Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kylekramer | Hacker News Reader

From all the outrage, I'll learn that users will love (or perhaps just grow accustom to) an utterly broken and opaque system as long as it is left around to grow a community. If you used Google Reader's social features before, you impress the hell out of me. I never grokked a single element of it after many years of use. I think Google clearly needed to do something, and integration with G+ is an obvious move. Perhaps the transition could have been smoother, but I cannot really see how the old system was superior in any way except for a very tiny amount of traction.

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I voiced some of my concerns in the other HN submission which I will repeat here:

The old system had flaws but it worked. Firstly, I'm not against G+ integration if it meant both products were improved. However, this change looks to me like forcing a whole lot of Reader users to begrudgingly use G+. Reader's social features were not improved; only removed other than a "share to G+".

Not replacing the following system with an interface into G+ so that you can view and comment on friends' submissions from Reader is annoying. Reader was my social network. Why are they forcing me to go open G+ in a new tab everyday to see if my friends had shared anything? That's the _very_ reason I use a feed aggregator. Google doesn't provide any way to view streams in Reader (to my knowledge. I would really love to be wrong here); the only way is probably to use a third party method with no guarantee to not break every time Google touches the G+ code.

Edit: additionally, when viewing shared items on Reader, Reader tries to get the article or picture in. Now, not only do you have to go to G+, it only gives you a link rather than try to fit the article or picture onto the post. Irritating.

Ways in which the old system was superior:

- You interacted with that subset of your friends (and their friends) that cared enough about reading to use this weird software.

- You could read your hand-selected feeds, share items and read others' shares in the same place. It was social reading. Now the reading and the social aspect are divorced.

Seems like the first complaint is actually an improvement in the new version. You lose the reading focused only culture, but you gain the ability to have even better granularity. You can share stories with your sports buddies, work relevant info with your coworkers, local stuff with people in your area. Before, you were limited to a very niche group. Now, you can share with people who never even heard of Google Reader or RSS. And if you wanted, you could make an old Google Reader power readers circle. I think that is a fair trade off when you are talking about a Google scale application; I think this the main point everyone is missing, you aren't the typical user. If you were, Google Reader would be mentioned in the same breath as Twitter and Facebook.

Divorcing the social aspect from the RSS reader makes sense. Social reading should be a subset of Google+, not a layer on top of Google Reader. Google should improve the reading articles aspect of Google+ (Sparks or whatever seemed DOA), yes, but the overarching concept is very sound.

also

* you could view the shared items and their comments in the same interface.

> how the old system was superior in any way

Not sure how G+ handle this, but when multiple people share the same article, it will often show only once in Shared Items.

Agreed. I've used Reader for years and I out of the 500+ people I'm usually connected to on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+, I think all of 10 were on Reader. Just not enough to make sharing there worthwhile.

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