i'm not sure if i buy this, honestly. mainly because people who relied enough on google reader did find other rss catchers to replace it. there's just been a major shift away from independent blogs in general
he keeps talking about how the reason this is true because even if only a few people used google reader they were the RIGHT people and they were INFLUENCERS or whatever and like... i think those people just moved to feedly
like maybe google reader contributed but i kinda think that the fact that responsible journalism isn't actually something that capitalism can support is probably the bigger issue
it's really tempting to blame tech companies for all of it and they def are profiting off of the situation but we've got a crumbling fourth estate here
like there's nothing stopping you from using whatever rss reader you like best to subscribe to a bunch of bullshit
like... people just do podcasts and streams more than blogging now and do their blogging on twitter and medium. it's not that deep
we really want someone to blame for this shit and don't get me wrong there are people who are exploiting it for profit
but ultimately the failure of journalism to manage to halt the spread of fake news is because, well, fake news sells
and like so many other problems right now, any fix other than the total destruction of capitalism as a system will only be a stopgap
people are totally willing to believe ridiculous shit with no basis in reality as a matter of faith because they want to do that instead of dealing with facts
people are happy to keep spreading "only two genders" based on the lies-to-children they got in 9th grade biology without doing more research because they feel good stepping on someone else
the problem isn't that no one is doing the fact-checking fast enough. it's that a lot of people want to be lied to
people form religions based on their belief in things that are unknowable with the hope that faith will grant them something, whether that thing is access to a better afterlife or just the ability to lead a better life in the here and now
but like, it's totally possible to get them to do that about stuff that is knowable that they just don't want to know
you can totally make a political platform based on being in denial and terrified and sell products with it and get rich
it's so tempting to be like "google is complicit in this... because they killed MY AUDIENCE'S FAVORITE CANCELLED PRODUCT" but like. google is complicit in this because they manage the advertising for most of this shit
they've also failed to come up with any measure of trustworthiness for their search results, even on the stuff they list on "news", and share stuff from bullshit mongers for their own profit when you use them to search
[thing you are mad about] caused [other thing you are mad about] is just a wildly successful formula for getting people who want to believe to retweet something
