Hacker News Reader

Comment by Yhippa | Hacker News Reader

Google Reader with sharing content to a "feed" and having friends comment on it was peak social media for me. I'd argue that today's social media is no different from mobile games. Designed to extract as much time, money, and knowledge about you as possible.

View on HN

Yeup. I wish we all went back to blogs and posting stuff to our own sites. There was a barrier to entry for doing this, naturally, but it kept the riff-raff off. There was also a few years of early Twitter days before the general public came on, and it was pretty amazing and useful

I'd rather just have a feed-reader that I manage, and manually subscribe to people's content. Something like how Spokeo or FriendFeed back in the day.... FriendFeed was also awesome. I wish we'd go back to those days.

Isn’t that what Martin Fowler is sort of doing? Posting on his blog, then advertising on all the platforms.

Sounds like it. But I personally don't even bother with the feed thing anymore, and I definitely don't use an aggregator or Twitter or any of that. I go to a couple information sources that I expect the good stuff to bubble up to, and spend my 10 or 15 minutes/day with that content.

It doesn't feel like there's critical mass keeping rss feeds up to date. And I had a pretty extensive Feely configured for awhile after the google blog reader went away, too.

But as he himself admits, he doesn't comment on anyone's posts. Social media posting for him just seems to be manually cross posting links to his blog.

POSSE - Publish Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere

1. https://indieweb.org/POSSE

This doesn't work for all topics though, for some popularity is an anti signal.

Google Reader + Google Talk (the chat app) were incredible. I had an ancient Blackberry Bold 9000 with 128MB RAM on which Gtalk absolutely flew. It's shocking how laggy modern chat apps are by comparison.

> It's shocking how laggy modern chat apps are by comparison.

Also how little content they can actually fit on screen. When you optimize for press release photos everyone suffers.

It was also incredible how standards-compliant they were. Google Reader was feeding on RSS data, and Google Talk was a XMPP/Jabber client that respected federation and all that. Google was even pivotal for the development of Jingle, XMPP's VoIP extension. Peak Web 2.0.

Back when the Internet was for internetworking sites together, not just a dumb pipe to connect you to walled gardens protected by impressive moats & highest of walls.

Agreed about Google Reader. It's the experience I keep trying to recapture.

> Designed to extract as much time, money, and knowledge about you as possible.

Potential irony? Wasn’t this model, at least in part, popularized by the Facebook game Farmville?

RSS feeds and del.icio.us were great.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com