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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

#291

Post by JohnFen »

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…

Oddly enough, this was a watershed thing for me as well. It was when I finally had it driven into my head that it's mistake to rely too much on anything Google offers.

I say "oddly enough" because I never really used Google Reader. I did (and still do) use RSS heavily, but I use a different reader for it. But Google's actions struck me because RSS was such a fundamental aspect of the way things worked that axing Reader without offering a replacement seem to me like them axing search itself without offering a replacement.

If Reader can suffer such a fate, anything Google does can as well.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#292

Post by dredmorbius »

saurik wrote: post #90
thr717272 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sing…

There were over 8 million Google+ Communities formed. Roughly 10,000 of those had > 10k members, based on my own analysis of a data extract of these:

https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Migrating_Google%...>

The absolute obliteration of online groups was inexcusable, most especially as there were not provisions made for exporting or supporting contact, and in fact active obstruction of attempts to the same.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#293

Post by JohnFen »

igetspam wrote: post #180
pvorb wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did RSS die??? (I get HN headlines via RSS)

Not for me. It's still the primary way that I stay up to date on the web.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#294

Post by JohnFen »

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…

> I support open platforms but RSS had a super noise-to-signal UX and I personally don't miss it

The problem is that nothing arose that adequately replaces it.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#295

Post by JohnFen »

maccard wrote: post #174
pirsquare wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You missed emails asking for verification" Did you saw the title of the email? "Important Information for your Account". It reads more like an informational email. How many important emails you've received this week? Could've been worded "[Action Required]", "Account Suspension Notice" etc. And they didn't even drop a notification when my servers were shutdown. "This will happen to you again on AWS or any other prov…

> Did you saw the title of the email? I did, and I saw who it was from. There's absolutely no way that I would ignore an email from my cloud provider like that. > I need to be very clear, the suspension is not due to fraudulent issue. It's due to "missing some paperwork". I've been paying using the same card for the past 4 yrs. You're putting words in my mouth here. I never said it was due to fraud, it's due to you n…

In all honesty, spam has taught me to ignore any email that has a subject line like "Important information about your account". Not saying it's good, but it's deeply trained into me and automatic, like ignoring things that look like banner ads.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#296

Post by 98codes »

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 the moment "embrace, extend, extinguish" was no longer the purview of only Microsoft.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#297

Post by JohnFen »

aniforprez wrote: post #192
mschuster91 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but this part of your article is basically handing all responsibility of poorly handling important communication off to someone else I'm not the person you replied to. Anyway, I'd expect of a company like Google to not word their e-mails in the same way cyber-criminals do - and for what it's worth, many cyber-security training programs actually teach that vaguely worded but "important sounding" subjects are a key i…

Ah sorry I didn't notice you weren't the same person While the subject line could be better, the subject is not the only indicator of the importance of the email. It is coming from "Google Payments" and as a customer of GCP, why wouldn't you treat every email that comes from Google with an equal amount of importance even if there are false positives? As I said, having a filter of email addresses routed to a specific…

> It is coming from "Google Payments"

How do you know? Sender lines are faked all the time. If the subject line reads like spam, I'm not looking at who sent it. I just delete it out of pure muscle memory.

Again, not saying this is a good habit, but it is an understandable habit.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#298

Post by JohnFen »

Kye wrote: post #172
devn0ll wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 (something else that was killed by google but still everyone knows that means) I used freshrss, and got to this article via RSS as well. It's my only source of news. I'm usually the first to know about new stuff in my circle of friends because of my carefully curated RSS feeds.

+1ing things far predates Google+.

One of the good things that Google+ did for me was that it got me to stop +1ing things.

Re: Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today

#299

Post by ipaddr »

xattt wrote: post #235
AlecSchueler wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This was a solved problem in 2012. Ads are stories and can easily filtered skipped. Duplicate story checkers filter based on title/content similarity. Software available for iOS can be limited compared to windows or linux.
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