How Google Helped Destroy Adoption of RSS Feeds
How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
Google built products around the open RSS protocol to gain market share, only to remove support once users were locked in. From killing Google Reader and FeedBurner to stripping RSS buttons from Chrome, these actions have severely damaged user confidence. This pattern of embracing and extinguishing open standards threatens the freedom of the internet and has driven many users to abandon RSS feeds entirely.
Google has single-handedly contributed to the reason many users who once relied on RSS feeds have stopped using them.
- throwaway63467
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.
- schappim
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.
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...
- bakemawaytoys
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.
- betenoire
Google Reader going away felt like the beginning of the end the internet as I knew it. I miss websites
- orzi
Don't forget Mozilla removing Live Bookmarks (RSS feeds showed up directly in your bookmarks menu) and RSS feed subscriptions in Firefox 64.
https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-prod...
- konsalexee
Just why bother relying on Google products for RSS?
I use for the last many years NetNewsWire and have never had any problems reading the news I want to read.
- dabinat
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.
- arjie
I think centralized social networks were going to dominate in the end. There's just too much of an advantage to going to HN. There's a lot of content and a user-filter pushes the best stuff to the top in a way that you don't get from other feeds.