Talk about recursive web history… Digg Reader bit the dust this week, five years after it came to be in the aftermath of Google burying its own RSS reader.
I won’t even search my own blog, I know there are many rants about Google’s decision. Yet on seeing the notice just two weeks ago that Digg’s death was imminent, my first reaction was a shrug.
Has anyone done the eulogy?
Born as the bastard child of Google Reader, Digg’s own spawn came into being June 26, 2013 as a ray of hope for the RSS fanatics, aiming to offer the same feature set as the dead Google parent.
Digg Reader lived a placid life, not quite firmly connected with it’s parent’s products (whatever they are) but performed a yeoman’s service for the dwindling few who believed in the choice of news and information sources, rather than sucking up to the hose of some algorithm.
But Digg Reader’s health was failing as many noticed the dwindling reliability and upkeep of the mobile app. It’s death was mercifully quick, it did not suffer long, yet left most wondering in its wake why it was even sick.
Today the notice was pinned to the wall of the web:
“We are shutting down Digg Reader today. We would like to thank our community for using Reader for the past five years. It’s been fun.
You’ll still be able to export your feeds, diggs, and saves from Reader. Please export your feeds from Reader at digg.com/settings to save your subscriptions to use in another reader service like Feedly, Inoreader or a number of others. Read more about all that in our FAQ.
Contact us at support@digg.com if you have any questions.
Thank you for all of your support. We love you.
-Digg”
I saw a burst of worry, questions about what to do in this wake, look at the mile long thread of comments in Bryan Alexander’s post on Digg’s Done Death.
There was no sleep lost for me; I always used Feedly as a second reader, usually for classes where students blogged, and I would import an OPML subscription file that I typically generate from my Feed WordPress setup. But they do have that 100 feed limit.
I had played a little with Inoreader and decided to give it a try; It was a painless effort to import the feeds I extracted from the lungs of the dying Digg.
But here is where I find RSS Reader death a yawn… for the basic functions of managing, reading feeds, you don’t lose a thing when one reader bites the dust. It does not take any content from you; if you get your subscription file, you can pick it up and go anywhere. There’s nothing really to reclaim IMHO.
Sure you can wrangle about one feeder versus the next, or dive into the dungeon if setting one up on a domain. But to me, for my oen basic use of reading other web sites, the features of one tool to the next do not matter much to me (I will say Inoreader has an amazing set of features if you want to go into tagging and resyndicating, and what was best for my class feeds was dynamic linking to an OPML URL).
But that’s above and beyond the way I use a reader 99.9% of the time– just to scan the headlines and read deeper.
Yeah it’s crappy Digg died, but no tears falling from me.
Featured Image: Generated from the Custom Tombstone Maker plus photoshopped to add ¯\_(?)_/¯
