Didn't know about the mute words feature. Thanks! Apparently I'm not the only one who had that thought.
I'm not sure Reader and the death of various blogs is necessarily cause and effect. My impression is that, to some degree, personal blog content has just shifted to Medium, podcasts, Facebook, etc.--or just gone away after it became less of a "thing" to do.
I'm hoping one day there is something smarter.
I know RSS still exists but it feels like Google Readers death killed a lot of the blogs I followed off too. The new posts just got less and less and eventually stopped.