Comment by wryoak
8 hours ago
Google is widely faulted with effectively killing RSS by pulling the plug on Reader (I, for example, haven’t used RSS since), so I don’t think they’re missing the big picture, I think they just prefer a different picture
I never got the backslash with Reader, having always used native apps to handle RSS.
Native apps are always better, but having a web page syncing your feeds made it easier to access them, eg from the library or work computer. Not to mention nothing to install (or update) reduces friction. I didn’t have to stop using RSS, but the newly exposed hurdles were enough discouragement that I did stop
It's probably worth considering that if the technology could be killed by one company pulling its chips off the board, perhaps the technology wasn't standing on its own.
We still use RSS and Atom feeds for podcasts. It's a pretty widely-adopted use case. Perhaps there is a lot more to the contraction of RSS as a way for discovering publishing of "blog"-style media than "Reader got killed" (it seems like Reader offered more features than just RSS consolidation that someone could, hypothetically, build... But nobody has yet?).