How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

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ppudgywalsh about 5 hours ago 66 commentsRead Article on openrss.org

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Discussion (66 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

throwaway63467•about 1 hour ago

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.

mathieudombrock•1 minute ago

What I don't understand about the "RSS can't support ads" argument is that most of my RSS feeds don't actually let me read the article. Just a headline and a snippet at most. So if I want to actually read the article I'm going to have to load their page.

user3939382•30 minutes ago

> the privacy friendly browsers just exist to serve ads when I think about it

Not LibreWolf. I’m also a fan of ungoogled-chromium, those are my two daily browsers.

orzi•3 minutes ago

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...

torment-nexus•2 minutes ago

This is an interesting problem. A similar approach that worked for us was to only load the tools the agent actually needs for each task.

bakemawaytoys•about 2 hours ago

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.

timmg•about 2 hours ago

As someone who was a big fan of Reader and worked at Google at the time (not on G+): I never understood why they didn’t try to put Reader into G+.

Like you could imagine getting your RSS feed in your G+ stream. If you didn’t want any social stuff you could just use it as a reader. But it would also give you an easy way to share stuff from your feed. And it might have been useful for those providing RSS feeds to interact more with their readers (if they chose to.)

I think it would have been an interesting way to bootstrap things.

glenstein•about 1 hour ago

Exactly. Reader was maturing into a proto social network in its own right (I started commenting on articles with friends in it in college right before it started getting deprecated) and finding the organic activity and rolling with it and thinking in terms of honoring the core users could have been a very good strategy.

Google Plus could have worked imo and the path to success would have involved smart stewardship of reader.

deepsun•about 1 hour ago

Same thing with Google Music, it was perfect. You could stream, or could buy and download mp3, or you could upload your library to it.

And the best feature: "I am feeling lucky" -- play a random song you ever liked and keep playing a generated playlist off it.

But they killed it due to internal wars with YouTube Music that sucks. There's still nothing like Google Music.

wildzzz•10 minutes ago

Google Music's song radio feature was really good. It would play similar songs obviously but it exposed you to actually new artists. Meanwhile, spotify basically encourages you to listen to the same stuff all the time, It's like listening to my old CD collection.

PunchyHamster•39 minutes ago

They could have Spotify market and just decided not to.

firefax•about 2 hours ago

It was a great example of being evil -- they reduced user choice while pushing an inferior product.

InsideOutSanta•about 2 hours ago

And then killed it too. They killed a tool people loved to promote a tool people didn't want to adopt, and in the end both ended up dead.

rcxdude•about 1 hour ago

It seems like Google culturally can't deal with products that aren't overwhelming, gigantic successes, but they also really struggle to put in the effort to actually create those. Multiple times they have spent a lot of resources developing a product, then released to great fanfare, but then don't have the follow-through to keep supporting it into being a big success. Stadia seemed to be the most ridiculous example to me. The console market is famously difficult to break into and Microsoft only managed it by making a loss for a very long time, but Google just didn't put in anywhere near that amount of effort, and just gave up pretty much as soon as it launched.

galaxyLogic•about 1 hour ago

And killing G+ killed a community. I lost many could be real-friends, whom I've never heard from since. That if anyting was Evil, killing a community.

leoc•about 2 hours ago

The final irony is that if they'd just maintained G+ a bit better and kept it around after 2018 it's likely they'd eventually have had a decent chance to pick up a number of waves of unhappy people leaving Facebook or Twitter.

But, ceterum censeo: while Vic Gundotra may have been the main force behind G+ it's important to emphasise that, as usual, the buck stops with Google's Class B overlords Page and Brin personally. If they were the decent people and responsible stewards they were originally promoted as then the Google+ debacle would not have happened, or certainly not in the way it did.

alightsoul•about 2 hours ago

As a result many people in developing countries were driven towards social media like instagram and TikTok where they get their news. And now they're addicted to them.

dannyobrien•about 1 hour ago

At the time, I was working at the Committee to Protect Journalists with dissident bloggers working in Syria, Egypt, UAE, Turkey, etc. We had a group of them come to the US to talk to the big tech companies about the issues they were struggling with: fake takedowns, language support, local censorship, and so on. I remember distinctly as we worked on the agenda for the meeting with Google that Google Reader being shut down was the first complaint any of us mentioned. We laughed, but it was serious.

pronik•about 2 hours ago

Probably Google's biggest failure ever was to recognize they've already had a social network: Gmail.

jonas21•about 1 hour ago

They tried to develop Gmail into a social network in 2010 with Google Buzz [1]. It received a lot of backlash from people who did not want their email to be a social network.

The social network they were not developing well was YouTube. Eventually, they figured it out, and it's estimated YouTube would be worth $550B as a standalone business today [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz

[2] https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/youtube-valuation-wort...

thataccount•about 1 hour ago

But they totally used Google wave. It was/is the future.

charcircuit•about 1 hour ago

Do you not realize that Google+ was a newer product and was a strategic priority for Google. Trying to say they are the same so you should be able to apply the same exact criteria is a false equivalence.

betenoire•about 2 hours ago

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

adamm255•about 2 hours ago

"I miss websites". Damn that hit. I realise the only place pushing me to an actual website these days are my RSS feeds (self hosted FreshRSS), and HN. Maybe very occasional share on LinkedIn.

danesparza•about 2 hours ago

I'm still bitter about Google Reader going away. I endorse this sentiment.

gertlex•about 2 hours ago

Me too, but there were some replacements that made me happy because they fixed some irk with google's version. (I think I used Commafeed?)

I eventually got away from subscribing to like 50 webcomics (all I used RSS for... most other stuff was too high-volume, and I liked reading everything in my feed, iirc) though and stopped using an RSS feed altogether.

fsflover•35 minutes ago

What prevents you from using RSS now? Outsourcing your RSS feed to a megacorp sounds like a horrible idea.

tombert•about 1 hour ago

Yeah. There honestly was a purity to the disconnected nature of shitty Geocities and Angelfires pages, where filled with amateurs writing shitty HTML just because they thought it would be cool to have their own web site.

That's not a dig, to be clear. I was one of those kids writing shitty HTML for Geocities.

I don't hate the modern internet, but I feel like there's roughly now about ~10 sites that I visit frequently, whereas when I was a teenager there were lots more. Maybe it's just my "old man yells at cloud" moment.

konsalexee•about 2 hours ago

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

venusenvy47•35 minutes ago

No Android or Windows availability?

glenstein•about 1 hour ago

I mean you're right, but also Google had one of the legitimately best options at the time and massive visibility and seemingly credible institutional commitment. And it was early to a scene of web based always online RSS readers when before that they were typically desktop-based. And on desktop portability was achievable but not as convenient. With reader it was nearly effortless.

While it was definitely possible to use alternatives, it effectively became king of the mountain which gave it the power to deal a punishing blow to RSS once they pulled the plug.

I will just say it was a very different time and at the time I didn't regard Google as a place that didn't make credible commitments to new products. But big picture I think you're right.

carlosjobim•about 2 hours ago

And he includes a Safari plugin to get an RSS button back into the interface for easy subscribing (on Mac).

dabinat•about 2 hours ago

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.

basilikum•about 1 hour ago

RSS is a free way to reach almost no one.

tombert•about 1 hour ago

I've used it on every blog I've ever built (https://blog.tombert.com/index.xml) because it's super easy to set up, but I really don't know anyone who uses RSS in any serious capacity.

That said, stuff like BBC actually does maintain an RSS feed: https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml

delduca•about 1 hour ago

Ironically HN don’t have feed…

orzi•16 minutes ago

Not true. https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

logn•17 minutes ago

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

russellbeattie•1 minute ago

[delayed]

GrayHerring•about 2 hours ago

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.

carlosjobim•about 1 hour ago

I don't think the average person has to be taken into account all the time. There are millions of companies providing products and services which the average person has no interest in. Most books and music has no appeal to the average person, neither do most sports or hobbies.

fiatpandas•21 minutes ago

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.

cft•19 minutes ago

No, because it's not cross platform, it doesn't take you outside of a Google product

AlexAplin•about 2 hours ago

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.

mattsimpson•about 2 hours ago

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.

glenstein•about 1 hour ago

Agree. It was the watershed moment that represented the break from "don't be evil", a cheeky slogan that was remarkably effective at conveying a sense of what they were about by talking about what they were trying not to be.

jll29•about 1 hour ago

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

delduca•about 1 hour ago

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

monksy•about 2 hours ago

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

tommek4077•about 2 hours ago

You couldnt put ads that easily in rss feeds.

InsideOutSanta•about 2 hours ago

It's a decentralized solution in a world where google wants everything to go through google.

goldenarm•about 2 hours ago

They killed greader and RSS to push Google+, which was a brilliant decision.

danesparza•about 2 hours ago

Ad revenue.

smusamashah•about 2 hours ago

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.

firasd•about 1 hour ago

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

renegat0x0•about 2 hours ago

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

grigio•about 1 hour ago

RSS is still alive yarr is fantastic

ralfd•about 1 hour ago

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

tim-projects•about 1 hour ago

Facebook IMO was more culpable.

salynchnew•25 minutes ago

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

LightBug1•about 3 hours ago

Yeah, fuck Google for all of this.

That's my intellectually considered response.

Fuck Google.

rpdillon•about 2 hours ago

Upvoted not for your particular phrasing, but because in a sense, this was my experience as well: I wanted to work at Google, and I thought Google was learning how to marry a great business with treating customers well. Killing GReader was the inflection point for me, when Google tipped from "Great!" to "Kinda evil". It's been a slide ever since.

amazingamazing•about 1 hour ago

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.

8organicbits•about 1 hour ago

I use RSS specifically because the people who publish via RSS are not trying to monetize their content.

amazingamazing•44 minutes ago

Yup, and that’s why it would never be mainstream.

shevy-java•about 2 hours ago

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.