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by nameless912 918 days ago
I think you're falling prey to Hanlon's Razor. What probably happened here is something approaching the following conversation:

$PM: Hey $ENGINEER, it looks like this "arr ess ess" thingy has very few users, do you know what it does?

$ENGINEER: Yeah, it's a web standard that publishes a feed of updates to our website. It's kind of neat actually, if you have an RSS read--

$PM (waving hands): okay skip the wikipedia article, that's fine; but does it generate revenue?

$ENGINEER (blinking): uh...no, it doesn't. Anyone can query our RSS feed and update their local cache of articles and read them later, it's actually really useful if you're ever somewhere without interne--

$PM: So we can't monetize this?

$ENGINEER: ...no, this is an RSS feed for a tech blog. We can't monetize this.

$PM: If you remove this and integrate $FEATURE on $PAID_SERVICE, I'll write you a better peer review this year. It's reducing tech debt right? This sounds like an old school thing anyway, I've never even heard of it!

$ENGINEER (heavy sigh): Yeah, whatever man.