[HN Gopher] Google Reader shutdown tidbits (2013)
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Google Reader shutdown tidbits (2013)
Author : goranmoomin
Score : 41 points
Date : 2024-04-21 18:58 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.persistent.info)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.persistent.info)
| gkoberger wrote:
| I'm always curious how people can still be so upset about Google
| Reader a decade later, but not a single (popular) RSS reader has
| popped up and really taken off as a replacement.
| anotherhue wrote:
| There have been several. I liked newsblur for a while, but the
| magic of reader seemed to be when a friend of a friend shared
| an article that you would never otherwise have seen.
|
| Simultaneously, blogging as a medium has changed for many
| economic and cultural reasons so even if reader remained I
| think the ecosystem would be different.
|
| Someone on HN recently said that the difference ten+ years ago
| was that people were blogging in the evenings and weekends
| after their full time position, but now the content economy can
| provide an income, so we have a lot more processional creators,
| who IMO, over produce.
| sega_sai wrote:
| Inoreader is probably as good as Google Reader. I have been
| using it for last 10 years or so. I know people used feedly (I
| personally didn't like it). But clearly none of those are as
| popular as Google reader. Presumably because many switched away
| from consuming RSS.
| D13Fd wrote:
| Google reader was free, popular, and had a great UI. Lots of
| the best parts of it came from network effects.
|
| You don't really get that from Inoreader, Feedbin, Feedly etc
| from what I've seen in trying them.
| mynegation wrote:
| There were and definitely appeared the readers with pretty much
| equivalent functionality and some were even copying the look
| and feel straight up. But the main advantage of the reader was
| that it had almost all the past posts from the feed archived,
| for the vast number of sites. No company other than Google
| wanted to pull this off. Another aspect is that people felt
| Google signaled to the site owners that they do not have to
| pursue feed support as actively if at all.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| That's because RSS as a medium has been supplanted by closed-
| garden style social media - some people still use RSS, but it's
| no longer as popular, because how could it be when most of my
| "feeds" are explicitly closed off to RSS?
| thinkingemote wrote:
| Google Reader wasn't really only a RSS reader, it was a social
| network. You could follow your friends feeds, see what they
| liked, see their activity, discover new blogs as well as share
| what you were into. I found so many new blogs that way, it was
| the main entry into the web for me. It was my homepage and my
| friends were there too.
| D13Fd wrote:
| Exactly. I get that, supposedly, it wasn't shut down to make
| room for other social network features.
|
| But whatever the intent was, they shut down a very effective,
| useful and popular social network feature and didn't replace
| it with any workable equivalent. They just gave that traffic
| to competitors for no reason. It was pretty boneheaded.
| O1111OOO wrote:
| > They just gave that traffic to competitors for no reason.
|
| I always felt that RSS cost Google long-term ad revenue and
| that was the reason for the closure. It cost websites
| actual live visitors and these interactions became
| increasingly important as surveillance capitalism became
| more nuanced.
|
| That is: how much time you spent on a page, where you
| hovered your mouse, etc..
|
| It was more important to upsell the benefits of Google
| Analytics - what it could do, what it could track. To get
| sites excited about SEO (ie, Google Ads and Google itself)
| than to cater to the wishes of the end-user (who ultimately
| does not want to become a product).
|
| When you're building an ad network, you want to get
| everyone involved. You need active, participating partners
| so that the network grows and builds on itself. This growth
| is what brings in larger, long-term ad money. RSS was the
| opposite of that.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Oh, that's simple.
|
| Take me for example: I never used Google Reader. I used Google
| Reader a lot.
|
| Thing is, I never used GR on my desktop, FeedDemon was always a
| better experience. But on the go (in that short time it was
| available) I wanted to have the same feeds and, of course, the
| same un/read statuses. And Google Reader was a perfect sync
| _service_ first and good enough RSS reader second.
|
| Sure, there were a lot of attempts at that time, but... Feedly,
| which was pushed as the best great thing after sliced bread^W^W
| GR didn't run good on my RAZR (if at all, I think I abandoned
| it when it started to sat down on the loding splash) and there
| were no desktop version. Other apps (which names eludes me)
| were no better, at least for me. And the most important part is
| what they lacked the integrated sync what was available to you
| as a Gmail (sic!) user, so it was some other sync provider, if
| at all.
|
| So for a short time when there were no king the RSS lost a lot
| of it's momentum _for the consumers_ of the feeds. Some years
| later the alternatives matured, but the time of RSS has gone.
| People moved to podcasts, Twitter and whatever and RSS was no
| longer even a necessary tech to implement.
|
| [0] http://feeddemon.com/
| nullsmack wrote:
| Shutting down Reader was a monumentally stupid thing to do.
| Social features aside, I liked that it was a website I could go
| to and catch up on things no matter if I was at home or at work
| or elsewhere. The alternatives were things like apps, that
| didn't have that kind of access, or a self-hosted thing that I
| didn't want to manage, or some services that I don't think
| lasted.
|
| All of the alternatives are worse. And imagine if you're
| dependent on gmail and they shut that down. Reader was like
| that.
| geor9e wrote:
| I use Feedbro. It works decently well that I haven't looked for
| an alternative in a long time. It's great just seeing unread
| posts in chronological order - no feed algorithm at all. I
| mainly follow Hackernews, Facebook friends (individually
| added), and Twitter (via nitter, also individually added).
| benrapscallion wrote:
| Newsblur
| paradox460 wrote:
| A single reader hasn't popped up. Many have. There's Feedly and
| feedbin, inoreader (which I use), newsblur, and many others
| changoplatanero wrote:
| I remember bring your parents to work day that's mentioned in the
| article there. That was a great event! If I recall correctly some
| parents even traveled all the way from India to attend and some
| parents sincerely mentioned that it was one of the happiest days
| of their life.
| orcul wrote:
| bazqux does the trick for me
| aworks wrote:
| Likewise. After Google Reader, I was using both bazqux and
| Feedly. I finally dropped Feedly.
| cft wrote:
| Google search thrived from the third party websites. RSS
| incentivized and enabled those third-party websites. By killing
| the reader and RSS, they helped consolidate the web into
| unsearchable walled gardens like Facebook. If those decision
| makers still work in Google, that's a reason for continuing
| Google's downfall.
|
| The decision was probably based on two reasons:
|
| 1. They wanted users to discover content using their algorithm as
| opposed to manual subscriptions to RSS thus depriving users of
| content Discovery agency.
|
| 2. They wanted to promote Google
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