Hacker News Reader

Comment by flir | Hacker News Reader

Google Reader. Never forget.

I miss Google Search being good and useful and not covered in intrusive ads much more than I miss something easily replaced with local software or Feedly.

Almost everything Google does outside of GCP, Maps, Search, and YouTube could evaporate for all I care. Google's problem is not that they cancel stuff, it's the everpresent need to grow revenue and embed annoying ads into more and more of everyone's daily lives. I'd love for them to cancel Gmail with a very short notice period.

The endgame for Google is every Google user loaded full of energy drinks watching ads continuously for 20 hours a day. Every lifestyle that's less profitable than that is something Google will eventually try to engineer away.

I started to use Kagi instead of google search. Since, it's difficult to get back on google, the results are so much worse.

What's an example search that's better on Kagi?

"Radiator". I just picked a word at random. All the other ones are better too.

Funny enough, I just tried it and I agree. I have pinned Wikipedia in Kagi, so that came out on top rather than a link to Autozone at Google. Google's "Places" results were also (significantly) farther away yet no more relevant than Kagi's.

So...yes. Radiator.

It's not really the ads that killed Google search for me. it's more the over agressive minmaxed SEO that makes most of results garbage.

Can you explain "minimaxed" in this context, please?

Not bad enough to be outright spam with just enough relevance to be shown in the top ten search results. Try finding product reviews, or product comparison articles. It will likely be LLM garbage that doesn't say anything, but uses the right keywords and enough coherency to be indexed.

It's obvious LLM tripe when you click into the article and it begins with several worthless paragraphs describing why someone would be interested in the topic and how things can sometimes go wrong...

Yes, I already knew that. That's why I'm here.

It might be an attempt to copy customer service 'empathy' but it has the opposite effect: angering me because my time is wasted with this crap, and I have to scroll several screens to find what I need.

Tangent: your use of the word "tripe" here is spot-on.

The secondary definition (nonsense) works, but I'm talking about the apt metaphor of its primary definition: offal that's technically edible but comes from low-quality parts of the digestive system which are literally filled with feces.

LLM-generated SEO spam should always be called "tripe".

Honestly, a lot of this isn't LLM stuff. It's "people being paid pittance".

Good point; maybe all clickbait and SEO spam, regardless of human provenance, counts as "tripe".

And the content itself is just a reflection of the search. Whole web is turning to rot such that the only few remaining great sites don't even need indexing because well there's so few left.

> It will likely be LLM garbage that doesn't say anything, but uses the right keywords and enough coherency to be indexed.

Or some site that "aggregates" Stackoverflow, Quora and whatnot. Pure hell and I wish everything bad possible on this planet to the people who have implemented this kind of scam.

I block them using uBlacklist in Firefox. My blacklist is growing.

Not OP.

I believe "minimaxed" in this context refers to optimizing profits while trying to keep search results useful to users.

The term comes from game theory where a player tries to maximize their gains while minimizing their losses:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax

For me it's when they stopped showing results that include your keywords and instead a random smattering of anything broadly related to the topic being searched for.

You can use quotes around keywords.

https://blog.google/products/search/how-were-improving-searc...

This shifted from "can" to "absolutely have to" a long time ago for my use cases.

I’ve had google searches disregard my quoted query.

even quotes don't work 100% of the time- if there is strong signal to show another result, it will be shown even if it isn't a quote-match. Previous user clicks are the top ranking signal.

IIUC "verbatim mode" is supposed to do something like this. https://search.googleblog.com/2011/11/search-using-your-term...

When I use Google search-which is rare these days-I exclusively use verbatim mode.

Often it's not even related at all.

For example, Google often prioritizes obscure music bands or albums even for generic or well-known terms.

What ADs? Install uBlock.

> everything Google does outside of GCP, Maps, Search, and YouTube could evaporate for all I care

Honestly, even YouTube could evaporate and it really wouldn't make a difference. 99.9999% of YouTube is just mindless entertainment, which is 100% fungible with every other form of entertainment. The amount of actually unique, insightful, worthwhile content on YouTube is a rounding error, and will find other places to live.

AFAIK more than 95% of all email traffic is spam. I still consider email an absolutely vital tool, despite the efficiency below a steam engine.

Same with YouTube: the small sliver of content I care about is important enough for me to pay for YouTube premium.

Sometimes people compare something to a gold mine, to emphasize how rich that is. A typical gold mine extracts several grams of good per tonne of rock, that is, a few parts per million.

Don't cry about the Sturgeon's law; embrace it and celebrate what you can extract.

YouTube isn't analogous to email, it's analogous to Gmail. We were hosting video in the 90s, and the cost of storage, bandwidth, and compute have become orders of magnitude cheaper since then. Video hosting is not magic that only YouTube can pull off.

Unlike Gmail, YouTube is a large public repository of media.

Pulling your email account from Gmail affects you. Pulling a video from YouTube affects potentially huge numbers of people.

If the useful YouTube content scattered to multiple alternatives, it would immediately become far less useful. Discovery is a big part of YouTube’s value proposition for me.

But Reader _wasn't_ easily replaced by local software. They centralised social usage of RSS, then killed it. Yes, you can still run an RSS reader, but RSS and blogs as a a model of social networking? Never came back.

That wasn't Reader, that was apps. Nobody uses the web anymore except as API transport for native apps. Blame Android and Apple for that.

I am fucking pissed at how Google created tons of make work for me by killing old Universal Analytics and replacing it with an inferior product.

OTOH, I successfully skipped the whole AMP saga because I could tell from the start that it was bullshit.

Universal Analytics used third-party cookies. Support for them has been removed from all major browsers due to privacy issues.

So you adapt to that. Adapting to changes does not require any of the crap in GA4.

I see Reader as Google's attack on RSS' popularity. The product was killed off when its job was accomplished.

No because if anything (the effect might have been small) it reduced the power of the open web and many websites (which Google tied togeather) and encouraged people to go to walled gardens ( Facebook, Instagram, twitter, etc ) which are controlled by other companies.

A lot of heavyweight bloggers and aggregators used Reader in their toolchains - it was very good at surfacing trending content. I don't think the effect on the blogging ecosystem was small.

I could believe they were clearing a path for G+ and Discover on Android.

What's frustrating is that Reader would have been complementary to Google+. It could have served as a huge funnel by which users could discover content to share on Google+. That's how I used to use Reader (though at the time I found content that I shared other places, such as Facebook, Digg, or Reddit).

I think it just was never going to get the mass adoption it needed to justify the upkeep.

The upkeep was apparently 12 engineers and they had tens of millions of users. It doesn't take that many users to justify 12 engineers plus infra, so it sounds like it was more that Google doesn't care to operate any product unless it will have users in the hundreds of millions.

It doesn't take that many <revenue generating> users to justify 12 engineers plus infra,

Otherwise, those 12 engineers and infra are pure negative on the balance sheet

Having basically all their users (well, as much as for any of their revenue generating products anyway) be revenue generating would require practically no effort for google specifically. It fit their revenue model perfectly. It is trivial to put the exact same ads in there as they already had on search and gmail, and it is stickier than search or gmail.

That would seem a little rude wouldn't it?

Taking content from another site, maybe that has ads, and then displaying it in Reader next to your own ads instead?

I think it would have caused some issues in the RSS world that such a big player was using everyone's content for themselves.

I used Reader daily back then. It's strange to think my current method of manually checking sites for updates was solved so long ago.

LOL. the Googs worrying about being rude is charmingly funny in a webcomic kind of way. they removed their tag line of don't be evil. you think they are concerned about being rude?

however, this is precisely what Reddit was complaining about 3rd party apps doing to their content. everyone was trying to pivot to blaming AI scrappers, but that's just FUD.

Broadly, I think some business models are better suited for smaller companies than Google for sure.

Reader probably didn't have much B2B potential and was maybe profitable but yeah, they tend to swing for larger audiences.

I don't think they ever put ads on it, really wonder what the decision process on that was.

Many blogs have ads on them. So you'd be stripping ads and replacing them with your own - not cool.

Well, sure, but they could just not show ads for blogs that didn't use google ads.

The ones that do... Well, why not show ads for them as originally intended?

By the end it had an upkeep of one dude's 20% time. It was very reliable and the Google infrastructure didn't require much ongoing maintenance at that time, the servers just kept on trucking.

Apparently what actually happened is Reader was put together by a team that really cared about it, but always had to fight the corporation to keep it alive. They finally lost the political game to Google Plus, which stole a lot of their key people before it imploded:

https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-r...

The article above is actually very interesting, because the story it tells is that Google's two highest-profile failures are actually one failure. Facebook freaked them out so much that they scrambled to build something comparable with Google Plus. Google Plus stole most of the company's mind share but was executed so poorly that it never went anywhere. The company got major egg on their face from suffocating Reader to make Plus, then again when Plus died after having been pushed so hard.

Three greatest failures. Google+ started the trend of having Google product strategy set by executives who were accountable to the CEO/CFO rather than users/customers, vs. the previous bottom-up culture of engineers who passionately wanted to serve the user. That culture change is the root of the issues we're talking about in this thread.

Obligatory reminder that RSS is alive and well. It remains popular. I both subscribe to RSS, and support it on my blog. You can too.

Still use it - I even read HN via RSS - but I've never found a tool with the critical mass of users you need to show trending content the way GR did.

That's true. I use Newsblur. It has social features, but the community is so small and the social aspect is so limited that it has little value. With that said, the people who engage with it tend to be authentic users interested in high-quality content and respectful discussion. Discovery of other users is terrible, though. You basically have to stumble upon them if they're interacting with an article already in your RSS feeds.

theoldreader, same problem.

Idle musing 1: A mechanism for all these small readers to federate their trending content? Out of many comes one?

Idle musing 2: These tools were mostly written a decade ago. It might be possible, with the current state of the art, to extract a more useful signal out of a smaller pool of users.

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