How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds - Open RSS
How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds - Open RSS
Learn how one of the biggest tech companies played a major role in the reason many people stopped using RSS feeds
Content summary:
- Google removes RSS button from Chrome browser
- Google acquires FeedBurner and limits RSS
- Google shuts down Google Reader
- Google removes RSS from Google Alerts
- Google kills its RSS browser extension
- Google removes RSS integration from Google News
- Google's still at it...
To play devil's advocate, they kept rss feeds for youtube (albeit it not easily found). This allowed me to 'subscribe' and get updates via newsboat on Linux. When i open these links, a redirect extension in my browser takes me to invidious and noscript prevents google from pulling even small bits of data. Then i use yt-dlp with a sponsorrblock flag to grab the actual vid and watch it using mpv. Yay...but yeah, Google has weird loopholes they left open.
More obvious example of this irony is buying a Google Pixel and installing GrapheneOS.
What about the terrible clickbait headlines? When ever I have tried to integrate RSS it's been mind numbing to find real content.
This is the reason why I stopped using RSS (for news). When they shut down Google Reader I migrated to Feedly instead, but over time I started to unsubscribe from news sites as I didn’t get the content I wanted anymore. In the end I stopped using it altogether because I saw no use.
Tbh same, the only real use I've found for RSS is for some niche dev blog posts or dev trackers (the few that supported RSS at least) so I can have them all in the same place and don't have to check manually since they don't post often. Everything else was just bloated mess of shitty news articles with no real discoverability, just chronological spam. Then again I have the same issue with mastodon so it might be a me issue.
I also had issues finding proper tools to handle RSS. The few commonly suggested ones weren't free or even required a subscription, I ended up installing fluent reader but it's very barebones and finnicky, just the action of moving the source from one category to another takes a dozen clicks through unintuitive menus.
What about it? That's a general issue, on websites just like on feeds.