Comment by ta12653421 a day ago
I never understood why noone built a Copycat (like "bgr" -> "better google reader :-D) There would have been a clear change to fill this vacuum?
The thing is: I guess they didnt see a good way to monetize it (according to their "metrics"), while the product itself had somehow relative high OpEx and being somehow a niche thingy.
> I never understood why noone built a Copycat (like "bgr" -> "better google reader :-D)
like theoldreader and Inoreader, which explicitly copied the columnar interfaces, non-RSS bookmarklet content saving, item favoriting, friend-of-a-friend commenting and quasi-blog social sharing features, and mobile app sync options via APIs? Or NewsBlur, which did all of that _and also_ added user-configurable algorithmic filtering? Or Feedly, which copied Reader's UX but without the social features? or Tiny Tiny RSS and FreshRSS, which copied Reader's UX as self-hosted software?
theoldreader remains the most straightforward hosted ripoff of Google Reader, right down to look and feel, and hasn't changed much in more than a decade. Tiny Tiny is very similar, and similarly unchanging. FreshRSS implemented some non-RSS following features. So did NewsBlur, but as it always has, it still struggles with feed parsing and UI performance.
Inoreader and Feedly both pivoted toward business users and productivity to stay afloat, with the former's ditching of social features leading to another exodus of people who'd switched to it after Google Reader folded.
Killing Reader didn't just kill Reader. It killed the expectation of RSS to be a valid default consumption format of the internet. These days, if you use RSS, it's either relying on some legacy hidden feed feature that hasn't been shuttered yet (lots of Rails and WordPress sites that are like this) or you're explicitly adding RSS to your site as a statement.
Picking up the pieces after Reader was impossible because the entire RSS ecosystem imploded with it. Almost every single news site decided that with killing Reader, they wouldn't bother maintaining their RSS feeds, leaving them basically all "legacy" until they irrevocably break one day and then get shut down for not wanting to get maintained.