[smacktoward]

It's because the RSS community never figured out standard, easy ways for users to:

1) Find new feeds

2) Subscribe to feeds

They got close on #2 with the addition of feed autodiscovery (http://www.petefreitag.com/item/384.cfm) as a built-in feature of browsers, but the UX never got polished enough to make it a single-click thing, and eventually the browser vendors decided it wasn't being used enough and phased it back out again. #1 is a nut that nobody ever even came close to cracking.

In retrospect, all the energy that went into the war that ended up splitting the community into RSS and Atom camps was energy that was diverted from solving existential problems at a critical moment. It'd be interesting to read a retrospective asking the various players in that war how they feel now about the decisions they made then.

[bsder]

Am I hallucinating because I could have sworn that I remember "RSS" buttons on web pages that automatically did the right thing with your RSS reader via your browser?

[ashitlerferad]

Those still exist outside of the Web 2.0 world.

[rvern]

The two problems are solved very well by Mozilla Firefox. You only need to customize the browser to drag the feed button to the toolbar. Whenever it is not grayed out, you know there is a RSS feed available for the current website or page, and you can click on it to view the feed and click "Subscribe Now" to subscribe to it in your default feed reader.

[type0]

It's a shame that they don't ship it by like that by default. Even if it's "easy" to customize it's still is frustrating trying to explain it to computer illiterate relatives.