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A comment on It’s Time to Get Back to RSS. Parent comment

Re:It’s Time to Get Back to RSS by nl on Sunday May 17, 2020 @08:13PM (#23216789)
Google says they killed Reader because of declining usage[1], and there was little reason to doubt that at the time. It's very true that people were switching to mobile consumption and no longer reading lots of news all at once.

I was a heavy user of Reader (and did huge amounts of work on RSS/Atom/etc), and I agreed with this assessment at the time.

More and more publishers were just putting headlines in RSS, so you had to click through anyway, and commercial blog sites were publishing a much larger volume of content, most of which I ignored. But I didn't want to unsubscribe, because occasionally there was something good.

Given that, I was finding much better content through aggregators like HN or via Twitter/FB.

Maybe they could have iterated and built something different, but what they had really wasn't useful.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2013/06/why-google-reader-got-the-ax/

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:It’s Time to Get Back to RSS by tannerbrockwell on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @12:33PM (#23236851)
"In December 2007, Reader linked up with Google Talk (the chat feature in Gmail) to display shared streams from friends. Within the context of feed reading, it fomented something of a Neolithic Revolution. Foragers, hitherto gathering headlines on a crude and solitary basis, became farmers, cultivating streams of information for their neighbors. Sharing increased 25% overnight." [1]

[1]: https://www.buzzfeed.com/robf4/googles-lost-social-network

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:It’s Time to Get Back to RSS by nl on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @10:07AM (#23246915)
What they didn't point out there was that feature was a disaster for many users.

There was no separation of the chat friends and the people that you followed.

I've still got random people in my address books from that debacle.

[ Parent | on HN ]