The Internet in the early 2000s felt a little more special as compared to today, when 99.999 % of content is locked in a handful of walled gardens. I mean sure everything we had then is still possible but let’s be honest everything about the web is fine tuned to deliver ads to our eyeballs, browsers, operating systems and even protocols are being designed with ad delivery in mind. Even the privacy friendly browsers just exist to serve ads when I think about it. Kind of sad really, but I guess you could be happy as it’s so big now and there’s so much to do. Just makes you wonder what stuff would thrive if ads didn’t exist. As of now every niche thing that gets successful will be invariably pulled into the ad ecosystem as it’s very hard to say no to money.
RSS wasn’t in the interest of the big platforms as it’s decentralized and there’s no good way to deliver ads through it, simple as that.
There was also .001% of the content there is now. The Internet of 2000 was microscopic.
Now everyone can create content, without any of the friction of hosting it. The vast majority of it is crap, but that was always the case.
The main difference between now and 30 years ago is that the Internet is vastly more diverse. It isn't just other CS majors any more. Now everyone gets to wade in the vast crap pool looking for the smidge of things that appeal to them. Meanwhile the CS majors still host their own stuff, because they can, and you find out about it via the same word of mouth.
The .001% was the top .001% of today's content. The other 99.999% we gained was spam aimed at getting money while providing minimal value and taking minimal effort.
> everything about the web is fine tuned to deliver ads to our eyeballs, browsers, operating systems and even protocols are being designed with ad delivery in mind.
I use Firefox with uBlock Origin on Linux, and haven't seen an ad in years. It's not like ads weren't a thing 20 years ago. Pop-up windows were particularly bad. Javascript, in particular, has been constantly abused against the user ever since it was created.
Same setup and same experience. I've recently joined another company which only provided chrome with no extensions by default. I know the web is filled with ads but I'm shocked again and again when I get a glimpse into what it's like without an adblocker.
What I don't understand about the "RSS can't support ads" argument is that most of my RSS feeds don't actually let me read the article. Just a headline and a snippet at most. So if I want to actually read the article I'm going to have to load their page.
I’ve encountered feeds that do this and I tend to not keep those subscriptions long. That said, some feeds often have content that doesn’t present well in my feed reader and I’ll end up clicking to view the web presentation
What I miss is that back when Safari had RSS built in was I used to just open all the new articles in tabs from an RSS list in my bookmark bar. This is the experience I really would like to recover, being able to just get a set of tabs that represent new posts at sites that I want to follow. Maybe I’ll vibe code this for myself now that I’ve given in and turned to the dark side with Claude.
Moz Support says "Firefox's built-in support for web feeds and Live Bookmarks ended in December 2018 with version 64."
I checked as I use the Feedbro extension in Firefox and Chrome family browsers for holding and updating a tree of RSS feeds and thought I'd missed a built in FF feature :/
Google’s obviously fake excuse for killing their RSS reader (declining usage) was especially maddening at the time because they were pushing Google+ - which _nobody_ used.
As someone who was a big fan of Reader and worked at Google at the time (not on G+): I never understood why they didn’t try to put Reader into G+.
Like you could imagine getting your RSS feed in your G+ stream. If you didn’t want any social stuff you could just use it as a reader. But it would also give you an easy way to share stuff from your feed. And it might have been useful for those providing RSS feeds to interact more with their readers (if they chose to.)
I think it would have been an interesting way to bootstrap things.
Exactly. Reader was maturing into a proto social network in its own right (I started commenting on articles with friends in it in college right before it started getting deprecated) and finding the organic activity and rolling with it and thinking in terms of honoring the core users could have been a very good strategy.
Google Plus could have worked imo and the path to success would have involved smart stewardship of reader.
Google Buzz also seemed like a better path for Google to have a "social network" than what they tried to do with G+: Post short twitter-like things from various Google properties and have your friends posts show up in the same place. Between Buzz, Reader and gmail chat, Google had a fairly solid lineup of social products that they killed one way or another to boost G+.
I had a cohort of friends from grad school that used Buzz like crazy. We tried Google+, but it just wasn't as useful. This would have been 2008-2010.
We also really wanted to use Google Wave, but couldn't get enough invitations to go around. It was like nobody at Google figured out that the only reason invitations worked for Gmail was because Gmail was interoperable with email. Wave didn't interoperate with anything. Either your friends were on it and you could use it, or they weren't and you couldn't. 3-4 invitations after a couple months just wasn't enough of a social effect to make it useful like it had been for Gmail.
The thing that sucks about Google Music is that they could have merged them but kept the good parts of both. Youtube Music is still missing features of Google Music. It would have been more than "just", but Google Music with Youtube backend and branding would have worked. It is the backend song licensing they wanted to merge.
The same happened with Google Podcasts. Merged into Youtube Music, not even separate Youtube Podcasts, and it sucks.
The thing that pissed me off was that I had uploaded so many indie local bands' CDs, none of which were ever on YouTube, so I lost more than half of my music library when they forced that change and there was nothing I could do about it, having long since gotten rid of the disks because I believed them that they would never delete my stuff.
(Degoogled not long after that, actually. Fool me twice...)
Google Music's song radio feature was really good. It would play similar songs obviously but it exposed you to actually new artists. Meanwhile, spotify basically encourages you to listen to the same stuff all the time, It's like listening to my old CD collection.
Why anyone trusts any streaming music service is absolutely beyond me. It will always get enshittified. I have 65GiB of mp3s I've accumulated from ripping CDs over the years and it used to be a burden to transfer around between machines. Now it easily fits on a thumb drive or microsd and it's easy to copy it onto all of my machines.
Yes, because you did not need to copy it to all devices. You could stream your own library at any device.
Probably you could set up a homelab server and there are tools/apps for streaming it to your own devices, but I havent bothered yet.
AND discovery part -- I'm feeling lucky let me listen to new music. If I liked it I bought it. But it's hard to find new music, get out of your bubble.
GPM was amazing for keeping my library accessible on a device with all of 16GB of storage space, but for recommendations, Grooveshark took the cake. Spotify, Pandora, Tidal, Youtube... None have ever gotten close to GS in terms of showing me songs completely outside my wheelhouse that I immediately loved. Also likewise cruelly cut down by cynical forces.
It seems like Google culturally can't deal with products that aren't overwhelming, gigantic successes, but they also really struggle to put in the effort to actually create those. Multiple times they have spent a lot of resources developing a product, then released to great fanfare, but then don't have the follow-through to keep supporting it into being a big success. Stadia seemed to be the most ridiculous example to me. The console market is famously difficult to break into and Microsoft only managed it by making a loss for a very long time, but Google just didn't put in anywhere near that amount of effort, and just gave up pretty much as soon as it launched.
Google, culturally, seems very tone-deaf to market signals.
Granted: historically they have often been the smartest person in the room (collectively speaking)
But a consequence of this is that an organization (a) doesn't develop pre-release "listening to user needs" skills & (b) can't post-release pivot in response to user feedback. Microsoft and Apple do much better jobs at both.
This works as long as Google releases exactly what users need the first time (e.g. original Google search or Gmail), but flounders when opinionated, artistic product design with long-term vision is needed (Reader, YouTube, Stadia) or when people outside Google have better ideas (Chrome, GCP, messengers, Docs/Drive, AI dev harnesses).
At this point, I've decided it's less about revenue (the common finger point) and more about organizational prioritization and decision-making. It's just not in Google's DNA.
Nothing short of a Bezos-style API memo is going to change it... and Pichai doesn't seem like he's willing/able to rock the boat that much.
Google's problem is that, fundamentally, they hate end users. They do not want to hear feedback from them, they don't want to fix their bugs. They don't want to hear your thoughts and they actually don't value feedback. They don't want to support devices or older versions. They have no idea what LTS even means.
Google pretends to be data driven. What that means is that Google would rather creepily spy on you using all kinds of underhanded means that they invented themselves, tell itself it cares about privacy because it doesn't "sell" that raw data to third parties, and then mine said data for the only signals that matter--how they are going to make more money off advertising to you.
And god forbid some machine-learning system goes wrong and classifies you as a scammer. If they think you're a scammer, you're dead to them, and they will ghost you without a second thought, with no recourse on your part.
Google thinks anything below a billion users is not worth even pursuing.
When I worked there it was always about 10X and moonshots and more magic moments. There was a mantra "focus on the user and all else will follow". The users who matter are advertisers. So they did that, and advertisers keep forking over their cash. End users do not fork over cash, so screw them. Leeches.
When I used it, it was popular among folks who would do photography as a hobby when attending academic conferences.
Tom Anderson liked one of my landscape photos, which briefly made me popular with the crew who'd roll into gallery showings for the wine and cheese.
(This was back before Instagram got acquired by Facebook and Obama let Putin take Crimea and Xi Jingping scoop up rare earth mineral rights in Africa.)
The final irony is that if they'd just maintained G+ a bit better and kept it around after 2018 it's likely they'd eventually have had a decent chance to pick up a number of waves of unhappy people leaving Facebook or Twitter.
But, ceterum censeo: while Vic Gundotra may have been the main force behind G+ it's important to emphasise that, as usual, the buck stops with Google's Class B overlords Page and Brin personally. If they were the decent people and responsible stewards they were originally promoted as then the Google+ debacle would not have happened, or certainly not in the way it did.
> I also don’t think the user experience offered by products like TikTok is possible with RSS.
I use an app called Feeeed on iOS that scrolls my RSS feeds like a social media feed.
If the TikTok reference is more about the never ending algorithmic feed… RSS not doing that is a feature. Of course, I think many among us have been guilty of overloading an RSS reader to the point where it feels like a never ending feed that’s impossible to catch up on.
They tried to develop Gmail into a social network in 2010 with Google Buzz [1]. It received a lot of backlash from people who did not want their email to be a social network.
The social network they were not developing well was YouTube. Eventually, they figured it out, and it's estimated YouTube would be worth $550B as a standalone business today [2].
It has the vibe of a corporate company doing post hoc justification for a decision they already made.
And then the commenter provides a parallel to how willing they were to put money into Google+, i.e. they appear willing to put money into a relatively low usage product when they feel like doing it.
As a result many people in developing countries were driven towards social media like instagram and TikTok where they get their news. And now they're addicted to them.
At the time, I was working at the Committee to Protect Journalists with dissident bloggers working in Syria, Egypt, UAE, Turkey, etc. We had a group of them come to the US to talk to the big tech companies about the issues they were struggling with: fake takedowns, language support, local censorship, and so on. I remember distinctly as we worked on the agenda for the meeting with Google that Google Reader being shut down was the first complaint any of us mentioned. We laughed, but it was serious.
Do you not realize that Google+ was a newer product and was a strategic priority for Google. Trying to say they are the same so you should be able to apply the same exact criteria is a false equivalence.
"I miss websites". Damn that hit. I realise the only place pushing me to an actual website these days are my RSS feeds (self hosted FreshRSS), and HN. Maybe very occasional share on LinkedIn.
Me too, but there were some replacements that made me happy because they fixed some irk with google's version. (I think I used Commafeed?)
I eventually got away from subscribing to like 50 webcomics (all I used RSS for... most other stuff was too high-volume, and I liked reading everything in my feed, iirc) though and stopped using an RSS feed altogether.
Yeah. There honestly was a purity to the disconnected nature of shitty Geocities and Angelfires pages, where filled with amateurs writing shitty HTML just because they thought it would be cool to have their own web site.
That's not a dig, to be clear. I was one of those kids writing shitty HTML for Geocities.
I don't hate the modern internet, but I feel like there's roughly now about ~10 sites that I visit frequently, whereas when I was a teenager there were lots more. Maybe it's just my "old man yells at cloud" moment.
Google tried to kill RSS, but it is not dead, in fact it is still a huge part of the Open Web Initiative. There is no performance hit or real resource cost in supporting RSS. If big platforms like Shopify can do it, we can support RSS feeds (and more) too! I've recently added RSS and other alternative representations to our Rails based ecom store[1] and rails makes it super easy[1a].
If you're using Rails it is basically free to add RSS feeds w/ the 'feed' or 'rss' gems[2]. Because of this we provide RSS feeds for everything, including customer orders and their tracking.
If you want to support the Open Web Initiative[3], I'd also encourage you to support alternative representations[4] of your content (markdown, CSVs, etc), add support for ActivityPub / Fediverse directly and webhooks to your site/app.
I do not think so. It was such a GOOD feature. Imagine opening your browser and you had all your news instantly in your bookmark under address bar. I loved Firefox for this.
But, thankfully, you can have almost the same thing with Livemarks extension.
I mean you're right, but also Google had one of the legitimately best options at the time and massive visibility and seemingly credible institutional commitment. And it was early to a scene of web based always online RSS readers when before that they were typically desktop-based. And on desktop portability was achievable but not as convenient. With reader it was nearly effortless.
While it was definitely possible to use alternatives, it effectively became king of the mountain which gave it the power to deal a punishing blow to RSS once they pulled the plug.
I will just say it was a very different time and at the time I didn't regard Google as a place that didn't make credible commitments to new products. But big picture I think you're right.
I don’t understand why many sites with news updates / blogs don’t offer an RSS feed. Are they expecting me to keep visiting the site over and over to see if there is new content? They’re guaranteeing I’ll never visit their site again.
Perhaps they’re expecting people to subscribe to social media accounts or via email, but those both cost money to reach users. RSS is free.
I've used it on every blog I've ever built (https://blog.tombert.com/index.xml) because it's super easy to set up, but I really don't know anyone who uses RSS in any serious capacity.
Because RSS is a way to give your bait content away for free without getting your ad revenue for it. Its a complete misfeature from the perspective of a site.
I think the core issue is that it is hard to sell why you need an RSS, especially for the average user. It would not be uncommon to meet an IT professional who has at best heard the term, but never really tried to delve further. Sadly by the time the average internet dweller hears of RSS, their mind is already so ingrained in the "usual" browsing experience that anything that is out of the ordinary feels instinctively wrong, even if it clearly has multiple merits.
I don't think the average person has to be taken into account all the time. There are millions of companies providing products and services which the average person has no interest in. Most books and music has no appeal to the average person, neither do most sports or hobbies.
> I don't think the average person has to be taken into account all the time.
This needs to be said louder and more often whenever this "average person" argument is trotted out.
Except for the very largest technology businesses, like the FAANGs of this world, relatively few technology companies are offering products and services aimed at the "average person".
No business I've ever worked for has had the "average person" as their customer. They're all aiming for particular market segments and positioning their products and services to meet the needs of those market segments. I spent a lot of time working on software developer tools that were only of interest to software developers working on the Microsoft stack, for example. Java, C++, and Python developers wouldn't have known or cared about these tools and that was just fine.
So, like you, I couldn't give two hoots what the "average person" thinks of RSS, whether they find it useful, whether they understand it, or whether they've even heard of it.
Whereas there are in fact loads of people who aren't sat on the average (whatever that means) who do find RSS incredibly useful.
We blame the RSS aggregators for the death, which is very fair. But I don't know if blog writers ever supported RSS, either.
With RSS, your words are read, which is great. But you lose the ability to control the feel of the post... the best blogs have a vibe where the medium is at least large portion of the message. A pg essay would feel wrong in a chunk serif font, and I've read blogs that have used interactivity to great effect. RSS also kills monetization, since you can't have ads or push users to sign up.
I would love to see a platform (mobile would be great for this) that let the creator control the design and maybe even levels of monetization. (Some could argue I'm somewhat describing Medium or Substack, although I don't think they quite hit it for me.)
I could never get into RSS. I theoretically loved it as a concept, but I missed "feeling" the vibe the author was going for.
> lose the ability to control the feel of the post.
Agreed, rss was popular with people who wanted to decrease noise.
> RSS also kills monetization, since you can't have ads
This was the killer and the dumb part, because it could, but monetization sofar means integration with all the bad parts of the Internet that desire to track people.
I have a feeling that it used to be much more valuable to send users to your site in the past, than today where a lot of traffic comes from search/ads/social media.
Perhaps it is time to revisit a distribution model, where the full content of the article is available for paid users inside the reader itself. The RSS reader would require a subscription and pay RSS feed providers a share of the subscription price. A sort of distributed spotify model.
Feeds still have a lot of inertia, at least. Most blogs generate them out of the box, and Wordpress being as predominant as it still is means you can still find them even where you don't expect to. Even social media profiles can compress into feeds with a little help from solutions like Nitter (or in Bluesky's case, offered natively). What I think is really missed is the social component that Reader had, which you still can't really find even with the variety of great readers that came in its wake.
I know I will probably just migrate them to RSSHub when the time calls, but YouTube's channel and playlist feeds have been such a great way to follow a large number of creators. I'm still holding my breath for the day they unceremoniously stop working.
You never know what will be someone's straw-that-broke-the-camels-back moment, but this was it for me. Nothing in this post was new news, but despite that, seeing it written down in one place made me realize just the type of person, I mean company, that you are and what you really want, Google. For too long I've been holding on to the "do no evil" person, I mean company, that you once were. But now it's clear to me... you're a toxic friend. We've been drifting apart for years, but now it's official... we're breaking up. I'm sure there's a person, I mean company, out there for me. One that will treat me right, be good to me, and respect me as a person and I'm going to find it.
Agree. It was the watershed moment that represented the break from "don't be evil", a cheeky slogan that was remarkably effective at conveying a sense of what they were about by talking about what they were trying not to be.
I'm still so angry about this. RSS was EVERYWHERE and then it just wasn't anymore. It was so useful and such a nice, advertising-free way, of using the internet.
Was evolution of email newsletters also one major reason ? Email newsletters are more publisher friendly where they get your data (emails), understand how many people are opening your email, sell subscriptions as well.
Social Media / RSS feed / Email newsletters are things which are just entry points to bring people eventually to the website.
Amongst these maybe Email newsletters are more friendly to publishers at least in terms of capturing first party data, so that you can be retargeted easily
I think the real issue is that the 'hobbyist web' is dead because there is no distribution
Let's say you want to post about 'best way to clean your car windshield'. Why would you post it on a blog when nobody will read it when the TikTok algo will at least give you a pity test to a few hundred people
So all that's left is Reddit and social media and the short form video apps (and Youtube)
The other part of course is Google itself won't rank mypersonalblog .com/i-found-a-cool-way-to-clean-windshields
So there's a doom loop... the supply of potential independent sites can't connect to audience demand, the audience is not being funneled to indie sites anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And now Reddit gets to make much dinero out of selling access for AI training cause that's the only place organic discussion happens at scale
It makes me think if YouTube’s subscription feed will meet the same fate as RSS. It’s basically RSS for YouTube, in the sense that it’s a chronological feed of channels you directly follow.
It just seems too useful and un-derived to remain a Google-maintained feature for the long term.
RSS was never going to work anyway due to lack of monetization. If this is not true you would still see them today. See everyone posting archive paywall bypassing links on every opportunity here, lol. There is no incentive for a news site to support RSS.
Upvoted not for your particular phrasing, but because in a sense, this was my experience as well: I wanted to work at Google, and I thought Google was learning how to marry a great business with treating customers well. Killing GReader was the inflection point for me, when Google tipped from "Great!" to "Kinda evil". It's been a slide ever since.
Whatever it touches, it destroys - excluding adMoney. That's its only soul.
What I have also noticed is that people are no longer happy to say "I worked at Google". It's now more a career killer (to some extent) than an accelerator.
Anyone remember Google+? Nobody used it but Google tried to force-abuse people into using it.
RSS wasn’t in the interest of the big platforms as it’s decentralized and there’s no good way to deliver ads through it, simple as that.
Now everyone can create content, without any of the friction of hosting it. The vast majority of it is crap, but that was always the case.
The main difference between now and 30 years ago is that the Internet is vastly more diverse. It isn't just other CS majors any more. Now everyone gets to wade in the vast crap pool looking for the smidge of things that appeal to them. Meanwhile the CS majors still host their own stuff, because they can, and you find out about it via the same word of mouth.
Hey, that's not fair! It also had nine year olds who bought a book about HTML and made shitty sites on Geocities!
I use Firefox with uBlock Origin on Linux, and haven't seen an ad in years. It's not like ads weren't a thing 20 years ago. Pop-up windows were particularly bad. Javascript, in particular, has been constantly abused against the user ever since it was created.
Same setup and same experience. I've recently joined another company which only provided chrome with no extensions by default. I know the web is filled with ads but I'm shocked again and again when I get a glimpse into what it's like without an adblocker.
What I miss is that back when Safari had RSS built in was I used to just open all the new articles in tabs from an RSS list in my bookmark bar. This is the experience I really would like to recover, being able to just get a set of tabs that represent new posts at sites that I want to follow. Maybe I’ll vibe code this for myself now that I’ve given in and turned to the dark side with Claude.
I checked as I use the Feedbro extension in Firefox and Chrome family browsers for holding and updating a tree of RSS feeds and thought I'd missed a built in FF feature :/
Not LibreWolf. I’m also a fan of ungoogled-chromium, those are my two daily browsers.
Like you could imagine getting your RSS feed in your G+ stream. If you didn’t want any social stuff you could just use it as a reader. But it would also give you an easy way to share stuff from your feed. And it might have been useful for those providing RSS feeds to interact more with their readers (if they chose to.)
I think it would have been an interesting way to bootstrap things.
Google Plus could have worked imo and the path to success would have involved smart stewardship of reader.
We also really wanted to use Google Wave, but couldn't get enough invitations to go around. It was like nobody at Google figured out that the only reason invitations worked for Gmail was because Gmail was interoperable with email. Wave didn't interoperate with anything. Either your friends were on it and you could use it, or they weren't and you couldn't. 3-4 invitations after a couple months just wasn't enough of a social effect to make it useful like it had been for Gmail.
And the best feature: "I am feeling lucky" -- play a random song you ever liked and keep playing a generated playlist off it.
But they killed it due to internal wars with YouTube Music that sucks. There's still nothing like Google Music.
The same happened with Google Podcasts. Merged into Youtube Music, not even separate Youtube Podcasts, and it sucks.
(Degoogled not long after that, actually. Fool me twice...)
YouTube Music still has this feature and it even uses the die icon, just like always.
> you could upload your library to it.
You can also do this in YouTube Music.
> But they killed it
They rebranded the exact same code base with largely the same staff. I don't know why you perceive this to have been a break.
It was the betrayal that turned me off Google.
Probably you could set up a homelab server and there are tools/apps for streaming it to your own devices, but I havent bothered yet.
AND discovery part -- I'm feeling lucky let me listen to new music. If I liked it I bought it. But it's hard to find new music, get out of your bubble.
Granted: historically they have often been the smartest person in the room (collectively speaking)
But a consequence of this is that an organization (a) doesn't develop pre-release "listening to user needs" skills & (b) can't post-release pivot in response to user feedback. Microsoft and Apple do much better jobs at both.
This works as long as Google releases exactly what users need the first time (e.g. original Google search or Gmail), but flounders when opinionated, artistic product design with long-term vision is needed (Reader, YouTube, Stadia) or when people outside Google have better ideas (Chrome, GCP, messengers, Docs/Drive, AI dev harnesses).
At this point, I've decided it's less about revenue (the common finger point) and more about organizational prioritization and decision-making. It's just not in Google's DNA.
Nothing short of a Bezos-style API memo is going to change it... and Pichai doesn't seem like he's willing/able to rock the boat that much.
Google pretends to be data driven. What that means is that Google would rather creepily spy on you using all kinds of underhanded means that they invented themselves, tell itself it cares about privacy because it doesn't "sell" that raw data to third parties, and then mine said data for the only signals that matter--how they are going to make more money off advertising to you.
And god forbid some machine-learning system goes wrong and classifies you as a scammer. If they think you're a scammer, you're dead to them, and they will ghost you without a second thought, with no recourse on your part.
Google thinks anything below a billion users is not worth even pursuing.
When I worked there it was always about 10X and moonshots and more magic moments. There was a mantra "focus on the user and all else will follow". The users who matter are advertisers. So they did that, and advertisers keep forking over their cash. End users do not fork over cash, so screw them. Leeches.
Tom Anderson liked one of my landscape photos, which briefly made me popular with the crew who'd roll into gallery showings for the wine and cheese.
(This was back before Instagram got acquired by Facebook and Obama let Putin take Crimea and Xi Jingping scoop up rare earth mineral rights in Africa.)
But, ceterum censeo: while Vic Gundotra may have been the main force behind G+ it's important to emphasise that, as usual, the buck stops with Google's Class B overlords Page and Brin personally. If they were the decent people and responsible stewards they were originally promoted as then the Google+ debacle would not have happened, or certainly not in the way it did.
A lot of people do use RSS without realizing it, via podcasts.
“Solving the problem” is only one aspect of the reason something becomes popular in the mainstream.
I also don’t think the user experience offered by products like TikTok is possible with RSS.
I use an app called Feeeed on iOS that scrolls my RSS feeds like a social media feed.
If the TikTok reference is more about the never ending algorithmic feed… RSS not doing that is a feature. Of course, I think many among us have been guilty of overloading an RSS reader to the point where it feels like a never ending feed that’s impossible to catch up on.
The social network they were not developing well was YouTube. Eventually, they figured it out, and it's estimated YouTube would be worth $550B as a standalone business today [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz
[2] https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/youtube-valuation-wort...
What's obviously fake about that?
And then the commenter provides a parallel to how willing they were to put money into Google+, i.e. they appear willing to put money into a relatively low usage product when they feel like doing it.
Reader had no such strategic leverage, at least to Google execs' understanding.
I eventually got away from subscribing to like 50 webcomics (all I used RSS for... most other stuff was too high-volume, and I liked reading everything in my feed, iirc) though and stopped using an RSS feed altogether.
> First thing: don’t send money. This app is written for love, not money. :)
https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/blob/main/T...
That's not a dig, to be clear. I was one of those kids writing shitty HTML for Geocities.
I don't hate the modern internet, but I feel like there's roughly now about ~10 sites that I visit frequently, whereas when I was a teenager there were lots more. Maybe it's just my "old man yells at cloud" moment.
If you're using Rails it is basically free to add RSS feeds w/ the 'feed' or 'rss' gems[2]. Because of this we provide RSS feeds for everything, including customer orders and their tracking.
If you want to support the Open Web Initiative[3], I'd also encourage you to support alternative representations[4] of your content (markdown, CSVs, etc), add support for ActivityPub / Fediverse directly and webhooks to your site/app.
Stay open!
1. https://littlebirdelectronics.com.au/help/atom-feeds 2. https://github.com/ruby/rss 3. https://littlebirdelectronics.com.au/open-web 4. https://guides.rubyonrails.org/v5.0/layouts_and_rendering.ht...
https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-prod...
But, thankfully, you can have almost the same thing with Livemarks extension.
Some of the people behind Opera has built Vivaldi, which also contains an RSS reader. I haven't used it myself, but it looks promising.
I use for the last many years NetNewsWire and have never had any problems reading the news I want to read.
For ref: https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire
While it was definitely possible to use alternatives, it effectively became king of the mountain which gave it the power to deal a punishing blow to RSS once they pulled the plug.
I will just say it was a very different time and at the time I didn't regard Google as a place that didn't make credible commitments to new products. But big picture I think you're right.
Perhaps they’re expecting people to subscribe to social media accounts or via email, but those both cost money to reach users. RSS is free.
That said, stuff like BBC actually does maintain an RSS feed: https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml
This needs to be said louder and more often whenever this "average person" argument is trotted out.
Except for the very largest technology businesses, like the FAANGs of this world, relatively few technology companies are offering products and services aimed at the "average person".
No business I've ever worked for has had the "average person" as their customer. They're all aiming for particular market segments and positioning their products and services to meet the needs of those market segments. I spent a lot of time working on software developer tools that were only of interest to software developers working on the Microsoft stack, for example. Java, C++, and Python developers wouldn't have known or cared about these tools and that was just fine.
So, like you, I couldn't give two hoots what the "average person" thinks of RSS, whether they find it useful, whether they understand it, or whether they've even heard of it.
Whereas there are in fact loads of people who aren't sat on the average (whatever that means) who do find RSS incredibly useful.
We blame the RSS aggregators for the death, which is very fair. But I don't know if blog writers ever supported RSS, either.
With RSS, your words are read, which is great. But you lose the ability to control the feel of the post... the best blogs have a vibe where the medium is at least large portion of the message. A pg essay would feel wrong in a chunk serif font, and I've read blogs that have used interactivity to great effect. RSS also kills monetization, since you can't have ads or push users to sign up.
I would love to see a platform (mobile would be great for this) that let the creator control the design and maybe even levels of monetization. (Some could argue I'm somewhat describing Medium or Substack, although I don't think they quite hit it for me.)
I could never get into RSS. I theoretically loved it as a concept, but I missed "feeling" the vibe the author was going for.
Agreed, rss was popular with people who wanted to decrease noise.
> RSS also kills monetization, since you can't have ads
This was the killer and the dumb part, because it could, but monetization sofar means integration with all the bad parts of the Internet that desire to track people.
But until that happens, ads fill a middle ground: users don't want to pay and creators want to be paid.
Most people who use RSS, use it because they don't want to go to a website (filled with ads) and they want content 100% for free.
Perhaps it is time to revisit a distribution model, where the full content of the article is available for paid users inside the reader itself. The RSS reader would require a subscription and pay RSS feed providers a share of the subscription price. A sort of distributed spotify model.
I know I will probably just migrate them to RSSHub when the time calls, but YouTube's channel and playlist feeds have been such a great way to follow a large number of creators. I'm still holding my breath for the day they unceremoniously stop working.
Amongst these maybe Email newsletters are more friendly to publishers at least in terms of capturing first party data, so that you can be retargeted easily
Let's say you want to post about 'best way to clean your car windshield'. Why would you post it on a blog when nobody will read it when the TikTok algo will at least give you a pity test to a few hundred people
So all that's left is Reddit and social media and the short form video apps (and Youtube)
The other part of course is Google itself won't rank mypersonalblog .com/i-found-a-cool-way-to-clean-windshields
So there's a doom loop... the supply of potential independent sites can't connect to audience demand, the audience is not being funneled to indie sites anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And now Reddit gets to make much dinero out of selling access for AI training cause that's the only place organic discussion happens at scale
It just seems too useful and un-derived to remain a Google-maintained feature for the long term.
RSS (and Atom) were too nerdy and the mainstream did and does not care for it. Google did not „destroy“ it
https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-feeds
often using my crawling server because rss are often protected against bots
https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy
The only point the author made that fits the title is what they did to FeedBurner.
I've vomited better things.
The spec is a horrible mash up and seriously needed refinement. It made it easy to kill
Time goes on, things evolve, or are not monetizable so they're soon forgotten, or replaced, or improved, or... look a new shiny thing!
That's my intellectually considered response.
Fuck Google.
Whatever it touches, it destroys - excluding adMoney. That's its only soul.
What I have also noticed is that people are no longer happy to say "I worked at Google". It's now more a career killer (to some extent) than an accelerator.
Anyone remember Google+? Nobody used it but Google tried to force-abuse people into using it.