I try to avoid these sorts of submissions, mainly because of their non-content and the subsequent familiar discussion, but somehow they keep reaching the front page.

It’s certainly your prerogative to use whatever you like but the incorrect assertions bother me, especially the prevalent one: “It's because I think that Google is now working against the potential of the open web”.

Here’s a rebuttal in the form of a partial list of links to Google initiatives that exist primarily to advance the “open web”:

http://www.webrtc.org

http://www.chromium.org

And their various web speed efforts:

https://developers.google.com/speed/spdy

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed

And of course:

https://fiber.google.com

I don't think the closure of Google Reader was any indication to the contrary, and all of these are certainly much more important to the web than yet another centralized RSS reader.

Other errors in that post: Chrome never ‘dropped decent RSS support’ as it never supported it to begin with, it was actually Firefox that dropped their support. Also there is no evidence that Reader was closed to “drive users to Google+”, there is no proof nor common sense explanation to support that assertion.