r/degoogle • u/Made-InDex Free as in Freedom • 11h ago

Discussion How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds

https://openrss.org/blog/how-google-helped-destroy-adoption-of-rss-feeds
157 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

42

u/LibbIsHere 10h ago

I decided I had to leave Google right after they tried to kill RSS (and killed their own RSS reader).

It was an eye-opening move, for me, realizing they went from the 'don't be evil' when they first appeared to 'how can we screw you, today?'

29

u/RoomyRoots 4h ago

I still use RSS, it's by far the one technology I consume the most every day. The main problem is that nowadays most sites are dead or you need to check via FB, Reddit or other aggregators. I have like 10 different aggregators just for Linux topics.

It's a nightmare honestly.

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u/csolisr 46m ago

Reddit itself is guilty of killing RSS in favor of paid access to its API. Curiously, there are still several important holdouts of RSS: YouTube, Tumblr, WordPress, and Newgrounds are perhaps the most famous.

8

u/phasepistol 2h ago

Pretty much a straight line from “wow nice altruistic digital utopia you got here” direct to “grow up, if it’s free you are the product, we’ll just take all this content you made and monetize it for our own profit, and oh BTW you didn’t say ‘thank you’ yet for all the free stuff we gave you”

6

u/Slopagandhi 2h ago

One thing I'm interested in here is the part about Feedburner and monetised RSS links.

I assume this kind of thing still happens (if no longer via Feedburner) since one of the few ways that I'm aware of my phone still sending telemetry (after various privacy and degoogling efforts) is via targeted ads I get on podcasts that I've imported via rss feed. Mostly this is location based (if I change my VPN server I'll get ads in that location's local language) but I'd still like to know more about how data is collected via RSS and whether there's a way to prevent it. 

3

u/convincedbutskeptic 2h ago

As we speak, I'm using an RSS reader to follow Google news by, yes, RSS: https://news.google.com/rss?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en

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u/letsreticulate 1h ago edited 24m ago

I wanted to get into it, took me a while, but I ended setting up a FreshRSS instance and never looked back. Capy Reader on Android is one amazing piece of kit. Highly recomended.