We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution (opens in new tab)

This is actually ironic in light of popular HN sentiment in Google-related articles, where many seem to imagine Google acting as a single whole, rather than different teams working in their own interests and not thinking of the big picture. E.g. people in this thread imagining that "Google" thought about RSS support and made a decision based on advertising revenue (or whatever imaginative reason), when in fact the team working on the "DevSite" infrastructure probably barely thought about RSS at all. Maybe they should have, but the reality that RSS (unfortunately) doesn't matter much seems harder to swallow for many, than theories about maliciously breaking it.

And the culture changed at the same time. Lots of seemingly needless rules to protect rising fiefdoms that started the sclerosis that only got worse over time. Gamergate internally felt like a Civil War waged over Google+.

Google+ itself was the height of Google’s hubris, thinking they could kill a beloved product (Google Reader) to kill a different company’s beloved (at the time) product, Facebook. I remember being deeply disappointed with the release of Google+ like I was when the Segway was released. All this hype and promise for a secret product built with an enormous group of highly-talented people, kept away from the teeming masses of similarly talented people that could’ve told them that it was a dumb idea and here are the reasons why.

Really, if I had to blame one thing, it would be Google+ because of the corrosive effects of social media. Before Google+, my colleagues were just my colleagues who brought their whole selves to the office but we still mostly talked about work. Folks had mailing lists I wasn’t subscribed to where they would talk about their abhorrent political beliefs so I wouldn’t find out about them.

And then, all of a sudden, after Google+ came out, some guy I thought was cool revealed that he didn’t want women to be able have abortions. And some other guy was a randroid, hellbent on not understanding that taxes pay for roads. And on and on…seemingly everyone just spent a lot of time being mad at each other.

Obviously it’s hard for me to point to a specific thing or time period, but the writing was on the wall in the early 2010s (to me, anyways) and I bounced by the middle of the decade.

I know they still dabble in search but that’s not the point.

http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2000/10/google-launches-self...

The majority of corporate deadlines are fictional in the sense that there is not a regulatory or legislative component to them, so it's easy to hand-wave them away and say that $THING should be a higher priority than the deadline. But that doesn't make them any less real for the people who have that deadline imposed by their boss (or more realistically, their boss's boss's boss's boss).

There is a freeze to the new infrastructure's product features until after the new year and we needed to get this in before then (we can land feed support without a product feature change)

The people I have working on the older infrastructure will be on new projects for our team in the new year.

1. Google Reader was not necessarily the best reader. The anger and frustration with the handling of Google Reader lies in the fact that Google Reader was the first reader from a major tech company. That essentially killed all the other innovation in this space and then Google Reader was itself killed in such a short span that there wasn’t an opportunity to have a smooth transition for the entire industry with it.

2. The one spade that did see a lot of competition growth and innovation were off-web RSS clients (precisely because Google Reader wasn’t a player in this space). But even these were completely handicapped by the elimination of Google Reader because Google Reader has become the de facto syncing solution for your RSS list and read states, etc. Again, the short time between announcement and end of life meant many of the popular clients couldn’t find a smooth transition for their users.

3. Google Reader had a social network effect component where someone could publish RSS articles they were reading and others could subscribe to their feed. In this sense it almost acted as an alternative to Twitter. The Twitter implosion has shown exactly how hard it is for alternatives to a social network to arise (because you invariably get many alternatives and it’s hard to get everyone onto one).

And the RSS reader social network space was nascent so the fragmentation as a result of the destruction of Google Reader meant a lot of people migrated to Twitter instead (Google had hoped they would migrate to Google+ instead but Google+ was awful so that didn’t happen).

No FTP, RSS, etc.

For me it shows an alert asking if I want to subscribe in my installed feed reader.

Opera (my main browser back then) use to have so much stuff built in (RSS, email, IRC, note taking, mouse gestures). Chrome use to have a resizable extension bar recently. OneNote use to have a more colorful and compact UI. Start menu and taskbar used to be useful before windows 11/10/8.

Reminds of an article posted here about removing less used keys/letters from keyboard. https://www.marginalia.nu/log/48-i-have-no-capslock/

So not saying Vivaldi's RSS is bad, mostly want to mention that Thunderbird can do RSS too, if one happens to use it anyway.

https://mastodon.social/@bramus@front-end.social/11144816695...

[1] https://www.saltydog-grrr.com/category/crisps

that’s the world Google wants. Money sloshing around the system and them getting a cut each time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeedBurner

I don't think Google's fear is who's in control of any one particular RSS. I think Google's fear is what if people realize that, for the purposes of subscribing to updates from a source, RSS is objectively better than Google. They're afraid of losing the mindshare of being the unquestionably better option for everything.

(Ok, you and I are probably not the most "mainstream" people in the world, but what I mean is these ideas aren't understood exclusively by antitrust lawyers anymore)

Companies are catching up too though. Google coaches its employees on what language to use internally.

So they have some stupid conversation like “patching the rss code will take 5 units of labor, but I want to cyberdize the whoozit that also takes 5 units. Does anyone even care about rss and use it? Oh the analytics show zero. Let’s de prioritize that.”

I think the bigger problem is people on the team not using rss and knowing this is super dumb. And PMs now knowing the world their metrics don’t track.

Seems to kind with google once being great and now full of fat rich peoples’ kids just riding the slow and gradual suck. (Based on the theory that smart people have weak, pampered kids; then weak kids get destroyed by jerk fascists; then jerk fascists get overturned by smart people and the cycle completes).

Of course the dumb kids think they are geniuses because their parents are part. And the parents want to pretend their kids are smart. Etc etc

Facebook did that with emails - slowly remove all the content to turn them into traffic generators for the feed team.

Hilariously when they launched workplace, the corporate productive product, they did the same thing, viciously spamming you with emails that have the first 15 characters of the workplace post that triggered them (and 2 more for the notification and every comment).

zero respect for your time, everything must drive traffic.

In the real world, the options aren't just an RSS feed vs. "load the page daily". Readers also come from search engines, social media, link aggregators and non-RSS news feeds.

If it was the latter, it's almost certainly a cynical drive to get more 'page impressions' by making people visit the actual website to read the blog posts.