Upvotes, nah; thank you for reading it, seriously.
I wish I could dig it up again, but ages ago I listened to an interview with Weizenbaum ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum )... he said computers, technology in general, just like everything, can be used to empower people, or to disenfranchise/control them.
In some ways, things like Facebook make people "experiment with publishing" that might not have before, so that's cool... but it shouldn't end there. Just like "organizing the world's information" is not Google's task. If Facebook's and Google's goal was to make themselves obsolete, I'd be all for it.
But it's not, and like with many others, "innovation" is often enough just the excuse to be the middleman. I personally don't need those inventions. Sometimes flowers grow on a dung heap, but most of it is really dung... and flowers can grow perfectly fine on meadows, too.
I'm as big a fan of literacy as the rest, but killing Google Reader doesn't spot people from writing blogs, or others with RSS readers from consuming them. I sometimes feel like I'm the only person on Earth who's never used that product. I use a desktop reader, have done so for years.
Maybe when my phone gets enough bandwidth and screen size to make RSS useful I'd care more about that but even so, I can switch to a different alt. at that time if needed.
The parent to my post wasn't just talking about Reader, nor was I. I was referring to the more general point that there are two competing models out there of how the web should work, the walled garden and the open network. Sure, killing Reader doesn't stop people from blogging, but that's not really what this is about.
Google has made it obvious, not just by killing Reader but by many of its recent actions, that it has switched sides from the open network to the walled garden. And the mindset of the walled garden does stop people from blogging (because they're too busy clicking "Like" buttons) or consuming RSS feeds (or any other information channel that doesn't appear in their walled garden).
Personally, I'm with you--I own my own domain name, host my own blog, have my own email that's independent of Google or anyone else, etc. If I want to consume someone's RSS feed, I can just do it; I don't need a walled garden to do it for me. But you and I are outliers.
