>BREAKING: In a surprise belated April Fool's joke, Google revives Reader, according to former CEO Eric Schmidt, "just to fuck with everyone who spent money developing a shitty alternative."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5976363

This whole Old Reader debacle is just absurd to me. According to this blog post[0], life for the developers has become "hell in every possible aspect we could imagine" as a result of all the users they've gotten since Google Reader shut down. But this makes no sense - why wouldn't you just start charging for access so that you can hire more people to run the site, and so that you don't get overwhelmed with more users than you can handle?

0: http://blog.theoldreader.com/post/56798895350/desperate-time...

They addressed that, if obliquely: "not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur". It sounds like they didn't want to turn it into a job.

Probably should have closed registrations when Google announced the impending death of Reader, then.