I wasn’t reader user, but it seems to me like when advertising self interest took over

Meh the ad business was pretty established well before 2013 when Reader shut down. RSS was declining well before that. Google acquired Doubleclick in 2008 aka what became the real Adwords in its prime.

I personally don't expect tech conglomerates to be the ideal solution for niche markets. But I don't see many people providing good arguments why alternatives like Feedly didn't take off if there was really a strong market demand for RSS.

And I say that was an uber-fan of RSS back in the day.

Yeah. I think what really killed RSS was a change in people's behavior. Twitter, Reddit, and other social media sites gained traction as link sharing communities and RSS became less relevant after that. Instead of subscribing to an RSS feed, you could just follow your favorite sites on Twitter, for example.

How is RSS even dead today? I can’t think of a useful site that doesn’t still have an RSS feed - including Reddit.

That's like saying "how is IRC dead today" when Slack/Discord/WhatsApp/Zoom/etc exists or Yahoo style portals when Google exists (yes Yahoo is still a real business) or "how are horses a dead transportation" when cars exist in 1930s America because horses can still walk on roads (aka takes a minimal investment to support).

Sure they still work and will continue to work but let's be honest it's a super niche technology and it didn't survive/flourish because it was flawed and fundamentally nerdy option people stopped caring about.

Supporting RSS takes the bare minimum of effort. Yet even in 2013 (aka a decade ago) RSS was declining in usage before Reader was killed.

I support open platforms but RSS had a super noise-to-signal UX and I personally don't miss it.

Google didn't kill RSS, they killed the best RSS product at the time and accelerated a dying protocol that would still be only used by HN's demographic and little else.

Why do I care if it’s a “niche” technology as far as other people subscribing if it is still supported by publishers? I can’t think of a single site that I go to and say “I sure wish this site supported RSS” and doesn’t?

Using NetNewsWire and subscribing to subreddits with NNW on one half of my iPad and the Reddit app on the other half is still a great experience for instance.

I click on the date on NNW and the post opens in the Reddit app.

HN also has an RSS feed.

> Why do I care if it’s a “niche” technology as far as other people subscribing if it is still supported by publishers?

If it is a niche technology it will fall out from requirements docs and from CMS implementations.

One can already see that many news sites only provide headlines, not even teasers in the feed and different site generator based blogs (using Hugo and such) forget to create feeds as well.

My feed reader still provides value to me, but I regularly stumble over sites providing interesting content irregularly but no feed. (For irregularly posting blogs it is especially important as manually checking is annoying)

They don’t have the entire article because they can’t display ads.

DaringFireball and a few other blogs get around this by having native ads as an RSS entry.

One could also embed an image on the text or do textual ads in the article. However market is too small, thus they do the simple thing which is limiting the value of the feed, till nobody cares about it anymore and they turn it off.

> I support open platforms but RSS had a super noise-to-signal UX and I personally don't miss it

The problem is that nothing arose that adequately replaces it.

So make one. There's apparently a lively niche market on HN looking for one (allegedly).

I think it's 'dead' in comparison to the way it used to be used.

I was actually just looking for RSS feeds for some of the top news sites, and a lot of them have specialized RSS feeds for a certain category but not for the entire site. (I had to eventually settle for Newsweek)

I genuinely don't know, so this is an honest question. Nowadays, outside of podcast feeds, what's the incentive for media outlets to provide RSS feeds? Isn't it just a fringe assortment of techies still using it? (To be clear, I'm part of that fringe.)

Having specialized feeds prevents the whole “sipping from the firehose”.

It's much easier to whine about Google than accept trends in consumer behaviour.

Programmers get nostalgic about their pet technologies that even the majority of tech-denographic (and often themselves) don't even use when given the option. I don't blame them but they aren't always honest about their favourite niche tech simply being niche technology.

Attention was shifting from basement blogs and projects to professionally made content for the web. Which would only have one paragraph or a title on the RSS feed and the rest was on the site with ads.

Did RSS die???

(I get HN headlines via RSS)

Not for me. It's still the primary way that I stay up to date on the web.

A market dying might not mean what you think it means then.

My usage went downhill, but long after the death of Google Reader. RSS didn't really die, but it never went into mainstream either.

I think the bug factor was Facebook. There were places making money selling ads in feeds but they weren’t making within an order of magnitude what Facebook promised. Google+ was a botched reaction to that but I do wonder what Google could have done embracing the open web instead and actually trying to monetize Reader or provide top-notch feed ads. It might not have made Facebook-level rates but it also wouldn’t have soured a generation on their business.

I wonder how feedly is doing, their higher tier plans focusing on enterprise/analysis/teams suggest the demand for rss still among power users / consumers.

Hi, this is Petr from Feedly, we're doing really well and yes, our focus shifted towards Enterprise - Threat Intelligence and Market Intelligence use cases. Individual users can use our Pro+ plan to access Feedly AI to leverage the power of searching through RSS feeds to get the signals more easily and quickly.

Despite the prior “more wood behind fewer arrows” announcement, it might be the first time Google killed something that was popular with Googlers. I think it was an “Elves leave Middle-Earth” moment for my friends on campus. Memegen was full of “we can launch (ultradoomed project) but can’t keep Reader alive?” snark, less good-natured than usual. I’ve heard it blamed on Vic and G+, actual security issues from scraping Javascript, or just falling behind on the promo-driven infra treadmill that threatens everything mature.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007750

I haven't heard the phrase "more wood behind fewer arrows" before, but I am pretty sure that never in the history of the evolution of projectiles was that tradeoff ever taken in that direction.

That's what makes it so amazing!!! It was a delicious self-parody. I remember reading it and thinking it made absolutely no sense as a metaphor: just imagine the poor archer being told "instead of having 15 arrows to take with you today, we've decided to give you three really heavy arrows"... that was the announcement that really made Google product management feel like a laughing stock to me, and is what I return to thinking about every time they kill another project.

https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind-few...

I always thought it was something like a comparison between ballistae with fewer shots and larger arrows (javelin size, really) doing more damage, and a storm of smaller regular arrows. Maybe I was being too generous with my interpretation.

I just remembered remembered that I had read something about the history of this phrase, and I found it: an answer on Quora from five years ago.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-origin-of-the-phrase-putti...

> The background seems an oft-used phrase in Sun Microsystems by the former CEO, "all the wood behind a single arrow" which means focus on a single product and be the best in it.

> When deer hunting .. "Real men bring only one arrow. They know how to aim (and they remember to take plenty of time when aiming), and they put all the wood behind that one arrow."

They even managed to find a usage of the same space of metaphor from Apple!

> While the layoffs are intended to reduce operating costs, Apple said it trimmed its technology portfolio to streamline development efforts. “Time to market is very important to me,” Amelio said. “With the narrowing of our focus, we can put more wood behind the arrow.”

> —Stephen Howard, “Narrowing tech focus, Apple cuts 4,100 jobs,” MacWeek, March 17, 1997

Nice find!

Corporate buzzword bingo cards must have included 'wood behind arrows' in days of yore. I haven't heard it in a while...

So actual nonsense

If I have to shoot a tank, I'd rather have one 20kg anti-tank missile than 700 birdshot shells.

(Of course, if I want to shoot birds the reverse would be true)

Not if they’re photino birds.

The "more wood" is in the bow, not the arrows. A bigger, heavier bow will shoot arrows with more force, but will take more effort, strength, and time to operate, so shoot fewer arrows harder.

OMG THANK YOU SO MUCH THAT MAKES SO MUCH MORE SENSE

It's still a little weird, since the bow is mostly ahead of the arrow, and only "behind" it in a metaphorical supporting sense.

The force of the "more wood" is behind the arrow when pulling it back and shooting (and once you've released, the entire bow is behind it). I get what you're saying though.

I'm a fan of how the phrase gets dumber the more you think about it, and how it's just a way to try to make "put all your eggs in one basket" sound like a good thing. It's delightfully stupid.

More chickens in fewer hen houses.

F = M * A

Raise the mass of the arrow and it'll hit with more force. There's a sweet spot for piercing heavy cloth armor. If the arrows are too light, they'll bounce right off.

and if the arrows are too heavy they're not gonna make it, and if you run out of arrows, you're fucked

> and if the arrows are too heavy they're not gonna make it, and if you run out of arrows, you're fucked

Enough thrust will make anything fly: if your bow's range is halved by a heavier arrow, maybe switch it out for a crossbow.

It only doesn't make sense if you choose the position that arrows can be switched out but not bows.

or we could just use guns, if we're going to go away that far from the original analogy

Well there's the other possible interpretation where wood refers to the bow instead of the arrows. Thus, the larger bow can impart larger momentum to each arrow

How many times have 2 birds been killed with 1 stone?

Is there a proven evolutionary advantage to birds rising earlier in order to catch the worm?

The meaning is clear as you got it, despite you never hearing it before, so it undeniably works.

It's a saying. I've heard it so it could be a britishism?

> How many times have 2 birds been killed with 1 stone?

It is not that it has happened, more that it would be desirable

> Is there a proven evolutionary advantage to birds rising earlier in order to catch the worm?

I think anyone collecting worms as fishing bait will tell you that worms favour dawn to daytime, so yes.

I'm British, and I think the arrow thing sounds like US corporate BS rather than a traditional saying

Well putting more wood behind fewer arrows in this case is desirable for them. The point is there doesn't have to be historical precedent for a figure of speech. It just has to effectively communicate something.

Well I did business studies aswell so it might be management speak.

I'm not sure if it's unreasonable.

In videos I've seen of tests of arrows against armour the shafts usually break, so that the weight of the shaft does not fully go into the penetration.

Stiffer shorter arrows have, therefore, a better chance. Thus the men fighting heavily armoured troops may choose crossbows, which with their long reloading time would literally trade number of shots for heavier shots.

Stiffer shorter arrows will also make you miss unless you have a bow adapted to them!

This is the metaphor that keeps giving

I think they're actually inherently less accurate, even with a bow suited to them, even with a crossbow.

The fletchings have less of a moment arm to correct things.

I guess if the word 'wood' means weight/power in this instance it kinda makes sense. (as outlined in the child comments)

When you get serious like the Romans about putting more wood behind fewer arrows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballista

Thanks for linking “Elves leave Middle-Earth”.

The soda can anecdote made me realize that “We give you free soda and after-hours pizza, so you can ruin your health for the company.” matured unceremoniously into “If you want to ruin your health, pay for it like any other member of society.”

Realize it, and “embrace the warmth of leaving home.”

I thought that Google Wave had a lot of unrealised potential, in addition to Reader. Still sorry they killed that, too.

But Wave was not a mature product when it was killed, it was still basically a tech demo.

Killing it just wasn't as painful.

Indeed; it felt magical, but was a solution in search of a problem... which was ultimately found in Google Docs having very similar live editing ability.

Also its rollout was done in the most ridiculous way possible. For a product that relies on your workmates or friends to have access, they didn't let those workmates or friends have access. Then by the time they did, the hype had worn off, and people had moved elsewhere.

I can't tell if you're talking about internal rollout of public because the same problems existed internally. One person on your team would request it because they bought the hype but not everyone had access so only that one person would play with it and the social aspect of it just wasn't there. I tried to make it useful for a couple weeks but my impression at the end was the same as when they did the TGIF demo: mostly pointless fluff.

So, pretty much exactly what happened with Google+?