Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

Feedly seems like a company that is trying anything that will stick to get people to subscribe without getting rid of their free offering.

Their free plan is likely enough for most people. I know for me none of those features matter.

Especially since I just never log into Feedly themselves. I just use the Reeder app as my frontend and have gone a couple years without logging in. I also just don't change my actual feeds much.

Yeah their AI efforts are weird. It's like they are ashamed of "just" making an excellent product for rss, and want to do something special but nothing useful, at least for me, came out of it do far. TBH, I'm ok with them just being an excellent rss reader and will keep paying for it.

Have you tried Lenna.io? I’d guess no, but it could regard some of the pains. (Disclosure - a product I work on)

I just wish they'd stop trying to add AI and automated topic highlighting which clearly doesn't work.

A bunch of companies are also doing or attempting to do AI and automated trial finding for clinical trials, and that's not working either: https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/please-be-dying-but-not-.... Fortunately, the stakes are low, since patients who don't find the right clinical trial for cancers will only die.

It works alright, and TBH it's time RSS readers moved PAST google reader and add more useful features. Deduplciation, AI summarization etc. Stuff that helps manage RSS for those with lots of feeds, as one is likely to accumulate over time.

Feedly is great, but it baffles me it still doesn't support notifications on Android. It's strictly pull, and I'm now used to push.

Feedly is free depending on how many feeds you need.

But that is likely part of why reader shut down. Depending on how often it's pulling and how often you are reading, that isn't free to run.

Especially if you don't even use their app to read your feeds, you may never be able to see an ad.

Would rather pay for it personally so I know it's there.

Your mentality of expecting everything to be free is why there are no alternatives, and also why Google Reader shut down. Building and maintaining these services isn't free, so when people don't want to pay for it there's no incentive to actually make or maintain such service.

I haven't used it in a while but https://theoldreader.com/ seemed like a fairly drop-in replacement for Google Reader.

Newsblur was offering a decent alternative free layer.

https://blog.newsblur.com/2013/03/17/three-months-to-scale-n...

https://blog.newsblur.com/2014/03/13/google-reader-announced...

Netvibes was/is free, Google Reader didn't work nearly as well for me when I tried it.

I went years without consuming RSS until I discovered Fraidy Cat[1] here at Hacker News.

1. https://fraidyc.at

I never looked at clients other than the Reeder app (not google reader), but that is iOS and Mac only.

Even supports local pulling (not sure if it always did though, never thought to check until now).

I imagine that didn't help Google's situation either. Here I was using their servers and never going to the website except to do the occasional subscription modification.

Yeah, I was a huge fan of FeedDemon at the time. Unfortunately, it was updated to be primarily a local Google Reader client and lost many users to Google Reader itself. Development stopped around the time Reader was canceled. I ended up switching to Newsblur and have been using it ever since through (mostly) the web interface. I've switched to Mac/iOS since then as well and have tried out NetNewsWire and Reeder. Both are excellent and sync with Newsblur, but neither support Newsblur's social features, which are important to me.

I love being able to read others' comments, leave my own, and receive replies from a community of folks who are all committed enough to RSS as a medium to keep at it. I find it provides a significant amount of value. It also aids in discovery of new blogs/sites that I've ended up following directly over the years.

not unlike iPods helping lead to the adoption of podcasts.

Podcasts are named after the iPod, because that's who the audience was. They are radio shows that are recorded and then made available for download; other than the usual lack of melody, they are identical to other mp3 files.

Spoken-word musical albums and books on tape were already well-established phenomena before the iPod existed. What's the difference supposed to be?

For me it’s been NewsBlur — every time I get the itch to find a new reader I decide it’s not worth the hassle of learning a new UI.

Feedbin is so great. Easy filtering, can process newsletters, etc etc. Very reasonably price. Highly recommended.

Right, I think you've hit the essence of the issue here.

Those alternatives were definitely there, but there's an order of magnitude difference between them and Google in terms of what they did for the normalization of RSS as a way of consuming content.

Saying Google stopped supporting RSS but at least there's a boutique alternative, I think is kind of saying well Coca-Cola shut down but at least there's Soda Stream. Not wrong, but it misses the point that there's a global embeddedness that was left behind.

It's like people forgot that non-web-interface rss readers existed.

I'd wager that a lot of people never even knew these existed. To a lot of people, the browser became (or simply always was) the only real interface to everything internet related (or for some people, just about everything period).

I wonder how many people maintain Gmail...

I was at Google during the reader shutdown. It was absolutely a top down decision and not a lack of support due to incentives. The execs tried to frame it as an infra problem/cost of migration, but neither myself nor any of my coworkers believed that at the time.

It was very telling during TGIF that week when Larry and Sergey skipped literal pages worth of top questions about it and refused to give direct answers as to why it was shut down.

The Reader shutdown coupled with Google+ reaching its tendrils into every product (“hey, real identities are great for YouTube users!”) at the time convinced me “don’t be evil” may have been a goal, but “don’t miss out on profit” was a requirement.

This raises questions (that you probably can't answer, but still) about why Google doesn't have a "maintenance subsidiary" playbook, where instead of killing a project off, they spin it off, with a bucket of cash to last that project 3 years, after which they'll have to have figured out their own monetization plan (or open source transition) while still having access to everything Google because it'd just be another Alphabet-owned company.

Not every engineer wants to live the fast-paced "create and move on" life, there are so many skilled engineers who would happily take the lower salary, but also lower-pressure, maintenance jobs.

If a project makes a million bucks under Google, that doesn't even remotely push the needle and it gets shut down. If a 5 man subsidiary makes a million bucks, that's a million bucks. Foster that?

That's the problem though isn't it. Google doesn't want to maintain stuff otherwise they would incentivize it. Classic "The purpose of the system is what it does"

I use Newsblur, it’s open source and you can self host, but for the price of the service, I am happy to pay. There are apps for most every platform.

https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur

FreshRSS, works well directly from the browser, desktop or mobile.

What I like about it is that you can gradually work your unread list: if you're in a specific feed and mark it as read it switches to the next feed only with unread items. If you do it from a category it switches to the next category. I find it helps a lot going quickly through a mountain of new unread items.

Not saying others don't do it, but this one does, so I'm keeping it.

I've been using FreshRSS for several years, and like it quite a lot.

I've been using commafeed for a few months now. The UI is closest thing to GReader I've seen. It's still a bit light on features compared to other more older and popular self-hosted RSS reader options. But it works well and gets frequent updates.

https://www.commafeed.com

Miniflux has good integrations and third party UIs that look great. But I'm fine with the default UI themes. Selfhost or pay $15/year to use the flagship hosted instance.

https://miniflux.app/docs/index.html

I've been using FreshRSS for a while and I've been rather pleased with it. It's browser UI is pretty good and a good number of mobile RSS apps support it.

As well as disabling Usenet groups readership.

Perhaps google’s long-term contribution to the internet was definitively proving the importance of self-hosted and free, open source software — by epitomising what can go horribly wrong with the alternative. Hopefully in a generation from now this will be just common sense.

Honestly, HN triggered my self-hosting from all the stories of people getting fucked over by proprietary software over the years.

Same , wish there was a directory of rss . In past it was googles task to provide quality sources when searching and google excelled at this but somehow google is failing at this now.

There's no "easy way to find quality sources", that's mutually exclusive nowadays. Whatever is mainstream and easy to find gets automatically gamed through SEO junk, advertising, astroturfing, and becomes poor quality again in no time. Like how much do you trust CNET and Linus Tech Tips?

The best quality sources are always involving thorough human vetting of trusted and impartial people on platforms which have higher bar to entry and require some friction to find, aka word of mouth.

Which is why curated and moderated user platforms like HN, some sub-Reddit, blogs, mailing lists, community forums, are so important and also why Google search is just so useless nowadays for finding anything other than model number datasheets and product online shopping.

Back in '05 when I started self-hosting tt-rss I thought it'd be cool to add some "social" features to it. Specifically, I'd like to see new feed suggestions from people for whom I have followed feeds in-common.

My idea was dismissed by the tt-rss author (and at the time and I still had aspirations to submit patches). I gave up on submitting patches, forked the code for my personal use, and never got around to the "social" idea.

I don't know if mainstream feed readers still do OPML[0] exports or not. I'd enjoy seeing OPML files from people whose blogs I read.

Actually, I'd like it if people on HN published OPML files. Maybe I should. Hmmm...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPML

One of the many things I love about seamonkey is that it has built-in RSS support and will pop up an icon at the end of the URL bar when an RSS feed is defined on a site. Combined with the built in RSS/Email/NNTP reader, it makes it very convenient to find feeds just by clicking links on sites like this one.

There is no easy way, because you have to be able to identify the greats of a field to find relentless quality. You have to become a nerd of greatness, armed with an RSS reader. Example: You can probably tell what Jeff Beck, Stefan Hauk, Jacob Deraps have in common. Sreten of M539 Restaurations? Marco Reps or Shariar of The Signal Path? Igor Bogdanov. Chips and Cheese. The Orbital Mechanics Podcast. The War Zone. Some post once a year or even less.

Sounds like distributed tumblr. I think the world needs that really bad right now. Tumblr is going to fail soon it's totally zombified as far as the software goes.

But this is basically how Tumblr operates except it's centralized.

Try it again

But nobody used it.

Stats are addictive. They are also the first step towards justifying spending time on it.

Have some stats.

Nobody used it? That is indeed the exact right amount of social networking.

Plus we used to be able to use tools that scraped and turned sites into feeds, but now most of the sites I'd like to do that on are "protected" by javascript challenges etc.

I will visit your site more if you let me get updates in my preferred fashion!

Youtube still has RSS feeds thankfully, although they did kill the subscription OPML export

Your analogy leaves out the fact that RSS doesn't work for serving ads, which is why all of this was in Google's interest.

Then once they had everyone onboard reader and there weren't really anyone competing

There may not have been profit driven companies competing and that detail is mostly irrelevant. There was no shortage of alternatives like software running on your computer and self hosting options.

RSS wasn't designed to help companies make money. The demise of Google's competitors is irrelevant to the long term health of RSS. It was thriving before such companies tried to make money off of it.

People who didn't use Google Reader were not at all impacted by its demise. The RSS experience remained the same. It's silly to claim Google played a role in killing it.

For myself and most people i knew that knew of RSS feeds, we weren't introduced by google reader, we migrated to it because it was a great reader.

Right, this is exactly my experience as well. I used all manner of desktop based RSS readers before Google reader appeared on the scene and became my mainstay.

I also think it's not wrong to note that Google Reader introduced a lot of people to RSS. But I don't think it follows that shutting down Google Reader was merely a net neutral impact on RSS. I guess I just don't follow the logic of, well Google elevated RSS, therefore there's no problem with shutting it down in the grand scheme of things. Shutting down Google Reader rolled back progress that had been achieved by Google Reader itself, but the fact that the RSS ecosystem had recentered itself around Google's offerings and integrations also made the shutdown uniquely damaging.

The point I'm making is most users of RSS wouldn't have used RSS had Reader not been around. The fact that many stopped using RSS after the demise of Reader is simply a reflection of how many people Google introduced to RSS.

I clearly remember at the time many Reader users equating it with RSS and not knowing the difference. Just as many people I encounter equate Git with GitHub and don't realize GitHub doesn't develop or own Git.

Telegram, Twitter, Mastodon, Matrix, IRC... anything that permits bots. The fun part is that when you write a new bot you'd tend to just look for the site's rss.xml or atom.xml. That file must exist.

And since that file still exists on most of the web, some people gonna make dedicated clients as well that intermix the feeds in the way they want... that seems clunky to do on a messaging app. But two roads in the forest!

The article is a fanciful mixture of paranoid lego-duplo block imaginings, with a slab of boredom used for fuel.

Podcasts seem to be a rather effective and continuing use of RSS, so perhaps rumors of its death are premature. There, we find ourselves back at the written vs spoken form debate.

I think the iPod played a critical role in normalizing podcasts as a globally accepted form of content consumption. And I actually don't think RSS was too far behind. There is more in the way of development and integration that could have continued to normalize RSS, And I suspect it wasn't a specific reaction to the benefits of RSS, so much as it was the company's mobilization behind Google Plus, that led to their strategic pivot.

That core passionate user base that believed in and used the product, I believe was in fact the critical alchemy that was missing from Google+, which by comparison was soulless and pushed by strategic considerations rather than organic iteration on user feedback or response to user needs. Articles have been written about this before, but I absolutely believe in the right circumstances Google could have successfully built out a social network, but it was Google Reader in fact was becoming one. I think Google correctly assessed that there was redundancy between Google Reader and Google Plus, but they just chose the wrong path.

Was it bad? I recall thinking it was good in the version 1, 2, and 3 days. A drop-down menu from the bookmark with a list of headlines that would be refreshed every 15 minutes or so. Clicking on one would take you to the site/url to read the full contents.

I ran my own postfix + [lots more brain tiring things here] for 15 years with very few hitches and felt quite satisfied with my successful caveman lifestyle. But then I got too busy and settled on migadu and my gosh what a fool I was. My wife and I use email like SMS these days and always force commercial conversations to email. signal for the truly trite things.

I don't remember what I pay, not going to look it up, but the money for monetizing email is truly well spent: happiness base level permanently raised.

The only stupidity left in my email setup is Thunderbird killing off the ability to use emacs as the editor. Enshitification without revenue... genius.

I'm confused why people can't also send anything they want over RSS. Unless you are directly scraping their website for updates, I thought they could publish anything to a feed.

20 years ago they launched Google Reader to do exactly that. ~10 years ago they killed that, too.

But the ads are baked into the content.

Barely hanging on by nature of being an open format and Apple generously hosting the feed index publicly. But even that gets challenged now that most people switch to Spotify to listen to "podcasts" there - and those are completely siloed.

Exactly.

Title-only RSS is so much better than email notification.

RSS was already dead long before Chrome was the market leader.

And even if the feed was rendered properly, it's essentially useless without an associated extension or website to aggregate those feeds.

The funny thing is...non-Google browsers had even done that. Chrome was the odd one that didn't, and Firefox was still more popular at the time.

Firefox had Live Bookmarks, which I used for a long time. You'd just drag the icon to your bookmarks toolbar and then it would appear as a folder containing all of the entries as clickable bookmarks to the relevant web pages. The browser alerted you to autodiscovered feeds as well. The orange RSS pictogram (not the initialization) would appear right there in the URL bar if the site was set up right.

As early as OS X 10.4, desktop Safari had a built in RSS reader as well. You'd open the sidebar that's currently mostly used for the reading list and bookmarks, and there was some way to add the current page's discovered RSS feed with a button click or two. It also rendered feed XML in a particularly nice way that looked like a very clean looking blog, so landing on an XML page wouldn't intimidate less technical users.

Chrome deliberately was dysfunctional, and it taking over probably had more to do with RSS not growing more mainstream (as well as the rise of social networks and over commercialization) than Google Reader shutting down.

me

Me, every day for ... a lot of years!

That would be a compelling argument if the RSS button had never been added to websites in the first place.

The UI and UX was left entirely to the website administrator, not big tech, and even websites that did not have any monetization did not improve the experience for users.

And of course adtech could have invested in RSS to make it financially attractive. But they didn't, cause nobody uses it.

Apple tried. RSS was shoved into every part of OS X at the time, and users were still confused about what it even is.

Microsoft Outlook still has RSS support: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/subscribe-to-an-r... Basically, an RSS feed is represented as an auto-populating mail folder. As still mentioned on the page linked above, Internet Explorer provided an easy way to subscribe.

"RSS" wasn't very common to put on feed buttons. The standard RSS icon was normal, including in Firefox (where it would display on the URL bar when detected on a site). And commonly web pages linking directly to their feed would say something along the lines of "subscribe via RSS" or just "subscribe" with the icon.

People are definitely used to poking cryptic pictograms on contemporary UIs, and RSS clearly gives off an impression of something being broadcast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#/media/File%3AFeed-icon.sv...

OP here - I have a desktop RSS reader and I do not subscribe to feeds that only have abstracts.

I much rather just go to the site personally.

If every feed had just abstracts then I probably wouldn’t even bother with an RSS readers.

I’m technical already and I can’t imagine any regular person bothering with RSS if it was just abstracts.

Also people share articles. If you have a feed there is roughly 0% chance of me sharing one of your articles. If I subscribe to your feed and like the article then I may share it with friends or post to Reddit or Hacker News.

Of course while you may reach some users that you wouldn't have otherwise, you may also lose some ad views from people who would still check your site if there was no feed. So it is a balance.

Well I don’t think there is any audience because very few sites had/have any decent RSS feeds.

Well except maybe tech sites, but most people are not into tech sites.

Ah yes, most people running sites are rolling in dough, especially journalism…

Quite a Nietzschean insight. Both in therms of its direction and the quality of its expression in language. I am bowing to you, Sir.

I don't think you are alone here - there's a reason Chrome invested so heavily in dev tools and made them (and things like view-source) accessible in the core distribution even though they were also perfect candidiates for being addons. Many of us owed our careers to the path that view source opened, and we wanted to pay it forward.

I do regret not finding ways to do more - for example, an unrealized goal of mine was to find a way to add a 'create' button to Chrome to nudge everyone to be a creator - my favorite simple+cheeky idea was to have a way to enable contentEditable on the current site, then save the resulting changes as an extension you could give to your friends, allowing you to graffiti the internet in private small groups.

Unrelated but you are a great writer! "user agency lives in the very long tail of any software usage" "agency drives the birth of tech but dies in the scoreboards" "scale to species level adoption discover that the ethos of creation is lost in the swarm of consumption"

You remind me of the writing of Antonio Garcia Martinez in the book Chaos Monkeys.

Thank you for taking me down memory lane with this great question. It's been almost twenty years, so I may misremember the internal popularity of many things, but one that stands out was browsing history - almost everyone that joined the team for the first ten years wanted to redesign history and felt it could've been a huge differentiator. We had mockups that looked like subway maps, implemented floating overlays showing your recent tasks, and we designed the history database to store everything forever.

In reality, Google search was good enough to find what you wanted 95% of the time, and most people would not bother discovering and learning a separate pathway to find the remaining 5% - especially when combined with our poor human memories and local search capabilities at the time.

Unfortunately I don't remember the exact reason, but with some squinting at the past I believe it would've come down to two things - resources and how we thought about the role of developers:

Chrome was a no-crunch 50-person project, which sounds like a lot until you think about how we were porting webkit to windows, adding a sandbox, creating a new javascript engine, a new windows UI toolkit, etc and we were ruthless about prioritization - any engineer who could've spent on an RSS renderer would've been taken away from valuable webkit windows compatibility work (omg ACID tests), and weeks mattered.

Second, we had an extremely strong belief in letting developers own as much as they could - our impossible ideal was that the Chrome UI wouldn't exist and developers would just create content you could access emphemerally through your operating system. At the time, we had seen that it was possible for developers to use various trickery (XSLT or CSS?) to style RSS feeds so they would show up somewhat like how you described (IIRC Feedburner did this)

So if you take those two things together (and again I may be misremembering) you see it being a "developers can do it so if they care they can do it, we should not spend time making something that overrules them"

It's not possible for me to know whether that was the right idea in hindsight because I don't know what we would've sacrificed (I think I would've preferred using that time to make the standalone image renderer have better zooming/panning controls)

I can name one mature alternative at that time: Netvibes. Still usable now for free.

I feel sure there were others but would have to look them up.

So Google made a free service, and when it was gone, everyone realized they weren't willing to pay for it. Because it wasn't valuable to them. This is the real problem that RSS has.

To your point, Google acquired Blogger in 2003, Feedburner in 2007, created Google Reader and had a dedicated blog search that could let you follow search terms as RSS feeds when you posts were made that matched your terms.

Indeed - this is more or less what has been implemented with Google news, Facebook, Twitter etc.

I do think rss or another protocol would have been nice even for what you’re describing but such is life.

and the answer to that is an RSS app that grabs the article and runs it through a reader mode of some sort (Unread and I believe Reeder have this feature on iOS)

Typically, when a page refers to the feed in an appropriate way, you can add it to your reader directly, without needing to extract the URL by hand.

I can't browse timelines on X without an account

It takes just a few seconds to create an account.

they've blocked all third party apps

The first party app works fine for me.

most sites I subscribe to via RSS don't tweet every new post anyway

It would be in the best interests of these sites to post about new content on social media themselves for extra visibility. Worst case someone else can repost it on social media for them.

It's fascinating to think of what alternative norms could have emerged. I think people forget how significant delicious was to its particular time on the internet. I think it was every bit as influential as Reddit during its heydey, but unfortunately was catastrophically mismanaged into the ground by Yahoo.

I do think delicious could have normalized social bookmarking in different circumstances.

Oh no...

Access to feeds is not considered in the number of subscribers for the content creator, isn't it?

Google is the only one that spams me, actually. Funny how they are "good" at filtering incoming spam but don't care about egress.

Reader competed with G+ like television competes with AM radio. Sure, people have a finite amount of attention, but these aren't replacements.

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?{kind}_id={id}

where kind can either be channel or playlist (possibly more).