It also coincided with a persistent trend of HN itself no longer featuring random blog posts heavily but rather a) mostly popular news sites like NYTimes that finally started understanding the web demanded clickbait/Twitter-friendly high volume articles (where no one reads the article but shares the headline) and b) blogs that went viral via Twitter/FB/etc.
That was the new reality a decade ago. Social media apps was how you found blog posts, not RSS feeds.
I remember Reader dying and within a year finding a replacement but still moving on because the high noise-to-signal RSS simply wasn't doing it for me.
It's possible we all stopped using RSS because of Google but it's also possible we simply found replacements when prodded. Just like how us torrent obsessed pirates eventually moved on from harddrives full of MP3s to lazily curating Spotify accounts and from AVIs to Netflix. Google Reader was a far-too-early end of an era, but the fact we all didn't jump to a competitor like we did with Digg->Reddit was probably not just Google's fault.
EWh. There are still RSS alternatives and at least most sites (if by no means all) still have RSS feeds.
Now, you might argue that "But Google Reader was the de facto standard and mainstream audiences didn't know to just use something else."
However, unless they were reading RSS in the background through a portal like Yahoo!, mainstream audiences weren't using RSS long before Google Reader was killed (if ever).
Explicit use of RSS through RSS readers was always primarily the province of journalists, analysts, researchers, and various other folks who wanted relatively unfiltered from-the-source on specific topics.
It also didn't help that individual blog content has tended to migrate to publishing platforms in general. I still write a lot but publish on my "personal" blog relatively seldom these days because visibility is so much higher elsewhere.
RSS peaked in 2006 and has been dying since. I suspect it was from the rise of social networks. Though not a replacement feature-wise, social networks have been competing for time and attention from users since day 1, and RSS readers lost. Google Reader was too late to a declining trend, and it was just a matter of time before it was going to get killed off anyway.
Google Reader and RSS has outsize importance in tech and blogging circles, but as someone who was in college in the late-2000s, I count on one hand the number of people who knew what RSS even was. I'd say FB and Twitter killed forums and website comment sections.
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.
Did RSS ever go away? Almost all of the blogs I follow still have RSS feeds. Maybe I'm just in a bubble. I think the decline in relative importance of RSS is certainly real, but that's more an effect of people getting their information from more centralized sources (like HN).
For mainstream users, the function of blogs and feeds were subsumed by Facebook. For techies, self-curated feeds were dropped in favor of canned feeds from Reddit and Hacker News, sadly.
The result is that as content consumers, we mostly abdicated our discovery of content and people to follow to big content sites and their algorithms. You get just enough "good enough" content that way that people don't bother to be their own algorithm, discovering and curating their feed themselves.
I also blame Google because they essentially killed Google Reader (their excellent RSS feed app) because they had Zuckerberg envy and built Google Plus to be the serious person's Facebook. If instead of trying to create their own walled garden of content and social network, they should have cultivated the wild garden of RSS and made it friendlier for the masses. Now both Google Plus and Reader are dead. What a shame.
Still, RSS as a protocol for publishing and pulling information is not dead but its promise as the Operating System of All Connected Things didn't become as widespread and mainstream as its hype in the early days where every coffee pot and your apartment's laundry room were expected to have RSS feeds you could subscribe to.
I personally think something like RSS is ripe for a comeback (based on JSON instead of clunky XML). Tim Berners Lee is advocating for that very thing, bringing back a decentralized, self-owned web of content curated by curious minds and not by commercially-driven ad robots.
> Edit: Also, why do fewer and fewer sites have an RSS feed? :(
Bit sad, that. Somehow it happened that a critical mass of bloggers/readers moved over Google Reader while during the same period all those social-feed web apps kept gaining momentum, then Reader shut off.. things can change like that over a decade or so. A 20-year-old today was perhaps 7-10 when XML feeds were hot currency. I'm still content with my numerous working subscribed feeds in Thunderbird though, can't catch up as it is.
To avoid a thread filled entirely with confirmation bias, I'll post to say I used to use RSS extensively until about 5 years ago. I never used Google Reader, so the fate of that product didn't affect me.
Mostly, my appetite for news has changed, in that I went from passively consuming news to seeking out particular sites and reading more articles -- and also, because of HN, I discover more news than I could organically follow through RSS on my own.
I can share my experience on why I stopped having an RSS reader and keeping track of blogs, it kind of summarizes also some opinions from old avid readers I know.
TLTR: Lack of good content, and amazing alternatives.
- Huge backlog: I used to track 2k+ blogs on Bloglines/Google Reader, it was nearly impossible to read everything, but the collective mind of the internet made easy to keep track of what my close friends were reading using delicious and I could easily keep up with good content.
- Lack of good content: Once delicious was losing interest, I started to rely on Twitter to find good content, again unsuccessful.
Thanks, today we have Reddit/HN to filter this, but getting a click from HN won't make me "subscribe."
- Good alternatives for tech content. Today most conferences dump their entire collection on YT; I'd rather watch a 45mn lecture on 2X on youtube or listen to an excellent podcast than read a long blog post.
- Audibooks =)
In the long run, it's almost impossible for individual text blogs to compete with such social validated content and curated content.
I remember when Google Reader shutdown and I was outraged. Found RSSOwl and migrated all subscriptions tediously. Then YouTube shut down its RSS feeds and all I had left was basically slightly smarter bookmarks to a scattering of blogs. Then Firefox removed RSS. At that point, why bother trying anymore?
Entirely replaced by link-voting sites now, like HN.
Yeah. I think what really killed RSS was a change in people's behavior. Twitter, Reddit, and other social media sites gained traction as link sharing communities and RSS became less relevant after that. Instead of subscribing to an RSS feed, you could just follow your favorite sites on Twitter, for example.
But Reader _wasn't_ easily replaced by local software. They centralised social usage of RSS, then killed it. Yes, you can still run an RSS reader, but RSS and blogs as a a model of social networking? Never came back.
From my perspective, the RSS reader mostly killed Slashdot for me; Slashdot was great when it was able to surface things I normally wouldn't have seen otherwise. Once RSS (then Twitter) came along, the sites that were generating their own content were easier to find/skim directly rather than waiting for Slashdot to throw them a little publicity.
I frequent HN because it does serve that purpose that Slashdot once did - bringing content to my attention that I otherwise would have missed.
I think that, at least for young people, it is not as popular as it was for us older people.
Things like the death of Google Reader and web browsers making it harder or even disabling subscriptions to websites via RSS were a huge deal. Allegedly all of that was because RSS lost momentum.
People like me had to resort to use things like Feedly, but frankly it is not the same. I for one dream about the resurgence of RSS and making the web again a little less corporation-in-the-middle.
That was the new reality a decade ago. Social media apps was how you found blog posts, not RSS feeds.
I remember Reader dying and within a year finding a replacement but still moving on because the high noise-to-signal RSS simply wasn't doing it for me.
It's possible we all stopped using RSS because of Google but it's also possible we simply found replacements when prodded. Just like how us torrent obsessed pirates eventually moved on from harddrives full of MP3s to lazily curating Spotify accounts and from AVIs to Netflix. Google Reader was a far-too-early end of an era, but the fact we all didn't jump to a competitor like we did with Digg->Reddit was probably not just Google's fault.
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