How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

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.

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.

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.

No you don't need Mullvad VPN to use Mullvad Browser.

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...

Hey, that's not fair! It also had nine year olds who bought a book about HTML and made shitty sites on Geocities!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...)

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

But until that happens, ads fill a middle ground: users don't want to pay and creators want to be paid.

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.

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