alt Hacker NewsThis is not about stickiness. People complain because they liked the dead product. Do you hear complaints about Google+ dying? Reader wasn't a risk, it was a product people loved that wasn't hard to run. It was just too boring to maintain, didn't support the ad monopoly, and Google dropped it for the next shiny monetizable object.
Anyway, enterprise products are an entirely different ballgame where product support, and the reliability thereof, is measured in decades. The consumer product attitude is just a bad look, but things like the Railway incident are deal killers.
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Reader was dropped in the run up to G+. I believe there was a strategic decision to try and get people to move to G+ and move both personal news and organisational news together.
Google+ couldn't handle spams. Inbox was an excellent execution. one needed the tech that made Gmail, and the other couldn't co-exist with Gmail? we will never truly know.
Well, actually, Google+ circa 2014 was the only social network that had enough of the interesting technical content for me, and I did use it in exactly the way how one would use a decent social network: I posted my content, got comments, and read what other people posted. Some formatting weirdness aside, it was not bad at all, and surely better and quieter, in a good sense, than Facebook back then, and especially than Facebook now.
I still have the Takeout archive of my posts, might be a nice time machine experience to parse that huge JSON and read through it.
So, yes, I do complain.