321–330 of 354 posts
It started around when Google Reader shut down and had all the exact features Google Reader had. I migrated around 10 years and have been using it ever since. It's blazing fast, always available, and never changes. I just bought a lifetime subscription a few minutes ago because I plan to use it for another 10 years.
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 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.
Reader had been running on a shoestring budget for years with only one or two engineers. It was beginning to show its cracks, and at the time there was a giant push to move to Kennedy (the UI design pattern with whitespace everywhere and one or two red buttons). There weren't enough engineers to do that migration and solve some of the underlying problems.
Nobody wanted to work on it because there wasn't anything in it you could use for promo. "Kept Reader running" on your perf packet would get you a Meets Expectations at best. It might be seen negatively by some. To get a promo you needed big sexy new features. And at the time there was a promo factory that was sucking up all of the prime engineers (cough Google+ cough). It was also popular among employees, and there was a "Save Reader" campaign, but nobody cared enough to actually try to transfer in.
No director wanted it either. It wasn't profitable. It wasn't driving traffic to other Google properties. It was basically a money sink and nobody wanted to be tied to it as a failure.
Source: I was on Google+ (it was a promo factory). My team worked on a number of features that were meant to be used by third parties to tie into Plus. One of those was the comments system. Before the Google+ YouTube comment debacle there were plans to offer that comment system directly to third parties (similar to Disqus). We pitched Google+ taking over Reader and using it as a proving ground for that comment system. As a side bonus, blogs that signed on would already have a (hopefully) vibrant comment history. Management didn't see the value. Google+ comments rolled out to YouTube, it was a disaster, and all those lines of code were lost in time, like tears in rain.
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…
2013 They delete everyone's subscriptions AND everyone's subscribers. Blogs come and go every day in large numbers. No more subscribers means it is time to let it go and go do something else. After years building an audience google moved in to embrace, extend, and extinguish. At the time I had many thousands of RSS subscriptions (in my own aggregator), I could see the post frequency decline and the comments dry up by the thousands.
2011 They killed blog search.
2007-2009 They hired Kevin Marks, Technorati's lead architect. And in 2014 Technorati died.
2005, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo created an initiative to help kill the eco system of organic links in comment. They chose to promote the Nofollow attribute to portray everyone and their references as spam. Spam is defined here as not obeying their webdesign orders. We might have gone a bit over the top with etiquette and "rules of civility" say 200 years ago but instruction to treat your guests as spammers??? Punishment if you don't comply!
You may link to a limited number of things from your article/blog post but it must be approved materials following their instructions. Sometimes one needs to point out others are wrong on the internet. It is arguably what we do online? I write down my thoughts, you tell me I'm wrong? The idea one should not link to the "wrong" publication is not constructive to the dialog.
But you can still post your articles to google wave and knol and to your google pages (joking) How about under that amateurish cookie banner defacing blogspot or google groups? usenet?
They are endlessly tinkering with the search algorithm trying to find worthy results, dictating how we should shoot web (or else!), but everyone and their mum already gave up making websites for fun. Even developers who could put something together in a few hours at best have websites with just their resume on it.
Its like.. Google talk > google hangout > google chat. Ahh, they finally stopped talking.
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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.
It wasn't killed in favor of Google+. It was killed because nobody wanted to work on it and nobody wanted to fund it. Reader had been running on a shoestring budget for years with only one or two engineers. It was beginning to show its cracks, and at the time there was a giant push to move to Kennedy (the UI design pattern with whitespace everywhere and one or two red buttons). There weren't enough engineers to do th…
It wasn't driving measurable traffic. If the choice is A) people loving one of your products or B) people hating your brand. Behind which door is the money?
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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.
But lets stick to the technology, first things first, how are you going to get me to subscribe to your feed? I just don't see it happening. Finding subscribers is incredibly hard.
You might be able to get one feed into my aggregator but I just press delete?
If it has as many postings as this one...
https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
...they all vanish when I press delete.
It isn't like you only have to obtain my email address. But if it was it would be easy for google to copy paste the gmail filter.
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 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.
I jumped to Feedly, then I switched to Inoreader for a UI closer to Google Reader.
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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.
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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.
Google Reader was a publish-subscribe platform with chronological/per site newsfeed whereas Google+ was a peer-to-peer platform with an algorithm newsfeed. I didn't appreciate the difference at the time, but the philosophy was completely different and I couldn't come up with any idea that could fit Google Reader into the Google+ vision.
This strikes me as similar to the spirit of Reader, though of course without the site-specific subscription of RSS. Conceptually, the idea of including RSS results in the stream wouldn't have been much of a stretch.
Regardless, that feature was axed pretty early in G+ history.
What irked most about the forced amalgamation of G+ and other Google services was the context sheer and violation of boundaries and social significance of various activities. In particular, suddenly G+ conversations based on YouTube links were now listed at YouTube under the video's comments, and comments from YouTube now appeared in G+ discussion streams. I responded by deleting all my own G+ posts of YouTube links, and deleting all content from the linked YouTube account (I'd used it little regardless).
When G+ finally merged G+ and YouTube profiles, after about a year of my repeatedly stating "no, don't do that", and based solely on the fact that I'd used the same email address to register for each, it was a tremendous violation. Numerous other people felt similarly.
The three top stories on HN that day were about the forced merger. Two of them were links to my own posts on G+. The original links are of course now dead, though I archived nearly all my own posts at the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
https://imgur.com/YgEjUuI>
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2013-11-16>
There might have been other ways to