[apatters]

Not saying this is wrong, but I think a less cynical rephrasing which explains a superset of the problem is that RSS failed to win adoption from a critical mass of content producers.

You can go to pretty much any website and assume there will be an index.html equivalent which spits more or less anything the site wants at your browser.

You definitely cannot assume that any website you want to receive updates from has an RSS feed. You could never do this, even at its height commercial content producers regarded it with deep skepticism for totally valid commercial reasons. They would publish excerpts but not full articles, headlines but not excerpts, etc.

Now had the RSS community offered more incentive to the content producers to get on board, it might have seen more adoption. The clearest example of this is that RSS never solved the advertising problem--someone could take your feed, strip out your ads, throw it on a website and introduce their own ads and make money off of your content. Boom there goes your support from anyone whose writing is ad-supported. Why would they embrace RSS when it will de-monetize their audience?

[spriggan3]

> someone could take your feed, strip out your ads, throw it on a website and introduce their own ads and make money off of your content.

Someone can do that with web scraping too, don't blame RSS for this stuff.

[seanp2k2]

While I loved RSS and the ncurses readers it powered for me, the ad thing was real and many publishers just put a blurb or a headline on their feeds (basically worthless), content scraping requires effort and varies by site, whereas RSS / Atom would be standardized and stupid easy for any old talentless profiteering hack to install as a source for new WordPress articles to feed their content farm.

Having the "barrier" of writing a content scraper for each site you want to scrape and figuring out a way to get that onto your crappy WP link farm blog is a high enough bar that many marketers just can't be bothered, so it "solves" the scraping problem for the majority case at the expense of the users.

Now we have things like Feedly which AFAIK maintain their own scrapers and I can still basically read most articles without looking at ads for this one new trick to get rid of tonsillitis complete with a nasty gif.

[type0]

> The clearest example of this is that RSS never solved the advertising problem

I'm not sure what you mean by advertising problem, it's not inadequacy of RSS/Atom but the feature that the web is open, you don't wan't your articles to being copied you simply put it behind the login screen. You could even provide the feed for authenticated users only or implement personalized feed(s).