> When did RSS go out of style anyway?

It went away when Google killed Reader. Reader had more or less killed off the independent RSS reader market. When it got shuttered, alternatives weren't well developed and people shifted more or less entirely onto Twitter. The Twitter shift had been happening already but the shutdown kind of forced the issue.

I think you and HN in general vastly overstates the gravitas of the Google Reader shutdown. I loved it too but the demise of RSS happened probably more because of people switching to Twitter, Facebook and others as their "aggregator" than by killing off one RSS-Reader.

The only thing which killed Reader was Google management trying to make Google+ popular. Reader was extremely popular (and well outside of IT circles - I still hear from librarians, scientists, policy wonks, etc. who are bitter about Google taking away their information filter. In DC it was common to see other people on metro in the morning with the popular mobile apps open, just like you now see the Facebook blue) and the social network there was quite active until the day Google shut it down and forced everyone into the alpha-quality Google+.

If Google had just added comments or other social elements to their reader instead of killing it they might not have missed the boat.

Instead they killed their popular Reader and made Orkut and Google Plus.

They did have comments and other social elements [0]. It was possible to follow people and share articles with or without adding your own note to it. They had a bookmarklet that allowed you to share any article, even if it didn't have an RSS feed. Their move to Google+ sharing wasn't exactly an improvement though [1].

I never got why people moved to Twitter, it wasn't, and isn't, as good at consuming or sharing content as Reader was. It's just one more step towards the more centralized web we have today, and hopefully we will move back to a more decentralized experience soon.

[0] http://googlereader.blogspot.se/2009/03/google-reader-is-you... [1] http://googlereader.blogspot.se/2011/10/new-in-reader-fresh-...

The same could kinda be said for YouTube. That is, Goggle had a massive and active community, but it needed some tweaks. Instead they build Google Plus and wait for they to come. We know that outcome :)

I think the problem with RSS was - and still is? - is the data it provides. A social network can harvest MUCH more data (due to the endless number of connections between "the nodes.") RSS is too old school.

Put another way, imagine being hired by Google - while FB and Twitter are taking off - and being told you're going to work on a new & improved RSS reader. That would have triggered a mass exit.

Orkut is older than Reader, and was killed off just a year later. I don't think Google ever really bet on it, it was just a 20% time project that grew organically.

I agree. I never used Reader and I think I hardly heard of it before it was shut down.

I wasn’t a heavy RSS user, but had a few bookmarks in Firefox – and the same thing is doable today.

Those services used to also carry RSS, but they silently removed them not long after Google Reader shut down. That might be unrelated, but still.

Not true at all. Alternatives were already available when Google Reader(GR) closed, i.e. July 2013. Inoreader, which was feature-complete in regards to GR, was launched a month after the announcement in March. That's why Feedly hogged most of the momentum as it was released in 2008 already.

I would say Google Reader's discontinuation actually increased the popularity of RSS. The protocol was big news for a few weeks, and it sparked a lot of new services which made news themselves.

I don't know whether feeds usage was growing but it was not comparable to social media. At that time papers were increasingly adding paywalls and didn't show any signs of embracing feeds any further.

Op's example is a textbook example of what happened to me. I used to have a lot of RSS feeds in Google Reader, when it closed I never moved anywhere else because at the time there wasn't an obvious alternative.

Why not just an RSS aggregator program / app? Like those which preceded and continued after Google Reader. They're no more difficult to use, you just add feeds and the program does the rest. And no login required.

It seems odd to me to take a federated protocol, centralise it in a proprietary system and then shrug and forget RSS when that goes away.

I was on Akgregator for years, then Bamboo in Firefox, now on QuiteRSS now that Quantum has killed Bamboo. All using the same imported OPML file of feeds.

> Why not just <overly simple thing>

Which self hosted RSS aggregator contains an easy to deploy, backup, and maintain ecosystem (easier than Dokuwiki), an Android and iPhone app, that all work synchronized together...

It's overly complicated to set up and maintain the infrastructure needed for most people. Time costs a lot.

Feedly is fantastic. Coupled with Reeder on iOS it more than replaces.

I'm curious about your comment. Why don't you use Feedly by itself? Why/how do you combine Feedly with Reeder?

Feedly's mobile app has pretty bad UX (or at least that's been my experience every time I try installing it on Android).

For example, in the article list view, there's a single basically-identical swipe left/right gesture to...

  * mark single article as read
  * mark single article as unread
  * mark all articles on page as read
  * mark all articles on page as unread

The difference between marking a single article and marking all articles seems to be based on how far you've swiped, but if (for example) you don't release your swipe and keep moving your finger further after it's marked all as read, it suddenly does the opposite and marks all articles as unread. The direction of the swipe (left or right) doesn't seem to control whether you're marking read/unread -- it's (in my experience) been completely arbitrary what it decides to do, regardless of swipe direction. It's ridiculous how painful it is, and it's basically been this way for as long as I can remember.

The app has really poor bulk management of articles, so I just turn to other apps. Currently I'm using News+, which has superior bulk management capabilities... but it hasn't been updated in forever (and is buggy in other ways).

Reeder works with multiple backend providers, Feedly being one of them. I do the same, have had a great experience.

Reeder's app feels less heavy than the feedly equivalent. That said, it's what you feel familiar with! I can parse 200-300 posts in a 20-30 min commute and i think the ux helps focus my attention.

Google Reader wasn't just an RSS client, it was social. you could subscribe to your friends feeds, see what they were interested in etc.

Google Reader was a social network around RSS

(I also think there was in platform commenting too?)

It didn’t had a comment system, but you could share an article with a comment attached to it.

Google shutting down Reader 'killed' RSS and made people move to Twitter? You might want to look outside the cage a bit, the world is a lot bigger. Neither Google Reader nor Twitter 'killed' RSS (a syndication protocol, not a hosted service).

I never used Google Reader nor Twitter but RSS has seen plenty of use here, from following commits to projects to simply following news sources. I currently use the News reader [1] for Nextcloud, sometimes in combination with one of the Android apps compatible with the former. Works fine, no Google nor Twitter needed, no spurious censorship, no centralised data mining.

[1] https://github.com/nextcloud/news

Interesting what would happen if Google were to bring back reader? (given that google+ has flopped completely, they might want to get some following back)

There are numerous alternatives to Reader, and a lot of people are using them.

Medium has had RSS for quite a while, it just didn't link them in a page's metadata. I believe they do now.

For example:

https://medium.com/feed/flockademic (publication)

https://medium.com/feed/@flockademic (user)

The latter also includes responses to stories though, which can be noisy.

Oh wow thanks I didn’t realize there was a comment free version, that’s very handy. I worry though if rss is a secret feature that will get the axe someday since I was never able to find any reference to rss on the sites themselves and only came across the noisy @ version by chance from some other random comment on the internet someplace.

It went out of style for the mainstream because they haven't (yet) figured out how to lace it with ads.

John Gruber (daringfireball.com) charges around $7000 a week for one sponsored RSS article on Sunday and a follow up post thanking the sponsor on Friday. It can be done for small publishers in a tasteful way.

Many websites which rely on paid adds put only the title and first paragraph in the RSS feed with a link to the article. But that notification is pretty convenient, so I'm still willing to use those sites' RSS feeds.

That is a keen observation. I guess rss is a technology from simpler and more explorative times of the internet instead of the current oppressive and commercialized phase we are going through now.

Eh, the surveillance was weaker, but I'm not sure about the commercialization. RSS is from 99/00, the era of Punch The Monkey flash banner ads and dozens of popups and popunders.

From what I can tell, RSS was the equivalent of today's OpenGraph. It was a tool for a company (Netscape) to slurp content into its portal. It's just that AOL then blundered when they bought Netscape and removed support for RSS, which then became a de-facto standard format.

In fact, as RSS popularity wanes, a feed reader that can reader OG tags is probably a good idea.

They provide feeds, but don't show a link anywhere on the UI (which is strange).

[1]: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214874118-RSS-feed...

Not that strange, every site on which I've looked for it has RSS/atom feeds where relevant, but hide them (eg this, github, etc).

Interestingly enough, Firefox has a "feeds" section when looking at page info, which will show RSS feeds included in the meta tags (which they all seem to be).

So really, I've never stopped using RSS, not sure how to go "back" to it. I understand the whole thing with Twitter killing it but as a dev I use RSS as todo lists and that still works wonders.

> I use RSS as todo lists and that still works wonders

How as todo lists?

Mostly versions of projects too small to notify you by email (but still important enough to keep up to date).

Edit: To elaborate, gitlab and github have RSS feeds of tags, which devs use as releases. New tag = new release = another item in my RSS feed. Which means there's something for me to do.

That's the actual problem. I don't get why everyone is putting such a strong emphasis on the google reader shutdown. It's the fact that everyone stopped providing RSS feeds. Probably because you can't put 500 tracking pixels and ads and scripts in them, so they hope by shutting them down people will visit the page directly more frequently. Which might actually work out in general.

I have not experienced this. In my experience only niche, self-built websites offer no RSS feed. Plus there are other ways to make your RSS feed "useless" by only providing a title and the opening sentence, that way people will have to visit your site for the full content.

You can't show ads in it. I even asked a few sites to set it up a few years ago but they wouldn't. They wanted the income from the ads to run the site.