Not a Reader user, so maybe I’ve got this wrong, but I think what many people are complaining about boils down to something like this: Google, with their monop

Not a Reader user, so maybe I’ve got this wrong, but I think what many people are complaining about boils down to something like this: Google, with their monopol-ish resources, created a free reader app that was so good that it was hard for other RSS readers to match them (on features, and certainly on price). As a result they consolidated most of the market around RSS readers (even though RSS remained an open protocol). So when they killed Reader, it may have made it possible for other RSS readers to finally compete openly, but it also shook things up so much that many Reader users may have just dropped RSS entirely, shrinking the RSS community and the audiences of RSS-based blogging. Sure, in an efficient market customers would simply flow from the large and killed product to the new alternatives. But in our inefficient world, it’s possible that the barrier of having to export and import feeds was too high for a lot of users (even with things like Reader Takeout). One might argue that if that’s the case, then perhaps all those RSS audiences weren’t actually all that engaged in the first place. But I’d argue that it’s actually quite possible for genuinely good things to be very fragile.