Hacker News Reader

Comment by VikingCoder | Hacker News Reader

> all the air sucked out by Google

I don't think that's fair.

Google Reader was Blockbuster Video. It lacked the personality of all of the RSS Aggregators (aka mom'n'pop rental stores), but it looked nice, it had most of what you were looking for, and the price was fair (lol). But it was a giant, faceless and unchanging monolith.

Well, the brick and mortar rental DVD market is dead. And so is the cloud RSS aggregator market. Is it Blockbuster's fault that DVD rental died? No. It got replaced by better things. Netflix, Amazon Instant, Hulu+...

Cloud RSS Aggregation sure felt nice, but as a business, I'm not convinced it was at all sustainable. Being an inherently read-only medium, where you have to maintain a huge library of content to be useful, is shaky ground to me.

We like the technical idea of RSS, but we all read Facebook, Reddit, and HN. Why is that?

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I think it's entirely fair. They came into a thriving market and killed it with a subsidized product pushed by an enormous brand. And then they did nothing with it.

I read Facebook and HN, but I subscribe to Newsblur because there are other good ways to get news. To me, Newsblur is the text equivalent of my podcast app: My tool for paying attention to particular sources and making sure I don't miss anything. Podcasts are also an inherently read-only medium, and just like newsreaders, people making podcasting apps don't really have to maintain a huge library of anything; it's the podcasters who do that.

If I understand you correctly, big-brand companies shouldn't introduce new products in thriving markets.

Or if they do, they shouldn't get to subsidize them.

Or if they do, they have to switch to profitable or exit the market really quickly, so as to not screw up the market.

Or if they aren't profitable, they have to just keep adding features and hope to one day get profitable.

I honestly don't get what people think Google should do. I mean, people are PISSED at Google over Google Reader shutting down. WHY? Companies fail with their products, all the time.

If you keep taking a single point and drawing a line through it, you'll regularly fail to understand people.

I think Google Reader should have either a) taken their product seriously, or b) shut it down as soon as they decided it wasn't a priority.

Put another way, Google should have recognized much earlier that their giant presence means that they can accidentally ruin markets and done the responsible thing. The more power you have, the more responsibility you have.

If you don't understand the consequences of your argument, people will regularly complain that your argument makes no sense.

They spent large amounts of money preparing and operating Google Reader. There is no other way they could possibly prove to you that they took it more seriously, short of throwing MORE good money after bad.

They watched the growth curves, they added features (reader.google.com/play for one), they integrated with other products (Buzz), they waited for new products to be released and integrated with them as well (Google+).

At some point, they decided to leave the market.

Or they should have shut it down sooner? Before they added those features, before they integrated with other products, before the other products were released and before they integrated with them?

Taking it seriously = more time, more money.

Shutting down sooner = less time, less money.

It's apparently OBVIOUS to you exactly how much money they should have spent on it, how they should have prioritized their new features and integrations, and the precise date at which they should have shut down.

And it's so obvious to other people, that they get ultra pissed about it, and abandon all other Google products out of spite.

I wish I had your crystal ball.

Do you find that being a dick generally makes you more persuasive? Because it isn't working for me here.

Google Reader was well known within Google as an orphan project for a long time. Years before they shut it I was chatting with some Googler and Reader game up. He mentioned how impressive it was that it was still alive given how starved for resources it had been. I think he said that it was just one guy. And here's Reader's creator in 2011 acknowledging it was understaffed: http://massless.org/?p=174

So yes, they should have shut it down way sooner rather than starving it. That was irresponsible both internally (because it's a management failure) and externally (because they were harming a market that they weren't serious about).

I'm sorry I thought you started it, when you claimed that I was too stupid to understand you.

> He mentioned how impressive it was that it was still alive given how starved for resources it had been.

Everyone's pet-project is understaffed. That's how passionate people will always describe their favorite projects.

If you divide man-hours by revenue, you'll note that Google Reader was getting pretty close to infinite resources.

> rather than starving it.

Most, if not all, RSS aggregators don't DREAM of having the software tooling, crawling and storage resources, DevOps, and visibility that Google Reader had.

I say again, I wish I had your crystal ball for the correct amount of resources, and the correct amount of time to spend on a project.

It's pretty easy to armchair quarterback, though.

Why does everyone ignore the prevalence of free RSS readers when Google reader came along?

Why do you ask me that when I'm not ignoring them?

> We like the technical idea of RSS, but we all read Facebook, Reddit, and HN. Why is that?

Because RSS has no facility for discourse. It wasn't designed with that in mind. All the examples you mention are known for their userbase and commenting more than just simple aggregation.

RSS still has a place, and that is simple news consumption. I don't have an opinion on the technical aspects of RSS, I like it and use it every day because it's essentially my own tailored digital newspaper. Much like an actual newspaper, that isn't and will never be how many want to get their news. Still, the option is nice and Reeder is still one of the most important apps on my phone.

Yes, Reddit, HN and Facebook may get individual visits from many because they provide something that RSS doesn't. But for places that have a useless comment base like The Verge or Engadget, for places that have better articles than comments like Ars Technica, Anandtech and Re/code, RSS is the only way I access them.

When the profits go out of a market, you lose the mom-and-pop stores first, followed by a wave of increasing consolidation that leaves a de facto monopolist, whose services degenerate and stagnate, and finally that last one goes bankrupt.

Blockbuster was the death throes of rental video, not the glory days. And arguably Google Reader was the death throes of mass market RSS, kept around for awhile as a profitless zombie by Google's deep pockets.

What has since emerged is "niche market RSS" as a viable business for a few.

To be fair, I believe there are a few B&M rental stores doing alright. They just aren't the giants that we all remember.

I think that is a digression, though. As is the concern of "we all read on ____". Because, first off, we don't. Quite a lot of us still read RSS feeds. I don't think many RSS feeds disappeared, just a big tool to read them.

What far fewer of us do, is talk about the things we read on RSS, because it is not an inherently social tool. Consider, if I find a neat article in an rss feed, the only way I can talk about it with my peers is to post it on facebook/g+/twitter.

Which is what Google Reader actually managed to bring to the table for RSS. I could share stories and have conversations in my peer groups. This actually even worked with Google Buzz. It was surprisingly nice.

The problem there, I think, is all of these conversations happened with no real intrusion from ads. Google had no real way to put "sponsored" stories into my rss feeds without it being glaringly obvious. There was no "trending now" feed that I was willing to subscribe to.

Oh man, someone else who liked Buzz? I adored it, and miss it now that it's gone.

It was only good for me, because it was well integrated with Reader. To the point that some folks "discussing" my shares weren't even using the Buzz interface to do so. That was very nice.

Your closing argument falls pretty flat to me since I ingest Reddit and HN entirely through RSS. The first step is filtering out the junk I don't care about to find the interesting articles, and besides subscribing to sites that are weighted more towards interesting articles than junk (HN, e.g.), RSS allows me to quickly filter out the junk. Then I go to the article and participate in the conversation.

I don't read Facebook or Reddit, and I only read HN via RSS (and only the stories that get at least 100 points)... So watch out for the generalizations. ;)

What's the feed url for that? The one I've been using hasn't updated in a couple of weeks.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/hacker-news-feed-100

https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100

I use http://feeds.feedburner.com/newsyc100

I use http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/index.rss, myself.

I'm not going to visit every blog that occasionally has interesting news to me on a daily basis. But I'm content to scan headlines/summaries in my RSS reader (Feedly) to pick out the gems. I follow a number of blogs that aren't popular or well known, so expecting them to show up on [insert name of social network/news agreggator here] would be folly.

To me, Google Reader ended up being more of a backend, just because some of the other dedicated readers were so nice. Can't say I've tried Newsblur, but my favorite ended up being Reeder. I don't think that shutdown changed anything for me except switching the backend to Feedly instead...

(maybe I'll try Newsblur...)

If you are power user, you'll LOVE NewsBlur!

What would be interesting (technical feasibility aside) would be a community aggregator spin on a RSS feed. Let me use an RSS feed as normal but expose all the different communities on top of that as additional data.

To me Facebook is all kid pictures and life hacks posting, interesting only when I want to see what my family is up to.

Reddit/HN are interesting for:

a.) Posts I haven't seen before, and

b.) Comments

RSS solves neither, but it provides frequent updates for sites I'm interested in, which is a non-goal for reddit/HN. There's an interesting intersection between the two (RSS & social sites) in the comments. Why can't I see what other people have said about a story in my RSS feed?

I wouldn't be surprised if this hasn't be done before, but I haven't seen any RSS application/site do this.

> I wouldn't be surprised if this hasn't be done before, but I haven't seen any RSS application/site do this.

Have a look at bazqux: https://bazqux.com/

For a number of people (non-technical included), the follwing/sharing component of Reader was an excellent source of interesting, high quality links up until the end. Facebook and Twitter have since replaced that I guess, but they are both terrible at it. Ostensibly Google thought some of that economy would shift to Plus, but maybe they didn't even care.

Newsblur/The Old Reader have built in this feature, but I have maybe 2-3 friends on each service and it's just not vibrant.

Maybe the sharing aspect of Reader would have withered and died anyway, but I miss it dearly.

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