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.
drnick1 22 hours ago [-]
> 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.
mschild 22 hours ago [-]
> 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.
cwnyth 21 hours ago [-]
There are dozens of us. Maybe one day people will realize how much better Firefox is now and how nicer the web can be with no ads.
anonymousiam 18 hours ago [-]
It's not just a better user experience. It also addresses the security issues.
Blocking ads will also prevent malware scripts, unscrupulous information collection, and deceptive virus infection messages. I've got friends who've been infected because they believed the popup that told them their computer had a virus, and they needed to click the link to remove it.
endless_smash 15 hours ago [-]
Blocking ads is recommended by CISA. It should really be more mainstream.
Some demographics are heavy ad blockers, 90%+.
piguin 11 hours ago [-]
[dead]
jerojero 8 hours ago [-]
There's more to ads than banners and unskippable videos.
I bet if you open YouTube, even with Adblock and sponsorblock, you'll see ads. "Tech" channels are nothing but ads because all they do is present products for people to buy.
Even channels that do legos are ad channels.
YouTube itself has become a platform for serving videos that are advertisement at their core. These videos are popular, get good engagement, pay the content creators and come in cheap for brands. This style of "journalism" extends to many other platforms.
yaksha 3 hours ago [-]
Watching Youtube through Brave browser and I can't remember the last time I saw ads (ads by youtube, not by the content creator within the video). Twitch is different story, platform ads certainly play there.
Prior to Brave, ublock origin on Firefox provided a similar ad-free Youtube experience.
I don't consider ad content like the tech channels you mention to be a negative. Informing people about new products is a useful service. The ads that are negative are those that impose themselves over other content or mess with normal internet browsing experience.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
I switched to a Firefox fork, but recently opened Firefox itself and was horrified to see the browser itself shoving ads in my face. Buy our VPN! Sign up to a Mozilla profile! Did you know about the extension store?
Firefox (the product) and Mozilla (the for-profit company) are lost causes. Firefox (the technology) is still there, for now.
pmdr 10 hours ago [-]
> It's not like ads weren't a thing 20 years ago. Pop-up windows were particularly bad.
Google pretty much declared war on those back then, providing reasonable-looking ad formats that could be integrated discreetly on the page (and as far as I remember, they had a limit of how many banners you could show). I really wish we could back to that. Now they serve animated/video ads.
firatsarlar 14 hours ago [-]
So we have ad blockers, ad blocker detectors....
But apparently no ad blocker blocker. Should I continue?
Block the blockers by blocking the blockage... ouch.
ButlerianJihad 14 hours ago [-]
> ad blocker blocker
Manifest v3; Android
HenryMulligan 7 hours ago [-]
Huh? I use Firefox on Android with uBlock Origin and it blocks ads just fine. I concur regarding Chrome though and try to avoid it.
ajsnigrutin 11 hours ago [-]
There are adblock blockers... some sites detect the ad blocker and prevent you from visiting the site without ads... so yeah, you then don't visit the site.
drnick1 4 hours ago [-]
I just go back and ignore the website when that happens.
GaryBluto 15 hours ago [-]
Popup windows could be easily blocked if you knew how, whilst modern in-page popup modals are much more tedious to deal with.
paradox460 18 hours ago [-]
Funny, I literally just saw an ad for Firefox
crabbone 12 hours ago [-]
There's a difference. It was a matter of principle for a Web site (not) to use pop-up ads or ads in general. It would be highly inappropriate for a large and successful business to have (especially pop-up) ads in their product (unless ads was their business).
Another aspect of ads from the early 2000: they were individually made for particular places, rarely generating any controversy. For example, I used to be a moderator on a forum dedicated to ActionScript, and we had a sponsor, who, basically paid our hosting expenses, and that sponsor had a banner in the header of the forum advertising lessons in Web design / programming. The banner was designed to match the overall forum appearance, it didn't track anyone's browsing history, didn't collect cookies... it was simply a big and fancy button linking to the sponsor's Web site.
The problems really started with the "media buying" waterfalls, i.e. the automated ad delivery. Ad agencies automated their job by providing customers with (semi-, but increasingly fully-automatic) ways to design their ad campaigns. In order to make these campaigns at least somewhat effective, they needed to somehow automatically reproduce the situation similar to the one I described having in the ActionScript forum: they needed to find a good match between the audience and the ad, but they had to cut corners because of the automation and resort to the unsavory mechanisms of tracking users' behavior. The decrease in quality had to be compensated for by increase in quantity. And that's how we got here...
jfengel 22 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 22 hours ago [-]
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.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 20 hours ago [-]
can’t wait to hear about how some 9/11 truther blog was the cream of the crop. I’m surprised you can see anything through those rose coloured glasses.
the most charitable interpretation is that the internet used to more exclusively cater to your interests specifically, which i’m sure is true.
try asking most women about the internet then vs now. there are still scumbags, and one could reasonably argue that they’ve gotten worse, but at least theres more to do now.
pwdisswordfishq 17 hours ago [-]
> can’t wait to hear about how some 9/11 truther blog was the cream of the crop
Compared to the torrent of AI slop today, it was.
inigyou 9 hours ago [-]
This is true.
tombert 21 hours ago [-]
> It isn't just other CS majors any more.
Hey, that's not fair! It also had nine year olds who bought a book about HTML and made shitty sites on Geocities!
modriano 20 hours ago [-]
Those were just CS majors before they majored in CS.
KPGv2 18 hours ago [-]
Jokes on you, I majored in pure mathematics.
scantron4 7 hours ago [-]
I WAS THIRTEEN
fl4regun 19 hours ago [-]
i don't think it's fair to say it was just CS majors, I'm a 90s baby and i was on the web in the 2000s when i was in middle school, I still remember reading web comics and forums, messaging people on MSN and playing MMOs with online friends, looking up gameFAQs to get past sticking points. This could just be me, but it felt more social and personal.
0xDEAFBEAD 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah it feels like people aren't making friends online as much nowadays. Everyone is chasing clout, and if you get a rando who sends you a friendly message, it's quite likely a pig butchering scam.
bandrami 12 hours ago [-]
In the early aughts the web was largely anonymous (MySpace and Friendster were just starting out and Facebook was still a Ivy league only thing). We thought we wanted to be able to find and be found by specific people, but in retrospect I definitely regret that change. It was better when I was just a randomish string of characters.
gmadsen 19 hours ago [-]
The 90s were very different from the 2000s
fl4regun 19 hours ago [-]
the commenter was talking about the internet in the 2000s, as am I. I was only born in the 90s.
gmadsen 5 hours ago [-]
i thought it was clear we were talking about internet in the 90s, the original commentor said three decades ago...
JKCalhoun 17 hours ago [-]
Yeah, that was fine. It meant I got out riding my bike more often.
docjay 18 hours ago [-]
It sounds like you agreed with them from the other direction. “The internet of yesteryear felt more special.” - “Nah, there wasn’t as much slop back then and now it’s a crap pool that anyone can wade into and look for scraps.”
22 hours ago [-]
siren2026 19 hours ago [-]
That's exactly why I used to love tech (and working in tech) 20 years ago and why I lost faith in tech completely.
We went from a bunch of open protocols and decentralized web to a full closed garden gatekeeped by a couple mega companies. It is a sad state of the world, but the MBAs and BigTech won.
antod 19 hours ago [-]
yeah, when I first stumbled on to the internet it was all about the protocols and specific implementations didn't matter.
Then later IE dominated the web and hurt interoperability, but we fought back through the Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox era anxiously following IE6 slowly losing market share.
Only to find that the war had shifted beyond clients and standards support to the sites and the power of their business models.
And parallel battles for the old standards based DIY freedom lost to hyperscaler clouds and now AI.
All in all compared to that, losing Google Reader seems small, but it was kinda the nexus point at the centre of it all.
ethagnawl 18 hours ago [-]
> ... when I first stumbled on to the internet ...
StumbleUpon used to be an endlessly entertaining way to find new content on the internet.
mathieudombrock 22 hours ago [-]
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.
dhosek 22 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 22 hours ago [-]
Doesn't Firefox still have this? It's a special kind of bookmark folder populated by RSS.
defrost 21 hours ago [-]
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 :/
jjav 13 hours ago [-]
> So if I want to actually read the article I'm going to have to load their page.
Right here, that's how HN RSS feed works.
I only follow HN through the RSS feed. But it only gives the title and links to content and comments.
But for HN use case, that's ok IMO. Based on title I can decide if the comments might be worth it and follow the link.
singpolyma3 20 hours ago [-]
Also you can literally insert ads into the feed content
TheFlyingFish 10 hours ago [-]
Feed aggregators (inoreader, feedly) make this difficult, though. One request may end up serving any number of end users, so you can't personalize ads the same way.
Good, you might say, and I wouldn't disagree, but Google et al sure would.
watwut 13 hours ago [-]
Google dont care about ads on their page. They care about ads on google pages.
SanjayMehta 20 hours ago [-]
There are some RSS feeds which let you read even their paywalled content completely, without ads. I'm guessing by accident, not design.
onel 10 hours ago [-]
The main reason for that is because most of the interactions back then were based on Open standards: rss, email, etc.
If we want to get back to that. We need to start using Open standards for all things: chat - signal, social media - activity pub / at proto, news/blogs - rss, long messages - email
A public open standard solves most of the problems of walled gardens
emzo 21 hours ago [-]
Google felt a little more special. "Don't be evil" and all that. Those were the days.
Funes- 6 hours ago [-]
Ads have destroyed our culture. Just look at the fundamental change YouTube underwent in 2012 when they made all users eligible for monetization. It turned it into junk/infomercial TV.
port11 3 hours ago [-]
I don’t disagree with you at all, but it’s not like we didn’t have alternatives. We could’ve just paid for the content, directly subsidising the creators we like.
bandrami 12 hours ago [-]
IDK, I ran an RSS feed that had ads 20 years ago (it was a niche hobby blog and every fifth post was an ad for supplies for that hobby). It made enough to pay for the hosting.
22 hours ago [-]
user3939382 23 hours ago [-]
> the privacy friendly browsers just exist to serve ads when I think about it
Not LibreWolf. I’m also a fan of ungoogled-chromium, those are my two daily browsers.
schappim 22 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
timmg 24 hours ago [-]
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.
glenstein 24 hours ago [-]
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.
ksec 15 hours ago [-]
>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+.
Oh there were many post on HN about the politics of G+ at the time, how meta ( Facebook ) are going to crush them with social graph etc. And G+ was effectively its own little organisation within Google. I remember there were something about RSS they didn't want. But I guess I have to dig up my bookmarks to find it.
fiddlerwoaroof 22 hours ago [-]
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+.
smeej 21 hours ago [-]
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.
deepsun 24 hours ago [-]
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.
ianburrell 22 hours ago [-]
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.
smeej 21 hours ago [-]
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...)
jeffbee 21 hours ago [-]
I am not sure what you mean here. I just checked my uploads and all my live music stuff is still there, as well as obscure published records.
smeej 3 hours ago [-]
I had CDs from all my high school friends' dumb little bands. All gone.
I don't care that nobody else on YouTube would ever have wanted to hear them. I don't even really care that the band members themselves would probably be embarrassed that I still had a copy. The point of buying the disk (and uploading it in the first place) was so that I word continue to have access to it.
wildzzz 23 hours ago [-]
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.
titzer 22 hours ago [-]
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.
deepsun 22 hours ago [-]
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.
smeej 21 hours ago [-]
I trusted it in 2008 because none of these things had been around long enough to have a track record of enshittification.
abraham 22 hours ago [-]
I liked Google Play Music a lot but like any Google product it had a lot of issues. Still way better than YouTube Music.
underlipton 22 hours ago [-]
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.
PunchyHamster 23 hours ago [-]
They could have Spotify market and just decided not to.
jeffbee 21 hours ago [-]
> "I am feeling lucky"
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.
cmrdporcupine 17 hours ago [-]
> 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.
This is actually completely false. (Source: I worked at Google at the time this transition was made, though not on GPM or YTM).
Two completely different codebases and teams and in fact YTM launched missing a boatload of features that Play Music had. Including annoyingly the ability to use our own Chromecast features on the desktop/browser version. (I worked on the Cast team). There were quite a few angry internal buganizer tickets.
smeej 21 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but if the songs in your Google Music library weren't on YouTube Music, you just lost them forever. End of story.
It was the betrayal that turned me off Google.
Sargos 1 hours ago [-]
Are you talking about uploaded music? All of mine is still available and a lot of it definitely isn't on YouTube. Did you try looking for the uploaded music tab? It can be hard to find
jeffbee 21 hours ago [-]
This isn't true. I have tons of stuff that I uploaded that they've never heard of
smeej 3 hours ago [-]
I lost my entire local indie music collection. I'm glad your interests were apparently more mainstream, but I can't listen to my high school classmates' songs ever again.
firefax 1 days ago [-]
It was a great example of being evil -- they reduced user choice while pushing an inferior product.
InsideOutSanta 1 days ago [-]
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.
rcxdude 24 hours ago [-]
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.
ethbr1 23 hours ago [-]
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.
titzer 22 hours ago [-]
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.
esafak 20 hours ago [-]
I think Google's culture is to blame; launches are lauded, nurturing is not.
galaxyLogic 24 hours ago [-]
And killing G+ killed a community. I lost many could be real-friends, whom I've never heard from since. That if anyting was Evil, killing a community.
firefax 22 hours ago [-]
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.)
leoc 24 hours ago [-]
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.
al_borland 22 hours ago [-]
The mainstream ended up using social media to solve the problem RSS had already solved years earlier… it just had poor marketing.
A lot of people do use RSS without realizing it, via podcasts.
ksec 15 hours ago [-]
>A lot of people do use RSS without realizing it, via podcasts.
A lot of people were using Google Reader without ever knowing what RSS was all about. And when Google reader was gone, they stopped using it, Facebook then taken the newsfeed over.
Grombobulous 21 hours ago [-]
While that may be true, I just don’t believe for a second that RSS had any chance of becoming mainstream outside of techie circles.
“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.
zdunn 6 hours ago [-]
But RSS did become mainstream; podcasts are a normal part of media now and non-techies seem to have no problem finding and consuming them. They don't have to know about RSS.
There's no reason similar UIs can't exist for text based content. Google Reader, and then G+, had a path to becoming "mainstream outside of techie circles"
There's nothing special about TikTok's user experience. It uses an algorithm that isn't interested in providing a chronological feed, but I don't see why RSS couldn't be used to build something similar. Again, podcasts use it and it works well for that. The discovery aspect happens outside of the scope of RSS, but once you find things you like, RSS works well for tracking them.
The tiktok (or any corporate social media, really) comparison is also a bit odd because they don't need RSS, even if they wanted to provide a chronological feed. The platform hosts the content so it knows when there's new stuff and how to access it to provide to followers. RSS is useful in a decentralized environment where the content could be hosted anywhere and you want to aggregate it
Grombobulous 3 hours ago [-]
I think this is a lot like saying that SQLite is super popular with my grandma.
Technically, that’s true. But RSS isn’t the reason why podcasts are popular just like SQLite isn’t the reason why XYZ app is popular.
Some of the most popular podcast platforms like YouTube and Spotify are completely detached from RSS.
My whole point about TikTok as a comparison is that the centralization is part of the convenience and feature set of TikTok for the layperson. The interactivity provided by having a centralized platform is above and beyond RSS. Namely, commenting, posting your own content, etc. Decentralizing that type of interactivity has only recently been achieved by ActivityPub.
zdunn 3 hours ago [-]
> But RSS isn’t the reason why podcasts are popular
I don't understand the relevance of this point. RSS is infrastructure so why would end users need to know about it? They don't know about IP addresses when they type a domain name into a browser, but you wouldn't argue that it isn't mainstream tech.
> Some of the most popular podcast platforms like YouTube and Spotify are completely detached from RSS.
This is a quibble and beside the point, but neither of these platforms have podcasts. I can't subscribe to their audio tracks in a podcast player.
But again, I don't see the releavnce. Some platforms not using RSS doesn't detract from the usage that RSS does have.
> Decentralizing that type of interactivity has only recently been achieved by ActivityPub.
This was not a recent occurence. ActivityPub is descended from a long line of work (Ostatus, pump.io, etc) some of which used Atom. Dave Winer (one of the developers of RSS) is experimenting with building a full social network on top of RSS. Podcasting 2.0 (https://podcasting2.org) is working on adding chat/commenting to podcasts. Your original assertion was that RSS can't be used to build something like TikTok, but there have been multiple projects built with either RSS or a close enough analog that show it can be done
TFNA 10 hours ago [-]
In the early millennium, I read a wide variety of blogs on art, humanities, and the religious denomination I was part of. This audience trended non-techie and rather elderly, and yet in blog comments readers would often reveal in passsing that they were largely consuming blogs through RSS. The technology was much more accessible than you assume.
al_borland 21 hours ago [-]
> 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.
pronik 24 hours ago [-]
Probably Google's biggest failure ever was to recognize they've already had a social network: Gmail.
jonas21 24 hours ago [-]
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].
They had so many chat services over time it' ridiculous
bandrami 12 hours ago [-]
Buzz was weird because its main impact was killing another Google product, Orkut
frollogaston 2 hours ago [-]
Thank goodness
abraham 22 hours ago [-]
> Google’s obviously fake excuse for killing their RSS reader (declining usage)
What's obviously fake about that?
asveikau 22 hours ago [-]
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.
dredmorbius 21 hours ago [-]
G+ plausibly challenged an existential threat: Facebook.
Reader had no such strategic leverage, at least to Google execs' understanding.
ethagnawl 18 hours ago [-]
Well, everybody _did_ use Google+ but nobody _wanted to_. I remember constantly finding myself redirected to it and them doing shady things like automatically connecting you with everyone in your gmail contact list. Also, if memory serves, they chose an avatar for me using Picasa or photos in my gmail or something and it was a photo of me without a shirt on.
frollogaston 2 hours ago [-]
They shoved it hard into YouTube. The comment system there is still broken to this day.
alightsoul 1 days ago [-]
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.
dannyobrien 24 hours ago [-]
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.
thataccount 24 hours ago [-]
But they totally used Google wave. It was/is the future.
mapt 22 hours ago [-]
You mean Google Wave? Or Google Metaverse?
charcircuit 23 hours ago [-]
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.
betenoire 1 days ago [-]
Google Reader going away felt like the beginning of the end the internet as I knew it. I miss websites
adamm255 1 days ago [-]
"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.
danesparza 1 days ago [-]
I'm still bitter about Google Reader going away. I endorse this sentiment.
gertlex 1 days ago [-]
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.
fsflover 23 hours ago [-]
What prevents you from using RSS now? Outsourcing your RSS feed to a megacorp sounds like a horrible idea.
inigyou 22 hours ago [-]
Who do you outsource yours to, or do you read with curl?
frollogaston 2 hours ago [-]
There have been many RSS aggregators since before Google Reader existed, most of them local
al_borland 22 hours ago [-]
I use NetNewsWire. It’s free, open-source, and explicitly says not to send money.
> First thing: don’t send money. This app is written for love, not money. :)
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.
betenoire 5 hours ago [-]
Same, I was one of them, too. It used to feel like a place you'd discover things. Now we are led to them.
konsalexee 1 days ago [-]
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.
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.
venusenvy47 23 hours ago [-]
No Android or Windows availability?
richie_adler 22 hours ago [-]
What's the Android option?
carlosjobim 24 hours ago [-]
And he includes a Safari plugin to get an RSS button back into the interface for easy subscribing (on Mac).
frollogaston 2 hours ago [-]
Cause and effect seem reversed here. The feed aggregator is the most easily replaceable part of RSS, so if RSS were actually popular, it shouldn't have even mattered that Google killed Reader or those Chrome features. The harder part is getting RSS content, and YouTube is one big hold-out supporting that.
dabinat 24 hours ago [-]
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.
tombert 24 hours ago [-]
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.
RSS is a free way to reach content genuinely created for users, not for profit.
johanyc 2 hours ago [-]
I think simply because they are not aware of RSS
wildzzz 22 hours ago [-]
Because you can't serve ads as nicely over RSS
zdunn 6 hours ago [-]
Aren't the ads already on the webpage? If the RSS contains snippets of the pages and I have to navigate to the page to view the article, then I see your ads.
Also, can't the ads be a part of the feed just as nicely as the articles? What's stopping publishers from inserting ads as items in the feed?
fragmede 6 hours ago [-]
Can't get the same metrics off the ads in an RSS feed. Companies, like people, are cheap so they don't want to spend money on advertising that doesn't work. RSS feed ads don't report back the same way browser advertising does.
zdunn 5 hours ago [-]
That's only a problem for the engorged advertising industry that's been built up in the past couple decades. Putting ads in an RSS feed is no different than non-algorithmic ads on a webpage or classified sections in newspapers, which worked fine for everybody until targeted advertising was introduced.
Secondly, that just leads back to my first point. The ads (even targeted ads) are already on the final content.
I just can't view this as a failing of RSS. It wasn't intended to help publishers advertise, it was intended to help end users track the sites they wanted to track. I understand these are some of the reasons Google and other publishers disincentivized the usage of RSS but RSS works great for its intended purpose. I want more technology like RSS, not tech that helps publishers exploit us
mathieudombrock 22 hours ago [-]
It seems to me like the common pattern these days is to ask for notification permissions instead.
ikiris 21 hours ago [-]
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.
They moved the functionality from Firefox to Thunderbird IIRC, which seemed like a desperate attempt to get anyone to use Thunderbird.
culi 22 hours ago [-]
Did any other browser ever have this?
orzi 22 hours ago [-]
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.
throwawsy7273 21 hours ago [-]
Opera used to have a built in RSS reader that was better in my opinion.
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.
culi 20 hours ago [-]
Seems risky to rely on a browser as your RSS reader. I know you could always export your OPML file but not every reader seems to import/export that spec correctly
21 hours ago [-]
TiredOfLife 17 hours ago [-]
Somebody used Live Bookmarks?
sunaookami 14 hours ago [-]
Yes, me. It was a good feature.
GrayHerring 1 days ago [-]
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.
frollogaston 4 hours ago [-]
I remember in middle school we had to do a preso on a web technology. I chose RSS. Nobody had heard of it before. After seeing my preso, nobody cared.
I stopped using it not long after. Think the problem is people don't care enough to put in the time curating a feed.
frollogaston 2 hours ago [-]
Oh also, Podcasts are RSS for audio, but the branding there is so much better that maybe they should've called text RSS "Podcasts" too.
carlosjobim 24 hours ago [-]
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.
bartread 22 hours ago [-]
> 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.
logn 23 hours ago [-]
And they shut down Google Podcasts, migrating it to YouTube Music. The podcast ecosystem is open and RSS-based. YouTube Music is closed.
jillesvangurp 13 hours ago [-]
Fun fact, youtube channels have proper Atom feeds that you can subscribe to from most feed readers out there.
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.
mattsimpson 1 days ago [-]
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.
glenstein 24 hours ago [-]
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.
pss314 16 hours ago [-]
EFF recently pointed out to some RSS feed readers as part of below article:
To be fair: youtube is one of the very few social media sites that still support RSS.
lylo 14 hours ago [-]
RSS is a wonder, but given that it removes any opportunity for ads and monetisation you can see why the powers that be at Google might want to kill it. Still, it lives on but only in our geek circles.
I run my own RSS reader product (feedgrab.net) and one thing I’ve learned is that there are plenty of sites that serve RSS yet block bots from reading it (ie. RSS crawlers!!).
Not sure what needs to happen to make RSS more popular again - there are loads of feed readers and most blog/news sites support it. Maybe it’s just too complicated for the masses? I tried to address this in Feedgrab with a “Discover” approach which I think could help, but I need to put more effort into the directory.
Also, let’s not forget social media’s role in killing it.
blackqueeriroh 4 hours ago [-]
There are far, far more RSS feeds today than there were when Google Reader died.
Google has not destroyed adoption of RSS feeds at all.
gkoberger 22 hours ago [-]
Okay bear with me here.
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.
adolph 22 hours ago [-]
> 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.
gkoberger 22 hours ago [-]
For what it's worth, and there's lots of reasons this hasn't and won't happen, I think micropayments are the solution here.
But until that happens, ads fill a middle ground: users don't want to pay and creators want to be paid.
adolph 2 hours ago [-]
The upper level of YouTube creators use direct product placement in their videos. This is direct content and ad integration that could be part of the content delivered via RSS as opposed to tracking systems and generic ad placement that cannot.
The recent @patio11 Complex Systems podcast lays out how it works:
I agree (although I do find ad breaks in text to undermine the content more than visual mediums, for whatever reason).
But RSS made tracking very hard. And while I know that's your point (not wanting to be tracked), one reason it works in YouTube videos is there's a lot of analytics that can be used to advocate for rates (and track what's skipped, what's watched, etc).
colesantiago 22 hours ago [-]
So what is the solution here other than ads?
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.
throwawsy7273 21 hours ago [-]
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.
jll29 23 hours ago [-]
Let's make sure Ladybird will have good RSS and Atom feed support, then that'll settle things.
monksy 1 days ago [-]
What did Google benefit from killing rss? Seems like that would help engagement on the web in general.
tommek4077 1 days ago [-]
You couldnt put ads that easily in rss feeds.
InsideOutSanta 1 days ago [-]
It's a decentralized solution in a world where google wants everything to go through google.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
They could've added a Google-only feed type to Reader and encouraged authors to migrate to it using EEE. This is exactly what they tried to do with Usenet via Google Groups. (Google is now banned from Usenet)
goldenarm 1 days ago [-]
They killed greader and RSS to push Google+, which was a brilliant decision.
waqasx 21 hours ago [-]
Subscribing to RSS creates a p2p web over http. It cuts out the middleman. Who is the biggest middleman of the internet?
danesparza 1 days ago [-]
Ad revenue.
1 days ago [-]
1 days ago [-]
encrypted_bird 19 hours ago [-]
Fun Fact: Most, if not all, YouTube channels automatically have an RSS feed. That's what I use to follow channels I like. No Google account necessary.
ramijames 22 hours ago [-]
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.
pmdr 9 hours ago [-]
Nowadays you have to get past Cloudflare to even see headlines.
smusamashah 24 hours ago [-]
When 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.
firasd 23 hours ago [-]
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
lylo 14 hours ago [-]
I wouldn’t say it’s dead. Rather, niche.
IndieWeb blogging products are alive and well. Google definitely scrapes and ranks (my blog gets good juice) and there are and increasing number of aggregators like Kagi small web, bubbles.town, ooh.directory.
delduca 23 hours ago [-]
Not sure if true, but said thousands times on HN. The reason to kill google reader was some trouble upgrading dependencies on it (borg)
arjie 19 hours ago [-]
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.
fiatpandas 23 hours ago [-]
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.
cft 23 hours ago [-]
No, because it's not cross platform, it doesn't take you outside of a Google product
tripleee 22 hours ago [-]
I'm visiting this exact thread from an RSS feed.. it's there and great to use
Icarusfoundyou 21 hours ago [-]
Same, using newsboat as my reader.
ashu1461 22 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 22 hours ago [-]
Compared to websites that is an incredible paucity of surveillance data. Just email address? That's all?
ashu1461 21 hours ago [-]
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
0xDEAFBEAD 20 hours ago [-]
Interestingly I think Google's mishandling of RSS created an opening for Substack, which famously allows authors to export their mailing list at any time.
lylo 14 hours ago [-]
Substack provides RSS too which is nice
Animats 22 hours ago [-]
This is why Google's browser business needs to be separated from Google's search business, as illegal vertical integration under antitrust law.
LIMEVINCE 21 hours ago [-]
Google had announced RSS support for Chrome back in 2021 and by the time this article was written in 2023 people were still waiting...
Kalabasa 19 hours ago [-]
It was actually implemented the same year as that announcement
It was Chrome mobile only afaik. And yeah it was also silently killed.
If you are already using agentic tools, making them crawl and summarize the news with some RSS feeds is super useful. If you use a vector database to store your feeds, you can do RAG against that content as well. Super useful for lots of things if you haven't tried this. This is one of those things that non technical users would be doing if only they knew how to do that.
You don't need social networks with their AI filtering any more if you have that. That stuff just became obsolete. People just haven't figured that out yet. Including most people that actually do use RSS readers.
Terge Mathiesen with brilliant asides like<Terje.Mathisen "almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching" and with surprising insights into bisection bandwidth.
Intelligent discussions now happen on closed forums. My people have moved to mailing lists like arch-general@lists.archlinux.org, or behind authentication firewalls in professional societies.
The public internet is now populated by the sort of people I devotedly avoid in real life...
These days most of the high quality material I read is on Anna's Archive.
casey2 8 hours ago [-]
RSS peaked in 2005 [1] so unless google has been killing it for that long the waning popularity is genuine. Or at least forced by a broader industry push for locked down feeds.
The spec is a horrible mash up and seriously needed refinement. It made it easy to kill
sylware 10 hours ago [-]
Weird.
I download RSS from gogol: youtube channel information. Why, because the real evil of gogol and its friends: the whatwg cartel. Their web engines are technical abominations they pushed down the throat of the whole planet, because they actually control all (including the SDK then the computer language). How? They break on purpose interop with small tech web engines, aka noscript/basic HTML.
What's really annoying are major authorities unable to regulate that, namely force interop with small tech (network protocols/file formats)... like they know but are careful not to do anything with a significant impact. Well, In my EU country, this is decided at the top level: prime minister and president and that's it: this is a sorta proof that matter is actually really important. Everything started to go wrong from my EU country gov of 2015/2016 since they 'forgot'(ooopsie!) small tech web engines in the 'master document'.
There is still hope, once small tech is added again to this 'master document' (web engines, currated subset of network protocols and file formats), interop with small tech web engines (most are EU) will have to be added, in 3 years.
tim-projects 24 hours ago [-]
Facebook IMO was more culpable.
22 hours ago [-]
Telaneo 21 hours ago [-]
Never forget.
croes 17 hours ago [-]
Many of the reasons are either a Google service removed providing RSS or Google killed a program/extension consuming RSS.
Seems RSS was on Google‘s life support all the time.
For instance the Google killing its RSS extension should be such big problem
I mean, Facebook acquiring FriendFeed felt at least as bad as Google shutting down Google Reader.
pipeline_peak 21 hours ago [-]
It’s not Google’s responsibility to put RSS into their products.
The only point the author made that fits the title is what they did to FeedBurner.
LightBug1 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, fuck Google for all of this.
That's my intellectually considered response.
Fuck Google.
rpdillon 1 days ago [-]
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.
LightBug1 4 hours ago [-]
Exactly the same trajectory / story this side. Tragic ... but fond of those hopeful / naive days.
vee-kay 3 hours ago [-]
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vee-kay 3 hours ago [-]
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EtienneDeLyon 1 days ago [-]
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amazingamazing 24 hours ago [-]
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.
8organicbits 23 hours ago [-]
I use RSS specifically because the people who publish via RSS are not trying to monetize their content.
amazingamazing 23 hours ago [-]
Yup, and that’s why it would never be mainstream.
shevy-java 1 days ago [-]
This is the Company of Pure Evil.
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.
Kuyawa 22 hours ago [-]
Oh come on, what's next? How Microsoft helped destroy Visual FoxPro?
Time goes on, things evolve, or are not monetizable so they're soon forgotten, or replaced, or improved, or... look a new shiny thing!
Rendered at 21:03:12 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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.
Blocking ads will also prevent malware scripts, unscrupulous information collection, and deceptive virus infection messages. I've got friends who've been infected because they believed the popup that told them their computer had a virus, and they needed to click the link to remove it.
Some demographics are heavy ad blockers, 90%+.
I bet if you open YouTube, even with Adblock and sponsorblock, you'll see ads. "Tech" channels are nothing but ads because all they do is present products for people to buy.
Even channels that do legos are ad channels.
YouTube itself has become a platform for serving videos that are advertisement at their core. These videos are popular, get good engagement, pay the content creators and come in cheap for brands. This style of "journalism" extends to many other platforms.
Prior to Brave, ublock origin on Firefox provided a similar ad-free Youtube experience.
I don't consider ad content like the tech channels you mention to be a negative. Informing people about new products is a useful service. The ads that are negative are those that impose themselves over other content or mess with normal internet browsing experience.
Firefox (the product) and Mozilla (the for-profit company) are lost causes. Firefox (the technology) is still there, for now.
Google pretty much declared war on those back then, providing reasonable-looking ad formats that could be integrated discreetly on the page (and as far as I remember, they had a limit of how many banners you could show). I really wish we could back to that. Now they serve animated/video ads.
Manifest v3; Android
Another aspect of ads from the early 2000: they were individually made for particular places, rarely generating any controversy. For example, I used to be a moderator on a forum dedicated to ActionScript, and we had a sponsor, who, basically paid our hosting expenses, and that sponsor had a banner in the header of the forum advertising lessons in Web design / programming. The banner was designed to match the overall forum appearance, it didn't track anyone's browsing history, didn't collect cookies... it was simply a big and fancy button linking to the sponsor's Web site.
The problems really started with the "media buying" waterfalls, i.e. the automated ad delivery. Ad agencies automated their job by providing customers with (semi-, but increasingly fully-automatic) ways to design their ad campaigns. In order to make these campaigns at least somewhat effective, they needed to somehow automatically reproduce the situation similar to the one I described having in the ActionScript forum: they needed to find a good match between the audience and the ad, but they had to cut corners because of the automation and resort to the unsavory mechanisms of tracking users' behavior. The decrease in quality had to be compensated for by increase in quantity. And that's how we got here...
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 most charitable interpretation is that the internet used to more exclusively cater to your interests specifically, which i’m sure is true.
try asking most women about the internet then vs now. there are still scumbags, and one could reasonably argue that they’ve gotten worse, but at least theres more to do now.
Compared to the torrent of AI slop today, it was.
Hey, that's not fair! It also had nine year olds who bought a book about HTML and made shitty sites on Geocities!
We went from a bunch of open protocols and decentralized web to a full closed garden gatekeeped by a couple mega companies. It is a sad state of the world, but the MBAs and BigTech won.
Then later IE dominated the web and hurt interoperability, but we fought back through the Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox era anxiously following IE6 slowly losing market share.
Only to find that the war had shifted beyond clients and standards support to the sites and the power of their business models.
And parallel battles for the old standards based DIY freedom lost to hyperscaler clouds and now AI.
All in all compared to that, losing Google Reader seems small, but it was kinda the nexus point at the centre of it all.
StumbleUpon used to be an endlessly entertaining way to find new content on the internet.
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 :/
Right here, that's how HN RSS feed works.
I only follow HN through the RSS feed. But it only gives the title and links to content and comments.
But for HN use case, that's ok IMO. Based on title I can decide if the comments might be worth it and follow the link.
Good, you might say, and I wouldn't disagree, but Google et al sure would.
Not LibreWolf. I’m also a fan of ungoogled-chromium, those are my two daily browsers.
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...
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.
Oh there were many post on HN about the politics of G+ at the time, how meta ( Facebook ) are going to crush them with social graph etc. And G+ was effectively its own little organisation within Google. I remember there were something about RSS they didn't want. But I guess I have to dig up my bookmarks to find it.
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...)
I don't care that nobody else on YouTube would ever have wanted to hear them. I don't even really care that the band members themselves would probably be embarrassed that I still had a copy. The point of buying the disk (and uploading it in the first place) was so that I word continue to have access to it.
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.
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.
This is actually completely false. (Source: I worked at Google at the time this transition was made, though not on GPM or YTM).
Two completely different codebases and teams and in fact YTM launched missing a boatload of features that Play Music had. Including annoyingly the ability to use our own Chromecast features on the desktop/browser version. (I worked on the Cast team). There were quite a few angry internal buganizer tickets.
It was the betrayal that turned me off Google.
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.
A lot of people were using Google Reader without ever knowing what RSS was all about. And when Google reader was gone, they stopped using it, Facebook then taken the newsfeed over.
“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.
There's no reason similar UIs can't exist for text based content. Google Reader, and then G+, had a path to becoming "mainstream outside of techie circles"
There's nothing special about TikTok's user experience. It uses an algorithm that isn't interested in providing a chronological feed, but I don't see why RSS couldn't be used to build something similar. Again, podcasts use it and it works well for that. The discovery aspect happens outside of the scope of RSS, but once you find things you like, RSS works well for tracking them.
The tiktok (or any corporate social media, really) comparison is also a bit odd because they don't need RSS, even if they wanted to provide a chronological feed. The platform hosts the content so it knows when there's new stuff and how to access it to provide to followers. RSS is useful in a decentralized environment where the content could be hosted anywhere and you want to aggregate it
Technically, that’s true. But RSS isn’t the reason why podcasts are popular just like SQLite isn’t the reason why XYZ app is popular.
Some of the most popular podcast platforms like YouTube and Spotify are completely detached from RSS.
My whole point about TikTok as a comparison is that the centralization is part of the convenience and feature set of TikTok for the layperson. The interactivity provided by having a centralized platform is above and beyond RSS. Namely, commenting, posting your own content, etc. Decentralizing that type of interactivity has only recently been achieved by ActivityPub.
I don't understand the relevance of this point. RSS is infrastructure so why would end users need to know about it? They don't know about IP addresses when they type a domain name into a browser, but you wouldn't argue that it isn't mainstream tech.
> Some of the most popular podcast platforms like YouTube and Spotify are completely detached from RSS.
This is a quibble and beside the point, but neither of these platforms have podcasts. I can't subscribe to their audio tracks in a podcast player.
But again, I don't see the releavnce. Some platforms not using RSS doesn't detract from the usage that RSS does have.
> Decentralizing that type of interactivity has only recently been achieved by ActivityPub.
This was not a recent occurence. ActivityPub is descended from a long line of work (Ostatus, pump.io, etc) some of which used Atom. Dave Winer (one of the developers of RSS) is experimenting with building a full social network on top of RSS. Podcasting 2.0 (https://podcasting2.org) is working on adding chat/commenting to podcasts. Your original assertion was that RSS can't be used to build something like TikTok, but there have been multiple projects built with either RSS or a close enough analog that show it can be done
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.
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
Also, can't the ads be a part of the feed just as nicely as the articles? What's stopping publishers from inserting ads as items in the feed?
Secondly, that just leads back to my first point. The ads (even targeted ads) are already on the final content.
I just can't view this as a failing of RSS. It wasn't intended to help publishers advertise, it was intended to help end users track the sites they wanted to track. I understand these are some of the reasons Google and other publishers disincentivized the usage of RSS but RSS works great for its intended purpose. I want more technology like RSS, not tech that helps publishers exploit us
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 stopped using it not long after. Think the problem is people don't care enough to put in the time curating a feed.
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.
Here's @realcountbinface's feed: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UClAxTtZ...
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.
Hate “The Algorithm?” RSS Is One of the Tools You’ve Been Looking For https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/hate-algorithm-rss-one...
I run my own RSS reader product (feedgrab.net) and one thing I’ve learned is that there are plenty of sites that serve RSS yet block bots from reading it (ie. RSS crawlers!!).
Not sure what needs to happen to make RSS more popular again - there are loads of feed readers and most blog/news sites support it. Maybe it’s just too complicated for the masses? I tried to address this in Feedgrab with a “Discover” approach which I think could help, but I need to put more effort into the directory.
Also, let’s not forget social media’s role in killing it.
Google has not destroyed adoption of RSS feeds at all.
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.
The recent @patio11 Complex Systems podcast lays out how it works:
https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/justin-kuiper...
But RSS made tracking very hard. And while I know that's your point (not wanting to be tracked), one reason it works in YouTube videos is there's a lot of analytics that can be used to advocate for rates (and track what's skipped, what's watched, etc).
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.
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
IndieWeb blogging products are alive and well. Google definitely scrapes and ranks (my blog gets good juice) and there are and increasing number of aggregators like Kagi small web, bubbles.town, ooh.directory.
It just seems too useful and un-derived to remain a Google-maintained feature for the long term.
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
It was Chrome mobile only afaik. And yeah it was also silently killed.
I guess the author didn't follow Google enough.
https://paavandesign.com/blog/how-to-use-chrome-s-new-follow...
You don't need social networks with their AI filtering any more if you have that. That stuff just became obsolete. People just haven't figured that out yet. Including most people that actually do use RSS readers.
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
RSS (and Atom) were too nerdy and the mainstream did and does not care for it. Google did not „destroy“ it
John Mashey would pipe in with old_systems_guy@yahoo.com (John Mashey) "I repeat the old proverb:"Money can buy bandwidth, but latency is forever.""
https://yarchive.net/comp/latency.html
Terge Mathiesen with brilliant asides like<Terje.Mathisen "almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching" and with surprising insights into bisection bandwidth.
Intelligent discussions now happen on closed forums. My people have moved to mailing lists like arch-general@lists.archlinux.org, or behind authentication firewalls in professional societies.
The public internet is now populated by the sort of people I devotedly avoid in real life...
These days most of the high quality material I read is on Anna's Archive.
[1] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=rss%2520reader&date=all&...
I've vomited better things.
The spec is a horrible mash up and seriously needed refinement. It made it easy to kill
I download RSS from gogol: youtube channel information. Why, because the real evil of gogol and its friends: the whatwg cartel. Their web engines are technical abominations they pushed down the throat of the whole planet, because they actually control all (including the SDK then the computer language). How? They break on purpose interop with small tech web engines, aka noscript/basic HTML.
What's really annoying are major authorities unable to regulate that, namely force interop with small tech (network protocols/file formats)... like they know but are careful not to do anything with a significant impact. Well, In my EU country, this is decided at the top level: prime minister and president and that's it: this is a sorta proof that matter is actually really important. Everything started to go wrong from my EU country gov of 2015/2016 since they 'forgot'(ooopsie!) small tech web engines in the 'master document'.
There is still hope, once small tech is added again to this 'master document' (web engines, currated subset of network protocols and file formats), interop with small tech web engines (most are EU) will have to be added, in 3 years.
Seems RSS was on Google‘s life support all the time.
For instance the Google killing its RSS extension should be such big problem
2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39493770
The only point the author made that fits the title is what they did to FeedBurner.
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.
Time goes on, things evolve, or are not monetizable so they're soon forgotten, or replaced, or improved, or... look a new shiny thing!