I never really went in for the social aspects, but I knew people who did, and I really did like the idea of curating my own sources, and seeing them in one place, distilled down to text and images only. Brilliant product. I initially tried to self-host one of the alternatives, but nothing ever worked as smoothly, and eventually I sort of of half-consciously pivoted to curating not by source, but by topic (i.e. Reddit). It was an amazing tool for “defragmenting” the web during its era, though.

I also have to think that Google could come up with a better way to deprioritize the smaller projects without killing them off, thereby inviting bad press and at this point stunting adoption of anything that looks different or requires any buy-in. Imagine if Reader had been spun off, or if they wanted to maintain control, just shuttled off to a subsidiary or vertical business unit that would “buy” server time and have a budget and a monetization roadmap. Maybe it still would have been enshittified, but it would have lasted longer and had a legitimate chance to prove it was the next big thing, or at the very least preserve goodwill for long enough not to hit Google’s reputation with early adopters and power users.