Hacker News Reader

Comment by perardi | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has used RSS since NetNewsWire looked like this…

https://ranchero.com/images/nnw2/nnwtoolbarhidden.png

…get off my lawn, kids.

And then let grandpa here hitch up his britches even higher: people still lament the end of Google Reader for a reason.

In retrospect, it was the least toxic social network. You added your friends, their recommendations bubbled up in the interface, so you saw cool new stuff. Was that perfect? Of course not—you were still in a filter bubble, and what bleeds, leads. But, it surfaced interesting stories, it let you follow news sources you wanted to see, and it did so without the screaming madness of Twitter and Facebook.

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The bit I find fascinating about Reader, and its impact (I’m convinced that its death resulted in an immediate strong surge towards social media centralisation), is that it was entirely contingent; it didn’t have to happen. There are many parallel universes where Google (a) didn’t make an rss reader so dominant that it became The RSS Reader and then (b) kill it. In a healthier market with a bunch of widely used readers, things would have been very different.

(Reader’s impact was particularly dramatic because a lot of ostensibly separate products like NNW started using it as a backend…)

And, if, as seems at least plausible, over the next year or so Twitter crumbles and decentralised social media (whether in the form of Mastodon et al, blogs or something else) comes back, again, totally contingent! An idiot buying Twitter and breaking it wasn’t some sort of historical inevitability, just a weird high-impact thing that happened.

It think you got things very mixed up here.

Google Reader was shut down in 2013.

At that time Facebook was THE hugely dominant social network, with Twitter solidly established, and Instagram rapidly becoming popular.

Google Reader was well past it's prime, most "regular" users had already moved to those platform, outside of the more hardcore Tech circles.

Google Plus was also really struggling,so they probably wanted to push the user base on to their "real" social network.

Yeah, the RSS ecosystem was never the leading ‘social network’ by number of users, but it used to be systemically important, in a way that it isn’t today. Keeping track of what was happening in many fields (particularly tech, but also others) used to be primarily via RSS, now Twitter (and in some cases moving to Mastodon, now).

I never used Reader but I did use another one that also folded, a year or two before Reader went away. Then it got bought and came back, changed, and that stutter interrupted my process and I never really recovered. I set up Feedly and then don’t use it.

I think I’m from the generation(s) that expect to spend a lot of time in a browser window instead of hopping between applications triggered by notifications. So the moment I put something into an app, if it’s not situation dependent like Apple Fitness, or team chat for work, it’s just too much friction to make it a habit.

The most fascinating bit for me is that people actually used any of the social features of Google Reader. I just read my feeds and interacted with nobody, and that wasn't too uncommon in my circles.

Oh, I’m not sure how many people ever used Google Reader’s _own_ social features. But RSS facilitated social networking via blog (remember, for a while ~every blog had comments and trackbacks, on which twitter quote-retweets are based), and, unfortunately, Reader became so synonymous with RSS that its death largely killed that ecosystem. It was really noticeable at the time; blog activity really fell off, and even if you switched to an alternative RSS reader which stayed working (a lot of readers used Reader as a backend!) you had to switch to Twitter to keep up with what was going on.

Google killing of Reader was the symbolic point where the business plan of the internet moved from "Let's sell stuff to users!" to "Let's sell users to advertisers!".

Thank you for making my exact comment. I was too stressed out today and you nailed it ;)

Google Reader was a free product, subsidized by google ads.

Google Reader was a service that brought in good will, subsidized by people trusting Google to "not be evil" and provide useful services. This subsequently turned into people using Google's money-making products, like ads.

At least to most I've spoken with on the subject (a few dozen, so informal straw poll), killing Google Reader turned people's opinion of Google from scrappy startup to untrustworthy behemoth.

> At least to most I've spoken with on the subject (a few dozen, so informal straw poll), killing Google Reader turned people's opinion of Google from scrappy startup to untrustworthy behemoth.

You can add me to that informal poll. I moved to Feedly, but Google Reader was my go to for a whole lot of years. My opinion of Google changed the day they announced its demise. I am probably an outlier but the only way I want to consume content on the web is via RSS feeds. Allows me to curate what I see and if subscribed sites start delivering me poor content, I drop them from the feed list.

Right, but it was an early step in Google’s now-classic playbook of undercutting existing paid solutions by subsidizing a free, shiny alternative, driving the paid versions out of business, then either turning their product into a surveillance nightmare or shutting it down.

So is Mail, Maps, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Youtube, etc.

What’s your point?

Indeed, spot on. And given the internet is the computer this is (as good as any) a representation of the fatal bifurcation that has essentially destroyed the potential of digitization for at least a generation (and maybe forever)

Agreed. And that while I am not claiming Apple as a savior here or anything, imagine how bad it could be if we didn’t have at least 1 company still in the business of selling computers. At least to SOME degree. Things could be a lot worse

Apple does some amazing things with network protocols, but they are a leading force in pushing walled gardens, locked down devices, and such.

Other companies give you less privacy, but more functionality exposed to the user.

Of course, without Apple's walled gardens, google might lock down their stuff too, no longer needing to have a bit of openness to differentiate themselves.

I'm going to disagree with that.

It was when business plans from moved from letting users control what they consume to being in control of what users consume.

Why did they want to do that, if not to be more effective, in the long run, for advertisers?

There are a variety of motivations. These include...

The biggest is that they are trying to maximize revenue/profits. In controlling the flow of information to people they are in better control of that. A lot has been studied about this.

I didn't realize there were other motivations until FB started to publish studies they carried out on people. Some of those (which they published awhile ago) were around the manipulation of users emotions and their ability to target voting groups (to increase people going to vote in target groups) around elections.

Yeah I can think of a few. That sort of influence is one, benefiting advertisers is another, positioning themselves to get a cut of all transactions is another. Is there an alternate universe where in order to get your content in front of users, it has to be AMP and in order to be AMP, it has to meet a new requirement that all payments must be done through a payment framework that lets google control the user experience (“purely for the end users’ benefit” of course)? Probably.

I hear what you guys are saying, but "maximize revenue/profits" means "benefit advertisers so they come to us instead of anybody else." "Getting a cut of all transactions" means benefitting advertisers who sell anything through the site.

It's all advertising all the time.

What? Getting a cut of transactions has nothing to do with advertisers. Are you saying apple forcing app payments through the App Store is about advertisers? Seems like you are trying to fit all scenarios to a predetermined narrative here.

YOU are 100 percent correct.

Generally speaking when Google prevents and limits what end users can control -- the offending product gets worse and eventually dropped.

This is exactly what users want. Tiktok is so successful because you don’t have to pick the content you consume. RSS on the other hand is far too manual and too much bad content gets mixed in with the good.

I don’t know, to me it feels like it was 10 years ago.

Be humble grandpa! There were people who used to use Google Reader without any of its social network shenanigans. And of course, there were people who have been using RSS readers before Google Reader was even born. But, no RSS reader has ever reached the ceiling of common usage, which is not a bad deal.

In my circles, which admittedly may not be representative, RSS is/was a tool for people whose job it was in part to proactively ferret out a wide range of information and insights from obscure corners of the internet--so journalists, analysts, and the like. Which just doesn't describe a mainstream audience.

While it's satisfying to blame Google, the killing of Reader always seemed like a natural effect of RSS not being popular than its cause. It's not like there aren't other RSS alternatives. And, of course, social media does a pretty good job--for all its faults--of surfacing those various tidbits with or without RSS.

It was successful enough that a much smaller business than Google would have tried to keep it going, probably as a subscription service. But for Google it was a rounding error, and the code base needed a rewrite.

It seems hard to argue that it would have become more successful, given that its successors are pretty good but they’re small businesses.

Right. And the problem with rounding error businesses at large companies is that:

1. They're a distraction and

2. It's probably very career limiting to work on them.

Someone at IBM told me years ago that if something wasn't going to be a billion dollar business they weren't interested. And Google walked away years ago from organizing the world's knowledge if advertising wasn't attached.

There is an argument to be made that these… micro services were a part of a bigger offering from Google. Maybe by itself Reader wasn’t a billion dollar business, but together with other niche features Reader attracted an influential and wealthy audience.

> There were people who used to use Google Reader without any of its social network shenanigans.

I was even blissfully ignorant to the existence of these social features in Google Reader until this moment.

Same. I am glad of that too. I loved it and probably wouldn’t have if the social aspect was in your face.

I don't think OP was referring to any social features beyond what RSS specified:

> In retrospect, it was the least toxic social network. You added your friends, their recommendations bubbled up in the interface, so you saw cool new stuff.

This is just "subscribe to people's blogs". That's still the ideal social media for me.

No, Google Reader had a social layer where you could add friends, see items that they recommended, and comment on them. It was really great, but it was ruined by the migration to Google+ before Reader was actually killed.

Was this the same as Google Buzz?

My friends and I loved Buzz and lamented its loss. We tried Google+, but it couldn't even really do what Buzz could do, and it certainly didn't have any other killer features, so it didn't take.

I stopped appreciating RSS after "below the fold" content started being hidden by default.

It was when the Internet died. We have been basking in the glory of a dead innovation ever since.

I don't mind so long as there is a summary/abstract for me to assess if it's worth my time, and their site is accessible. Press a button from the feed reader and now elinks opens up for me to read it. Some site's this is better. But with malice or carelessness others don't cater to a TUI (no skip link, navigation is duplicated for mobile for no reason, etc.) well or on the GUI they'll pile in targeted ads/trackers (though blocked) but will also hide a bunch of useful stuff carelessly behind JavaScript, like image loading or the entire article (which if your primary site purpose is content, you should be obligated to make sure at least the noscript situation is covered as folks don't want to trust code execution for what is likely a one-off read).

Some sites*

There are tools like five filters that follow the links, and download the whole story. O think RSS is unusable without them.

Which tools do you recommend?

Feedly does not do this (at least, not by default?), and I consider the experience substandard.

If you're on a Mac or iOS, NetNewsWire can fetch and extract the whole article for an individual item, or you can set it to automatically do it for an entire feed: https://netnewswire.com/help/mac/5.1/en/reader-view

On Apple devices Reeder 5, NetNewsWire and Feedbin all use the Mercury parser API (hosted by Feedbin) to extract the full article text. I believe Fiery Feeds also includes this functionality (with a subscription) although I am uncertain of the process used. Lire is yet another reader that includes this functionality by default.

Of those above I recommend Reeder 5 if you don’t care about web accessibility and Feedbin if you do.

The light social layer on top of stories was super interesting. You could comment on articles with your friends. There was a lot of potential there.

This!

Instead, you create a link with a comment in Signal to a group of friends, copy that to a few other Signal groups who are mutually exclusive of those other groups, then paste into a few Discord groups...

Literally a manual social network.

If you're wise enough to use Signal, why would you also be using Discord?

It's the original FB problem all over again: if that's where all the people are, you don't really have much choice if you want to reach them.

Newsblur has this feature although I don't think it's used much.

This is where that gab project from a couple years ago was amazing (although the most generous thing I can say about the user content created by it was that it was not amazing lol). it had an extension you would install and it would overlay a comments section on any webpage on the internet.I would love to see something like that but with properly threaded comments and an easy way to subscribe to specific communities commenting, or ideally, federated but you could choose the communities you wanted to overlay moderation from. even better if it has support for easy account switching so you could bin your comment into the proper group for the level of moderation it would pass.

activity pub almost does this but comment threading has been universally garbage on every instance I have tried (how hard is it to thread stuff like comments on hacker news are threaded????) but the method is wrong in that you scroll activity pub feeds instead of surfing the net and finding the rich and interesting comment sections for what you are seeing.

Much like Reddit, or you know, Hacker News.

For me RSS worked very well at a time when mobile data connection/wifi was not ubiquitous yet. For a year or two, every morning when I came to school I went directly to that one place where there was the one Wi-Fi router. I downloaded all the new articles in my NetNewsWire feed and then read them over the day.

The tech is nice, but I have no desire to use it anymore. I no longer follow specific blogs. Now I just open hacker news or reddit any time I want to read something.

As someone who has used RSS since NetNewsWire looked like this… https://www.coolaboo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/cuneifor... …get off my lawn, kids.

In retrospect, the end of Google Reader was nothing compared to the neolithic revolution.

The way I mitigated this problem was to periodically check places like Reddit or Slashdot, noting which sources were cropping up for things I found interesting, and then adding those to my feed reader, skipping the middle man.

Once a week or when I ran out of feed I’d go hunting for more. The friends aspect diminished greatly but I had plenty to read.

Ah, it's hard to see those 15 unread items from Aaron Swartz. What an optimistic time that was for the internet.

And NNTP before that...

Still a fan of NNTP... thinking of doing something similar with HTTP and Cloudflare workers (and adjacent service). Durable Objects for incrementing counters per group, and R2 for header/body storage. Not inherently distributed to separate servers, but an open enough API that it would be similar and allow for other implementations. Only thinking CF, in that I wouldn't have the issues of trying to self-scale in the same way something that could be simple if it gained wider usage.

With "nntp//rss" you could get the best of both worlds. It contained both an NNTP server and an RSS aggregator, with a web interface for administration.

It's no longer maintained, but it was a great concept

Gnus having NNTP and it's "nnrss" module means its my default newsreader.

1. You're a kid yourself if you were that late.

2. No-one used the social features.

Same here — first piece of Mac software that I ever paid for, in 2002. Still use it.

Akregator still looks exactly like that, I guess if it works, it works.

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