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It also coincided with a persistent trend of HN itself no longer featuring random blog posts heavily but rather a) mostly popular news sites like NYTimes that
by dmix 4y ago
It also coincided with a persistent trend of HN itself no longer featuring random blog posts heavily but rather a) mostly popular news sites like NYTimes that finally started understanding the web demanded clickbait/Twitter-friendly high volume articles (where no one reads the article but shares the headline) and b) blogs that went viral via Twitter/FB/etc.
That was the new reality a decade ago. Social media apps was how you found blog posts, not RSS feeds.
I remember Reader dying and within a year finding a replacement but still moving on because the high noise-to-signal RSS simply wasn't doing it for me.
It's possible we all stopped using RSS because of Google but it's also possible we simply found replacements when prodded. Just like how us torrent obsessed pirates eventually moved on from harddrives full of MP3s to lazily curating Spotify accounts and from AVIs to Netflix. Google Reader was a far-too-early end of an era, but the fact we all didn't jump to a competitor like we did with Digg->Reddit was probably not just Google's fault.
- jochem9 4y agoSpeak for yourself, I'm still heavily using RSS. I stumbled upon this thread via RSS.
- dmix 4y agoSure but I'm still speaking for the hundreds of thousands of tech people who didnt keep using RSS even when given alternatives. Feedly was around after Reader (started in 2008, the same year of my 14yr old HN account and 5 years before Reader shut down), even I used it for 6 months after Reader. You can pretend Google is why no one cares about RSS but I'm skeptical it's the root reason.
- devn0ll 4y ago+1 (something else that was killed by google but still everyone knows that means) I used freshrss, and got to this article via RSS as well. It's my only source of news. I'm usually the first to know about new stuff in my circle of friends because of my carefully curated RSS feeds.
- friendzis 4y agoThe killer feature of Reader was sharing. Not only could one see posts by sites they "follow", but could also see whatever their friends shared and chose to either read that single article or follow the site. Notice any similarities? We have moved, just not to another RSS reader, but rather to G+/facebook/twitter/whatever, platforms which had that social element. Coincidentally, it was a time when g+ was failing to gain expected traction.
- naravara 4y agoAt this point I see almost no content from my friends on most social media. It’s almost entirely ads or high-follower/influencer content guiding it. What stuff comes from friends is just reposts from influencer pages.
- naravara 4y ago> That was the new reality a decade ago. Social media apps was how you found blog posts, not RSS feeds. The big social media influencers at the time, however, were using RSS feeds to find the stuff they would take viral. So it still had a beneficial effect on the environment as a whole. The tool itself can be niche in its user base but punch well above its weight if the users are influential.