I think you and HN in general vastly overstates the gravitas of the Google Reader shutdown. I loved it too but the demise of RSS happened probably more because of people switching to Twitter, Facebook and others as their "aggregator" than by killing off one RSS-Reader.

The only thing which killed Reader was Google management trying to make Google+ popular. Reader was extremely popular (and well outside of IT circles - I still hear from librarians, scientists, policy wonks, etc. who are bitter about Google taking away their information filter. In DC it was common to see other people on metro in the morning with the popular mobile apps open, just like you now see the Facebook blue) and the social network there was quite active until the day Google shut it down and forced everyone into the alpha-quality Google+.

If Google had just added comments or other social elements to their reader instead of killing it they might not have missed the boat.

Instead they killed their popular Reader and made Orkut and Google Plus.

They did have comments and other social elements [0]. It was possible to follow people and share articles with or without adding your own note to it. They had a bookmarklet that allowed you to share any article, even if it didn't have an RSS feed. Their move to Google+ sharing wasn't exactly an improvement though [1].

I never got why people moved to Twitter, it wasn't, and isn't, as good at consuming or sharing content as Reader was. It's just one more step towards the more centralized web we have today, and hopefully we will move back to a more decentralized experience soon.

[0] http://googlereader.blogspot.se/2009/03/google-reader-is-you... [1] http://googlereader.blogspot.se/2011/10/new-in-reader-fresh-...

The same could kinda be said for YouTube. That is, Goggle had a massive and active community, but it needed some tweaks. Instead they build Google Plus and wait for they to come. We know that outcome :)

I think the problem with RSS was - and still is? - is the data it provides. A social network can harvest MUCH more data (due to the endless number of connections between "the nodes.") RSS is too old school.

Put another way, imagine being hired by Google - while FB and Twitter are taking off - and being told you're going to work on a new & improved RSS reader. That would have triggered a mass exit.

Orkut is older than Reader, and was killed off just a year later. I don't think Google ever really bet on it, it was just a 20% time project that grew organically.

I agree. I never used Reader and I think I hardly heard of it before it was shut down.

I wasn’t a heavy RSS user, but had a few bookmarks in Firefox – and the same thing is doable today.

Those services used to also carry RSS, but they silently removed them not long after Google Reader shut down. That might be unrelated, but still.

Not true at all. Alternatives were already available when Google Reader(GR) closed, i.e. July 2013. Inoreader, which was feature-complete in regards to GR, was launched a month after the announcement in March. That's why Feedly hogged most of the momentum as it was released in 2008 already.

I would say Google Reader's discontinuation actually increased the popularity of RSS. The protocol was big news for a few weeks, and it sparked a lot of new services which made news themselves.

I don't know whether feeds usage was growing but it was not comparable to social media. At that time papers were increasingly adding paywalls and didn't show any signs of embracing feeds any further.

Op's example is a textbook example of what happened to me. I used to have a lot of RSS feeds in Google Reader, when it closed I never moved anywhere else because at the time there wasn't an obvious alternative.

Why not just an RSS aggregator program / app? Like those which preceded and continued after Google Reader. They're no more difficult to use, you just add feeds and the program does the rest. And no login required.

It seems odd to me to take a federated protocol, centralise it in a proprietary system and then shrug and forget RSS when that goes away.

I was on Akgregator for years, then Bamboo in Firefox, now on QuiteRSS now that Quantum has killed Bamboo. All using the same imported OPML file of feeds.

> Why not just <overly simple thing>

Which self hosted RSS aggregator contains an easy to deploy, backup, and maintain ecosystem (easier than Dokuwiki), an Android and iPhone app, that all work synchronized together...

It's overly complicated to set up and maintain the infrastructure needed for most people. Time costs a lot.

Feedly is fantastic. Coupled with Reeder on iOS it more than replaces.

I'm curious about your comment. Why don't you use Feedly by itself? Why/how do you combine Feedly with Reeder?

Feedly's mobile app has pretty bad UX (or at least that's been my experience every time I try installing it on Android).

For example, in the article list view, there's a single basically-identical swipe left/right gesture to...

  * mark single article as read
  * mark single article as unread
  * mark all articles on page as read
  * mark all articles on page as unread

The difference between marking a single article and marking all articles seems to be based on how far you've swiped, but if (for example) you don't release your swipe and keep moving your finger further after it's marked all as read, it suddenly does the opposite and marks all articles as unread. The direction of the swipe (left or right) doesn't seem to control whether you're marking read/unread -- it's (in my experience) been completely arbitrary what it decides to do, regardless of swipe direction. It's ridiculous how painful it is, and it's basically been this way for as long as I can remember.

The app has really poor bulk management of articles, so I just turn to other apps. Currently I'm using News+, which has superior bulk management capabilities... but it hasn't been updated in forever (and is buggy in other ways).

Reeder works with multiple backend providers, Feedly being one of them. I do the same, have had a great experience.

Reeder's app feels less heavy than the feedly equivalent. That said, it's what you feel familiar with! I can parse 200-300 posts in a 20-30 min commute and i think the ux helps focus my attention.

Google Reader wasn't just an RSS client, it was social. you could subscribe to your friends feeds, see what they were interested in etc.

Google Reader was a social network around RSS

(I also think there was in platform commenting too?)

It didn’t had a comment system, but you could share an article with a comment attached to it.

Google shutting down Reader 'killed' RSS and made people move to Twitter? You might want to look outside the cage a bit, the world is a lot bigger. Neither Google Reader nor Twitter 'killed' RSS (a syndication protocol, not a hosted service).

I never used Google Reader nor Twitter but RSS has seen plenty of use here, from following commits to projects to simply following news sources. I currently use the News reader [1] for Nextcloud, sometimes in combination with one of the Android apps compatible with the former. Works fine, no Google nor Twitter needed, no spurious censorship, no centralised data mining.

[1] https://github.com/nextcloud/news

Interesting what would happen if Google were to bring back reader? (given that google+ has flopped completely, they might want to get some following back)

There are numerous alternatives to Reader, and a lot of people are using them.