For me, Google Reader was about high volume headline digestion, reading articles without having to follow links, read articles without having to switch between a multitude of publishers’ crappy and varied web UIs. It was about fast and efficient information hoovering from around the world. Reddit is a different animal altogether. Great for what it does but not like a clean RSS tree.

Also, just want to add: Google killed the “discussions” search filter, which let you limit your search results to forums, around the same time, IIRC. Screw Google.

See my response to another comment suggesting HN is a proper replacement:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26582491

What I forgot to mention in that comment was that Google Reader was tied to your Gmail account. The only people who were in "your" network by default were other people on Gmail where Google had somehow determined that you knew each other (presumably whether you were in each other's address book). This is opposite of HN or Reddit, where everyone can sign up and it's basically all strangers in a public popularity contest.

Reddit is hardly a place for people who don't like talking about themselves~

In fact we've probably reached the peak opposite of that with people posting about themselves on /r/nextfuckinglevel