> When the Guardian social reader first launched, the impact was dramatic: millions of users installed the app within a matter of weeks (a total of 12 million have installed it so far, according to the Guardian post) and by April of this year, 6 million unique visitors were reading content within the app every month. According to former Guardian developer Martin Belam, Facebook referrers at one point even eclipsed traffic coming from Google. After the changes in May, however, the number of readers dropped just as dramatically — falling from about 600,000 average users a day to below the 200,000 level. Facebook now reports the app as having 2.5 million monthly users.

This needs a little more context, doesn't it? Did usage drop because the app is unpopular? Did it drop because the Guardian is unpopular? Or is Facebook losing share overall?

The OP does link to a Buzzfeed analysis which points at the culprit being a change in FB's algorithm: http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/facebook-social-readers-ar...

In other words, FB giveth and FB taketh away. The popular explanation may be that users were just fed up with the intrusion in their lives and the Guardian is making a principled stand...but let's face it, users have shown more than enough willingness to accept intrusions. And the Guardian clearly isn't doing this out of respect for their users' privacy...anger over inadvertent sharing was immediate at the app's launch, and the Guardian always had the option of turning off the auto-sharing element.

That said, I'm not sure why the drop in usage requires killing the app. A referral is a referral, right? Did the app require constant maintenance? There are some users who love sharing what they read and so why not let them continue to do so and configure the app to not make such links lead to a "do you want to install this app" popup.