Google spent 15 years quietly killing RSS. A 2023 autopsy is blowing up on Hacker News for a reason.

A 2023 analysis from Open RSS, a registered nonprofit organization, is generating significant discussion on Hacker News this week. The piece traces a 15-year pattern: Google builds a product around the open RSS protocol, accumulates users, then removes support once the audience is locked in. The renewed attention is not nostalgia. It lands at a moment when Google's AI Overviews are doing to web publishers what Reader's 2013 shutdown did to RSS apps: intercepting the reader before they reach the source.

Google launched Google Reader in 2005. By 2013, it was the backbone of the RSS ecosystem. Third-party apps relied on its backend to sync feeds across devices, and when Google announced the shutdown, developers had weeks to build replacement infrastructure 1. Google's stated reason was declining usage. An engineer who worked on the project said it "felt like the entire time I was on the project, various people were trying to kill it" 2.

The damage rippled outward. The Old Reader, a competing app, closed registration after its developers described months of unsustainable load 1. Feedly, Digg, and NewsBlur rushed to fill the vacuum 3. But Reader was the headline. The systematic work happened around it.

The Open RSS analysis documents a string of additional instances where Google added RSS support to a product, then removed it. Early versions of Chromium, the open-source engine behind Chrome, shipped with a built-in RSS button in the browser bar. It disappeared without notice or explanation. Google acquired FeedBurner, an RSS feed service, in 2007, converting standard feeds into Google-owned versions embedded with ads and tracking. The company shut down FeedBurner's APIs in October 2012, cutting off third-party integrations. In July 2022, FeedBurner's infrastructure was overhauled, removing email subscriptions and leaving users with broken feed URLs and no fix. Google added RSS delivery to Google Alerts in 2008, removed it in July 2013, then reinstated it after backlash, by which point the Reader shutdown had already eroded the RSS user base. Google News launched in 2002 with RSS support, deprecated it, and shut it down entirely in December 2017 with no reason given, while proprietary Google News links continued working. Google maintained a Chrome extension that placed an RSS icon next to website URLs, removed it, then reinstated it within a week, claiming the removal was unintentional. In May 2021, Google announced it was working on bringing RSS back to Chrome. There has been no official launch since 2.

That paragraph reads like a timeline because it is one. Each entry follows the same arc: build on the open protocol, gather users, remove the open path, leave the proprietary alternative standing. Open RSS describes this as an "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" model 2.

This is where AI Overviews enter the frame. RSS was the open web's distribution layer. It let any reader pull content directly from any publisher, with no intermediary deciding what appeared or in what order. AI Overviews now sit at the top of Google search results, summarizing publisher content inside Google's own interface. Publishers have told NPR that AI Overviews have led to dramatic declines in traffic 4. Members of Digital Content Next, a trade group representing digital publishers, have reported Google search traffic losses between 1% and 25% linked to AI Overviews 5. Columbia University researcher Klaudia Jaźwińska, who studies how AI is reshaping the news industry, told NPR that publishers face a structural bind: opting out of AI Overviews means opting out of Google Search entirely 4.

The parallel is structural, not metaphorical. RSS let readers bypass algorithmic filters and go straight to sources. Google built products on top of that protocol, captured the audience, then dismantled the open path. AI Overviews sit where RSS feeds used to: between the reader and the source. The difference is that this time, the intermediary was never open to begin with.

In 2013, Eric Goldman, writing in Forbes, warned that killing Reader would lead to information flows that were slower, more heavily intermediated by algorithms, and less diverse, with publishers receiving fewer readers 6. Publishers are now reporting exactly that outcome from AI Overviews. The question the Hacker News thread is circling is whether anyone will build the next open distribution layer before the current intermediaries finish consolidating control over what readers see and where they go. RSS still works. It just has fewer on-ramps than it did 15 years ago, because the company that built the most on-ramps systematically closed them.