How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

For longtime internet users, this story hit like a breakup text from 2013 that still stings. The article argues that Google built trust on RSS — the simple tool that lets people follow website updates in one place — and then kept stripping support away once people depended on it. First came Chrome losing its built-in RSS button, then Google bought FeedBurner and later hollowed it out, then came the move many commenters still talk about like a digital extinction event: the death of Google Reader. For some, that was the moment the internet stopped feeling like a collection of websites and started feeling like a handful of giant platforms.

And wow, the comments are not in a forgiving mood. One user delivered the thread’s blunt thesis: “Fuck Google.” Another called the company “Pure Evil,” while someone else said killing Reader felt like “the beginning of the end of the internet as I knew it.” That’s the vibe: less polite debate, more communal therapy session. The hottest complaint? People think Google’s excuse that Reader had “declining usage” was laughable, especially while the company was loudly pushing Google+, which commenters roasted as the social network “nobody used.”

There was one big question in the pile-on: what did Google even gain by killing RSS? That doubt added extra drama, because even critics seem torn between “this was greed” and “this was pointless destruction.” Either way, the community verdict is brutal: Google didn’t just close products — it nudged people away from the open, user-controlled web and into the ad-fed algorithm circus.