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Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

358 points ofalkaed | 5 comments | 11 Oct 25 22:16 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

Just curious and who knows, maybe someone will adopt it or develop something new based on its ideas.
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bxparks ◴[11 Oct 25 23:45 UTC] No.45553791[source]▶
A lot of things on https://killedbygoogle.com/ . I used to use 30-40 Google products and services. I'm down to 3-4.

Google Picasa: Everything local, so fast, so good. I'm never going to give my photos to G Photos.

Google Hangouts: Can't keep track of all the Google chat apps. I use Signal now.

Google G Suite Legacy: It was supposed to be free forever. They killed it, tried to make me pay. I migrated out of Google.

Google Play Music: I had uploaded thousands of MP3 files there. They killed it. I won't waste my time uploading again.

Google Finance: Tracked my stocks and funds there. Then they killed it. Won't trust them with my data again.

Google NFC Wallet: They killed it. Then Apple launched the same thing, and took over.

Google Chromecast Audio: It did one thing, which is all I needed. Sold mine as soon as they announced they were killing it.

Google Chromecast: Wait, they killed Chromecast? I did not know that until I started writing this..

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brandonb927 ◴[12 Oct 25 00:50 UTC] No.45554121[source]▶
Google Reader: I will forever be salty about how Google killed something that likely required very little maintenance in the long run. It could have stayed exactly the same for a decade and I wouldn't have cared because I use an RSS reader exactly the same way I do that I did back in 2015.
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1. ta12653421 ◴[12 Oct 25 19:00 UTC] No.45560793[source]▶
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.

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2. starkparker ◴[12 Oct 25 22:04 UTC] No.45562383[source]▶
> 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.

3. janwl ◴[12 Oct 25 22:25 UTC] No.45562583[source]▶
There were a few copycats, but they 1) weren't as good (mostly because they wanted to do more than google reader!) and 2) they weren't free.
4. stevage ◴[13 Oct 25 00:33 UTC] No.45563490[source]▶
They did, Feedly.
5. noirscape ◴[13 Oct 25 12:04 UTC] No.45567411[source]▶
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.