Google Reader shutdown tidbits (2013)
blog.persistent.info
blog.persistent.info
Simultaneously, blogging as a medium has changed for many economic and cultural reasons so even if reader remained I think the ecosystem would be different.
Someone on HN recently said that the difference ten+ years ago was that people were blogging in the evenings and weekends after their full time position, but now the content economy can provide an income, so we have a lot more processional creators, who IMO, over produce.
That is so accurate and highly relatable. I find myself reading blogs from over a decade ago+ simply because the author is really intimate with the content and it feels more personal.
Meanwhile, nowadays everything just feels fake, overcreated and not of much substance. Granted even back then they had the same issues but it was just regularly easier to find organic true spirited content.
Though when it comes to technical blogs, unfortunately that seems to be what the market wants. For some reason, a significant amount of developers are loathe to ever read official docs or evaluate new technologies themselves, but are quite happy to take as gospel some random, poor, blogspam tutorial. It's an annoying type of learned helplessness. And then there's all the Youtube channels making stretched 30 minute videos about simple articles shared here last week
Though it's not like the good "for the love of it" authors have gone away, it's just that they naturally put less time into promoting their blog/channel
I can't help but think about the Google Reader shutdown "conspiratorially". I think YouTube has similar artifacts:
1. It would be very useful (and very obvious) to have a curated index by topic interface for YouTube videos and channels, but we only get search. And on top of that, the search is suspiciously shitty. I often search for very specific topics on YouTube and seemingly exhaust the results, only to come upon pre-existing videos later that should have come up in the search.
2. YouTube used to have messaging between users, but that was also shut down... I presume the reasoning given to the public for that would be similar to the story given here.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story
I think The Man has something against curated indexes, communities forming around them, and all the other things that can emerge from such ecosystems, one of them being power.
You don’t really get that from Inoreader, Feedbin, Feedly etc from what I’ve seen in trying them.
As time went on less and less sites supported RSS so it became less of an issue and I had to switch to other way less efficient ways to read/scan news.
I still use feedly here and there for some of my feeds. I also tried one called old reader (?) and then a few home grown ones and one I wrote. None of them were close to reader.
Before reader remark (probably not spelled correctly) was amazing.
But whatever the intent was, they shut down a very effective, useful and popular social network feature and didn’t replace it with any workable equivalent. They just gave that traffic to competitors for no reason. It was pretty boneheaded.
I always felt that RSS cost Google long-term ad revenue and that was the reason for the closure. It cost websites actual live visitors and these interactions became increasingly important as surveillance capitalism became more nuanced.
That is: how much time you spent on a page, where you hovered your mouse, etc..
It was more important to upsell the benefits of Google Analytics - what it could do, what it could track. To get sites excited about SEO (ie, Google Ads and Google itself) than to cater to the wishes of the end-user (who ultimately does not want to become a product).
When you're building an ad network, you want to get everyone involved. You need active, participating partners so that the network grows and builds on itself. This growth is what brings in larger, long-term ad money. RSS was the opposite of that.
As it stands now, the analytics situation for RSS sucks. You can basically track your server logs and hope the RSS bots for Feedbin, Feedly, Inoreader etc are kind enough to tell you how many subscribers you have. But that says nothing of what posts are actually pulling people in.
I would expect that Google would have known the consequences of letting a codebase rot, so one could still imagine how it was done deliberately in order to eventually be replaced by Google+/Wave...
The deciding "feature" was that the social networks that were going to replace the RSS/Reader ecosystem would force all users to only publish on the operator's site, wereas with RSS you could get content from any site.
Plain old social media replaced it. All of the features described here are things that sites like Reddit do.
The really simple syndication part of RSS wasn’t really the “killer app.”
Instead they killed reader to try and force people into the facebook clone and failed. Google+, for the users who wanted a facebook like experience, would have been much more valuable with google reader users injecting content into it.
Take me for example: I never used Google Reader. I used Google Reader a lot.
Thing is, I never used GR on my desktop, FeedDemon was always a better experience. But on the go (in that short time it was available) I wanted to have the same feeds and, of course, the same un/read statuses. And Google Reader was a perfect sync service first and good enough RSS reader second.
Sure, there were a lot of attempts at that time, but... Feedly, which was pushed as the best great thing after sliced bread^W^W GR didn't run good on my RAZR (if at all, I think I abandoned it when it started to sat down on the loding splash) and there were no desktop version. Other apps (which names eludes me) were no better, at least for me. And the most important part is what they lacked the integrated sync what was available to you as a Gmail (sic!) user, so it was some other sync provider, if at all.
So for a short time when there were no king the RSS lost a lot of it's momentum for the consumers of the feeds. Some years later the alternatives matured, but the time of RSS has gone. People moved to podcasts, Twitter and whatever and RSS was no longer even a necessary tech to implement.
All of the alternatives are worse. And imagine if you're dependent on gmail and they shut that down. Reader was like that.
I wouldn't be surprised if killing Reader played a role in RSS decline.
It wasn't that there were no other RSS clients, but Reader was extremely dominant and there was no strong immediate contender with enough reach and quality to carry the crown.
The (IMHO planned) idea was replaced with 'social networks', which would offer total central control and far more monetization potential for the intermediaries/operators.
The decision was probably based on two reasons:
1. They wanted users to discover content using their algorithm as opposed to manual subscriptions to RSS thus depriving users of content Discovery agency.
2. They wanted to promote Google
And the original comment is weird anyway. Google had billions of views with and without google reader.
The normal person doesn't use a RSS Reader at all. Even in my nerdy / tech group not everyone uses one.
Feedly apparently hast 15 million users across the world.
If I am a higher-up executive in Google, I'm not going to much care what the numbers on RSS look like now, it takes less half a brain to understand that Google Reader has at least a CHANCE at chewing into the bottom line hard if it takes off -- even if those chances are slim. I'd kill it quickly as possible. If I can do so early, with little fanfare, even better.