People don't understand how much RSS is useful...
I'm still angry at Google for killing Reader. It was the best way to consume content on the web.
People don't understand how much RSS is useful...
I'm still angry at Google for killing Reader. It was the best way to consume content on the web.
It's too much work and effort to maintain such complicated legacy technology for the incredibly busy brain of a Google engineer.
I wonder what's going on in the head of a person that decides to axe RSS support.
"Surely my user base will continue coming to the landing page of my website to check for updates every day."
I would guess that rss doesn’t show up in their JavaScript-driven web analytics so they mistakenly think no one uses it.
So they have some stupid conversation like “patching the rss code will take 5 units of labor, but I want to cyberdize the whoozit that also takes 5 units. Does anyone even care about rss and use it? Oh the analytics show zero. Let’s de prioritize that.”
I think the bigger problem is people on the team not using rss and knowing this is super dumb. And PMs now knowing the world their metrics don’t track.
Seems to kind with google once being great and now full of fat rich peoples’ kids just riding the slow and gradual suck. (Based on the theory that smart people have weak, pampered kids; then weak kids get destroyed by jerk fascists; then jerk fascists get overturned by smart people and the cycle completes).
Of course the dumb kids think they are geniuses because their parents are part. And the parents want to pretend their kids are smart. Etc etc
they mistakenly think no one uses it.
No, I think it's a very deliberate choice. RSS is a means to escape the gaze of Big G. Can't let that happen
Or maybe they gaslight that as the reason. Their blog post talks about how they don’t have resources and they are prioritizing.
So I agree the real reason is that google doesnt want people using minimally tracked file downloads and thinks they can shovel people towards their more data rich analytics and content consumption.
I think you're falling prey to Hanlon's Razor. What probably happened here is something approaching the following conversation:
$PM: Hey $ENGINEER, it looks like this "arr ess ess" thingy has very few users, do you know what it does?
$ENGINEER: Yeah, it's a web standard that publishes a feed of updates to our website. It's kind of neat actually, if you have an RSS read--
$PM (waving hands): okay skip the wikipedia article, that's fine; but does it generate revenue?
$ENGINEER (blinking): uh...no, it doesn't. Anyone can query our RSS feed and update their local cache of articles and read them later, it's actually really useful if you're ever somewhere without interne--
$PM: So we can't monetize this?
$ENGINEER: ...no, this is an RSS feed for a tech blog. We can't monetize this.
$PM: If you remove this and integrate $FEATURE on $PAID_SERVICE, I'll write you a better peer review this year. It's reducing tech debt right? This sounds like an old school thing anyway, I've never even heard of it!
$ENGINEER (heavy sigh): Yeah, whatever man.
I have to imagine that for a chrome releases and developer updates blog that this has absolutely nothing to do with ensuring someone uses search or ads and more just plain priorities and no one bothering to add RSS after they upgraded the site. Occam's razor and all that
I would guess that rss doesn’t show up in their JavaScript-driven web analytics so they mistakenly think no one uses it.
All it would take is ?utm_source=rss, but betcha readers would start stripping that, because once you've started abusing everything, anything will look like abuse.
I always include that stuff unless it breaks my experience.
Both to respect the publishers preferences and it’s easier to cut and paste rather than edit the clipboard.
bingo; you just found the kpi. everything needs a kpi.
Facebook did that with emails - slowly remove all the content to turn them into traffic generators for the feed team.
Hilariously when they launched workplace, the corporate productive product, they did the same thing, viciously spamming you with emails that have the first 15 characters of the workplace post that triggered them (and 2 more for the notification and every comment).
zero respect for your time, everything must drive traffic.
It probably is about analytics, you're right. But to be fair, maintaining RSS feeds requires some resources, even if nominal. If the usage of RSS is low or declining, the cost of maintaining it might not justify the benefits, leading to a decision to allocate resources elsewhere.
Bro, what cost in maintaining? Maybe if you're building like it's the '90s and doing it by hand.
The static site generator I use (Pelican) can produce templated RSS feeds that are exactly to my liking. If I can use that off-the-shelf stuff for a small blog, then it's trivial to put together a template and plug in database data on relevant events. Could even just run a cronjob that tracks the site daily and forget about it, most people would not care.
maintaining RSS feeds requires some resources
I find that rss output is just part of good architecture so it’s sort of something I’m going to make even if no one uses it. Because I want to have some static form of syndication that processes can check.
Of course there is some nominal cost to exposing the uris or something, but anyone complaining about this would be weird to complain. Especially given all the other odd feature requests going on.
This is the reason. Some analytics hit causes a line to go up. Program manager says line must go up!
I mean Facebook can do it, a random blog can't.
Google killed Plus, so it's not like when they killed Reader. They just like killing things I guess?
They thought RSS stood for 'Really Stop Sending'
redundant site serving
More likely it is "analytics shows that only 0.01% of our readership arrives to us via RSS" or "an A/B experiment shows that the RSS feed only increases readership by 0.01%".
In the real world, the options aren't just an RSS feed vs. "load the page daily". Readers also come from search engines, social media, link aggregators and non-RSS news feeds.
Depending on the content of the RSS they were publishing it was either an exceprt or abstract of the article, or the whole article itself.
If it was the latter, it's almost certainly a cynical drive to get more 'page impressions' by making people visit the actual website to read the blog posts.
“We are actively working on a solution…”
it takes passively less than 30 mins to make a RSS feed generator...
Not if you do things the Google way. What takes you 30 minutes takes them 30 weeks.
Google has two big strengths: (1) they build systems at huge scale and (2) they are wildly profitably.
(2) is also weakness because it means they can afford to have highly inefficient processes. It is the reason why Google keeps pushing trash software on the world like Kubernetes (takes that 30 minute project and multiples it by a lot all by itself) as well as cargo cult management processes like OKRs. (Ever see what happens to a startup that is just treading water when management stops everything and introduces a layer of meaningless paperwork?)
Good job they specified "actively", or we might've thought they were working on it some other way.
I have "implemented" RSS on a tiny personal blog. Am willing to be hired for FAANG money. :-)
Yeah but was it on a homegrown Frankenstein stack with no documentation that will be EOL'd in 2 years?
Sorry sweety, they only hire people with five years experience with latest fad technologies.
Yeah... it's not like they working code already in place or anything.
But think of the maintenance cost. It must be dollars per year!
If only they had a first-party blogging platform that has great RSS support including WebSub real-time updates.
I love the smell of sarcasm in the morning. But considering how hostile Google has been lately to the 'open' web I am not surprized.
Hey all, I lead the team that runs this site.
We moved our site to a different infrastructure that doesn't support the automatic generation of RSS feeds.
I'm painfully aware that this isn't the best solution right now. I needed our team to hit a deadline for migrating all the content to the new system, and then manage cleanup of known missing functionality after.
We are working on making sure this lands asap.
Paul
We moved our site to a different infrastructure that doesn't support the automatic generation of RSS feeds.
I had been wondering why https://developer.chrome.com/feeds suddenly died.
I needed our team to hit a deadline
Why?
There's lots of reasons some of which I can't go into details about, but there are some that I can:
There is a freeze to the new infrastructure's product features until after the new year and we needed to get this in before then (we can land feed support without a product feature change)
The people I have working on the older infrastructure will be on new projects for our team in the new year.
Were the deadlines, feature freezes, and project reshuffling imposed on you from above, or were they your decisions?
In a blog post two months ago you said, "I've taken the decision..." https://web.dev/blog/webdev-migration
There was clearly someone in Google management who decided that RSS could be broken.
Why is this important? Well, for example, it seems that the RSS feed was already broken when this important announcement was posted: "Resuming the transition to Manifest V3" https://developer.chrome.com/blog/resuming-the-transition-to...
Not the GP but I think that blog post https://web.dev/blog/webdev-migration you linked explains it pretty clearly?
• The people working on web.dev decided to migrate to a common Google site platform, so that they could focus on content rather than maintaining an ad-hoc infrastructure,
• That platform happens not to support RSS (yet), so they've done the best they can in the meantime, filing a bug with the platform, creating the https://developer.chrome.com/feeds info page acknowledging the issue, and even creating unofficial feeds.
You could phrase this as “someone in Google management who decided that RSS could be broken”, but relative to the big decision of whether to spend effort maintaining your own custom infrastructure or just focus on the content, the presence or absence of RSS support is probably just not a big factor.
[One could imagine a culture of "never migrate to a new system unless it fully supports every single functionality of the old system", but that (just like "never launch a product/feature unless you're confident you're going to support it forever") is simply not in Google's culture, where there are always ongoing migrations between "the old system that is deprecated and the new system that is not ready yet" — but that is "just" a cultural problem rather than anyone consciously deciding that RSS could be broken.]
relative to the big decision of whether to spend effort maintaining your own custom infrastructure or just focus on the content, the presence or absence of RSS support is probably just not a big factor.
This is a false dichotomy. I wasn't questioning the decision to migrate platforms, I was questioning "the deadlines, feature freezes, and project reshuffling".
there are always ongoing migrations between "the old system that is deprecated and the new system that is not ready yet" — but that is "just" a cultural problem rather than anyone consciously deciding that RSS could be broken.
I disagree, because whenever you migrate, some features are considered essential and others inessential. Someone consciously decided that RSS was among the inessential features in this specific case. The "culture" did not make that specific decision.
This is the developer relations team. How can you have relations with developers when they don't even see your announcements? The essential part is the communication with outside developers, not the internal CMS.
they've done the best they can in the meantime, filing a bug with the platform, creating the https://developer.chrome.com/feeds info page acknowledging the issue, and even creating unofficial feeds.
How were developers supposed to know any of this? I had no idea until now.
The freeze "until after the new year" is just the end-of-year freeze to avoid production breakage when a lot of people are on vacation: it's an extension of the principle of not deploying on Friday evenings / weekends; lots of companies have such a freeze. Once you've decided a couple of months earlier to do a migration, doing it "before the freeze" is also a natural deadline to pick, for migrating to the new infrastructure, and for people working on the old infrastructure to complete the migration and move to other projects. I'm not on the team but these all seem like logical choices.
And yes, in the decision between "keep maintaining a custom infrastructure" and "switch to a common infrastructure", someone must have decided that RSS support is not an essential feature whose lack should block (or indefinitely postpone) the migration; this seems reasonable and what my previous post was about, including the "probably just not a big factor" bit you quoted above. It looks like they're planning to add this support though.
The freeze "until after the new year" is just the end-of-year freeze to avoid production breakage when a lot of people are on vacation
There was production breakage! The RSS feeds broke. That's the entire point of this HN submission and discussion.
Once you've decided a couple of months earlier to do a migration, doing it "before the freeze" is also a natural deadline to pick, for migrating to the new infrastructure
Why? Migrations almost always break stuff, right? So why would you break stuff when "a lot of people are on vacation" and thus can't fix the breakage? It seems to me the natural and logical choice would be to wait until after the new year to migrate. What sense does it make to break stuff and then go on vacation?
RSS support is not an essential feature whose lack should block (indefinitely postpone) the migration; this seems natural (especially if you think you can add it back in a few weeks / months)
It's interesting that you say "indefinitely" postpone but then turn around right away and say "a few weeks/ months".
Sorry that this conversation is going in circles. At first, I was talking about the culture of migrating to a new system when it supports ~75% of the features (by importance) of the old, rather than closer to 100%. I would find it reasonable for some team to judge that RSS support is not in the crucial 75% (and its lack would not constitute production breakage); clearly you disagree. That's fine.
As for the rest, I was just explaining the general idea of a production freeze. If you're going to stop trying to make changes by a certain date "to be safe"; then that's the freeze date. Equivalently: people keep trying (and sometimes rushing) to do things until the actual freeze date. The date is early enough (quite a bit earlier than Dec 24) so that there's still enough time and people left to fix things or roll back, if there are genuine emergencies. This replaces the risk of production breakage with the risk of embarrassment/questions from asking for approval for an emergency fix during the freeze period, so people will still only do things they're fairly confident will be safe. Anyway, none of this is relevant unless lack of RSS support is considered a production breakage, which is the very point of disagreement here.
Sorry about the "few weeks / months" comment; I was editing it out while you were posting your comment. But yes, when deciding whether something is a blocker, it's safer to assume that it can take indefinitely long (until it actually exists), even if you think (or have been promised) that it will be quick. It's the difference between taking the mean versus the 95th percentile of the distribution of time estimates.
its lack would not constitute production breakage
Of course it's production breakage. You can't redefine it to not be "production" breakage just because you make a distinction between essential and non-essential features to pull the trigger on the migration. If the migration only supports 75% of the previous features, then 25% of the previous features are broken in production after the migration. If you're ok with that, then ok, but let's not pretend there's no production breakage. The RSS feeds were in production, and then they broke. That's production breakage. What else would you call it?
As for the rest, I was just explaining the general idea of a production freeze.
I don't need that explained.
Anyway, none of this is relevant unless lack of RSS support is considered a production breakage, which is the very point of disagreement here.
I think you're the only one who doesn't think RSS support isn't production breakage. Otherwise, Google wouldn't be "actively working on a solution."
I don't really disagree with you, but I've been on the other end of this before and there was a major incentive to get it in before the break: all the context in our heads.
If we waited several weeks until after the christmas break, we'd lose a lot of mental context. It's also a horrible dark cloud hanging over your head. When dealing with a big migration, it's really ideal to do it while everything is still fresh. Context switching can be very expensive
Were the deadlines, feature freezes, and project reshuffling imposed on you from above, or were they your decisions?
They were my decisions based on all the data I had, including launching with what we had.
re: "Resuming the transition to Manifest V3" this was posted on the old infrastructure and should have been in your RSS feeds up until late last week when our migration happened - so for just under a month... I can check more to make sure what I am saying is correct, but the migration only happened last week.
According to my backups, https://developer.chrome.com/feeds had XML with <updated>2023-10-17T00:00:00Z</updated> until December 7, then HTML after December 8. So it wasn't entirely broken until December 8 but seems to have been frozen for some time before that.
Hmm - that shouldn't have been the case, but I can speak to the team to see what might have happened. Thanks for diving in to this.
There was a bug in the old RSS implementation (the last-updated date was always Jan 1st 1980) so it would be great if you fixed that when you re-add it
My first quick scan of your comment gave me the impression that you were sarcastically asking for the date bug to be replicated in the new system for "backwards compatibility" purposes. Glad to see, upon reviewing, that I was wrong :-)
Probably related to whatever reason the site was moved in the first place, but regardless an internal Google deadline is unlikely to be met with anything other than "so what, fix RSS first" in this thread.
The majority of corporate deadlines are fictional in the sense that there is not a regulatory or legislative component to them, so it's easy to hand-wave them away and say that $THING should be a higher priority than the deadline. But that doesn't make them any less real for the people who have that deadline imposed by their boss (or more realistically, their boss's boss's boss's boss).
"so what, fix RSS first" seems like a valid criticism even if it really is true that this isn't something this particular person has any control over. If your organizational structure is forcing you to do something dumb, then there's a problem with your organizational structure.
Maybe - I don't think letting engineers decide all prioritization is by definition any better than having it all decided by SVPs trying to get their EVP promo or next stock bonus - but "fix Google's organizational structure" is about as helpful/useful a comment as "so what, fix RSS first."
Which might be true, but even harder to fix than the feature in question.
Gotta hit those marks you've made up so you can get a bonus.
For what it's worth, when the answers are "we are working on a solution" and "we are working on making sure this lands", to me, that is classical business speak for "we are not going to add it, but will present an alternative (that probably doesn't meet your needs the way it did)."
I'm leaning toward giving the benefit of the doubt in this case, but why be oblique like this? Why not say "We are working on adding RSS" or "we are aiming to restore RSS support"?
Sorry - it was business speak, it's certainly words that we use internally, the intent was to say we are working on adding RSS back to the site.
All of these statements seem quite similar to me. Especially "we are aiming to restore RSS support" is even less committal. To me, Pauls post reads like a pretty direct promise to restore that functionality and not like business speak.
Nice touch in the HN bio!
RSS is alive https://paul.kinlan.me/index.xml
Heh. Very apropos (it's been in there for a while).
Any somewhat competent programmer can create a working RSS feed in an hour. What the hell is happening at Google?
Can you elaborate on why it’s difficult to add ? I mean it is not looking like technological problem,
All the responses here just highlight how unreasonable technologists can be. Business and work is about trade-offs and so many on hacker news seem to be absolutists. Congrats on hitting your deadline and putting yourself out there; these are the sorts of decisions that I wish more hackers would have to actually make to realise the reality of the world.
This is hilarious big-company shit, that engineer on Chrome devrel team finds it easier to actually just write his own unofficial RSS feed-generator and make it public [1] — the feed for this blog is at [2] — than for the "Internal issues have been filed with the DevSite team" to get worked on [3]. And who knows when this will rise to a priority for that team?
In the old Google, it would have been easier for anyone to just fix this internally.
(Disclaimer: work at Google but not on anything related to this; all my information comes from links in this HN thread. Which is ironic / symptom of the same problem.)
[1]: https://front-end.social/@bramus/111448166340277056 and https://github.com/bramus/web-dev-rss / https://github.com/bramus/chrome-for-developers-rss
[2]: https://chrome-for-developers-rss.bramus.workers.dev/blog
[3]: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/314910854#comment2
when roughly would you place the "old Google" turning point?
Well it's all gradual and diffuse; for that matter there are still pockets of the "old Google" around today. My point here was just about, in a big company, different teams having their own domains that you don't/can't interfere in, rather than a free-for-all where everyone feels part of the same whole and can just jump in. (Which was probably never going to work anyway, so maybe encouraging such a culture in the first place is what Google did wrong.)
This is actually ironic in light of popular HN sentiment in Google-related articles, where many seem to imagine Google acting as a single whole, rather than different teams working in their own interests and not thinking of the big picture. E.g. people in this thread imagining that "Google" thought about RSS support and made a decision based on advertising revenue (or whatever imaginative reason), when in fact the team working on the "DevSite" infrastructure probably barely thought about RSS at all. Maybe they should have, but the reality that RSS (unfortunately) doesn't matter much seems harder to swallow for many, than theories about maliciously breaking it.
Agree with this take.
People always assume some ulterior motive to every single decision google does, but things are often much simpler than that, and mostly all it comes to prioritization...
Hanlon's Razor: Never ascribe to malice that which can easily be explained by stupidity.
Or Brown's Corollary of Apathy: Never ascribe to stupidity what can be explained by DGAF.
Or the corporate corollary: never ascribe to malice that which can be easily explained by a more profitable allocation of resources.
I hear ya but who sets the priorities? Management typically right? So if they don't see value in RSS and move their KPIs it will never be implemented.
And well profit motives push managements decisions so it's no wonder it never got prioritized. Nothing nefarious about it. RSS makes Google no money.
At the team level? Eng lead, pm lead, someone who cares about a problem.
Yes, this tendency of people drives me absolutely insane. I don't know why people so strongly default to thinking of large organizations as a monolith, but it is one of the largest fallacies that I see repeated continuously here.
I kind of wonder if it is spill-over from Apple. Apple is notoriously tight, controlled from the center, or at least was during Steve Job's reign. I wonder if that brush doesn't get applied to every company, even if it is a very different type of company.
But this fallacy make sense. Even the smallest part of the large oranization can't go against organization course/directions.
Yes definitely, if the top says "we're doing it this way" then the smallest parts will have to do it that way. But in a company like Google (and IME most large companies) the top doesn't get that specific. They give broad strategic objectives and let the departments figure out the best way to achieve them. It's possible of course, but seems unlikely to me that the top would say something like, "remove RSS feed support for the developer blog." And if they did, I would expect either complete silence on the issue, or some corporatey Newspeak about it. Since they said "Unfortunately, we don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're actively working on a solution" that to me seems like a top-down direction is extremely unlikely.
I don't think most of the criticisms towards Google literally assert that the top brass demanded specific technical decisions. Rather, "the top brass demanded it" or variations thereof is meant as shorthand for "the top brass set objectives and operational constraints that ultimately led to this choice being made, and this type of consequence was foreseen by said top brass but deemed an acceptable tradeoff".
The workings are much more indirect, the intentions slightly different, but the outcome is the same.
I quit in 2015 because the place was becoming like any other big company and I’d already been there for a decade. Larry becoming CEO in 2011 again probably started it…once he took the helm, Google soon got really concerned about expenses, likely because his net worth was tied to pleasing Wall Street. CFO Pichette left and bean-counting CFO Porat got hired who came from Morgan Stanley with a mandate to cut expenses.
And the culture changed at the same time. Lots of seemingly needless rules to protect rising fiefdoms that started the sclerosis that only got worse over time. Gamergate internally felt like a Civil War waged over Google+.
Google+ itself was the height of Google’s hubris, thinking they could kill a beloved product (Google Reader) to kill a different company’s beloved (at the time) product, Facebook. I remember being deeply disappointed with the release of Google+ like I was when the Segway was released. All this hype and promise for a secret product built with an enormous group of highly-talented people, kept away from the teeming masses of similarly talented people that could’ve told them that it was a dumb idea and here are the reasons why.
Really, if I had to blame one thing, it would be Google+ because of the corrosive effects of social media. Before Google+, my colleagues were just my colleagues who brought their whole selves to the office but we still mostly talked about work. Folks had mailing lists I wasn’t subscribed to where they would talk about their abhorrent political beliefs so I wouldn’t find out about them.
And then, all of a sudden, after Google+ came out, some guy I thought was cool revealed that he didn’t want women to be able have abortions. And some other guy was a randroid, hellbent on not understanding that taxes pay for roads. And on and on…seemingly everyone just spent a lot of time being mad at each other.
Obviously it’s hard for me to point to a specific thing or time period, but the writing was on the wall in the early 2010s (to me, anyways) and I bounced by the middle of the decade.
Are you saying Reader was killed to funnel people into Google+?
It was killed I think because it was a “distraction”. Can’t have two social networks at the same time, unlike messaging services and plenty of other Google products, apparently.
I don’t think it was ever staffed heavily (and that long piece on the product released earlier this year will attest to that) but if Google was going to go “all-in” on social, then to some leaders, everything else that might seem like a half-measure had to die.
It’s why it was killed despite what felt like half the company being willing to volunteer to keep it running.
Old Google would’ve let it live and let folks in their 20% time keep it running.
I've been at Google 14 years and 2014 was around the time I noticed more and more people internally lamenting that old Google was dead.
The timing seems right. A year after that, Google reestructured as Alphabet; three more years and it abandoned the "Don't be evil" motto.
Arrival of Sundar as CEO was the obvious sign, but probably few years before then.
I think this blog post is a good summary: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1
October 23, 2000. The day Google went from being a search engine to being an advertisement company.
I know they still dabble in search but that’s not the point.
http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2000/10/google-launches-self...
Not sure how old 'old Google' was. There was a bug in the Contacts web app where the states were out of order. They were ordered by 2 digit state ID but shown as state name. A simple order by mixup in SQL. This meant users in New York couldn't tab to the state and start typing the state name to get the state. It was a filed bug. Known by people within Google who wanted it fixed. It was finally fixed this year after nearly a decade.
n+1 but that’s about how long I’ve been gone from there. I left because Google was just becoming any other big company so I figured I’d go work for a different one that let me live wherever I wanted.
When chrome started taking over, all other major browsers (probably even internet explorer) had native RSS read support (read at least). They use to show rss icon in the url bar or some other indictor that this site has RSS available. But Chrome ever since has been throwing raw xml at you when you try to open an rss feed link and never indicates if there is RSS here. I believe this to be the main reason for decline of RSS.
And since then, the other browsers have removed their native RSS/Atom feed support. Firefox and Safari both used to have it and have since removed it. Visiting an RSS feed in Safari now shows you a page that resembles a 404, telling you that Safari no longer supports feeds.
Visiting an RSS feed in Safari now shows you a page that resembles a 404, telling you that Safari no longer supports feeds.
For me it shows an alert asking if I want to subscribe in my installed feed reader.
It's both odd and appalling.
Safari "development" is such an odd bag of changes. I sill miss the old dashboard widget maker that let you select a section of just about any page and use it as a widget.
And if you don't have a feed reader installed, that modal will send you to the App Store, with "RSS" as the search term (at least on macOS).
Yup. For firefox, having features that chrome doesn't, seems silly to them. It's not like they need market share or anything! Just remove fully functional, mature and feature complete code, cause why not?
No FTP, RSS, etc.
FTP is the one that really annoys me. It was a minimal implementation which would let me download a few ad hoc files as required. Now I have to launch a separate program every time.
At least with RSS, I can manually parse the XML in a pinch.
RSS is the antithesis to the interest of link aggregators like Google. It is no accident they didn't support it properly.
RSS readers had limited javascript support, which meant ads wouldn't show. Guess who sells more website ad inventory than anyone else?
Does nobody remember that RSS integration with browser (Firefox Live Bookmarks anyone?) was spectacular before Chrome showed up? They easily could have integrated it a hundred different times a hundred different ways. They didn't. They've even shut their own RSS reader. They don't want content to be available to your standards, they want it available to advertisers'.
I have to wonder if it just never caught on with the mainstream as average users didn't really get it? Apple went so far as to name a release of their browser, "Safari RSS" [1]. Even with this level of focus from Apple, I never really heard anyone talk about it or start using it. Those who already used RSS had better readers, and those who didn't use RSS never really saw the value with this implementation.
Having an RSS indicator in the URL bar used to be the first step to subscribing a feed. How do you get it if its not there. When a feature is removed, slowly everyone will forget that it was even a thing once.
Opera (my main browser back then) use to have so much stuff built in (RSS, email, IRC, note taking, mouse gestures). Chrome use to have a resizable extension bar recently. OneNote use to have a more colorful and compact UI. Start menu and taskbar used to be useful before windows 11/10/8.
Reminds of an article posted here about removing less used keys/letters from keyboard. https://www.marginalia.nu/log/48-i-have-no-capslock/
“Computers now instantly boot up when plugged into the wall”
Apple has done this with their laptops. When you plug them in, open the laptop, or press any key on the keyboard, they boot up.
I shut mine down to clean over the keyboard area and it kept booting up on me. It was extremely frustrating and there is no setting to simply turn it off.
I found this…
“Press and hold the left Control and Command buttons with the right Shift button for a total of 7 seconds. Without releasing them, press the Power button and hold them all together for an additional 7 seconds. Your Mac can only be powered on by using the Power button.”
I haven’t tried it, but it apparently only works as a one-off, so this silly process would need to be done each time the user wants the system to stay off.
Considering the laptops still have a power button, this seems crazy to me. Maybe they are preparing to remove it.
There are three additional reasons:
* Google Reader is often cited as the best RSS Reader but was killed, which reduced amount of users (I never used it, thus can't judge it)
* Many publishers want people to go to their site, thus don't provide full feeds, only headlines and limit it in additional ways.
* People went to Twitter and Facebook as their news aggregators, depending on the social graph to preselect "relevant" news.
Aside I think the pure list of entries only works to a limited degree for news sites: in RSS all articles are equal, but for news many people want to see the "main" news highlighted as on a news page. For some of my feeds on some news days the feed is barely usable when they push a main story combined with different detail articles, making it hard to find the main story (for instance on election day there is a main article for summary and then bunch of articles for different districts, different parties, ... which appear equal while they aren't equal, also the article with first results is already outdated and replaced ...)
Google Reader is often cited as the best RSS Reader but was killed
1. Google Reader was not necessarily the best reader. The anger and frustration with the handling of Google Reader lies in the fact that Google Reader was the first reader from a major tech company. That essentially killed all the other innovation in this space and then Google Reader was itself killed in such a short span that there wasn’t an opportunity to have a smooth transition for the entire industry with it.
2. The one spade that did see a lot of competition growth and innovation were off-web RSS clients (precisely because Google Reader wasn’t a player in this space). But even these were completely handicapped by the elimination of Google Reader because Google Reader has become the de facto syncing solution for your RSS list and read states, etc. Again, the short time between announcement and end of life meant many of the popular clients couldn’t find a smooth transition for their users.
3. Google Reader had a social network effect component where someone could publish RSS articles they were reading and others could subscribe to their feed. In this sense it almost acted as an alternative to Twitter. The Twitter implosion has shown exactly how hard it is for alternatives to a social network to arise (because you invariably get many alternatives and it’s hard to get everyone onto one).
And the RSS reader social network space was nascent so the fragmentation as a result of the destruction of Google Reader meant a lot of people migrated to Twitter instead (Google had hoped they would migrate to Google+ instead but Google+ was awful so that didn’t happen).
Vivaldi has that built in and a good RSS reader as well. Still very useful.
I use Vivaldi to detect the RSS and grab the URL, but actually have my RSS in Thunderbird. Back in the days of good Opera, I had mail, chat, RSS all inside the browser. But for some reason I couldn't get back to that when Vivaldi finally released the mail beta.
So not saying Vivaldi's RSS is bad, mostly want to mention that Thunderbird can do RSS too, if one happens to use it anyway.
The web seems to be becoming paradoxically less and less machine/automation friendly. I recently had to modify 150+ accounts in a Google Workspace. Twenty years ago, I would be doing this in a Unix environment with a very simple shell script. Instead, I had to click-copy-paste-click, 20 times per page, like a monkey. I'm sure there must be some sort of API, but it would have taken 100 times the time it would have taken to write a simple command line script. In the quest for more and more human eyeballs, the web is becoming less and less machine friendly.
Your general point definitely stands - there is a pretty nice third party solution for google workspace though: https://github.com/GAM-team/GAM
I doubt how many admins are comfortable with (or allowed to) using a non-approved third-party tool to manage their organization, despite open source and all that
The third party tool is based on the official google-api-python-client. It’s about as non-approved as ad hoc shell scripts.
It’s about as non-approved as ad hoc shell scripts.
That's not a fair comparison. There's a big difference between your own ad hoc shell script (or command line or whatever) that you fully understand, and downloading and running third party code without any kind of audit.
Meanwhile, the industry keeps talking about "software supply chain".
`src/gam/__init__.py` alone is over 3 MB of code that's not from `google-api-python-client`. Combine all the ad hoc shell scripts I've ever written and it probably wouldn't be that much.
https://github.com/GAM-team/GAM
GAM is a command line tool for Google Workspace admins to manage domain and user settings quickly and easily.
I need this about once per year, but every time it's invaluable.
I'm sure there must be some sort of API
There is, but somehow, rather than being a workspace API, it's a GCP api ; and so if you want to use it, there is a big step to climb.
The web seems to be becoming paradoxically less and less machine/automation friendly
Less distributed/democratized machine/automation friendly... But definitely automation friendly for giant search scrapers, with lots of compute, cash, IP blocks and AI.
I'd like to change that. I originally created BrowserBox^0 as a platform to serve "web scraping authoring tools". These tools are normally served as extensions, or even downloadable electron apps. But what about something easier to distribute, more powerful, more lightweight, and less beholden to walled-garden gatekeeping? BrowserBox changes all that, as it's clientless and runs in a regular web browser even on mobile. Anyone can build a scraping script on top of it, even from your mobile device while riding the bus. That's the vision anyway. But I got side-tracked by how the "embeddable browser" is a useful product in its own right. I still intend to return to fulfilling its original purpose however.
The key is to build a good "extensions-like"-but better-API atop the Chrome DevTools protocol and our BrowserBox functionality. We're open source so come visit if you'd liked to get involved or check it out! :)
You can automate a lot of that stuff in the DevTools command-line, using basic DOM APIs. It's not ideal, but it allows you do to most of the things you'd do manually (click things, read text, write to textboxes) and it's easy to learn.
User experience has long been superseded by developer experience. You can see it in how both camps operate, dev tools are snappy command line apps but end users get electron slop.
Google has an interest in our depending on Google to find stuff, so of course they see RSS as a threat.
Cue some "googler" show up defending this move and how it makes the world better.
Google has an interest in our depending on Google to find stuff, so of course they see RSS as a threat.
But they historically had several feed systems [1] [2] which were fully under their control.
Cue some "googler" show up defending this move and how it makes the world better.
Of course. 'We have a better system that uses 2FA to securely text you every ten minutes to generate a code that, in combination with a 16 character unicode password, allows you to check whether Google approved content has been updated.'
You forgot Feedburner that Google used to monetized feeds. Almost all bloggers I followed in Google Reader used it to track and monetize. Google had a lot of control over RSS.
I don't know how it is know but when I was doing a lot of SEO publishing 10 years ago Feedburner was the best kept secret.
People would always be complaining that Google wouldn't index their pages for months but if you: (1) burn an RSS feed, (2) subscribe to the burned feed, and (3) add items to the feed, the items would be indexed almost immediately.
But they historically had several feed systems [1] [2] which were fully under their control.
I don't think Google's fear is who's in control of any one particular RSS. I think Google's fear is what if people realize that, for the purposes of subscribing to updates from a source, RSS is objectively better than Google. They're afraid of losing the mindshare of being the unquestionably better option for everything.
10-20 years later in a court case, these emails will show up.
Exactly, thank you my friend. I'm happy to see that such ideas are entering the mainstream.
(Ok, you and I are probably not the most "mainstream" people in the world, but what I mean is these ideas aren't understood exclusively by antitrust lawyers anymore)
Companies are catching up too though. Google coaches its employees on what language to use internally.
Why don't we use Edge, Firefox, Brave, Opera and so on?
Only one of those browsers you listed does not use Chromium
I did not realize it was that bad. Opera too? Maybe resistance _is_ futile? :-(
yep, since 2013
Opera too?
Sadly yes, Presto died many moons ago. I still miss the old Opera, when it wasn't owned by a Chinese company and had it's own rendering engine. But building a browser is expensive, a rendering engine even more so. We won't pay the cost of developing software, so we can't have nice things.
I do.
Safari here.
Unfortunately, we don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're actively working on a solution.
RSS could be that solution!
we're actively working on a solution
Yeah exactly, what kind of bs is that
"Sign up for our email newsletter"
"we're actively working on a replacement" doesn't sound as good.
I was wondering about that wording as well, it's such a weird way to word it. You had a feature, you took it way, and now you're working on a solution... for what?
Did Google develop a new internal blogging platform and just didn't get around to supporting RSS?
It seems so if I read this right:
https://mastodon.social/@bramus@front-end.social/11144816695...
'Google has stopped...', or 'Google no longer...', 'Google have removed'.
As I can no longer watch yt without getting annoyed, looks like it's time to get a new email provider (as well) .
@ yahoo seem to have few(er?) problems.
There are probably others. Can anyone recommend a good search engine?
As I can no longer watch yt without getting annoyed
uBlock Origin + EFF Privacy Badger should take care of it. I've never seen any ads on YouTube (except the ones the stream includes inherently).
It's unusably slow on desktop Firefox with UBO active. This was not the case for a long time. They're degrading the experience on non-Chrome browsers intentionally.
I'm not experiencing that. Granted, I have 16 GB of RAM, and browsers are memory hogs, but my CPU is a Core i5-7600K with no overclocking, so not something super-strong.
Are you sure your experience is common rather than anecdotal?
Mine is on MacOS.
RSS requires a lot of developer resources to work with.
AdSense, for example, is super hard to fit into RSS. How do you do it?
Sorry, we tried everything but the user agent support for Javascript in RSS is simply lacking. Unfortunately, it has to be dropped, there is no alternative.
This may be the most Poe's Law HN comment I have ever read. Bravo :-)
I think this is satire. This is satire right?
AdSense, for example, is super hard to fit into RSS. How do you do it?
You don't.
RSS reader software won't be successful. RSS reader should be built into the browser and every time you open the browser, the RSS feed should be the landing page. Every time you open a new tab, it should show a minimal feed that can be fully expanded.
Firefox used to have this feature, sort of. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks
This stuff was cash money. Firefox's RSS and Atom support used to be amazing, especially with extensions.
Yes! Why isn’t this the case already?
RSS is not aligned with Google's business goals.
Why? RSS can be monetized. It was monetized by Google before they killed Reader to force people to use Google+.
Now, what's Google's goal to monetize social networks? They have non as far as I know. They lost all opportunities in the social space and they lost their lead in RSS. The Web lost too.
'can be monetized' isn't enough today. The modern internet is a shopping mall: Facebook Marketplace, Etsy, "tipping" people $5 on a livestream, subscribing to a paid newsletter or Patreon....
that’s the world Google wants. Money sloshing around the system and them getting a cut each time.
It can kind-of be monetized, but Google isn't just about monetization, it's about control. That's why we get stuff like AMP or more and more limiting version of Chrome pushed down our throats. RSS is way too open and difficult to control.
If you've ended up here, chances are you're looking to subscribe to our blog in your RSS feed.
Unfortunately, we don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're actively working on a solution.
Well, that certainly means they are going to have RSS feeds in the future. Right?
No no no, they're working on "a solution". That means they will built Google Updates™, a locked-down walled-garden push system with premium tiers.
Which they will a year later kill because it didn't become the new AdSense.
How low is to remove a thing then claim "oops we will". Really, what's wrong with just removing whatever they want to remove? Do they really have to blatantly lie about it? How's that helping?
"Removed" implies it was there at some point; is this true? Or has this blog just never had RSS support? (I searched for this blog in Feedly and it didn't show up any older feed, but that may not be a reliable method for checking?)
Yes, it used to have RSS then they migrated to a new publishing platform that doesn't support RSS
For now this can be used: https://chrome-for-developers-rss.bramus.workers.dev/blog or /articles or /case-studies
Not sure if it counts as dev blog but https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/ still has RSS and Atom feeds, I guess not everything got nuked.
googleblog.com runs on Blogger so has full RSS support. Presumably these other blogs were using something "custom" and after some rewrite/overhaul RSS support didn't hit the priority line.
In a cohesive organization they would improve Blogger to fulfill their needs, but instead they just waste resources recreating a one-off solution over and over again.
Found this HN post via RSS...
Same here.
Watch them slowly remove every RSS feed they operate, so when they come up with their own proprietary solution in 6 months nobody can lament their "sudden" removal of RSS.
Slowly remove RSS from everything and in the and claim that "RSS is dying tech, no one uses it, we have metrics to show it"
I have the feeling they're currently in the final stages of development for an alternative and want to remove RSS from all their stuff right now to preemptively avoid people lamenting its sudden removal then.
Maybe I'm to wishful, but if that's the case, then it's probably related to the Fediverse.
To be fair, HN doesn't offer RSS either. We need it!
For unofficial support, see https://hnrss.org
which rss reader do you use?
Personally I use NewNewsWire. Great simple and unobtrusive OSS mobile app.
I feel pleased that me as a single web dev with minimal money and few smarts, has managed to successfully implement rss on all blogs or blog like things I've made.
Perhaps I should interview at Google and teach them my amazing solution.
The RSS hit doesn't contribute to some program manager's 'engagement' metric on the developer docs site, so we don't need it anymore!
I think this thread could good place to share services (self-hosted or paid) that allow to monitor site for changes and make rss/send notification.
I use ChangeDetection,
- https://changedetection.io/#features
- https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io
Create RSS feeds based on changes in web content
Google, you helped kill widespread RSS adoption to begin with. You can't be trusted with anything technology.
It's worth noting that this new site replaces one that was just 3 years old, released in December 2020, here's the announcement of that version of the site: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/welcome
Loss of the ability to contribute via GitHub pull request is unfortunate, hopefully there will be a better way to contribute again in the future.
https://kill-the-newsletter.com
please donate: https://patreon.com/leafac
Let me guess... so users are forced to load a web page which will show them ads that couldn't fit into RSS records?
I think this site, is not well scrap-able without selenium. Google products however rely on web scraping because of Google search. It is a hypocrisy of sorts.
Google is a joke how does something like this even happen
Sometimes I think the jokes about Google having no management are true.
Bard solvable?
I noticed the same for Google's site https://web.dev/
The last article pushed to the feed was "Changes to the web.dev infrastructure" few months ago https://web.dev/blog/webdev-migration
The feed still there but with no updates https://web.dev/feed.xml and on the site you can see new articles published.
Is sad that on a infrastructure revamp of a modern site, the RSS feed was left out of the features list (at least for now).
“Unfortunately” - c’mon it wasn’t an act of God that removed them
Guess they don’t want people to read their pages.
If keeping up with Google dev blogs is important to you, at Monitoro[0] we support alerts even if the website doesn't offer RSS. You can also catch specific updates, for example if a new post mentions a Google tool you're using at work.
Feel free to get in touch with me if you need help or have questions.
[0]: https://monitoro.co
Bramus, a google engineer did an inoffical workaround:
https://mastodon.social/@bramus@front-end.social/11144816695...
Cue...
- commercial AI refusing to generate RSS XMLs from a webpages' content. - "illegal" AI that is willing to browse webpages without disclosing that their'e bots
I tried using RSS Generators like https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/ and even a graphical one, but it looks like this isn't a static site but there's some sort of delayed fetch of the posts that messes them up. Regardless how much I tried, I could only get it to fetch the top nav bar. I don't really think first of intentional malice to spite everyone else too, but maybe this is the same reason their own RSS feed generator no longer works either.
Also, I note the wording of the error message, that they're actively working on it.
Broadly, the entire tech community should be embarrassed about the extent to which they actually collectively "believed" Google's stated purpose for killing Google Reader; if we had effectively called out that utter BS a while ago, I genuinely believe the entire web would be a better place today.
Maybe they can find the code for reader somewhere on a backup disk?
The real crime is using Google tools/libraries
*-in-cheek-on
Google management too busy doing evil
what year is it
Wasn't Google planing to add some sort of RSS support in Chrome? Or did the experiment end as a failure?
There's a ton of smart people working at Google. Just none in the management
It makes sense. After killing Google Reader making RSS less relevant helps to justify that as the right decision :)
Google's fight against open technologies continues.
They are “actively working on a solution”, because it requires a Google-sized brain and 28477382 work hours to maintain an RSS feed of a blog. What a silly company.
Solution found.
curl -sA "" https://developer.chrome.com/blog/sitemap.xml \
|sed -n '
1i\
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>\
<rss version="2.0">\
<channel>
s}\(<loc>\)\(.*\)\(</loc>\)}\
<item>\
<title>\2</title>\
<description>\2</description>\
<link>\2</link>\
</item>}p;
$a\
</channel>\
</rss>
'
NB. The public sitemap.xml still refers to an (unofficial?) RSS feed.
I never used Reader so I'm not genuinely curious, what about it makes it difficult for someone to just create a copy of the service?
It's not about features. It's about defaults. Google Reader was linked right there on the top bar of the world's largest search engine. No one could credibly claim RSS was dead or neglect/remove support for it in the next revision.
That doesn't really answer my question. You can put any link in the bookmarks bar of the browser and have it there in every window.
That won't make it the default for and visible to the entire world.
I don't understand why that matters? If 3 other people or a billion other people are using a RSS reading service, surely my own experience is the same.
You run a search engine and don't understand why defaults matter? Google pays billions to be the default. I don't understand what you don't understand. RSS was the default. Then it "died" (became non-default) and we got the Facebook feed and Twitter's toxic impression-pumping algorithms, and it's so much worse.
Journalists depended on Reader the way they came to depend on Twitter. They didn't move to another reader.
RSS feeds are still very much around regardless of Google's actions. I'm looking at it from a user's perspective, not the operator's perspective, at what service is being offered? My question was why google reader was good, not why it was popular.
As for my search engine, I genuinely don't track my users, so I really don't have the fainest how many users I have. 4 people or a million people use my search engine, and I make the same amount of money from it. If I want the search engine to do well, I have to use my own eyes to assess how well it performs.
Once you learn about Venn diagrams it's going to completely blow your mind. One easy first pass at making inferences as to best services is to use popularity as an imperfect first proxy. So if someone says that a service became a de facto standard used by all of the internet, it's one of the ways to helpfully frame the conversation about whether the service proved to be useful. Of course there will be exceptions, but it's one of those functional literacy things where everyone can understand the significance of why people would bring that up in the context of a conversation that ultimately was closing in on making assessments about the value of the user experience.
Google's RSS reader was simple, ad free, fast, had an elegant design, didn't attempt to push superfluous services or subscriptions, set a standard for accessible anywhere at a time when many popular RSS readers were used on the desktop, and, in contrast to most of the best services now around, was free. I would go so far as to say it was almost unimproveable because it had one job and it did it correctly and didn't try to do other things, which used to be one of the things Google did best.
And I feel like none of this information is new, hard to discover, controversial, but is instead part of the generally accepted canon of internet history. So it's a bizarre question to me, if I'm being honest.
Edit: regarding the prevalence of RSS adoption in the present day, it may be true that as a numeric total there are more sites using it, but that as a percentage it is down. The same way that a winning candidate for president from the 1940s will have fewer votes then a losing candidate from the present day. Numbers will grow over time just due to population growth. Or in the case of the internet, The growth in the number of sites. But to understand whether RSS enjoys the same status as a de facto standard it's necessary to look at more than just the numbers, but at the proportion of adoption today compared to the proportion as an existed in the past.
I completely reject this analysis, as there are numerous counterexamples of things that are popular but not good, or good but not popular. One does not inform the other, especially in this case where it appears to have derived much of its popularity from Google shoving it onto users by featuring it in their other services.
Now that actually answers my question, but not the question of why someone couldn't just copy this design and carry on when Reader was shut down, which seems like it would have been a recipe for success given the outcry and hunger for Readeer.
Well as I stated in the original question, I never used reader.
Even looking at the proportion, it's more than likely still higher today, at least in terms of websites-with-RSS. The websites that tend to not have RSS are very large silo-like websites with enough gravity well to retain users regardless, but these website are by definition few in number and will not affect the statistics in any way.
In the past, it was more common with hand rolled HTML websites, that did not have RSS. These have almost all been supplanted by CMS:es and blog platforms that universally do support RSS.
Yikes, did you miss the part where I explicitly acknowledged that there are counterexamples? And since you missed it the first time, I guess I'm going to repeat it again here for emphasis. Yes, there are indeed counterexamples. Broad brush inferences always have counterexamples, and nevertheless are useful indicators. I spent a whole paragraph talking about the functional literacy of understanding why it's a good first approximation. People drive Priuses, people use iPhones, people listen to Taylor Swift. And each of those cases there's a a Venn diagram overlap between popularity and positive user experience where the former can be a proxy for the latter. If you genuinely don't understand how that argument works there's a functional literacy issue here. Moreover, there are counterexamples but this isn't one of them! This specific case, is one of those cases where popularity and positive user experience coincide, which was the whole point to begin with. Being obtuse about how those are connected is just a waste of everybody's time.
Well the crux of this conversation has been that this is an obtuse question in the first place, and that your preferred framing of the question in terms of user experience to the exclusion of popularity was an obtuse refusal to understand the significance of how those things meaningfully overlap, and it was obtuse in the sense of ignoring a broader conversation about mainstream adoption of RSS. The conversation was about that but you wanted to specifically turn it into an end user question.
Copies of it do exist, often with features paywalled. Part of the downward spiral from de facto standard to boutique experience.
However you measure it, it is no longer the de facto standard that it once was. You don't see the RSS icon next to the social media icons on websites. Google News, Twitter, and craigslist removed their RSS functionality, mainstream browsers have removed their built-in RSS functionality, and, again I have to raise the functional literacy thing, because look at what you're saying. The best justifications of RSS are this combination of scaffolding and duct tape about how if you squint and think about it you can still find it, it's just an entirely different universe than it being a de facto standard.
My dude, you seem very hostile. What is your problem?
RSS feeds are still around, but they're starting to disappear. Like, eg, Google removing RSS support from their developer blogs...
I'd say more websites have RSS or Atom feeds than not, based on looking at the data coming out of my crawler. Google's devblogs just aren't really particularly important.
Not really. Demand on RSS might induce RSS supply. Or might have had.
RSS is still very much around though. Most websites that aren't silos offer them. In fact, big problem is that many websites offer too many RSS feeds, and websites that don't need them offer them; makes algorithmic curation much harder.
More used to offer them than currently do. And the trend has been for sites that have RSS to remove it. So you're correct that RSS has not become extinct due to Google, it has merely contributed to lower adoption.
Google reader was the alpha and Omega of RSS feed reading, and it set a standard norm followed by the rest of the internet, and Google's decision to move on from RSS similarly was followed by much of the rest of the internet. If, in the heyday of Google Reader, you asked me what one thing could drive the stake through the heart of RSS, it would be Google making some choice to drive norms and standards of the web in a different direction.
It's pretty rare to find a news site that doesn't have an RSS feed today. I know because I've been collecting a long list of feeds.
I would say it's not rare at all. I collect a long list of RSS feeds too, and a lot of the time to figure out if there's an RSS feed, I have to install on an external plug-in, leave the site that I'm on and do a Google search to see if that same site has RSS, only to find it from an old tweet from 7 years ago, or an outdated web page that has links to RSS that amazingly still work. Or sometimes I view source and search for.rss or.xml. So the emphasis, visibility and discoverability has cratered. And the trend has been towards removing rather than adding.
It used to be a standard to have the RSS icon side by side with the Twitter and Facebook icons, but in the present day that tends not to happen.
Twitter itself used to have RSS feeds, Google News used to have RSS feeds, Craigslist used to, those are all gone to my knowledge. RSS tools used to be native to browsers, and now there are numerous RSS tools out there to manually build feeds to make up for the lack of feeds on sites where people want them. Magazines in particular sometimes don't have them, such as Vogue magazine. And you can look at the prevalence of searches for RSS feeds by users and see in trends over time that people are searching for RSS less frequently.
Google reader had social features, shares and comments.
Ah, now that actually makes sense!
Thank you for sharing this! I didn't have the opportunity to use Reader. I have always wondered what made it stand out.
NetNewsWire on ios+macos+icloud for sync
That’s the best solution if you’re on Apple.
I love NetNewsWire on my Mac, but I also use Linux and Android, so I'd love if there was something as perfect as NetNewsWire on those platforms!
This is one of the best apps of any kind on any platform. It just works flawlessly.
I use that setup too, but I wish that NetNewsWire offered an image thumbnail in its story list.
My man so we are at least two fans of the app
Without ads. And without using search. And without paying Google to push news headlines on Android devices.
RSS is a menace to Google's bottom line!
No. Many RSS feeds had plenty of ads, and most of them were served by Google. And many bloggers only shared headlines or cropped articles through feeds because they wanted to have visitors come to their pages and click ads. Google couldn't lose either way.
In the world of central banks Profit is not what motivates corporations.
I’m happy, it lead to an explosion of available readers, including many self-hosted ones.
Walkers did the same with their crisps ("chips" for left-ponders), made them healthy by reducing the fat content, disgusting, like eating dried leaves. End result: a wealth of new crisp brands and people keen to try them. My favourite, Salty Dog [1], couldn't have happened without Walkers pissing on their own chips ("fries" for left-ponders).
[1] https://www.saltydog-grrr.com/category/crisps
Did they get the memo that fat isn't really the enemy? (well, satfat still not ideal, but...)
That's probably why they killed it—it gave the end user too much control over content they consume and how they consume it. And of course you can't tell what they actually read or when....
Isn't it possible to simply check when the request to the RSS feed is made? It won't tell you which posts the user read, or even if the user read them at the time of the request (I'm thinking caches), but it could at least tie IP or some other drive-by info to a rough idea of readership.
Since this is now the "my Reader replacement" thread: NetNewsWire, with Miniflux as the sync backend/web reader.
TheOldReader.com is also very good (UI is very heavily Google Reader inspired).
Oh, they do understand. That's why they are moving it. It is too useful.
Internet users can't have nice things.
I've installed FreshRSS which gives me nearly the same vibe and experience. Since I use it I never really missed Google Reader.
I have never, and never will forgive them for that, but inoreader is better.
I understand RSS completely and the goals, but honestly? I don't find it useful at all. I'm always surprised how many people on HN claim to still use it.