Hacker News Reader

Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

Because Google Reader was the social network for people who don't like talking about themselves but about things on the web that they find interesting, and nothing since has ever come close to it.

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Also because killing Google Reader single handedly killed a bustling and fast growing RSS based ecosystem.

Google Reader was the first RSS client to incorporate social features with RSS. To that it added an extremely fast web client (I can't think of any web client that even existed before), and syncing across devices.

A LOT of software in the RSS ecosystem relied on Google Reader for their syncing capabilities. It had basically become the defacto backend for the majority of RSS readers. As an example, I used NetNewsWire for my RSS reading, and while I rarely (never?) used the Google Reader interface, NNN relied on my Google Reader account to backup and sync my feeds.

Google Reader had basically become essential infrastructure in the RSS ecosystem.

While it can't have helped, I can't "single handedly" blame Google for the death of RSS. By 2013 RSS was already arguably dying all by itself.

RSS was awesome in late 2000s during the Web 2.0 mania and it was common to see entire site's contents reproduced in their feed. By 2013 I'd argue many sites had realized giving their full text content away with no ads in the RSS feed wasn't exactly helping their bottom lines and started delivering ads and content snippets instead. The intent of course was to drive you back to the site where ads can be served more reliably. When these practices became widespread RSS quickly lost its shine for me and others I'm sure.

There are services that pull the full text from truncated feeds.

This is very contrary to my experience: it was thriving up until the day Google pulled the switch. I knew a number of people who were expecting them not to go through with it because Reader was so important to their daily routine. The catastrophic failure Google made was not recognizing how disproportionately the Reader community were influencers — in particular, tons of journalists used it so they were pushing out an un-QAed Google+ and telling everyone that it was great right after taking away the service they liked. Even if Google+ had been well-designed or implemented that would have been a tough sell. Since it took something like 6 months for them to think about problems like privacy, spam, or notification overload the coverage of Google+ was overwhelmingly negative.

All of the RSS readers I used at the time other than the Reader web app also had the option of fetching full text or loading the feed in a browser frame to avoid the fragment problem. Some of that was simply performance: a busy site publishing full text could generate some massive XML files which take time to transfer and parse.

Also, why is it a problem to show ads in feeds? Annoying ones, sure, but I'd be happy to have ads (or pay for a subscription) if that meant that places could pay journalists.

The social aspect is the part I missed most. It was a good rss reader, to be sure, but plenty others exist. But the surrounding conversation was strictly with people who I followed. I may be misremembering it a bit, but I recall that most of the comments I saw under any article were by people I knew, which was ideal.

I like reddit and this site enough to visit almost daily, and it's important to get opinions from strangers which is why I value these sites, but the signal / noise ratio is awful. Being able to see a list of news I've explicitly catered to myself _and_ commentary from people I explicitly care to hear from was excellent.

Then again the internet "crowd" was much different back then. It may just be an artifact of its own time by this point.

This. The gReader feed was manually curated & annotated by sources we trusted and their friends. Less ramblings, no pushy algorithm suggestions. The UI was snappy but it was essentially about the community.

After Google Reader got plugged off, I haven't stuck with any of the alternatives, as the community wasn't there.

Wishfully thinking, if enough VIPs would turn to a similarly structured platform, we could have our feed back.

HN is pretty close to the news feed I had in Reader.

Maybe for you, in terms of linked articles. Other than that I'd hardly find the two comparable.

Google Reader had reshares, not upvotes. The only indication you had for "is this an article worth reading?" beyond the actual headline was the number of friends who reshared the same article. However, unlike any other social network, Google Reader wouldn't show me who reshared an article first, nor would you get any imaginary points for sharing something interesting. As such, there was no gamified hunt for "karma" or "upvotes" or whatever. There was no incentive for resharing other than "I read/watched this and think it's interesting", and the result was a much more sincere curation of topics that interested your friends.

Similarly, there were no downvotes or upvotes on the discussions.

NewsBlur copied that set-up, but out of roughly 40 close friends from college who intensely used Google Reader, only five made the switch to NewsBlur. The rest ended up scattered among chat apps and other social networks.

True. My first internet enabled phone was Nokia 7210 (or 6210 i think). A tiny one, with half screen & lower half keyboard. Sharp crispy colors. Opera mini & Google Reader had all of my feeds lined up. Some philosophical posts, some technical, some funny, a bit of everything I liked. Pure Author Contents. No comments on the feed atleast. I miss it.

I would check it in the morning, while in washroom, in bus, waiting & any time.

In retrospect, Google Reader could have evolved into a service like tiktok that keeps pushing interesting contents to its subscribers. Of course, it's easier to say that in hindsight.

Isn't Pinterest basically what you describe?

You're trolling, right?

What makes you say that?

It could be, there's a place for comments on the image posts, but I rarely see any actual discussion.

It might be nice if there were a way to filter by number of comments.

Isn't this exactly what Reddit is?

I wasn't a Google Reader user, but I'd be interesting in understanding what I was missing.

For me, Google Reader was about high volume headline digestion, reading articles without having to follow links, read articles without having to switch between a multitude of publishers’ crappy and varied web UIs. It was about fast and efficient information hoovering from around the world. Reddit is a different animal altogether. Great for what it does but not like a clean RSS tree.

Also, just want to add: Google killed the “discussions” search filter, which let you limit your search results to forums, around the same time, IIRC. Screw Google.

Reddit is hardly a place for people who don't like talking about themselves~

In fact we've probably reached the peak opposite of that with people posting about themselves on /r/nextfuckinglevel

See my response to another comment suggesting HN is a proper replacement:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26582491

What I forgot to mention in that comment was that Google Reader was tied to your Gmail account. The only people who were in "your" network by default were other people on Gmail where Google had somehow determined that you knew each other (presumably whether you were in each other's address book). This is opposite of HN or Reddit, where everyone can sign up and it's basically all strangers in a public popularity contest.

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