You skipped the first part, where Google Reader drove out most of the rest of the rss ecosystem, replacing it with something more centralized around Google. Then killed it.

The worst of both worlds.

Microsoft may have popularized the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish modus operandi, but Google loves that play too.

Honestly, I don’t understand how anyone can trust them.

It really only seems like a matter of time until they have stabbed every single one of their customers in the back.

I wonder if that strategy is an unavoidable modus operandi, if so much of your management / work force motivation is derived from increasing the stock price.

...and at least consumers in that are not the customers, but the product...

The same strategy was pursued with Android. It was open-source, but Google set up the Open Handset Alliance with OEMs in 2007 and one of the membership stipulations were that OEMs could not create competing OSes based on forks of the open source code.

Over time, more and more functionality became linked to Google Play Services, which was not open source. The logical result of this was that OEMs simply went with the Google-approved proprietary flavour of Android.

How Samsung stay on while selling Tizen OS?

Tizen is a Linux foundation project, it's not an Android fork. In any case, Samsung can always arrange for preferential treatment as they are the flagship OEM.

I don't think any for-profit entity can be trusted with a monopoly over an important piece of infrastructure. It's healthy to have competing options.

It remains to be seen whether a non-profit entity can be trusted with such a position.

> Google Reader drove out most of the rest of the rss ecosystem

but how come it's not reviving now that the biggest gorilla is gone?

There's some inherent commercial unfeasibility to RSS i think, which google uncovered by having a free client.

There were a lot more rss readers popping up and/or getting more attention immediately after Reader shut down. Feedly was one of the earlier winners for example.

Inoreader is good Google Reader replacement (at least for me).

Even if Google revived Reeder, I'd still use NewsBlur over it. Once burned, twice shy.

> We went from a really vibrant blog culture with a ton of platforms and different setups

I mean, don't we still have that? I know that my RSS feed is still too content-free to keep up with (even after culling a double-digit number of hefty ones.)

And now we have even more RSS aggregators (Feedbin, The Old Reader, etc.) than we had before!

RSS has changed as well. Earlier, the RSS feed could be the entire article or blog post. Then it changed to include ads. Then it changed to a snippet of the article or just the headline with some ads. Every change made it worse for usability.

I don't know how the RSS feed is configured if you set up a blogspot or wordpress blog now, let alone the newer blogging platforms or tools like Hugo.

The RSS didn't change. It's 100% on every content creator to decide what to include in an RSS item. Some decide to put only a snippet, hoping to lead you to their full website to show you ads. It has been this since the earliest days of RSS.

All three platforms you mentioned, Hugo, Blogspot and Wordpress have RSS enabled by default.

I feel like doing stupid comparisons right now. Feedbin, The Old Reader, or even running a feed aggregator on your own computer are like the sound of a tree falling in the woods. They're also not like The Matrix, because not only they can't be explained but the people who still complain about Google Reader don't understand them when they see them themselves.

yes, but all lack design that would inspire the mainstream. Being niche is fine but the reader was big with multiplicators like journalists etc.

You don't get them with wholemeal bread.

I use Feedly, which is pretty nicely designed (it has other drawbacks, but it looks and feels like a modern, proper app).

The real frustration is that websites only put short extracts of their content into the RSS feed to force you to go and... look at their ads, I guess? But I'd imagine the number of folks using RSS feed readers who don't also use ad-blockers is vanishingly small.

Inoreader provides more value than Feedly at a fraction of the costs.

I use Feedly’s free version, but thanks for the tip!

really?

end of Reader didn't kill blogging, Social Media killed blogging by effectively allowing anyone to blog with zero effort. FB and Twitter are or were where the majority of discussion was happening.

If it could be killed by the removal of a single app then it was not actually a viable culture in the first place.