There have been several. I liked newsblur for a while, but the magic of reader seemed to be when a friend of a friend shared an article that you would never otherwise have seen.
Simultaneously, blogging as a medium has changed for many economic and cultural reasons so even if reader remained I think the ecosystem would be different.
Someone on HN recently said that the difference ten+ years ago was that people were blogging in the evenings and weekends after their full time position, but now the content economy can provide an income, so we have a lot more processional creators, who IMO, over produce.
"Someone on HN recently said that the difference ten+ years ago was that people were blogging in the evenings and weekends after their full time position, but now the content economy can provide an income, so we have a lot more processional creators, who IMO, over produce."
That is so accurate and highly relatable. I find myself reading blogs from over a decade ago+ simply because the author is really intimate with the content and it feels more personal.
Meanwhile, nowadays everything just feels fake, overcreated and not of much substance. Granted even back then they had the same issues but it was just regularly easier to find organic true spirited content.
A great example of how economics can incentivize degredation of a system: long blog posts that took weeks to prepare were pretty common, blowing up the main portal (and the network effects with it) that work is presented on can be a pretty significant disincentive, giving competing platforms and formats (the medium is the message) an opportunity to capture and keep that attention (...is all you need).
I can't help but think about the Google Reader shutdown "conspiratorially". I think YouTube has similar artifacts:
1. It would be very useful (and very obvious) to have a curated index by topic interface for YouTube videos and channels, but we only get search. And on top of that, the search is suspiciously shitty. I often search for very specific topics on YouTube and seemingly exhaust the results, only to come upon pre-existing videos later that should have come up in the search.
2. YouTube used to have messaging between users, but that was also shut down... I presume the reasoning given to the public for that would be similar to the story given here.
I think The Man has something against curated indexes, communities forming around them, and all the other things that can emerge from such ecosystems, one of them being power.
Yeah. It's the same effect seen with Youtube videos (and amateur videos of a different type, actually). On one hand, production values are a lot higher and there is some very good content out there, but I feel that the overall SNR has gone down as quantity overtakes quality. A lot of content feels like people sensationalizing and acting like an authority on topics they clearly just googled last week
Though when it comes to technical blogs, unfortunately that seems to be what the market wants. For some reason, a significant amount of developers are loathe to ever read official docs or evaluate new technologies themselves, but are quite happy to take as gospel some random, poor, blogspam tutorial. It's an annoying type of learned helplessness. And then there's all the Youtube channels making stretched 30 minute videos about simple articles shared here last week
Though it's not like the good "for the love of it" authors have gone away, it's just that they naturally put less time into promoting their blog/channel
Simultaneously, blogging as a medium has changed for many economic and cultural reasons so even if reader remained I think the ecosystem would be different.
Someone on HN recently said that the difference ten+ years ago was that people were blogging in the evenings and weekends after their full time position, but now the content economy can provide an income, so we have a lot more processional creators, who IMO, over produce.