[HN Gopher] RIP Google Reader
___________________________________________________________________
RIP Google Reader
Author : mrbbk
Score : 561 points
Date : 2021-03-25 15:27 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ripgooglereader.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ripgooglereader.com)
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| "On March 25th, 2021 Google Reader will have been dead for longer
| than it was alive"
| liopleurodon wrote:
| loyal feedly user. thanks feedly
| dpeck wrote:
| Those of you who don't understand why people were attached to
| Reader: Please keep in mind that it's generally not the death of
| the tool that we lament after all these years. It is the
| destruction of our communities there that we're still sad about.
|
| Imagine your favorite coffee shop, bar, church or social club
| ceased to be. You'd still see some of the previous members at
| other places, but the community as it existed is gone.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Wait, what was the community?
|
| I thought it was just an RSS reader. This is the first I've
| ever heard of a Reader "community".
|
| I'm looking it up and it doesn't appear there were forums or
| anything. What was the community aspect?
| mattmcknight wrote:
| It allowed you to share and discuss items with a closed set
| of friends. It was really good for that.
|
| http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2007/12/reader-and-talk-
| are...
|
| http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2011/01/more-control-
| over-c...
| dpeck wrote:
| Yep, though it wasn't quite "closed" since people were
| after see comments from friends of friends.
|
| I had several real professional friendships start this way,
| and quite a few others that I followed just to see the
| thoughts/opinions of people in different life stages & life
| styles. It was a very different vibe from other "social"
| sites even then, and I haven't found anywhere else that had
| ability to have conversations about a large breadth of
| topics while also going deep into them if one wanted.
|
| It had a BarCamp kind of feel to me, more like the
| discussions that happen at a party with a lot of people who
| are confident in themselves but aren't looking to prove it
| to other attendees.
|
| Note that this is almost certainly some bit of
| romanticizing, and the communities would of course have a
| lot of variance but mine was dope. Fashion designers,
| artists, historians, a couple chefs, computer scientists,
| theologians, and others came together for great
| conversations and lots of perspectives.
| seaman1921 wrote:
| there was no community aspect, they probably mean to say that
| it was their favourite hangout spot, like a library
| dpeck wrote:
| Nope, I don't mean that at all. See sibling comment of
| yours for details.
| seaman1921 wrote:
| thanks for clarifying!
| rexf wrote:
| There were social features. Since it used google accounts,
| there was a large base of people who were able to like your
| shared news items (IIRC).
|
| I didn't have a large following, but I would see people
| liking my shared feed items from time to time, and they could
| subscribe to your feed (IIRC).
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Not forums, but it did have social features.
| eastbayjake wrote:
| I was an outer-circle member of the community of people who did
| the Google Reader shutdown protest in DC in 2011:
| https://dcist.com/story/11/10/26/click-click-google-reader-p...
|
| It really did create a community atmosphere that I've only seen
| at cocktail/dinner parties, where everyone knows someone but
| you meet new friends-of-friends and maybe become friends
| yourselves.
| smusamashah wrote:
| I believe it's chrome that killed RSS altogether. Even today,
| there is not native RSS support in chrome. Before chrome all
| major browsers had native RSS support. You could just subscribe
| to any website.
|
| The killed RSS, then the reader. It's all on Google for demise of
| RSS.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| On this day, March 25 2021, Google Reader has been dead for
| longer than it was alive.
|
| source: https://twitter.com/ZackMaril/status/1365834285463257091
| approxim8ion wrote:
| It's interesting how impactful Google Reader was that not an
| insignificant number of people bounced off RSS entirely when it
| died.
|
| Most RSS readers/providers have been at least serviceable for me.
| On newsboat now, trying elfeed occasionally too.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Complaining about Google killing Reader and Google's monopoly
| power in the same page is strange. Actually killing reader made
| Reader competitors the chance to develop, didn't it?
|
| I think there was a trend for content providers to share content
| on multiple platforms directly instead of with RSS, that's what
| people may not like.
| Uehreka wrote:
| Not a Reader user, so maybe I've got this wrong, but I think
| what many people are complaining about boils down to something
| like this:
|
| Google, with their monopol-ish resources, created a free reader
| app that was so good that it was hard for other RSS readers to
| match them (on features, and certainly on price). As a result
| they consolidated most of the market around RSS readers (even
| though RSS remained an open protocol). So when they killed
| Reader, it may have made it possible for other RSS readers to
| finally compete openly, but it also shook things up so much
| that many Reader users may have just dropped RSS entirely,
| shrinking the RSS community and the audiences of RSS-based
| blogging.
|
| Sure, in an efficient market customers would simply flow from
| the large and killed product to the new alternatives. But in
| our inefficient world, it's possible that the barrier of having
| to export and import feeds was too high for a lot of users
| (even with things like Reader Takeout).
|
| One might argue that if that's the case, then perhaps all those
| RSS audiences weren't actually all that engaged in the first
| place. But I'd argue that it's actually quite possible for
| genuinely good things to be very fragile.
| noman-land wrote:
| A very sad day when this was killed. It was my favorite
| social/intellectual experience at the time. Really never
| recovered from it.
| dccoolgai wrote:
| The Web hasn't recovered from it, either. In retrospect, they
| obviously did it to pave way for AMP. Now that AMP is gone,
| maybe there's a small chance they could bring it back.
| Reason077 wrote:
| I dunno. They easily could have integrated AMP into Reader,
| couldn't they?
| exikyut wrote:
| It was a different time.
|
| Back then, people would have shot it dead for tech-
| astroturfing.
|
| Today, people wouldn't see the point since AMP is more
| convenient anyway. /s
| rhacker wrote:
| I'm guessing it's not coming back - it competes with google
| news which makes Google money where reader did not.
| SquareWheel wrote:
| AMP doesn't cause any issues for RSS readers. People are
| still using Inoreader, Feedly, etc just fine today.
|
| > Now that AMP is gone
|
| Why do you say that?
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _" Why do you say that?"_
|
| Recently it was reported that Google will no longer give
| search-result priority to AMP pages. Which means any
| incentive for publishers to support them is gone.
| SquareWheel wrote:
| That seems pretty speculative. We've known AMP would be
| losing its priority in the carousel for almost a year
| now, but I haven't seen any reduction in its usage.
| prepend wrote:
| I'm excited thinking about 2040 when Google pulls a Microsoft
| and starts working to be cool. One of the fun nostalgic ways
| they show that they're no longer assholes will be reviving and
| open sourcing Reader. Kind of like how Microsoft open sourced
| calc.exe.
|
| There's no business value or harm but it's a good symbol. Old
| Microsoft would have complained how they had to prioritize
| engineering resources and open sourcing calc.exe was bad (like
| Google needed to prioritize engineers away from Reader).
| Semiapies wrote:
| The cherry on top is the complaint about how users only go to
| five sites anymore...by the very community of people who started
| the death-of-RSS myth because Google stopped providing the app
| they used.
| webscout wrote:
| Not an RSS reader by design, but I'm with https://upstract.com --
| Made by the original Popurls inventor.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Wow, that's a bold default color scheme. If you sign up can it
| be changed?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| rasfincher wrote:
| I still miss Google Reader almost every day. I now use Inoreader
| but for some reason it just doesn't feel the same.
| richardjs wrote:
| I was a heavy Google Reader user and mourned it for years. At
| some point, though, I discovered Miniflux [1], and haven't really
| missed Reader since.
|
| What I _do_ miss from the Reader days, though, is widespread RSS
| support. I wonder if the death of such a prominent RSS reader
| gave sites "permission" to stop supporting RSS, and pushed RSS
| into further obscurity. Anecdotally, it feels like RSS is a
| feature often not carried over after a site redesign.
|
| [1] https://miniflux.app/
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I think the reason things like this just don't die is we all long
| for the days (long past) when Google was a leading force in
| making the web nicer, and having a very positive reputation, from
| making search a thousand times better than [Yahoo|Ask
| Jeeves|etc.], making maps amazing (compared to MapQuest/etc.),
| building a good, free email service (we've since learned the cost
| of 'free'), and building products everyone knows and loves like
| Reader.
| drzaiusapelord wrote:
| I believe this was just a money decision. You really can't run
| all those fancy tracking ads and other engagement/conversion
| tricks within RSS readers, or if you did, people would just
| switch to readers that didn't support ads and tracking. RSS was,
| mostly, just content that you could format and read as you like
| and that's a pretty big threat to operations like Google who rely
| so much on ads and tracking. Reading mode in browsers is the
| middle ground that sorta works. We still get presented with ads
| and tracking but get the option to view things in a sane format.
| Of course, we don't get the neat all-in-one aspect we had with
| RSS. We still, somehow, are using the bookmark system for
| visiting and consuming the web.
| arbirk wrote:
| I miss Reader every day. Curated, tagged and verified news
| sources and watched pages should be valuable to google, no?
| memechunk wrote:
| There are two internet services in my lifetime that I was
| devastated to see shut down (at the time): Google Reader and
| lala.com.
| Emendo wrote:
| Google created a popular free RSS reader, stopped innovating it,
| and then declared to the whole world that usage of Reader (and by
| extension, RSS) had decreased so much that it isn't worth it for
| Google to keep on life support.
|
| It didn't have to happen like that. I argue that Google
| unintentionally did an embrace and extinguish on RSS. That's what
| people were unhappy about.
| Hezkore wrote:
| Does anyone have a good RSS reader suggestion? I'm looking for a
| desktop application (Linux preferably). I'd really like one that
| does download all the feeds, but lets me tag words and topics
| that I'm interested, and get a notification based on that.
|
| Maybe I need to write my own...
| CA0DA wrote:
| I've been using "Feedbro" Firefox extension as a Google Reader
| replacement. Pretty good!
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| I was about to ask this thread what people use as an RSS reader
| because I really can't stand Feedly. I'm going to check this
| out, thanks.
| GNU_James wrote:
| I've been using Thunderbird as my RSS reader for years. Who in
| their right mind trusts Google?
| gdsdfe wrote:
| I really do miss google reader from time to time ... I think I've
| stopped consuming RSS since it went away
| emayljames wrote:
| Yeah, folk will say "but use xyzRSS" and just not understand
| how well curated Google Reader was. It was immense for content.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| Is there anything integrating rss + the fediverse in the same
| way for curation?
| emayljames wrote:
| I tried many many others and the feeds just felt stale. You
| will maybe get some "but this is close", but because
| everyone in tech used GR, they will never have the same
| level of content.
| cletus wrote:
| Whatever was said at the time, I'm convinced Google Reader was
| collateral damage from the Bay of Pigs Google Plus effort. It had
| social features (which I honestly never used) and anything social
| had to be G+.
|
| Still, I honestly don't understand why this is the hill people
| want to die on, what they feel most betrayed about. Like I
| haven't seen some people this upset since Firefly was canceled.
| novok wrote:
| Journalists loved google reader, and they have outsized
| publicity effects when you kill something they love, that is
| related to their work.
|
| Therefore it feels like it dying is way more of a deal than it
| actually is, since what is talked about with journalists feels
| like is what everyone actually cares about, even if it isn't.
|
| Personally I still miss it, nothing was quite as fast or robust
| in reading RSS queues. RSS feed updates were fast & reliable,
| the UI was fast, keyboard shortcuts made it fast to use, it
| didn't have basic bugs that current alternatives have at times
| and the few alternatives don't quite approach how good it was.
| OskarS wrote:
| The social features were actually killed off before the product
| itself: a few years earlier they did a redesign which removed
| all of the social features. The social features were cool, I
| remember following a couple of journalists i really like who
| commented on the articles and discussed it with each other, it
| was a really nice thing.
|
| The reason people are so bitter is that Google Reader was the
| kind of thing that if you liked it, it became part of your
| daily routine. It became the thing you checked in the morning
| over coffee, the thing you checked when you were
| procrastinating at work. Today that is social media, but Google
| Reader really felt like your own little curated space in a way
| (say) Twitter does not: with Twitter, you always feel at the
| mercy of The Algorithm. It also was essentially totally free of
| the toxic stuff you see on social media today.
|
| They took this cool and personal service, ripped all social
| features out, did zero development on it for years, and then
| unceremoniously killed it in some insane attempt to make
| Google+ into the next Facebook. I'm still pissed about it, and
| it was the last time I've ever made myself rely on a Google
| Service like this.
| ecliptik wrote:
| Newsblur has support for twitter feeds alongside RSS. You
| need to setup an API key for it and it's a bit hidden in the
| settings, but once setup it works really well for consuming
| (not participating in) feeds.
|
| Combined with the training features of Newsblur you can
| curate twitter feeds even more. Don't want to see re-tweets
| by a specific user, thumbs down. Don't want to see replies by
| another user, thumbs down. Want to percolate a specific
| keyword to the top, thumbs up.
|
| I don't think I've looked at my native twitter feed in
| months.
| basch wrote:
| As someone who prefers both chronological river
| (https://techmeme.com/river) AND a metric of popularity
| (upvotes) nothing beats https://hckrnews.com. I wish that
| design was more common.
|
| Instead of having higher ranking posts climb to the top, a
| hotness bar and a popular bar to the left of links is ideal.
| The bigger the bars, the more activity an article is
| generating.
|
| Are there any feedreaders that I can use to 1) score but not
| rank articles, and 2) set a threshold to hide everything
| below a score 3) deduplicate stories from multiple sources,
| and aggregate+/average their scores together?
| jolux wrote:
| Twitter still supports the chronological timeline. It's no
| Google Reader, but I refuse to submit to The Algorithm.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| Yes, and how often are you having to switch it back? I've
| read several stories that Twitter will flip it back for you
| every couple of weeks.
| jolux wrote:
| Weirdly I feel like they used to switch me back to "Home"
| constantly but it doesn't seem to happen anymore. It only
| changes when I change it now.
| bosswipe wrote:
| I remember this happening on Facebook but it hasn't
| happened to me on Twitter that I can remember. I've had
| the setting on for at least a couple years without
| issues.
| dwighttk wrote:
| Seems to be the default if you log out and back in. Which
| I do a lot. But otherwise it (seems to) stick(s).
| caoilte wrote:
| You can avoid content curation by only using Twitter with a
| unofficial client.
| 8note wrote:
| "your own curated space" sounds like the problem. It's hard
| to inject paid for stories and ads in without making it
| unpersonal
| krrrh wrote:
| The basic fact that it was a "reader" presumed that people
| would read the article before commenting, which made it so
| different from Twitter (and hacker news for that matter)
| where it seems the majority of people repost and comment
| based solely on the headline. Twitter was testing a feature
| recently that popped up a confirmation dialog asking if you
| had read the link you hadn't clicked on before you were able
| to retweet it.
| ChrisSD wrote:
| In retrospect Reader's death marked a turning point in how
| Google was perceived. There were grumblings before that but
| Google was still the darling of the web.
|
| As you say, Google+ was consuming Google at that time. So when
| they killed Reader it was not just killing a beloved service.
| It also acted like a lightning rod for the discontent that had
| started to swell. A lot of people would never again view Google
| through a rose tinted lens.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I also see it as the marker for the turning point from
| "Google embraces the open web and web standards" to "Google
| likes proprietary walled gardens now". Google got a lot of
| early good will from that first stance, and if "proprietary
| walled garden" wasn't necessarily "evil" from the perspective
| of that early Google's messaging (obviously its search
| infrastructure and "Page Rank" still implied a lot of
| proprietary secrets), it certainly seemed like the slippery
| slope towards evil in the "extinguish" part of the triple-E
| "bad guy mentality" most often referenced when talking about
| 90s Microsoft.
|
| Google Reader was built top to bottom on RSS and OPML (and
| Atom), which were open web standards. You could import an RSS
| feed from just about anywhere and read in in Reader. You
| could export your list of feeds back out as OPML which a
| bunch of other readers supported. Google+ was much more a
| walled garden with proprietary everything.
|
| It happened in other areas too, such as Google moving away
| from the XMPP/Jabber-standardized (and federated!) Talk
| system to ones entirely proprietary. Wave was announced and
| designed to be XMPP-backed and federated as well. It seems
| like Wave died as much because they wanted to lock that down
| too. You can't just subscribe to Google Docs as a federated
| XMPP user and run a custom Google Docs frontend, Google Docs
| is just another proprietary walled garden now.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| It's that, but it's also a symbol for how the Web has
| changed. Google bulldozing Reader in order to clear ground
| for a (intended) social media behemoth reflects how all sorts
| of smaller online communities and spaces have been razed or
| faded away as everything continues to consolidate onto the
| social media giants.
| atmosx wrote:
| ... so everything consolidated in G+?
| llarsson wrote:
| I still remember being swept away by Google Wave. Such a
| cool idea at the time, I thought.
|
| That was such a good idea compared to Google Plus. Your
| content, your comments, just aggregated.
|
| They could have pulled it off, too, I am sure. They just
| didn't want to.
| cheschire wrote:
| Maybe I'm just remembering poorly, but Wave seemed super
| buggy and laggy to me at the time.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| We used it for architectural discussions and exploring
| ideas. I'd be hard pressed to think of something that was
| better for that.
| edoceo wrote:
| It was crappy but it's intention was good.
| macintux wrote:
| Certainly that was Google's intention. Thank goodness
| they failed.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| But they didn't even try very hard. G+ didn't event have
| a way to create events. Google Calendar was on every
| Android device, it would have been so seamless if you
| could have create a birthday party or attend a rave in
| the park and it would be right in your calendar.
|
| But no, you could only post stories and pictures. That
| made for a rather bare-bones social network.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| This is a great illustration of the problem G+ had;
| events in g+ were amazing but nobody (apparently) knew.
| Setting them up was easy, inviting people was easy,
| privacy for events made sense from the UI, etc. If you
| set things up correctly, everyone who was invited would
| have a shared photo album that they would be able to
| share pictures to with one click.
|
| I have a friend who had an amazing wedding photo album
| created this way; to this day they swear that if it had
| been marketed better g+ events would have put wedding
| photographers out of business...
| pantalaimon wrote:
| Maybe they added it later? When it launched there was no
| such feature, I think they added events after a year or
| so, but by then all the hype had already died down.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| First iteration was rather nice, clean interface without
| many distractions. However, then they got all cardy with
| that material design, and it all was very confusing
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| And it's not just the web. It's everything. Every company
| in our capitalist utopia just keeps growing and growing.
|
| Microsoft is the perfect example. They've bought companies
| from the start, and never stopped. I still hate that they
| were allowed to buy GitHub. They will eventually make it
| supplant their stupid MSDN "devops" thing in their
| offerings.
|
| But if not Microsoft, it just would have been Oracle or
| Amazon or someone else, and the problem is all the same.
| Now it's just another -- vital -- service, where I'm not
| the customer, and I can't ever fully trust it.
|
| And, yes, you can argue that this didn't materially change
| with the Microsoft buyout, but I trusted former
| management's objectives for the site to run more closely to
| my interests than Microsoft's.
| pessimizer wrote:
| https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2021/03/23/microsoft-
| discord...
| CA0DA wrote:
| Some people are trying to build a community here:
| https://neocities.org/
| Apofis wrote:
| I can't believe that website is still around. I just got
| teleported to the 90's.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| Yeah, I noticed this too: I think Google Reader was heavily
| used by the right sort of people (devs, bloggers and media
| types) that, when Google killed it, it created a lot of bad
| will with the people who shape opinions.
| [deleted]
| Semiapies wrote:
| Who then went and told everyone else that RSS was dead
| because Reader was gone.
| jessaustin wrote:
| Spotify wants you to believe it, but it's not true.
| ufmace wrote:
| Interesting perspective. I had long tended towards the
| viewpoint of, "Jeez guys, it's just an RSS reader, there's 50
| better ones now, why do we have to whine about Reader getting
| cancelled every 5 minutes?". This is the first good
| explanation I've found for why it could be considered a
| bigger deal.
| llampx wrote:
| Yes, for me that's when I started to develop a negative
| opinion if Google. I still use Android but aside from that
| my life has drastically been de-googled since then.
| pradn wrote:
| Is there evidence that Google+ caused the demise of Google
| Reader? Couldn't a simpler explanation be that the VP in
| charge of this product wanted to put headcount toward
| something more profitable? One problem with talking about a
| large company is that decisions, even major ones, are often
| made without other functions having much of a say, and yet
| every decision is attributed to the company as a whole. And
| just because Google+ was happening at the same time as the
| Reader shutdown doesn't mean you can create a causal link
| between the two.
| xnx wrote:
| Though very disappointed, it is not surprising in retrospect.
| Google doesn't want to make a niche application for a handful
| (relatively) of nerds. They want to make unduplicatable
| AI/big-data services for billion+ users. Anyone can make a
| feed reader. No one else has been able to create a search
| engine, translation service, or email service (spam
| filtering, auto-complete) nearly as good.
| input_sh wrote:
| I mean they could've easily sprinkled in some AI to decide
| which specific unread items to prioritise, and turned the
| homepage into a social media feed with sharing and
| commenting, while presenting RSS feeds similarly to
| Facebook's pages.
|
| It had all the potential to become the basis of Google+,
| but Google just prioritises building products from scratch
| instead of improving existing ones (hence 50 or so IM /
| video call apps).
| xnx wrote:
| That would've been a good way to go. It's a shame they
| haven't gotten social to catch in any of their many
| attempts (Buzz, Plus, YouTube, Reader, etc.) because I'd
| prefer anything from Google over Facebook.
|
| I'm cautiously optimistic that Google is slowly
| recognizing the error prioritizing hot new projects over
| continuous maintenance and improvement of existing ones.
| Google Chat seems like it might finally be a proper
| successor to Google Talk after dozens of half-baked
| services: Hangouts, Voice, Allo, Duo, Messages, etc. etc.
| etc.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Because that thing was infinitely useful. I was able to read
| 100+ articles without burning out, got the only things that I
| wanted to see, filter what I didn't want and was able to track
| the most interesting sites.
|
| I've skimmed everything in 15 minutes, mark/star/whatever
| anything with unprecedented speed.
|
| It was the ultimate user-curated feed, without all the cruft of
| today's _feed_. It was mine, tailored for me, by me.
|
| ...and whole thing was keyboard-drivable.
| kevstev wrote:
| you make it sound like this functionality is now dead and you
| are grieving it. Feedly offers all of this, its what I
| migrated to after Google Reader.
| rrdharan wrote:
| Feedly is great!
| basch wrote:
| Unpopular retrospective opinion, but given how stagnant Reader
| was before its death, the boon of Reader Replacements to arrive
| on the scene after its demise was worth its disappearance. The
| race to be the replacement made a metric ton of competing
| products better.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Which ones are your favorites?
| mvaliente2001 wrote:
| https://theoldreader.com/
| vmladenov wrote:
| Do you have a favorite? I have a Feedly account but I don't
| use the site much, and the Reeder app added local
| subscriptions recently.
| sco1 wrote:
| I've been happily using Inoreader since the plug was pulled
| on Google Reader
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| > how stagnant Reader was before its death
|
| That's a feature, not a bug. It was close to perfect, no
| pointless UI re-designs required. Fast, lightweight, no bs.
| basch wrote:
| Yes and no. By being the de facto standard and housing most
| of the people, it somewhat stifled innovation in the space.
| Sure there were a ton of front ends built over the top of
| it, and the space was vibrant, but it really shined after
| they were forced into the spotlight. It was like turning on
| a flashlight and spiders scattering everywhere. The scatter
| breathed new sustaining life into many many projects.
| dleslie wrote:
| The social features were incredible.
|
| Roughly fifty friends and I shared articles and had long
| comment threads.
|
| Think of it as a private reddit where there's no barrier to
| joining a conversation with people you know.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| You're right, but it wasn't about competing product... It was
| about competing cost. Specifically, competition for hardware
| resources and engineers.
|
| Social imposed upon Google substantial new costs under-the-hood
| in terms of infrastructure and time to implement. You wouldn't
| think a Facebook competitor would require a lot of compute and
| storage resources, or a lot of engineering hours, but Google
| had high hopes regarding what the platform would become, and
| they definitely didn't want to get blocked by lack of
| resources. In addition, a massive internal infrastructure
| overhaul to the accounts system that was coupled with the
| social initiative required a re-architecting of every app that
| had an "account" concept attached to it.
|
| On the grand balance sheet, Reader was a product with a non-
| growing userbase, didn't align with Google's long-term strategy
| goals, took resources to maintain, consumed storage and compute
| resources that could be used for more valuable bets, and was on
| track for a software re-architecting (which faced Google with
| the alternative of saving the eng-hour cost by just killing it
| instead of re-architecting it). Those facets combined put it on
| the chopping block.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's not like there aren't Google Reader alternatives today.
|
| IMO, what really happened was that a lot of the sorts of people
| who are active on social media really liked having their own
| curated RSS feeds and when explicitly using RSS--and providing
| feeds--fell out of fashion (not that it was ever really in
| fashion for the mainstream) [1], it felt good to blame Google
| Reader as the case rather than it being an effect.
|
| [1] Sort of. Of course, RSS still gets used behind the scenes
| in a lot of places, not least of which are podcasts.
| leajkinUnk wrote:
| Collateral damage is an interesting way to put it. I've heard
| the internal story from people who worked at Google at the
| time, and it sounds like the rough sequence of events goes like
| this:
|
| 1. Google Reader is launched, built on internal Google
| technologies (the distributed database and filesystem
| technologies available at the time, like GFS).
|
| 2. Headcount is not allocated to Google Reader to do ongoing
| engineering work. Headcount is instead allocated to projects
| like Google+.
|
| 3. The technologies underneath Google Reader (like GFS) are
| shut down. Without the engineering headcount to migrate, Google
| Reader is shut down.
|
| Google+ was reportedly shut down for the same reasons (but
| different technologies). The internal tech stack at Google is
| always changing, and projects without sufficient headcount for
| ongoing engineering will eventually get shut down. The timing
| of the Google Reader and Google+ shutdown reflect the timing of
| changes in Googles tech stack more than it reflects any
| strategic direction by Google.
|
| [Edit: Just to be clear, this doesn't explain the _reason_ why
| these projects get shut down. It just explains the timing.]
| ramraj07 wrote:
| As someone seeing org level decisions being interpreted very
| differently by different people, I am not sure how much
| weight we can give to this insiders representation- this
| sounds like what an Eng manager (who himself might not know
| the real reason) would tell their disgruntled engineers.
|
| Also the real question is why google didn't assign an Eng
| team for this product used by millions, not why products
| without engineers die..
| leajkinUnk wrote:
| Just to be clear... I wasn't explaining the reason these
| projects get shut down, just the timeline of events and
| some of the contributing technical factors, since these
| factors are a little different at Google than at other
| companies.
|
| The decision to deallocate headcount and stop ongoing
| engineering effort on a project will eventually cause that
| project to get shut down, no matter what company you work
| at. However, at many of the software companies I've worked
| at, projects that run on "industry-standard" or at least
| mundane tech stacks can run for a very long time with a
| relatively low amount of effort. At Google, the timeline is
| shorter.
|
| For example, if you have a web app that runs on Rails or
| PHP, or something that runs on the JVM, maybe with a
| Postgres, MySQL, or MS SQL backend, you might be able to
| shove it onto different machines or VMs for years, only
| making occasional / minor changes to the code base. If, in
| 2008, you had a JVM app which used PostgreSQL and ran in
| Apache Tomcat, there's a good chance you could still run it
| today with minor changes.
|
| At Google, the internal tech stack--filesystems, databases,
| monitoring, etc... has changes that are large enough and
| frequent enough that the situation is different, and
| projects are shut down on stricter timelines.
| signal11 wrote:
| This is a really good story about how _not_ to be a customer-
| centric organisation and not take user feedback.
|
| What I take away is that just because they're not paying
| customers doesn't mean they won't remember and judge you. And
| clearly people hold grudges for a long time (witness the
| number people who still maintain "Micro$oft is evil" from
| their 90s experiences).
| fareesh wrote:
| I liked Google+ disappointing that it did not catch on
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Because Google Reader was the social network for people who
| don't like talking about themselves but about things on the web
| that they find interesting, and nothing since has ever come
| close to it.
| davchana wrote:
| True. My first internet enabled phone was Nokia 7210 (or 6210
| i think). A tiny one, with half screen & lower half keyboard.
| Sharp crispy colors. Opera mini & Google Reader had all of my
| feeds lined up. Some philosophical posts, some technical,
| some funny, a bit of everything I liked. Pure Author
| Contents. No comments on the feed atleast. I miss it.
|
| I would check it in the morning, while in washroom, in bus,
| waiting & any time.
| addicted wrote:
| Also because killing Google Reader single handedly killed a
| bustling and fast growing RSS based ecosystem.
|
| Google Reader was the first RSS client to incorporate social
| features with RSS. To that it added an extremely fast web
| client (I can't think of any web client that even existed
| before), and syncing across devices.
|
| A LOT of software in the RSS ecosystem relied on Google
| Reader for their syncing capabilities. It had basically
| become the defacto backend for the majority of RSS readers.
| As an example, I used NetNewsWire for my RSS reading, and
| while I rarely (never?) used the Google Reader interface, NNN
| relied on my Google Reader account to backup and sync my
| feeds.
|
| Google Reader had basically become essential infrastructure
| in the RSS ecosystem.
| giobox wrote:
| While it can't have helped, I can't "single handedly" blame
| Google for the death of RSS. By 2013 RSS was already
| arguably dying all by itself.
|
| RSS was awesome in late 2000s during the Web 2.0 mania and
| it was common to see entire site's contents reproduced in
| their feed. By 2013 I'd argue many sites had realized
| giving their full text content away with no ads in the RSS
| feed wasn't exactly helping their bottom lines and started
| delivering ads and content snippets instead. The intent of
| course was to drive you back to the site where ads can be
| served more reliably. When these practices became
| widespread RSS quickly lost its shine for me and others I'm
| sure.
| asdff wrote:
| There are services that pull the full text from truncated
| feeds.
| acdha wrote:
| This is very contrary to my experience: it was thriving
| up until the day Google pulled the switch. I knew a
| number of people who were expecting them not to go
| through with it because Reader was so important to their
| daily routine. The catastrophic failure Google made was
| not recognizing how disproportionately the Reader
| community were influencers -- in particular, tons of
| journalists used it so they were pushing out an un-QAed
| Google+ and telling everyone that it was great right
| after taking away the service they liked. Even if Google+
| had been well-designed or implemented that would have
| been a tough sell. Since it took something like 6 months
| for them to think about problems like privacy, spam, or
| notification overload the coverage of Google+ was
| overwhelmingly negative.
|
| All of the RSS readers I used at the time other than the
| Reader web app also had the option of fetching full text
| or loading the feed in a browser frame to avoid the
| fragment problem. Some of that was simply performance: a
| busy site publishing full text could generate some
| massive XML files which take time to transfer and parse.
|
| Also, why is it a problem to show ads in feeds? Annoying
| ones, sure, but I'd be happy to have ads (or pay for a
| subscription) if that meant that places could pay
| journalists.
| kypro wrote:
| Isn't this exactly what Reddit is?
|
| I wasn't a Google Reader user, but I'd be interesting in
| understanding what I was missing.
| tomcooks wrote:
| Reddit is hardly a place for people who don't like talking
| about themselves~
| airstrike wrote:
| In fact we've probably reached the peak opposite of that
| with people posting about themselves on
| /r/nextfuckinglevel
| aksss wrote:
| For me, Google Reader was about high volume headline
| digestion, reading articles without having to follow links,
| read articles without having to switch between a multitude
| of publishers' crappy and varied web UIs. It was about fast
| and efficient information hoovering from around the world.
| Reddit is a different animal altogether. Great for what it
| does but not like a clean RSS tree.
|
| Also, just want to add: Google killed the "discussions"
| search filter, which let you limit your search results to
| forums, around the same time, IIRC. Screw Google.
| enobrev wrote:
| The social aspect is the part I missed most. It was a good
| rss reader, to be sure, but plenty others exist. But the
| surrounding conversation was strictly with people who I
| followed. I may be misremembering it a bit, but I recall that
| most of the comments I saw under any article were by people I
| knew, which was ideal.
|
| I like reddit and this site enough to visit almost daily, and
| it's important to get opinions from strangers which is why I
| value these sites, but the signal / noise ratio is awful.
| Being able to see a list of news I've explicitly catered to
| myself _and_ commentary from people I explicitly care to hear
| from was excellent.
|
| Then again the internet "crowd" was much different back then.
| It may just be an artifact of its own time by this point.
| kdmytro wrote:
| Isn't Pinterest basically what you describe?
| vanderZwan wrote:
| You're trolling, right?
| onion2k wrote:
| HN is pretty close to the news feed I had in Reader.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Maybe for you, in terms of linked articles. Other than that
| I'd hardly find the two comparable.
|
| Google Reader had reshares, not upvotes. The only
| indication you had for _" is this an article worth
| reading?"_ beyond the actual headline was the number of
| friends who reshared the same article. However, unlike any
| other social network, Google Reader wouldn't show me who
| reshared an article first, nor would you get any imaginary
| points for sharing something interesting. As such, there
| was no gamified hunt for "karma" or "upvotes" or whatever.
| There was no incentive for resharing other than _" I
| read/watched this and think it's interesting"_, and the
| result was a much more sincere curation of topics that
| interested your friends.
|
| Similarly, there were no downvotes or upvotes on the
| discussions.
|
| NewsBlur copied that set-up, but out of roughly 40 close
| friends from college who intensely used Google Reader, only
| five made the switch to NewsBlur. The rest ended up
| scattered among chat apps and other social networks.
| hintymad wrote:
| In retrospect, Google Reader could have evolved into a
| service like tiktok that keeps pushing interesting contents
| to its subscribers. Of course, it's easier to say that in
| hindsight.
| [deleted]
| yreg wrote:
| I too don't get this. I also used Google Reader back then. When
| iPhone was novel and WiFi spots were rare, so people had to
| preload a part of the web to get through the day.
|
| When they killed it I switched to NetNewsWire and didn't miss
| the previous product.
|
| What was so special about Google Reader?
| yreg wrote:
| Just as a curiosity, the parent is now my most downvoted
| comment ever. Interesting that it's so controversial to ask
| what's special about Google Reader.
| ProAm wrote:
| it worked. People liked it. And didn't need to be killed?
| They could have literally put zero dollars into it for the
| remaining amount of time left in the universe and life would
| have been better off.
| sofixa wrote:
| > it worked. People liked it. And didn't need to be killed?
| They could have literally put zero dollars into it for the
| remaining amount of time left in the universe and life
| would have been better off.
|
| The costs of storage and bandwidth of something as popular
| as Google Reader probably weren't negligible.
| prepend wrote:
| They probably were negligible. Billions of links, maybe
| some content cache that they already had since Google
| indexes and caches most of the web. Bandwidth was born by
| the user and content server. Checking RSS feeds is mostly
| a bunch of 304s.
|
| The newsblur dev is in this thread and he runs a good
| reader and could probably say what the storage and
| bandwidth was.
| prepend wrote:
| It was also one of the first times I heard doublespeak from
| Google and stopped loving them.
|
| Saying "it's expensive to maintain" and killing it because
| it competed with, and was better than Google+ without
| giving them control, was such BS. That so many smart people
| built and run clones as one man shows proves that Google
| could have maintained it for next to nothing.
|
| I hope they never kill Google scholar.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| What you have to remember about Google is that engineers
| are mostly free to choose what teams and projects they
| want to work on. And there's also a lot of pressure to go
| promo.
|
| So in the context of the times (I joined Google roughly
| around when this all went down, but this is not insider
| information, I'm just speculating) I can imagine how it
| happened -- it likely became hard to staff the project.
| It probably became hard to "demonstrate impact" by doing
| incremental changes on it, and little desire on the
| company's part to put a major push on launching new
| features or migrating it to new tech stack etc. etc.
| People working on it could have transferred to any number
| of higher impact projects and done better for themselves
| in the corporate career success game.
|
| No manager would have the "power" to demand that the
| people involved stay working on the project.
|
| So if it needed technical work, and no product managers
| saw a future for it, and few if any engineers wanted to
| work on it, and Google was in the middle of pushing its
| energies behind G+... It seems inevitable for a project
| like that to die. It was likely dying internally long
| before it was killed externally. That's my educated guess
| anyways.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Since you brought up NetNewsWire, Google Reader had a
| critical feature back in 2005 that most RSS readers today
| still lack: you could configure feeds to not just store the
| RSS <item> but also visit the website to save the full
| article.
|
| I just opened up NetNewsWire and, yup, 99% of my
| subscriptions are a few sentences and then a "Read more" link
| which kinda defeats some of the major upsides of an RSS
| reader. I don't just want a notification service, I want to
| completely cache the content locally so that I don't need to
| depend on an internet connection nor the fragility of the
| web.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| When you see just a blurb, you can click the paper/text
| icon to read the whole article. NetNewsWire downloads the
| feed and you don't have to exit the app and load the full
| page. This works for me on kinja sites which have the read
| more link.
| naravara wrote:
| This seems expensive to do for the host. Maybe specifically
| snapshotting pages for "Read it later" purposes but I can't
| imagine having to load up every web-page from every site
| you follow whether you're going to read it or not.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > What was so special about Google Reader?
|
| It was free and web-based.
| kevwil wrote:
| Not sure I am/was upset enough to call it the hill I want to
| die on, but to me this was the decisive moment where social
| media took over people's consciousness. To me, it was a curated
| feed of educational, informative, and entertaining content
| sources; devoid of people constantly throwing their political
| biases in my face and telling me what a horrible person I am.
| Logically, it could have been replaced by any number of other
| feed aggregator tools, but it seemed the war was already lost
| and social media took over regardless. It wasn't the beginning
| of the social media onslaught, it was the last hurdle.
|
| Meh, maybe that's inaccurate, but that's how I have felt ever
| since.
| gorkish wrote:
| Quite simply, Google Reader is antiethical to an Internet
| brokered by a central conglomerate. It made total sense for
| Google to kill it. They wanted the shitshow we have now;
| however on the heels of Gmail they thought they could take over
| every other market (social, news, announcements, etc.) too. The
| irony is that killing Google Reader caused enough customer
| fallout that none of these other products ever made it. However
| they wouldnt have made it if Google hadn't killed Reader.
|
| In retrospect Google should have doubled down to monetize
| Reader. I'm pretty damn sure we'd be consming far less of our
| news directly from Facebook and Reddit had they done so.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Never understood the draw of Firefly. It's ... okay, but kinda
| cringey.
|
| Google reader was nice because it was simple and it just
| worked.
| tommoor wrote:
| Going to take this opportunity to tell everyone that NetNewsWire
| has gotten really good - it's free, looks great on Big Sur, syncs
| via iCloud, I can't recommend it enough.
| davidhariri wrote:
| RIP Reader.
|
| I use Feedly + NetNewsWire. Great combo.
| criddell wrote:
| I use NetNewsWire on my iPad and it's outstanding. Totally free
| (no ads) and open source (MIT). Brent Simmons is the project
| lead and he has a long history with RSS and clearly loves it.
| ykevinator wrote:
| It was the best ever, I haven't found anything even close.
| ryanmarr wrote:
| I miss it so much.
| Element_ wrote:
| Seeing that screenshot makes me remember how much I miss the
| original simple HTML UI used in all Google Apps. So fast,light
| weight, and it just worked.
| Applejinx wrote:
| "when there were more than five websites and we could log off
| without missing anything."
|
| In my experience, when you get fed up and quit things like
| Facebook and Twitter (also, pruning other things like YouTube
| channels that try too hard for 'engagement'), you magically
| return to a time when you can log off without missing anything.
|
| It's nice.
|
| I get that it's scary, but it seems worth mentioning that it is
| possible. I'm not at all sure that I'm suffering for the
| decision. If I was, that would imply that there's a give-and-take
| and that being wired to that addictive armature had a chance of
| giving you meaningful attention. I no longer believe there's
| significance in attaining the attention of folks who are there
| because they're glued to the machine. It's the activity of
| twitter-scrolling or what have you, that they're pursuing, not
| you. If they're deeply enough sunk into it, they've got nothing
| left for any real connection with anybody.
|
| Seems like Google Reader was a bit like 'real connections with
| people', at a manageable pace.
| psanford wrote:
| All these years later, I still use the Google Reader frontend
| (with newsblur as the backend).
|
| It turns out that Reader's UI assets were stand alone enough that
| you could just implement the backend API and it all would work.
|
| I saw this originally in a project for viewing your Reader
| Takeout data[1], and just built on that idea to make my own
| personal Google Reader experience.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/mihaip/readerisdead
| tech234a wrote:
| There was also a browser extension [1] that locally
| reimplemented parts of the Google Reader interface. It has
| since been removed from the Chrome Web Store.
|
| [1]:
| https://crxcavator.io/report/cemddjmmnfebpkpkonmbkdmakilpkci...
| psanford wrote:
| Actually, that project still has the nostalgia Reader interface
| online: http://readerisdead.com/reader/view/#overview-page
| dbrereton wrote:
| As someone who was born too late for Google Reader, I genuinely
| don't understand why people bring it up every 5 minutes.
|
| There are 1000 feed reader apps that exist right now, some of
| which have the branding of "it's just like Google Reader", so
| what am I missing here?
| jaywalk wrote:
| You're missing the pain that we had to go through to find
| something comparable.
|
| I'm sure you know the meme that any new Google product that's
| launched is basically on borrowed time, because it'll get
| cancelled soon enough. Well, Reader was the first one to get
| that treatment.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| I remember when Reader was shut down, very rapidly
| alternatives were coming up. Lots of people switched to
| Feedly within a few weeks, and The Old Reader came up, etc.
| The transition really wasn't that bad.
| jaywalk wrote:
| I was one of those people who switched to Feedly. And I'm
| also one of the people still using the Feedly Classic app,
| which they had to launch because of the uproar after they
| radically overhauled the app. I'm just hoping they decide
| to keep it around, since they never update it it's not like
| it's costing them anything.
| sweden wrote:
| I agree that HN goes overboard with Google Reader but I can
| also share the sentiment.
|
| You are right when you say that there are many alternatives to
| Google Reader, even better ones you could say. I am fond not
| just of Google Reader but also I am fond of the times of better
| news consumption of back then.
|
| When Google Reader disappeared, it left some sort of hole in
| news consumption that got filled up with Google+, Twitter and
| Facebook. The media outlets became obsessed about sharing news
| articles in social media, fighting for "likes", "+1s" and
| "retweets".
|
| Google Reader provided a simple of way of having your news
| centralized on a snappy service, with good UI, without any ads
| or "smart suggestions" and without all of your social graph
| embedded in there. It was _the_ way of consuming news for
| people that actually wanted to be informed.
|
| And the best part, you could actually subscribe to other's
| people favorite feeds. It was kind of hidden, there was no
| dedicated "find friends" button or anything like that, you had
| to go out of your way and ask to someone "Can I have the link
| to you RSS feed for your saved items?" in order to "add them"
| to Google Read. And you could actually comment on their saved
| items.
|
| I miss these times, I was actually a news junky back then
| because of Google Reader. I was shown what I wanted to be shown
| with no social crap or "hot articles" thrown to my face. I
| slowly lost interest in consuming news after that.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| I think one thing that you're missing that hasn't been
| mentioned is content caching.
|
| If your favorite website went away, you could still read and
| search all of the articles in the cached feed. I don't think
| there was an expiry time on it (other long-term users, feel
| free to correct me).
|
| These days there is no equivalent. If someone you follow
| decides to take down their website, you have to hope that
| someone archived some of their content on the popular archive
| sites.
| brundolf wrote:
| Seems like it wouldn't be hard to integrate an RSS reader
| with Wayback Machine for something similar
| mFixman wrote:
| I am old enough to have used Google Reader, and I don't get it
| either.
|
| My guess is that the death of Google Reader was one of the last
| domino pieces to fall in the change from the multi-website
| internet to the Reddit aggregator internet. The replacement
| apps don't work because the internet model where RSS was useful
| died a decade ago.
|
| This whole thing might be like the death of a popular BBS
| client for someone born in the 1980s. But then again... it's
| been 8 years. It's time to let go.
| chippy wrote:
| It was an app but with a network effect around it. All the
| replacements seem to have no community.
| crazygringo wrote:
| What was the network effect or community?
|
| I thought it was just an RSS reader.
|
| Were there forums or commenting on posts or something? I
| don't remember anything at all like that.
| btouellette wrote:
| Yes you could follow friends who could republish from their
| feeds onto a feed you could subscribe to and eventually it
| supported comments on those items which would allow
| discussion within their community. Discoverability and
| community which hasn't been replicated with the scattered
| userbase after it was killed.
| ip34162 wrote:
| Wow that sounds awesome.
| outime wrote:
| Nostalgia and attacking Google (or almost any big corporation)
| is usually very welcomed here.
| twelve40 wrote:
| Well in this case it's fully deserved. I was in shock when G
| started nudging me to share my photo albums. They came pretty
| close to scamming me into sharing random crap I would never
| imagine sharing (reminiscent of Linkedin scraping and
| blasting your entire address book), all for the sake of
| promoting stupid, closed-off G+. And Google Reader, which I
| used on a daily basis until its death, probably fell victim
| to the G+ effort.
|
| I use Newsblur as a replacement (thanks conesus!) but Google
| could have used their influence to promote RSS and make the
| web much more consumer-friendly, now without that everyone
| crawled off into their own walled garden like Facebook, etc.
| A number of people I read ended up only on Facebook
| unfortunately. RSS, while still around, never really took off
| to its full potential, and the G+ fiasco contributed to that.
| perardi wrote:
| 1. Way to make me feel old.
|
| 2. It was, by far, the dominant reader. Nobody other big
| corporation+ decided to make a top-level project that surfaced
| feed reading like this. So people remember it fondly, because
| it was the heyday of RSS, before Twitter and Facebook took over
| news delivery.
|
| + _OK, fine, I think Apple did a thing where you could read RSS
| feeds in Mail._
| gowld wrote:
| It's nostalgia for the world before "Social". Reader was just
| the public face of martyrdom.
| kleer001 wrote:
| Read the full comments and you should get it.
|
| > There are 1000 feed reader apps that exist right now,
|
| Sure, but Reader was basically the first.
|
| If you've never lost something you've loved it's impossible to
| understand.
| [deleted]
| keenreed wrote:
| That is moment when Google started cancelling products and
| turned evil. Before that they were geeks who could not even
| file IPO correctly.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Google Reader was the internet.
| pedrogpimenta wrote:
| Adding to what people answered:
|
| I think it's the ripple effect of ending that service. It
| meants RSS was dead. It probably was dying a slow death but
| that was the final straw.
|
| Websites stop supporting RSS feeds more and more so we are left
| with nothing else than following them through facebook or
| twitter or whatever new thing comes on.
|
| That's my take on it.
|
| Still, the sites that matter (to me) do still have RSS feeds :)
| darekkay wrote:
| > It meants RSS was dead.
|
| This has been claimed for years, but it's simply not true:
|
| > Still, the sites that matter (to me) do still have RSS
| feeds :)
| elliekelly wrote:
| It's kind of like your favorite coffee shop closing. Sure, I
| can get coffee anywhere but it was part of my daily routine.
| And a part of my daily routine that I _enjoyed_. When it gets
| yanked away it still leaves a gap that can 't quite be filled
| by the next-best substitute.
| justin66 wrote:
| > what am I missing here?
|
| People aren't just mourning Google Reader, they're mourning the
| Google that used to run products like Google Reader.
| bluedays wrote:
| Because before Google Reader was cancelled Google was known for
| not cancelling anything. Now they get rid of things left and
| right. It was basically the beginning of the end.
| kergonath wrote:
| That is not quite accurate. They've always killed stuff
| randomly. My personal issues at the time were Sparrow (an
| amazing email app on iPhone, killed when they bought the
| developer), Google Wave, Google Talk (they were already a
| headless chicken as far as IM was concerned; Google Talk was
| interoperable with other servers and we used it quite a lot),
| Google Video.
|
| Other notable cancellations before Google Reader were Google
| Buzz, Google Code search, Google Desktop, and Google Labs.
| There were dozens of others.
|
| They have always been as focused as a squirrel on drugs.
| vkou wrote:
| > Because before Google Reader was cancelled Google was known
| for not cancelling anything
|
| Web Accelerator, Wave, Google Video immediately spring to
| mind, but there's a few dozen smaller services that were all
| cancelled before Reader was.
| bluedays wrote:
| I would argue that all of those were failures, so there was
| no reason to keep using them. So I guess the better
| argument is that at this time Google wasn't known for
| cancelling successful products
| deepsun wrote:
| It was just a very good, no-bs type of service. With good-
| looking performant UI (it was before "material" UI conquered
| almost all other google services). Not that I'm against
| Material, I do my websites on it, but I have to admit previous
| google design was more intuitive.
| guyzero wrote:
| it's nostalgia for lost youth, same as nostalgia for anything.
| it's meaningless sentimentality.
| aksss wrote:
| A lot of the attempts to replace Reader aren't clean enough -
| they try to present the feed like a magazine layout or do other
| BS to dress up information, where Google reader was "just the
| facts". It feels a lot like this old game that kicked ass for
| the time, but you realize the magic will never be back again.
| Google killed it almost certainly because it distracted from
| other money making opportunities, so a lot of us associate it
| with a further corruption of the internet in a broad sense -
| like intentionally making things worse to make money off the
| bad process. They win, we all lose a little bit.
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| g. Reader had a reshare feature that made your account a RSS
| feed. Your peers/friends/colleagues would feed from you and to
| you.
|
| Together with reshared count, it implemented a very effective
| peer review mechanism.
|
| Having high adoption, it provided me very good feeds - nothing
| comes close now.
| Andrex wrote:
| Exactly. It was basically a share-ier Twitter long before
| Twitter, built on an open standard (RSS.) You could subscribe
| to every news website's RSS feed and at the time, most would
| offer their full content in your feed. You had incredible
| power to curate and refine your feed based on your interests
| and social circle.
| blakesterz wrote:
| I guess you had to be there? "it's just like Google Reader"
| means it's NOT as good, but close enough. GR was solid and we
| LOVED it, especially the search. I think RSS readers are one of
| those things that some of us LOVE and we're still bitter that
| Google took it away. Maybe it was the first big thing Google
| cancelled? I know for me it was, and I've not trusted anything
| new from Google since. Maybe that's it... before they broke my
| heart with killing Reader I really believed they were
| different, that they really tried to "not be evil" and then
| POOF one day my favorite thing on the web was gone.
|
| I guess you had to be there, I know it sounds ridiculous.
| mxfh wrote:
| I miss search the most, no other replacement came even close.
| Like a searchable corpus of your curated library of stuff
| you're interested in.
| treesknees wrote:
| As others have said, it marked a turning point for how Google
| is perceived. It's not as though GR had 100k beta users like
| Stadia, it had nearly 5 million active users when it shut
| down. The closing marked the end of Google doing cool things
| because they're cool, and showed their true colors as a major
| corporation looking after profits first. Something that is
| pretty much a given opinion of them today.
| BuckRogers wrote:
| I never did use Google Reader, having been used to Firefox Live
| Bookmarks. Today I'm using the Livemarks extension. Just taking a
| brief look at alternatives, because Livemarks was a very early
| response to Mozilla removing Live Bookmarks in 2018, Feedbro
| looks to be even more popular and more Google Readerish. It's
| more than I'm looking for but it looks good for the Google Reader
| crowd. On my phone (iOS) I use Inoreader.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| And don't forget Google Wave.
| bsharitt wrote:
| I miss pre-Google+ Google Reader. It's social features(shared
| feeds and comments) make it the only social network I've really
| enjoyed using without any serious dislikes.
| thrower123 wrote:
| I still pay for theoldreader, for some reason, though I don't
| really keep up with my RSS subscriptions anymore.
|
| Twitter chews up the time I used to spend on blogs, and I don't
| even get through the emailed newsletters that I used to check on
| daily.
| kepano wrote:
| A few folks here are asking why old timers still mourn Google
| Reader when there are so many good alternatives available now. I
| agree, there are. It even opened the door for many more tools in
| the space. I love using Feedly, Reeder, and NetNewsWire.
|
| But to me the sadness comes from seeing the open web continue to
| fray. At the time Google felt like an important part of the open
| web, and RSS was part of the glue that held it together.
| Discontinuing Google Reader felt like an admission that Google
| did not stand for those values anymore.
| ghaff wrote:
| >But to me the sadness comes from seeing the open web continue
| to fray.
|
| That's really the thing. People lash out at Google because it's
| a concrete target. And probably one of the worse examples of
| Google killing something that seemed clearly in the purview of
| an early mission to organize information. I'm often a bit
| surprised that Blogger has survived.
|
| But it's also emblematic of the fact that a fairly niche open
| web activity was becoming even more niche.
| kawfey wrote:
| Why are you using 3 different readers?
| kepano wrote:
| I use Feedly for sync, Reeder for iOS and NetNewsWire for Mac
| ambirex wrote:
| The real missed opportunity for Google was expanding reader's
| social/collaboration features into a more robust social
| network.It would have saved them from trying to ham fist Google+
| for everyone. It could have been a home for Wave and Buzz type of
| tech. Instead they threw out the baby, be damn the bathwater.
|
| That being said, I have a found NewsBlur a great replacement.
| EarthLaunch wrote:
| I was aghast when they killed Reader in order to promote G+. It
| was obviously the kind of "strategic business" decision that I
| would only expect from a failing organization, which changed my
| view of Google.
|
| The organic, 'bootstrapped' way forward for Google would have
| been to carefully expand the social features of Reader, which
| had a large loyal following. Instead they forced it to stagnate
| then sacrificed it upon their stupid G+ altar trying to copy
| Facebook years late. SO lame.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| Does anyone know why google didnt open source it?
| mattmcknight wrote:
| Guessing that it was dependent on too many internal services.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| Google Reader was my favorite web app by a wide margin and I can
| remember how well informed I was back then. Social networks were
| not part of my life yet, so free time was spent on Reader. RIP.
|
| Now I work the best I can using IFTTT to pull news from the feeds
| that are still functional and then pushing results into an
| Evernote notebook I nostalgically named Reader.
| [deleted]
| Reason077 wrote:
| I still miss it terribly. And it's a constant reminder that no
| matter how useful or popular it is, any Google
| product/service/API/platform that you use or depend on could be
| shut down at any time.
| simonw wrote:
| Something I find really interesting about the closure of Google
| Reader is that it affected a relatively tiny proportion of people
| - the vast majority of humans have never heard of RSS and would
| have no idea what the product was even for.
|
| But... those ten million users are incredibly influential. Today
| they are in positions where they make cloud computing purchasing
| decisions on behalf of huge organizations. And they haven't
| forgotten.
|
| I wonder how much Reader's closure has cost Google in subsequent
| loss of trust and sales.
| sagolikasoppor wrote:
| I am one of those guys that make sure my company will never
| chose anything google hosted partly because of this reason.
| batpangolin wrote:
| This sounds more like a fantasy based on questionable ideas of
| karma or natural justice than an actual business consideration
| for Google.
| [deleted]
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Reader wasn't the breaking point for my company, but there's
| a clear trend in Google products
|
| - They will break your API contracts, and break them often.
|
| - They will likely be end-of-lifed, usually 2 to 5 years
| after implementation (perfect timing for the devs at your
| company that did the original implementation to have mostly
| moved on to a different company, so lots of domain knowledge
| loss right before a major product shift)
|
| - They often look shiny but run like absolute fucking
| dogshit. I don't know if you've loaded GCP console (or hell,
| even just gmail)_recently, but prepare to spend 30+ seconds
| waiting for the initial pageload to finish.
|
| ----
|
| I have influence on which products we purchase and use. We do
| not use Google for anything in production (with the exception
| of our Android app, for fairly obvious reasons).
|
| Again, reader didn't break the camel's back, but it sure
| added some weight.
| swiley wrote:
| Google doesn't want the google reader users. They're the sort of
| people that don't scroll through ads.
| markappel wrote:
| While I share the lament, I happily pay for
| https://www.inoreader.com/ which innovated beyond what Google
| would have been willing to do. Highly recommended.
| cecida wrote:
| Ya, I signed up for it a few weeks ago based upon a
| recommendation here. It's a brilliant RSS reader. Has every
| feature I want.
| threeboy wrote:
| I found out about this post via RSS through Feedly.
| buss wrote:
| I don't understand the hagiography. Any one of us can build a
| replacement instead of lamenting reader's demise. If you miss
| reader so much then rebuild it.
| dr-detroit wrote:
| The point is these elites' lives are so comfortable they expect
| everything to be effortless, familiar, and bad things should be
| relegated to the realm of other people.
| draw_down wrote:
| For me, when I see old screenshots like this, it makes me realize
| how festooned with garbage UIs used to be. Just sooo much
| unnecessary shit. Everywhere.
|
| I also don't love the state we're in today, when useful things
| are hidden or just removed altogether. But man, I can appreciate
| how we got here.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Festooned with garbage? Nearly everything in that screenshot
| serves a purpose. Like is there a single thing in that
| screenshot that looks superfluous?
| draw_down wrote:
| Just because something _could be_ used doesn 't mean I need
| to be looking at it right this second. And it turns out that
| every single div doesn't need a border.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| > festooned with garbage UI
|
| Huh?! Can you point out a single UI element in that screenshot
| that doesn't serve a useful purpose?
|
| Reader's UI was basically perfect. I believe that's what proved
| to be the end of it at Google. There was no more changes to be
| made to it. So Google had to shut it down, because they
| absolutely have to be doing new stuff.
| sogen wrote:
| Fraidycat [0] is a very good substitute, plus, it's more
| streamlined.
|
| [0]: https://fraidyc.at
| jdauriemma wrote:
| Fraidycat is great; I can't wait until they release a mobile
| client
| thefz wrote:
| I found peace with Tiny Tiny RSS on a small and cheap VPS. It has
| all the features I need and I use it daily. Hardly any problem
| with it, 200+ feeds.
| tomcooks wrote:
| Remembering a tool that killed useful technology, for what
| reason? If there's one thing that should be remembered is RSS
| itself, and shouldn't RIP but come back to life.
|
| Google is not your friend, don't praise gigacorps - especially
| when they kill stuff that works.
| jdauriemma wrote:
| It still hurts
| thayne wrote:
| I never really used google reader, and there are plenty of other
| RSS clients out there. What I mourn isn't Google Reader
| specifically, but the decline of RSS generally, which to be fair
| may have been accelerated by the end of Google Reader.
| aasasd wrote:
| So basically, one can begin slapping together a competitor as
| soon as Google rolls out a service--because the service is likely
| to go the way of the Reader in a few years.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I think that is a reasonable take, it my more accurately say to
| both founders and investors that time / money invested in doing
| something Google is already doing is not a "bad bet"[1]
|
| [1] Caveat search engines? Who knows when that house of cards
| will finally collapse.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| [1] only "knuckleheads" would take that one on ;) Come join
| the new club in town https://knuckleheads.club/ - your
| immense knowledge and experience can help the cause a lot.
| crucialfelix wrote:
| Google Keep is next. It is neat and simple, though I haven't
| been using it lately.
| volongoto wrote:
| I use Keep, but there are already millions of apps that does
| what Keep is doing. I don't think there will be a huge
| vacuum.
| nanoservices wrote:
| I actually really like Microsoft ToDo. Your setup can be as
| simple as you want or as complex as you need it to be!
| aasasd wrote:
| Case in point, 'To Do' is derived from Wunderlist that
| has been around since 2011.
| zaat wrote:
| But Keep is much more than ToDo, it is more like a less
| capable OneNote (or, put differently, it is very much
| like the newer version of OneNote).
| 45ure wrote:
| I really hope they don't kill it. Although, I never really
| recovered from the Red Wedding of Reader. However, I recently
| convinced myself to use Google Keep; it has a neat
| implementation of grabbing text from an image and works
| fairly well.
|
| I realise that I will be training the algorithms, and
| appending data to the already vast collection. It is a trade-
| off I am willing to accept. I have generally been using it to
| grab text from labels for ingredients and other products to
| create my own notes.
| crucialfelix wrote:
| I have a sync script that fetches all my google Keep notes
| and saves as markdown.
|
| I was using it to sync into Roam for a while, but now I
| have it syncing into my markdown folder.
|
| My current note taker is iA Writer. On the go markdown
| authoring, syncs with dropbox.
| 45ure wrote:
| Thanks for the tip on iA Writer - like the aesthetics,
| and features. I will definitely give it a shot.
| mrisoli wrote:
| I think it's Google Podcasts, barely any efforts on features
| for the app, seems like they just made it because there
| needed to be a podcast app, Keep, while not given much
| attention by Google, is still easily accessible within Gmail.
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26581736.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Indeed, Google's launch validates a market, creates enthusiasm,
| and once they shut it down you can be there to catch the users.
| javajosh wrote:
| This is the VC cycle in a nutshell: venture capital does some
| PoC, business/tech R&D, and when it fails (usually does!) the
| lessons are still available to others.
|
| It's no different even if the (defunct) startup has a patent:
| IP law doesn't really matter when the IP doesn't have any
| money behind it.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > It's no different even if the (defunct) startup has a
| patent
|
| Not true - VC's are scared of giving money to anything that
| directly infringes a patent. If the company ever does
| wildly well, you can be sure whoever bought that patent for
| cents will be trying to collect millions...
| javajosh wrote:
| I don't think VC's care about patents, they care about
| risk. A patent without any money behind it isn't a risk.
| A company that isn't making money to steal also isn't at
| risk. But if you have money, and the patent holder has
| money, then let the legal fireworks begin, and as a happy
| side-effect, the patent attorneys get to pay for their
| kids' college, and maybe an investment property or two.
| thayne wrote:
| > IP law doesn't really matter when the IP doesn't have any
| money behind it.
|
| But that IP could end up owned by a patent troll that
| _does_ have the money to enforce it in court, or at least
| threaten to do so.
| adfm wrote:
| Vine lives in a glass jar on the mantlepiece.
| javajosh wrote:
| What a curious comment - care to elaborate? (I'm thinking
| a USB drive with Vine's source code is actually on your
| mantelpiece?)
| escape_goat wrote:
| That might be true, but the risk is always that Google can
| remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
| brundolf wrote:
| Sounds like I better get started on my Stadia clone ;)
| oetnxkdrlgcexu wrote:
| "netflix for games" is an incredible value proposition if you
| have the capital to act on it.
| Razengan wrote:
| So Apple Arcade?
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| I think you need console/pc games to make it work.
|
| And microsoft are waaay ahead of you ;)
| jonny_eh wrote:
| You'll also be competing with Amazon (Luna), Nvidia (Geforce
| Now), Microsoft (Xbox Game Pass), and Sony (Playstation Now).
| Plus other small players that are much farther along, like
| Shadow.
| spijdar wrote:
| If you think about it, though none of these except Shadow
| are "small players naively competing with big business", it
| still kind of demonstrates the point. Google starts
| something that is ostensibly a good idea, demonstrates that
| there is some market, but flops the execution. I don't know
| what'll happen to Stadia, I'm hesitant to dismiss it just
| because "lol Google made another thing, surely they'll kill
| it in a year", but just skimming the news it does seem
| it'll go the way of Allo and Hangouts and Reader (And G+
| ironically)...
| harha wrote:
| Let us also remember Inbox, haven't been able to manage day
| through my calendar, tasks and email in one place as seamlessly
| since that one was sunset.
| politelemon wrote:
| I am still holding out naive, idiotic hope that someone will
| build an Inbox replacement. And not the box-ticking feature-
| parity that they still haven't delivered on, but the actual
| intelligent workflows, while maintaining a clean uncluttered
| experience, that Inbox was so good at. I do understand though,
| that a lot of people who didn't "get" Inbox will not understand
| this sentiment either. But there are dozens of us!
|
| The closest I'm finding now, strangely, is Outlook, and MS
| Todo. Through a combination of flagged emails and the archive
| function. Though it's still in multiple places and not one.
| SparkMail app helps as well with slightly advanced snoozing,
| but nowhere near the Inbox experience. I'm bitter now, thanks
| harha wrote:
| Having To-dos and Calendar entries pop up at the right time,
| eliminating the need to switch apps in the daily flow, it was
| all such a work of genius.
|
| I never got used to Outlook, though I don't recall why, and
| now I'm back to what macOS has, even though it feels so basic
| and I sometimes end up unprepared for meetings or have them
| in the wrong time zone because I add them through Mail but
| can't edit them in Calendar.
|
| Inbox without Google would be such a great product, if I had
| a team to work with I would take on this problem (I'm a PM
| happy to contribute what I can if anyone is interested):
|
| - The main useful features don't have that many "smart"
| parts, I think it would take some translation layer into all
| the different protocols to appear seamless. That's probably
| the hardest part to implement given how ancient e-mail,
| calendar, tasks are (at least from a user perspective, I must
| admit, I don't know much about the protocols).
|
| - The "smart" features, such as trips could be implemented as
| plugins.
|
| - Add an interface for custom plug-ins and this would
| integrate so well both in individual workflows of power users
| and teams.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| I think I've tried basically every email client out there
| since Inbox shut down and haven't found a satisfying
| replacement. I've found Twobird to be the closest though.
| progx wrote:
| Welcome to killedbygoogle.com
| seaman1921 wrote:
| typical - waiting all day just to bash Google on HN without any
| context. Reader was deprecated 8 years ago.
| vzaliva wrote:
| I was first dissapointed when they close. Then I started using
| Feedly. It turns out quite well: I they are as powerfull, but I
| have one less entangelment with google ecosystem.
| Jackim wrote:
| * { letter-spacing: 1px; }
| ndr wrote:
| I recently started to consume content via RSS again. It turns
| out, most of the blogs I care about have a working RSS feed.
|
| I'm using newsblur (no affiliation) and it's working quite well,
| I no longer need to poll the websites, or wait for posts to
| appear here or on Twitter.
|
| The nicest side effect is that checking newsblur before
| HN/Twitter limited my mindless scrolling, although this comment
| proves it didn't eliminate it.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Newsblur also lets you subscribe to YT channels, which is much
| nicer experience than YT's own way of handling subscriptions
| waterhouse wrote:
| Hmm, interesting. Is it based on Youtube's raw RSS features?
| Because you can use RSS for an entire channel, or for a
| playlist, but the latter doesn't work if there are more than
| 15 (IIRC) videos in the playlist. Does Newsblur do something
| specific to Youtube to work around that?
|
| Also, does any RSS reader have some kind of regex filtering
| option? "I want all the items from this RSS feed that match
| the following regex".
|
| While I'm at it, how about getting the output of an arbitrary
| program? (Use case: websites that have a page with what I
| want--e.g. every article published by a certain author--but
| have no built-in RSS functionality. Ideally I would specify
| the program as "curl [URL] | egrep -o [stuff]", and it would
| generate new RSS entries anytime that output changed.) I know
| I can kludge together a cron job that runs such a program and
| generates a file, and point my RSS reader at the URL
| "file://path/to/output.xml", but is there anything with
| built-in functionality like that?
| alex_duf wrote:
| I think youtube had killed every RSS endpoint, I remember
| channels disappearing from my RSS app. So either youtube
| has done the right thing or that specific reader is
| scrapping the HTML of the channel pages.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I am subscribing to youtube channels through thunderbird.
| It works well for right now and it makes it easy to
| either open the url or copy it to youtube-dl or mpv for
| out of browser watching, but getting the rss url for a
| named channel is so janky now, and it feels like it works
| only because nobody has turned it of, like it is one
| design tweak from being disabled entirely.
|
| Ah well, I will continue subscribing in Thunderbird until
| whomever keeps RSS alive at youtube (thank you, if you
| are reading this) moves on to better things.
|
| Then I will watch it sunset just as I did with google
| music, G+, Google reader and all the rest Google has
| killed over the years.
| waterhouse wrote:
| You can get a Youtube channel's Atom feed as something
| like this: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?chann
| el_id=UC0Xe2bv...
|
| From the channel's URL like this:
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0Xe2bvq_2uucE2IRALSR_Q
| ecliptik wrote:
| I'm not entirely sure how the Newsblur youtube feeds work,
| but here's an older blog post on switching to API v2,
|
| https://blog.newsblur.com/post/117767869761/a-real-
| solution-...
|
| I have about 20 youtube channels in Newsblur and watch them
| almost always within Newsblur itself, so it works well
| enough.
|
| For regex filtering, Newsblur has training features. You
| can curate a feed based off specific attributes, like
| author, topic, keywords, etc.
| waterhouse wrote:
| Nice, so they do have something custom-built for Youtube.
| And I don't know if that extends to following a
| particular playlist, but at least for my purposes,
| matching a string in the titles of a channel's videos
| would be equally useful. So that should work.
| cromka wrote:
| Tiny Tiny RSS has regex filtering. Use it extensively and
| works as expected.
| waterhouse wrote:
| Nice. Incidentally, I found https://siftrss.com/ , which
| lets one do string-based filtering at the level of
| _creating a new feed based on the old one_ , which means
| you can plug it into your existing reader.
| addicted wrote:
| {RSS Reader} also lets you subscribe to {Feed based Service}
| which is a much nicer experience than {Feed Based Service}'s
| own way of handling subscriptions.
|
| -----
|
| I've found that the above statement works for a very large
| set of values for {Feed Based Service}.
|
| One really great example was when I setup Redmine (open
| source Jira alternative) for my company's project management
| needs. Instead of having it email me notifications, having
| them in the Reader was amazing.
| baxter001 wrote:
| When I'm bored and looking for distraction, I'll often get as far
| as reader.goog in the address bar before I remember :(
| danesparza wrote:
| Still bitter about this. This helps my grief. Thanks.
| ortusdux wrote:
| I've kept my Google Reader bookmark next to my Gmail bookmark as
| a reminder to not get overly invested in their products.
| jazzido wrote:
| Paraphrasing from a tweet that I saw a while ago: "You don't miss
| Google Reader. You miss your life as it was when you used Google
| Reader. You miss being young".
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| geez, when was this made, recently/now? It's like come on, "dead
| longer than it was alive"..... there were so many contributing
| factors to the environment and shifts of the day when it happened
| -- this endlessly bringing it up shows like so much unawareness
| of surroundings/history
|
| and also, what other options took its place / fill the void / RSS
| is not dead! etc
| conesus wrote:
| It was in the summer of 2008, three years after Google launched
| Reader and had at least 5 million users, when I decided to write
| my own RSS reader. There were just so many features I wanted that
| I knew Google would never build and for some strange reason I
| thought I could make money with my own opinionated take on a news
| reader.
|
| Then at 4pm on March 13th, 2013, I got an email from Nilay at The
| Verge asking if I'd heard the news. That was a difficult month as
| I scaled (and wrote about scaling[0]), since by then Google
| Reader had 10 million active users. After Reader was sunset,
| about 5 million found their homes on the news readers that
| remained.
|
| It's strange to think that naively competing with one of the big
| platforms paid off, but there's plenty of companies that did well
| in the wake of a giant choosing to ignore the ecosystem near
| their feet.
|
| [0]: https://blog.newsblur.com/post/45632737156/three-months-
| to-s...
| baumy wrote:
| At some point a year or two ago I googled around for "best rss
| reader app" or "best rss news app" looking for android
| specifically, and I don't remember seeing newsblur talked about
| anywhere. All of the ones I did try (aggregator, feedly,
| inoreader, etc) were unsatisfactory in various ways.
|
| I just downloaded and tried newsblur and it's pretty much
| perfect for my taste and needs. Going to try it for a few days
| then will likely become a paid user. This comment is coming
| from a place of relative ignorance, but have you considered
| investing in a bit of marketing, or a bit more if you have? For
| how good this app is among rss readers, it doesn't seem as
| discoverable as it deserves to be.
| einpoklum wrote:
| I'm using Flym, although TBH I'm not a very demanding user
| not have I carried out a thorough survey.
| aasasd wrote:
| Well you'd come upon it sooner if you used alternativeto.net,
| which is pretty good among software listings.
| macintux wrote:
| But also could apparently use some marketing.
| aasasd wrote:
| Eh, it's likewise seemingly maintained by two guys, so it
| has some of the homely feel, and is not spammed to death
| like a widely popular service would be.
| conesus wrote:
| Marketing is hard for me because I've hired a few folks to do
| targeted ads and it ended up being a big cost sink. Beyond
| that, I try to blog regularly and use big screenshots for new
| features, which helps a bit with SEO and discoverability. But
| getting NB onto lists? I'm not sure what that requires.
| slgeorge wrote:
| I'm a subscriber so I have self-interest in you being
| successful and I've paid money to help support that. If
| there's one thing I would encourage/plead you to do, it's
| to hire one person who will do "advocacy marketing". You
| said "Marketing is hard" and there's no doubt. But you'll
| know the right person, because they'll be __more__ excited
| about talking about your product and how it can be used,
| and who can use it ... than even you are. Most importantly,
| they'll just do that one thing. RSS/Newsletters is an area
| of content that geeks love - so finding someone who wants
| to __regularly__ talk about that in content, video, <forums
| that count> would be massive. I'll stop there ;-)
| londons_explore wrote:
| Set up a referral scheme. Anyone who refers a new paid
| user to NewsBlur gets a month free. Anyone who refers 10
| people gets a tshirt. Anyone who refers 100 paid users
| gets actual cash...
|
| Make sure you run the messaging past a bunch of existing
| users to make sure you pique their interest but don't
| alienate them in the process.
| mpol wrote:
| @conesus You found your advocacy marketeer :)
|
| More seriously, if you follow this advice, your own users
| might be the best place to find someone like this.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| Nothing much to add. Roy-less? Seriously, why not follow
| this great advice?
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| FWIW, I've repeatedly come across Newsblur, when searching
| for RSS readers; it's quite possibly the most common name I
| see, even from back when Google Reader died, to a few months
| ago (when I last searched).
|
| It's possible that you were adding the "for android" context
| in your searches, and it might not do well in that case
| (because of people seeing it as primarily web-based or cross-
| platform, and not emphasising the Android part).
| gambler wrote:
| Finding good applications, especially for Android, is way
| harder than it should be. Seems like _this_ is a problem
| worth solving as well.
| joshschreuder wrote:
| I've been a paying (happily) user since Reader died, and I am a
| big fan of Newsblur. It's one of my "multiple visits a day"
| sites / app.
|
| You're also super responsive on Twitter / support channels too
| whenever I've needed, thanks for putting together a great
| service and being such a strong face of it.
| myelin wrote:
| Another happy NewsBlur customer here; I was part of the mass
| exodus from Google Reader, and NewsBlur has been an excellent
| replacement.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Thank you for making newsblur. I used it for a long time after
| google reader, until I moved all my RSS subscriptions to
| Thunderbird.
|
| If anybody else wants a good cloud RSS service, take a look at
| newsblur.
| user_error wrote:
| > "My hosting provider, Reliable Hosting Services, was neither
| reliable, able to host my increasing demands, or a service I
| could count on."
|
| I cried when I read this. Beautiful.
| beefman wrote:
| Happy customer since 2013. Never stop!
| greenyoda wrote:
| Here's yet another thank-you! I've been a paying NewsBlur user
| since Google Reader died, and enjoy using it every day.
|
| Despite everyone saying that "RSS is dead", it's very rare for
| me to find a blog I'm interested in that doesn't have an RSS
| feed.
| ecliptik wrote:
| Thank you for Newsblur, it's one of my essential apps and I use
| it for almost everything; RSS feeds, reddit, youtube, twitter,
| newsletters, even gemini:// via proxy.
|
| It's a solid product, and the amount of work you've put into it
| shows and I plan to remain a customer for years to come.
| conesus wrote:
| Then you'll be excited to see the upcoming redesign that I
| have yet to publicly launch (but want a few users on to test
| the waters early): https://beta.newsblur.com
| ecliptik wrote:
| Looks awesome, replaced my pinned tab with the beta version
| and will put it through it's paces. Thank you!
| pfd1986 wrote:
| Is there (plan for) a "read it later" feature? Sometimes I
| find a good link that I just want to be able to find and
| read at a later time.
|
| Thanks!
| blakesterz wrote:
| I've been with you since! Newsblur is still the way I keep up
| with the things I find important. I actually discovered HN on
| the suggested feeds thing on Newsblur!
| egypturnash wrote:
| oh man I love the last item on the table comparing Free
| Newsblur to Paid Newsblur. Free version: My dog goes hungry!
| Paid version: Tiny photo of happy dog and a note about what a
| nice meal you'll cook for her.
| JustARandomGuy wrote:
| Thanks for NewsBlur! I've been a paying customer since Reader
| got cancelled.
|
| I recommend NewsBlur to everybody: super uptime, great API,
| integrated with IFTTT, and supported by a lot of good mobile
| reader apps
| p4bl0 wrote:
| Same here!
| lcfcjs wrote:
| I hated Google Reader, it always favored right-wing news outlets,
| no matter how I messed with it.
| petercooper wrote:
| I find https://feedbin.com/ almost identical (Feedly feels a bit
| too different for my liking, but is clearly the most popular) but
| it also feels like times have moved on and I don't find myself
| using it in the same way. The blogosphere isn't quite what it was
| back in the late 00s.
| slk500 wrote:
| No more drama. Emacs + elfeed is the savior
| sdfjkl wrote:
| Will you stop crying about Google Reader already and move on
| please.
|
| RSS is alive and well if you want it to be. I've switched to
| theoldreader.com when Google pulled the plug, imported my feeds
| and have been there ever since.
|
| I'm subscribed to 125 feeds, 72% of which had new posts in the
| last year (following super low volume things is one of the many
| advantages of RSS). Most of the inactive ones have simply
| atrophied or ceased to exist entirely rather than turn off their
| RSS feeds.
|
| I never log into YouTube but follow many channels via RSS
| instead. There's also Twitter gateways, although the one I've
| used stopped working and most everyone I care about has moved on
| to Mastodon anyways, so I haven't bothered with finding another.
|
| I still regularly subscribe to new blogs, Youtube channels and
| other stuff via RSS and don't really know any other sane way to
| follow such things. I'll certainly not go and bookmark a bunch of
| sites and then click on them to see if they have posted something
| new or not - that would be insanity.
|
| So yes, Google took a big dump on RSS, but then that's what
| Bigcorp does. Get on with it - RSS is fine. Build more feeds into
| your webthings because if it doesn't have RSS the grumpy old
| nerds like me will probably not look at it twice! :-P
| fbnlsr wrote:
| I quickly glanced at theoldreader.com front page, and it looks
| nice. I tried setting up a new account and it immediately
| proposed to try out 14 days free "premium".
|
| Not only do you have to click on a tiny link to discover what
| the premium brings, but there is no information on how much the
| premium plan costs. That's a really bad UX.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Dunno why they don't advertise it, but this is what I pay:
|
| > Description: $25 per year - Up to 500 feeds
| adkadskhj wrote:
| I didn't use Google Reader much, what did it do for you that made
| it memorable? Or perhaps, what are other Readers failing to
| deliver?
| selykg wrote:
| For me, it wasn't so much Google Reader itself, it was a free
| feed sync source.
|
| So I could subscribe to a feed in Google Reader, then use a 3rd
| party app (like Reeder or any number of others) to view the
| feeds I was subscribed to, and it would provide all the
| tracking and syncing so to speak.
|
| It fills the gap of services like Feedbin, Feedly, and others.
| Except it was "free" and now I have to pay $50/yr for Feedbin.
| While this isn't a big deal, I don't track that many feeds so
| it's kind of unpleasant to pay $50/yr for the 10 feeds I track.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| Feedly has a free tier that's more than sufficient for such
| light use.
| selykg wrote:
| Problem with Feedly, in my experience, has been the rate
| they provide updates to feeds. I may track these 10 or so
| feeds which is low, but I do want timely updates to those
| feeds in my RSS app. Seeing delays of multiple hours is a
| lot less useful to me in several cases.
|
| I realize I am sounding a bit whiny here. I just didn't
| have these problems with Google Reader and it sucks that
| the free option that worked well disappeared. At the end of
| the day though, $50/yr isn't a big deal, it's just a
| combination of everything becoming a damn subscription and
| how I'm sort of tired of subscriptions. Subscription
| fatigue is real for me.
| pwdisswordfish0 wrote:
| > So I could subscribe to a feed in Google Reader, then use a
| 3rd party app (like Reeder or any number of others) to view
| the feeds I was subscribed to, and it would provide all the
| tracking and syncing so to speak.
|
| Can you explain what this means? What's involved here? How
| does it differ from dumping all your RSS feeds into an
| ordinary RSS reader?
| selykg wrote:
| Think of Google Reader as a 3rd party sync API, and a
| variety of tools use this API.
|
| lets use Twitter as an example.
|
| Google Reader is Twitter with their API
|
| Reeder (or your RSS reader with support for the API) is
| like Tweetbot.
|
| This isn't a great example, because read status of feed
| items and all that is handled by Google Reader. But it's
| close.
| taeric wrote:
| It actually had really good social integration with gmail. I
| could have conversations with close friends on items in my
| feed.
|
| Hilarious, as all replacements were trying to build a social
| interaction.
| schuke wrote:
| I had a great time with my friends on it. I've never had that
| much good discussions with my friends about anything since.
| martini333 wrote:
| No competition back then.
| detaro wrote:
| There were multiple options you could migrate your feeds to
| when it was shutdown. So I wouldn't say "no competition", but
| more some specific features that the competition didn't have.
| ambirex wrote:
| The last interaction/version of Bloglines was really quite
| good, but at that point the user base has switched to Reader.
| prepend wrote:
| Never forget. Never trust.
| vishnu_ks wrote:
| I have been building an RSS reader for developers called
| https://diff.blog. It's havily integrated with GitHub. For
| example, when you sign up, it automatically follows the blog of
| developers and organizations you are part of. I have been working
| on it in my spare time during the last 2 years and it has been
| growing steadily. It has over 1200+ users now. Do give it a try!
| pikseladam wrote:
| I suggest Fraidycat
| tarkin2 wrote:
| Killing Google Reader has to be one of the worst developer
| relations disasters at Google.
|
| It killed A LOT of goodwill.
| ava1ar wrote:
| Was a huge disappointment when google made a decision to close
| it. I remember lots of services appeared pick up the audience. I
| switched to BazQux back then and still using it (bought lifetime
| license after several years and enjoying it every day).
| Glench wrote:
| Shout out to https://bazqux.com, a modern Google Reader
| replacement and the only SaaS I pay for. I'm not affiliated, just
| really love it. It's been solid and awesome for me for over 7
| years now.
| jonpurdy wrote:
| Shout out to Feedbin! It was created shortly after (I think)
| Google announced the Reader deprecation. I signed up around the
| first day and have been a subscriber since then. It even has a
| well-documented and supported API. I hope Ben keeps running it
| for many years to come.
| listenallyall wrote:
| Best G.Reader replacement by far!
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