How low is to remove a thing then claim "oops we will". Really, what's wrong with just removing whatever they want to remove? Do they really have to blatantly lie about it? How's that helping?
bingo; you just found the kpi. everything needs a kpi.
Facebook did that with emails - slowly remove all the content to turn them into traffic generators for the feed team.
Hilariously when they launched workplace, the corporate productive product, they did the same thing, viciously spamming you with emails that have the first 15 characters of the workplace post that triggered them (and 2 more for the notification and every comment).
zero respect for your time, everything must drive traffic.
It probably is about analytics, you're right. But to be fair, maintaining RSS feeds requires some resources, even if nominal. If the usage of RSS is low or declining, the cost of maintaining it might not justify the benefits, leading to a decision to allocate resources elsewhere.
I find that rss output is just part of good architecture so it’s sort of something I’m going to make even if no one uses it. Because I want to have some static form of syndication that processes can check.
Of course there is some nominal cost to exposing the uris or something, but anyone complaining about this would be weird to complain. Especially given all the other odd feature requests going on.
Bro, what cost in maintaining? Maybe if you're building like it's the '90s and doing it by hand.
The static site generator I use (Pelican) can produce templated RSS feeds that are exactly to my liking. If I can use that off-the-shelf stuff for a small blog, then it's trivial to put together a template and plug in database data on relevant events. Could even just run a cronjob that tracks the site daily and forget about it, most people would not care.
More likely it is "analytics shows that only 0.01% of our readership arrives to us via RSS" or "an A/B experiment shows that the RSS feed only increases readership by 0.01%".
In the real world, the options aren't just an RSS feed vs. "load the page daily". Readers also come from search engines, social media, link aggregators and non-RSS news feeds.
I would guess that rss doesn’t show up in their JavaScript-driven web analytics so they mistakenly think no one uses it.
So they have some stupid conversation like “patching the rss code will take 5 units of labor, but I want to cyberdize the whoozit that also takes 5 units. Does anyone even care about rss and use it? Oh the analytics show zero. Let’s de prioritize that.”
I think the bigger problem is people on the team not using rss and knowing this is super dumb. And PMs now knowing the world their metrics don’t track.
Seems to kind with google once being great and now full of fat rich peoples’ kids just riding the slow and gradual suck. (Based on the theory that smart people have weak, pampered kids; then weak kids get destroyed by jerk fascists; then jerk fascists get overturned by smart people and the cycle completes).
Of course the dumb kids think they are geniuses because their parents are part. And the parents want to pretend their kids are smart. Etc etc
I have to imagine that for a chrome releases and developer updates blog that this has absolutely nothing to do with ensuring someone uses search or ads and more just plain priorities and no one bothering to add RSS after they upgraded the site. Occam's razor and all that
I think you're falling prey to Hanlon's Razor. What probably happened here is something approaching the following conversation:
$PM: Hey $ENGINEER, it looks like this "arr ess ess" thingy has very few users, do you know what it does?
$ENGINEER: Yeah, it's a web standard that publishes a feed of updates to our website. It's kind of neat actually, if you have an RSS read--
$PM (waving hands): okay skip the wikipedia article, that's fine; but does it generate revenue?
$ENGINEER (blinking): uh...no, it doesn't. Anyone can query our RSS feed and update their local cache of articles and read them later, it's actually really useful if you're ever somewhere without interne--
$PM: So we can't monetize this?
$ENGINEER: ...no, this is an RSS feed for a tech blog. We can't monetize this.
$PM: If you remove this and integrate $FEATURE on $PAID_SERVICE, I'll write you a better peer review this year. It's reducing tech debt right? This sounds like an old school thing anyway, I've never even heard of it!
Or maybe they gaslight that as the reason. Their blog post talks about how they don’t have resources and they are prioritizing.
So I agree the real reason is that google doesnt want people using minimally tracked file downloads and thinks they can shovel people towards their more data rich analytics and content consumption.
> I would guess that rss doesn’t show up in their JavaScript-driven web analytics so they mistakenly think no one uses it.
All it would take is ?utm_source=rss, but betcha readers would start stripping that, because once you've started abusing everything, anything will look like abuse.
Depending on the content of the RSS they were publishing it was either an exceprt or abstract of the article, or the whole article itself.
If it was the latter, it's almost certainly a cynical drive to get more 'page impressions' by making people visit the actual website to read the blog posts.
Not if you do things the Google way. What takes you 30 minutes takes them 30 weeks.
Google has two big strengths: (1) they build systems at huge scale and (2) they are wildly profitably.
(2) is also weakness because it means they can afford to have highly inefficient processes. It is the reason why Google keeps pushing trash software on the world like Kubernetes (takes that 30 minute project and multiples it by a lot all by itself) as well as cargo cult management processes like OKRs. (Ever see what happens to a startup that is just treading water when management stops everything and introduces a layer of meaningless paperwork?)
Exactly, thank you my friend. I'm happy to see that such ideas are entering the mainstream.
(Ok, you and I are probably not the most "mainstream" people in the world, but what I mean is these ideas aren't understood exclusively by antitrust lawyers anymore)
Companies are catching up too though. Google coaches its employees on what language to use internally.
> Google has an interest in our depending on Google to find stuff, so of course they see RSS as a threat.
But they historically had several feed systems [1] [2] which were fully under their control.
> Cue some "googler" show up defending this move and how it makes the world better.
Of course. 'We have a better system that uses 2FA to securely text you every ten minutes to generate a code that, in combination with a 16 character unicode password, allows you to check whether Google approved content has been updated.'
You forgot Feedburner that Google used to monetized feeds. Almost all bloggers I followed in Google Reader used it to track and monetize. Google had a lot of control over RSS.
I don't know how it is know but when I was doing a lot of SEO publishing 10 years ago Feedburner was the best kept secret.
People would always be complaining that Google wouldn't index their pages for months but if you: (1) burn an RSS feed, (2) subscribe to the burned feed, and (3) add items to the feed, the items would be indexed almost immediately.
> But they historically had several feed systems [1] [2] which were fully under their control.
I don't think Google's fear is who's in control of any one particular RSS. I think Google's fear is what if people realize that, for the purposes of subscribing to updates from a source, RSS is objectively better than Google. They're afraid of losing the mindshare of being the unquestionably better option for everything.
Walkers did the same with their crisps ("chips" for left-ponders), made them healthy by reducing the fat content, disgusting, like eating dried leaves. End result: a wealth of new crisp brands and people keen to try them. My favourite, Salty Dog [1], couldn't have happened without Walkers pissing on their own chips ("fries" for left-ponders).
It's not about features. It's about defaults. Google Reader was linked right there on the top bar of the world's largest search engine. No one could credibly claim RSS was dead or neglect/remove support for it in the next revision.
I don't understand why that matters? If 3 other people or a billion other people are using a RSS reading service, surely my own experience is the same.
You run a search engine and don't understand why defaults matter? Google pays billions to be the default. I don't understand what you don't understand. RSS was the default. Then it "died" (became non-default) and we got the Facebook feed and Twitter's toxic impression-pumping algorithms, and it's so much worse.
Journalists depended on Reader the way they came to depend on Twitter. They didn't move to another reader.
RSS feeds are still very much around regardless of Google's actions. I'm looking at it from a user's perspective, not the operator's perspective, at what service is being offered? My question was why google reader was good, not why it was popular.
As for my search engine, I genuinely don't track my users, so I really don't have the fainest how many users I have. 4 people or a million people use my search engine, and I make the same amount of money from it. If I want the search engine to do well, I have to use my own eyes to assess how well it performs.
I'd say more websites have RSS or Atom feeds than not, based on looking at the data coming out of my crawler. Google's devblogs just aren't really particularly important.
> My question was why google reader was good, not why it was popular.
Once you learn about Venn diagrams it's going to completely blow your mind. One easy first pass at making inferences as to best services is to use popularity as an imperfect first proxy. So if someone says that a service became a de facto standard used by all of the internet, it's one of the ways to helpfully frame the conversation about whether the service proved to be useful. Of course there will be exceptions, but it's one of those functional literacy things where everyone can understand the significance of why people would bring that up in the context of a conversation that ultimately was closing in on making assessments about the value of the user experience.
Google's RSS reader was simple, ad free, fast, had an elegant design, didn't attempt to push superfluous services or subscriptions, set a standard for accessible anywhere at a time when many popular RSS readers were used on the desktop, and, in contrast to most of the best services now around, was free. I would go so far as to say it was almost unimproveable because it had one job and it did it correctly and didn't try to do other things, which used to be one of the things Google did best.
And I feel like none of this information is new, hard to discover, controversial, but is instead part of the generally accepted canon of internet history. So it's a bizarre question to me, if I'm being honest.
Edit: regarding the prevalence of RSS adoption in the present day, it may be true that as a numeric total there are more sites using it, but that as a percentage it is down. The same way that a winning candidate for president from the 1940s will have fewer votes then a losing candidate from the present day. Numbers will grow over time just due to population growth. Or in the case of the internet, The growth in the number of sites. But to understand whether RSS enjoys the same status as a de facto standard it's necessary to look at more than just the numbers, but at the proportion of adoption today compared to the proportion as an existed in the past.
> Once you learn about Venn diagrams it's going to completely blow your mind. One easy first pass at making inferences as to best services is to use popularity as an imperfect first proxy. So if someone says that a service became a de facto standard used by all of the internet, it's one of the ways to helpfully frame the conversation about whether the service proved to be useful. Of course there will be exceptions, but it's one of those functional literacy things where everyone can understand the significance of why people would bring that up in the context of a conversation that ultimately was closing in on making assessments about the value of the user experience.
I completely reject this analysis, as there are numerous counterexamples of things that are popular but not good, or good but not popular. One does not inform the other, especially in this case where it appears to have derived much of its popularity from Google shoving it onto users by featuring it in their other services.
> Google's RSS reader was simple, ad free, fast, had an elegant design, didn't attempt to push superfluous services or subscriptions, set a standard for accessible anywhere at a time when many popular RSS readers were used on the desktop, and, in contrast to most of the best services now around, was free. I would go so far as to say it was almost unimproveable because it had one job and it did it correctly and didn't try to do other things, which used to be one of the things Google did best.
Now that actually answers my question, but not the question of why someone couldn't just copy this design and carry on when Reader was shut down, which seems like it would have been a recipe for success given the outcry and hunger for Readeer.
> And I feel like none of this information is new, hard to discover, controversial, but is instead part of the generally accepted canon of internet history. So it's a bizarre question to me, if I'm being honest.
Well as I stated in the original question, I never used reader.
> Edit: regarding the prevalence of RSS adoption in the present day, it may be true that as a numeric total there are more sites using it, but that as a percentage it is down. The same way that a winning candidate for president from the 1940s will have fewer votes then a losing candidate from the present day. Numbers will grow over time just due to population growth. Or in the case of the internet, The growth in the number of sites. But to understand whether RSS enjoys the same status as a de facto standard it's necessary to look at more than just the numbers, but at the proportion of adoption today compared to the proportion as an existed in the past.
Even looking at the proportion, it's more than likely still higher today, at least in terms of websites-with-RSS. The websites that tend to not have RSS are very large silo-like websites with enough gravity well to retain users regardless, but these website are by definition few in number and will not affect the statistics in any way.
In the past, it was more common with hand rolled HTML websites, that did not have RSS. These have almost all been supplanted by CMS:es and blog platforms that universally do support RSS.
>I completely reject this analysis, as there are numerous counterexamples of things that are popular but not good,
Yikes, did you miss the part where I explicitly acknowledged that there are counterexamples? And since you missed it the first time, I guess I'm going to repeat it again here for emphasis. Yes, there are indeed counterexamples. Broad brush inferences always have counterexamples, and nevertheless are useful indicators. I spent a whole paragraph talking about the functional literacy of understanding why it's a good first approximation. People drive Priuses, people use iPhones, people listen to Taylor Swift. And each of those cases there's a a Venn diagram overlap between popularity and positive user experience where the former can be a proxy for the latter. If you genuinely don't understand how that argument works there's a functional literacy issue here. Moreover, there are counterexamples but this isn't one of them! This specific case, is one of those cases where popularity and positive user experience coincide, which was the whole point to begin with. Being obtuse about how those are connected is just a waste of everybody's time.
>Now that actually answers my question,
Well the crux of this conversation has been that this is an obtuse question in the first place, and that your preferred framing of the question in terms of user experience to the exclusion of popularity was an obtuse refusal to understand the significance of how those things meaningfully overlap, and it was obtuse in the sense of ignoring a broader conversation about mainstream adoption of RSS. The conversation was about that but you wanted to specifically turn it into an end user question.
>which seems like it would have been a recipe for success given the outcry and hunger for Readeer.
Copies of it do exist, often with features paywalled. Part of the downward spiral from de facto standard to boutique experience.
>Even looking at the proportion, it's more than likely still higher today, at least in terms of websites-with-RSS.
However you measure it, it is no longer the de facto standard that it once was. You don't see the RSS icon next to the social media icons on websites. Google News, Twitter, and craigslist removed their RSS functionality, mainstream browsers have removed their built-in RSS functionality, and, again I have to raise the functional literacy thing, because look at what you're saying. The best justifications of RSS are this combination of scaffolding and duct tape about how if you squint and think about it you can still find it, it's just an entirely different universe than it being a de facto standard.
RSS is still very much around though. Most websites that aren't silos offer them. In fact, big problem is that many websites offer too many RSS feeds, and websites that don't need them offer them; makes algorithmic curation much harder.
More used to offer them than currently do. And the trend has been for sites that have RSS to remove it. So you're correct that RSS has not become extinct due to Google, it has merely contributed to lower adoption.
Google reader was the alpha and Omega of RSS feed reading, and it set a standard norm followed by the rest of the internet, and Google's decision to move on from RSS similarly was followed by much of the rest of the internet. If, in the heyday of Google Reader, you asked me what one thing could drive the stake through the heart of RSS, it would be Google making some choice to drive norms and standards of the web in a different direction.
I would say it's not rare at all. I collect a long list of RSS feeds too, and a lot of the time to figure out if there's an RSS feed, I have to install on an external plug-in, leave the site that I'm on and do a Google search to see if that same site has RSS, only to find it from an old tweet from 7 years ago, or an outdated web page that has links to RSS that amazingly still work. Or sometimes I view source and search for.rss or.xml. So the emphasis, visibility and discoverability has cratered. And the trend has been towards removing rather than adding.
It used to be a standard to have the RSS icon side by side with the Twitter and Facebook icons, but in the present day that tends not to happen.
Twitter itself used to have RSS feeds, Google News used to have RSS feeds, Craigslist used to, those are all gone to my knowledge. RSS tools used to be native to browsers, and now there are numerous RSS tools out there to manually build feeds to make up for the lack of feeds on sites where people want them. Magazines in particular sometimes don't have them, such as Vogue magazine. And you can look at the prevalence of searches for RSS feeds by users and see in trends over time that people are searching for RSS less frequently.
No. Many RSS feeds had plenty of ads, and most of them were served by Google. And many bloggers only shared headlines or cropped articles through feeds because they wanted to have visitors come to their pages and click ads. Google couldn't lose either way.
That's probably why they killed it—it gave the end user too much control over content they consume and how they consume it. And of course you can't tell what they actually read or when....
Isn't it possible to simply check when the request to the RSS feed is made? It won't tell you which posts the user read, or even if the user read them at the time of the request (I'm thinking caches), but it could at least tie IP or some other drive-by info to a rough idea of readership.
> People don't understand how much RSS is useful..
I understand RSS completely and the goals, but honestly? I don't find it useful at all. I'm always surprised how many people on HN claim to still use it.
I have the feeling they're currently in the final stages of development for an alternative and want to remove RSS from all their stuff right now to preemptively avoid people lamenting its sudden removal then.
Sadly yes, Presto died many moons ago. I still miss the old Opera, when it wasn't owned by a Chinese company and had it's own rendering engine. But building a browser is expensive, a rendering engine even more so. We won't pay the cost of developing software, so we can't have nice things.
Watch them slowly remove every RSS feed they operate, so when they come up with their own proprietary solution in 6 months nobody can lament their "sudden" removal of RSS.
I was wondering about that wording as well, it's such a weird way to word it. You had a feature, you took it way, and now you're working on a solution... for what?
Did Google develop a new internal blogging platform and just didn't get around to supporting RSS?
Why? RSS can be monetized. It was monetized by Google before they killed Reader to force people to use Google+.
Now, what's Google's goal to monetize social networks? They have non as far as I know. They lost all opportunities in the social space and they lost their lead in RSS. The Web lost too.
It can kind-of be monetized, but Google isn't just about monetization, it's about control. That's why we get stuff like AMP or more and more limiting version of Chrome pushed down our throats. RSS is way too open and difficult to control.
'can be monetized' isn't enough today. The modern internet is a shopping mall: Facebook Marketplace, Etsy, "tipping" people $5 on a livestream, subscribing to a paid newsletter or Patreon....
that’s the world Google wants. Money sloshing around the system and them getting a cut each time.
I tried using RSS Generators like https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/ and even a graphical one, but it looks like this isn't a static site but there's some sort of delayed fetch of the posts that messes them up. Regardless how much I tried, I could only get it to fetch the top nav bar. I don't really think first of intentional malice to spite everyone else too, but maybe this is the same reason their own RSS feed generator no longer works either.
Also, I note the wording of the error message, that they're actively working on it.
I feel pleased that me as a single web dev with minimal money and few smarts, has managed to successfully implement rss on all blogs or blog like things I've made.
Perhaps I should interview at Google and teach them my amazing solution.
If keeping up with Google dev blogs is important to you, at Monitoro[0] we support alerts even if the website doesn't offer RSS. You can also catch specific updates, for example if a new post mentions a Google tool you're using at work.
Feel free to get in touch with me if you need help or have questions.
They are “actively working on a solution”, because it requires a Google-sized brain and 28477382 work hours to maintain an RSS feed of a blog. What a silly company.
googleblog.com runs on Blogger so has full RSS support. Presumably these other blogs were using something "custom" and after some rewrite/overhaul RSS support didn't hit the priority line.
In a cohesive organization they would improve Blogger to fulfill their needs, but instead they just waste resources recreating a one-off solution over and over again.
RSS reader software won't be successful. RSS reader should be built into the browser and every time you open the browser, the RSS feed should be the landing page. Every time you open a new tab, it should show a minimal feed that can be fully expanded.
The web seems to be becoming paradoxically less and less machine/automation friendly. I recently had to modify 150+ accounts in a Google Workspace. Twenty years ago, I would be doing this in a Unix environment with a very simple shell script. Instead, I had to click-copy-paste-click, 20 times per page, like a monkey. I'm sure there must be some sort of API, but it would have taken 100 times the time it would have taken to write a simple command line script. In the quest for more and more human eyeballs, the web is becoming less and less machine friendly.
I doubt how many admins are comfortable with (or allowed to) using a non-approved third-party tool to manage their organization, despite open source and all that
> It’s about as non-approved as ad hoc shell scripts.
That's not a fair comparison. There's a big difference between your own ad hoc shell script (or command line or whatever) that you fully understand, and downloading and running third party code without any kind of audit.
Meanwhile, the industry keeps talking about "software supply chain".
`src/gam/__init__.py` alone is over 3 MB of code that's not from `google-api-python-client`. Combine all the ad hoc shell scripts I've ever written and it probably wouldn't be that much.
You can automate a lot of that stuff in the DevTools command-line, using basic DOM APIs. It's not ideal, but it allows you do to most of the things you'd do manually (click things, read text, write to textboxes) and it's easy to learn.
> The web seems to be becoming paradoxically less and less machine/automation friendly
Less distributed/democratized machine/automation friendly... But definitely automation friendly for giant search scrapers, with lots of compute, cash, IP blocks and AI.
I'd like to change that. I originally created BrowserBox^0 as a platform to serve "web scraping authoring tools". These tools are normally served as extensions, or even downloadable electron apps. But what about something easier to distribute, more powerful, more lightweight, and less beholden to walled-garden gatekeeping? BrowserBox changes all that, as it's clientless and runs in a regular web browser even on mobile. Anyone can build a scraping script on top of it, even from your mobile device while riding the bus. That's the vision anyway. But I got side-tracked by how the "embeddable browser" is a useful product in its own right. I still intend to return to fulfilling its original purpose however.
The key is to build a good "extensions-like"-but better-API atop the Chrome DevTools protocol and our BrowserBox functionality. We're open source so come visit if you'd liked to get involved or check it out! :)
User experience has long been superseded by developer experience. You can see it in how both camps operate, dev tools are snappy command line apps but end users get electron slop.
I think this site, is not well scrap-able without selenium. Google products however rely on web scraping because of Google search. It is a hypocrisy of sorts.
252 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] thread> Unfortunately, we don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're actively working on a solution.
Well, that certainly means they are going to have RSS feeds in the future. Right?
"Surely my user base will continue coming to the landing page of my website to check for updates every day."
Facebook did that with emails - slowly remove all the content to turn them into traffic generators for the feed team.
Hilariously when they launched workplace, the corporate productive product, they did the same thing, viciously spamming you with emails that have the first 15 characters of the workplace post that triggered them (and 2 more for the notification and every comment).
zero respect for your time, everything must drive traffic.
Google killed Plus, so it's not like when they killed Reader. They just like killing things I guess?
I find that rss output is just part of good architecture so it’s sort of something I’m going to make even if no one uses it. Because I want to have some static form of syndication that processes can check.
Of course there is some nominal cost to exposing the uris or something, but anyone complaining about this would be weird to complain. Especially given all the other odd feature requests going on.
The static site generator I use (Pelican) can produce templated RSS feeds that are exactly to my liking. If I can use that off-the-shelf stuff for a small blog, then it's trivial to put together a template and plug in database data on relevant events. Could even just run a cronjob that tracks the site daily and forget about it, most people would not care.
In the real world, the options aren't just an RSS feed vs. "load the page daily". Readers also come from search engines, social media, link aggregators and non-RSS news feeds.
So they have some stupid conversation like “patching the rss code will take 5 units of labor, but I want to cyberdize the whoozit that also takes 5 units. Does anyone even care about rss and use it? Oh the analytics show zero. Let’s de prioritize that.”
I think the bigger problem is people on the team not using rss and knowing this is super dumb. And PMs now knowing the world their metrics don’t track.
Seems to kind with google once being great and now full of fat rich peoples’ kids just riding the slow and gradual suck. (Based on the theory that smart people have weak, pampered kids; then weak kids get destroyed by jerk fascists; then jerk fascists get overturned by smart people and the cycle completes).
Of course the dumb kids think they are geniuses because their parents are part. And the parents want to pretend their kids are smart. Etc etc
No, I think it's a very deliberate choice. RSS is a means to escape the gaze of Big G. Can't let that happen
$PM: Hey $ENGINEER, it looks like this "arr ess ess" thingy has very few users, do you know what it does?
$ENGINEER: Yeah, it's a web standard that publishes a feed of updates to our website. It's kind of neat actually, if you have an RSS read--
$PM (waving hands): okay skip the wikipedia article, that's fine; but does it generate revenue?
$ENGINEER (blinking): uh...no, it doesn't. Anyone can query our RSS feed and update their local cache of articles and read them later, it's actually really useful if you're ever somewhere without interne--
$PM: So we can't monetize this?
$ENGINEER: ...no, this is an RSS feed for a tech blog. We can't monetize this.
$PM: If you remove this and integrate $FEATURE on $PAID_SERVICE, I'll write you a better peer review this year. It's reducing tech debt right? This sounds like an old school thing anyway, I've never even heard of it!
$ENGINEER (heavy sigh): Yeah, whatever man.
So I agree the real reason is that google doesnt want people using minimally tracked file downloads and thinks they can shovel people towards their more data rich analytics and content consumption.
All it would take is ?utm_source=rss, but betcha readers would start stripping that, because once you've started abusing everything, anything will look like abuse.
Both to respect the publishers preferences and it’s easier to cut and paste rather than edit the clipboard.
If it was the latter, it's almost certainly a cynical drive to get more 'page impressions' by making people visit the actual website to read the blog posts.
Google has two big strengths: (1) they build systems at huge scale and (2) they are wildly profitably.
(2) is also weakness because it means they can afford to have highly inefficient processes. It is the reason why Google keeps pushing trash software on the world like Kubernetes (takes that 30 minute project and multiples it by a lot all by itself) as well as cargo cult management processes like OKRs. (Ever see what happens to a startup that is just treading water when management stops everything and introduces a layer of meaningless paperwork?)
Cue some "googler" show up defending this move and how it makes the world better.
(Ok, you and I are probably not the most "mainstream" people in the world, but what I mean is these ideas aren't understood exclusively by antitrust lawyers anymore)
Companies are catching up too though. Google coaches its employees on what language to use internally.
But they historically had several feed systems [1] [2] which were fully under their control.
> Cue some "googler" show up defending this move and how it makes the world better.
Of course. 'We have a better system that uses 2FA to securely text you every ten minutes to generate a code that, in combination with a 16 character unicode password, allows you to check whether Google approved content has been updated.'
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGoogle
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Reader
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeedBurner
People would always be complaining that Google wouldn't index their pages for months but if you: (1) burn an RSS feed, (2) subscribe to the burned feed, and (3) add items to the feed, the items would be indexed almost immediately.
I don't think Google's fear is who's in control of any one particular RSS. I think Google's fear is what if people realize that, for the purposes of subscribing to updates from a source, RSS is objectively better than Google. They're afraid of losing the mindshare of being the unquestionably better option for everything.
I'm still angry at Google for killing Reader. It was the best way to consume content on the web.
I’m happy, it lead to an explosion of available readers, including many self-hosted ones.
[1] https://www.saltydog-grrr.com/category/crisps
That’s the best solution if you’re on Apple.
I never used Reader so I'm not genuinely curious, what about it makes it difficult for someone to just create a copy of the service?
Journalists depended on Reader the way they came to depend on Twitter. They didn't move to another reader.
As for my search engine, I genuinely don't track my users, so I really don't have the fainest how many users I have. 4 people or a million people use my search engine, and I make the same amount of money from it. If I want the search engine to do well, I have to use my own eyes to assess how well it performs.
Once you learn about Venn diagrams it's going to completely blow your mind. One easy first pass at making inferences as to best services is to use popularity as an imperfect first proxy. So if someone says that a service became a de facto standard used by all of the internet, it's one of the ways to helpfully frame the conversation about whether the service proved to be useful. Of course there will be exceptions, but it's one of those functional literacy things where everyone can understand the significance of why people would bring that up in the context of a conversation that ultimately was closing in on making assessments about the value of the user experience.
Google's RSS reader was simple, ad free, fast, had an elegant design, didn't attempt to push superfluous services or subscriptions, set a standard for accessible anywhere at a time when many popular RSS readers were used on the desktop, and, in contrast to most of the best services now around, was free. I would go so far as to say it was almost unimproveable because it had one job and it did it correctly and didn't try to do other things, which used to be one of the things Google did best.
And I feel like none of this information is new, hard to discover, controversial, but is instead part of the generally accepted canon of internet history. So it's a bizarre question to me, if I'm being honest.
Edit: regarding the prevalence of RSS adoption in the present day, it may be true that as a numeric total there are more sites using it, but that as a percentage it is down. The same way that a winning candidate for president from the 1940s will have fewer votes then a losing candidate from the present day. Numbers will grow over time just due to population growth. Or in the case of the internet, The growth in the number of sites. But to understand whether RSS enjoys the same status as a de facto standard it's necessary to look at more than just the numbers, but at the proportion of adoption today compared to the proportion as an existed in the past.
I completely reject this analysis, as there are numerous counterexamples of things that are popular but not good, or good but not popular. One does not inform the other, especially in this case where it appears to have derived much of its popularity from Google shoving it onto users by featuring it in their other services.
> Google's RSS reader was simple, ad free, fast, had an elegant design, didn't attempt to push superfluous services or subscriptions, set a standard for accessible anywhere at a time when many popular RSS readers were used on the desktop, and, in contrast to most of the best services now around, was free. I would go so far as to say it was almost unimproveable because it had one job and it did it correctly and didn't try to do other things, which used to be one of the things Google did best.
Now that actually answers my question, but not the question of why someone couldn't just copy this design and carry on when Reader was shut down, which seems like it would have been a recipe for success given the outcry and hunger for Readeer.
> And I feel like none of this information is new, hard to discover, controversial, but is instead part of the generally accepted canon of internet history. So it's a bizarre question to me, if I'm being honest.
Well as I stated in the original question, I never used reader.
> Edit: regarding the prevalence of RSS adoption in the present day, it may be true that as a numeric total there are more sites using it, but that as a percentage it is down. The same way that a winning candidate for president from the 1940s will have fewer votes then a losing candidate from the present day. Numbers will grow over time just due to population growth. Or in the case of the internet, The growth in the number of sites. But to understand whether RSS enjoys the same status as a de facto standard it's necessary to look at more than just the numbers, but at the proportion of adoption today compared to the proportion as an existed in the past.
Even looking at the proportion, it's more than likely still higher today, at least in terms of websites-with-RSS. The websites that tend to not have RSS are very large silo-like websites with enough gravity well to retain users regardless, but these website are by definition few in number and will not affect the statistics in any way.
In the past, it was more common with hand rolled HTML websites, that did not have RSS. These have almost all been supplanted by CMS:es and blog platforms that universally do support RSS.
Yikes, did you miss the part where I explicitly acknowledged that there are counterexamples? And since you missed it the first time, I guess I'm going to repeat it again here for emphasis. Yes, there are indeed counterexamples. Broad brush inferences always have counterexamples, and nevertheless are useful indicators. I spent a whole paragraph talking about the functional literacy of understanding why it's a good first approximation. People drive Priuses, people use iPhones, people listen to Taylor Swift. And each of those cases there's a a Venn diagram overlap between popularity and positive user experience where the former can be a proxy for the latter. If you genuinely don't understand how that argument works there's a functional literacy issue here. Moreover, there are counterexamples but this isn't one of them! This specific case, is one of those cases where popularity and positive user experience coincide, which was the whole point to begin with. Being obtuse about how those are connected is just a waste of everybody's time.
>Now that actually answers my question,
Well the crux of this conversation has been that this is an obtuse question in the first place, and that your preferred framing of the question in terms of user experience to the exclusion of popularity was an obtuse refusal to understand the significance of how those things meaningfully overlap, and it was obtuse in the sense of ignoring a broader conversation about mainstream adoption of RSS. The conversation was about that but you wanted to specifically turn it into an end user question.
>which seems like it would have been a recipe for success given the outcry and hunger for Readeer.
Copies of it do exist, often with features paywalled. Part of the downward spiral from de facto standard to boutique experience.
>Even looking at the proportion, it's more than likely still higher today, at least in terms of websites-with-RSS.
However you measure it, it is no longer the de facto standard that it once was. You don't see the RSS icon next to the social media icons on websites. Google News, Twitter, and craigslist removed their RSS functionality, mainstream browsers have removed their built-in RSS functionality, and, again I have to raise the functional literacy thing, because look at what you're saying. The best justifications of RSS are this combination of scaffolding and duct tape about how if you squint and think about it you can still find it, it's just an entirely different universe than it being a de facto standard.
Google reader was the alpha and Omega of RSS feed reading, and it set a standard norm followed by the rest of the internet, and Google's decision to move on from RSS similarly was followed by much of the rest of the internet. If, in the heyday of Google Reader, you asked me what one thing could drive the stake through the heart of RSS, it would be Google making some choice to drive norms and standards of the web in a different direction.
It used to be a standard to have the RSS icon side by side with the Twitter and Facebook icons, but in the present day that tends not to happen.
Twitter itself used to have RSS feeds, Google News used to have RSS feeds, Craigslist used to, those are all gone to my knowledge. RSS tools used to be native to browsers, and now there are numerous RSS tools out there to manually build feeds to make up for the lack of feeds on sites where people want them. Magazines in particular sometimes don't have them, such as Vogue magazine. And you can look at the prevalence of searches for RSS feeds by users and see in trends over time that people are searching for RSS less frequently.
RSS is a menace to Google's bottom line!
TheOldReader.com is also very good (UI is very heavily Google Reader inspired).
Internet users can't have nice things.
I understand RSS completely and the goals, but honestly? I don't find it useful at all. I'm always surprised how many people on HN claim to still use it.
Sadly yes, Presto died many moons ago. I still miss the old Opera, when it wasn't owned by a Chinese company and had it's own rendering engine. But building a browser is expensive, a rendering engine even more so. We won't pay the cost of developing software, so we can't have nice things.
RSS could be that solution!
Yeah exactly, what kind of bs is that
Did Google develop a new internal blogging platform and just didn't get around to supporting RSS?
https://mastodon.social/@bramus@front-end.social/11144816695...
Google management too busy doing evil
Now, what's Google's goal to monetize social networks? They have non as far as I know. They lost all opportunities in the social space and they lost their lead in RSS. The Web lost too.
that’s the world Google wants. Money sloshing around the system and them getting a cut each time.
Also, I note the wording of the error message, that they're actively working on it.
Perhaps I should interview at Google and teach them my amazing solution.
Feel free to get in touch with me if you need help or have questions.
[0]: https://monitoro.co
- https://changedetection.io/#features
- https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io
> Create RSS feeds based on changes in web content
In a cohesive organization they would improve Blogger to fulfill their needs, but instead they just waste resources recreating a one-off solution over and over again.
That's not a fair comparison. There's a big difference between your own ad hoc shell script (or command line or whatever) that you fully understand, and downloading and running third party code without any kind of audit.
Meanwhile, the industry keeps talking about "software supply chain".
> GAM is a command line tool for Google Workspace admins to manage domain and user settings quickly and easily.
I need this about once per year, but every time it's invaluable.
There is, but somehow, rather than being a workspace API, it's a GCP api ; and so if you want to use it, there is a big step to climb.
Less distributed/democratized machine/automation friendly... But definitely automation friendly for giant search scrapers, with lots of compute, cash, IP blocks and AI.
I'd like to change that. I originally created BrowserBox^0 as a platform to serve "web scraping authoring tools". These tools are normally served as extensions, or even downloadable electron apps. But what about something easier to distribute, more powerful, more lightweight, and less beholden to walled-garden gatekeeping? BrowserBox changes all that, as it's clientless and runs in a regular web browser even on mobile. Anyone can build a scraping script on top of it, even from your mobile device while riding the bus. That's the vision anyway. But I got side-tracked by how the "embeddable browser" is a useful product in its own right. I still intend to return to fulfilling its original purpose however.
The key is to build a good "extensions-like"-but better-API atop the Chrome DevTools protocol and our BrowserBox functionality. We're open source so come visit if you'd liked to get involved or check it out! :)
0: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox