About 20 years ago something new arose on the Web, it was called web logging, or ‘blogging. People would write long and thoughtful articles about their interests.
And a few years later we got RSS, which was a way of syndicating the content of your blog. Other people could read it in whatever app they preferred.
And a few years after that, Google (back when they still had “do no evil” in their mission statement) invented Google Reader, which was an easy way to scoop up and read the content from your favorite blogs. The combination of using Google Reader to follow the RSS feeds of your favorite blogs created a complete and compelling ecosystem around high quality, independent publishing.
In the mid-2000s a few other publishing services came into being, and a few big winners emerged — notably Facebook and Twitter. These services were very different from the old blogging ecosystem. They were centrally controlled and their design encouraged people to spend many hours consuming bite-size, throwaway content because that was the best way to sell more ads. Google entered this category with Google+ in 2011, and shortly thereafter discontinued Reader. Reader could be seen as a competitor to G+ and it never made much money.
The old blogging and syndication scene never really recovered from the death of Reader, it is still used and appreciated by many today, but it’s Facebook, Twitter and (kind of) Google who shape the world zeitgeist. A zeitgeist in which we grapple with fake news, elections rigged by foreign powers, privacy relegated to a past age. Congressional hearings and EU regulations to keep these monsters at bay.
One wonders if the world itself might be a very different place today, had Google shown some vision and doubled down on something like Reader. Doubled down on promoting thoughtful, independent content instead of A/B optimizing for maximum engagement with advertising.
Maybe economics dictated that the world of today was inevitable, maybe not. But from Mastodon to Medium, most new publishing tools are seeking a cure for an industry that is quite clearly sick. One wonders.