I still miss Google Reader
And the internet as a whole moving away from RSS feeds in general is also not helpful
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 could’ve had basically Reddit if they added a way to have comments in Google reader. Then again, they would’ve never invested in moderation, so it probably would’ve turned into a shitheap.
they would’ve never invested in moderation, so it probably would’ve turned into a shitheap.
i.e., basically Reddit!
Google+ could have been successful to a degree, in terms of features it was an improvement over Facebook in several ways. The problem was the invite only launch.
The invite period worked for Gmail because it was still interoperable with other email services, and made getting a Gmail address seem exclusive and desirable. Making a walled garden social network invite only, however, just lead to it being empty. Most who did sign up looked around for a few minutes then went back to Facebook.
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).
Reddit still provides RSS for every feed page as far as I know. Users, subreddits, etc. For example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lemmy/.rss
RIP Aaron Swartz
Just to add, while I don’t think they’re the cause of the decline of RSS on the web, Apple hasn’t entirely helped here either. They did some great work adding RSS support to both their Mail.app client and Safari, only to remove them a few releases later.
I just went back to RSS after some years and it’s just as good as I remember it.
Thankfully all the sites I follow still publish their RSS feeds. I fear the day when they start dropping off.
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.
I’ve been using RSS for literally 18 years and that has always been the case. News sites make money by advertising, they get no advertising if you just read the RSS feed, so they give you a snippet.
It would be nice if every site was like Arstechnica and gave you a full text ad free RSS feed when you pay to subscribe.
Why not? That’s based on the current system of websites loading in third party ad providers. If you include the ads in the article/have sponsors etc. they will come through the rss.
It’s not perfect, but newsletters are making do it with just fine. I read a couple newsletters with them but make no effort to remove them like I do with web articles, because they are not disruptive, inappropriate, heavy or privacy invasive.
The difficulties in monetisation is what had been slowly killing RSS support on websites. There have been services that have tried to solve this problem, one is mentioned in the article, but they don’t seem to have had wide adoption.
It’s not just inserting ads either, today it’s also the pervasive tracking that makes money.
RSS was great for things like personal blogs, but commercial sites came to see little value in it, and have been dropping it as a result.
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?
