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Comment by abtinf | Hacker News Reader

Having worked at a giant company, I know there are many competing motivations, teams, and personalities involved - companies are not uniform entities.

Still...

Google Reader did more to destroy my perception of Google's reputation than everything else evil they've ever done. Conspiracy to suppress wages for tech workers, James Damore, the Snowden revelations - all of those bugged me, but not like Reader.

They killed Reader, I suspect to support Plus, just as the walled gardens of the social networks turned into iron curtains, destroying the only viable alternative decentralized content distribution mechanism. And now we get to live in that world.

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Other than my own list of unread bookmarks, Google Readers signal to noise ratio (as a platform) was second to none. The feeds I followed would post 95% worthwhile content. A blog post is like a dinner speech, don't want to miss it. In social media the dinner speech is also available, only sandwiched somewhere between all the small talk and pleasantries. I never found a replacement, and quite a few people I followed cut down on blogging.

Feedly still works. I wouldn't be able to follow as many blogs as I do without it.

Their pricing and paid features scare me, because it's clearly intended for professional news gatherers, which means I'm not their actual customer.

https://bazqux.com/

That's the closest I've found to the cleanliness and speed of Google Reader, with additional features

In terms of tech evilness, those aren't really comparable, they're more political.

Reader's shutdown, after monopolizing neAly RSS tech and in order to push their own flavor of the year (Plus), was a classic tech evil

The other evil that Google is perpetrating is AMP. Reader followed an "embrace and extinguish." AMP is a full on "embrace, extend, and extinguish."

Did ex-Microsoft people join the Google Plus team?

EWh. There are still RSS alternatives and at least most sites (if by no means all) still have RSS feeds.

Now, you might argue that "But Google Reader was the de facto standard and mainstream audiences didn't know to just use something else."

However, unless they were reading RSS in the background through a portal like Yahoo!, mainstream audiences weren't using RSS long before Google Reader was killed (if ever).

Explicit use of RSS through RSS readers was always primarily the province of journalists, analysts, researchers, and various other folks who wanted relatively unfiltered from-the-source on specific topics.

It also didn't help that individual blog content has tended to migrate to publishing platforms in general. I still write a lot but publish on my "personal" blog relatively seldom these days because visibility is so much higher elsewhere.

There were a lot of Google Reader users that didn't know anything about the details of RSS: they already had an account at the time because they were using Gmail, and they'd automatically see "shared" stories feeds they could subscribe from friends/contacts that were also Gmail users, and from those social feeds they'd see articles from other feeds they could subscribe directly. All without knowing anything about RSS or how to find an RSS feed on a webpage they visited.

Google Reader nailed the social experience around RSS, and there definitely was a high point where RSS feeds were used by a lot of people on Google Reader that didn't understand and didn't need to understand RSS feeds to take advantage of them. It was just that weird news app "next" to Gmail on their browser tabs.

At least that was my anecdotal observation. A lot of college friends that I tried to convince to use RSS for ages before suddenly used RSS because it was already lit up on their Gmail account and they were seeing the stuff I was sharing at the very least.

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