[gmerc]

bingo; you just found the kpi. everything needs a kpi.

Facebook did that with emails - slowly remove all the content to turn them into traffic generators for the feed team.

Hilariously when they launched workplace, the corporate productive product, they did the same thing, viciously spamming you with emails that have the first 15 characters of the workplace post that triggered them (and 2 more for the notification and every comment).

zero respect for your time, everything must drive traffic.

[wildrhythms]

This is the reason. Some analytics hit causes a line to go up. Program manager says line must go up!

[xwowsersx]

It probably is about analytics, you're right. But to be fair, maintaining RSS feeds requires some resources, even if nominal. If the usage of RSS is low or declining, the cost of maintaining it might not justify the benefits, leading to a decision to allocate resources elsewhere.

[prepend]

> maintaining RSS feeds requires some resources

I find that rss output is just part of good architecture so it’s sort of something I’m going to make even if no one uses it. Because I want to have some static form of syndication that processes can check.

Of course there is some nominal cost to exposing the uris or something, but anyone complaining about this would be weird to complain. Especially given all the other odd feature requests going on.

[zlg_codes]

Bro, what cost in maintaining? Maybe if you're building like it's the '90s and doing it by hand.

The static site generator I use (Pelican) can produce templated RSS feeds that are exactly to my liking. If I can use that off-the-shelf stuff for a small blog, then it's trivial to put together a template and plug in database data on relevant events. Could even just run a cronjob that tracks the site daily and forget about it, most people would not care.

[rollcat]

I mean Facebook can do it, a random blog can't.

Google killed Plus, so it's not like when they killed Reader. They just like killing things I guess?