Worthy Read is an ongoing series here at the blog where I link out to a piece I think is worth your valuable time.
The internet lasts forever, the internet never forgets. And yet it is also a place in which I feel confronted with an almost unbearable volume of daily reminders of its decay: broken links, abandoned blogs, apps gone by, deleted tweets (miss you always, ah-well-nevertheless!), too-cutesy 404 messages, vanished Vines, videos whose copyright holders have requested removal, lost material that the Wayback Machine never crawled, things I know I’ve read somewhere and want to quote in my work but just can’t seem to resurface the same way I used to be able to.
Some of these losses are silly and tiny, but others over the years have felt more monumental and telling. And when Google Reader disappeared in 2013, it wasn’t just a tale of dwindling user numbers or of what one engineer later described as a rotted codebase. It was a sign of the crumbling of the very foundation upon which it had been built: the era of the Good Internet.
Oh Google Reader, how I miss you.
In many ways, Google Reader and the RSS feed addiction that followed resulted in this very blog. Even now as I use Feedbin, it still is my connection to the internet.
When Google Reader died, yes, the social media sites took over, but what was worse — the people who own websites decided that RSS feeds weren’t necessary anymore. A syndication process they owned, not Meta or X or anyone else, it was no longer necessary.
How wrong they were.
This is where I also add the ironic twist: The Ringer, after a recent website re-design, no longer has an RSS feed. Meaning it’s all the harder for me to keep up with their good writing (like this). Shame.