As other have said it was the moment we realised goog was now run by suits and not techies and therefore lost its cool.
Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today
231–240 of 354 posts
Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today
#232Earlier 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.
Which describes for me everything that is wrong with Google these days. How can someone build a good product, if they are not even able to maintain a good product.
If a product is maintenance mode, do you need developers or just SREs?
Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed; it felt magical, but was a solution in search of a problem... which was ultimately found in Google Docs having very similar live editing ability.
Also its rollout was done in the most ridiculous way possible. For a product that relies on your workmates or friends to have access, they didn't let those workmates or friends have access. Then by the time they did, the hype had worn off, and people had moved elsewhere.
So, pretty much exactly what happened with Google+?
Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which part of Google Reader was the one that no other tools came close to? There's almost as many good and different RSS reader clients as Todo list apps, so this somehow seems like seen through rose-tinted glasses.
I gave the entire gamut a chance back then, none was the same. They either cost a lot, didn’t offer the same UX or both. The fact that we are celebrating its anniversary today shows how irreplaceable it was so not sure if I’m the one wearing rose tinted glasses or if it’s the other way around where folks can’t acknowledge the magic some products capture that’s not easy to put in words.
Google Reader had an "outdated" UI, in the sense that it was really bare-bones and feature-less, and focused on its main function. If it survived to today, it would probably have been redesigned 7 times like gmail and become increasingly complex and slow. So while you're not exactly wearing rose tinted glasses, you're yearning for a time when the web was simpler and gave birth to Google Reader.
Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
So? You just unsubscribe from any that are shit. Unlike on google where you can't delete a site from the search results (which you can on kagi btw, which is great).
So if RSS took off with the general public and this was your plan you'd very quickly be left with an empty feed reader. The point is that RSS was/less overrun by advertising than the web because of cultural reasons, not thanks to something inherent to the technology.
News sites would start dropping ads into your feed, and currently, there would be no way to filter it out.
Right now, there’s no iOS RSS readers that will filter duplicate stories. I can’t imagine how adblocking would get implemented.
Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even now, 10 yrs on, that makes no sense (their justification, not yours). How do you convince a bunch of blog authors to switch from 'free-to-air' and searchable everywhere RSS feeds, to move into closed social media platform? It seems like idiotic management making idiotic decisions completely out of touch with the userbase has been with us since the dawn of the web. Just this week, Spotify are turning the mobile a…
Who was in charge of killing it?
Brian Shih would know, but would he ever tell?
Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They don't have it to this date. Are you sure? I distinctively remember them announcing it and being promptly mocked by people asking when was the date they were going to kill it. Did they abandon the desktop version before a stable release? https://techdows.com/2022/08/chrome-desktop-rss-follow-sites...
Just try opening any RSS link from a site that has it. It will open as plain xml.
I believe you (I don’t use Chrome) but that doesn’t mean the support isn’t there. It could just be that it’s not on by default or that you need to add feeds manually.
Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today
#238I 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 .
I realised that I was already browsing the web in a repetetive way, so RSS basically let me automate that. The daily loop would be something like...
- theguardian.com for UK news
- democracynow.org for US and world news
- various blogs for Emacs things (irreal, planetemacs, sachachua)
- ianvisits and londonist for London curios
- a few youtube accounts that I care about
- a friend's flickr
- websites of some NGOs I care about
- HN front page and replies to my comments (like yours!)
Good suggestion about Bartosz Ciechanowski's excellent site - will add it now.
Edit: looking at your post history, to add that I too have ADHD and this has helped me focus and keep ontop of web updates way better than I have done before. News websites like the guardian feel like they're designed to obliterate your concentration.
Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today
#239So how many of you actually pay for and fund a sustainable alternative like Feedly or Old Reader?
I pay for Feedly even though I had access to a very generous free plan. Their product is reliable and I use it every day, so it only seems fair to pay.
Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today
#240I self host a yarr[1] instance. I love it, and it's pretty cheap to do so. RSS is still ubiquitous, if underground. Sometimes the feed links are hard to find but they're usually there.