Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#221

Post by dredmorbius » Mon, Mar 13, 2023, 1:45 PM UTC

pydry wrote: post #121

wolpoli wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When the first rumors of Google+ swirled I figured that Google Reader would be used to seed it. I really found it baffling that they didn't do that. It felt like they needlessly kneecapped plus's launch.

Google tried integrating other services with G+, including both YouTube and Google Calendar (!!!).

Neither went well, or were well accepted, including especially by Google fanboiim.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

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Post by ortusdux » Mon, Mar 13, 2023, 1:54 PM UTC

I still have Reader bookmarked next to Gmail as a reminder.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#223

Post by pwpw » Mon, Mar 13, 2023, 1:57 PM UTC

nanna wrote: post #108

I finally managed to create a habit out of RSS after years of trying. What worked was,I know this may sound obvious, using a phone based reader instead of a desktop. It's like a categorizable, algorithmless social media feed now, full of content that people spent more than a few minutes writing, and it's great. Aside from regular feeds I feed in HN through hnrss.org, YouTube directly, and the odd twitter account thro…

How did you procure a list of feeds worth following? I really enjoy RSS, but I have had trouble finding enough content to fill a feed I can regularly check.

An example of the perfect feed for me is https://ciechanow.ski/atom.xml.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

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Post by argiopetech » Mon, Mar 13, 2023, 1:58 PM UTC

izacus wrote: post #110

slyall wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are confusing "the day Google died" with "the day the old Google died". For a long time there Google was a cool company that was more than just something to make money. It was doing all this other stuff that didn't make money but made the world better. These days it does about the same amount of "good" as any other company in the Fortune 100.

I don't know if you noticed, but the economic system you've built outright punishes companies and their CEOs if they don't extract maximum value and follow the herd.

We have noticed, 10 years ago today.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#225

Post by RamenJunkie_ » Mon, Mar 13, 2023, 2:10 PM UTC

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…

It was for me for sure.

I had someone a few years previous say they had never seen a bigger Google fanboy.

With the death of Reader I pretty much slowly pulled away and barely use Google anything these days.

Another commentor mentioned, it was the reason. This was right in the middle of the push for Google+.

It was never explocitly stated as a reason, but Google+ Pages rolled out just before or after Reader qas killed and its clear that the intention qas to drive content producers to run Pages for their blogs and websites instead of just letting people use RSS. Also, they wanted to encourage users to go to Plus and Pages to get feeds, bot RSS.

Google had killed a lot of other products but this was the first that clearly felt incredibly malicious and was the start of the end of "Don't be evil."

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#226

Post by megaman821 » Mon, Mar 13, 2023, 2:11 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #73

I imagine there's a small but significant overlap between the people who are still annoyed about the Google Reader Shutdown a full decade later and the people who are today making large scale cloud computing purchasing decisions. I doubt Google took into account how damaging for their reputation is would be to shut down a product that had an audience that was small but extremely online and influential, both at the ti…

I am not in charge of the biggest buys in the world, but that describes me. I have chosen AWS or Azure everytime over Google Cloud mostly because Google Reader shutdown.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#227

Post by nntwozz » Mon, Mar 13, 2023, 2:13 PM UTC

RSS is only dead to those who don't know how to use it or lack imagination, what a weird thing to say really.

Personally I've been using it for a myriad of things ever since 2007, just recently I discovered you can add .atom to GitHub releases e.g. https://github.com/BLeeEZ/amperfy/releases.atom for a nice list of updates.

I like how neatly I can keep track of everything in one place without having to run around the web and deal with all the madness. If the feed is full of crap I can filter it out with www.feedrinse.com

RSS brings order to chaos, it keeps the signal-to-noise ratio under my control in a world bent on exploiting my web usage

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#228

Post by ghaff » Mon, Mar 13, 2023, 2:13 PM UTC

asoneth wrote: post #209

arthur_sav wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What stops anyone else from building another reader?

There are many fine RSS readers, but what I miss most was the social and community features. The communities that spring up around things like GReader are like lightning in a bottle. Perhaps the companies that can afford to build things like that have concluded that other forms of social media are more profitable. There still are niches of the internet that operate like a book club for excitable nerds, but they can b…

On the other hand, I never used a thing in Google Reader other than subscribe to feeds. It's probably inevitable though that it would have become more of a social media product over time.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#229

Post by RamenJunkie_ » Mon, Mar 13, 2023, 2:14 PM UTC

Reason077 wrote: post #217

rhaway84773 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was the reason they killed it for me. Google Reader was successful and growing. It wasn’t killed on its own merits. It was killed because Google decided Facebook was an existential threat to them so they had to do everything they could to make Google+ work, including killing otherwise successful and popular products like Reader because, killing it may lead to a slight increase in G+ adoption.

Imagine if, instead of simply shutting down Reader, Google had gradually and subtly integrated it more and more in to Google+ over time. Things could have turned out very different!

Imagine of Google+ had had a proper API for automatic posting. If I remeber right, there still wasn't one when Pages dropped.

So unlike Twitter and Facebook, I couldn't just set up my Wordpress site to feed all my posts to Google Plus. I had to go and manually post them.

They also had the real names policy still, so I have to post as my real name instead of the name I post online with everywhere else.

Plus was so poorly mishandled because Google does not understand people at all. You can't boul everyone down to a handful of easy categories to make it easier for alogrythms to manage.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#230

Post by scarface74 » Mon, Mar 13, 2023, 2:15 PM UTC

saurik wrote: post #127

scarface74 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”) a…

That's the same problem, though, isn't it? Like, you are clearly not one of those people (based on your response there). And that's great: Google probably needs as lot of people like you to care to come up with new features and products. But the vast majority of jobs in this world--including ones that pay quite well, such as "doctor"--are not activities that are going to involve "scope and impact": they involve doing…

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that a lot of people make “enough” so that they feel like the extra stress of worrying about getting ahead isn’t important as long as they keep up with inflation. I’m at that point.

But, I’m not at the point where I can quit working. I’ve been around long enough to know that you always need to be interview ready when it’s time to look for your next job.

Being a “maintenance developer” is a sure fire way to get caught up in the “expert beginner” trap - “1 year of experience 10 times” and make yourself unemployable .