Why is everyone suddenly making Google Reader replacements?

I get that Google Reader was probably a good service and whatever hole it left remains a void to be filled, but I am also seeing virtually no difference between one reader app and the next. The point of a news reader is to let you read and otherwise get out of the way and there are plenty that already do that. None of the last five Google Reader replacements to have made it to the front page of HN did anything more than that besides "having a clean UI."

The way all the Google Reader clones are suddenly popping up rather reminds of the accusations people are making right now about innovation, that instead of making anything new, people are building things like recipe sites and to-do list apps. [1] Which is not to say people should stop building RSS readers--people are entitled to work on whatever they're interested in--but why are people so fascinated by them?

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[1] I don't mean recipe sites or to-do list apps are necessarily useless. I used them as examples of high saturation, not of low utility.