How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
Google followed an Embrace, Extend, Extinguish pattern to reduce RSS adoption over many years.
The article details six incidents where Google built RSS support into products (Chrome, FeedBurner, Reader, Alerts, News, and a browser extension), then removed or crippled it after users were locked in. FeedBurner's APIs were shut down in 2012. Google Reader was killed in 2013, ostensibly due to low usage, though an engineer said people inside Google had tried to kill it for years. Google Alerts lost RSS in 2013, was reinstated after backlash. Google News deprecated RSS in 2017.
The pattern is characterized as EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish). The author argues this eroded user confidence in RSS and pushed users away from the open web protocol, benefiting Google's ad-driven, centralized model.
What commenters are saying
The dominant sentiment is anger and betrayal, especially over Google Reader's shutdown, which many saw as the moment Google tipped from trustworthy to "kinda evil."
Commenters debate Google's motive: several point to ad revenue and the desire to push users toward Google+, an inferior product that also died. One insider notes they never understood why Reader wasn't folded into G+. Another recalls that exiled dissident journalists visiting Google in 2013 raised Reader's shutdown as their first complaint. A few mention successful self-hosted RSS replacements like FreshRSS.