4 ms·

Yeah, ask anyone outside of hacker news if they ever heard of Google Reader. Or RSS. Nobody.

• giancarlostoro 8y ago
  Well RSS you know plenty of devs have... At least hears of it... I hope...
• ksk 8y ago
  Isn't this entire site dedicated to discussing things 'nobody' has heard about?
• CharlesW 8y ago
  > Yeah, ask anyone outside of hacker news if they ever heard of Google Reader. Consider that because of your highly-technical background, you may be underestimating the popularity of Google Reader and overestimating the popularity of Hacker News among the general internet-savvy population at the time.
  • ucaetano 8y ago
    Are you replying to me? That's exactly what I'm saying. Google Reader was an irrelevant product to the general public, only adopted by a very small niche of users, just as Hacker News is largely irrelevant and unknown to the general public.
    • pdonis 8y ago
      > Google Reader was an irrelevant product to the general public Do you have any numbers to back this up? From what I remember, it had at least several million users.
      • ucaetano 8y ago
        No hard numbers, but here are some estimates: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/03/google-reader-data-points.html http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/03/google-reader-data-... While CNN and Engadget had 24M and 7M RSS subscribers (which include Google Reader), the numbers drop quickly, with the 3rd one having 1.7M (NYT). Also, apparently the Google Reader Android app had <5M downloads at time of shutdown. Given that distribution and how fast it drops, I'd expect Reader to have had a couple million daily active users at time of shutdown, a tiny drop in the Internet & Google ocean. And you can go around and ask people who don't work in tech: nobody will have heard of Google Reader.