Mohammed Taher
Andy BaioThe Verge goes deep on who killed Google Reader, ten years after its demise. I’ve always been furious about this, and somehow, reading this made me even angrier. https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-rss-social
I knew a lot of this story already, except how horribly Google execs treated the Reader team, who built something wonderful and then were forced to constantly defend it and beg for resources, until they were dragged away to work on Google Plus and it was unceremoniously killed.
Matt Round@andybaio I'd have been SO fired if I'd been in that meeting, would've instinctively laughed or raised my eyebrows at that line
Tim (Swast) Sweña
David Wheeler@andybaio I kind of appreciate the clarity here. This condescension is usually implied.
Dan Sugalski@andybaio It's difficult to overstate how much of a mess Google Plus made inside Google.
M. Forester@andybaio I'll have to read the article.
To be honest, I never got the prolonged grieving for Google Reader, although I never used it myself. I've been using a bunch of different feed readers over the years (including Feedly at one time) and RSS never went away or died for me.
Can somebody tell me what exactly made this implementation so very special?
To be honest, I never got the prolonged grieving for Google Reader, although I never used it myself. I've been using a bunch of different feed readers over the years (including Feedly at one time) and RSS never went away or died for me.
Can somebody tell me what exactly made this implementation so very special?
gio@mforester @andybaio "...Reader launched in 2005, right as the blogging era went mainstream; it made a suddenly huge and sprawling web feel small and accessible and helped a generation of news obsessives and super-commenters feel like they weren’t missing anything. It wasn’t Google’s most popular app, not by a long shot, but it was one of its most beloved..."
lia bulaong@andybaio frequently tempted to write a top ten dumbest things decided by tech execs that helped ruined the internet list
rstevens 🐳💨✅@andybaio everyone who has ever run google should go to jail or be thrown in a pit
Jesse@misc we can keep one prison for special cases like this
Rob Cottingham (OLD ACCOUNT)
michael miller jr
Bert@andybaio grrrrrrr. I was so frustrated by the loss of Reader and available options at the time that I abandoned RSS and, like many, went to Twitter. Thankful that @brentsimmons brought back @NetNewsWire !
@andybaio The death of Google Reader remains one of the big eye-opening moments for me about where the digital giants really stood — that for all the rhetoric about empowering people and building an open Internet, they really were just ruthless profit-maximizers like any other. Naive of me to believe any differently... but in retrospect I realize how badly I'd wanted them to be an exception to the rapaciousness of corporate capital.
Jesse@andybaio Wow, yeah, reading this is just as infuriating as when they first killed it. More so, even, since we now know the murder of Google Reader as one of the first big landmarks for the enshittification of the modern internet
Phil Gyford@andybaio Tangentially, I'm always curious who's the champion there for Feedburner, who's ensured it keeps going, even minimally, knowing how many things would break if it stopped. It seems exactly the kind of thing Google would have killed years ago otherwise.
Thomas Vander Wal@philgyford @andybaio This exact thing struck me yesterday as I’m back updating the underlying code on my blog and whole site and noticed my RSS still runs through Feedburner.
Shiny Gyarudos
John Gordon
Simon Hain@andybaio I never used any of the built-in social functionality, and while it sucked for a while, feedly basically serves the same purpose for me every day.
Even me mostly ignoring the "new features" and just using the feed reader stayed the same.
Even me mostly ignoring the "new features" and just using the feed reader stayed the same.
Kartik Agaram@andybaio I too carried the torch for Reader for many years, but seem to have acquired some perspective 10 years later.
Now I'm glad when I see organizations exhibit incompetence. A world of competent organizations that are able to hold on to our attentions in the long term -- such a world is too horrible to contemplate. Probably something like Google Search or Reddit, monetization run rampant.
I'm no longer angry Google killed Reader. I'm angry I let it get into my muscle memory.
brennen@akkartik @andybaio yeah. what i'm angry about isn't reader's demise _per se_, it's the structural role reader played in consolidating so much of the feed ecosystem that the end of a single product could massively damage it.
a lesson we never, collectively, seem to learn despite endless opportunities.
@akkartik @andybaio (it's a good article, and i'm glad i read it, but the lamentations about what reader _could have been_, the ways it could have been more of a totalizing thing, miss the basic point that reader is a microcosm of all the ways entities like google or the social networks it failed to become are an antipattern, a disaster, an unfolding crime.)
kobra@andybaio I'm legitimately going to migrate off of gmail finally because of this article. I had forgotten how much Google destroyed.
Peter OrganisciakGiven how Google treated Reader, I'm glad this is the grudge customers still keep against the company.
Jim Nelson@andybaio Related:
Atom Feed Format Was Born 20 Years Ago
https://www.rssboard.org/news/213/atom-feed-format-born-20-years-ago
suldrew 🚲🏳️🌈@andybaio Just in time to divest Domains
🇦🇶 Placebo Domingo@andybaio thanks for making my blood boil - again. I'm still salty after all these years. Can't believe how out of touch those C-suite fuckers were. 30 million users just weren't enough ffs. Thankfully Feedly has filled that void for me, but it took a while to get used to the UI.
Extinction (our fate)@andybaio Is the source code out there somewhere?
Bill Seitz@andybaio I'm more upset about the chat/messaging debacle. I want the inside story of that.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-of-instability-the-history-of-google-messaging-apps/
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-of-instability-the-history-of-google-messaging-apps/
Ash@andybaio I've been using simplerssreader.com, a clone of what Reader was but I'll never forgive Google for killing it.
Jens Oliver Meiert@andybaio, #GoogleReader was awesome. It did what one needed it for.
(Could we say that given the low info density, flat design superficiality of everything that came later, Reader’s shutdown marked the death of “Web 2.0”?)
I was at Google at the time and recall my own and other Googlers’ disappointment
Perhaps the biggest disappointment though is how everyone seems to have understood the death of Reader as the death of feeds
Feeds aren’t dead, but we lost a decade bringing them to people
Mark Needham@andybaio Google reader was the web for me for so long. Gutted when they shut it down!
tante@andybaio it made me furious to read it. Reader was such an interesting social network
@andybaio Google actually killed Reader Social first. The Reader product limped on for 1-2 years.
I use Feedbin now. Great product.
Hardik PanjwaniYup, don’t be evil died when they chose to chase after FB. The idiots did not realise they had an orthogonal social network in Reader that was much more resilient as finding people to talk world events with in a safe space was a need that was always going to exist. Now some of us are doing it in lemmy and mastadon and kbin.
Lauren Wu (Kayna on TFT)@andybaio @seanhollister I will never forgive Google for shutting down Reader
Paul Pichaureau@andybaio I still feel the sentiment of trahison I felt ten years ago. Reader was simple, modest and yet indispensable for me. 😢
Jinji the Gengar@andybaio To me, the fate of Google Reader, and its subsequent legacy and influence over the Fediverse, exactly epitomise the top half of https://xkcd.com/1497/
leemeade@andybaio @garius
Was using Bloglines at the time Google Reader dropped. Was a huge upgrade . Bloglines was unstable on a good day. Have seen so many programs I love get killed.
Flipboard bought Zite and killed that, promising to incorporate Zite’s discovery engine. Never happened. This new millennium has been an endless crock of shit.
Was using Bloglines at the time Google Reader dropped. Was a huge upgrade . Bloglines was unstable on a good day. Have seen so many programs I love get killed.
Flipboard bought Zite and killed that, promising to incorporate Zite’s discovery engine. Never happened. This new millennium has been an endless crock of shit.
Ink & Wax@andybaio @johnchivall thanks for sharing that. I’ve missed GR everyday since.
TheNewNo2@andybaio I use Feedly since then.
Mandi@andybaio I miss Google Reader. But I was definitely not using it to its full potential.
Kent Brewster
Jason Shellen