Google’s decision to kill Google Reader was a turning point in enabling media to be manipulated by misinformation campaigns. The difference between individuals choosing the feeds they read & companies doing it for you affects all other forms of media.
I didn’t even use Reader that much, but its social model more closely mirrored the old LiveJournal dynamic, which isn’t inherently broken. (FriendFeed got this right, too.) And that made it more resilient to distortion, which matters more in tools used by those who create media.
The point is not that huge numbers of people used Google Reader. It’s that lots of people who *make media* did. Instead, they look at a feed generated by an opaque, unaccountable algorithm whose board member thinks nothing of destroying media companies & funding misinformation.
The same people who think Google Reader didn’t matter because it didn’t have tons of users think Twitter matters less in culture than Instagram because it has fewer users. But _you’re reading this_. YouTube Creator Studio doesn’t have many users, but it has huge impact on media!
Anyway, the reason we made the @Glitch community open source is so that someday soon, when we suggest apps for you to check out, you’ll be able to see the reason why they were recommended. And if you don’t like it, you can help improve it. It’s all doable.
Relatedly: medium.com/@anildash/the-…
And six years ago. anildash.com/2012/12/the-we…
(Not that it matters for the point I’m making, but Google Reader had tens of millions of users.)
