Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My question was why google reader was good, not why it was popular. Once you learn about Venn diagrams it's going to completely blow your mind. One easy first pass at making inferences as to best services is to use popularity as an imperfect first proxy. So if someone says that a service became a de facto standard used by all of the internet, it's one of the ways to helpfully frame the conversation about whether th…
> Once you learn about Venn diagrams it's going to completely blow your mind. One easy first pass at making inferences as to best services is to use popularity as an imperfect first proxy. So if someone says that a service became a de facto standard used by all of the internet, it's one of the ways to helpfully frame the conversation about whether the service proved to be useful. Of course there will be exceptions, b…
Yikes, did you miss the part where I explicitly acknowledged that there are counterexamples? And since you missed it the first time, I guess I'm going to repeat it again here for emphasis. Yes, there are indeed counterexamples. Broad brush inferences always have counterexamples, and nevertheless are useful indicators. I spent a whole paragraph talking about the functional literacy of understanding why it's a good first approximation. People drive Priuses, people use iPhones, people listen to Taylor Swift. And each of those cases there's a a Venn diagram overlap between popularity and positive user experience where the former can be a proxy for the latter. If you genuinely don't understand how that argument works there's a functional literacy issue here. Moreover, there are counterexamples but this isn't one of them! This specific case, is one of those cases where popularity and positive user experience coincide, which was the whole point to begin with. Being obtuse about how those are connected is just a waste of everybody's time.
>Now that actually answers my question,
Well the crux of this conversation has been that this is an obtuse question in the first place, and that your preferred framing of the question in terms of user experience to the exclusion of popularity was an obtuse refusal to understand the significance of how those things meaningfully overlap, and it was obtuse in the sense of ignoring a broader conversation about mainstream adoption of RSS. The conversation was about that but you wanted to specifically turn it into an end user question.
>which seems like it would have been a recipe for success given the outcry and hunger for Readeer.
Copies of it do exist, often with features paywalled. Part of the downward spiral from de facto standard to boutique experience.
>Even looking at the proportion, it's more than likely still higher today, at least in terms of websites-with-RSS.
However you measure it, it is no longer the de facto standard that it once was. You don't see the RSS icon next to the social media icons on websites. Google News, Twitter, and craigslist removed their RSS functionality, mainstream browsers have removed their built-in RSS functionality, and, again I have to raise the functional literacy thing, because look at what you're saying. The best justifications of RSS are this combination of scaffolding and duct tape about how if you squint and think about it you can still find it, it's just an entirely different universe than it being a de facto standard.