I'm making an observation. I try to spot language change. And "which" has been popping up in stupid places, at the expense of "that".
There is a real difference between "which" and "that", whether Joe Sixpack gives a damn or not. And nowadays a lot of people seem to be inappropriately overusing "which", and it seems to be driven by UK speakers.
Here's a sample explanation: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/grammar/which-vs-that
I should be making a collection of the most OTT examples.
That might be a sample of what you're thinking, but it isn't a correct explanation of anything. It's just some random mythmaking, which is par for the course from "grammar advice" websites.
Which and that are not distinguished in the manner that page wishes they were. That cannot be used (in the modern language) to introduce a nonrestrictive relative clause. Which can be used to introduce a restrictive or nonrestrictive relative clause.
> There is a real difference between "which" and "that", whether Joe Sixpack gives a damn or not.
There are real differences, but there are no differences as to the usage you flagged. The bigger difference is that which, being a pronoun, is part of a gender distinction (with who) between persons and nonpersons, whereas that, not being a pronoun, has no such distinction.
You might note, hopefully, that if feed readers were people, "feed readers who don't take 'no' for an answer" would be completely standard grammar. The same is also obviously true of "feed readers which don't take 'no' for an answer" when the feed readers aren't people.
CGEL [Cambridge Grammar of the English Language; both authors are from the UK] doesn't even bother to mention this myth, but the first example of a relative clause that it does give is He'll be glad to take the toys which you don't want. (Chapter 12 §2.1, example 1.i; page 1034)
If you want to play a grammarian on the internet, wouldn't it be better to know some grammar first?
> I try to spot language change.
> And nowadays a lot of people seem to be inappropriately overusing "which"
You're doing a remarkably terrible job; this change took place seven hundred years ago. Here's The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage:
> According to McKnight 1928 that was prevalent in early Middle English, which began to be used as a relative pronoun in the 14th century, and who and whom in the 15th.
> [...] By the early 17th century, which and that were being used pretty much interchangeably. Evans 1957 quotes this passage from the Authorized (King James) Version (1611) of the Bible:
>> Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.
> During the later 17th century, Evans tells us, that fell into disuse, at least in literary English. It went into such an eclipse that its reappearance in the early 18th century was noticed and satirized by Joseph Addison in The Spectator (30 May 1711) in a piece entitled "Humble Petition of Who and Which against the upstart Jack Sprat That."
(entry for that [1]; page 894 of the 1993 printing.)
It's a Britticism (AFAICT) making inroads.