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How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

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Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#81

Post by drnick1 »

throwaway63467 wrote: post #48

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 j…

> 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.

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#82

Post by dhosek »

mathieudombrock wrote: post #71
throwaway63467 wrote: post #48

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 j…

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.

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#83

Post by orzi »

culi wrote: post #73
orzi wrote: post #68

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...

Did any other browser ever have this?

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.

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#85

Post by mschild »

drnick1 wrote: post #81
throwaway63467 wrote: post #48

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 j…

> 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 crea…

> Firefox with uBlock Origin on Linux

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.

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#87

Post by 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...

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#88

Post by titzer »

ethbr1 wrote: post #50
rcxdude wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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 release…

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.

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#89

Post by deepsun »

titzer wrote: post #79
deepsun wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing with Google Music, it was perfect. You could stream, or could buy and download mp3, or you could upload your library to it. 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.

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.

Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

#90

Post by PunchyHamster »

jonas21 wrote: post #40
pronik wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably Google's biggest failure ever was to recognize they've already had a social network: Gmail.

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]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz [2] https://variety.…

They had so many chat services over time it' ridiculous
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