> > It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds. > No, this was never the case. Newsfeeds were always a minority-feature. The mass of user used to be bigg

> > It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds. > No, this was never the case. Newsfeeds were always a minority-feature. The mass of user used to be bigger, but not to the level where it could be called a mass medium. True, but that minority included a very influential segment (journalists, podcasters, and bloggers). The turning point of when the blogosphere lost out to the centralized walled gardens of social media was probably around 2009 (though it wasn't obvious at the time); that was the year of the FriendFeed (an aggregator of your social accounts across multiple sites into one profile/timeline) acquisition by Facebook and of Farmville's explosive growth. After that point, Facebook and Twitter started being treated as infrastructure by startups and media organizations, a trend that accelerated during the 'Arab Spring' of the 2010s.