[dead]
RIP Google Reader
71–80 of 424 posts
Re: RIP Google Reader
#72Will 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
Re: RIP Google Reader
#73As 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?
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.
Re: RIP Google Reader
#74As 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?
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.
Re: RIP Google Reader
#75Whatever 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.
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.
Which ones are your favorites?
Re: RIP Google Reader
#76As 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?
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.
Re: RIP Google Reader
#77Whatever 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.
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…
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?
Re: RIP Google Reader
#78There are two internet services in my lifetime that I was devastated to see shut down (at the time): Google Reader and lala.com.
Re: RIP Google Reader
#79I've been using Thunderbird as my RSS reader for years. Who in their right mind trusts Google?
Re: RIP Google Reader
#80Whatever 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.
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…
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.