Google Reader died – and why the web misses it more than ever | Hacker News Reader

Google Reader died – and why the web misses it more than ever

theverge.com

58 pointsmicroflash11 comments

10 years later and I still can't let go. Shortly after they killed Reader, perhaps as a coping mechanism, I wrote a little wrapper that lets me use the Reader frontend on top of newsblur's API. The frontend is a pretty straight forward single page app, and ex-reader engineer Mihai Parparita had already demonstrated how to do this in the readerisdead[0] project.

[0]: https://github.com/mihaip/readerisdead

I've used Inoreader ever since myself. This was the day Google became evil to me and I've never forgiven them. To this day I hope Google dies a slow painful death.

RSS with signed exchanges for the articles could provide a pleasant reading experience. Waiting for each article to load makes the experience worse than FB with IA. That's the problem.

What I remember of Reader was an interface like Gmail but instead of the article pane loading instantly like the Gmail conversation pane, it took many seconds to load. I'd get tired of all the waiting. It also didn't have any filtering functionality to match Gmail.

> Google tried its best to bury the announcement: it made it the fifth bullet in a series of otherwise mundane updates and published the blog post on the same day Pope Francis was elected to head the Catholic Church... But as it turns out, the people who care about Reader don’t really care about the Pope.

> But as it turns out, the people who care about Reader don’t really care about the Pope.

I grant you that the overlap is small but it's definitely non-zero. (A more interesting story is that Benedict was forced out making his resignation invalid meaning Francis isn't the Pope... but you suggested you don't care about the Pope. :-)

What was really surprising was when we learned that the new pope also used Reader.

Google Reader didn't die, it was murdered, ruthlessly, in its prime.

I still miss it.

The 5 billionth eulogy for Google Reader. These vergebait articles are getting tedious last few weeks.

Yes it hurt the web, but at the time there was a lot more going on as far as competition/facebook/walledgardens/apple and especially twitter, which, again, at the time, replaced RSS very effectively for a bit. Context and history is important. And endlessly revisiting it isn't going to make it come back. Improve other platforms/data channels (and there's so many options the last few years for those that want them).

What's wrong with Feedly (https://feedly.com/)? I've been using it since Reader shut down and havent noticed much of a difference.

Feedly used to have a view that just loaded the first few paragraphs of an article and then you could expand it if you wanted to keep on reading, the death of that feature really killed Feedly for me.

Still haven't gotten over the death of Google Reader, the day it shut down was the day that Google died for me.

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