@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.
@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.
Companies like Google were once considered actually good, and with some good reason. They produced software that was useful, but also stable -- people lived with win 9x for half a decade and between the OS crashing, wiping out your FAT, requiring a reinstall, and the reinstall being broken junk, people were used to their software being kind of junk. They provided that product free of charge due to ads which were shockingly reasonable and non intrusive compared to the brutal ads on most of the internet (and this was largely pre-adblock, you couldn't just install an extension and get normal internet yet)
It might look naive now, but it was a more optimistic time. It seemed like we were on the verge of a new era -- and we were, just not in the way any of us envisioned.
@sj_zero @strypey @ifixcoinops @joepie91 I’m an old guy who was around the whole time. google reader was launched in 2005. Feedly was launched in 2006. Google went evil and bought doubleclick in 2007. Google Reader was shut down in 2013. It’s 2025. We’ve known about alternatives and reasons for seeking out alternatives for a while now. I’ll cut folks some slack for not absorbing the implications of the doubleclick acquisition right away. But eventually the consequences of ad-based search and a dubious attitude towards privacy became obvious to everyone. Right?!
You'll note I'm not even remotely defending them as they exist today. The only google product I still use regularly is youtube, since they have a lot of creators who don't post anywhere else. I run my own non-google searx instance with a yacy instance for search. It's been a long time I've been trying to be decentralized off of big tech as much as possible in general, and google specifically.
I'm solely explaining why people might have seen things differently back then. Even by 2013 I suspect a lot of people still didn't realize how bad it was to hitch your wagon with Google.
I really like Nextcloud news as an RSS reader. Lets me read the news online from anywhere, but also has a great app on android that syncs to the nextcloud instance.
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@sj_zero
> Even by 2013 I suspect a lot of people still didn't realize how bad it was to hitch your wagon with Google
Also it was possible to be fully aware that things were going wrong at Goggle, and even accept the rot was probably permanent, and still defend pre-2007 projects like Reader. For those who thought the company could be returned to its pre-2007 state, defending such projects was all the more important.