What did Google benefit from killing rss? Seems like that would help engagement on the web in general.
Ad revenue.
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How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
21–30 of 265 posts
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#22i still use feeds often
https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-feeds
often using my crawling server because rss are often protected against bots
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#23Google Reader going away felt like the beginning of the end the internet as I knew it. I miss websites
I'm still bitter about Google Reader going away. I endorse this sentiment.
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.
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#24I 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.
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#25Just 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.
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#26When chrome took the stage, it was the only popular browser that didn't display rss feeds XML in a readable way. It still does not to this day.
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#27Google’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.
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#28Google’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.
Probably Google's biggest failure ever was to recognize they've already had a social network: Gmail.
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#29I 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.
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#30Just why bother relying on Google products for RSS? I use for the last many years NetNewsWire and have never had any problems reading the news I want to read. For ref: https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire
And he includes a Safari plugin to get an RSS button back into the interface for easy subscribing (on Mac).