Post #3530785

2026-07-02 08:32 UTC

RE: https://fediverse.zachleat.com/@zachleat/116845291090365543 Obviously everyone knows that Vic Gundotra killed Reader, but he didn't succeed immediately. He could destaff the project, but people could still spend 20% time maintaining it. It was inevitable that it would die, but what the final blow was a standard Google outcome - load bearing infrastructure was going to be turned off, and everyone had to port their project to the replacement that didn't really work yet. Reader just didn't have the resources, so died.

Replies (2)

@jwz@mastodon.social 2026-07-02 09:13

@mjg59@nondeterministic.computer Unpopular take: Google Reader was nothing special, but lots of people who should have known better decided that this re-centralized version of RSS was equivalent to RSS, and so when Google Reader died so did RSS. All the anger about Google killing RSS is wrong, they just killed one barely-above-mediocre app. [ narrator ] RSS is exactly as alive as it ever was. Google Reader's one innovation was "what if cache". It was the Clownflare of blog syndication.

Open ##3530784
@mjg59@nondeterministic.computer 2026-07-02 08:34

(An especially funny version of this is that Google Hangouts lasted a year longer than it should have done, because Google Cloud Print depended on Hangouts, so they threw resources at maintaining it so they could have an orderly deprecation)

Open ##3532538