Technology

The crazy thing is, they had a nascent social network going with Google Reader, populated by people who were engaged and interested in the content. And they threw it all away to chase a Facebook clone, which was doomed anyway.

They only thought they moved away from RSS feeds. A whole bunch of the internet is built on Wordpress which publishes an RSS feed by default at website.url/rss or website.url/feed. Which means a shitload of sites are running feeds even if they don't advertise it (or realize it).

The end of reader got me started on reddit .

And it's way better than social media

I dont know anything about RSS, it worth it to learn and set my own?

He was the main draw of Reddit and it hasn’t been nearly as useful for political activism since he left us.

Many popular sites have dropped it. New sites often don't support it in the first place. In cases they do, it's a truncated version. Only a snippet/topic is visible and rest relinks to a browser. It is still better than nothing but the halcyon days of RSS are gone, IMO.

For me, that already happened.

I had planned a train trip that started to seem pretty unlikely when the relevant union started talking about a strike. I needed to check the union’s site every day to see how the negotiations were going. Doing that through RSS would have been nice, but the site didn’t support it and none of the apps I tried were able to help me either. Do I need to craft my own webscraping code and make a cron job to run it every hour?

i miss reading quality cracked articles on rss. there isn't really any article-length comedy anymore anywhere is there. it's all dry stuff or deranged opinions

Feedly picked up where reader left off and is now way better than reader ever was.

Yeah google didnt help of course, but the internet as a whole pivoted from RSS. It still very much exists today and you have user friendly easy ones like feedly still out there in spite of the pivot, but the inability of RSS to go mainstream is more the result of how social media and apps dominate the modern web

I switched over to Livemarks which has provided an almost drop-in replacement. Looking at the low number of users of this extension, it makes sense they would stop supporting it to reduce maintenance cost.

Personally as an RSS user I dont even want or need it to send me the article. I almost always just click the link and go to the website directly. I think RSS could still exit as just a link aggregate with a preview. The thing that lead to the decline of RSS is that it was competing with social media and news aggregates like google news.

Setting up your RSS reader takes work. Even the super user friendly ones like feedly still require you to search for different sources that you want to add. In the old school and more pure RSS programs you have to manually find the rss link on a website and add it to your feed.

In a more open optimistic future of the internet this would be the way we get content. Exploring the web and adding it to our list if we want updates o demand. In the actual modern internet addictive monopolistic social media has to cater to algorithms instead or social media engagement(that often doesnt actually read the source).

Google not encouraging and getting rid of its rss content certainly didnt help matters but I think RSS is just a living fossil of a potential evolutionary branch that the internet count grown into but didnt.

even if it was only title and brief description, I say it's still a vastly better user experience to have a personally curated list of updates to websites you want to follow than manually going to a dozen homepages and dealing with the awful layouts and disorganization they inevitably have (in addition to ads), many of which don't even have the option of chronological view.

The Chief Enshittification Officer got wind of it and put a stop to that real quick

I am afraid this is a uno reverse card: if you were an actual boomer, RSS feeds would be your bread and butter. 🤔 You'll figure it out, eventually. I'm confident!