alternatives for the majority of users of google reader. As a result reader being killed changed the general habits of those users to no longer use rss feeds for information, and given by that time things like twitter provided similar services (most blogging platforms have a "post updates to twitter") they had no real reason to go back to rss readers.
So the basic argument for reader making rss become irrelevant for general blogging, etc was:
1. RSS comes into existence
2. Apps start being made to subscribe to rss
3. People start using those apps
4. Google introduces Reader, which is free
5. Paid apps from <2> can't compete with free so either die or adopt in app ads (which at the time reader didn't have) so people move to reader
6. Non-google rss readers don't have syncing, so people move to reader
7. Non-google rss readers either require people pay, or use specific paid services, to get syncing, so people move to reader. Or they use google reader as their back end so their users can now trivially just start using reader anyway.
8. At this point there are no major alternatives to google reader, it makes up the overwhelming majority of all people using rss, as a result the few stand alone readers that still exist are for niche use cases or are unpolished hobby projects that come and go over time
9. Blogging platforms introduce tools to allow posts to blogs to automatically post updates to twitter, Facebook, etc
10. Google kills reader
11. The free rss readers that still exist all use reader for syncing, so lose syncing, and have to either charge money or require users adopt paid syncing tools, so people don't migrate to them. The projects that come into existence at this point are too rough for general users so they don't bother, and at this point they don't need to as the autoposting from <9> means that they don't need it.
I think that's a fairly fair assessment of what happened. But I think there's a big caveat to be addressed though. Google reader was far and away the most popular RSS reader, like overwhelmingly so, prior to it existing the market of RSS readers was something where a few people could earn some money, but it was not really a significant market. So my question is, absent google reader would RSS feeds ever have become as popular as they were during the period reader was available?
Back in the day, there were desktop RSS readers in many forms, and a paid new browser, Opera 7.0 ($10, I still have my license somewhere) with built in RSS reader and email client, and torrent client, among other things...
However, the problem was a missing synchronisation of readed entries between your home and office PC. Mobile device was not a thing back then but slowly started main stream adoption. I mean, very few had smartphones.
Google reader was revolutionary, solving this exact problem for free and mobile app quickly followed. It caused almost all offline RSS readers to decay and starve to death.
And then few years passed by, and this is the moment they pull the rug, but the damage was done. Luckily, Feedly and others quickly emerged, and smartphones were a thing. Also, some self hosted RSS readers came to existence and get polished.
Bad UX and UI choices have destroyed the adoption of RSS feeds.
RSS has always been a niche solution used only by technically knowledgeable people because of how it was always presented by RSS feed vendors.
Instead of having a button saying "Install this browser extension and click here to get all new articles in your browser", the user is presented with an orange "RSS" button with no explanation of what it is and how to use it, that will show a weird XML file when clicked on by the average user.
How are people supposed to use that feature when it's so obscure?
Better UX would have helped adoption and would have led to Google keeping the RSS button (and Google Reader probably).
Agree. Text on buttons should be verbs. "Subscribe" or "Follow" would've been 1000x better than "RSS". Of all the sidequests Firefox has put itself on, better supporting RSS would be a good one. Mozilla already owns Pocket, so it would be a very small jump.
"RSS" wasn't very common to put on feed buttons. The standard RSS icon was normal, including in Firefox (where it would display on the URL bar when detected on a site). And commonly web pages linking directly to their feed would say something along the lines of "subscribe via RSS" or just "subscribe" with the icon.
People are definitely used to poking cryptic pictograms on contemporary UIs, and RSS clearly gives off an impression of something being broadcast.
This is such a good point that I hadn't even realized til just now. I'm a pretty tech-savvy user and was never able to really figure out how it worked, or at least how to make it work for me. Can't imagine the average user's experience!
> Better UX would have helped adoption and would have led to Google keeping the RSS button
The most obvious people to have improved that UX is the browser... aka Google. The way that XML rendered was controlled by the browser. This all sounds like Google apologism.
Reader was killed in 2013, Chrome already had ~40% market share by then. It may have not been as dominant as it is now, but Chrome was already a major influence on the web user experience.
The funny thing is...non-Google browsers had even done that. Chrome was the odd one that didn't, and Firefox was still more popular at the time.
Firefox had Live Bookmarks, which I used for a long time. You'd just drag the icon to your bookmarks toolbar and then it would appear as a folder containing all of the entries as clickable bookmarks to the relevant web pages. The browser alerted you to autodiscovered feeds as well. The orange RSS pictogram (not the initialization) would appear right there in the URL bar if the site was set up right.
As early as OS X 10.4, desktop Safari had a built in RSS reader as well. You'd open the sidebar that's currently mostly used for the reading list and bookmarks, and there was some way to add the current page's discovered RSS feed with a button click or two. It also rendered feed XML in a particularly nice way that looked like a very clean looking blog, so landing on an XML page wouldn't intimidate less technical users.
Chrome deliberately was dysfunctional, and it taking over probably had more to do with RSS not growing more mainstream (as well as the rise of social networks and over commercialization) than Google Reader shutting down.
That's not even remotely what happened. UX was bad because RSS was barely tolerated in the ad-driven web that was being established. No one had any interest in evolving the UI.
That would be a compelling argument if the RSS button had never been added to websites in the first place.
The UI and UX was left entirely to the website administrator, not big tech, and even websites that did not have any monetization did not improve the experience for users.
And of course adtech could have invested in RSS to make it financially attractive. But they didn't, cause nobody uses it.
Being the nerdy little kid I was in the 2000s, I tried getting into RSS and even made a presentation in school computer class about it... but actually I never really used it. It just wasn't fun. So who used it if not me?
I had hoped that as more people grew up with computers, the share of sophisticated users who would adopt technologies with higher inherent complexity would increase. I'm disappointed the opposite has happened.
If popular browsers had embraced RSS enthusiastically, it might have taken off with mainstream users. There's nothing about the protocol that makes it difficult to provide a well-integrated experience. Firefox even had a crude built-in reader around the time it was the most popular browser, but did not put in the effort to create a good UX around it.
Microsoft Outlook still has RSS support: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/subscribe-to-an-r...
Basically, an RSS feed is represented as an auto-populating mail folder. As still mentioned on the page linked above, Internet Explorer provided an easy way to subscribe.
Support has been removed from Firefox, but it still exists in Thunderbird.
It's not surprising. It seems that many understand RSS more as a form of news (like a newsgroup or mailing list) than as a form of discovery for web content.
Shutting down Google Reader was the peccatum originale of Google. The original sin. The phase transition from "don't be evil" to evil. The moment when the sign flipped from net positive to net negative.
Unfortunately Mozilla has greatly contributed to this. At the time when Firefox had a good user share Mozilla instead of promoting RSS has decided to remove RSS/Atom feed icon from the address bar because of their telemetry showing rare usage. While it is still possible to install the icon as well as live bookmarks as add-on to do that one needs to know of their existence.
I’m doing my part: Building websites with WordPress and every single one of them has an RSS feed. Makes me happy to know WP powers a significant part of the open web. I loathe every aspect of doing business online with Google. Analytics, ads, search console, the search engine, Google businesss: ALL terrible. While I can avoid them personally, if you do business online you just can’t.
Gmail's spam and scam filtering is pretty good, but, come to think of it those guys are also encroaching on Google's turf. Google wants to be the only one to be able to spam you.
Browsers dropping RSS support certainly did not help. Now instead of being in everyone's super-app, people need a dedicated service or application to handle it.
Even sites which have a feed, typically do not advertise. My best option is to open the source and CTRL-F for "atom" or "feed".
Users never caught on much to RSS either. Plenty of news sites still have RSS feeds, but hardly anybody bothers setting them up with a reader. And I don't think it's Google's fault that nobody else is making a popular RSS reader.
and the answer to that is an RSS app that grabs the article and runs it through a reader mode of some sort (Unread and I believe Reeder have this feature on iOS)
If you were burned by Google with RSS, get ready to be burned by Google with LLMs.
Google (correctly) saw RSS as a challenge to the position it wants to be in, which is a replacement for URLs. It wants its search to intermediate all user interaction with the web, and RSS violates that in the steady-state. Google did the smart thing, which is to use it's vast capital to embrace, extend, extinguish viable RSS tech first with Reader and then with Feedburner.
The interesting thing is that LLMs are another contender to intermediate users' relationships with URLs. An LLM that gives references-as-links within an answer is a much better usability story and I predict this usage alone will displace traditional search in the next couple of years. If past is prologue, I think we can expect Google to spend a great deal on LLMs, make internal projects, buy companies, and then shut them down. (Of course it may be that the Search team will pivot to an LLM UX, which would be remarkable but not entirely out-of-the-question since it's compatible with Google's bread-and-butter, search ads.)
RSS was to the Internet as CSV is to Data. The great way to move data between applications. IFTTT is a great way to export content data, convert to RSS, and put the data(posts/comments/stories) where you wanted.
Even youtube had rss feeds for channels. Freeing the data was a core concept before all the megacorps or startups wanted a monopoly.
One of the key things about attacks on RSS is that it shows the need to be a little more aggressive when writing FLOSS: specifically, relying on parsing the pages as they're presented to the end user, and RSS-ifying them. Twitter is a good example of where this happens. Youtube could be, too, if its RSS feeds get yanked.
I'm tired of everyone blaming google for their woes. If your ecosystem is so fragile it will break because a single player bailed out, you were bound for failure anyways.
RSS destroys their walled-garden feed ad model. I got sick of it, and went back to RSS. I use Feedbro personally. It also supports Twitter (via nitter) and Facebook friends (public posts) without the ads and algorithms. Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/J1IDql9.png
This could be an explanation, but the old rule says "Never ascribe to malice what you could attribute to incompetence or ignorance."
Based on what I have heard from people who work at Google (and read on the personal blogs of Googlers & Xooglers), a perhaps equally plausible explanation is that Google management would be unable to pull something like that off because groups are too chaotic/independent, and what is described by the OP would require coordinated action, but there isn't an overall "strategy" (which is even true for companies much more organized than Google, sadly).
> The most recent incident was in May 2021, where Google announced they're working on an update to Google Chrome that brings back RSS support. But there has been no word on an official launch since it was announced years ago. It's unclear of what the implications of this feature will be.
The feature is launched. Base don my experience: Any site you "follow" will appear in the "Following" tab of the new tab page, and I have seen these sites also pop up in the feed of my Pixel phone (Google Now?)
Blaming Google for going anti-RSS is like blaming the rack when stepping on it. What did people expect to happen?
If you're looking someone to blame, blame the ones who evangelised Chrome and Google Reader when better alternatives existed. Back in the day we had Opera (the classic version) with amazing performance and built-in RSS reader. However, at the time, industry influencers promoted Chrome instead, a zero-feature browser with horrible performance (unless you had a relatively high-end PC with a multicore CPU, which was not the majority of users).
Many people (devs in particular, who should know better) use Chrome to this day.
Oh well, the browser market is as democratic as they come, people vote with their usage. The conclusion is that people just don't care.
I wonder, if in retrospect, Google kept Google Reader if only to avoid the constant nagging they seem to receive about "killing RSS". Been on the internet for decades now, I don't think I ever missed or cared about this so-called assassination. Yet, every chance they get, there is some group of hardcore RSS enthusiasts who can't keep talking about it. Very strange to me.
I recently made an alternative to RSS feeds tailored towards walled gardens like Instagram & Twitter. It lets you set alerts when certain accounts/pages post content. It's called Alerts.boo
Not a full replacement for RSS feeds but useful if you want social media curation/monitoring.
Google has destroyed the Web by directing traffic from its SEPRPs to pages filled with their own ads that are stuffed with useless content to encourage scrolling and optimize for ranking. Google any recipe for details. Not sure if it’s any consolation that AI will at the very least level the playing field and give us more direct answers.
Google Reader was the only web-based solution I managed to use for reading feeds. I tried several others and ended up purchasing Reeder, which supports not only RSS and Atom but also other sources like Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit.
One of the net's unsung/unseen killer apps that was slowly pushed down by 'social media'.
Reader's been dead longer than it was alive.
Many contributing factors to environment, shifts of the day when it happened. Endlessly bringing it up shows lack of awareness of surroundings/history. Also, other options/filled void/RSS not dead.
There are a lot of us keeping RSS alive. I've been working on a very minimalist RSS reader in Phoenix LiveView for like a year now if anyone is interested in trying out another reader: https://catnip.vip
Adding a plug for Readwise.io - I was a longtime Feedly user but switched because Readwise is more capable. I'm a paying subscriber but otherwise have no connection to the company.
I use Blogtrottr to get RSS clips for feeds by email. It's great for sites that are updated very infrequently, and you can choose the frequency of emails for a feed, from a daily digest to as-it-happens. Yes, there are ads in the free plan.
Limited monetization potential stopped the adoption of RSS. Competition from social media feeds included a social factor and eventually allowed for a monetization solution that did not infringe on the content creators.
Article doesn't mention iGoogle personal homepage which they killed in 2014 I think. It was a way to show rss reeds on a Google homepage with a Google searchbar at the top. So very useful
What are people using for rss on mobile? I feel like that's the biggest change, at least for me. The way I consume news moved from something I did on my laptop to something I did on my phone.
...are you serious? I can't browse timelines on X without an account, they've blocked all third party apps, and most sites I subscribe to via RSS don't tweet every new post anyway.
> I can't browse timelines on X without an account
It takes just a few seconds to create an account.
>they've blocked all third party apps
The first party app works fine for me.
>most sites I subscribe to via RSS don't tweet every new post anyway
It would be in the best interests of these sites to post about new content on social media themselves for extra visibility. Worst case someone else can repost it on social media for them.
The speed of creating an account is immaterial when I don't want one, nor do I wish to use their clunky website to read news on. There's no official app for my OS even if I did wish to install one.
Posting to a walled garden is certainly not in the best interests of all sites, but offering your readers a way to directly subscribe to feeds in the software of thsir choice as well as whatever social media stuff you're doing is a win all round.
Sort of. You can just poll it like it is a feed. However annoyingly if you want push updates you need to subscribe which is a publicly visible action. There is no way to follow a feed without having some profile to appear as a "follower".
I can't help but wonder how much of this is intentional sabotage on the part of Google vs how much of it is just RSS itself dying because people don't really like it. The opinions on HN likely don't mirror those of the average person. I support RSS, but it seems a simple mailing list subscription is both technically and functionally superior. The article itself admits that Google benefits from RSS because it helps with indexing. I don't see why Google would be invested in "killing" RSS, how they would benefit from it dying, or how their actions have actually contributed to it's death. This all just seems very conspiratorial to me. The simplest explanation to this is that most people don't really get what RSS is and would rather not use it when email is available and all the content they want is on Facebook anyway.
RSS is the victim of thousands of paper cuts. Examples:
- Craiglist: disabling RSS dealt it a blow. I was a big user of RSS for Craiglist searches. Having one simple, inbox-like dashboard where items of interest drip, and where you can delete ones you're not interested in was great.
- Mastodon: doing RSS in an idiotic way. You subscribe to an RSS feed (e.g. for a hash tag) using your home instance ... but the links in the items take you to remote instances, where you have to jump through an annoying hoop to engage with them on your home instance.
- StackOverflow: ignoring a long-running bug whereby if you have an RSS reader in your browser pulling StackOverflow RSS feeds (that in and of themselves work great), you get logged out of StackOverflow. When you click on the items to navigate to them, you find you're logged out.
Because you can set up a feed that only provides a short intro and require a click through for the full article, which many websites do with their RSS feed.
It increases the number of people regularly visiting your site.
Also people share articles. If you have a feed there is roughly 0% chance of me sharing one of your articles. If I subscribe to your feed and like the article then I may share it with friends or post to Reddit or Hacker News.
Of course while you may reach some users that you wouldn't have otherwise, you may also lose some ad views from people who would still check your site if there was no feed. So it is a balance.
Not everyone is you and you're ignoring the fact that some people do subscribe to those feeds and will drive traffic to your site for a completely negligible effort even if you personally wouldn't.
Your original post was about why you, as a website owner, would provide an RSS feed. Not why you personally would use an RSS feed
My original post is about why RSS didn’t take off. My second post is also about why RSS didn’t take off. Together they present an angle from both the provider and consumer sides with the greater point that Google didn’t kill RSS — rather, the relative unpopularity of RSS caused Google to pull out.
RSS wasn't about monetization. While there were ways you could game it, it really wasn't for content providers who wanted to make money. There were and are some/many of them but you basically weren't the audience.
Lots of standard blog publishing software generates RSS feeds. For example, every Substack site I've ever seen has an RSS feed at "/feed". They don't tell you about it, but it's there if you want it. And the RSS aggregator I use, Newsblur, can automatically find most RSS feeds if you just give it the site's home page URL.
The issue isn't really that there aren't RSS feeds or that there aren't RSS feed readers. But it's easier to demonize Google for killing Reader (which they probably shouldn't have done) than it is to admit that reading info from RSS feeds just isn't mainstream behavior--and really never was but now there are more alternatives.
> Why would I provide a feed that earned me no money?
Because (unless you have infinite greed?) at some point in your life you will have enough money, and then you might wish to provide a feed for other reasons?
Because not everything has to be about making money?
I understand that monetization is the goal for some people but it wasn't how the web historically worked and RSS probably isn't the right mechanism in a world where everything is about how much money you can make.
I think this article makes it to sound more of a conspiracy than it is. Yes, google does not pay much attention to rss and stopped meaningful investment in it a while ago. But I don't think laying such charge as them destroying the rss adoption is warranted. Especially on the proof so thin as buying a company and 10 years later shutting down some services. Google has little interest in RSS, and that's fine, it can do well enough without it.
You know the question is whether an XML based standard is going to be suitable moving forward. I'm not saying JSON or something else are better but I do think we're sort of seeing the decay, lack of support and slow removal of RSS across the web. Even still I found it to be really useful and my personal news reader news.mu.xyz is built using it but I do feel like for this stuff to progress we might end up seeing a new standard emerge. I won't say it's activity pub or something else. Just that the support is getting pulled from many places.
But I am not looking forward to when that changes, I like getting my news in a timeline manner from exactly who I want.
One part of the article bothers me a bit:
> Users were left with no RSS reader application, no comparable alternative, and no education from Google on how to continue using their RSS feeds without Google Reader. This led users to not only discontinue using Google Reader, but abandon RSS feeds altogether.
I may be misremembering but didn't Feedly step up very quickly? Even offering the ability to easily migrate everything over.
I continue to use Feedly today and it has been great. Maybe I just didn't really notice since I have always used a third party app on iPhone (Reeder) so I just repointed the app from Google Reader to Feedly and it was basically as if nothing happened.
Don't get me wrong them shutting it down was the start of me distancing myself from Google services. But I feel like there was very much an alternative that seemed to advertise fairly heavily on migration. Or am I misremembering the timeline a bit?