alt Hacker NewsI still miss Google Reader. I loved the social aspects, where I could repost my favorite articles (with comments about them), and friends could easily subscribe to my feed and comment on my shares. It was a really great social network for sharing blog posts and articles. I credit the demise of Google Reader with a lot of the downfall of the Old Web.
Since then, social sharing platforms are motivated to keep you on their platform. I recently ran an experiment on Facebook, where I posted a link to a content creator's video on YouTube with a lot of my thoughts about it.
I then downloaded the same video from YouTube and uploaded it to Facebook (this particular creator didn't upload his content to Facebook directly), and posted the exact same text content (but this time, hid the link the the source video in a comment).
The post where I downloaded + reposted the video got about 1000x more views than the one where I linked to the source.
On top of that, Facebook will often hide the link to the source video unless I click "Show all comments" (rather than the default "Show most relevant").
Facebook deprioritizes (shadowbans?) posts that link off of their platform, and it starts feeling like a stagnant pond. It's frustrating that it's difficult to share insightful blog posts on that platform, and I'm feeling pretty done with it.
Getting a good RSS reader isn't the part that I'm looking for -- I want the easy social aspect that Google Reader and Google+ gave me.
Replies
I used https://www.theoldreader.com/en/ for a long time before giving up on RSS. At the time it was the most similar to Google's.
Newsblur has a similar social feature
I suppose you could make your own "meta" rss feed today, where you repost interesting articles to this feed, wrapped in your comments.
> Facebook deprioritizes (shadowbans?) posts that link off of their platform
That tells you that's not what it's for. It would be like posting your resume on FB and LinkedIn and then pointing out that FB led to fewer job offers than LinkedIn. Different platforms, different purposes.
Have you tried Feedly or Inoreader or Flipboard or The Old Reader or any other RSS services that popped up after Google Reader was killed?
> I credit the demise of Google Reader with a lot of the downfall of the Old Web.
maybe you have causation wrong. social platforms were so effective they caused downfall of old web, and with it the demise of Google Reader