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Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

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Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#81

Post by lozenge »

pvorb wrote: post #74
dmix wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh the ad business was pretty established well before 2013 when Reader shut down. RSS was declining well before that. Google acquired Doubleclick in 2008 aka what became the real Adwords in its prime. I personally don't expect tech conglomerates to be the ideal solution for niche markets. But I don't see many people providing good arguments why alternatives like Feedly didn't take off if there was really a strong ma…

Yeah. I think what really killed RSS was a change in people's behavior. Twitter, Reddit, and other social media sites gained traction as link sharing communities and RSS became less relevant after that. Instead of subscribing to an RSS feed, you could just follow your favorite sites on Twitter, for example.

Attention was shifting from basement blogs and projects to professionally made content for the web. Which would only have one paragraph or a title on the RSS feed and the rest was on the site with ads.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#82

Post by raizer88 »

scarface74 wrote: post #79
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #60

This always seemed like one of Google's worst decisions to me, and given that I remember the time they tried to spend $6 billion to buy Groupon, that's saying something. It was a plain unforced error. Google Reader was a product that was crazy cheap to maintain (no way it had more than a dozen engineers working on it), and it was used primarily by the extremely online, especially journalists, bloggers, and other sort…

> Google Reader was a product that was crazy cheap to maintain (no way it had more than a dozen engineers working on it), It’s hard to show “scope” and “impact” by maintaining a product with declining usage. No one who cared about their career would want to work on something that was in maintenance mode.

I never understood why Google doesn't hire B teams to do the maintenance work, or outsource it. It's normal that if you hire only top players that no one wants to be stuck doing tickets.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#83

Post by saurik »

scarface74 wrote: post #79
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #60

This always seemed like one of Google's worst decisions to me, and given that I remember the time they tried to spend $6 billion to buy Groupon, that's saying something. It was a plain unforced error. Google Reader was a product that was crazy cheap to maintain (no way it had more than a dozen engineers working on it), and it was used primarily by the extremely online, especially journalists, bloggers, and other sort…

> Google Reader was a product that was crazy cheap to maintain (no way it had more than a dozen engineers working on it), It’s hard to show “scope” and “impact” by maintaining a product with declining usage. No one who cared about their career would want to work on something that was in maintenance mode.

Ok, that's great, because those are the people most likely to break a good thing. Maybe we can instead hire at least a few people (and given that Google uses shared database storage, build engineering, deployment, etc. I can't imagine we need many such people) who care more about things like a predictable schedule working on a low-stress product so they can have good work/life balance, to essentially just keep working software working correctly?

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#85

Post by scarface74 »

dmix wrote: post #80
scarface74 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is RSS even dead today? I can’t think of a useful site that doesn’t still have an RSS feed - including Reddit.

That's like saying "how is IRC dead today" when Slack/Discord/WhatsApp/Zoom/etc exists or Yahoo style portals when Google exists (yes Yahoo is still a real business) or "how are horses a dead transportation" when cars exist in 1930s America because horses can still walk on roads (aka takes a minimal investment to support). Sure they still work and will continue to work but let's be honest it's a super niche technolog…

Why do I care if it’s a “niche” technology as far as other people subscribing if it is still supported by publishers? I can’t think of a single site that I go to and say “I sure wish this site supported RSS” and doesn’t?

Using NetNewsWire and subscribing to subreddits with NNW on one half of my iPad and the Reddit app on the other half is still a great experience for instance.

I click on the date on NNW and the post opens in the Reddit app.

HN also has an RSS feed.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#86

Post by flir »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #10

I feel like killing Reader was the point at which I switched from viewing Google mostly positively to more skeptically. Which doesn't seem terribly rational, really; it wasn't the first product to be axed, it was perfectly possible to replace... Maybe it was just the first product axing that really affected me? The moment Google went from "provider of great free stuff" to "sometimes provider of free stuff, sometimes…

Yes, it was something I used, but also I think Reader was what drove the linkblog ecosystem, behind the scenes. Linkbloggers subscribed to interesting feeds, and amplified whatever they thought was interesting.

By interfering with that ecosystem I think Google received out-sized negative feedback. They would have been much better off just leaving it running.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#87

Post by pirsquare »

wolpoli wrote: post #58
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #10

I feel like killing Reader was the point at which I switched from viewing Google mostly positively to more skeptically. Which doesn't seem terribly rational, really; it wasn't the first product to be axed, it was perfectly possible to replace... Maybe it was just the first product axing that really affected me? The moment Google went from "provider of great free stuff" to "sometimes provider of free stuff, sometimes…

I stopped having a positive view of Google due to their poor explanation for shutting down Google Reader. They explained they were shutting it down due to declining usage and they are pouring all of their energy into fewer product, however, as Google had a reputation for building cool and free stuff back then, it seemed reasonable to me that they could have maintain it in a frozen state or provide a longer transition…

Remember Stadia? Google doesn't give a fuck about their users or customers. I would rather trust my money with Bernie Madoff than Google.

I'm a 4 yrs customer with Google Cloud and they shutdown all my servers last friday. 3 days now and they still haven't gave me a resolution.

Context: https://www.onvoard.com/blog/our-production-servers-was-susp...

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#88

Post by whatshisface »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #56
plorkyeran wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was the first thing they'd killed which had been around for quite a while, still had devoted users, and Google didn't offer a replacement. If you look at the graveyard, the pre-Reader things they killed were things which had flopped (e.g. Buzz), things which were no longer relevant (e.g Gears), acquisitions, and mergers where they had two redundant products (e.g. Google Video).

Despite the prior “more wood behind fewer arrows” announcement, it might be the first time Google killed something that was popular with Googlers. I think it was an “Elves leave Middle-Earth” moment for my friends on campus. Memegen was full of “we can launch (ultradoomed project) but can’t keep Reader alive?” snark, less good-natured than usual. I’ve heard it blamed on Vic and G+, actual security issues from scrapin…

I haven't heard the phrase "more wood behind fewer arrows" before, but I am pretty sure that never in the history of the evolution of projectiles was that tradeoff ever taken in that direction.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#89

Post by scarface74 »

saurik wrote: post #83
scarface74 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google Reader was a product that was crazy cheap to maintain (no way it had more than a dozen engineers working on it), It’s hard to show “scope” and “impact” by maintaining a product with declining usage. No one who cared about their career would want to work on something that was in maintenance mode.

Ok, that's great, because those are the people most likely to break a good thing. Maybe we can instead hire at least a few people (and given that Google uses shared database storage, build engineering, deployment, etc. I can't imagine we need many such people) who care more about things like a predictable schedule working on a low-stress product so they can have good work/life balance, to essentially just keep workin…

And then they get laid off and when it comes time for the behavioral interviews at their next company, they can’t discuss anything they did significant in STAR format.

And their skills are too rusty to pass the DS&A section of the interview and they didn’t do anything significant to show off their system design skills.

I work at $BigTech in the cloud consulting department (cloud app dev/“application modernization”) and the equivalent of “doing tickets” is being put on a project where you aren’t actually doing “consulting”, you’re doing “staff augmentation”. I avoid those like the plague.

Even though I’m not chasing after a promotion, I want to have something to show for the time I spent here when it comes to my next job either inside the company or outside.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#90

Post by saurik »

thr717272 wrote: post #41
js4ever wrote: post #16

This is probably the inflection point in history where I lost all trust I had in Google. I don't know how much they saved by shutting it down (probably nearly nothing) but I know that for me and people around me it was a such terrible signal that I never trusted again Google for anything serious/business. Well done guys

Ironically, for me it was probably when they shut down Google+ that I finally changed my views on Google. For me Google+ was a lot like HN: Peaceful, quiet and beautiful and lots Open Source content and smart people. I still look once or twice a year but it seems everyone who are into building social media wants to copy not only the very limited functionality of Twitter, down to its dumb limitations, but also its UX…

Yeah: they essentially deleted the early Android community and all of the knowledge and history that was built up around it, because all of those people were organized on Google+. And I think it is also important to note that shutting down that particular service felt like a particularly frustrating insult given how they had essentially rammed it down everyone's throats and forced it to get integrated into every single Google product in confusing and sometimes horrifying ways... and then it failed anyway.
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