RIP Google Reader • Hacker News Board

Re: RIP Google Reader

#131

Post by jaywalk » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 4:42 PM UTC

benhurmarcel wrote: post #86

jaywalk wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#132

Post by twelve40 » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 4:42 PM UTC

outime wrote: post #62

dbrereton wrote: post #58

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?

Nostalgia and attacking Google (or almost any big corporation) is usually very welcomed here.

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.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#133

Post by sogen » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

Fraidycat [0] is a very good substitute, plus, it's more streamlined.

[0]: https://fraidyc.at

Re: RIP Google Reader

#134

Post by Andrex » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #73

dbrereton wrote: post #58

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?

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.

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.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#135

Post by prepend » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 4:45 PM UTC

noman-land wrote: post #9

A very sad day when this was killed. It was my favorite social/intellectual experience at the time. Really never recovered from it.

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).

Re: RIP Google Reader

#136

Post by Jackim » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 4:45 PM UTC

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Re: RIP Google Reader

#137

Post by waterhouse » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 4:46 PM UTC

alex_duf wrote: post #120

waterhouse wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

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.

You can get a Youtube channel's Atom feed as something like this: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC0Xe2bv...

From the channel's URL like this: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0Xe2bvq_2uucE2IRALSR_Q

Re: RIP Google Reader

#138

Post by justin66 » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

dbrereton wrote: post #58

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?

> 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.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#139

Post by onion2k » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

vanderZwan wrote: post #30

cletus wrote: post #11

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.

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.

HN is pretty close to the news feed I had in Reader.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#140

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #122

ChrisSD wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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]