@ifixcoinops @joepie91 I feel like the same description could be applied to a lot of rss readers. I don’t really understand why people miss google reader. So many capable alternatives (that are at least as easy to use). And no stench of google on them!
@jasonw22
> I don’t really understand why people miss google reader
It was a different time. Goggle was still mostly an engineer-run company, and "don't be evil" was still plausible. Reader, like so many of their most innovative apps, began as a 10% time project. It was 100% driven by a desire to support open standards, and make a subscription app with a friendly UX.
@jasonw22 @ifixcoinops @joepie91 Keep in mind that was before Google had a stench. Gmail was still everyone’s favorite new kid on the block solution for email, and “everyone” (bias: college aged at the time) was on it. Killing Reader (and going all in on Plus because Orkut and Buzz were awful and they “needed” to beat Facebook) was a lot of the earliest stench. Reader was the canary in that coal mine.
@jasonw22 @ifixcoinops @joepie91 What Google Reader especially had that none of the current RSS Readers have is Network Effects. Buzz was the intentional “what if we could turn Gmail into a social network” (and was forced into the Gmail UI and sucked and failed) and Reader was the *accidental* one that was beloved and spread by word of mouth. “Oh you use Gmail, too, you should check out Reader, I share a bunch of stuff there.”
@jasonw22 @ifixcoinops @joepie91 It was simple to find your contact list’s shared social feeds. From the social feeds you could easily subscribe to RSS feeds directly (possibly without knowing what RSS feeds are). If you had the right friend group (bias: I was college aged) it was a busy social network with tons of comments from friends and a lot of social cross-pollination of feeds. New friends discovered it easily, even non-technical friends.
@jasonw22 @ifixcoinops @joepie91 That’s why Reader’s shutdown will forever linger for me. Other readers have the same raw features (I love Newsblur today), but Google shutdown one of my favorite digital places to hang out with friends and keep up with the Blogger.com sites they created to not just comment but be able to top post. It was a better social network for a simpler time. There’s not even a fraction of its users on Newsblur or any one of the others.
@joepie91@social.pixie.town at the time it was being able to sync my feeds across devices. they all have that now.
@joepie91 the fact i had a group of friends who actively shared stuff that was interesting, in a way no social media since has managed to replicate
@marlies Hmm, could you elaborate? I've always known RSS readers as being a tool for unidirectionally following things like blogs, rather than as a proactive sharing thing.
@joepie91 you could subscribe to other users and they could share articles from feeds they deemed interesting. And if you liked it you could then easily also subscribe to the feed it came from. This explains it reasonably well: https://www.fastcompany.com/3013598/the-irreplaceable-draw-of-googles-aborted-social-network/
@marlies Thanks, I never knew about this!
@joepie91 it was really great
@joepie91 Being a core google service made it very visible to a lot of people so when it was running, people in general blogged more and engaged with blogs more and talked about subscribing to feeds more. There was nothing about it technically speaking that I needed that nothing else provided, but its death had repercussions on the internet more broadly. I pretty happily switched to Feedly afterwards for as long as I was still actively using it. But nowadays Feedly has gone kinda weirdly procapitalist and is pushing AI pretty much every time I open it so I can't recommend it.
@joepie91 The fact that it didn't say RSS.
Folk used it who'd never heard of RSS, folk who'd normally tune out the moment they encountered an abbreviation like that (which is Most People tbh). Having a big name there made RSS common and understandable the same way that iPods never talked about MP3s and Kindles never talked about EPUB. Someone made something who knew how to market it (apart from, y'know, the part where they killed it).
The actual reader was... like, OK, it was an RSS reader, y'know? It was fine. It worked well enough. Nothing really special about it. The actual utility was that lots of normal, non-techy people used it and knew about it, the magic was in the culture surrounding it.