Re:Time to rebuild the web?
by fragmede on Monday April 16, 2018 @11:28AM
(#16849609)
Because there's no money in making a better RSS reader.
I'm sure the internal story of why Google killed off Reader is far more mundane office politics that we'll ever know, but since then, there's not been another that's risen to popularity. As the article mentions there's Feedly who's UI is functional if a bit baroque (why does every feed need to be tagged?) but ultimately it's still like trying to drink from a firehose. There's not been an RSS reader company that has come about since that shows Google was wrong to kill off Reader.
It's easy enough to think up improvements to their UX, but we don't have a marketplace of ideas because there is so much friction (even ignoring the work involved in starting up a company and hiring a team, there's no way to introduce a small tweak to Feedly without recreating their platform - and then you'd still have to convince enough people to migrate to your Feedly-clone first).
What we have a marketplace of VC-funded corporations, and branding is king. There's no stock exchange for listing specific features Feedly could implement in order to promote better RSS reader software.
I'm sure the internal story of why Google killed off Reader is far more mundane office politics that we'll ever know, but since then, there's not been another that's risen to popularity. As the article mentions there's Feedly who's UI is functional if a bit baroque (why does every feed need to be tagged?) but ultimately it's still like trying to drink from a firehose. There's not been an RSS reader company that has come about since that shows Google was wrong to kill off Reader.
It's easy enough to think up improvements to their UX, but we don't have a marketplace of ideas because there is so much friction (even ignoring the work involved in starting up a company and hiring a team, there's no way to introduce a small tweak to Feedly without recreating their platform - and then you'd still have to convince enough people to migrate to your Feedly-clone first).
What we have a marketplace of VC-funded corporations, and branding is king. There's no stock exchange for listing specific features Feedly could implement in order to promote better RSS reader software.