The value vs volume is such an important insight. Facebook and Instagram know a lot about which cat memes my friends and I send back and forth to each other.

The value vs volume is such an important insight. Facebook and Instagram know a lot about which cat memes my friends and I send back and forth to each other. In contrast, my RSS feed knows a lot about what content I think is valuable to consume in my spare cycles. I would never get in ad in Instagram for anything software-related, but that's at least 1/2 of my RSS feed, and something I'm more likely to spend money for than whatever cat toy they think will cause me to pry open my wallet. I think if somebody could choose the highest-signal metadata to get to know me well, they should choose my browser/search history, my RSS reader, my e-reader, and iMessage or the corporate Slack instance. Anything else is tangential at best. I have no idea why they shut down Google Reader, it's clearly the best signal:noise product outside of Maps and Search. Maybe with the prevalence of google analytics and device/id fingerprinting, they thought it was redundant data.