Flutterby™! : the death of Google Reader

Verge: Who killed Google Reader?

Ten years after its untimely death, the team that built the much-beloved feed reader reflects on what went wrong and what could have been.

It sure felt like Google Reader was killed so that the brand could focus on the ultimate "tech bros try to engineer a social media product" disaster that was Google+. And that really felt like a tipping point for "don't be evil", and Google as a company.

Also, there's so much they could be mining from blogs and RSS (and Atom) feeds had they nurtured that ecosystem that instead they're replacing with often completely wrong linkbait fed by Large Language Models.