RIP Google Reader • Hacker News Board

Re: RIP Google Reader

#331

Post by vkou » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 12:43 AM UTC

bluedays wrote: post #316

vkou wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

Reader was a failure in the commercial sense, though. No good path towards monetization, no positive synergy with other products, too much technical debt that nobody wanted to work on.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#332

Post by mastrsushi » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 12:45 AM UTC

This site can't go a month without complaining over the long overdue extinction of RSS and it's prehistoric software clients.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#333

Post by ineedasername » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 12:50 AM UTC

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.

I think it was a more mercenary decision than (just) that: Consuming content in that method left fewer options for monetization through ads. There would be many fewer searches: right now, instead of actually typing the address bar, getting to a website for many people involves a google search as they type it into the address bar, see the results, and click on the site instead of going there directly. I'm sure they would have figured it out, but it probably wasn't a problem they were very interested in solving when they could just kill the product.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#334

Post by arunc » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 1:01 AM UTC

blakesterz wrote: post #74

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?

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…

Well said. Coincidentally I was talking about GR to my wife and kid last night. It is a sad death indeed.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#335

Post by gfxgirl » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 1:12 AM UTC

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.

I agree. I used Reader a ton and was upset when Google cancelled it. I signed up for a few different paid readers, one in particular was trying to be a clone for Google Reader. But, in those few months, my behavior changed and I no longer felt like using them.

In other words, in hindsight I'm not sad it's gone. If I really valued it then I should have valued the clone but I didn't

Re: RIP Google Reader

#336

Post by kazinator » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 1:14 AM UTC

Wasn't it pretty silly to need an online application in order to subscribe to and monitor RSS feeds?

It's almost anti-RSS.

It's like requiring an online application to browse the web.

An RSS reader is just a browsers that has a list of bookmarks. Those bookmarks point to specially formatted XML documents. It automatically refreshes those document and notices new items, which it presents somehow, perhaps an mail-inbox-like interface.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#337

Post by ropable » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 1:32 AM UTC

conesus wrote: post #35

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 hea…

Signed up for Newsblur after Google Reader announced the shutdown on a HN recommendation, did the import, haven't looked back since. Bravo.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#338

Post by MithrilTuxedo » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 1:32 AM UTC

Why isn't there a federated clone? This seems ideal for the fediverse. I think the server would just need to host your feed URLs, save a little read state info, and host your favorites/starred feed that other users can subscribe to. It doesn't seem like much overhead on the server side.

Then we get to the client and I don't know what I'm doing.

Re: RIP Google Reader

#339

Post by corobo » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 1:37 AM UTC

MithrilTuxedo wrote: post #338

Why isn't there a federated clone? This seems ideal for the fediverse. I think the server would just need to host your feed URLs, save a little read state info, and host your favorites/starred feed that other users can subscribe to. It doesn't seem like much overhead on the server side. Then we get to the client and I don't know what I'm doing.

Cause there's more people in the world asking why things don't exist than there are people making those things

Re: RIP Google Reader

#340

Post by Lazare » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 1:40 AM UTC

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.

RSS is a bit of a relic of an earlier, more open web, and Google Reader was at the time the best, most popular RSS client.

Killing it was bad for users, and bad for RSS, but it was also a very visible marker of a shift towards a more closed, proprietary web.

So it's not just "having Google Reader was better than not having it, I'm mad", but more about regret for what might have been if we'd all gone down a different path. The Google that, rather than killing Reader, had invested resources in it might have done other things.

Example: Right at the same time they were killing off Reader, they were removing XMPP/Jabber support from Google Talk. Is it plausible Google might have continued backing open standards like XMPP and RSS? And if they had...what would the internet be like now? It's certainly clear that RSS is much less popular than it was; could Google's support for the standard have prevented some of that?

In short: People are upset about Google Reader as such (I use bazqux.com, it's just as good as Google Reader ever was) but what it implied and represented.