
Stop Whining About Google Reader - emin_gun_sirer
http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/03/17/google-reader/
======
georgemcbay
I think he is vastly underestimating the amount of work required to make a
true Google Reader replacement. Reader was a lot more than just an RSS reader,
and much more than just the front-end bits. Reading this post makes me wonder
if he ever even used it or had much direct interaction with the underlying
feed API and all that it offers (historical feed data, etc).

Re-read this blog post with every mention of "Google Reader" replaced with
"Google Search" to get an idea of how ridiculous a notion it is that we should
just shut up and make our own in a couple of months. Granted, the scale isn't
_quite_ the same. Google Reader is not as difficult to replace as Google
Search would be, but it is far more difficult than he thinks.

Having said all of this, it is absolutely Google's call if it wants to keep
Reader going or not, they don't owe me anything when it comes to Reader or any
of their other services that I don't pay for, but OTOH shutting down Reader
does mean I'm going to think twice (or four times) about adopting any future
Google service. They've now established quite a pattern of killing off things
I've grown to depend on, and they are free to do that, but I'm free to avoid
their services for fear of being burned again.

~~~
emin_gun_sirer
I was indeed a Reader user, but by no means a power-user, so I could very well
be unaware of some difficult-to-duplicate parts of Reader that are hidden
under the covers. Can you let me know what I could be missing?

~~~
TillE
> historical feed data

Google caches the entire history of an RSS feed from the moment it entered
their database. This is in many cases unique, irreplaceable data that's going
to have to be systematically extracted over the next few months, because I
seriously doubt Google will release the entire data dump.

~~~
emin_gun_sirer
Thanks, I appreciate this.

In your estimate, what percentage of Reader users have, or will, donate to the
Internet Archive to perform this archival task?

At what percentage level would it be wrong to call Reader users "entitled",
given that the IA folks were hurting for disk space while these complainers
chose to ignore its pleas?

~~~
samastur
At what point will you stop behaving like an asshole?

Not everyone who complains knows about IA or should necessarily care about it.
We are not all the same person with same needs and things we miss from reader
may not be the same, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a true loss/problem
for each that is not easy to replace (I tried and none of the alternatives
come close which is why I WILL write my own).

~~~
emin_gun_sirer
That kind of language will bring the discussion to an end.

------
bonzoesc
> A real hacker would not whine about missing code. Hackers see missing code
> as an opportunity to build. Hackers like to build.

Fuck you and fuck your "no true Scotsman" bullshit. Who appointed you to be
king of hackers?

~~~
andrewmunsell
Yeah, I have to kind of agree here... Just because someone is considered a
"hacker" doesn't mean he or she can't use someone else's product instead of
building their own. Not everyone has time to build their own RSS parser and
reading interface.

It's kind of like taking away a mechanic's car--they'd still be annoyed you
took it away. Just because someone _can_ build something (and maybe not quite
to the extent of an entire multi-billion company's skill and attention),
doesn't mean they should waste time doing so. If you think you can do better,
go for it, but in most cases it's better to use what's out there.

~~~
shmago
And what is a "hacker" to begin with? I believe he meant the hacker which is
defined here <http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html>, and not that
you should invent the wheel avoiding other products (no problem should ever
have to be solved twice), on the contrary, you should fill in the gaps when
it's possible (the world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be
solved). That's the true hacker attitude, not whining.

------
derefr
I'm not concerned about finding another RSS reader, or about the impact on
"RSS as a standard." Mostly, I'm concerned that blogs I enjoy which are "at
the margin" of traffic profitability will be killed when at least some of
their subscription base stop following them on Reader, and then never start
following anywhere else.

Ask any company who makes money from an email list what would happen if
everyone suddenly became unsubscribed and they had to just sit and hope they
would all subscribe again. Listen for the wails :)

~~~
maigret
In this case, the blog should be where the readers have migrated - G+, FB,
Twitter, etc. If they were on the limit, it is probably because they couldn't
capture an audience big enough anyway.

I'm concerned about the standard. Because having all information circulating
through walled gardens is bad. My opinion is that the root cause is not that
not enough people used GReader (you didn't wrote that, but others did), but
rather that Google had no (good enough) revenue model with RSS.

If a sustainable and easy to use pay model finally emerges, then open
standards would keep those different sources syndicated. Because syndication
is not something people will give up soon, at the opposite.

------
shared4you
> they're attached to their Twitter feed but dontcha-know-it's-just-not-the-
> same thing as Google Reader

I need to have a Twitter account to follow someone's feed. But I don't need to
open account anywhere to subscribe to an RSS feed. The blog owner doesn't know
who the subscribers to his RSS feed are. RSS anonymous and private. That is
the difference. Twitter is like centralized VCS. RSS is like distributed VCS.

Ironically, this is also the reason why Google shutdown GR - they want
everyone to "follow" others on Google+. So that all your posts are hidden in
some megacorp's servers, creating a "lock-in" situation.

~~~
emin_gun_sirer
There is some confusion here between RSS and Reader. RSS isn't being canceled.
Anyone can download any feed any time they like.

You did need a Google account to use Reader, which made it not so anonymous
and not so private.

Once again, RSS != Google Reader. They are not even the same type.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
I didn't use the Google Reader web client. I'm not even sad to see it go, I
think the UI is really bad. Yet, I use the Google Reader _service_ all day,
through RSS clients on several platforms (none of which made by Google). I use
the Google Reader _service_ to store my subscriptions and allow for syncing of
my read items, starred items, etc. That's what I'll need to find a replacement
for: a RSS service that interfaces with all the RSS clients that I know and
love.

------
michaelwww
Broad generalizations, harsh judgements about people with nothing to back them
up, wise guy pretensions, a professor talking the cynical tough talk. I prefer
Maddox but he didn't write about Google Reader. He does write about getting
banned from Apple Stores.

------
Samuel_Michon
Just because there will be replacements for most of Google Reader's
functionality, that doesn't make sunsetting GR with 3 months notice any less
of a dick move.

 _"There have been far too many HN articles on how evil Google is for
canceling a free service, how this product cancellation is a symbol, how
Google should never have given anything to anyone if they were going to cancel
it later."_

If a large company starts giving away a service that one would normally expect
to pay for, and if it puts its marketing muscle into getting everyone to use
the service instead of alternatives, it has responsibility towards those users
for quite some time to come, having killed the market for others.

Now dozens of developers of RSS clients have to scramble to replace the GR
backend that everyone is using. For example, Aaronbretthorst sent out an email
today about the client he's working on:

"To be honest, I never intended to announce my project this week. I started
working on Viafeeds on February 11th, and expected that I'd have at least six
months to get it working and well-polished before Google shut down Reader.
Unfortunately, things didn't work out the way I expected, and I've been forced
to accelerate my timetable. This is due, in no small part, to the fact that I
was an avid Reader user, and want to make sure that I have a product at least
as good to use on my iPhone, iPad and desktop before it shuts down on July
1st."

~~~
Kylekramer
I really don't get this idea that Google owes people something cause they gave
it away from free. Google never said it was staying around for any amount of
time. The API wasn't even public. This "responsibility" is an entirely made up
concept. At no point did Google say "Come one and all, build on our backend!".

If someone was leeching off my unsecured wifi and came to depend it, I'd laugh
in their face if they complained when I put a password on it. I could
understand people getting mad if they jacked prices after shutting out
competition, but saying they have to maintain a product at their own cost for
third parties who gave them nothing but more work?

~~~
Samuel_Michon
_"If someone was leeching off my unsecured wifi and came to depend it, I'd
laugh in their face if they complained when I put a password on it."_

If you knew that your entire town had switched from dialup to using your
unsecured wifi, and they installed dozens of extenders all over town at their
own expense, and you knew about that but allowed it for years, and then you
suddenly pull the plug, then yes, that'd be a dick move.

 _"I could understand people getting mad if they jacked prices after shutting
out competition"_

I would've been absolutely fine with that and I think many GR users would've
been happy to pay.

------
thebigshane
The author appears to be playing along as if this is not satire, but I am
pretty sure it is.

Here is my case for calling it satire:

It starts off with caricatures...

    
    
      every single one of these people do indeed have Twitter
      profiles, and they are entrepreneurs also, and they're 
      thinking about their next pivot, and they certainly have 
      an opinion on NodeJS versus Clojure even though they've 
      never gone past the tutorial on either platform [...]
    

Stating the obvious

    
    
      the only thing in between a hacker who misses Reader and a working 
      Reader implementation past-June is... nothing
    

Hyperbole...

    
    
      Reader's cancellation will have absolutely no impact on RSS. 
      Reader isn't RSS. It isn't anything but a consumer, one of many, 
      of the RSS standard.
    
      whoever is in possession of your RSS feeds probably knows
      you more intimately than Target, which supposedly knows 
      when a woman is pregnant before her father. It's an 
      intimate relationship, based on trust.
    
    

But I didn't really become convinced it was satire until this line...

    
    
       Entitlement without effort is like representation without taxation.
    

So, am I the only one who sees this as satire? A subtle poke at Hacker News
for taking itself too seriously? Or am I the guy who mistakenly laughs "Ha!
Yea that would be crazy, right?" even though the other guy was totally
serious?

~~~
emin_gun_sirer
Here's some straight-up satire:

    
    
      Only a relatively small fraction of the population, mostly
      highly intelligent, and well informed, curious individuals
      used Reader.
    

Source: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5391119>

It's Lake Wobegon and all you need to enter is a Reader account and some
outrage.

~~~
thebigshane
So give it me straight: not satire?

You wrote a post to HN about how those who are complaining about Google Reader
(a group you admit is not all programmers) should stop complaining about
Google Reader's shutdown because these people could just whip up their own
alternative? And you see no other facet of this situation that is worthy of
being upset about?

You very successfully just trolled HN. And that wasn't even your intention?

~~~
emin_gun_sirer
My post ends on this note:

    
    
      Wouldn't it be much better to channel all this energy
      towards something more productive? Like, say, writing a
      few thousand lines of Rails or Django or Node JS or
      Clojure or whatever code you like to implement a
      replacement, either from scratch, or by contributing to 
      an existing OSS project. It's a big world out there, we
      have not "entered a darker timeline in the history of 
      the net," and it's always time to make it better, not 
      demand that someone else do that for you.
    

If that perspective sounds like trolling to anyone, they can just click on any
of the other submissions and discuss the relative merits of the Google Reader
population over ordinary people.

------
Ensorceled
I like how a company that is actually competing in this space, with an
existing, operating product, has posted a blog article[1] essentially asking
for their new, fresh from Google Reader, users to help prioritizing the
missing features and this _hacker_ says just build your own, as if it's a
couple of hours or something.

Instead of writing this, he should have made a Google Reader clone and got
rich this weekend.

[1] <http://blog.feedly.com/>

------
hlfcoding
The point of a programmer is to save time by writing as little code as
possible. You contribute to an existing project that's OSS, not roll your own
bug-ridden p-o-s in the framework / language-of-the-year. You shouldn't be
presumptive about 'hacker's and about Reader's users, especially when you're
not heavily acquainted with the product yourself and its usefulness as a
learning / info-gathering aid. Next time, don't write an article about a
subject you don't know enough about, when you can just go hack yourself.

~~~
emin_gun_sirer
Agreed, contributing to OSS is much better than rolling one's own from
scratch. From the vehemence of the "bring-back-Reader" posts, I assumed that
there were absolutely no OSS projects that were suitable, and wrote the post
for the worst case, building from scratch. But contributing to an existing
project would clearly be a better idea. And if all these Reader users could
pool their efforts constructively, the sky is the limit.

------
DonCarlitos
No!! First Wave, now this. It's a question of trust & honest transparency. Why
should anyone trust Google ever again?

~~~
greyfade
Honest transparency? They've announced the move quite clearly, and have even
given a timeline for its shutdown. You can still access your data and export
it through Google Takeout[1].

I don't see what's untrustworthy, dishonest, or non-transparent about this. I
am disappointed they're discontinuing a service I enjoy immensely, but it's
their prerogative - they're not required to continue to offer a service if
it's not in there interests to do so.

[1]: <https://www.google.com/takeout/>

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Google Reader co-creator Chris Wetherell: _“When they replaced sharing with +1
on Google Reader, it was clear that this day was going to come,” he said.
Wetherell, 43, is amazed that Reader has lasted this long. Even before the
project saw the light of the day, Google executives were unsure about the
service and it was through sheer perseverance that it squeaked out into the
market. At one point, the management team threatened to cancel the project
even before it saw the light of the day, if there was a delay._
<http://gigaom.com/2013/03/13/chris-wetherll-google-reader/>

That's like Walmart moving into your small town, pricing its items so low that
no local retailer can compete, watching all the local stores shut down, and
when only Walmart is left they say "Not enough money to be made here, we're
shutting down".

~~~
ok_craig
Which gives the local retailers a chance to come back, right? Or are they all
gone forever?

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Sure, but by that time, most of the citizens will have moved to a town that
has shops. Only the poor and the elderly will stay, because they have nowhere
to go. Sadly, they'll develop all kinds of health problems because they're
forced to eat at fast food restaurants every day.

------
ktf
Seriously, guys. Your favorite RSS reader has been deprecated. Not only is
this _not_ the end of the world, it is something that one-million-percent does
not matter. Let it go!

Worst case scenario: you try a different RSS reader, and it works okay. You
are in no danger of missing that all-important news article or blog post that
all your friends are reading.

I take it back. Worst case scenario: RSS itself implodes, is obliterated from
the face of the earth, and now you have to visit news websites and (manually!)
click the refresh button to ensure that you're not missing that life-or-death
article or blog post.

Wait, hang on -- I take it back. Here's the really-truly worst case scenario:
instead of sitting impatiently with your lips wrapped around the proverbial
firehose, desperately afraid that your content-thirst can never be sated
without Google's help, you go out and _actually create some content of your
own_.

(Or just buy a fucking newspaper. Jeez.)

