Hacker News Reader

Comment by aesthetics1 | Hacker News Reader

I imagine in the coming months (years?) we will see Google transition away from Google+ as a catchall platform, and back to standalone solutions similar to their offerings from the pre-Google+ days.

A bit off-topic:

I think it's the right move for them. Google+ was (and still is) a pretty cool platform. It has a lot of neat features that existing social networks lack. Facebook just somehow holds on to their userbase -- probably due to familiarity and complacency -- and Google just can't disrupt that.

Facebook has turned into a pretty strange place compared to its early years. I don't see much but 'news' posts, spammy pictures/articles, and clickbait ("DOCTORS HATE HIM, CLICK TO SEE WHY!").

Other platforms are much better for connecting with friends and colleagues, but no one is leaving Facebook. Feels like Microsoft's 90's/2000's stranglehold. Personally, I hope to see a Facebook exodus sooner rather than later.

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Can they bring Google Reader back now? I'm still bitter about it being killed to focus on Google+. Now that Google+ is dead in the water it makes the decision to kill Reader even worse.

Why? Reader was in maintenance mode for years, and companies that appeared when it disappeared have gone above and beyond what they offered. See: Feedly.com

Feedly has improved a lot but it still doesn't display feeds as densely as Reader did and I feel a lot slower getting through a lot of feeds. Searching for articles was fantastic on Google Reader, but with Feedly it never works. Maybe I need to pay to enable search? Ultimately search 'just worked' on Google Reader and never works for me on Feedly.

If Reader was in maintenance mode then that's even worse to have killed it. It didn't need new features or major work and had a devoted and loving following. It just needed someone to make sure the lights stayed on.

> it didn't need new features or major work

That was my favorite part about it. It just worked.

Do you use Feedly? Are you in "Title Only" mode? It's pretty dense -- I might be misremembering, but I'm not sure how Google could have been denser.

I was very bitter about Google Reader ending at first, but honestly, Feedly is fantastic and I'm now glad it closed. That said, I don't use the search feature, so perhaps that's not as good as Google's was.

Feedly may have improved it's layout since I last tried it (admittedly it's been over a year). But, of all the companies to come up with what I found to be the best replacement: reader.aol.com

I know... I know. But it's served my basic needs for quite a while now.

My problem with Feedly is UI/UX. Web is.. fine, but the app have really weird interactions and is clunky.

I use Digg Reader. Web is awesome, love the simplicity, the app need some love but is way more better than Feddly. The thing I don't like about Digg Reader is the Digg part, I only want my lovely curated RSS feeds.

Also try NewsBlur, Feedreader, The Old Reader and Newsvibe but Digg Reader was the best for my needs.

Feedly's Android app is a mess. I can fiddle with the settings to get it into a usable state, but the default behavior just makes no sense (and it's not good after the tweaking).

The default, so far as I can tell, is to dump every feed together to provide an "all-up" view. That could be okay, but then they layer a terrible card UI on top of it that's completely unintuitive. The top cards are big and generally pixelated (because it zooms in for some inexplicable reason), and it switches to a slightly different view after the first card, again, for no clear reason. I can swipe through the cards and reach the end, where it shows a giant checkmark and the words "Done" and "N reviewed". Reaching that page doesn't actually mean I'm done, though. Nothing is actually marked read until I go back to the top and tap on each them (or use the "mark all read" option). I'm either completely missing the interaction paradigm they intend or they haven't put much thought into what the interaction paradigm actually is. Maybe the devs all use iPhones and the Android client is an afterthought?

Meanwhile their website is generally okay, but I am completely at a loss for how to mark an item as unread once I've opened it. I should probably look for a different feed aggregator.

Have you enabled "Auto Mark as Read" in Settings? You can change the "ALL" View in the Sidemenu.

I am actualy working on a Feedly alternative. That's sorts articles by popularity. And can import Popularty counts from Sites that offer it. I hope the 70k Hacker News Readers on Feedly would like that. My Idea is to make search free and instead offer "Sort by Time" and "Compact View" as a Pro feature. Would anyone here be interested?

No, I apparently don't have that enabled. I could do that, but I'm pretty much ready to move to something else. The Feedly web app is pretty nice, though it has quirks and obvious bugs. But I shouldn't have to change half the settings on the Android app just to make it usable. I can't understand how they built this and never said, "Oh, this is really awkward." It's awkward enough that I pretty much just never use it. I only used the Android app again recently because I got a new phone and decided to give it another try.

Of course, maybe everyone else loves the interaction model and I'm the oddball. That's entirely possible, but regardless I want to find something else at this point. (Trying Digg reader as of last night.)

I use newsblur and it can get really slow, especially in safari.

Hey, I run NewsBlur and I'd love to know why it's slowing down in safari for you. I use Safari myself as my primary browser and NewsBlur's always instantaneous. Are you running any extensions, specifically adblock? Email me: samuel@newsblur.com.

Replied!

(and in retrospect that comment was a lot more negative than I really feel about newsblur, I'm absolutely not looking to switch to something else)

Give AOL Reader a try. Feels very familiar to G Reader and the search functionality is competent enough.

I recommend Bazqux.com. It is similar to Google Reader in many ways, the UI is very familiar as well, and it lets you log in with a Google account if you like.

It is paid-for, although very cheap (and first month free). I ended up buying a life-subscription. I really miss Google Reader as well.

What's obnoxious is that everyone watching from the outside knew all these forced G+ moves were annoying and not welcome. One of the worst outcomes, imo, is the addition of G+ comments on YouTube videos - you end up with comments like "Check this out" in the video's actual comments section. Those comments are completely useless and destroy any sort of conversation, if it's even possible to have one in YT comments.

>What's obnoxious is that everyone watching from the outside knew all these forced G+ moves were annoying and not welcome

What makes you think it was any different from the inside?

Optimism, I suppose.

That's one of the reasons why I stopped using G+. I couldn't figure out how to make a public link on G+ to a YouTube video - without the comment appearing on YouTube. It got to a point where I would look on Vimeo etc to see if they had the video to link to.

Alientube (firefox plugin) might be of interest to you. It shows reddit comments for youtuve videos, which tend to be of slightly better quality (not always though).

Digg Reader is an excellent replacement. It's very similar in execution, but you do need to sign up using a Google, Facebook, or Twitter account.

> Now that Google+ is dead in the water

Why do you say that?

In my experience every single teen I know is on Google+ and not facebook, while the older parents are on facebook.

Some of the teens also have facebook, but none don't have Google+.

This is because of two reasons: 1: Gmail means they all have Google+ accounts almost automatically, and 2: The privacy controls are much better in Google+, and they like that.

> In my experience every single teen I know is on Google+ and not facebook, while the older parents are on facebook.

The only few people I know on Google+ are hardcore google fans who work in tech. Every teen (~15-18) I know is on facebook. And their younger siblings.

Plugin, Facebook Messenger seems to be quite dominant across those age groups too.

I think that they are going to focus on the product Google Newsstand* following the idea of hosted content (Apple News, Facebook instant articles).

*I think they are going to change the name and redesign the product to push forward the adoption.

I actually have really enjoyed the UI for G+. I think it's really a technically excellent platform that has totally failed to execute well on the userbase side.

I absolutely agree. If my memory serves me correctly, it was the first Google app to feature "cards" -- which has obviously made its way to almost every other IP that Google owns. The UI is slick, and it felt very fresh when it debuted.

Your memory is correct. Lots of UI features debuted in Google+ first before hitting other Google properties.

I like the UI for G+, especially for the posts and comments. I don't like the design of the menus though. On a comparative scale, Facebook is ugly and mostly cluttered.

Tying up all Google services together with G+ really put me off the entire platform, and the reversal in some parts may be a bit too late. On the privacy front, I also trust Google a bit more than I trust Facebook.

Perhaps if they allowed it to grow organically rather than trying to shove it down everyone's throats, it may be a different story.

The number of unread Facebook messages I have is not printed on 30% of all the web pages I visit. This is what I find so irritating about Google+, it's everywhere it doesn't need to be. Comparisons to things like Twitter and FB fall flat for this reason.

I'm not excusing this -- it annoys me too -- but you can set up a user style [1] to hide this element.

[1] e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/stylish/

I did that for a while to hide the random “notifications” from people I had never heard about that appeared every other day on google.com. I had to change the custom style so many times because they changed the ids/classes every other week that now I just logged out of my Google account to not see it.

There's a better way now. Click the notifications bell and then in the popup, click on the gear icon - you can check and uncheck boxes to customize which Google products show notifications there.

> The number of unread Facebook messages I have is not printed on 30% of all the web pages I visit.

I've only seen this printed in google search and google plus, not on any other website. Maybe it's an extension of yours?

If it's google search you're complaining about, just log out, or use something like DDG.

> Facebook has turned into a pretty strange place compared to its early years.

Yep. At least among my friends, family, and acquaintances, nobody posts on their wall anymore; it's a wasteland of weird automated posts and the rare half-hearted re-share of a funny story about a cat.

Where the action is in the groups. Groups for friends, patient support groups, guild groups for MMOs, groups about crafts or hobbies. Which is weird, because Facebook isn't actually a very good platform for that sort of thing.

Odd.

That makes sense to me, once the novelty wears off, broadcasting stuff about yourself to everyone you know is not so fun.

About a week ago I decide to look through all my friends' profiles and decide whether Facebook was worth keeping. It made me realise how much of their posts never made it to the wall (or whatever it's called) - bear in mind I only have about 50 people on there with a third are posting nothing. I ended up permanently deleting the account as it's just not worth it.

Apart from the privacy issues, one thing I really despise in Facebook is search. It literally sucks! Unlike Gmail, Facebook is built as a platform where information goes to die a quick death. In groups, as on web forums, a big drag is people asking the same questions again and again. Searching for information even by admins who would like to help people out is cumbersome and difficult due to the way Facebook search works (or doesn't work).

I really long for email discussion threads tied into a web interface with a great search engine behind (like on the * Group platforms from the early web).

Yep. I mean...

We've got newsgroups, hosted blog comments (like disqus), normal blog comments, email lists, usenet, forums (in all their infinite variety from oldschool phpBB to newer offerings like muut), reddit (and similar sites like hnews), google groups, RSS feeds, pingbacks, Stackoverflow and friends, Facebook groups, whatever G+ has, and probably two dozen other related products, clones, variants and crossbreeds I'm not even thinking of.

...all in an attempt to solve the same basic problem, ie, me and some other people I don't really know and who won't be online at the same time would like to chat, post stuff, and maybe find stuff that has been posted before, hopefully with the ability to build a sense of community, low barriers to entry, good usability, and decent filtering, moderating, and admin tools.

I admit, it's a hard problem. But it seems like one in an unusually unsolved state, given the sheer amount of interest and work that's gone into it over the many many years we've been trying. Newsgroups date back to 1979-1980, and looking at the Facebook groups my girlfriend happily participates in, I'm not 100% sure we're any closer to solving the underlying issue. In fact, I'm afraid we might be further. It's weird.

Edit: To be clear, I'm not suggesting we should have—or will ever have—one product that solves every use case. I'm wondering why we don't seem to have a product that really solves even one use case yet. Disqus or Facebook are widely used, but hardly perfect or loved. And then there's stuff like the Wikipedia project, which uses aggressively unfriendly tools for internal discussion and organisation; I have no idea how that ever seemed like a good choice.

> I imagine in the coming months (years?) we will see Google transition away from Google+ as a catchall platform

Way to predict the past. Google's been doing that for years; its been widely noticed since Hangouts was spun out.

> Facebook has turned into a pretty strange place compared to its early years. I don't see much but 'news' posts, spammy pictures/articles, and clickbait ("DOCTORS HATE HIM, CLICK TO SEE WHY!").

I've noticed facebook groups are replacing email forwards to some extent. Some of my friends have joined various groups (fitness, religion, science, etc) and I constantly see them 'sharing' various soundbites, very similar to how I used to get email forwards a decade ago.

I think that's an interesting observation, and I agree.

I feel that the FB posts are just as annoying and unwanted as those FW: FW: FW:... emails of yesteryear.

What are some of the parts of G+ that you particularly like?

Location sharing in realtime is one feature my wife and I still use to keep track of each other. Even if I can't answer the phone (in a meeting, didn't hear it go off) she can take a look and see where I am.

Hangouts is great. Remember that Hangouts launched as a part of Google+ before breaking out.

Ironically, Google+ Photos is also one of my favorites. If you snapped photos on a vacation, you may return to find that Google has stitched them together into a "story" -- including where you were when you took photos, who you were with, etc. It's a nice way to relive the memory.

Circles is also a very simple concept for social network security. It's easy to understand, and I like that Google left it out in the open as something you should definitely do. Facebook has a similar feature, but it's not in their best interest to highlight it.

> Location sharing in realtime is one feature my wife and I still use to keep track of each other...

iOS users can use the "Find My Friends" app for the same purpose. It is a huge time saver (and safety tool) for my wife and I. I don't like calling her when she's driving to ask how far she is from home. One quick look at the app and I know when it's time to get the baby ready for dinner.

And the 'notify me when…' feature is pretty handy for departure times from work or school.

IMO, hangouts is infuriatingly bad. It's way too keystroke-intensive to sign in and sign out of accounts in the iOS app; the Chrome app (plugin?) thing is terrible and the functionality seems to change every other week.

I can't count on them not breaking notifications (such as those for when I receive a message while signed out) in new and exciting ways at random times, and... well, it's just terrible in all kinds of ways.

Looks like location sharing is being moved from Google+ soon too [1], and the auto awesome features in Google+ photos are still available in Google Photos. I use Google+ mainly to share photos, they're already there backed up from my phone, so it's convenient.

[1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/07/20/apk-teardown-google-...

Like a lot of things that wound up clumsily rolled into Google+ location sharing actually existed pre-Google+ in the form of Latitude (which came out of Dodgeball originally).

And as with other things smushed into Google+ at one point or another (see Voice, Reader, Picasa, etc), a lot of users of the old thing will tell you that the old thing was actually superior to what wound up in Google+. In the case of Latitude you could easily share the information in a general way to all of Google Maps which covered a lot more platforms than Google+ itself does.

I find circles very hard to understand compared to Facebook's "friendship model". If I add you as a friend and you accept, you can see my entire profile, and interact with it and I can the same with yours. Very straight forward.

If I add you to a circle, what happens? Are you now part of a known group? Are you just secretly tagged for my convenience? Can you see my profile in full because I added you? Can I see yours?

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