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.
How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
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Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#42Just 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
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.
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#43I 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.
RSS is a free way to reach almost no one.
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#44I 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.
That said, stuff like BBC actually does maintain an RSS feed: https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was a great example of being evil -- they reduced user choice while pushing an inferior product.
And then killed it too. They killed a tool people loved to promote a tool people didn't want to adopt, and in the end both ended up dead.
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.
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#46Facebook IMO was more culpable.
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#47You 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..…
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.
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#48The 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.
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#49Google’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.
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.
Re: How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then killed it too. They killed a tool people loved to promote a tool people didn't want to adopt, and in the end both ended up dead.
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 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.