5 ms·
Google Reader. Never forget.
by flir 3y ago
Google Reader. Never forget.
- sneak 3y agoI miss Google Search being good and useful and not covered in intrusive ads much more than I miss something easily replaced with local software or Feedly. Almost everything Google does outside of GCP, Maps, Search, and YouTube could evaporate for all I care. Google's problem is not that they cancel stuff, it's the everpresent need to grow revenue and embed annoying ads into more and more of everyone's daily lives. I'd love for them to cancel Gmail with a very short notice period. The endgame for Google is every Google user loaded full of energy drinks watching ads continuously for 20 hours a day. Every lifestyle that's less profitable than that is something Google will eventually try to engineer away.
- Kuinox 3y agoI started to use Kagi instead of google search. Since, it's difficult to get back on google, the results are so much worse.
- xnx 3y agoWhat's an example search that's better on Kagi?
- recursive 3y ago"Radiator". I just picked a word at random. All the other ones are better too.
- freeAgent 3y agoFunny enough, I just tried it and I agree. I have pinned Wikipedia in Kagi, so that came out on top rather than a link to Autozone at Google. Google's "Places" results were also (significantly) farther away yet no more relevant than Kagi's. So...yes. Radiator.
- Galanwe 3y agoIt's not really the ads that killed Google search for me. it's more the over agressive minmaxed SEO that makes most of results garbage.
- gjvc 3y agoCan you explain "minimaxed" in this context, please?
- ok123456 3y agoNot bad enough to be outright spam with just enough relevance to be shown in the top ten search results. Try finding product reviews, or product comparison articles. It will likely be LLM garbage that doesn't say anything, but uses the right keywords and enough coherency to be indexed.
- HeckFeck 3y agoIt's obvious LLM tripe when you click into the article and it begins with several worthless paragraphs describing why someone would be interested in the topic and how things can sometimes go wrong... Yes, I already knew that. That's why I'm here. It might be an attempt to copy customer service 'empathy' but it has the opposite effect: angering me because my time is wasted with this crap, and I have to scroll several screens to find what I need.
- chrisweekly 3y agoTangent: your use of the word "tripe" here is spot-on. The secondary definition (nonsense) works, but I'm talking about the apt metaphor of its primary definition: offal that's technically edible but comes from low-quality parts of the digestive system which are literally filled with feces. LLM-generated SEO spam should always be called "tripe".
- moomin 3y agoHonestly, a lot of this isn't LLM stuff. It's "people being paid pittance".
- RektBoy 3y agoWhat ADs? Install uBlock.
- kibwen 3y ago> everything Google does outside of GCP, Maps, Search, and YouTube could evaporate for all I care Honestly, even YouTube could evaporate and it really wouldn't make a difference. 99.9999% of YouTube is just mindless entertainment, which is 100% fungible with every other form of entertainment. The amount of actually unique, insightful, worthwhile content on YouTube is a rounding error, and will find other places to live.
- nine_k 3y agoAFAIK more than 95% of all email traffic is spam. I still consider email an absolutely vital tool, despite the efficiency below a steam engine. Same with YouTube: the small sliver of content I care about is important enough for me to pay for YouTube premium. Sometimes people compare something to a gold mine, to emphasize how rich that is. A typical gold mine extracts several grams of good per tonne of rock, that is, a few parts per million. Don't cry about the Sturgeon's law; embrace it and celebrate what you can extract.
- kibwen 3y agoYouTube isn't analogous to email, it's analogous to Gmail. We were hosting video in the 90s, and the cost of storage, bandwidth, and compute have become orders of magnitude cheaper since then. Video hosting is not magic that only YouTube can pull off.
- nine_k 3y agoUnlike Gmail, YouTube is a large public repository of media. Pulling your email account from Gmail affects you. Pulling a video from YouTube affects potentially huge numbers of people.
- macintux 3y agoIf the useful YouTube content scattered to multiple alternatives, it would immediately become far less useful. Discovery is a big part of YouTube’s value proposition for me.
- moomin 3y agoBut Reader _wasn't_ easily replaced by local software. They centralised social usage of RSS, then killed it. Yes, you can still run an RSS reader, but RSS and blogs as a a model of social networking? Never came back.
- sneak 3y agoThat wasn't Reader, that was apps. Nobody uses the web anymore except as API transport for native apps. Blame Android and Apple for that.
- voytec 3y agoI see Reader as Google's attack on RSS' popularity. The product was killed off when its job was accomplished.
- slyall 3y agoNo because if anything (the effect might have been small) it reduced the power of the open web and many websites (which Google tied togeather) and encouraged people to go to walled gardens ( Facebook, Instagram, twitter, etc ) which are controlled by other companies.
- flir 3y agoA lot of heavyweight bloggers and aggregators used Reader in their toolchains - it was very good at surfacing trending content. I don't think the effect on the blogging ecosystem was small. I could believe they were clearing a path for G+ and Discover on Android.
- freeAgent 3y agoWhat's frustrating is that Reader would have been complementary to Google+. It could have served as a huge funnel by which users could discover content to share on Google+. That's how I used to use Reader (though at the time I found content that I shared other places, such as Facebook, Digg, or Reddit).
- wombat-man 3y agoI think it just was never going to get the mass adoption it needed to justify the upkeep.
- lolinder 3y agoThe upkeep was apparently 12 engineers and they had tens of millions of users. It doesn't take that many users to justify 12 engineers plus infra, so it sounds like it was more that Google doesn't care to operate any product unless it will have users in the hundreds of millions.
- justinpombrio 3y agoObligatory reminder that RSS is alive and well. It remains popular. I both subscribe to RSS, and support it on my blog. You can too.
- flir 3y agoStill use it - I even read HN via RSS - but I've never found a tool with the critical mass of users you need to show trending content the way GR did.
- freeAgent 3y agoThat's true. I use Newsblur. It has social features, but the community is so small and the social aspect is so limited that it has little value. With that said, the people who engage with it tend to be authentic users interested in high-quality content and respectful discussion. Discovery of other users is terrible, though. You basically have to stumble upon them if they're interacting with an article already in your RSS feeds.
- flir 3y agotheoldreader, same problem. Idle musing 1: A mechanism for all these small readers to federate their trending content? Out of many comes one? Idle musing 2: These tools were mostly written a decade ago. It might be possible, with the current state of the art, to extract a more useful signal out of a smaller pool of users.
- earthboundkid 3y agoI am fucking pissed at how Google created tons of make work for me by killing old Universal Analytics and replacing it with an inferior product. OTOH, I successfully skipped the whole AMP saga because I could tell from the start that it was bullshit.
- jonas21 3y agoUniversal Analytics used third-party cookies. Support for them has been removed from all major browsers due to privacy issues.
- earthboundkid 3y agoSo you adapt to that. Adapting to changes does not require any of the crap in GA4.