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Comment by aeonik | Hacker News Reader

They really aren't shy about massive breaking changes.

I'm still upset about Google Reader.

I remember being upset about Google Reader for a few months after its death… before moving to one of its many, fuller-featured competitors and carrying on using RSS feeds exactly as before.

What upsets me re RSS these days is how many people were apparently so reliant on one reader that they still publicly mourn every time it comes up, 12 years later. Who are these fair-weather feed followers who threw their hands in the air with the loss of exactly one product?

There still is no replacement for Google Reader. The difference is that there was a community around Reader’s social features. That only really works with wide adoption, and it’s a lot easier for people to adopt a Google product than a random company x one. Today, there are many replacements with the mechanical features of browsing & sync, but the community will never come back.

The other problem was that Google killing Reader was a signal to the broader web to move away from RSS. RSS has kind of limped along since then.

> The difference is that there was a community around Reader’s social features.

Are social features the main selling point of RSS readers? I mean I just use mine to know when there's a new blog post/webcomic posted on a few sites I follow, without having to give my email or use another platform like social media to know about it. And I'd use the social features which are present on the blogs, under the control of the blog owner(s), if there's any. Or maybe my use case is not the most common one?

Though I agress about the signal Google sent by killing GR.

Killing Google Reader killed blogs. You personally can replace Google Reader as a product, but since most people didn't and just sort of moved on to closed platforms, there was less content produced on blogs and less discussion activity on the blog posts that were created after.

John Gruber of DaringFireball has said his blog has still not recovered completely from the Google Reader shutdown and he has the most popular blog in the Apple ecosystem

GR had some primitive social features that none of the competitors, as far as I know, could replicate. Side-effect of being the largest. Even an exact clone wouldn't behave the same. It was the core of the blogging ecosystem, and IMO its removal was the main cause of blogging falling apart.

All so they could clear the way for Google Plus. And look how that turned out.

So yeah, watershed moment, the point where the scales fell from my eyes, still justifiably pissed, fool me twice, etc etc etc

(Still using RSS daily, though I lapsed for a while).

I realized I was reading too many websites and decided to switch to RSS, only to find out that Google had killed Reader a month earlier.

Years later, I came across Artifact, created by the founders of Instagram, and thought it was an interesting idea. The problem was I was reading its shutdown announcement.

Sometimes I think products are killed way too early. Look at twitch, it boomed after years of stagnation.

Twitch has found some not-amazing niches to bulk up its revenue. A service needs to be profitable to work, and I don't think anyone wanted to pay for RSS. Or not enough.

Somewhat true back then, but I think now there are more people who would pay for it, and they could capitalize a lot on integrating LLMs into RSS apps.

By comparison, Twitch's yearly revenue is consistently over $100m[0] from subscriptions and other in-app payments (e.g. taking a cut for buying their internal currency).

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/517907/twitch-app-revenu...

I'm still upset about the "I've Got A Bad Feeling About This" button.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z4RKRLaSug

I didn't use Reader. What was so special about it? Iirc it was an RSS aggregator, which sounds pretty simple to replace. Nobody has an open source equivalent?

There wasn't an equivalent when it was deprecated. It downloaded the contents and they were archived in your account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5371982

Great and simple UI, synced across all your devices (which is what ended up killing RSS in f.ex. Thunderbird for me).

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5371725

Many of us are still upset about Reader. It definitely felt like a watershed moment between the old cool Google who sent pizzas to hackers and had clean fast web design and weren't evil.

I'd be so glad now to give up on Google and all its enshittified shit. I could give up things that are still super useful and I get value from every day: YouTube, Gmail, Play Services, Drive, Maps. But I don't think I could give them all up at once. I've been trying to migrate to Proton and OpenStreetMap and some kind of real Linux phone etc, I don't even mind if I have to fiddle around before everything works. The trouble is that the claws are in, but they're not in me.

Remember when Google proudly didn't advertise themselves? They got to critical mass through word of mouth, from having a compellingly better product. Now what they have is network effects and locking. They used to appeal to developers and techies because and that ended up making the services better for everyone. Now like all the other tech giants they have PHB's optimizing for the next millisecond of attention and Microdollar of ad revenue from a lowest-common-denominator victim.

Google is so big that it's a significant part of life for a significant proportion of the world. When Google is shit it moves the needle on net human suffering. I think the UN should be focussing on prevent war and trying to salvage our environment, but if they aren't going to do that then it might be rational to just form a worldwide consumer group to take on megacorps.

+1 for Google Reader

That marks my coming of age on the enshittified web. The killing of Google Reader was a watershed moment. It marks the moment in time when the tide turned from the open Web to closed social media gardens.

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