Hacker News Reader

Comment by brandonb927 | Hacker News Reader

Google Reader: I will forever be salty about how Google killed something that likely required very little maintenance in the long run. It could have stayed exactly the same for a decade and I wouldn't have cared because I use an RSS reader exactly the same way I do that I did back in 2015.

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Yes. That was the single worst business decision in Google history, as somebody correctly noted. It burned an enormous amount of goodwill for no gain whatsoever.

Killing Google Reader affected a relatively small number of users, but these users disporportionately happened to be founders, CTOs, VPs of engineering, social media luminaries, and people who eventually became founders, CTOs, etc. They had been painfully taught to not trust Google, and, since that time, they didn't. And still don't.

Just think of the data mining they could have had there.

They had a core set of ultra-connected users who touched key aspects of the entire tech industry. The knowledge graph you could have built out of what those people read and shared…

They could have just kept the entire service running with, what, 2 software engineers? Such a waste.

This would require the decision-maker to think and act at the scale and in interests of the entire company. Not at the scale of a promo packet for next perf: "saved several millions in operation costs by shutting down a low-impact, unprofitable service."

There is some truth in this. I fit into a few of these buckets and I don’t think I could ever recommend their enterprise stuff after having my favourite consumer products pulled.

Yes, Google killing Reader was probably the first time they killed a popular product and what started the idea that any Google product could be killed at any time.

Yes! I loved this product… it was our little social network for my friends and coworkers.

It was so freaking no-nonsense, loved it!

Yep came here to say exactly this.

I never understood why noone built a Copycat (like "bgr" -> "better google reader :-D) There would have been a clear change to fill this vacuum?

The thing is: I guess they didnt see a good way to monetize it (according to their "metrics"), while the product itself had somehow relative high OpEx and being somehow a niche thingy.

> I never understood why noone built a Copycat (like "bgr" -> "better google reader :-D)

like theoldreader and Inoreader, which explicitly copied the columnar interfaces, non-RSS bookmarklet content saving, item favoriting, friend-of-a-friend commenting and quasi-blog social sharing features, and mobile app sync options via APIs? Or NewsBlur, which did all of that _and also_ added user-configurable algorithmic filtering? Or Feedly, which copied Reader's UX but without the social features? or Tiny Tiny RSS and FreshRSS, which copied Reader's UX as self-hosted software?

theoldreader remains the most straightforward hosted ripoff of Google Reader, right down to look and feel, and hasn't changed much in more than a decade. Tiny Tiny is very similar, and similarly unchanging. FreshRSS implemented some non-RSS following features. So did NewsBlur, but as it always has, it still struggles with feed parsing and UI performance.

Inoreader and Feedly both pivoted toward business users and productivity to stay afloat, with the former's ditching of social features leading to another exodus of people who'd switched to it after Google Reader folded.

There were a few copycats, but they 1) weren't as good (mostly because they wanted to do more than google reader!) and 2) they weren't free.

They did, Feedly.

Killing Reader didn't just kill Reader. It killed the expectation of RSS to be a valid default consumption format of the internet. These days, if you use RSS, it's either relying on some legacy hidden feed feature that hasn't been shuttered yet (lots of Rails and WordPress sites that are like this) or you're explicitly adding RSS to your site as a statement.

Picking up the pieces after Reader was impossible because the entire RSS ecosystem imploded with it. Almost every single news site decided that with killing Reader, they wouldn't bother maintaining their RSS feeds, leaving them basically all "legacy" until they irrevocably break one day and then get shut down for not wanting to get maintained.

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