Stop Whining About Google Reader | Hacker News Reader

Stop Whining About Google Reader

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102 pointsemin_gun_sirer55 comments

I think he is vastly underestimating the amount of work required to make a true Google Reader replacement. Reader was a lot more than just an RSS reader, and much more than just the front-end bits. Reading this post makes me wonder if he ever even used it or had much direct interaction with the underlying feed API and all that it offers (historical feed data, etc).

Re-read this blog post with every mention of "Google Reader" replaced with "Google Search" to get an idea of how ridiculous a notion it is that we should just shut up and make our own in a couple of months. Granted, the scale isn't quite the same. Google Reader is not as difficult to replace as Google Search would be, but it is far more difficult than he thinks.

Having said all of this, it is absolutely Google's call if it wants to keep Reader going or not, they don't owe me anything when it comes to Reader or any of their other services that I don't pay for, but OTOH shutting down Reader does mean I'm going to think twice (or four times) about adopting any future Google service. They've now established quite a pattern of killing off things I've grown to depend on, and they are free to do that, but I'm free to avoid their services for fear of being burned again.

That's an interesting comparison... it actually strikes me that Google Reader is much harder for me to replace than Google search. Switching to Bing would be easy, whereas Reader was something I'd integrated into my life, and which I'd curated for myself.

But the part you curated you can export and take with you.

You can't export the content of the feeds (EDIT: using Google Takeout, that is.) Oftentimes, GR is the only one that still has a copy of an older article. What use is it to know I've starred an article if I can't read it anymore?

(To remedy this, I've been using Reeder to export all my starred items to both Instapaper and Evernote. But no thanks to Google.)

Closest thing you can do is grab the JSON of the data as the browser downloads it. The cached content that shows up on a feed's pane is transferred in bulk via JSON, so it should make a decent archive.

Just need a way to do it automatically...

It can be done but it isn't pretty.

My first resort when someone deletes their blog or whatever thing that was meaningful to me that I foolishly failed to mirror, is to go to archive.org and see if they have a good mirror. If they don't but they do have enough that you can find out the RSS URL, you can get google reader's archive of the feed like so: http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/17484/archive-exp...

What you get back is just raw XML.

EDIT: for example, here are the last 100 posts from Mark Pilgrim's blog: http://www.google.com/reader/atom/feed/http://diveintomark.o... ... in this particular case archive.org has a good copy though so this isn't necessary as a last resort.

Here's a way to download the archive of all your starred items, 1000 at a time, straight to XML: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/reader/fMLNWm-s...

I'm a day or two away from "finishing" a script that will allow you to do that (well, at least as far as Google will let me) and pushing it to Github. I'm likely not the only person working on this so I expect we'll be able to save most of our data.

I pushed a small python script to allow you to export your read items as JSON here https://github.com/motdiem/GRARchiver - this can help

I was indeed a Reader user, but by no means a power-user, so I could very well be unaware of some difficult-to-duplicate parts of Reader that are hidden under the covers. Can you let me know what I could be missing?

> historical feed data

Google caches the entire history of an RSS feed from the moment it entered their database. This is in many cases unique, irreplaceable data that's going to have to be systematically extracted over the next few months, because I seriously doubt Google will release the entire data dump.

Thanks, I appreciate this.

In your estimate, what percentage of Reader users have, or will, donate to the Internet Archive to perform this archival task?

At what percentage level would it be wrong to call Reader users "entitled", given that the IA folks were hurting for disk space while these complainers chose to ignore its pleas?

At what point will you stop behaving like an asshole?

Not everyone who complains knows about IA or should necessarily care about it. We are not all the same person with same needs and things we miss from reader may not be the same, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a true loss/problem for each that is not easy to replace (I tried and none of the alternatives come close which is why I WILL write my own).

That kind of language will bring the discussion to an end.

Well, reliable parsing of feeds in itself is difficult and never really solved, but other than that none of the features was difficult to duplicate. They rarely are. But that doesn't mean there weren't lots of them and that building reader is not a huge project.

Sure I could build my own (in fact, I plan to), but this is obviously completely non-realistic attitude to take for every service that can or does bugger you.

Much easier than building these new alternatives is for you to just not read the articles which bother you. Especially since in this case you mostly can know from the title if they will.

I would suggest reading the blogs and information about NewsBlur, the demands on his system are huge. If one is just talking about having a single user RSS Reader these have been around for years, but in terms of a web app for thousands the scale of the database and requests is significant.

> A real hacker would not whine about missing code. Hackers see missing code as an opportunity to build. Hackers like to build.

Fuck you and fuck your "no true Scotsman" bullshit. Who appointed you to be king of hackers?

Yeah, I have to kind of agree here... Just because someone is considered a "hacker" doesn't mean he or she can't use someone else's product instead of building their own. Not everyone has time to build their own RSS parser and reading interface.

It's kind of like taking away a mechanic's car--they'd still be annoyed you took it away. Just because someone can build something (and maybe not quite to the extent of an entire multi-billion company's skill and attention), doesn't mean they should waste time doing so. If you think you can do better, go for it, but in most cases it's better to use what's out there.

And what is a "hacker" to begin with? I believe he meant the hacker which is defined here http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html, and not that you should invent the wheel avoiding other products (no problem should ever have to be solved twice), on the contrary, you should fill in the gaps when it's possible (the world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved). That's the true hacker attitude, not whining.

>Fuck you

Feel free to disregard my opinion and express your disagreement in whatever terms best reflect you as a person.

Cute. You are the smug one, aren't you?

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm not concerned about finding another RSS reader, or about the impact on "RSS as a standard." Mostly, I'm concerned that blogs I enjoy which are "at the margin" of traffic profitability will be killed when at least some of their subscription base stop following them on Reader, and then never start following anywhere else.

Ask any company who makes money from an email list what would happen if everyone suddenly became unsubscribed and they had to just sit and hope they would all subscribe again. Listen for the wails :)

In this case, the blog should be where the readers have migrated - G+, FB, Twitter, etc. If they were on the limit, it is probably because they couldn't capture an audience big enough anyway.

I'm concerned about the standard. Because having all information circulating through walled gardens is bad. My opinion is that the root cause is not that not enough people used GReader (you didn't wrote that, but others did), but rather that Google had no (good enough) revenue model with RSS.

If a sustainable and easy to use pay model finally emerges, then open standards would keep those different sources syndicated. Because syndication is not something people will give up soon, at the opposite.

> they're attached to their Twitter feed but dontcha-know-it's-just-not-the-same thing as Google Reader

I need to have a Twitter account to follow someone's feed. But I don't need to open account anywhere to subscribe to an RSS feed. The blog owner doesn't know who the subscribers to his RSS feed are. RSS anonymous and private. That is the difference. Twitter is like centralized VCS. RSS is like distributed VCS.

Ironically, this is also the reason why Google shutdown GR - they want everyone to "follow" others on Google+. So that all your posts are hidden in some megacorp's servers, creating a "lock-in" situation.

Maybe technically. For me the difference is much more practical: with RSS, I can subscribe to something that updates once every five months, and not miss that update, because it ends up as an unread item in my inbox forevermore. With Twitter (or Facebook, Tumblr, or any other "activity feed" site), by the time I check, that one update has long been washed away by the stream of more frequent updates from other things.

You'll notice, though, that there is one other thing that already manages this perfectly: email newsletter subscription. RSS at this point could really just be made into a microformat on top of email--presumably, just a specific additional MIME-type for messages--and then an RSS "client" would just be a special email client that gives you an alternate view of your own email account's inbox, only showing messages that have a representation in that MIME-type available, and laying them out in the traditional "river of news + passing an item marks it as read" style. And there would be literally no difference experience-wise!

It could even be set up on top of your Gmail inbox, which feels justly spiteful somehow. :)

Now, obviously, not everybody wants to set up their own Sendgrid account or something just to allow RSS subscriptions. Regular "XML file on a webserver" RSS could still exist as the lazy producer-side method, while still changing the consumer-side entirely into something SMTP+MIME-based. PubSubHubbub gateways (like Superfeedr) are already doing something equivalent in cost to sending out email; it would just be a matter of convincing them to add an additional subscription option.

Also, the fact that RSS items would be served with an "additional" MIME-type is important: if all these messages also had a regular text/plain or text/html representation, then looking at your email inbox with a regular mail reader would still show you all the same messages (though they could obviously be filtered away from your inbox into a "Subscriptions" tag if you so preferred.) What was starred in your RSS reader would be starred in your email client. To share an RSS item with a friend, you'd just forward it (and then they'd see it in their RSS client, since the forwarded message ended up in their email inbox!) You'd never lose anything as long as you had an IMAP client to sync it with. Et cetera.

In effect, RSS would no longer be its own special domain, only exposed through special tools; it would "just" be email. And more interestingly, vice-versa! Any message that wanted to (I'm thinking "lifecycle emails" or newsletters) could add an RSS MIME representation, and it would start showing up in your RSS client just like anything you had subscribed to through one of the PuSH gateways. "Email newsletter" would, in fact, become unified as a concept with "RSS." If we're all being called-to-arms to get down to hacking on something, why not set this up instead of just writing a thousand crappy new RSS readers? ;)

---

P.S. While we're at this call-to-arms: you could build another "filtered-MIME-type viewer client" of your email inbox, and make that one a to-do list program. Think about it. (http://blog.gaborcselle.com/2012/03/email-as-todo-list-proto..., http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html)

But what's the point? If you want to read RSS in your email, it's not particularly hard, so what would be the point of coming up with new formats and adapting newsletter software?

Here's an analogy for the current "way of things" in email-land: imagine if, instead of a web browser, you just had a database view into an HTTP cache: a list of URLs retrieved recently, each of which, when clicked, rendered as an HTTP "message." (Imagine a file-folder full of MHTML archives, basically.) At the top, there would be an address bar--but, when you entered an address into it, it would simply retrieve a new item into the cache, which you would still have to click into to look at. It wouldn't be very obvious at all how to build something like an AJAX web-app on top of this, because, although the protocol is compatible with it, the representation is too low-level.

As a user of a web browser--an abstraction over HTTP messages--you don't care about each individual HTTP response; you only care about pages. Sometimes an HTTP response will deliver you new pages; sometimes it will modify a page already loaded. Web browsers only still really use HTTP at all because the verb set (GET, PUT, POST, etc.) so closely aligns with the things people want to do on the web. It's an excellent protocol for generic RPC between machines, that also happens to be usable directly by humans to GET web-pages. Now, why doesn't anyone see that SMTP+IMAP are an excellent protocol for doing publish/subscribe between machines, where real humans happen to also be able to (and already do!) PUBLISH and SUBSCRIBE?

The advantages of making a protocol an abstraction over email are manifold:

1. the messages are stored in the receiver's email inbox--a universal resource that everyone has [and understands the purpose of!];

2. all messages can be processed using the same "utilities" we use for email (backup utilities especially);

3. the ports for SMTP, POP3 and IMAP are almost always open inside corporate firewalls, just like the ports for HTTP;

4. and all messages you send through those protocols will get passed through email infrastructure (which is big and robust and reliable, and, most important, already exists)--and, in the process, can get forwarded, multiplexed across mailing lists, thrown out as spam, and all the other convenient things riding on email infrastructure gives you for free.

There is some confusion here between RSS and Reader. RSS isn't being canceled. Anyone can download any feed any time they like.

You did need a Google account to use Reader, which made it not so anonymous and not so private.

Once again, RSS != Google Reader. They are not even the same type.

I didn't use the Google Reader web client. I'm not even sad to see it go, I think the UI is really bad. Yet, I use the Google Reader service all day, through RSS clients on several platforms (none of which made by Google). I use the Google Reader service to store my subscriptions and allow for syncing of my read items, starred items, etc. That's what I'll need to find a replacement for: a RSS service that interfaces with all the RSS clients that I know and love.

Yup, still this is a move against RSS from one of the biggest Internet company. Such a company sets trends and moves markets. So it matters.

Twitter is more of a status thing, which is annoying. RSS is more like a newspaper where you choose what you want to keep up with.

Broad generalizations, harsh judgements about people with nothing to back them up, wise guy pretensions, a professor talking the cynical tough talk. I prefer Maddox but he didn't write about Google Reader. He does write about getting banned from Apple Stores.

Just because there will be replacements for most of Google Reader's functionality, that doesn't make sunsetting GR with 3 months notice any less of a dick move.

"There have been far too many HN articles on how evil Google is for canceling a free service, how this product cancellation is a symbol, how Google should never have given anything to anyone if they were going to cancel it later."

If a large company starts giving away a service that one would normally expect to pay for, and if it puts its marketing muscle into getting everyone to use the service instead of alternatives, it has responsibility towards those users for quite some time to come, having killed the market for others.

Now dozens of developers of RSS clients have to scramble to replace the GR backend that everyone is using. For example, Aaronbretthorst sent out an email today about the client he's working on:

"To be honest, I never intended to announce my project this week. I started working on Viafeeds on February 11th, and expected that I'd have at least six months to get it working and well-polished before Google shut down Reader. Unfortunately, things didn't work out the way I expected, and I've been forced to accelerate my timetable. This is due, in no small part, to the fact that I was an avid Reader user, and want to make sure that I have a product at least as good to use on my iPhone, iPad and desktop before it shuts down on July 1st."

I really don't get this idea that Google owes people something cause they gave it away from free. Google never said it was staying around for any amount of time. The API wasn't even public. This "responsibility" is an entirely made up concept. At no point did Google say "Come one and all, build on our backend!".

If someone was leeching off my unsecured wifi and came to depend it, I'd laugh in their face if they complained when I put a password on it. I could understand people getting mad if they jacked prices after shutting out competition, but saying they have to maintain a product at their own cost for third parties who gave them nothing but more work?

"If someone was leeching off my unsecured wifi and came to depend it, I'd laugh in their face if they complained when I put a password on it."

If you knew that your entire town had switched from dialup to using your unsecured wifi, and they installed dozens of extenders all over town at their own expense, and you knew about that but allowed it for years, and then you suddenly pull the plug, then yes, that'd be a dick move.

"I could understand people getting mad if they jacked prices after shutting out competition"

I would've been absolutely fine with that and I think many GR users would've been happy to pay.

It might be more like putting hotspots with big "free wifi" signs up all around your city, waiting for the local ISPs to discontinue service and then turning your wifi off.

If it was a year or two people would still be whining, although with that people would have a couple of time to decide where to go. Having said that I disagree the company has any responsibility, their responsibility is to follow the contract (the one people do not read and just check "I agree" before moving on the form), as far as I can tell the contract says clearly they could just stop the service today, they did not.

The author appears to be playing along as if this is not satire, but I am pretty sure it is.

Here is my case for calling it satire:

It starts off with caricatures...

  every single one of these people do indeed have Twitter
  profiles, and they are entrepreneurs also, and they're 
  thinking about their next pivot, and they certainly have 
  an opinion on NodeJS versus Clojure even though they've 
  never gone past the tutorial on either platform [...]

Stating the obvious

  the only thing in between a hacker who misses Reader and a working 
  Reader implementation past-June is... nothing

Hyperbole...

  Reader's cancellation will have absolutely no impact on RSS. 
  Reader isn't RSS. It isn't anything but a consumer, one of many, 
  of the RSS standard.

  whoever is in possession of your RSS feeds probably knows
  you more intimately than Target, which supposedly knows 
  when a woman is pregnant before her father. It's an 
  intimate relationship, based on trust.

But I didn't really become convinced it was satire until this line...

   Entitlement without effort is like representation without taxation.

So, am I the only one who sees this as satire? A subtle poke at Hacker News for taking itself too seriously? Or am I the guy who mistakenly laughs "Ha! Yea that would be crazy, right?" even though the other guy was totally serious?

Here's some straight-up satire:

  Only a relatively small fraction of the population, mostly
  highly intelligent, and well informed, curious individuals
  used Reader.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5391119

It's Lake Wobegon and all you need to enter is a Reader account and some outrage.

So give it me straight: not satire?

You wrote a post to HN about how those who are complaining about Google Reader (a group you admit is not all programmers) should stop complaining about Google Reader's shutdown because these people could just whip up their own alternative? And you see no other facet of this situation that is worthy of being upset about?

You very successfully just trolled HN. And that wasn't even your intention?

My post ends on this note:

  Wouldn't it be much better to channel all this energy
  towards something more productive? Like, say, writing a
  few thousand lines of Rails or Django or Node JS or
  Clojure or whatever code you like to implement a
  replacement, either from scratch, or by contributing to 
  an existing OSS project. It's a big world out there, we
  have not "entered a darker timeline in the history of 
  the net," and it's always time to make it better, not 
  demand that someone else do that for you.

If that perspective sounds like trolling to anyone, they can just click on any of the other submissions and discuss the relative merits of the Google Reader population over ordinary people.

If it's satire, the professor is a very elaborate character creation which mostly lacks a sense of humor. The opposite case is more interesting. That he is for real, actually thinks and writes that way, and because he is from a different culture -- he says European, and I'm thinking the eastern part -- he comes across this way.

I like how a company that is actually competing in this space, with an existing, operating product, has posted a blog article[1] essentially asking for their new, fresh from Google Reader, users to help prioritizing the missing features and this hacker says just build your own, as if it's a couple of hours or something.

Instead of writing this, he should have made a Google Reader clone and got rich this weekend.

[1] http://blog.feedly.com/

The point of a programmer is to save time by writing as little code as possible. You contribute to an existing project that's OSS, not roll your own bug-ridden p-o-s in the framework / language-of-the-year. You shouldn't be presumptive about 'hacker's and about Reader's users, especially when you're not heavily acquainted with the product yourself and its usefulness as a learning / info-gathering aid. Next time, don't write an article about a subject you don't know enough about, when you can just go hack yourself.

Agreed, contributing to OSS is much better than rolling one's own from scratch. From the vehemence of the "bring-back-Reader" posts, I assumed that there were absolutely no OSS projects that were suitable, and wrote the post for the worst case, building from scratch. But contributing to an existing project would clearly be a better idea. And if all these Reader users could pool their efforts constructively, the sky is the limit.

No!! First Wave, now this. It's a question of trust & honest transparency. Why should anyone trust Google ever again?

Can you please describe what was so dishonest about Google's representation? What did they get anyone to do that cannot be undone with a click?

Honest transparency? They've announced the move quite clearly, and have even given a timeline for its shutdown. You can still access your data and export it through Google Takeout[1].

I don't see what's untrustworthy, dishonest, or non-transparent about this. I am disappointed they're discontinuing a service I enjoy immensely, but it's their prerogative - they're not required to continue to offer a service if it's not in there interests to do so.

[1]: https://www.google.com/takeout/

Google Reader co-creator Chris Wetherell: “When they replaced sharing with +1 on Google Reader, it was clear that this day was going to come,” he said. Wetherell, 43, is amazed that Reader has lasted this long. Even before the project saw the light of the day, Google executives were unsure about the service and it was through sheer perseverance that it squeaked out into the market. At one point, the management team threatened to cancel the project even before it saw the light of the day, if there was a delay. http://gigaom.com/2013/03/13/chris-wetherll-google-reader/

That's like Walmart moving into your small town, pricing its items so low that no local retailer can compete, watching all the local stores shut down, and when only Walmart is left they say "Not enough money to be made here, we're shutting down".

Which gives the local retailers a chance to come back, right? Or are they all gone forever?

Sure, but by that time, most of the citizens will have moved to a town that has shops. Only the poor and the elderly will stay, because they have nowhere to go. Sadly, they'll develop all kinds of health problems because they're forced to eat at fast food restaurants every day.

I do think that more mention should be made if Google Talkeout in all this, if only because I want access to my data when the _next_ Google product is closed and I'd rather encourage Google to offer more open data like this.

Nobody really depended on Wave yet, it was pulled off very early, so not a fair comparison.

> honest(y) transparency

I think they are being very transparent about it, gave the users plenty of time to migrate to another service, being very clear about their timelines.

> a question of trust

With that I agree with you, though, what is the option? Because if a giant as google is pulling a service out, who should you trust with it? smaller companies? While they might be more interested in keeping the service up, they are more susceptible to other thing that may cut the life of the product short.

What is the other option? Self hosting, that's a whole other discussion, it might be the solution, but it's far from perfect.

> Why should anyone trust Google ever again?

What can you trust 100%? Even google, facebook, twitter might go broke in some years, giants have fallen before, but one might argue that it's still the safe bet.

Seriously, guys. Your favorite RSS reader has been deprecated. Not only is this not the end of the world, it is something that one-million-percent does not matter. Let it go!

Worst case scenario: you try a different RSS reader, and it works okay. You are in no danger of missing that all-important news article or blog post that all your friends are reading.

I take it back. Worst case scenario: RSS itself implodes, is obliterated from the face of the earth, and now you have to visit news websites and (manually!) click the refresh button to ensure that you're not missing that life-or-death article or blog post.

Wait, hang on -- I take it back. Here's the really-truly worst case scenario: instead of sitting impatiently with your lips wrapped around the proverbial firehose, desperately afraid that your content-thirst can never be sated without Google's help, you go out and actually create some content of your own.

(Or just buy a fucking newspaper. Jeez.)

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