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Comment by dimator | Hacker News Reader

I realize google reader was a popular app, especially among the hn crowd. But there's been how many years since reader? Why hasn't anyone duplicated exactly the reader experience?

The truth is that you miss the world in which google reader could exist. Free, unfettered, unabridged access to full length articles in a highly consumable format is not a thing that most publishers are behind now. They want your eyes on their ux and their ads.

It's a bit like saying you miss street fighter 2 cabinets. Ok but, there are no arcades left.

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https://theoldreader.com

Excellent. But what Google took away was the culture of blog-RSSing.

It gave an enormous advantage to Facebook and Instagram. Which are competitors to Google. What a bad move from Google.

Google built Chrome and then AMP. I assume, Reader fell short where Chrome excelled, and hence the Google axe.

Reader was always a pet project by a few engineers who worked on it in their spare time.

When they moved on, nobody else wanted to take on support in their free time, and no department wanted to pay someone full-time to work on it, so it was killed.

AMP was designed to reduce publisher's ad revenue if they dared to use something else than AdSense. It was never about a reader.

It kept archives of defunct blogs. When Reader went away, they just deleted it all. Also, it's less useful for a smaller site to have social sharing features when we used to have a Google-sized network of readers.

Defunct blogs create no ad revenue stream.

Why not? I mean if there is readership interested in that content, nothing wrong with using the ad impression. Text storage requirements are insignificant

Inoreader - https://www.inoreader.com/

RSS still exists, you know!

I use TT-RSS (selfhosted) and it gives me everything I used GReader for. GReader closing was the best thing to happen to the RSS ecosystem as it lead to an explosion of new tools, most still up today.

I don’t think GReader led to a closing of feeds. It was simply a thing already happening. And even today the vast majority of sites still offer RSS feeds, I can’t even remember the last time I wanted to follow something, and it didn’t have a feed available.

> you miss the world in which google reader could exist

But what you're not getting is that Google Reader helped make that world. Deleting the largest RSS reader app and replacing it with proprietary news feeds damaged the open web.

There was a social component to reader that was very similar in ways to how people share news on Facebook. It was one of googles only solid social graphs. That they wasted that was a real misstep.

I use feedly. The UI is closest to what I liked about reader.

> Why hasn't anyone duplicated exactly the reader experience?

Huh? I use a self-hosted CommaFeed instance and it still works great.

Feedly replicated it when reader stopped.

Sad times we live in

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