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Comment by jo909 | Hacker News Reader

I used to read literally hundreds of blogs via RSS, but I have stopped doing that completely for no particular reason I can think of. Today I read zero blogs. Of course I still read lots of random blog posts from google search results or on HN, but I won't become a regular reader anymore.

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I used to have ~100 blogs I followed in Google Reader, then when Reader was killed I drifted away from many of them. I wonder how many authors lost large numbers of readers because of that sad event.

Reading these comments makes me think of a crazy conspiracy theory: Google killed Reader to promote search.

The common theory is they did it to boosts Google plus. They wanted you to follow blogs interest on G+ rather than more directly via Reader/RSS.

The driver was financial. Google cited (03/2013) a user decline [0]. You don't need a conspiracy or more reasons to shutter the service.

> "While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined."

[0] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-c...

They also killed iGoogle in the same year, and that's what I used as my daily RSS feed. From Wikipedia: due to "the unforeseen evolution of web and mobile apps and the erosion of the need for the site", whatever that means.

While not exactly as strong as a conspiracy theory, I think they were well aware of what they were doing, and RSS was in the "best if absent" feature category.

Same scenario for me. FWIW I switched to using http://www.ighome.com/ which more or less replaces the functionality (not affiliated in any way, just a user).

However, that would imply Google had some sort of coordination between teams...

I think you may be on to something here. I bet it was a data based decision...

Yeah I wonder if Google realized that people were reading long form content (much of it hosted off Google) without ads. Thus their own audience was being shunted off-site without revenue.

That interpretation only makes sense if you think Google would rather have more good little click monkeys than organizing good content...

From the lack of quality search results and the infestation of ads if you don't use an adblocker, I don't think that interpretation would be too far fetched.

Reader didn't have enough active users to keep it running.

Reader didn't have enough active employees to keep it running. Nobody inside Google worked on it any more, so it was just a zombie product running on inertia.

Reader's active users, though, tended to be influencers who read a lot and shared what they read with their friends on social media. So they still drove traffic, just by a different mechanism.

Many of the people I followed on Reader moved to Twitter after Google took it down and mimicked its social functions there. I'd wager they're still either using RSS readers or jury-rigging Twitter into being something like it.

Same here... I then moved to Bloglines, which was also closed down eventually. (Or maybe it was the other way around? Not sure which one closed down first.) I now use feed.ly, but I really don't read blogs as much as I used to.

> but I have stopped doing that completely for no particular reason

Death of Google Reader and migration of corresponding contents to other medias (especially social media?)

Like others have said, when Google Reader disappeared I stopped following RSS feeds directly, and moved to aggregators like HN and Reddit.

I think it's something to do with the rate at which content is being created today. Ten years ago following 10 blogs that interested you was a no brainer, but there's just so much today that it's hard to follow anything in particular when you are interested in everything. Heck, even sticking to aggregators only like HN and Reddit I'm still saving a lot more links to read later than I'm actually reading.

Thus I only subscribe to blogs with at most one article per day. Most have an average of one article per week or month. For the use case of following rarely-posting very-techy blogs, RSS feeders are still great.

I think there was a kind of collective blog exhaustion people went through around 2010-2013. My final tally was several dozen, it was hard to keep up, so I read less and less. I used Opera as my RSS reader, and when I switched from Opera 12 to Firefox (the next version of Opera switched to WebKit and got rid of all the good Opera UI features), I did not bother getting another RSS reader.

Recently I started subscribing to a couple of blogs again on my phone (Holo Reader on Android is great). Reading blog posts during downtime or while on the train does not feel like a distraction. I am also planning to start blogging again.

If you miss Google Reader - Digg Reader is the closest I've found even if it isn't so pretty.

Have you seen InoReader? It's very Google Reader like. I don't do social media of any sort and I rely on InoResder quite a bit.

I have no affiliation beyond a regular account there.

To reference TRON Legacy, I'm rockin' the pager.

Oh man, I used to be an RSS junkie for webcomics of all things. I don't read any of those anymore, but I assume they're doing ok with Patreon.

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