> Once you learn about Venn diagrams it's going to completely blow your mind. One easy first pass at making inferences as to best services is to use popularity as an imperfect first proxy. So if someone says that a service became a de facto standard used by all of the internet, it's one of the ways to helpfully frame the conversation about whether the service proved to be useful. Of course there will be exceptions, but it's one of those functional literacy things where everyone can understand the significance of why people would bring that up in the context of a conversation that ultimately was closing in on making assessments about the value of the user experience.

I completely reject this analysis, as there are numerous counterexamples of things that are popular but not good, or good but not popular. One does not inform the other, especially in this case where it appears to have derived much of its popularity from Google shoving it onto users by featuring it in their other services.

> Google's RSS reader was simple, ad free, fast, had an elegant design, didn't attempt to push superfluous services or subscriptions, set a standard for accessible anywhere at a time when many popular RSS readers were used on the desktop, and, in contrast to most of the best services now around, was free. I would go so far as to say it was almost unimproveable because it had one job and it did it correctly and didn't try to do other things, which used to be one of the things Google did best.

Now that actually answers my question, but not the question of why someone couldn't just copy this design and carry on when Reader was shut down, which seems like it would have been a recipe for success given the outcry and hunger for Readeer.

> And I feel like none of this information is new, hard to discover, controversial, but is instead part of the generally accepted canon of internet history. So it's a bizarre question to me, if I'm being honest.

Well as I stated in the original question, I never used reader.

> Edit: regarding the prevalence of RSS adoption in the present day, it may be true that as a numeric total there are more sites using it, but that as a percentage it is down. The same way that a winning candidate for president from the 1940s will have fewer votes then a losing candidate from the present day. Numbers will grow over time just due to population growth. Or in the case of the internet, The growth in the number of sites. But to understand whether RSS enjoys the same status as a de facto standard it's necessary to look at more than just the numbers, but at the proportion of adoption today compared to the proportion as an existed in the past.

Even looking at the proportion, it's more than likely still higher today, at least in terms of websites-with-RSS. The websites that tend to not have RSS are very large silo-like websites with enough gravity well to retain users regardless, but these website are by definition few in number and will not affect the statistics in any way.

In the past, it was more common with hand rolled HTML websites, that did not have RSS. These have almost all been supplanted by CMS:es and blog platforms that universally do support RSS.