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…
It was the most brilliant bit of corporate skullduggery I’ve ever seen. I was dating a guy back then who claimed that he worked at the Big G and had developed a plan for killing RSS and ATOM. I figured he was bullshitting me, and for a few other reasons we didn’t work out. But as it turned out every thing he said would happen, did.
what is google’s motivation for killing RSS?
There was the perception that RSS meant that user browsing habits couldn’t be tracked. A feed reader would pull a feed but there was no way for them to know what posts people were reading and which posts they were skipping. It was a revenue sink. The push has always been for greater and greater granularity of what users were interacting with and for how long.
I’ve often wondered if the interim push for RSS feeds to only have the first couple of sentences of a longer post (forcing the reader to click on the link to the full article) was an attempt to mitigate this on somebody’s part, he never mentioned anything like that (it was my own observation).
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.
What about it? That’s a general issue, on websites just like on feeds.
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.
