7 ms·

As someone who was born too late for Google Reader, I genuinely don't understand why people bring it up every 5 minutes. There are 1000 feed reader apps that e

As someone who was born too late for Google Reader, I genuinely don't understand why people bring it up every 5 minutes. There are 1000 feed reader apps that exist right now, some of which have the branding of "it's just like Google Reader", so what am I missing here?

outime 6y ago
Nostalgia and attacking Google (or almost any big corporation) is usually very welcomed here.
- twelve40 6y ago
  Well in this case it's fully deserved. I was in shock when G started nudging me to share my photo albums. They came pretty close to scamming me into sharing random crap I would never imagine sharing (reminiscent of Linkedin scraping and blasting your entire address book), all for the sake of promoting stupid, closed-off G+. And Google Reader, which I used on a daily basis until its death, probably fell victim to the G+ effort. I use Newsblur as a replacement (thanks conesus!) but Google could have used their influence to promote RSS and make the web much more consumer-friendly, now without that everyone crawled off into their own walled garden like Facebook, etc. A number of people I read ended up only on Facebook unfortunately. RSS, while still around, never really took off to its full potential, and the G+ fiasco contributed to that.
kleer001 6y ago
Read the full comments and you should get it. > There are 1000 feed reader apps that exist right now, Sure, but Reader was basically the first. If you've never lost something you've loved it's impossible to understand.
bluedays 6y ago
Because before Google Reader was cancelled Google was known for not cancelling anything. Now they get rid of things left and right. It was basically the beginning of the end.
- kergonath 6y ago
  That is not quite accurate. They’ve always killed stuff randomly. My personal issues at the time were Sparrow (an amazing email app on iPhone, killed when they bought the developer), Google Wave, Google Talk (they were already a headless chicken as far as IM was concerned; Google Talk was interoperable with other servers and we used it quite a lot), Google Video. Other notable cancellations before Google Reader were Google Buzz, Google Code search, Google Desktop, and Google Labs. There were dozens of others. They have always been as focused as a squirrel on drugs.
  - corobo 6y ago
    Oh man, I used to check labs so often. God damn Google became a proper fallen empire of a company 'eh
  - smeej 6y ago
    To this day I've yet to use any social media as much as I used sharing Google Reader articles on Google Buzz. My little circle of friends just caught the thing right at the right time, and we loved it hard!
- vkou 6y ago
  > Because before Google Reader was cancelled Google was known for not cancelling anything Web Accelerator, Wave, Google Video immediately spring to mind, but there's a few dozen smaller services that were all cancelled before Reader was.
  - bluedays 6y ago
    I would argue that all of those were failures, so there was no reason to keep using them. So I guess the better argument is that at this time Google wasn’t known for cancelling successful products
    - vkou 6y ago
      Reader was a failure in the commercial sense, though. No good path towards monetization, no positive synergy with other products, too much technical debt that nobody wanted to work on.
deepsun 6y ago
It was just a very good, no-bs type of service. With good-looking performant UI (it was before "material" UI conquered almost all other google services). Not that I'm against Material, I do my websites on it, but I have to admit previous google design was more intuitive.
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
g. Reader had a reshare feature that made your account a RSS feed. Your peers/friends/colleagues would feed from you and to you. Together with reshared count, it implemented a very effective peer review mechanism. Having high adoption, it provided me very good feeds - nothing comes close now.
- Andrex 6y ago
  Exactly. It was basically a share-ier Twitter long before Twitter, built on an open standard (RSS.) You could subscribe to every news website's RSS feed and at the time, most would offer their full content in your feed. You had incredible power to curate and refine your feed based on your interests and social circle.
  - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
    Amazingly, that pattern is very easy to implement and yet nothing across Mastodon/Lemmy/Reddit comes even close.
blakesterz 6y ago
I guess you had to be there? "it's just like Google Reader" means it's NOT as good, but close enough. GR was solid and we LOVED it, especially the search. I think RSS readers are one of those things that some of us LOVE and we're still bitter that Google took it away. Maybe it was the first big thing Google cancelled? I know for me it was, and I've not trusted anything new from Google since. Maybe that's it... before they broke my heart with killing Reader I really believed they were different, that they really tried to "not be evil" and then POOF one day my favorite thing on the web was gone. I guess you had to be there, I know it sounds ridiculous.
- treesknees 6y ago
  As others have said, it marked a turning point for how Google is perceived. It's not as though GR had 100k beta users like Stadia, it had nearly 5 million active users when it shut down. The closing marked the end of Google doing cool things because they're cool, and showed their true colors as a major corporation looking after profits first. Something that is pretty much a given opinion of them today.
- mxfh 6y ago
  I miss search the most, no other replacement came even close. Like a searchable corpus of your curated library of stuff you're interested in.
  - davidivadavid 6y ago
    Search was also the feature I missed in most replacements. Pretty happy with BazQux these days, though.
  - efreak 6y ago
    Why does nobody else benton the feature that local rss readers can't duplicate: the full history of the entire feed starting the first time it was indexed. Start up Google reader and for most feeds you've got the full history from day one.
- arunc 6y ago
  Well said. Coincidentally I was talking about GR to my wife and kid last night. It is a sad death indeed.
jaywalk 6y ago
You're missing the pain that we had to go through to find something comparable. I'm sure you know the meme that any new Google product that's launched is basically on borrowed time, because it'll get cancelled soon enough. Well, Reader was the first one to get that treatment.
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  I remember when Reader was shut down, very rapidly alternatives were coming up. Lots of people switched to Feedly within a few weeks, and The Old Reader came up, etc. The transition really wasn't that bad.
  - jaywalk 6y ago
    I was one of those people who switched to Feedly. And I'm also one of the people still using the Feedly Classic app, which they had to launch because of the uproar after they radically overhauled the app. I'm just hoping they decide to keep it around, since they never update it it's not like it's costing them anything.
    - pinkano 6y ago
      we'll keep it around, just won't update it
      - jaywalk 6y ago
        Thank you.
perardi 6y ago
1. Way to make me feel old. 2. It was, by far, the dominant reader. Nobody other big corporation† decided to make a top-level project that surfaced feed reading like this. So people remember it fondly, because it was the heyday of RSS, before Twitter and Facebook took over news delivery. †OK, fine, I think Apple did a thing where you could read RSS feeds in Mail.
gowld 6y ago
It's nostalgia for the world before "Social". Reader was just the public face of martyrdom.
keenreed 6y ago
That is moment when Google started cancelling products and turned evil. Before that they were geeks who could not even file IPO correctly.
pedrogpimenta 6y ago
Adding to what people answered: I think it's the ripple effect of ending that service. It meants RSS was dead. It probably was dying a slow death but that was the final straw. Websites stop supporting RSS feeds more and more so we are left with nothing else than following them through facebook or twitter or whatever new thing comes on. That's my take on it. Still, the sites that matter (to me) do still have RSS feeds :)
- darekkay 6y ago
  > It meants RSS was dead. This has been claimed for years, but it's simply not true: > Still, the sites that matter (to me) do still have RSS feeds :)
- lrem 6y ago
  Seems everyone and their dog moved their long-form into medium. And it does RSS. So, it's back to being mainstream?
guyzero 6y ago
it's nostalgia for lost youth, same as nostalgia for anything. it's meaningless sentimentality.
chippy 6y ago
It was an app but with a network effect around it. All the replacements seem to have no community.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  What was the network effect or community? I thought it was just an RSS reader. Were there forums or commenting on posts or something? I don't remember anything at all like that.
  - btouellette 6y ago
    Yes you could follow friends who could republish from their feeds onto a feed you could subscribe to and eventually it supported comments on those items which would allow discussion within their community. Discoverability and community which hasn't been replicated with the scattered userbase after it was killed.
    - ip34162 6y ago
      Wow that sounds awesome.
      - hattar 6y ago
        It was
justin66 6y ago
> what am I missing here? People aren't just mourning Google Reader, they're mourning the Google that used to run products like Google Reader.
elliekelly 6y ago
It's kind of like your favorite coffee shop closing. Sure, I can get coffee anywhere but it was part of my daily routine. And a part of my daily routine that I enjoyed. When it gets yanked away it still leaves a gap that can't quite be filled by the next-best substitute.
aksss 6y ago
A lot of the attempts to replace Reader aren’t clean enough - they try to present the feed like a magazine layout or do other BS to dress up information, where Google reader was “just the facts”. It feels a lot like this old game that kicked ass for the time, but you realize the magic will never be back again. Google killed it almost certainly because it distracted from other money making opportunities, so a lot of us associate it with a further corruption of the internet in a broad sense - like intentionally making things worse to make money off the bad process. They win, we all lose a little bit.
mFixman 6y ago
I am old enough to have used Google Reader, and I don't get it either. My guess is that the death of Google Reader was one of the last domino pieces to fall in the change from the multi-website internet to the Reddit aggregator internet. The replacement apps don't work because the internet model where RSS was useful died a decade ago. This whole thing might be like the death of a popular BBS client for someone born in the 1980s. But then again... it's been 8 years. It's time to let go.
quadrifoliate 6y ago
I think one thing that you're missing that hasn't been mentioned is content caching. If your favorite website went away, you could still read and search all of the articles in the cached feed. I don't think there was an expiry time on it (other long-term users, feel free to correct me). These days there is no equivalent. If someone you follow decides to take down their website, you have to hope that someone archived some of their content on the popular archive sites.
- brundolf 6y ago
  Seems like it wouldn't be hard to integrate an RSS reader with Wayback Machine for something similar
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sweden 6y ago
I agree that HN goes overboard with Google Reader but I can also share the sentiment. You are right when you say that there are many alternatives to Google Reader, even better ones you could say. I am fond not just of Google Reader but also I am fond of the times of better news consumption of back then. When Google Reader disappeared, it left some sort of hole in news consumption that got filled up with Google+, Twitter and Facebook. The media outlets became obsessed about sharing news articles in social media, fighting for "likes", "+1s" and "retweets". Google Reader provided a simple of way of having your news centralized on a snappy service, with good UI, without any ads or "smart suggestions" and without all of your social graph embedded in there. It was the way of consuming news for people that actually wanted to be informed. And the best part, you could actually subscribe to other's people favorite feeds. It was kind of hidden, there was no dedicated "find friends" button or anything like that, you had to go out of your way and ask to someone "Can I have the link to you RSS feed for your saved items?" in order to "add them" to Google Read. And you could actually comment on their saved items. I miss these times, I was actually a news junky back then because of Google Reader. I was shown what I wanted to be shown with no social crap or "hot articles" thrown to my face. I slowly lost interest in consuming news after that.
sys_64738 6y ago
Google Reader was the internet.
buss 6y ago
They don't miss Reader, they miss college

outime 6y ago

Nostalgia and attacking Google (or almost any big corporation) is usually very welcomed here.

twelve40 6y ago
Well in this case it's fully deserved. I was in shock when G started nudging me to share my photo albums. They came pretty close to scamming me into sharing random crap I would never imagine sharing (reminiscent of Linkedin scraping and blasting your entire address book), all for the sake of promoting stupid, closed-off G+. And Google Reader, which I used on a daily basis until its death, probably fell victim to the G+ effort. I use Newsblur as a replacement (thanks conesus!) but Google could have used their influence to promote RSS and make the web much more consumer-friendly, now without that everyone crawled off into their own walled garden like Facebook, etc. A number of people I read ended up only on Facebook unfortunately. RSS, while still around, never really took off to its full potential, and the G+ fiasco contributed to that.

kleer001 6y ago

Read the full comments and you should get it. > There are 1000 feed reader apps that exist right now, Sure, but Reader was basically the first. If you've never lost something you've loved it's impossible to understand.

bluedays 6y ago

Because before Google Reader was cancelled Google was known for not cancelling anything. Now they get rid of things left and right. It was basically the beginning of the end.

kergonath 6y ago
That is not quite accurate. They’ve always killed stuff randomly. My personal issues at the time were Sparrow (an amazing email app on iPhone, killed when they bought the developer), Google Wave, Google Talk (they were already a headless chicken as far as IM was concerned; Google Talk was interoperable with other servers and we used it quite a lot), Google Video. Other notable cancellations before Google Reader were Google Buzz, Google Code search, Google Desktop, and Google Labs. There were dozens of others. They have always been as focused as a squirrel on drugs.
- corobo 6y ago
  Oh man, I used to check labs so often. God damn Google became a proper fallen empire of a company 'eh
- smeej 6y ago
  To this day I've yet to use any social media as much as I used sharing Google Reader articles on Google Buzz. My little circle of friends just caught the thing right at the right time, and we loved it hard!
vkou 6y ago
> Because before Google Reader was cancelled Google was known for not cancelling anything Web Accelerator, Wave, Google Video immediately spring to mind, but there's a few dozen smaller services that were all cancelled before Reader was.
- bluedays 6y ago
  I would argue that all of those were failures, so there was no reason to keep using them. So I guess the better argument is that at this time Google wasn’t known for cancelling successful products
  - vkou 6y ago
    Reader was a failure in the commercial sense, though. No good path towards monetization, no positive synergy with other products, too much technical debt that nobody wanted to work on.

deepsun 6y ago

It was just a very good, no-bs type of service. With good-looking performant UI (it was before "material" UI conquered almost all other google services). Not that I'm against Material, I do my websites on it, but I have to admit previous google design was more intuitive.

eeZah7Ux 6y ago

g. Reader had a reshare feature that made your account a RSS feed. Your peers/friends/colleagues would feed from you and to you. Together with reshared count, it implemented a very effective peer review mechanism. Having high adoption, it provided me very good feeds - nothing comes close now.

Andrex 6y ago
Exactly. It was basically a share-ier Twitter long before Twitter, built on an open standard (RSS.) You could subscribe to every news website's RSS feed and at the time, most would offer their full content in your feed. You had incredible power to curate and refine your feed based on your interests and social circle.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  Amazingly, that pattern is very easy to implement and yet nothing across Mastodon/Lemmy/Reddit comes even close.

blakesterz 6y ago

I guess you had to be there? "it's just like Google Reader" means it's NOT as good, but close enough. GR was solid and we LOVED it, especially the search. I think RSS readers are one of those things that some of us LOVE and we're still bitter that Google took it away. Maybe it was the first big thing Google cancelled? I know for me it was, and I've not trusted anything new from Google since. Maybe that's it... before they broke my heart with killing Reader I really believed they were different, that they really tried to "not be evil" and then POOF one day my favorite thing on the web was gone. I guess you had to be there, I know it sounds ridiculous.

treesknees 6y ago
As others have said, it marked a turning point for how Google is perceived. It's not as though GR had 100k beta users like Stadia, it had nearly 5 million active users when it shut down. The closing marked the end of Google doing cool things because they're cool, and showed their true colors as a major corporation looking after profits first. Something that is pretty much a given opinion of them today.
mxfh 6y ago
I miss search the most, no other replacement came even close. Like a searchable corpus of your curated library of stuff you're interested in.
- davidivadavid 6y ago
  Search was also the feature I missed in most replacements. Pretty happy with BazQux these days, though.
- efreak 6y ago
  Why does nobody else benton the feature that local rss readers can't duplicate: the full history of the entire feed starting the first time it was indexed. Start up Google reader and for most feeds you've got the full history from day one.
arunc 6y ago
Well said. Coincidentally I was talking about GR to my wife and kid last night. It is a sad death indeed.

jaywalk 6y ago

You're missing the pain that we had to go through to find something comparable. I'm sure you know the meme that any new Google product that's launched is basically on borrowed time, because it'll get cancelled soon enough. Well, Reader was the first one to get that treatment.

benhurmarcel 6y ago
I remember when Reader was shut down, very rapidly alternatives were coming up. Lots of people switched to Feedly within a few weeks, and The Old Reader came up, etc. The transition really wasn't that bad.
- jaywalk 6y ago
  I was one of those people who switched to Feedly. And I'm also one of the people still using the Feedly Classic app, which they had to launch because of the uproar after they radically overhauled the app. I'm just hoping they decide to keep it around, since they never update it it's not like it's costing them anything.
  - pinkano 6y ago
    we'll keep it around, just won't update it
    - jaywalk 6y ago
      Thank you.

perardi 6y ago

1. Way to make me feel old. 2. It was, by far, the dominant reader. Nobody other big corporation† decided to make a top-level project that surfaced feed reading like this. So people remember it fondly, because it was the heyday of RSS, before Twitter and Facebook took over news delivery. †OK, fine, I think Apple did a thing where you could read RSS feeds in Mail.

gowld 6y ago

It's nostalgia for the world before "Social". Reader was just the public face of martyrdom.

keenreed 6y ago

That is moment when Google started cancelling products and turned evil. Before that they were geeks who could not even file IPO correctly.

pedrogpimenta 6y ago

Adding to what people answered: I think it's the ripple effect of ending that service. It meants RSS was dead. It probably was dying a slow death but that was the final straw. Websites stop supporting RSS feeds more and more so we are left with nothing else than following them through facebook or twitter or whatever new thing comes on. That's my take on it. Still, the sites that matter (to me) do still have RSS feeds :)

darekkay 6y ago
> It meants RSS was dead. This has been claimed for years, but it's simply not true: > Still, the sites that matter (to me) do still have RSS feeds :)
lrem 6y ago
Seems everyone and their dog moved their long-form into medium. And it does RSS. So, it's back to being mainstream?

guyzero 6y ago

it's nostalgia for lost youth, same as nostalgia for anything. it's meaningless sentimentality.

chippy 6y ago

It was an app but with a network effect around it. All the replacements seem to have no community.

crazygringo 6y ago
What was the network effect or community? I thought it was just an RSS reader. Were there forums or commenting on posts or something? I don't remember anything at all like that.
- btouellette 6y ago
  Yes you could follow friends who could republish from their feeds onto a feed you could subscribe to and eventually it supported comments on those items which would allow discussion within their community. Discoverability and community which hasn't been replicated with the scattered userbase after it was killed.
  - ip34162 6y ago
    Wow that sounds awesome.
    - hattar 6y ago
      It was

justin66 6y ago

> what am I missing here? People aren't just mourning Google Reader, they're mourning the Google that used to run products like Google Reader.

elliekelly 6y ago

It's kind of like your favorite coffee shop closing. Sure, I can get coffee anywhere but it was part of my daily routine. And a part of my daily routine that I enjoyed. When it gets yanked away it still leaves a gap that can't quite be filled by the next-best substitute.

aksss 6y ago

A lot of the attempts to replace Reader aren’t clean enough - they try to present the feed like a magazine layout or do other BS to dress up information, where Google reader was “just the facts”. It feels a lot like this old game that kicked ass for the time, but you realize the magic will never be back again. Google killed it almost certainly because it distracted from other money making opportunities, so a lot of us associate it with a further corruption of the internet in a broad sense - like intentionally making things worse to make money off the bad process. They win, we all lose a little bit.

mFixman 6y ago

I am old enough to have used Google Reader, and I don't get it either. My guess is that the death of Google Reader was one of the last domino pieces to fall in the change from the multi-website internet to the Reddit aggregator internet. The replacement apps don't work because the internet model where RSS was useful died a decade ago. This whole thing might be like the death of a popular BBS client for someone born in the 1980s. But then again... it's been 8 years. It's time to let go.

quadrifoliate 6y ago

I think one thing that you're missing that hasn't been mentioned is content caching. If your favorite website went away, you could still read and search all of the articles in the cached feed. I don't think there was an expiry time on it (other long-term users, feel free to correct me). These days there is no equivalent. If someone you follow decides to take down their website, you have to hope that someone archived some of their content on the popular archive sites.

brundolf 6y ago
Seems like it wouldn't be hard to integrate an RSS reader with Wayback Machine for something similar

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

sweden 6y ago

I agree that HN goes overboard with Google Reader but I can also share the sentiment. You are right when you say that there are many alternatives to Google Reader, even better ones you could say. I am fond not just of Google Reader but also I am fond of the times of better news consumption of back then. When Google Reader disappeared, it left some sort of hole in news consumption that got filled up with Google+, Twitter and Facebook. The media outlets became obsessed about sharing news articles in social media, fighting for "likes", "+1s" and "retweets". Google Reader provided a simple of way of having your news centralized on a snappy service, with good UI, without any ads or "smart suggestions" and without all of your social graph embedded in there. It was the way of consuming news for people that actually wanted to be informed. And the best part, you could actually subscribe to other's people favorite feeds. It was kind of hidden, there was no dedicated "find friends" button or anything like that, you had to go out of your way and ask to someone "Can I have the link to you RSS feed for your saved items?" in order to "add them" to Google Read. And you could actually comment on their saved items. I miss these times, I was actually a news junky back then because of Google Reader. I was shown what I wanted to be shown with no social crap or "hot articles" thrown to my face. I slowly lost interest in consuming news after that.

sys_64738 6y ago

Google Reader was the internet.

buss 6y ago

They don't miss Reader, they miss college