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Whatever was said at the time, I’m convinced Google Reader was collateral damage from the Bay of Pigs Google Plus effort. It had social features (which I honest

by cletus 6y ago

Whatever was said at the time, I’m convinced Google Reader was collateral damage from the Bay of Pigs Google Plus effort. It had social features (which I honestly never used) and anything social had to be G+. Still, I honestly don’t understand why this is the hill people want to die on, what they feel most betrayed about. Like I haven’t seen some people this upset since Firefly was canceled.

vanderZwan 6y ago
Because Google Reader was the social network for people who don't like talking about themselves but about things on the web that they find interesting, and nothing since has ever come close to it.
- addicted 6y ago
  Also because killing Google Reader single handedly killed a bustling and fast growing RSS based ecosystem. Google Reader was the first RSS client to incorporate social features with RSS. To that it added an extremely fast web client (I can't think of any web client that even existed before), and syncing across devices. A LOT of software in the RSS ecosystem relied on Google Reader for their syncing capabilities. It had basically become the defacto backend for the majority of RSS readers. As an example, I used NetNewsWire for my RSS reading, and while I rarely (never?) used the Google Reader interface, NNN relied on my Google Reader account to backup and sync my feeds. Google Reader had basically become essential infrastructure in the RSS ecosystem.
  - giobox 6y ago
    While it can't have helped, I can't "single handedly" blame Google for the death of RSS. By 2013 RSS was already arguably dying all by itself. RSS was awesome in late 2000s during the Web 2.0 mania and it was common to see entire site's contents reproduced in their feed. By 2013 I'd argue many sites had realized giving their full text content away with no ads in the RSS feed wasn't exactly helping their bottom lines and started delivering ads and content snippets instead. The intent of course was to drive you back to the site where ads can be served more reliably. When these practices became widespread RSS quickly lost its shine for me and others I'm sure.
    - asdff 6y ago
      There are services that pull the full text from truncated feeds.
    - acdha 6y ago
      This is very contrary to my experience: it was thriving up until the day Google pulled the switch. I knew a number of people who were expecting them not to go through with it because Reader was so important to their daily routine. The catastrophic failure Google made was not recognizing how disproportionately the Reader community were influencers — in particular, tons of journalists used it so they were pushing out an un-QAed Google+ and telling everyone that it was great right after taking away the service they liked. Even if Google+ had been well-designed or implemented that would have been a tough sell. Since it took something like 6 months for them to think about problems like privacy, spam, or notification overload the coverage of Google+ was overwhelmingly negative. All of the RSS readers I used at the time other than the Reader web app also had the option of fetching full text or loading the feed in a browser frame to avoid the fragment problem. Some of that was simply performance: a busy site publishing full text could generate some massive XML files which take time to transfer and parse. Also, why is it a problem to show ads in feeds? Annoying ones, sure, but I'd be happy to have ads (or pay for a subscription) if that meant that places could pay journalists.
- kypro 6y ago
  Isn't this exactly what Reddit is? I wasn't a Google Reader user, but I'd be interesting in understanding what I was missing.
  - aksss 6y ago
    For me, Google Reader was about high volume headline digestion, reading articles without having to follow links, read articles without having to switch between a multitude of publishers’ crappy and varied web UIs. It was about fast and efficient information hoovering from around the world. Reddit is a different animal altogether. Great for what it does but not like a clean RSS tree. Also, just want to add: Google killed the “discussions” search filter, which let you limit your search results to forums, around the same time, IIRC. Screw Google.
  - tomcooks 6y ago
    Reddit is hardly a place for people who don't like talking about themselves~
    - airstrike 6y ago
      In fact we've probably reached the peak opposite of that with people posting about themselves on /r/nextfuckinglevel
  - vanderZwan 6y ago
    See my response to another comment suggesting HN is a proper replacement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26582491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26582491 What I forgot to mention in that comment was that Google Reader was tied to your Gmail account. The only people who were in "your" network by default were other people on Gmail where Google had somehow determined that you knew each other (presumably whether you were in each other's address book). This is opposite of HN or Reddit, where everyone can sign up and it's basically all strangers in a public popularity contest.
- onion2k 6y ago
  HN is pretty close to the news feed I had in Reader.
  - vanderZwan 6y ago
    Maybe for you, in terms of linked articles. Other than that I'd hardly find the two comparable. Google Reader had reshares, not upvotes. The only indication you had for "is this an article worth reading?" beyond the actual headline was the number of friends who reshared the same article. However, unlike any other social network, Google Reader wouldn't show me who reshared an article first, nor would you get any imaginary points for sharing something interesting. As such, there was no gamified hunt for "karma" or "upvotes" or whatever. There was no incentive for resharing other than "I read/watched this and think it's interesting", and the result was a much more sincere curation of topics that interested your friends. Similarly, there were no downvotes or upvotes on the discussions. NewsBlur copied that set-up, but out of roughly 40 close friends from college who intensely used Google Reader, only five made the switch to NewsBlur. The rest ended up scattered among chat apps and other social networks.
- hintymad 6y ago
  In retrospect, Google Reader could have evolved into a service like tiktok that keeps pushing interesting contents to its subscribers. Of course, it's easier to say that in hindsight.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- kdmytro 6y ago
  Isn't Pinterest basically what you describe?
  - vanderZwan 6y ago
    You're trolling, right?
    - jpindar 6y ago
      What makes you say that?
  - jpindar 6y ago
    It could be, there's a place for comments on the image posts, but I rarely see any actual discussion. It might be nice if there were a way to filter by number of comments.
- enobrev 6y ago
  The social aspect is the part I missed most. It was a good rss reader, to be sure, but plenty others exist. But the surrounding conversation was strictly with people who I followed. I may be misremembering it a bit, but I recall that most of the comments I saw under any article were by people I knew, which was ideal. I like reddit and this site enough to visit almost daily, and it's important to get opinions from strangers which is why I value these sites, but the signal / noise ratio is awful. Being able to see a list of news I've explicitly catered to myself _and_ commentary from people I explicitly care to hear from was excellent. Then again the internet "crowd" was much different back then. It may just be an artifact of its own time by this point.
  - pax 6y ago
    This. The gReader feed was manually curated & annotated by sources we trusted and their friends. Less ramblings, no pushy algorithm suggestions. The UI was snappy but it was essentially about the community. After Google Reader got plugged off, I haven't stuck with any of the alternatives, as the community wasn't there. Wishfully thinking, if enough VIPs would turn to a similarly structured platform, we could have our feed back.
- davchana 6y ago
  True. My first internet enabled phone was Nokia 7210 (or 6210 i think). A tiny one, with half screen & lower half keyboard. Sharp crispy colors. Opera mini & Google Reader had all of my feeds lined up. Some philosophical posts, some technical, some funny, a bit of everything I liked. Pure Author Contents. No comments on the feed atleast. I miss it. I would check it in the morning, while in washroom, in bus, waiting & any time.
OskarS 6y ago
The social features were actually killed off before the product itself: a few years earlier they did a redesign which removed all of the social features. The social features were cool, I remember following a couple of journalists i really like who commented on the articles and discussed it with each other, it was a really nice thing. The reason people are so bitter is that Google Reader was the kind of thing that if you liked it, it became part of your daily routine. It became the thing you checked in the morning over coffee, the thing you checked when you were procrastinating at work. Today that is social media, but Google Reader really felt like your own little curated space in a way (say) Twitter does not: with Twitter, you always feel at the mercy of The Algorithm. It also was essentially totally free of the toxic stuff you see on social media today. They took this cool and personal service, ripped all social features out, did zero development on it for years, and then unceremoniously killed it in some insane attempt to make Google+ into the next Facebook. I'm still pissed about it, and it was the last time I've ever made myself rely on a Google Service like this.
- caoilte 6y ago
  You can avoid content curation by only using Twitter with a unofficial client.
  - hopesthoughts 6y ago
    yeah, I do this myself.
- basch 6y ago
  As someone who prefers both chronological river (https://techmeme.com/river https://techmeme.com/river) AND a metric of popularity (upvotes) nothing beats https://hckrnews.com https://hckrnews.com. I wish that design was more common. Instead of having higher ranking posts climb to the top, a hotness bar and a popular bar to the left of links is ideal. The bigger the bars, the more activity an article is generating. Are there any feedreaders that I can use to 1) score but not rank articles, and 2) set a threshold to hide everything below a score 3) deduplicate stories from multiple sources, and aggregate+/average their scores together?
- 6y ago
ChrisSD 6y ago
In retrospect Reader's death marked a turning point in how Google was perceived. There were grumblings before that but Google was still the darling of the web. As you say, Google+ was consuming Google at that time. So when they killed Reader it was not just killing a beloved service. It also acted like a lightning rod for the discontent that had started to swell. A lot of people would never again view Google through a rose tinted lens.
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  It's that, but it's also a symbol for how the Web has changed. Google bulldozing Reader in order to clear ground for a (intended) social media behemoth reflects how all sorts of smaller online communities and spaces have been razed or faded away as everything continues to consolidate onto the social media giants.
  - atmosx 6y ago
    ... so everything consolidated in G+?
    - macintux 6y ago
      Certainly that was Google's intention. Thank goodness they failed.
      - pantalaimon 6y ago
        But they didn't even try very hard. G+ didn't event have a way to create events. Google Calendar was on every Android device, it would have been so seamless if you could have create a birthday party or attend a rave in the park and it would be right in your calendar. But no, you could only post stories and pictures. That made for a rather bare-bones social network.
        Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
        First iteration was rather nice, clean interface without many distractions. However, then they got all cardy with that material design, and it all was very confusing
basch 6y ago
Unpopular retrospective opinion, but given how stagnant Reader was before its death, the boon of Reader Replacements to arrive on the scene after its demise was worth its disappearance. The race to be the replacement made a metric ton of competing products better.
- EamonnMR 6y ago
  Which ones are your favorites?
  - mvaliente2001 6y ago
    https://theoldreader.com/ https://theoldreader.com/
- perryizgr8 6y ago
  > how stagnant Reader was before its death That's a feature, not a bug. It was close to perfect, no pointless UI re-designs required. Fast, lightweight, no bs.
  - basch 6y ago
    Yes and no. By being the de facto standard and housing most of the people, it somewhat stifled innovation in the space. Sure there were a ton of front ends built over the top of it, and the space was vibrant, but it really shined after they were forced into the spotlight. It was like turning on a flashlight and spiders scattering everywhere. The scatter breathed new sustaining life into many many projects.
- vmladenov 6y ago
  Do you have a favorite? I have a Feedly account but I don’t use the site much, and the Reeder app added local subscriptions recently.
  - sco1 6y ago
    I've been happily using Inoreader since the plug was pulled on Google Reader
yreg 6y ago
I too don't get this. I also used Google Reader back then. When iPhone was novel and WiFi spots were rare, so people had to preload a part of the web to get through the day. When they killed it I switched to NetNewsWire and didn't miss the previous product. What was so special about Google Reader?
- ProAm 6y ago
  it worked. People liked it. And didn't need to be killed? They could have literally put zero dollars into it for the remaining amount of time left in the universe and life would have been better off.
  - sofixa 6y ago
    > it worked. People liked it. And didn't need to be killed? They could have literally put zero dollars into it for the remaining amount of time left in the universe and life would have been better off. The costs of storage and bandwidth of something as popular as Google Reader probably weren't negligible.
    - prepend 6y ago
      They probably were negligible. Billions of links, maybe some content cache that they already had since Google indexes and caches most of the web. Bandwidth was born by the user and content server. Checking RSS feeds is mostly a bunch of 304s. The newsblur dev is in this thread and he runs a good reader and could probably say what the storage and bandwidth was.
      - conesus 6y ago
        Storage and bandwidth are pretty negligible. I'm under Digital Ocean's quota for bandwidth and NewsBlur is pretty aggressive in keeping feeds up to date. I don't keep an archive of every story ever published, but most feeds don't publish all that much and I could probably invest in storing everything with a cheaper archival DB. Although the 80/20 rule is in effect, and when I query the DB I find that 80% of feeds have only a single active subscriber and 20% of feeds have 2+ active subscribers (activity in the past 30 days). But that's still quite a bit one-to-many fetching savings. And the majority of fetches are 304s.
shadowgovt 6y ago
You're right, but it wasn't about competing product... It was about competing cost. Specifically, competition for hardware resources and engineers. Social imposed upon Google substantial new costs under-the-hood in terms of infrastructure and time to implement. You wouldn't think a Facebook competitor would require a lot of compute and storage resources, or a lot of engineering hours, but Google had high hopes regarding what the platform would become, and they definitely didn't want to get blocked by lack of resources. In addition, a massive internal infrastructure overhaul to the accounts system that was coupled with the social initiative required a re-architecting of every app that had an "account" concept attached to it. On the grand balance sheet, Reader was a product with a non-growing userbase, didn't align with Google's long-term strategy goals, took resources to maintain, consumed storage and compute resources that could be used for more valuable bets, and was on track for a software re-architecting (which faced Google with the alternative of saving the eng-hour cost by just killing it instead of re-architecting it). Those facets combined put it on the chopping block.
ghaff 6y ago
It's not like there aren't Google Reader alternatives today. IMO, what really happened was that a lot of the sorts of people who are active on social media really liked having their own curated RSS feeds and when explicitly using RSS--and providing feeds--fell out of fashion (not that it was ever really in fashion for the mainstream) [1], it felt good to blame Google Reader as the case rather than it being an effect. [1] Sort of. Of course, RSS still gets used behind the scenes in a lot of places, not least of which are podcasts.
novok 6y ago
Journalists loved google reader, and they have outsized publicity effects when you kill something they love, that is related to their work. Therefore it feels like it dying is way more of a deal than it actually is, since what is talked about with journalists feels like is what everyone actually cares about, even if it isn't. Personally I still miss it, nothing was quite as fast or robust in reading RSS queues. RSS feed updates were fast & reliable, the UI was fast, keyboard shortcuts made it fast to use, it didn't have basic bugs that current alternatives have at times and the few alternatives don't quite approach how good it was.
bayindirh 6y ago
Because that thing was infinitely useful. I was able to read 100+ articles without burning out, got the only things that I wanted to see, filter what I didn't want and was able to track the most interesting sites. I've skimmed everything in 15 minutes, mark/star/whatever anything with unprecedented speed. It was the ultimate user-curated feed, without all the cruft of today's feed. It was mine, tailored for me, by me. ...and whole thing was keyboard-drivable.
- kevstev 6y ago
  you make it sound like this functionality is now dead and you are grieving it. Feedly offers all of this, its what I migrated to after Google Reader.
  - rrdharan 6y ago
    Feedly is great!
    - charles_f 6y ago
      Have some respect, we're still grieving here!
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    Exactly, Google Reader was a pretty straight forward RSS reader, and there are a bunch of other ones that existed then as they do now. Literally a week after it went down, someone wrote an exact alternative in Go you could host on AppEngine [1]. It was nearly identical. Many other similar project sprung up too, which goes to show how basic and non-special Reader really was. People love to put it on a pedestal and circlejerk to the nostalgia, but an app that any engineer worth their salt can code in a weekend isn't really something worth Google's time and Google-scale. https://github.com/mjibson/goread https://github.com/mjibson/goread
JustSomeNobody 6y ago
Never understood the draw of Firefly. It's ... okay, but kinda cringey. Google reader was nice because it was simple and it just worked.
dleslie 6y ago
The social features were incredible. Roughly fifty friends and I shared articles and had long comment threads. Think of it as a private reddit where there's no barrier to joining a conversation with people you know.
fareesh 6y ago
I liked Google+ disappointing that it did not catch on
gorkish 6y ago
Quite simply, Google Reader is antiethical to an Internet brokered by a central conglomerate. It made total sense for Google to kill it. They wanted the shitshow we have now; however on the heels of Gmail they thought they could take over every other market (social, news, announcements, etc.) too. The irony is that killing Google Reader caused enough customer fallout that none of these other products ever made it. However they wouldnt have made it if Google hadn't killed Reader. In retrospect Google should have doubled down to monetize Reader. I'm pretty damn sure we'd be consming far less of our news directly from Facebook and Reddit had they done so.
leajkinUnk 6y ago
Collateral damage is an interesting way to put it. I've heard the internal story from people who worked at Google at the time, and it sounds like the rough sequence of events goes like this: 1. Google Reader is launched, built on internal Google technologies (the distributed database and filesystem technologies available at the time, like GFS). 2. Headcount is not allocated to Google Reader to do ongoing engineering work. Headcount is instead allocated to projects like Google+. 3. The technologies underneath Google Reader (like GFS) are shut down. Without the engineering headcount to migrate, Google Reader is shut down. Google+ was reportedly shut down for the same reasons (but different technologies). The internal tech stack at Google is always changing, and projects without sufficient headcount for ongoing engineering will eventually get shut down. The timing of the Google Reader and Google+ shutdown reflect the timing of changes in Googles tech stack more than it reflects any strategic direction by Google. [Edit: Just to be clear, this doesn't explain the reason why these projects get shut down. It just explains the timing.]
- signal11 6y ago
  This is a really good story about how not to be a customer-centric organisation and not take user feedback. What I take away is that just because they’re not paying customers doesn’t mean they won’t remember and judge you. And clearly people hold grudges for a long time (witness the number people who still maintain “Micro$oft is evil” from their 90s experiences).
- ramraj07 6y ago
  As someone seeing org level decisions being interpreted very differently by different people, I am not sure how much weight we can give to this insiders representation- this sounds like what an Eng manager (who himself might not know the real reason) would tell their disgruntled engineers. Also the real question is why google didn’t assign an Eng team for this product used by millions, not why products without engineers die..
  - leajkinUnk 6y ago
    Just to be clear... I wasn't explaining the reason these projects get shut down, just the timeline of events and some of the contributing technical factors, since these factors are a little different at Google than at other companies. The decision to deallocate headcount and stop ongoing engineering effort on a project will eventually cause that project to get shut down, no matter what company you work at. However, at many of the software companies I've worked at, projects that run on "industry-standard" or at least mundane tech stacks can run for a very long time with a relatively low amount of effort. At Google, the timeline is shorter. For example, if you have a web app that runs on Rails or PHP, or something that runs on the JVM, maybe with a Postgres, MySQL, or MS SQL backend, you might be able to shove it onto different machines or VMs for years, only making occasional / minor changes to the code base. If, in 2008, you had a JVM app which used PostgreSQL and ran in Apache Tomcat, there's a good chance you could still run it today with minor changes. At Google, the internal tech stack--filesystems, databases, monitoring, etc... has changes that are large enough and frequent enough that the situation is different, and projects are shut down on stricter timelines.
kevwil 6y ago
Not sure I am/was upset enough to call it the hill I want to die on, but to me this was the decisive moment where social media took over people's consciousness. To me, it was a curated feed of educational, informative, and entertaining content sources; devoid of people constantly throwing their political biases in my face and telling me what a horrible person I am. Logically, it could have been replaced by any number of other feed aggregator tools, but it seemed the war was already lost and social media took over regardless. It wasn't the beginning of the social media onslaught, it was the last hurdle. Meh, maybe that's inaccurate, but that's how I have felt ever since.
ineedasername 6y ago
I think it was a more mercenary decision than (just) that: Consuming content in that method left fewer options for monetization through ads. There would be many fewer searches: right now, instead of actually typing the address bar, getting to a website for many people involves a google search as they type it into the address bar, see the results, and click on the site instead of going there directly. I'm sure they would have figured it out, but it probably wasn't a problem they were very interested in solving when they could just kill the product.
gfxgirl 6y ago
I agree. I used Reader a ton and was upset when Google cancelled it. I signed up for a few different paid readers, one in particular was trying to be a clone for Google Reader. But, in those few months, my behavior changed and I no longer felt like using them. In other words, in hindsight I'm not sad it's gone. If I really valued it then I should have valued the clone but I didn't
- ehsankia 6y ago
  It's almost like Google knew RSS was gonna die anyway and ditched that ship at the right time.
Lazare 6y ago
RSS is a bit of a relic of an earlier, more open web, and Google Reader was at the time the best, most popular RSS client. Killing it was bad for users, and bad for RSS, but it was also a very visible marker of a shift towards a more closed, proprietary web. So it's not just "having Google Reader was better than not having it, I'm mad", but more about regret for what might have been if we'd all gone down a different path. The Google that, rather than killing Reader, had invested resources in it might have done other things. Example: Right at the same time they were killing off Reader, they were removing XMPP/Jabber support from Google Talk. Is it plausible Google might have continued backing open standards like XMPP and RSS? And if they had...what would the internet be like now? It's certainly clear that RSS is much less popular than it was; could Google's support for the standard have prevented some of that? In short: People are upset about Google Reader as such (I use bazqux.com, it's just as good as Google Reader ever was) but what it implied and represented.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  RSS is hardly a "relic", it has in fact pioneered web federation technology. Newer Fediverse standards, such as ActivityStreams and ActivityPub build on the same foundation as RSS itself to decentralize more of the web.
- CodeGlitch 6y ago
  Podcasts are published using RSS - so I wouldn't say RSS is a relic if it's being used for a good chunk of modern media.
brandonheato 6y ago
And in the end they gave up on Google Plus. Clever decisions.
JeremyNT 6y ago
> Still, I honestly don’t understand why this is the hill people want to die on, what they feel most betrayed about. Like I haven’t seen some people this upset since Firefly was canceled. A world where Google cares about Reader is a world where RSS remains a first class citizen on the web. So it's not Reader the product so much as what abandoning it said about Google's broader ambitions (and their hostility towards the open web). Reader was a signal that RSS mattered. Google killing Reader sent the opposite signal. If Google cares about something, site owners have to care also (look at AMP) - and by not caring about RSS, they gave site owners permission to abandon their feeds. In retrospect it's easy to see that the "death of Reader" wasn't some specific inflection point - Google had already stopped caring about RSS or the open web (if they ever even had). But this marked the first time a lot of us really saw and understood that Google had no interest in using its clout to protect us from the walled gardens, and instead it had ambitions to become just another walled garden itself (as became even more evident with the all-in Google+ strategy).
subsaharancoder 6y ago
I worked at Google, albeit not in mother ship (MTV) when Google+ was everything, those were some crazy times!! I recall when G+ numbers were so embarrassing that dashboards (built using jigsaw) were scrubbed clean and teams were mandated to report usage numbers in terms of percentages instead of active users. Apparently "25% growth QonQ" sounds better than "we added 2500 users"
danesparza 6y ago
"I haven’t seen some people this upset since Firefly was canceled." Thank you for pouring salt on that wound, too. Good grief.

by cletus 6y ago

vanderZwan 6y ago

Because Google Reader was the social network for people who don't like talking about themselves but about things on the web that they find interesting, and nothing since has ever come close to it.

addicted 6y ago
Also because killing Google Reader single handedly killed a bustling and fast growing RSS based ecosystem. Google Reader was the first RSS client to incorporate social features with RSS. To that it added an extremely fast web client (I can't think of any web client that even existed before), and syncing across devices. A LOT of software in the RSS ecosystem relied on Google Reader for their syncing capabilities. It had basically become the defacto backend for the majority of RSS readers. As an example, I used NetNewsWire for my RSS reading, and while I rarely (never?) used the Google Reader interface, NNN relied on my Google Reader account to backup and sync my feeds. Google Reader had basically become essential infrastructure in the RSS ecosystem.
- giobox 6y ago
  While it can't have helped, I can't "single handedly" blame Google for the death of RSS. By 2013 RSS was already arguably dying all by itself. RSS was awesome in late 2000s during the Web 2.0 mania and it was common to see entire site's contents reproduced in their feed. By 2013 I'd argue many sites had realized giving their full text content away with no ads in the RSS feed wasn't exactly helping their bottom lines and started delivering ads and content snippets instead. The intent of course was to drive you back to the site where ads can be served more reliably. When these practices became widespread RSS quickly lost its shine for me and others I'm sure.
  - asdff 6y ago
    There are services that pull the full text from truncated feeds.
  - acdha 6y ago
    This is very contrary to my experience: it was thriving up until the day Google pulled the switch. I knew a number of people who were expecting them not to go through with it because Reader was so important to their daily routine. The catastrophic failure Google made was not recognizing how disproportionately the Reader community were influencers — in particular, tons of journalists used it so they were pushing out an un-QAed Google+ and telling everyone that it was great right after taking away the service they liked. Even if Google+ had been well-designed or implemented that would have been a tough sell. Since it took something like 6 months for them to think about problems like privacy, spam, or notification overload the coverage of Google+ was overwhelmingly negative. All of the RSS readers I used at the time other than the Reader web app also had the option of fetching full text or loading the feed in a browser frame to avoid the fragment problem. Some of that was simply performance: a busy site publishing full text could generate some massive XML files which take time to transfer and parse. Also, why is it a problem to show ads in feeds? Annoying ones, sure, but I'd be happy to have ads (or pay for a subscription) if that meant that places could pay journalists.
kypro 6y ago
Isn't this exactly what Reddit is? I wasn't a Google Reader user, but I'd be interesting in understanding what I was missing.
- aksss 6y ago
  For me, Google Reader was about high volume headline digestion, reading articles without having to follow links, read articles without having to switch between a multitude of publishers’ crappy and varied web UIs. It was about fast and efficient information hoovering from around the world. Reddit is a different animal altogether. Great for what it does but not like a clean RSS tree. Also, just want to add: Google killed the “discussions” search filter, which let you limit your search results to forums, around the same time, IIRC. Screw Google.
- tomcooks 6y ago
  Reddit is hardly a place for people who don't like talking about themselves~
  - airstrike 6y ago
    In fact we've probably reached the peak opposite of that with people posting about themselves on /r/nextfuckinglevel
- vanderZwan 6y ago
  See my response to another comment suggesting HN is a proper replacement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26582491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26582491 What I forgot to mention in that comment was that Google Reader was tied to your Gmail account. The only people who were in "your" network by default were other people on Gmail where Google had somehow determined that you knew each other (presumably whether you were in each other's address book). This is opposite of HN or Reddit, where everyone can sign up and it's basically all strangers in a public popularity contest.
onion2k 6y ago
HN is pretty close to the news feed I had in Reader.
- vanderZwan 6y ago
  Maybe for you, in terms of linked articles. Other than that I'd hardly find the two comparable. Google Reader had reshares, not upvotes. The only indication you had for "is this an article worth reading?" beyond the actual headline was the number of friends who reshared the same article. However, unlike any other social network, Google Reader wouldn't show me who reshared an article first, nor would you get any imaginary points for sharing something interesting. As such, there was no gamified hunt for "karma" or "upvotes" or whatever. There was no incentive for resharing other than "I read/watched this and think it's interesting", and the result was a much more sincere curation of topics that interested your friends. Similarly, there were no downvotes or upvotes on the discussions. NewsBlur copied that set-up, but out of roughly 40 close friends from college who intensely used Google Reader, only five made the switch to NewsBlur. The rest ended up scattered among chat apps and other social networks.
hintymad 6y ago
In retrospect, Google Reader could have evolved into a service like tiktok that keeps pushing interesting contents to its subscribers. Of course, it's easier to say that in hindsight.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
kdmytro 6y ago
Isn't Pinterest basically what you describe?
- vanderZwan 6y ago
  You're trolling, right?
  - jpindar 6y ago
    What makes you say that?
- jpindar 6y ago
  It could be, there's a place for comments on the image posts, but I rarely see any actual discussion. It might be nice if there were a way to filter by number of comments.
enobrev 6y ago
The social aspect is the part I missed most. It was a good rss reader, to be sure, but plenty others exist. But the surrounding conversation was strictly with people who I followed. I may be misremembering it a bit, but I recall that most of the comments I saw under any article were by people I knew, which was ideal. I like reddit and this site enough to visit almost daily, and it's important to get opinions from strangers which is why I value these sites, but the signal / noise ratio is awful. Being able to see a list of news I've explicitly catered to myself _and_ commentary from people I explicitly care to hear from was excellent. Then again the internet "crowd" was much different back then. It may just be an artifact of its own time by this point.
- pax 6y ago
  This. The gReader feed was manually curated & annotated by sources we trusted and their friends. Less ramblings, no pushy algorithm suggestions. The UI was snappy but it was essentially about the community. After Google Reader got plugged off, I haven't stuck with any of the alternatives, as the community wasn't there. Wishfully thinking, if enough VIPs would turn to a similarly structured platform, we could have our feed back.
davchana 6y ago
True. My first internet enabled phone was Nokia 7210 (or 6210 i think). A tiny one, with half screen & lower half keyboard. Sharp crispy colors. Opera mini & Google Reader had all of my feeds lined up. Some philosophical posts, some technical, some funny, a bit of everything I liked. Pure Author Contents. No comments on the feed atleast. I miss it. I would check it in the morning, while in washroom, in bus, waiting & any time.

OskarS 6y ago

The social features were actually killed off before the product itself: a few years earlier they did a redesign which removed all of the social features. The social features were cool, I remember following a couple of journalists i really like who commented on the articles and discussed it with each other, it was a really nice thing. The reason people are so bitter is that Google Reader was the kind of thing that if you liked it, it became part of your daily routine. It became the thing you checked in the morning over coffee, the thing you checked when you were procrastinating at work. Today that is social media, but Google Reader really felt like your own little curated space in a way (say) Twitter does not: with Twitter, you always feel at the mercy of The Algorithm. It also was essentially totally free of the toxic stuff you see on social media today. They took this cool and personal service, ripped all social features out, did zero development on it for years, and then unceremoniously killed it in some insane attempt to make Google+ into the next Facebook. I'm still pissed about it, and it was the last time I've ever made myself rely on a Google Service like this.

caoilte 6y ago
You can avoid content curation by only using Twitter with a unofficial client.
- hopesthoughts 6y ago
  yeah, I do this myself.
basch 6y ago
As someone who prefers both chronological river (https://techmeme.com/river https://techmeme.com/river) AND a metric of popularity (upvotes) nothing beats https://hckrnews.com https://hckrnews.com. I wish that design was more common. Instead of having higher ranking posts climb to the top, a hotness bar and a popular bar to the left of links is ideal. The bigger the bars, the more activity an article is generating. Are there any feedreaders that I can use to 1) score but not rank articles, and 2) set a threshold to hide everything below a score 3) deduplicate stories from multiple sources, and aggregate+/average their scores together?
6y ago

ChrisSD 6y ago

In retrospect Reader's death marked a turning point in how Google was perceived. There were grumblings before that but Google was still the darling of the web. As you say, Google+ was consuming Google at that time. So when they killed Reader it was not just killing a beloved service. It also acted like a lightning rod for the discontent that had started to swell. A lot of people would never again view Google through a rose tinted lens.

mumblemumble 6y ago
It's that, but it's also a symbol for how the Web has changed. Google bulldozing Reader in order to clear ground for a (intended) social media behemoth reflects how all sorts of smaller online communities and spaces have been razed or faded away as everything continues to consolidate onto the social media giants.
- atmosx 6y ago
  ... so everything consolidated in G+?
  - macintux 6y ago
    Certainly that was Google's intention. Thank goodness they failed.
    - pantalaimon 6y ago
      But they didn't even try very hard. G+ didn't event have a way to create events. Google Calendar was on every Android device, it would have been so seamless if you could have create a birthday party or attend a rave in the park and it would be right in your calendar. But no, you could only post stories and pictures. That made for a rather bare-bones social network.
      - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
        First iteration was rather nice, clean interface without many distractions. However, then they got all cardy with that material design, and it all was very confusing

basch 6y ago

Unpopular retrospective opinion, but given how stagnant Reader was before its death, the boon of Reader Replacements to arrive on the scene after its demise was worth its disappearance. The race to be the replacement made a metric ton of competing products better.

EamonnMR 6y ago
Which ones are your favorites?
- mvaliente2001 6y ago
  https://theoldreader.com/ https://theoldreader.com/
perryizgr8 6y ago
> how stagnant Reader was before its death That's a feature, not a bug. It was close to perfect, no pointless UI re-designs required. Fast, lightweight, no bs.
- basch 6y ago
  Yes and no. By being the de facto standard and housing most of the people, it somewhat stifled innovation in the space. Sure there were a ton of front ends built over the top of it, and the space was vibrant, but it really shined after they were forced into the spotlight. It was like turning on a flashlight and spiders scattering everywhere. The scatter breathed new sustaining life into many many projects.
vmladenov 6y ago
Do you have a favorite? I have a Feedly account but I don’t use the site much, and the Reeder app added local subscriptions recently.
- sco1 6y ago
  I've been happily using Inoreader since the plug was pulled on Google Reader

yreg 6y ago

I too don't get this. I also used Google Reader back then. When iPhone was novel and WiFi spots were rare, so people had to preload a part of the web to get through the day. When they killed it I switched to NetNewsWire and didn't miss the previous product. What was so special about Google Reader?

ProAm 6y ago
it worked. People liked it. And didn't need to be killed? They could have literally put zero dollars into it for the remaining amount of time left in the universe and life would have been better off.
- sofixa 6y ago
  > it worked. People liked it. And didn't need to be killed? They could have literally put zero dollars into it for the remaining amount of time left in the universe and life would have been better off. The costs of storage and bandwidth of something as popular as Google Reader probably weren't negligible.
  - prepend 6y ago
    They probably were negligible. Billions of links, maybe some content cache that they already had since Google indexes and caches most of the web. Bandwidth was born by the user and content server. Checking RSS feeds is mostly a bunch of 304s. The newsblur dev is in this thread and he runs a good reader and could probably say what the storage and bandwidth was.
    - conesus 6y ago
      Storage and bandwidth are pretty negligible. I'm under Digital Ocean's quota for bandwidth and NewsBlur is pretty aggressive in keeping feeds up to date. I don't keep an archive of every story ever published, but most feeds don't publish all that much and I could probably invest in storing everything with a cheaper archival DB. Although the 80/20 rule is in effect, and when I query the DB I find that 80% of feeds have only a single active subscriber and 20% of feeds have 2+ active subscribers (activity in the past 30 days). But that's still quite a bit one-to-many fetching savings. And the majority of fetches are 304s.

shadowgovt 6y ago

You're right, but it wasn't about competing product... It was about competing cost. Specifically, competition for hardware resources and engineers. Social imposed upon Google substantial new costs under-the-hood in terms of infrastructure and time to implement. You wouldn't think a Facebook competitor would require a lot of compute and storage resources, or a lot of engineering hours, but Google had high hopes regarding what the platform would become, and they definitely didn't want to get blocked by lack of resources. In addition, a massive internal infrastructure overhaul to the accounts system that was coupled with the social initiative required a re-architecting of every app that had an "account" concept attached to it. On the grand balance sheet, Reader was a product with a non-growing userbase, didn't align with Google's long-term strategy goals, took resources to maintain, consumed storage and compute resources that could be used for more valuable bets, and was on track for a software re-architecting (which faced Google with the alternative of saving the eng-hour cost by just killing it instead of re-architecting it). Those facets combined put it on the chopping block.

ghaff 6y ago

It's not like there aren't Google Reader alternatives today. IMO, what really happened was that a lot of the sorts of people who are active on social media really liked having their own curated RSS feeds and when explicitly using RSS--and providing feeds--fell out of fashion (not that it was ever really in fashion for the mainstream) [1], it felt good to blame Google Reader as the case rather than it being an effect. [1] Sort of. Of course, RSS still gets used behind the scenes in a lot of places, not least of which are podcasts.

novok 6y ago

Journalists loved google reader, and they have outsized publicity effects when you kill something they love, that is related to their work. Therefore it feels like it dying is way more of a deal than it actually is, since what is talked about with journalists feels like is what everyone actually cares about, even if it isn't. Personally I still miss it, nothing was quite as fast or robust in reading RSS queues. RSS feed updates were fast & reliable, the UI was fast, keyboard shortcuts made it fast to use, it didn't have basic bugs that current alternatives have at times and the few alternatives don't quite approach how good it was.

bayindirh 6y ago

Because that thing was infinitely useful. I was able to read 100+ articles without burning out, got the only things that I wanted to see, filter what I didn't want and was able to track the most interesting sites. I've skimmed everything in 15 minutes, mark/star/whatever anything with unprecedented speed. It was the ultimate user-curated feed, without all the cruft of today's feed. It was mine, tailored for me, by me. ...and whole thing was keyboard-drivable.

kevstev 6y ago
you make it sound like this functionality is now dead and you are grieving it. Feedly offers all of this, its what I migrated to after Google Reader.
- rrdharan 6y ago
  Feedly is great!
  - charles_f 6y ago
    Have some respect, we're still grieving here!
- ehsankia 6y ago
  Exactly, Google Reader was a pretty straight forward RSS reader, and there are a bunch of other ones that existed then as they do now. Literally a week after it went down, someone wrote an exact alternative in Go you could host on AppEngine [1]. It was nearly identical. Many other similar project sprung up too, which goes to show how basic and non-special Reader really was. People love to put it on a pedestal and circlejerk to the nostalgia, but an app that any engineer worth their salt can code in a weekend isn't really something worth Google's time and Google-scale. https://github.com/mjibson/goread https://github.com/mjibson/goread

JustSomeNobody 6y ago

Never understood the draw of Firefly. It's ... okay, but kinda cringey. Google reader was nice because it was simple and it just worked.

dleslie 6y ago

The social features were incredible. Roughly fifty friends and I shared articles and had long comment threads. Think of it as a private reddit where there's no barrier to joining a conversation with people you know.

fareesh 6y ago

I liked Google+ disappointing that it did not catch on

gorkish 6y ago

Quite simply, Google Reader is antiethical to an Internet brokered by a central conglomerate. It made total sense for Google to kill it. They wanted the shitshow we have now; however on the heels of Gmail they thought they could take over every other market (social, news, announcements, etc.) too. The irony is that killing Google Reader caused enough customer fallout that none of these other products ever made it. However they wouldnt have made it if Google hadn't killed Reader. In retrospect Google should have doubled down to monetize Reader. I'm pretty damn sure we'd be consming far less of our news directly from Facebook and Reddit had they done so.

leajkinUnk 6y ago

Collateral damage is an interesting way to put it. I've heard the internal story from people who worked at Google at the time, and it sounds like the rough sequence of events goes like this: 1. Google Reader is launched, built on internal Google technologies (the distributed database and filesystem technologies available at the time, like GFS). 2. Headcount is not allocated to Google Reader to do ongoing engineering work. Headcount is instead allocated to projects like Google+. 3. The technologies underneath Google Reader (like GFS) are shut down. Without the engineering headcount to migrate, Google Reader is shut down. Google+ was reportedly shut down for the same reasons (but different technologies). The internal tech stack at Google is always changing, and projects without sufficient headcount for ongoing engineering will eventually get shut down. The timing of the Google Reader and Google+ shutdown reflect the timing of changes in Googles tech stack more than it reflects any strategic direction by Google. [Edit: Just to be clear, this doesn't explain the reason why these projects get shut down. It just explains the timing.]

signal11 6y ago
This is a really good story about how not to be a customer-centric organisation and not take user feedback. What I take away is that just because they’re not paying customers doesn’t mean they won’t remember and judge you. And clearly people hold grudges for a long time (witness the number people who still maintain “Micro$oft is evil” from their 90s experiences).
ramraj07 6y ago
As someone seeing org level decisions being interpreted very differently by different people, I am not sure how much weight we can give to this insiders representation- this sounds like what an Eng manager (who himself might not know the real reason) would tell their disgruntled engineers. Also the real question is why google didn’t assign an Eng team for this product used by millions, not why products without engineers die..
- leajkinUnk 6y ago
  Just to be clear... I wasn't explaining the reason these projects get shut down, just the timeline of events and some of the contributing technical factors, since these factors are a little different at Google than at other companies. The decision to deallocate headcount and stop ongoing engineering effort on a project will eventually cause that project to get shut down, no matter what company you work at. However, at many of the software companies I've worked at, projects that run on "industry-standard" or at least mundane tech stacks can run for a very long time with a relatively low amount of effort. At Google, the timeline is shorter. For example, if you have a web app that runs on Rails or PHP, or something that runs on the JVM, maybe with a Postgres, MySQL, or MS SQL backend, you might be able to shove it onto different machines or VMs for years, only making occasional / minor changes to the code base. If, in 2008, you had a JVM app which used PostgreSQL and ran in Apache Tomcat, there's a good chance you could still run it today with minor changes. At Google, the internal tech stack--filesystems, databases, monitoring, etc... has changes that are large enough and frequent enough that the situation is different, and projects are shut down on stricter timelines.

kevwil 6y ago

Not sure I am/was upset enough to call it the hill I want to die on, but to me this was the decisive moment where social media took over people's consciousness. To me, it was a curated feed of educational, informative, and entertaining content sources; devoid of people constantly throwing their political biases in my face and telling me what a horrible person I am. Logically, it could have been replaced by any number of other feed aggregator tools, but it seemed the war was already lost and social media took over regardless. It wasn't the beginning of the social media onslaught, it was the last hurdle. Meh, maybe that's inaccurate, but that's how I have felt ever since.

ineedasername 6y ago

I think it was a more mercenary decision than (just) that: Consuming content in that method left fewer options for monetization through ads. There would be many fewer searches: right now, instead of actually typing the address bar, getting to a website for many people involves a google search as they type it into the address bar, see the results, and click on the site instead of going there directly. I'm sure they would have figured it out, but it probably wasn't a problem they were very interested in solving when they could just kill the product.

gfxgirl 6y ago

I agree. I used Reader a ton and was upset when Google cancelled it. I signed up for a few different paid readers, one in particular was trying to be a clone for Google Reader. But, in those few months, my behavior changed and I no longer felt like using them. In other words, in hindsight I'm not sad it's gone. If I really valued it then I should have valued the clone but I didn't

ehsankia 6y ago
It's almost like Google knew RSS was gonna die anyway and ditched that ship at the right time.

Lazare 6y ago

RSS is a bit of a relic of an earlier, more open web, and Google Reader was at the time the best, most popular RSS client. Killing it was bad for users, and bad for RSS, but it was also a very visible marker of a shift towards a more closed, proprietary web. So it's not just "having Google Reader was better than not having it, I'm mad", but more about regret for what might have been if we'd all gone down a different path. The Google that, rather than killing Reader, had invested resources in it might have done other things. Example: Right at the same time they were killing off Reader, they were removing XMPP/Jabber support from Google Talk. Is it plausible Google might have continued backing open standards like XMPP and RSS? And if they had...what would the internet be like now? It's certainly clear that RSS is much less popular than it was; could Google's support for the standard have prevented some of that? In short: People are upset about Google Reader as such (I use bazqux.com, it's just as good as Google Reader ever was) but what it implied and represented.

zozbot234 6y ago
RSS is hardly a "relic", it has in fact pioneered web federation technology. Newer Fediverse standards, such as ActivityStreams and ActivityPub build on the same foundation as RSS itself to decentralize more of the web.
CodeGlitch 6y ago
Podcasts are published using RSS - so I wouldn't say RSS is a relic if it's being used for a good chunk of modern media.

brandonheato 6y ago

And in the end they gave up on Google Plus. Clever decisions.

JeremyNT 6y ago

> Still, I honestly don’t understand why this is the hill people want to die on, what they feel most betrayed about. Like I haven’t seen some people this upset since Firefly was canceled. A world where Google cares about Reader is a world where RSS remains a first class citizen on the web. So it's not Reader the product so much as what abandoning it said about Google's broader ambitions (and their hostility towards the open web). Reader was a signal that RSS mattered. Google killing Reader sent the opposite signal. If Google cares about something, site owners have to care also (look at AMP) - and by not caring about RSS, they gave site owners permission to abandon their feeds. In retrospect it's easy to see that the "death of Reader" wasn't some specific inflection point - Google had already stopped caring about RSS or the open web (if they ever even had). But this marked the first time a lot of us really saw and understood that Google had no interest in using its clout to protect us from the walled gardens, and instead it had ambitions to become just another walled garden itself (as became even more evident with the all-in Google+ strategy).

subsaharancoder 6y ago

I worked at Google, albeit not in mother ship (MTV) when Google+ was everything, those were some crazy times!! I recall when G+ numbers were so embarrassing that dashboards (built using jigsaw) were scrubbed clean and teams were mandated to report usage numbers in terms of percentages instead of active users. Apparently "25% growth QonQ" sounds better than "we added 2500 users"

danesparza 6y ago

"I haven’t seen some people this upset since Firefly was canceled." Thank you for pouring salt on that wound, too. Good grief.