How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just why bother relying on Google products for RSS?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

i still use feeds often

https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-feeds

often using my crawling server because rss are often protected against bots

https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy

RSS is still alive yarr is fantastic

That is stupid ranting.

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

Facebook IMO was more culpable.

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

Yeah, fuck Google for all of this.

That's my intellectually considered response.

Fuck Google.

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

This is the Company of Pure Evil.

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

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

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