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Comment by paulcole | Hacker News Reader

> It was killed because Google decided Facebook was an existential threat to them

(citation needed)

This really feels like your (and a popular) reading of the situation, but isn’t as unequivocal as you make it seem.

To me it’s more like the iMac not having a floppy drive or no USBA ports on the newer MacBooks. Google saw that the web was trending away from blogs and written content. They removed one of the tools that people used to keep up with blogs and written content and accelerated the decline of blogs and written content.

People didn’t like it at the time, but they were (for the most part) right.

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> but they were (for the most part) right

And yet here we are, discussing things on a platform that is very akin to the web that Reader advanced. There was always going to be a market for non-Web 2.0 social media junk, albeit smaller. And frankly, trying to copy already successful iterations almost always fails (Google+). The resources that would have been required to maintain or even update Reader were minimal-- they were already wasting money on far more expensive dead end projects that were never going to make money.

The use of passive voice here is a little comical. "The lion noticed that the gazelle was headed for its stomach, and it turned out to be right."

I don't think I used passive voice in my comment at all. Can you quote the part that is passive?

Only part that might be slightly confusing is:

> People didn’t like it at the time, but they were (for the most part) right.

"They" in that sentence refers to Google, which should make it more clear. But it is still all in active voice.

I'm fairly sure someone here can provide you with a proper citation, but in the meanwhile I was very much online here and elsewhere during that time and IIRC it was common knowledge at the time and AFAIK nobody came up with a better hypothesis.

If someone doesn't comment on their reasoning for a decision they made, everybody else's best guess doesn't become the truth.

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