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I still use RSS and it's, in many ways, better than the web stupidity that surrounds us. The title is misleading. People who captured the feedreader market, k

I still use RSS and it's, in many ways, better than the web stupidity that surrounds us. The title is misleading. People who captured the feedreader market, killed the competitors then dropped it did a lot of damage. Maybe deliberately. LESSON: Never trust a big company that relies on advertising. RSS is a way to escape the nonsense that has come with those, who have no idea what the web can be, but have flooded in and drowned so much in their ignorance and lack of vision.

dang 8y ago
OK, we've rolled back the claim of the title using a representative phrase from the article. All: let's focus on something other than the title now—it's a pretty interesting piece for anyone who doesn't know the history (as I didn't).
- kovek 8y ago
  I wonder how much you learn from hacker news submissions. Thank you, dang!
abtinf 8y ago
Having worked at a giant company, I know there are many competing motivations, teams, and personalities involved - companies are not uniform entities. Still... Google Reader did more to destroy my perception of Google's reputation than everything else evil they've ever done. Conspiracy to suppress wages for tech workers, James Damore, the Snowden revelations - all of those bugged me, but not like Reader. They killed Reader, I suspect to support Plus, just as the walled gardens of the social networks turned into iron curtains, destroying the only viable alternative decentralized content distribution mechanism. And now we get to live in that world.
- epistasis 8y ago
  In terms of tech evilness, those aren't really comparable, they're more political. Reader's shutdown, after monopolizing neAly RSS tech and in order to push their own flavor of the year (Plus), was a classic tech evil The other evil that Google is perpetrating is AMP. Reader followed an "embrace and extinguish." AMP is a full on "embrace, extend, and extinguish."
  - walterbell 8y ago
    Did ex-Microsoft people join the Google Plus team?
- sakri 8y ago
  Other than my own list of unread bookmarks, Google Readers signal to noise ratio (as a platform) was second to none. The feeds I followed would post 95% worthwhile content. A blog post is like a dinner speech, don't want to miss it. In social media the dinner speech is also available, only sandwiched somewhere between all the small talk and pleasantries. I never found a replacement, and quite a few people I followed cut down on blogging.
  - patrickmay 8y ago
    Feedly still works. I wouldn't be able to follow as many blogs as I do without it.
    - WalterSear 8y ago
      Their pricing and paid features scare me, because it's clearly intended for professional news gatherers, which means I'm not their actual customer.
  - spikej 8y ago
    https://bazqux.com/ https://bazqux.com/ That's the closest I've found to the cleanliness and speed of Google Reader, with additional features
- ghaff 8y ago
  EWh. There are still RSS alternatives and at least most sites (if by no means all) still have RSS feeds. Now, you might argue that "But Google Reader was the de facto standard and mainstream audiences didn't know to just use something else." However, unless they were reading RSS in the background through a portal like Yahoo!, mainstream audiences weren't using RSS long before Google Reader was killed (if ever). Explicit use of RSS through RSS readers was always primarily the province of journalists, analysts, researchers, and various other folks who wanted relatively unfiltered from-the-source on specific topics. It also didn't help that individual blog content has tended to migrate to publishing platforms in general. I still write a lot but publish on my "personal" blog relatively seldom these days because visibility is so much higher elsewhere.
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    There were a lot of Google Reader users that didn't know anything about the details of RSS: they already had an account at the time because they were using Gmail, and they'd automatically see "shared" stories feeds they could subscribe from friends/contacts that were also Gmail users, and from those social feeds they'd see articles from other feeds they could subscribe directly. All without knowing anything about RSS or how to find an RSS feed on a webpage they visited. Google Reader nailed the social experience around RSS, and there definitely was a high point where RSS feeds were used by a lot of people on Google Reader that didn't understand and didn't need to understand RSS feeds to take advantage of them. It was just that weird news app "next" to Gmail on their browser tabs. At least that was my anecdotal observation. A lot of college friends that I tried to convince to use RSS for ages before suddenly used RSS because it was already lit up on their Gmail account and they were seeing the stuff I was sharing at the very least.
erikb 8y ago
> LESSON: Never trust a big company that relies on advertising. Let me rephrase that. Never trust people more powerful than you to consider your situation. That is basically also a core principle of the distributed building blocks of the internet. It's just that to the masses and to the power hungry these options are not attractive.

dang 8y ago

OK, we've rolled back the claim of the title using a representative phrase from the article. All: let's focus on something other than the title now—it's a pretty interesting piece for anyone who doesn't know the history (as I didn't).

kovek 8y ago
I wonder how much you learn from hacker news submissions. Thank you, dang!

abtinf 8y ago

Having worked at a giant company, I know there are many competing motivations, teams, and personalities involved - companies are not uniform entities. Still... Google Reader did more to destroy my perception of Google's reputation than everything else evil they've ever done. Conspiracy to suppress wages for tech workers, James Damore, the Snowden revelations - all of those bugged me, but not like Reader. They killed Reader, I suspect to support Plus, just as the walled gardens of the social networks turned into iron curtains, destroying the only viable alternative decentralized content distribution mechanism. And now we get to live in that world.

epistasis 8y ago
In terms of tech evilness, those aren't really comparable, they're more political. Reader's shutdown, after monopolizing neAly RSS tech and in order to push their own flavor of the year (Plus), was a classic tech evil The other evil that Google is perpetrating is AMP. Reader followed an "embrace and extinguish." AMP is a full on "embrace, extend, and extinguish."
- walterbell 8y ago
  Did ex-Microsoft people join the Google Plus team?
sakri 8y ago
Other than my own list of unread bookmarks, Google Readers signal to noise ratio (as a platform) was second to none. The feeds I followed would post 95% worthwhile content. A blog post is like a dinner speech, don't want to miss it. In social media the dinner speech is also available, only sandwiched somewhere between all the small talk and pleasantries. I never found a replacement, and quite a few people I followed cut down on blogging.
- patrickmay 8y ago
  Feedly still works. I wouldn't be able to follow as many blogs as I do without it.
  - WalterSear 8y ago
    Their pricing and paid features scare me, because it's clearly intended for professional news gatherers, which means I'm not their actual customer.
- spikej 8y ago
  https://bazqux.com/ https://bazqux.com/ That's the closest I've found to the cleanliness and speed of Google Reader, with additional features
ghaff 8y ago
EWh. There are still RSS alternatives and at least most sites (if by no means all) still have RSS feeds. Now, you might argue that "But Google Reader was the de facto standard and mainstream audiences didn't know to just use something else." However, unless they were reading RSS in the background through a portal like Yahoo!, mainstream audiences weren't using RSS long before Google Reader was killed (if ever). Explicit use of RSS through RSS readers was always primarily the province of journalists, analysts, researchers, and various other folks who wanted relatively unfiltered from-the-source on specific topics. It also didn't help that individual blog content has tended to migrate to publishing platforms in general. I still write a lot but publish on my "personal" blog relatively seldom these days because visibility is so much higher elsewhere.
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  There were a lot of Google Reader users that didn't know anything about the details of RSS: they already had an account at the time because they were using Gmail, and they'd automatically see "shared" stories feeds they could subscribe from friends/contacts that were also Gmail users, and from those social feeds they'd see articles from other feeds they could subscribe directly. All without knowing anything about RSS or how to find an RSS feed on a webpage they visited. Google Reader nailed the social experience around RSS, and there definitely was a high point where RSS feeds were used by a lot of people on Google Reader that didn't understand and didn't need to understand RSS feeds to take advantage of them. It was just that weird news app "next" to Gmail on their browser tabs. At least that was my anecdotal observation. A lot of college friends that I tried to convince to use RSS for ages before suddenly used RSS because it was already lit up on their Gmail account and they were seeing the stuff I was sharing at the very least.

erikb 8y ago

> LESSON: Never trust a big company that relies on advertising. Let me rephrase that. Never trust people more powerful than you to consider your situation. That is basically also a core principle of the distributed building blocks of the internet. It's just that to the masses and to the power hungry these options are not attractive.