I'm always curious how people can still be so upset about Google Reader a decade later, but not a single (popular) RSS reader has popped up and really taken off as a replacement.
Google Reader wasn't really only a RSS reader, it was a social network. You could follow your friends feeds, see what they liked, see their activity, discover new blogs as well as share what you were into. I found so many new blogs that way, it was the main entry into the web for me. It was my homepage and my friends were there too.
Exactly. I get that, supposedly, it wasn’t shut down to make room for other social network features.
But whatever the intent was, they shut down a very effective, useful and popular social network feature and didn’t replace it with any workable equivalent. They just gave that traffic to competitors for no reason. It was pretty boneheaded.
> They just gave that traffic to competitors for no reason.
I always felt that RSS cost Google long-term ad revenue and that was the reason for the closure. It cost websites actual live visitors and these interactions became increasingly important as surveillance capitalism became more nuanced.
That is: how much time you spent on a page, where you hovered your mouse, etc..
It was more important to upsell the benefits of Google Analytics - what it could do, what it could track. To get sites excited about SEO (ie, Google Ads and Google itself) than to cater to the wishes of the end-user (who ultimately does not want to become a product).
When you're building an ad network, you want to get everyone involved. You need active, participating partners so that the network grows and builds on itself. This growth is what brings in larger, long-term ad money. RSS was the opposite of that.
I run a corporate blog. I would love it if Google still ran Reader and offered analytics on RSS use. If they were still running Reader, they would be the only company able to provide good analytics on RSS use. Plus they could essentially run ads on other people’s sites by running ads on Reader. This was just throwing away traffic.
As it stands now, the analytics situation for RSS sucks. You can basically track your server logs and hope the RSS bots for Feedbin, Feedly, Inoreader etc are kind enough to tell you how many subscribers you have. But that says nothing of what posts are actually pulling people in.
Umm, put ads on Reader? Umm, feed their targeting system with valuable info like what kind of articles person X is interested in with a great confidence?
"it wasn’t shut down to make room for other social network features"
The deciding "feature" was that the social networks that were going to replace the RSS/Reader ecosystem would force all users to only publish on the operator's site, wereas with RSS you could get content from any site.
I would expect that Google would have known the consequences of letting a codebase rot, so one could still imagine how it was done deliberately in order to eventually be replaced by Google+/Wave...
Okay, this is the first time in years I understand why Google Reader closing was such a big deal, not having used it myself. It was not just a fancy web RSS client and it had social features.
which is how google really screwed up. They had a dedicated user base with google reader, they should have viewed it as simply a user interface on top of google+. i.e. one user interface on google+ would have been the facebook type clone, another could have been google reader.
Instead they killed reader to try and force people into the facebook clone and failed. Google+, for the users who wanted a facebook like experience, would have been much more valuable with google reader users injecting content into it.
so if, at some point in the future, say, 20 relevant influencers would choose a similarly featured RSS reader, more of us we'd try, and hopefully reach critical mass? built over ActivityPub / Matrix for extra novelty. I live with this fantasy.
There have been several. I liked newsblur for a while, but the magic of reader seemed to be when a friend of a friend shared an article that you would never otherwise have seen.
Simultaneously, blogging as a medium has changed for many economic and cultural reasons so even if reader remained I think the ecosystem would be different.
Someone on HN recently said that the difference ten+ years ago was that people were blogging in the evenings and weekends after their full time position, but now the content economy can provide an income, so we have a lot more processional creators, who IMO, over produce.
"Someone on HN recently said that the difference ten+ years ago was that people were blogging in the evenings and weekends after their full time position, but now the content economy can provide an income, so we have a lot more processional creators, who IMO, over produce."
That is so accurate and highly relatable. I find myself reading blogs from over a decade ago+ simply because the author is really intimate with the content and it feels more personal.
Meanwhile, nowadays everything just feels fake, overcreated and not of much substance. Granted even back then they had the same issues but it was just regularly easier to find organic true spirited content.
A great example of how economics can incentivize degredation of a system: long blog posts that took weeks to prepare were pretty common, blowing up the main portal (and the network effects with it) that work is presented on can be a pretty significant disincentive, giving competing platforms and formats (the medium is the message) an opportunity to capture and keep that attention (...is all you need).
I can't help but think about the Google Reader shutdown "conspiratorially". I think YouTube has similar artifacts:
1. It would be very useful (and very obvious) to have a curated index by topic interface for YouTube videos and channels, but we only get search. And on top of that, the search is suspiciously shitty. I often search for very specific topics on YouTube and seemingly exhaust the results, only to come upon pre-existing videos later that should have come up in the search.
2. YouTube used to have messaging between users, but that was also shut down... I presume the reasoning given to the public for that would be similar to the story given here.
I think The Man has something against curated indexes, communities forming around them, and all the other things that can emerge from such ecosystems, one of them being power.
Yeah. It's the same effect seen with Youtube videos (and amateur videos of a different type, actually). On one hand, production values are a lot higher and there is some very good content out there, but I feel that the overall SNR has gone down as quantity overtakes quality. A lot of content feels like people sensationalizing and acting like an authority on topics they clearly just googled last week
Though when it comes to technical blogs, unfortunately that seems to be what the market wants. For some reason, a significant amount of developers are loathe to ever read official docs or evaluate new technologies themselves, but are quite happy to take as gospel some random, poor, blogspam tutorial. It's an annoying type of learned helplessness. And then there's all the Youtube channels making stretched 30 minute videos about simple articles shared here last week
Though it's not like the good "for the love of it" authors have gone away, it's just that they naturally put less time into promoting their blog/channel
There were and definitely appeared the readers with pretty much equivalent functionality and some were even copying the look and feel straight up. But the main advantage of the reader was that it had almost all the past posts from the feed archived, for the vast number of sites. No company other than Google wanted to pull this off. Another aspect is that people felt Google signaled to the site owners that they do not have to pursue feed support as actively if at all.
Take me for example: I never used Google Reader. I used Google Reader a lot.
Thing is, I never used GR on my desktop, FeedDemon was always a better experience.
But on the go (in that short time it was available) I wanted to have the same feeds and, of course, the same un/read statuses. And Google Reader was a perfect sync service first and good enough RSS reader second.
Sure, there were a lot of attempts at that time, but... Feedly, which was pushed as the best great thing after sliced bread^W^W GR didn't run good on my RAZR (if at all, I think I abandoned it when it started to sat down on the loding splash) and there were no desktop version. Other apps (which names eludes me) were no better, at least for me.
And the most important part is what they lacked the integrated sync what was available to you as a Gmail (sic!) user, so it was some other sync provider, if at all.
So for a short time when there were no king the RSS lost a lot of it's momentum for the consumers of the feeds. Some years later the alternatives matured, but the time of RSS has gone. People moved to podcasts, Twitter and whatever and RSS was no longer even a necessary tech to implement.
Inoreader is probably as good as Google Reader. I have been using it for last 10 years or so. I know people used feedly (I personally didn't like it).
But clearly none of those are as popular as Google reader. Presumably because many switched away from consuming RSS.
That's because RSS as a medium has been supplanted by closed-garden style social media - some people still use RSS, but it's no longer as popular, because how could it be when most of my "feeds" are explicitly closed off to RSS?
I had just started subscribing to RSS feeds when they announced the shutdown. I never bothered again. I'm sure for many people, Reader was their only real foray into RSS.
I wouldn't be surprised if killing Reader played a role in RSS decline.
Shutting down Reader was a monumentally stupid thing to do. Social features aside, I liked that it was a website I could go to and catch up on things no matter if I was at home or at work or elsewhere. The alternatives were things like apps, that didn't have that kind of access, or a self-hosted thing that I didn't want to manage, or some services that I don't think lasted.
All of the alternatives are worse. And imagine if you're dependent on gmail and they shut that down. Reader was like that.
The shutdown of Reader killed RSS. Not the tech, but the ecosystem.
It wasn't that there were no other RSS clients, but Reader was extremely dominant and there was no strong immediate contender with enough reach and quality to carry the crown.
The (IMHO planned) idea was replaced with 'social networks', which would offer total central control and far more monetization potential for the intermediaries/operators.
It just killed my momentum when reader shut down. At that time there was nothing else that came close to reader's functionality on web and mobile. So I just gave up. Never recovered. Lost all my feeds. Nowadays most websites don't even have a feed.
I use Feedbro. It works decently well that I haven't looked for an alternative in a long time. It's great just seeing unread posts in chronological order - no feed algorithm at all. I mainly follow Hackernews, Facebook friends (individually added), and Twitter (via nitter, also individually added).
I had a whole dashboard set up with widgets etc. Completely boneheaded to rugpull powerusers like this. They could have turned it into a myspace/reddit/twitter but instead some clueless MBA just shut it down.
I switched to feedly and it was "good enough" but not really. They eventually engineered it to really close to what reader had. Which is great.
As time went on less and less sites supported RSS so it became less of an issue and I had to switch to other way less efficient ways to read/scan news.
I still use feedly here and there for some of my feeds. I also tried one called old reader (?) and then a few home grown ones and one I wrote. None of them were close to reader.
Before reader remark (probably not spelled correctly) was amazing.
Google search thrived from the third party websites. RSS incentivized and enabled those third-party websites. By killing the reader and RSS, they helped consolidate the web into unsearchable walled gardens like Facebook. If those decision makers still work in Google, that's a reason for continuing Google's downfall.
The decision was probably based on two reasons:
1. They wanted users to discover content using their algorithm as opposed to manual subscriptions to RSS thus depriving users of content Discovery agency.
The article suggest that it was neither. That rather it was an engineering decision: the product did not have staffing to be properly maintained, and rather than staff it up, it was easier to turn it down.
that's backwards - organisational/cultural/management decisions made it be under-staffed, which caused the code to rot, which led to the "oh, it's understaffed and the code rotted, let's just kill it".
I think there's very good reason to look past one blog post, people, come on.
If I am a higher-up executive in Google, I'm not going to much care what the numbers on RSS look like now, it takes less half a brain to understand that Google Reader has at least a CHANCE at chewing into the bottom line hard if it takes off -- even if those chances are slim. I'd kill it quickly as possible. If I can do so early, with little fanfare, even better.
They could be exploiting an undocumented/taboo feature of reality: simply telling people a good story can cause them to believe ("There is no reason at all to assume...") things that are not necessarily true.
I remember bring your parents to work day that's mentioned in the article there. That was a great event! If I recall correctly some parents even traveled all the way from India to attend and some parents sincerely mentioned that it was one of the happiest days of their life.
