Medium as an RSS reader
Tuesday, December 29, 2015 by Dave Winer

As you may know, you can now read my posts on Medium thanks to their relatively new API, and support for it in IFTTT. 

Yesterday I got a message from Mike Jones on Twitter: "FWIW now everything publishes to Medium I've returned to reading everything you publish. Just like pre-death-of-Google-reader."

Two observations:

  1. Medium can play the role of an RSS reader, at least how I, and my readers use it. They might want to develop that feature by directly supporting RSS, and allowing updates to posts to flow through to their version of a story. If, for example, I were to make a change to this story after Medium picked it up, those changes would not appear on Medium.
  2. Google really hurt the blogosphere with the dominance of Reader and then its shutdown. It's good to pay attention to that now. When you start relying on a dominant product, everything is good, because it hasn't gone away yet. You don't feel the pain until it goes away. 

  • I still don't understand why Google shut down Reader.  It seems like it was successful and consistent with their strategy.  Only thing I can guess is that it appeared to be a conflict with Google+?

    • I think this is why: They had a mandate from the top to cut services. This was publicized. This is notoriously difficult to do because the user bases scream loudly, and you get lots of negative publicity, but you need the people for other projects. So they had a rule a certain number of people from previous projects had to be assigned to new ones. They picked Reader probably because few people inside Google used it. It's something news people use. 

  • The RSS Readers that I have used, prominently featured an link back to the story on the originating website. This seems to be currently missing from Medium. 

  • What's wrong with Feedly? I switched from Reader to Feedly and never looked back.

    • No one said there's anything wrong with Feedly. It isn't even mentioned in this piece. What are you reacting to?