How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023) | Hacker News

An online discussion criticizes Google’s shutdown of Reader for weakening open-web reading and pushing news consumption toward social platforms.

Google Reader was a key tool for following many sites and creators through RSS, but its removal left fewer good alternatives.

As a result, users became more dependent on social media and platform-driven recommendations than on independent feeds.

The debate underscores how important RSS and other open distribution tools were to the web’s content discovery ecosystem.