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How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (openrss.org)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

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[–] Ross_audio 27 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Firefox has also had issues in this regard.

"Firefox's built-in support for web feeds and Live Bookmarks was removed with the release of Firefox version 64 in December 2018."

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacements-firefox

They pushed "Pocket" over RSS.

Now they're depreciating the Mac pocket app and it's clearly not going to do well in the future.

5 years of moving people away from RSS to another service, to then start to depreciate that service.

5 years from the major redesign of google reader from 2008 to 2013 and closing it down.

My lesson. Expect to change your software for the web every 4 years or so. If it lasts longer it's a bonus. But chances are if you make the effort to move to the best (and most recently developed) candidate every 4 years you'll be in a good place.

You know when software gets stale, you know when there are better options, use them.

Sometimes your current choice gets a new round of development, sometimes it goes stale.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I switched over to Livemarks which has provided an almost drop-in replacement. Looking at the low number of users of this extension, it makes sense they would stop supporting it to reduce maintenance cost.

[–] Ross_audio 4 points 10 months ago

Absolutely. The reason these things don't last is because it's not worth the investment to redevelop and maintain.

I'm just pointing out that's the reason to move to where there is investment and sustainability in the product.

Firefox cut funding for maintaining an option due to low usage. Speculative investment in a replacement fell flat.

Google cuts investment for the same reasons and that happens often. They speculate on a new product then cut it if it doesn't work out for them.

Neither company doing this is a bad thing.

The problem most people have is they are late to move to a mature product, which then having reached maturity is assessed as either a success or failure. Then due to low usage it's cut.

Then they're looking for the next mature product. Again ignoring sustainability. Which is then also cut.