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Google’s obviously fake excuse for killing their RSS reader (declining usage) was especially maddening at the time because they were pushing Google+ - which _no

Google’s obviously fake excuse for killing their RSS reader (declining usage) was especially maddening at the time because they were pushing Google+ - which _nobody_ used.

firefax 2mo ago
It was a great example of being evil -- they reduced user choice while pushing an inferior product.
- InsideOutSanta 2mo ago
  And then killed it too. They killed a tool people loved to promote a tool people didn't want to adopt, and in the end both ended up dead.
  - galaxyLogic 2mo ago
    And killing G+ killed a community. I lost many could be real-friends, whom I've never heard from since. That if anyting was Evil, killing a community.
    - firefax 2mo ago
      When I used it, it was popular among folks who would do photography as a hobby when attending academic conferences. Tom Anderson liked one of my landscape photos, which briefly made me popular with the crew who'd roll into gallery showings for the wine and cheese. (This was back before Instagram got acquired by Facebook and Obama let Putin take Crimea and Xi Jingping scoop up rare earth mineral rights in Africa.)
  - leoc 2mo ago
    The final irony is that if they'd just maintained G+ a bit better and kept it around after 2018 it's likely they'd eventually have had a decent chance to pick up a number of waves of unhappy people leaving Facebook or Twitter. But, ceterum censeo: while Vic Gundotra may have been the main force behind G+ it's important to emphasise that, as usual, the buck stops with Google's Class B overlords Page and Brin personally. If they were the decent people and responsible stewards they were originally promoted as then the Google+ debacle would not have happened, or certainly not in the way it did.
  - rcxdude 2mo ago
    It seems like Google culturally can't deal with products that aren't overwhelming, gigantic successes, but they also really struggle to put in the effort to actually create those. Multiple times they have spent a lot of resources developing a product, then released to great fanfare, but then don't have the follow-through to keep supporting it into being a big success. Stadia seemed to be the most ridiculous example to me. The console market is famously difficult to break into and Microsoft only managed it by making a loss for a very long time, but Google just didn't put in anywhere near that amount of effort, and just gave up pretty much as soon as it launched.
    - ethbr1 2mo ago
      Google, culturally, seems very tone-deaf to market signals. Granted: historically they have often been the smartest person in the room (collectively speaking) But a consequence of this is that an organization (a) doesn't develop pre-release "listening to user needs" skills & (b) can't post-release pivot in response to user feedback. Microsoft and Apple do much better jobs at both. This works as long as Google releases exactly what users need the first time (e.g. original Google search or Gmail), but flounders when opinionated, artistic product design with long-term vision is needed (Reader, YouTube, Stadia) or when people outside Google have better ideas (Chrome, GCP, messengers, Docs/Drive, AI dev harnesses). At this point, I've decided it's less about revenue (the common finger point) and more about organizational prioritization and decision-making. It's just not in Google's DNA. Nothing short of a Bezos-style API memo is going to change it... and Pichai doesn't seem like he's willing/able to rock the boat that much.
      - titzer 2mo ago
        Google's problem is that, fundamentally, they hate end users. They do not want to hear feedback from them, they don't want to fix their bugs. They don't want to hear your thoughts and they actually don't value feedback. They don't want to support devices or older versions. They have no idea what LTS even means. Google pretends to be data driven. What that means is that Google would rather creepily spy on you using all kinds of underhanded means that they invented themselves, tell itself it cares about privacy because it doesn't "sell" that raw data to third parties, and then mine said data for the only signals that matter--how they are going to make more money off advertising to you. And god forbid some machine-learning system goes wrong and classifies you as a scammer. If they think you're a scammer, you're dead to them, and they will ghost you without a second thought, with no recourse on your part. Google thinks anything below a billion users is not worth even pursuing. When I worked there it was always about 10X and moonshots and more magic moments. There was a mantra "focus on the user and all else will follow". The users who matter are advertisers. So they did that, and advertisers keep forking over their cash. End users do not fork over cash, so screw them. Leeches.
alightsoul 2mo ago
As a result many people in developing countries were driven towards social media like instagram and TikTok where they get their news. And now they're addicted to them.
- dannyobrien 2mo ago
  At the time, I was working at the Committee to Protect Journalists with dissident bloggers working in Syria, Egypt, UAE, Turkey, etc. We had a group of them come to the US to talk to the big tech companies about the issues they were struggling with: fake takedowns, language support, local censorship, and so on. I remember distinctly as we worked on the agenda for the meeting with Google that Google Reader being shut down was the first complaint any of us mentioned. We laughed, but it was serious.
timmg 2mo ago
As someone who was a big fan of Reader and worked at Google at the time (not on G+): I never understood why they didn’t try to put Reader into G+. Like you could imagine getting your RSS feed in your G+ stream. If you didn’t want any social stuff you could just use it as a reader. But it would also give you an easy way to share stuff from your feed. And it might have been useful for those providing RSS feeds to interact more with their readers (if they chose to.) I think it would have been an interesting way to bootstrap things.
- glenstein 2mo ago
  Exactly. Reader was maturing into a proto social network in its own right (I started commenting on articles with friends in it in college right before it started getting deprecated) and finding the organic activity and rolling with it and thinking in terms of honoring the core users could have been a very good strategy. Google Plus could have worked imo and the path to success would have involved smart stewardship of reader.
- fiddlerwoaroof 2mo ago
  Google Buzz also seemed like a better path for Google to have a "social network" than what they tried to do with G+: Post short twitter-like things from various Google properties and have your friends posts show up in the same place. Between Buzz, Reader and gmail chat, Google had a fairly solid lineup of social products that they killed one way or another to boost G+.
  - smeej 2mo ago
    I had a cohort of friends from grad school that used Buzz like crazy. We tried Google+, but it just wasn't as useful. This would have been 2008-2010. We also really wanted to use Google Wave, but couldn't get enough invitations to go around. It was like nobody at Google figured out that the only reason invitations worked for Gmail was because Gmail was interoperable with email. Wave didn't interoperate with anything. Either your friends were on it and you could use it, or they weren't and you couldn't. 3-4 invitations after a couple months just wasn't enough of a social effect to make it useful like it had been for Gmail.
pronik 2mo ago
Probably Google's biggest failure ever was to recognize they've already had a social network: Gmail.
- jonas21 2mo ago
  They tried to develop Gmail into a social network in 2010 with Google Buzz [1]. It received a lot of backlash from people who did not want their email to be a social network. The social network they were not developing well was YouTube. Eventually, they figured it out, and it's estimated YouTube would be worth $550B as a standalone business today [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz [2] https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/youtube-valuation-worth-550-billion-analysts-1236352586/ https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/youtube-valuation-wort...
  - PunchyHamster 2mo ago
    They had so many chat services over time it' ridiculous
  - bandrami 2mo ago
    Buzz was weird because its main impact was killing another Google product, Orkut
- frollogaston 2mo ago
  Thank goodness
thataccount 2mo ago
But they totally used Google wave. It was/is the future.
deepsun 2mo ago
Same thing with Google Music, it was perfect. You could stream, or could buy and download mp3, or you could upload your library to it. And the best feature: "I am feeling lucky" -- play a random song you ever liked and keep playing a generated playlist off it. But they killed it due to internal wars with YouTube Music that sucks. There's still nothing like Google Music.
- PunchyHamster 2mo ago
  They could have Spotify market and just decided not to.
- wildzzz 2mo ago
  Google Music's song radio feature was really good. It would play similar songs obviously but it exposed you to actually new artists. Meanwhile, spotify basically encourages you to listen to the same stuff all the time, It's like listening to my old CD collection.
- abraham 2mo ago
  I liked Google Play Music a lot but like any Google product it had a lot of issues. Still way better than YouTube Music.
- titzer 2mo ago
  Why anyone trusts any streaming music service is absolutely beyond me. It will always get enshittified. I have 65GiB of mp3s I've accumulated from ripping CDs over the years and it used to be a burden to transfer around between machines. Now it easily fits on a thumb drive or microsd and it's easy to copy it onto all of my machines.
  - deepsun 2mo ago
    Yes, because you did not need to copy it to all devices. You could stream your own library at any device. Probably you could set up a homelab server and there are tools/apps for streaming it to your own devices, but I havent bothered yet. AND discovery part -- I'm feeling lucky let me listen to new music. If I liked it I bought it. But it's hard to find new music, get out of your bubble.
charcircuit 2mo ago
Do you not realize that Google+ was a newer product and was a strategic priority for Google. Trying to say they are the same so you should be able to apply the same exact criteria is a false equivalence.
abraham 2mo ago
> Google’s obviously fake excuse for killing their RSS reader (declining usage) What's obviously fake about that?
- asveikau 2mo ago
  It has the vibe of a corporate company doing post hoc justification for a decision they already made. And then the commenter provides a parallel to how willing they were to put money into Google+, i.e. they appear willing to put money into a relatively low usage product when they feel like doing it.
  - dredmorbius 2mo ago
    G+ plausibly challenged an existential threat: Facebook. Reader had no such strategic leverage, at least to Google execs' understanding.
al_borland 2mo ago
The mainstream ended up using social media to solve the problem RSS had already solved years earlier… it just had poor marketing. A lot of people do use RSS without realizing it, via podcasts.
- Grombobulous 2mo ago
  While that may be true, I just don’t believe for a second that RSS had any chance of becoming mainstream outside of techie circles. “Solving the problem” is only one aspect of the reason something becomes popular in the mainstream. I also don’t think the user experience offered by products like TikTok is possible with RSS.
  - al_borland 2mo ago
    > I also don’t think the user experience offered by products like TikTok is possible with RSS. I use an app called Feeeed on iOS that scrolls my RSS feeds like a social media feed. If the TikTok reference is more about the never ending algorithmic feed… RSS not doing that is a feature. Of course, I think many among us have been guilty of overloading an RSS reader to the point where it feels like a never ending feed that’s impossible to catch up on.
  - TFNA 2mo ago
    In the early millennium, I read a wide variety of blogs on art, humanities, and the religious denomination I was part of. This audience trended non-techie and rather elderly, and yet in blog comments readers would often reveal in passsing that they were largely consuming blogs through RSS. The technology was much more accessible than you assume.
  - zdunn 2mo ago
    But RSS did become mainstream; podcasts are a normal part of media now and non-techies seem to have no problem finding and consuming them. They don't have to know about RSS. There's no reason similar UIs can't exist for text based content. Google Reader, and then G+, had a path to becoming "mainstream outside of techie circles" There's nothing special about TikTok's user experience. It uses an algorithm that isn't interested in providing a chronological feed, but I don't see why RSS couldn't be used to build something similar. Again, podcasts use it and it works well for that. The discovery aspect happens outside of the scope of RSS, but once you find things you like, RSS works well for tracking them. The tiktok (or any corporate social media, really) comparison is also a bit odd because they don't need RSS, even if they wanted to provide a chronological feed. The platform hosts the content so it knows when there's new stuff and how to access it to provide to followers. RSS is useful in a decentralized environment where the content could be hosted anywhere and you want to aggregate it
mapt 2mo ago
You mean Google Wave? Or Google Metaverse?
ethagnawl 2mo ago
Well, everybody _did_ use Google+ but nobody _wanted to_. I remember constantly finding myself redirected to it and them doing shady things like automatically connecting you with everyone in your gmail contact list. Also, if memory serves, they chose an avatar for me using Picasa or photos in my gmail or something and it was a photo of me without a shirt on.
- frollogaston 2mo ago
  They shoved it hard into YouTube. The comment system there is still broken to this day.
  - ethagnawl 2mo ago
    I've always found YT's comment features to be worst in class. I never see notifications, there's a way to find your own past comments but it seems purposely hidden and the Android app keyboard / spell checker is really wonky -- like they don't want you to use it to type anything substantive.

Google’s obviously fake excuse for killing their RSS reader (declining usage) was especially maddening at the time because they were pushing Google+ - which _nobody_ used.

firefax 2mo ago

It was a great example of being evil -- they reduced user choice while pushing an inferior product.

InsideOutSanta 2mo ago
And then killed it too. They killed a tool people loved to promote a tool people didn't want to adopt, and in the end both ended up dead.
- galaxyLogic 2mo ago
  And killing G+ killed a community. I lost many could be real-friends, whom I've never heard from since. That if anyting was Evil, killing a community.
  - firefax 2mo ago
    When I used it, it was popular among folks who would do photography as a hobby when attending academic conferences. Tom Anderson liked one of my landscape photos, which briefly made me popular with the crew who'd roll into gallery showings for the wine and cheese. (This was back before Instagram got acquired by Facebook and Obama let Putin take Crimea and Xi Jingping scoop up rare earth mineral rights in Africa.)
- leoc 2mo ago
  The final irony is that if they'd just maintained G+ a bit better and kept it around after 2018 it's likely they'd eventually have had a decent chance to pick up a number of waves of unhappy people leaving Facebook or Twitter. But, ceterum censeo: while Vic Gundotra may have been the main force behind G+ it's important to emphasise that, as usual, the buck stops with Google's Class B overlords Page and Brin personally. If they were the decent people and responsible stewards they were originally promoted as then the Google+ debacle would not have happened, or certainly not in the way it did.
- rcxdude 2mo ago
  It seems like Google culturally can't deal with products that aren't overwhelming, gigantic successes, but they also really struggle to put in the effort to actually create those. Multiple times they have spent a lot of resources developing a product, then released to great fanfare, but then don't have the follow-through to keep supporting it into being a big success. Stadia seemed to be the most ridiculous example to me. The console market is famously difficult to break into and Microsoft only managed it by making a loss for a very long time, but Google just didn't put in anywhere near that amount of effort, and just gave up pretty much as soon as it launched.
  - ethbr1 2mo ago
    Google, culturally, seems very tone-deaf to market signals. Granted: historically they have often been the smartest person in the room (collectively speaking) But a consequence of this is that an organization (a) doesn't develop pre-release "listening to user needs" skills & (b) can't post-release pivot in response to user feedback. Microsoft and Apple do much better jobs at both. This works as long as Google releases exactly what users need the first time (e.g. original Google search or Gmail), but flounders when opinionated, artistic product design with long-term vision is needed (Reader, YouTube, Stadia) or when people outside Google have better ideas (Chrome, GCP, messengers, Docs/Drive, AI dev harnesses). At this point, I've decided it's less about revenue (the common finger point) and more about organizational prioritization and decision-making. It's just not in Google's DNA. Nothing short of a Bezos-style API memo is going to change it... and Pichai doesn't seem like he's willing/able to rock the boat that much.
    - titzer 2mo ago
      Google's problem is that, fundamentally, they hate end users. They do not want to hear feedback from them, they don't want to fix their bugs. They don't want to hear your thoughts and they actually don't value feedback. They don't want to support devices or older versions. They have no idea what LTS even means. Google pretends to be data driven. What that means is that Google would rather creepily spy on you using all kinds of underhanded means that they invented themselves, tell itself it cares about privacy because it doesn't "sell" that raw data to third parties, and then mine said data for the only signals that matter--how they are going to make more money off advertising to you. And god forbid some machine-learning system goes wrong and classifies you as a scammer. If they think you're a scammer, you're dead to them, and they will ghost you without a second thought, with no recourse on your part. Google thinks anything below a billion users is not worth even pursuing. When I worked there it was always about 10X and moonshots and more magic moments. There was a mantra "focus on the user and all else will follow". The users who matter are advertisers. So they did that, and advertisers keep forking over their cash. End users do not fork over cash, so screw them. Leeches.

alightsoul 2mo ago

As a result many people in developing countries were driven towards social media like instagram and TikTok where they get their news. And now they're addicted to them.

dannyobrien 2mo ago
At the time, I was working at the Committee to Protect Journalists with dissident bloggers working in Syria, Egypt, UAE, Turkey, etc. We had a group of them come to the US to talk to the big tech companies about the issues they were struggling with: fake takedowns, language support, local censorship, and so on. I remember distinctly as we worked on the agenda for the meeting with Google that Google Reader being shut down was the first complaint any of us mentioned. We laughed, but it was serious.

timmg 2mo ago

As someone who was a big fan of Reader and worked at Google at the time (not on G+): I never understood why they didn’t try to put Reader into G+. Like you could imagine getting your RSS feed in your G+ stream. If you didn’t want any social stuff you could just use it as a reader. But it would also give you an easy way to share stuff from your feed. And it might have been useful for those providing RSS feeds to interact more with their readers (if they chose to.) I think it would have been an interesting way to bootstrap things.

glenstein 2mo ago
Exactly. Reader was maturing into a proto social network in its own right (I started commenting on articles with friends in it in college right before it started getting deprecated) and finding the organic activity and rolling with it and thinking in terms of honoring the core users could have been a very good strategy. Google Plus could have worked imo and the path to success would have involved smart stewardship of reader.
fiddlerwoaroof 2mo ago
Google Buzz also seemed like a better path for Google to have a "social network" than what they tried to do with G+: Post short twitter-like things from various Google properties and have your friends posts show up in the same place. Between Buzz, Reader and gmail chat, Google had a fairly solid lineup of social products that they killed one way or another to boost G+.
- smeej 2mo ago
  I had a cohort of friends from grad school that used Buzz like crazy. We tried Google+, but it just wasn't as useful. This would have been 2008-2010. We also really wanted to use Google Wave, but couldn't get enough invitations to go around. It was like nobody at Google figured out that the only reason invitations worked for Gmail was because Gmail was interoperable with email. Wave didn't interoperate with anything. Either your friends were on it and you could use it, or they weren't and you couldn't. 3-4 invitations after a couple months just wasn't enough of a social effect to make it useful like it had been for Gmail.

pronik 2mo ago

Probably Google's biggest failure ever was to recognize they've already had a social network: Gmail.

jonas21 2mo ago
They tried to develop Gmail into a social network in 2010 with Google Buzz [1]. It received a lot of backlash from people who did not want their email to be a social network. The social network they were not developing well was YouTube. Eventually, they figured it out, and it's estimated YouTube would be worth $550B as a standalone business today [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz [2] https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/youtube-valuation-worth-550-billion-analysts-1236352586/ https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/youtube-valuation-wort...
- PunchyHamster 2mo ago
  They had so many chat services over time it' ridiculous
- bandrami 2mo ago
  Buzz was weird because its main impact was killing another Google product, Orkut
frollogaston 2mo ago
Thank goodness

thataccount 2mo ago

But they totally used Google wave. It was/is the future.

deepsun 2mo ago

Same thing with Google Music, it was perfect. You could stream, or could buy and download mp3, or you could upload your library to it. And the best feature: "I am feeling lucky" -- play a random song you ever liked and keep playing a generated playlist off it. But they killed it due to internal wars with YouTube Music that sucks. There's still nothing like Google Music.

PunchyHamster 2mo ago
They could have Spotify market and just decided not to.
wildzzz 2mo ago
Google Music's song radio feature was really good. It would play similar songs obviously but it exposed you to actually new artists. Meanwhile, spotify basically encourages you to listen to the same stuff all the time, It's like listening to my old CD collection.
abraham 2mo ago
I liked Google Play Music a lot but like any Google product it had a lot of issues. Still way better than YouTube Music.
titzer 2mo ago
Why anyone trusts any streaming music service is absolutely beyond me. It will always get enshittified. I have 65GiB of mp3s I've accumulated from ripping CDs over the years and it used to be a burden to transfer around between machines. Now it easily fits on a thumb drive or microsd and it's easy to copy it onto all of my machines.
- deepsun 2mo ago
  Yes, because you did not need to copy it to all devices. You could stream your own library at any device. Probably you could set up a homelab server and there are tools/apps for streaming it to your own devices, but I havent bothered yet. AND discovery part -- I'm feeling lucky let me listen to new music. If I liked it I bought it. But it's hard to find new music, get out of your bubble.

charcircuit 2mo ago

Do you not realize that Google+ was a newer product and was a strategic priority for Google. Trying to say they are the same so you should be able to apply the same exact criteria is a false equivalence.

abraham 2mo ago

> Google’s obviously fake excuse for killing their RSS reader (declining usage) What's obviously fake about that?

asveikau 2mo ago
It has the vibe of a corporate company doing post hoc justification for a decision they already made. And then the commenter provides a parallel to how willing they were to put money into Google+, i.e. they appear willing to put money into a relatively low usage product when they feel like doing it.
- dredmorbius 2mo ago
  G+ plausibly challenged an existential threat: Facebook. Reader had no such strategic leverage, at least to Google execs' understanding.

al_borland 2mo ago

The mainstream ended up using social media to solve the problem RSS had already solved years earlier… it just had poor marketing. A lot of people do use RSS without realizing it, via podcasts.

Grombobulous 2mo ago
While that may be true, I just don’t believe for a second that RSS had any chance of becoming mainstream outside of techie circles. “Solving the problem” is only one aspect of the reason something becomes popular in the mainstream. I also don’t think the user experience offered by products like TikTok is possible with RSS.
- al_borland 2mo ago
  > I also don’t think the user experience offered by products like TikTok is possible with RSS. I use an app called Feeeed on iOS that scrolls my RSS feeds like a social media feed. If the TikTok reference is more about the never ending algorithmic feed… RSS not doing that is a feature. Of course, I think many among us have been guilty of overloading an RSS reader to the point where it feels like a never ending feed that’s impossible to catch up on.
- TFNA 2mo ago
  In the early millennium, I read a wide variety of blogs on art, humanities, and the religious denomination I was part of. This audience trended non-techie and rather elderly, and yet in blog comments readers would often reveal in passsing that they were largely consuming blogs through RSS. The technology was much more accessible than you assume.
- zdunn 2mo ago
  But RSS did become mainstream; podcasts are a normal part of media now and non-techies seem to have no problem finding and consuming them. They don't have to know about RSS. There's no reason similar UIs can't exist for text based content. Google Reader, and then G+, had a path to becoming "mainstream outside of techie circles" There's nothing special about TikTok's user experience. It uses an algorithm that isn't interested in providing a chronological feed, but I don't see why RSS couldn't be used to build something similar. Again, podcasts use it and it works well for that. The discovery aspect happens outside of the scope of RSS, but once you find things you like, RSS works well for tracking them. The tiktok (or any corporate social media, really) comparison is also a bit odd because they don't need RSS, even if they wanted to provide a chronological feed. The platform hosts the content so it knows when there's new stuff and how to access it to provide to followers. RSS is useful in a decentralized environment where the content could be hosted anywhere and you want to aggregate it

mapt 2mo ago

You mean Google Wave? Or Google Metaverse?

ethagnawl 2mo ago

Well, everybody _did_ use Google+ but nobody _wanted to_. I remember constantly finding myself redirected to it and them doing shady things like automatically connecting you with everyone in your gmail contact list. Also, if memory serves, they chose an avatar for me using Picasa or photos in my gmail or something and it was a photo of me without a shirt on.

frollogaston 2mo ago
They shoved it hard into YouTube. The comment system there is still broken to this day.
- ethagnawl 2mo ago
  I've always found YT's comment features to be worst in class. I never see notifications, there's a way to find your own past comments but it seems purposely hidden and the Android app keyboard / spell checker is really wonky -- like they don't want you to use it to type anything substantive.